Stavros grunted. “Now who’s being condescending?”
She stared at him across the table, one poker player to another, assessing his resolve. Wondering what cards they had left to play. Lauryn took a deep breath and released it slowly.
* * *
“Are they like that all the time?” Colt asked, jerking his head toward the back room.
Scratching Jasper’s head, Megan kept her eyes fixed on the street outside, though the tin debris hanging across the storefront obscured it. Staring hard helped her focus. The tin made a warped, warbling sound as it bobbed lightly in the wind.
“Actually, this is the most they’ve spoken since we met the doctor,” she said absently, a half-smile curling her lips. Like somehow that was funny.
“They’re like feuding parents,” Colt grumbled.
She shot a quick glance at him to see if he meant anything by that, then realized he didn’t know, couldn’t have known, and returned her eyes to their guard post. “Yeah, pretty much, now that you mention it,” Megan said. To change the subject, she asked, “So, do you believe me yet?”
Colt blew out a breath and leaned back in his chair. “About what year it is?” His tone was dubious, even suspicious. “It can’t be 2015. It just can’t be.”
Megan reached down, picked up the calendar she’d pulled off the wall behind the register, and held it up to him again. “Why not? Says so in black and white, right here.”
Colt rolled his eyes. “Because 2015 was five years ago. I know. I was there. I was ten when the Blindness happened—”
“That happened on Saturday,” she said, not for the first time. “Like, three days ago, dude.” Holding the calendar higher, she waggled it back and forth in front of him, then pointed to Saturday’s date. “It lasted a whole day.”
“Yeah,” Colt said, “but it lasted a whole day five years ago!” Something in his voice wasn’t as convinced as his attitude. “I don’t know,” he continued, sitting forward and placing his forehead in his hands. “My head still feels a little weird from this morning. Maybe you’re all just diesel-fueled hallucinations,” he half-laughed. Meeting her gaze, he said, “Your mom is right, by the way. We shouldn’t go anywhere near those people. They’re dangerous.”
“Everything’s dangerous here now.”
“True,” he answered. “Wherever here is.”
“I told you—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. This is Conroe, Texas. But it’s not my Conroe, Texas.”
“Or your time.”
There, she’d said it. They’d danced around the idea before by citing the calendar as incontrovertible proof. But they’d never spoken the notion of Colt’s time travel out loud until now.
“You’re crazy,” said Colt.
“Am I, Future Boy?” Megan’s sly look made Colt forget about his cloudy head. He couldn’t help but smile at her jab, then looked away quickly when he saw her smiling back.
Megan noticed. “Am I that ugly?” she said leadingly.
Colt’s eyes snapped back to her face. “Ugly? You’re—”
A fist slammed the table in the back room. Jasper’s head popped up and he woofed a warning.
“Well?”
“Well what?” Colt said absently, his attention drawn to the noise.
“Never mind.” Megan set her jaw as she stood to follow him to the back room. “You suck.”
* * *
“Are you sure the roads are open?” asked Marsten, watching his whiteshirts load up on the buses lined two by two along Simonton Street. The men and women of the Weisshemden were smiling as they climbed aboard. They seemed unusually relaxed for an evil army.
Simpson held up the satellite phone he’d picked up earlier, while everyone else was occupied with everyone else. He’d retrieved it from the nearby offices of the Conroe Courier, the town’s dying newspaper, two doors down from the courthouse. The reporter he’d encountered—the only one intrepid enough to come into the office—hadn’t wanted to hand it over. In short order, he hadn’t needed it anymore. But he’d been helpful enough to tune it to the EMS channel shared by police, fire, and road crews before Simpson killed him.
“I’ve figured out the route we need to take to get to the traffic management center in northwest Houston. It won’t be fast, but we’ll get there.”
Marsten glanced at the western horizon. The sun had all but disappeared. Navigating the interstate in the dark would be tricky, he knew, what with all the wrecks and storm debris. They’d have to move slowly, take their time.
“You better be right about that place,” the Maestro said, casting a meaningful, glazed left eye in Simpson’s direction. “Technology complicates things. Me? I prefer to keep things simple.” He hefted his axe for effect. “But you’ve convinced her, so … that’s where we’ll go.”
“That’s what we’re doing, Maestro,” Simpson assured him. “I’m troubleshooting potential complications. Once we control the roads, we control everything in Houston.”
The Maestro grunted, unconvinced, as he mounted his motorcycle. Simpson did the same while Maggie climbed onto what used to be Juggs’s bike. She wasn’t riding with Marsten now, Simpson noticed. He wondered what was up with that.
Cackler tried to look like an old hand at motorcycles as he threw his leg over Smack’s old ride, but he came off to anyone watching as simply nervous as hell. He’d never ridden a motorcycle in his life, Simpson knew. He watched and mimicked every move Marsten made as the Maestro fired up his bike.
“Where’s the Lady?” called Simpson.
The Maestro regarded him with his new, open-eyed leer. He simply pointed up without looking, and Simpson followed his index finger.
As the final rays of daylight waned on the horizon, Id rose above them, her long, red locks twirling lazily around her, a nest of snakes caressing the air. The orange-yellow mist swirled around her, spreading outward before them, projected southward along Highway 75. It would roll forward in front of them, Simpson realized, hang over them like a protective cloud, masking their numbers. Only the four of them on motorcycles would venture beyond it, reconnoitering the road ahead and verifying their route was clear as the buses crept along behind.
The Maestro gunned his throttle and smiled. The clap-clap-clap of his engine seemed to approve the launch of the Black Hand against the Bayou City and its resident sheep. “Come on, boys!” he yelled, passing between the pairs of yellow school buses. “The big city is where all the fun is!”
* * *
“You know it just hit me,” said Lauryn, tapping her fingers rhythmically on the tabletop. “Your dogmatic belief that you can fix all this. It’s blinding you to the realities of the situation. It’s like science is your religion.”
Stavros stared at her, eyes narrowing. I’m not a priest, he thought. I’m a witch doctor throwing bones into a beaker. Get it right. He was tempted to laugh out loud.
Seeing the look on his face made Lauryn shake off the turn their conversation had taken. “I will not put Megan in danger,” she said solemnly.
Equally calm, Stavros nodded. “I understand that. I do. You’ve been through a lot—” he began.
She flashed him a warning that promised if he patronized her, she’d be rapping on more than the table.
He blinked, giving her a moment. “Lauryn, it’s not my intention to put her or you or that boy in danger.” Stavros took a breath but Lauryn cut him off.
“Really? Because what you’re suggesting—”
She stopped short when the scientist’s balled fist slammed down. Immediately his demeanor softened. He clearly regretted the outburst. Swallowing hard, he said, “Please, let me finish.”
Lauryn’s eyes bored holes into him, but she closed her mouth.
“What I was going to say was, I don’t want to put anyone in danger. But it’s a little late for that concern, isn’t it? Now I have an ethical obligation to try and figure out what went wrong with my test subjects. If that makes me dogmatic, so be it. My work has killed peop
le, Lauryn. I’ve seen them. I’m not talking about the storms. Peter and the others…”
He paused, and the dink … dink … dink from the swaying corpse hanging in the prison men’s room rang again in his mind’s ear. The heavy, staccato plinking of the blood droplets in the metal toilet bowl. The slight drift of Bradford’s body. The squeak of the strap binding his feet to the ceiling, swaying … swaying in the darkness.
“During your time at the prison, did you ever work with Bradford?”
Lauryn blinked at the question from left field. “He was my trainer when I transitioned to the prison from the police force. He was a walking cliché—mountain of a man with a big heart. He was studying to become a massage therapist, of all things.” Lost in the memory of the moment, she said, “Can you picture those huge hands working out kinks in your back?” Then her eyes grew suspicious. “Why are you asking about Bradford?”
Stavros avoided her gaze, answered indirectly. “I’ve seen their victims, horribly mutilated. Up close and personal. I can only imagine the cost of what I haven’t seen.”
Dread oozed into Lauryn’s belly. “What happened to Bradford?” she asked, anxious but afraid to know. Then her imagination began filling in the details for her. Finger painting them red in her head.
“Peter happened to him.” Stavros sat up a little straighter and leaned forward, saying, “Even your husband’s death is at my feet.”
Lauryn’s face softened as she pushed aside the horrific visions of Bradford’s death. “That wasn’t your fault. Mark—”
“—sacrificed himself because Peter threatened Megan,” Stavros finished. “Peter might never have escaped, never have been there on that roof … all the criminals that are out now, I can trace the consequences of their actions to one activating event: my research … my work.”
It was like the air had quieted itself to hear Stavros speak. He took a moment, and she let him take it. Then Lauryn said, “You really do have a God complex.” She hoped her semi-serious snark would undercut the tension in the room.
He smiled oddly in response, a twisted expression like irony itself might wear, if irony had a face. “You know, I never had kids. Never had time, really, and my … well,” he said, waving his hand at TMI territory, “I never really had the, uh, motility.”
Lauryn regarded him evenly, and Stavros cleared his throat.
“In a strange way, my test subjects are like my children.” His voice was mired in the absurdity of what he was saying. “Yes, they’re criminals, and psychopaths to boot. But they’re human beings who put themselves into my care. I rewrote part of their brains, Lauryn. And somehow that work’s been perverted. And other people, not just my patients, are suffering for it. I have to do something about that.”
“You don’t need me for that,” she answered. “And you certainly don’t need my daughter.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Stavros matter-of-factly. There was none of the signature superiority in his voice now. Just simple truth. Humility, even. “I’m no warrior. You, on the other hand—you’re a goddamned Amazon.”
Lauryn’s eyebrows arched.
“He’s right, Mrs. Hughes.”
The two adults at the table turned to the teens standing in the doorway. Jasper sat next to Megan, panting in the heat.
“I appreciate the thought—”
“No, I meant the part about him not being a warrior,” replied the boy. He drew an index finger across his throat and winked.
“Seriously, dude. You suck,” said Megan.
Stavros sighed. “But he’s not wrong.” The expression on his face suggested his ego was battling his brain for control of his mouth. Finally, he said, “I let a fifteen-year-old with a small knife disarm me and nearly slit my throat.” Turning to Lauryn, he said, “I want to make this right with Peter and the others. I have an obligation to them … and their victims, past and future. Before this is all over, there will be blood. More blood, I should say. I want to minimize that.”
Lauryn regarded him. “I won’t place Megan in any more danger.” Her eyes were sympathetic, but her tone was flat as metal.
Stavros’s face fell. Maybe that was it, then. Maybe he was truly on his own. A witch doctor with only his bones to cast and the fleeting illusion of knowledge they granted him.
The sound of engines waxed and waned from the street. Jasper growled. Colt turned and placed his hands on Megan’s arms, said, “Stay here,” and returned to the sales floor as Lauryn rose from the table.
Colt moved quickly to the front door and dropped to one knee. He peered through a slit in the hanging tin.
Though the moon was barely visible, the buses passed so close on the street they were impossible not to see. Dozens of them, rolling south down Frazier Street, creeping along to avoid debris. The mechanical smell of their exhaust tickled fears of asphyxiation in Colt’s memory.
They were so full of prisoner-passengers, he could see them pressing against the windows. Filled to the gills, thought Colt. Jesus, look at them all. He felt Lauryn kneel beside him, heard her catch her breath.
“I think he’s right about the other thing, too,” said Colt without looking at her.
“What?” Lauryn’s voice was on automatic while her brain counted the buses passing on the street. “Who?”
“That you’re a goddamned Amazon. You handle yourself like the people where I come from. Like you don’t have time for bullshit.”
She skimmed her eyes toward him and couldn’t help the appreciative smile that formed on her lips. “Again, that’s sweet of you to say, Colt, but—”
“Not sweet,” he replied, sounding like she’d just insulted his intelligence. “Truth.”
Lauryn turned her gaze outward again, counting.
“I know where they’re going,” said Megan quietly.
Lauryn turned to her daughter, who was standing in the middle of the gun store, Stavros stepping up behind her. Megan had that weird look on her face again. Like in Capstone Church, when the orange storm came. Like that very morning in the middle of the road, when the buses had first appeared.
“Where?” Stavros asked Lauryn’s question for her. “Where, Megan?”
But the teenager only smiled down at Jasper, who stared up at her with his big, brown eyes, panting. Sighing, she said, “Thanks, Dad.”
Chapter 9: Tuesday, night.
“What do you mean, doll?” Lauryn asked, very deliberate in her choice of language. Doll was Mark’s term of endearment for Megan, one he’d shared with Lauryn in the hospital nursery.
She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, La. Like a living doll we made together.
Lauryn pushed the memory from her mind as she approached her daughter. Megan appeared spellbound and wasn’t answering. She seemed to be looking straight through the tin drooping down over the store’s entrance. Staring beyond the street and its convoy of yellow school buses passing by. As if her gaze were a telescope peering to some other, faraway place.
“My dream,” she said finally. “In my dream last night, I was at Dad’s work.” As Lauryn stroked her hair, Megan’s eyes, still seeing elsewhere, tried to focus on her mother. “She was there,” Megan said, her voice laced with venom. Turning to Colt, the distant look departed from her eyes. “And you were there, too. You were running from … from monsters, I think.”
Colt had begun to smile when she first mentioned daydreaming of him, then looked away quickly when Megan mentioned the monsters. He returned to monitoring the traffic outside.
Lauryn swept a lock of brownish-blonde hair from Megan’s forehead. “You dreamed of your Dad,” she said, trying to understand the connection. “You were at his work—”
“No,” Megan emphasized. “Well, yes, but it wasn’t exactly a dream. I mean it was, but.…” She squeezed her eyes shut in frustration. Words were failing her. “It was more like.…”
“More like what, Megan? A vision?”
Everyone looked at Stavros. The question sounded strange
, coming from him. “What? I can’t think outside the box?”
“Yes,” answered Megan, staring at him intensely. “More like a vision.”
Lauryn sighed. The storms and the aftermath, her father’s death, the events on the rooftop—they were taking more of a toll on her daughter than she’d realized. This girl of fourteen was not having visions, for God’s sake.
“I know what you’re thinking, Mom,” said Megan, challenging her mother’s absent stare. Lauryn’s eyes snapped back. “You think I’m being a drama queen.”
“I wasn’t thinking any such thing,” Lauryn said a bit defensively. “But ‘visions’? I think maybe your father’s death—”
“Stranger things,” interrupted Stavros. Again the party turned to stare at him. “I’m starting to think we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Lauryn was starting to get annoyed. She wanted to help Megan deal with her dream, help her understand it, not run off into fairy land with a scientist, of all people, leading the way.
“It means that some of what I’ve observed with Serenity can’t be explained—at least not yet—by what I know.”
Lauryn rolled her eyes, feeling herself falling back into a loggerhead debate with Stavros. She actually leaned physically backward in an effort to resist it. “More double-talk from the Minister of Science!”
“Mom, calm down,” breathed Megan.
“Don’t tell.…” Lauryn took a deep breath.
“I think I know what he means,” said Colt. “I can’t explain it, but I know Megan’s right about this place. This might be Texas, but it isn’t where I’m from. I look at the calendar and I see five years ago. My world went blind for a day back then. Yours just got its sight back. And I saw the look in those prisoners’ eyes. They were like the Exers, only with a black brand burned into their arms and a different kind of hunger driving them.” At the look Lauryn was giving him—a kind of pleading need for support, an ally for sanity even—the boy merely shrugged. “I know how it sounds.”
Ironheart (The Serenity Strain Book 2) Page 8
