“Don’t know any Drew. But I’ll go check.”
The little door slid shut, and Genevieve and Anna shared a do you believe this idiot glance. Karyn felt a stab of jealousy. Wouldn’t Anna have looked to her just a day or two ago?
Karyn let out a long, controlled breath and put her fists in the pockets of her jeans. She leaned back against the brick wall of the building and concentrated on staring straight ahead. Shrouded forms flickered in her peripheral vision, there and gone so quickly she couldn’t be sure they had ever really been there. A dark flag, fluttering to earth. A huge hunched shape pushing a shopping cart. A cloud of smoke boiling up from the gutter. She tightened her fists and tried to focus on the ache in her fingers.
She wished Drew would get his ass out here, if only so she could get the conversation over with and take another hit of blind. Her reality was already getting flaky around the edges, her heart galloping anew after each half-glimpsed oddity or horror. And Anna was giving her that sidelong look, the one that said she was minutes away from asking that unending goddamn question again. Are you OK? Screw that. She just needed to talk with this guy, and then it would be time to make all that crap go away. Well past time, too.
A creaking noise as the door swung open, and Anna pivoted toward the sound.
Must be real, then, Karyn thought, and she turned as well.
Skinny guy. Tall and attenuated, like he’d been stretched. Blue jeans, gray sweatshirt with the hood pulled up around his face.
He stepped out of the building, stopped a few feet away, and hooked his thumbs into his pockets. A string trailed from the back of his hand. It seemed to have grown right from the flesh. It dropped to the sidewalk, stretched a few yards behind him, and came to an abrupt end. A matching string came from the hand at his side, and one from the tops of each of his battered sneakers. This was easy, and Karyn welcomed the chance to focus on something useful. This guy had been played. He’d been somebody’s tool or puppet, but he’d been cut loose, probably recently. Just the cult, or something else? Did that make him a danger?
He held up his hand in a halfhearted wave, and she realized she’d been staring.
“Yo,” he said. “What do you want?” He was close enough now for her to get a decent look at him, and now Karyn saw lines of tension on his face, tightness around the eyes and lips. He was younger than she’d thought, maybe. She had to admit she wasn’t seeing everything as clearly as usual right now. But he looked to be just into his twenties. She didn’t guess that meant he was fresh-eyed and innocent, though. His nose had been broken at least once in the past, and a long scar trailed its way down the side of his face.
For the first time, she saw a pair of scissors—kids’ scissors, with plastic red handles—jammed into his belt. A couple of foot-tall homunculi, miniature thugs in leather jackets, one with a crowbar and one with a pair of brass knuckles, climbed onto his shoulders and began leering at the back of his head. She understood at once.
“You cut your own strings,” Karyn said.
“Huh?”
“But they’re coming for you anyway.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But his mouth tightened even further.
“Sure,” Karyn said. On the rare occasions she volunteered some information, that’s what everybody said. I don’t know what you’re talking about. They were always lying. She’d learned to let it go. This wasn’t the time, anyway, since the hallucinations were starting to get especially vivid. That meant not a lot of time to screw around. A few more hours of this, and I’ll wish I were insane. Actually, I will be, for all practical purposes. She fought the urge to check her jacket pocket again.
“So,” Anna said. “What’s the deal?”
“With what?”
Karyn spoke first, her voice hard. “The Brotherhood came for your sister yesterday. Cut her up pretty bad.” Genevieve shot her an evil look.
“Bullshit,” Drew said.
“Who do you suppose they were looking for?”
“I don’t—”
A scatter of silent bullet holes opened up in Drew’s torso, and he fell back. Karyn spun, looking for the assailant, but nobody else was moving.
“Uh-oh,” Anna said.
“Inside! Now!” Karyn shouted.
Drew still stood, whole but confused. “Wha—”
“Move!”
A white pickup truck crept around the corner of the block, maybe two hundred feet distant. As soon as Drew went for the door, the vehicle leapt forward with a squeal of tires.
Drew pulled the door open, and Karyn, Anna, and Genevieve sprinted after him. As the door closed, bullets tore holes through it. Drew slammed a heavy bolt home.
“Back of the building,” Anna said. “Get to the back!”
She was right, Karyn knew. The garage walls were basically corrugated aluminum—they kept out the wind, but they’d be shit for protection against even small arms. As if to underscore the point, a new line of holes opened up in the wall, and bullets spanged against an old cart covered with tools.
The four of them ran. A cinder-block partition separated the front of the garage from other bays in the back, and Karyn was pretty glad to get it between them and their assailants. Two women and the guy who’d answered the door cowered behind the wall.
“Weapons?” Karyn asked. “What do you have for weapons?”
Drew’s eyes were wide and white in the gloom. “Nothing, man. What the fuck?”
“Did you think they were going to come tickle you, or what?”
“They weren’t supposed to find me, but then you come up draggin’ ’em behind like they’re tied to your ass.”
“They were on the way,” Genevieve said. “Tina told them . . . a few things.”
“Oh, shit. Then—”
“Shh,” Karyn said. Gunfire riddled the back door. Then somebody kicked it open. Everybody stared at her, and she understood. “Somebody’s going to come around the back. Is that door locked?”
“The door’s always locked,” one of the women said.
“I don’t think it’s going to hold them very long.”
Genevieve stood. “How long we got?”
“Don’t know.”
“I’ll work fast.” She ran over, took a Sharpie from her pocket, and started scrawling on the metal surface of the door.
More gunfire from out front, and, from the way everyone else flinched, Karyn figured it was the real thing.
“Where else can we get out?”
“How many doors do you think we have?” Drew asked. “There’s the front and the back.”
“No, man,” the doorman said. “Some of the windows are boarded up at the east end. We can kick ’em out.”
“Go,” Karyn said.
Another partition had been set up, turning two-thirds of the large open space into a living area—practically a warren. Flimsy plywood walls and stolen cubicle dividers carved the space into a series of rooms that appeared to have been constructed without regard to any obvious rationale or even convenience. Even more confusing, the dividers seemed to have been pushed around and pressed into service any time somebody needed a new wall for anything or maybe just grew tired of the old arrangement, so what little organization the place had started with was soon buried beneath dozens of ad hoc changes that had never been cleaned up.
Drew pressed in, with Karyn and Anna close behind. Moments later, Genevieve caught them up.
“Don’t know if that’ll hold ’em, but it’ll give ’em one hell of a surprise,” she said. She looked around. “Damn. They’ll never find us in here.”
“Yeah, unless they throw in a match,” Anna grumbled. She was right about that, Karyn thought. The floor was littered with trash—fast-food containers, dirty blankets, and pieces of wood—and the walls themselves were all made of materials that would burn readily.
“Not good.”
“Come on,” Drew said.
More gunfire from behind, the distance and direction lost in the confusing echoes from the garage interior and the bewildering maze they found themselves in. A moment later—
BOOM!
It felt like the whole world pressed in on Karyn for one brief moment, then pushed out again. A high-pitched squealing started up in her ears.
“What the hell was that?”
Genevieve grinned. “Back door.”
Drew led the group into the last living space and dragged a whiteboard in front of the door. “Better than nothing,” he said, and he shrugged. “Help me with the boards.”
Sure enough, a large window opening, maybe four feet wide by three tall, had been covered over with heavy-duty plywood.
“Shit,” the doorman said. “We ain’t kicking this out.”
He was right, Karyn saw. In the light of Drew’s flashlight, she could see that some overzealous carpenter, in an effort to keep the outside out, had screwed the thick plywood to the frame with literally dozens of screws, spaced about every two inches around the whole perimeter.
“Screwdriver?” she asked. “Crowbar? Anything?”
“Yeah,” Drew said. “Out in the garage.”
Another burst of automatic-weapon fire sounded in the warren behind them, followed by a couple of pops from a slower-firing weapon. Something crashed, alarmingly close by.
Drew bounced himself off the plywood and groaned. The wood was sturdy enough that, if anything had cracked, it was in his shoulder and not the blocked window.
Two more shots, and a strangled wail. The doorman and Drew lined up to ram the window together. Neither looked too happy about the idea.
“Wait,” Karyn said. “Who’s left out there?”
“Nobody,” Drew answered. “We’re all here.”
“Then—”
The whiteboard flew aside, tipped, and fell, and Nail strode into the room with Tommy just behind.
“We need to go,” Nail said. “Right now.”
* * *
They stepped past three bodies on the way out of the little labyrinth, and saw another slumped in the doorway at the back. It was us or them, Anna thought. They shot first. Even so, her heart lurched at the sight of each corpse, and she felt as though she were walking on unstable earth that tilted and rocked and threatened to throw her off, spinning and light-headed, into space. At some point, Genevieve’s hand crept into hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. Anna took more strength from it than she would have expected.
For her part, Genevieve’s face was set, hard. Maybe she’d seen more of this kind of thing, or maybe she had better luck with the they shot first rationale, but she seemed less likely to fall off the earth than to punch something, and Anna envied her.
It wasn’t as though Anna had never seen violence. It was fairly commonplace in their line of work, and she’d been on both the giving and receiving sides. Sometimes you got caught by a mark, sometimes you had to fight your way out (or mace a guard), and sometimes an angry cop lost his cool. She’d fired shots in anger twice, but that had been more for the purpose of scaring somebody off than killing them. Nail, she knew, had done worse during his time in the military, and she suspected him of quietly disposing of a fence who’d decided it would be more profitable to blackmail the crew over the theft of an ancient illuminated manuscript than to just shift the goods and keep his mouth shut.
Even so, this wasn’t a beatdown in an alley or something that had happened out of sight that she could easily forget. This looked like a war zone. Would have been four dead squatters, if we hadn’t been here, she reminded herself. It sort of helped.
She caught Karyn’s eye as they reached the main door. Karyn was taking slow, even breaths at a pace so measured it was almost forced, and even with all the horrible shit she’d seen (none of it real, but all of it real enough), her face had gone pale and her lower lip trembled faintly, like she might start crying any moment.
“Us or them,” Anna whispered.
Karyn nodded. “Yeah.” She glanced back to the body in the doorway. “Shit.”
Nail opened the door. He looked like the only one with his shit still together, calm as if he’d just eaten breakfast. “We gotta go. Even in this neighborhood, cops will be along soon.”
Everybody filed out. Tommy ducked to one side and threw up his dinner. Anna did her best to ignore it, partly out of respect for Tommy and partly to keep from following his example. The squatters scattered on reaching open air.
“Not you,” Nail said, clapping a heavy hand on Drew’s shoulder. “You’re with us.”
Drew’s eyes seemed the size of baseballs, and they didn’t focus on anything in particular. “I . . . don’t . . . think . . .”
“Wasn’t a request, homes. Get in the van.”
Drew got in the van. The rest followed, and soon Nail was guiding the vehicle slowly along back streets away from the disaster at the garage.
“What’s going on?” Anna asked, almost as soon as the garage was out of sight. “What’s so important that Mendelsohn’s killing anybody who leaves? Why now?”
Drew pulled his gaze from the window. “You think—you think those guys are gonna be OK? I mean, they didn’t have to take me in. I wouldn’t want . . . you know.”
“I don’t think Mendelsohn’s got any problem with them,” Anna said, forcing as patient and calming a tone as she could manage. And anyway, it’s not like there’s anyone left to talk about them. She kept her face still, even as her gorge rose at the intruding thought. “Just you. So what’s up with that?”
“You know. It’s like, deserter policy. Like the army. You know.”
“Try again,” Karyn said from the front.
Anna tried on a reassuring smile. “She’ll know if you’re lying. Every time.” Maybe not strictly the truth, but who knew? Even Karyn didn’t fully understand Karyn’s gift.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled.
Nail shot an evil glance into the rearview mirror. “I just shot two people and stabbed a third to get this information. You think I’m gonna stop now?”
“Hey!” Genevieve said. “I don’t want to hear that kind of shit. We’re the good guys, remember?”
“There ain’t no good guys.”
“Look,” Genevieve said, ignoring Nail. Drew turned in his seat to see her. “We got in the middle of some severe shit back there. All we want to know is who we’ve pissed off, how bad, and why.” Her tongue fiddled with a stud in her lower lip for a moment. “It might actually be a matter of survival now.”
That was smooth, Anna thought. Didn’t play directly on the “you owe us” thing, but came at it indirectly. He’ll get there himself, instead of feeling like it’s being used as a crowbar on him. It appeared Genevieve had a few different kinds of tricks in her bag. Might be a good idea to keep that in mind.
“It’s Mendelsohn,” Drew said, his voice suddenly heavy with exhaustion. “And the Brotherhood. You already know that.”
“How bad?”
“How bad do you think? There’s four dead guys back there, that I know about. It’s not like you fucked up their bake sale, you know?”
Anna felt a sudden, intense urge to slap him. She chalked it up to stress and put her hands in her lap.
“Okay,” Genevieve said. “Why? Why is it so important that they get rid of you?”
“Ain’t just me. There were a couple others, but they’re both worm food.”
“That’s even worse. Tell us why.”
Drew kicked the back of Nail’s seat, like a five-year-old with nowhere else to vent his frustrations. “I know all their shit. I was way in, you know? And they don’t like their secrets getting out.”
“What secrets?”
“You know. Like, initiation and shit.”
Genevieve didn’t even dignify that with a question, merely looked at him.
Drew sighed. “It’s the goddamn ritual.” He lowered his voice, mumbled something that even Anna couldn’t make out from right next to him.
“What?” Genevieve asked.
“I said they’re gonna kill somebody!” Drew shouted. “Kill somebody! A fucking sacrifice, all right?”
Anna glanced at Genevieve, but the other woman didn’t look away from Drew for a moment. “Who?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. An ‘innocent,’ whatever that means.”
“Jesus, Drew. What did you get yourself into?”
“You don’t get it,” he said. “You always sat on the sidelines and laughed at us, but you don’t know what it’s like to be in. It’s—it’s . . .” Tears glistened in his eyes. “It’s the best thing you ever felt. All the time you’re surrounded by people who have your back no matter what. It’s like you fit somewhere for the first time ever. Don’t you get that?”
Silence, then Nail’s deep voice: “Yeah. I get that.” He paused. “It fucks with your head. Shit you never would have dreamed of before starts to seem normal after a while, because you’re tired and everybody else says it’s cool.”
Drew nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. That’s exactly it.”
Nail’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a smile as bitter as any Anna had ever seen. “U.S. Marines, First Recon. Four years.”
“Damn, dude.”
“Yeah.”
“So they suck you in a little at a time,” Drew said, “talk about the great glory of bringing your god to Earth, and when they start talking about the ‘unfortunate necessity of sacrifice,’ you don’t even blink. And, if they can help it, they don’t give you one moment alone. Cut you off from family. Keep you short on sleep, so you’re never quite thinking clearly. And people around you are, like, disappearing into a closed room for hours a day, doing weird shit. Some of them never come out, and they’re getting weirder and weirder, but you’re so damn tired it never registers. And then one day, you’re on the shitter getting your two and a half minutes of personal time, and you’re like, ‘Whoa. Did I agree to kill somebody?’” He looked at his hands as though they were already stained with blood. “So then you’re all, holy hell, this is fucked. I gotta get out of here.”
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