All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller

by Karin Kaufman

  “I’ll get the door,” Hall said as she strode to the switch on the wall.

  I glanced at Hall as I backed the SUV out of the bay. She stood calmly by the switch, ready to lower the door once we were clear of it. Did she not see what loomed ahead? Dread washed over me, wave after wave.

  Chapter 15

  Nathan made circles with his index finger then instructed me to drive for Loomis. That must have eased Hollow’s mind, because the crinkling sound the bags made as he sucked for air finally ceased. I turned on the radio, loud enough to distract the Sack but low enough so Nathan could hear his phone, then headed for downtown. I closed in on Loomis but never quite made it to Hollow’s block, instead making loops left and right in and around the neighborhood.

  After ten minutes of cutting figure eights in a half-mile radius around Hollow’s house, Nathan’s phone rang. I pulled to the nearest vacant spot at the curb, shut off the car, and turned to the backseat.

  Nathan’s eyes were shut, a look of pain on his face. “They’re taking care of you now?” he asked. After a moment he opened his eyes and said, “All right, I won’t,” then “Don’t worry about it.” He hung up, slipped the phone in his suit pocket, and yanked the bags from Hollow’s head.

  “Get out.” He motioned at the door.

  Hollow put his hand on the door but remained seated, looking hard at Nathan, as if it was all a cruel game and just as he stepped to freedom he’d feel a bullet shatter his spine.

  “Don’t make me say it again.”

  Like a puppet shaking in its master’s hands, Hollow fell out the open door, scrambled to his feet, and ran, arms flailing, toward the open field before him.

  “You’re letting him go?” Zack asked.

  “The porter,” I said. “Was he able to talk?”

  “Barely. Get us to 2040 Foothills Avenue.”

  I took off, driving west. We were five minutes from Foothills Avenue, but by going a few miles over the speed limit, I made it in four. We searched the addresses on the houses of the 2000 block until we found 2040, then Nathan had me park at the curb two houses down. In the rearview mirror I saw him screw the suppressor to his gun. Holy shit.

  “Nathan, this is not good.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  He positioned the gun in his coat pocket—a lousy, unpredictable place to carry in any case, but with the suppressor changing the pistol’s balance and handling, it could be dangerous. “It won’t go in your belt?” I asked.

  Zack jerked his head toward the backseat. “What’s going on?”

  “The element of surprise,” Nathan said. “And I’ve done this before, Jane. In this case my pocket’s better.”

  I threw my right arm over the seat back and faced Nathan. “You don’t think Hollow warned the other Sacks about us?”

  “He’s a mile from his house without a phone and he ordered a porter’s release,” he replied. “He won’t say anything. Not tonight, anyway.”

  “Did Hall show you their photos?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hadria is a woman?”

  “Yes. I want both of you to stay in the car. If anything goes wrong, leave immediately.”

  “Yeah, right, we’re going to leave you,” I said.

  “You follow orders. It’s not going to help me or anyone else if you get yourself killed.”

  “Then what did I come for?” Zack asked.

  “To drive back with Jane.”

  Nathan was right, of course. After what these Sacks had done to a porter—after what they’d planned to do—they’d have to be killed. Why wait until they were prepared? Hollow, too, if he didn’t disappear and become a snug little ditch after his scare tonight, would be targeted. What happened to Hollow from here on out was largely up to Hollow. Nathan knew that, but for tonight he had kept his promise. Promises kept, even to Sacks, marked his character, as did his need to dress like a bank president. I wasn’t sure I’d ever understand him.

  While we waited, he phoned for a clear-out in ten minutes at 2040 Foothills Avenue. Just after making a second phone call, this one for the return of Manifest Manifest in case he came back to the same address, a light-colored Honda passed our SUV and eased into the driveway at 2040. I gripped the lower half of the steering wheel.

  “I’ll be back in thirty seconds,” Nathan said.

  He walked swiftly toward the Honda, slowing when he reached the sidewalk in front of the driveway. He bent his head toward the car in a casual, almost listless, manner and took his hands from his pockets. In his left hand was a piece of paper. He brandished it then walked to the car, coming to a stop at the passenger’s window and angling the gun side of his body in the direction of the passenger. Seconds later I heard four muffled pops, one following the next so rapidly that they sounded nothing like gunfire. Just like that, it was over.

  I had always wondered if Nathan had a reaction similar to mine after a close-up hunter-style kill. The trembling, the tears, the silence. He did. Everything but the tears, that is. He stared out the backseat window as I drove from the scene, his arms folded, hands tucked. He didn’t look at or speak to Zack or me. And that was just as well, because what do you say after an execution, no matter how richly deserved?

  I gave three honks at the Overstreets’ garage door, my hand ready on my gun in case anything looked amiss inside the bay. Nathan didn’t speak until Hall had lowered the door behind us.

  “It’s important to get some sleep,” he said as he got out of the SUV. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning.”

  “Where to?” I asked, sliding down from the seat. It seemed to me that we’d done little but drive for three days. I was ten, fifteen miles from my house in Loveland, and more than anything at that moment I wanted to brew myself a decent cup of tea and fall asleep in my own bed. Wherever we went, though, I knew we couldn’t stay with the Overstreets. The risk for them was too great.

  “I’ll let you know in the morning.”

  I laughed. A tired, feeble kind of laugh. Was Nathan holding his cards to the vest again or just winging it like the rest of us? “What is Gatehouse doing to help?”

  “They’re working on it,” he said, pushing the door shut. “Right now I can’t say more than that.” He grabbed a folding chair someone had propped against the wall by the office door, carried it to where Hall sat, and opened it.

  “Porter problem settled?” Hall asked.

  “Yes,” Nathan said, taking his seat.

  I noticed Hall didn’t ask for the details.

  “Were we going to the hospital?” Zack asked as he sat next to Nathan.

  “His wife will be there soon. He asked us not to come.”

  Like me, Zack was relieved. My imagination had filled in the terrible blank spaces around what Nathan had said in the car—that the porter could barely talk. I didn’t want to know the nuts-and-bolts reality of what the Sacks had done to him.

  “I’ve been thinking about the LCA,” I said, taking the last chair in our circle. “I remember reading about this group that wanted to create a wildlife refuge free of human beings from Canada to northern Mexico, including all of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.”

  “That’s bat crazy,” Zack said.

  “It’s crazy now, but will it be in thirty years? I think Elations and Embodiments think much longer term than we give them credit for.”

  Hall scowled. “How would it benefit them to banish people from Canada to Mexico?”

  “No, no,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not saying that’s their plan, I’m saying that whatever their plan is, it’s long term and it looks crazy now, but they’re thinking twenty, thirty years into the future. They’ve found a new business model.”

  Hall chuckled. She was the official voice and arbiter of all things Sack and she was letting us know it.

  “I think Jane has a point,” Nathan said.

  Her expression a mixture of petulance and surprise, Hall clamped her mouth shut.

  “We’re seeing behavior now that
we’ve never seen before,” Nathan continued. “In a hundred years. This is more than just an increase in activity.”

  “They’re attacking in pairs, wearing body armor,” Zack said.

  “Coordinating with each other and killing a lot more porters and hunters,” I said. “So imagine the LCA buys up or takes over through easements or donations hundreds of thousands of acres. And imagine they turn around and sell that land, but only to other Sacks. Which they can easily do because there are Sacks all but running three state chapters.”

  “Their purpose being what?” Hall asked.

  I lifted a shoulder. “Create and populate their own communities?”

  “Obtain mineral rights and potential natural gas and oil reserves,” Nathan added. It was clear from his swift response that he’d considered the long-term reason for the Sacks’ western land grabs before and come to many of the same conclusions I had.

  Zack sat straighter in his chair. “If they sold the land to other Sacks and those Sacks built homes on that land, they could incorporate.”

  “Hundreds of thousands of acres, maybe millions, run by Sacks alone,” I said. “A law unto themselves. Tell me that’s not a goal worth waiting for.”

  “Even if they don’t incorporate ...” Zack began. His wheels were turning. He was seeing new possibilities. “They could keep that land under their control so no one could ever build on it.”

  “Bury the bodies of innocents in places no one’s allowed to dig,” I said.

  Hall crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair, looking up toward the ceiling. We were making sense and she didn’t like it.

  “If that’s the plan, or part of the plan,” Nathan said, “there’s no better place to carry it out than the West. It’s the only place the LCA can acquire enough land. It might explain why we’re seeing the increase in activity here and not in places like New England or Europe.”

  “Let’s say you’re right,” Hall said. “What does land have to do with the increase in the specific kinds of activity we’ve been seeing?”

  We’ve been seeing? Now she was one of us? “You mean ditches nibbling and Sacks going rampant,” I said.

  “However you want to put it,” she said.

  “Maybe nothing,” Nathan said. “There might be both a short-and long-term plan. One plan doesn’t have to exclude the other. In fact, one could help implement the other.”

  “Then what’s the short-term plan?” Zack said.

  “I don’t know, Zack,” Nathan said. “I’m just thinking out loud.”

  I didn’t buy that for a second. Nathan never talked off the top of his head. If it came out his mouth, he’d been thinking about it for some time, and that meant chances were there was a short-term plan and he’d considered what it might be. But something else occurred to me. In studying Sacks I’d learned they were masters of diversion and often went to great lengths to focus attention on the unexpected so that innocents would become blind to the obvious.

  “I wonder what the Sacks are doing while we’re playing defense,” I said.

  “Explain,” Hall said.

  “For one thing, hunters aren’t hunting right now. Hunters aren’t being allowed to do their jobs, but Sacks are doing whatever they damn well please.”

  “An outcome that has nothing to do with actions the LCA has taken,” she said.

  “Right. And for the first time, porters are on the run.”

  “Again, nothing to do with land or the LCA.”

  “The uncertainty creates chaos, and chaos creates diversions and opportunities.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “Best of all from the Sacks’ point of view,” I said, “hunters, porters, and Gatehouse members don’t know who to trust. The people they should trust, they don’t, and the people they shouldn’t trust, they do. That’s why my name was put on a kill list. More chaos, more fear, and more infiltrators. Pretty soon, Gatehouse isn’t Gatehouse anymore.”

  I shot a glance at Nathan and saw the faintest trace of a smile playing on his lips. Bingo.

  “Could be,” Hall said. “I know a little about mistrust.”

  Her tone was offensively superior and aggrieved, as though mistrust of her was unjust and irrational and made her a martyr. God, she rubbed me the wrong way.

  “You would, wouldn’t you?” I said. “Of course people mistrust you. You can’t do everything you must have done to become an Elation then say, whoops, made a mistake, now I want to shake hands with Gatehouse.”

  “Whoops? Do you think my decision to leave was as flippant as that?”

  “It’s never that easy, Jane,” Nathan said. “It’s life changing and dangerous.”

  “I can imagine that it—”

  “No, you can’t,” Hall said, wrapping her arms around her chest. “How dare you? You can’t imagine a damn thing.”

  “You’re not the injured party here,” I retorted. “You chose to become an Elation, and with that choice comes a perfectly reasonable response from other people. They’re afraid of you. They don’t trust you.”

  “Don’t you realize I wish I’d never turned?” she said. “I wish I knew nothing about this world.”

  “Join the club,” Zack said.

  For the first time since I’d met her, Hall sounded vulnerable. She was less calculating, her words less measured. “So why did you turn? And why did you leave?”

  “Those are private matters,” Nathan said.

  “She wants us to trust her but we’re not supposed to know anything about her?” I said.

  “Fair enough,” Hall said, holding up her hands. “You want to know? I turned for the same reason most people do. Anger and power. I hated my helplessness. I hated being told I had to forgive. A life of helplessness, unhappiness, and forgiveness—ensuring nothing but more of the same, year after year, until the day I died. I wanted revenge and the power to carry it out, and I never wanted to be helpless again.”

  It was all very vague to me. Helplessness, anger. We all felt those emotions, and we didn’t murder innocents. And what did forgiveness have to do with it? I would never forgive the Sack who murdered my sister, who tore my parents from me so that even on his hospital deathbed five months ago my father still refused to see me. But my rage was reserved for that Sack alone. If I ever saw him again, I’d kill him slowly, Gatehouse be damned. But Hall was using some past offense to excuse her turning. If she was trying to tell me she’d left her anger behind her and become a new woman, clearly she hadn’t.

  “You became a Sack because you felt helpless?” I said.

  “Have you ever felt true helplessness in the face of injustice?” Hall said.

  “I felt helpless when I watched a Sack murder my sister.”

  “And then you became—”

  “A killer of monsters, not innocents.”

  Nathan looked at his wristwatch, signaling that he was about to cut off the discussion, but I refused to be deterred. I needed to know why Hall was no longer a Sack. That was the most important piece of the puzzle. “So why did you leave? Sacks are after you, hunters want to kill you. You’re more helpless now than you were as an Elation.”

  “But I can sleep now.”

  Lucky her. “Why couldn’t you sleep, Elizabeth?” I’d never called her by her first name. It took her a couple seconds to recover.

  “Why can’t you sleep, Jane?”

  “Because I kill monsters for a living.” I was sure she’d made an educated guess that I had trouble sleeping. She didn’t really know. After all, I was a hunter, and hunters didn’t have sugarplum dreams and chamomile tea with the sandman.

  “Yes, that’s what you do.”

  “What happened to make you quit being a Sack?”

  Nathan was uncomfortable with the turn in our conversation, but he knew neither Hall nor I was about to stop. I needed to know why Hall had chosen to be restored, and Hall, for not entirely charitable reasons, wanted to tell me.

  “I was being hunted. Just before sunset, on a trail, w
alking back to my RV near Estes Park. I turned the tables on the hunter when I saw a tell. He touched the small of his back at the belt line.”

  “A gun.”

  “I smiled and walked right up to him. He let me get close, probably thinking I’d be an easier, quieter target that way. I cut his throat, but he was so tall I couldn’t cut deeply enough. I waited to make sure he died, and that was my mistake.”

  “How do you know he was a hunter?”

  “I’d been warned to expect a hunter his age.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Early forties.”

  “You hung around to watch him die? Why didn’t you just kill him when he fell?”

  “You know why.”

  “Sacks enjoy a slow death.”

  “Yes.”

  “Filled with as much agony as possible.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was your mistake?”

  “Someone came along.”

  Nathan exhaled, a guttural sound, and leaned forward, resting his forearms just behind his knees. For a moment I thought he was going to be sick.

  “Who?”

  “A ten-year-old boy. He was camping with his parents. I don’t know why they let him walk around by himself, even on a trail. He was looking for his dog when he saw me. It wasn’t dark out yet, so I couldn’t hide. He just appeared out of nowhere from behind a tree and looked me right in the face. From six feet away.” Hall stopped speaking and winced.

  “Jesus Christ.” I put my hands to my mouth.

  Zack muttered a curse. “Tell me you didn’t use the knife.”

  Hall said nothing. She was clutching the sides of her chair, staring straight ahead. Bracing herself.

  Zack stood abruptly and let loose with a string of curses so foul that Nathan rose, placed his body between Zack and Hall, and told him to move it to the other side of the bay, now.

  Hall continued to stare ahead. I glared at her, and Nathan, I saw from the corner of my eye, watched me. Was he expecting me to leap from my chair as Zack had done? Sick to my core, I didn’t have the energy. I could only gape at the monster he’d brought into our lives.

  For this woman, this thing, I’d killed my best friend.