Dr. Randall’s arms were warm beneath him, his chest comforting to lie against. There was rustling and a muffled curse as something crashed to the stone floor, echoing in the cavernous room.
His skin, now used to being naked, felt like it was being rubbed by sandpaper as Erika and Dr. Randall shoved Conexus clothes on him. Though he shivered with cold, he despised the feel of the cloth binding his skin. But he was helpless to protest, still too weak to even speak let alone still their hands.
His head bounced and jostled as Dr. Randall carried him. It brought a new wave of nausea as the pain intensified. Tex willed the bile down as he sought the comfort of the darkness once again. But this time, he hoped that he would wake.
31
JACK
Jack hadn’t paid attention to how they’d gotten from the car to Trattoria Segreto. His plan was to walk back to the car, get it started and park outside the restaurant and wait for Anna. He turned right at the end of the street he was on and weaved his way through the crowds of people on the sidewalk.
But the crowds thinned and he soon found himself in a neighborhood long past its prime. They hadn’t seen this neighborhood on their way to Trattoria Segreto. He turned and walked more quickly as if faster would magically make him unlost.
He got a sick feeling in his stomach and glanced over his shoulder. Two guys not much older than him were following closely behind him. Their hands were in their hoodie pockets. Maybe their hands are cold. It was a chilly day. Or maybe they’re carrying guns.
His brisk walk became a jog. Jack looked back and the guys were still there though he’d managed to put more distance between them. His jog became a run. Jack’s breathing was labored and sweat poured from his temples despite the autumn chill.
He was relieved when he saw the rust-bucket car. He’d lost the two sketchy-looking guys that he thought were following him. His heart pounded hard in his chest as he unlocked the car. He locked himself in and downed an entire bottle of water while he tried to calm himself.
It had already been close to twenty-five minutes since he left Anna. He’d planned to be back to the restaurant already. I hope she’s okay.
By the time Jack found the restaurant and circled the block to find a place to park, he’d been gone nearly thirty minutes. He expected to find Anna standing outside near Trattoria Segreto, angry that he was late. But she wasn’t outside the restaurant or on the sidewalk near the place. The twitchy feeling in his gut was back. She should be out here by now. Either she was sucking down pasta without him, or she was in trouble.
Jack wanted to text her to see if she was okay. But she’d insisted on no phones. “Too easy to listen in and track us,” she’d said.
I hate this off-the-grid crap.
Each second was like an hour as Jack weighed his options. While Erika was a bust-in-with-guns-blazing type, Jack was more methodical. He preferred considering all options and was always a fan of the choice that would lead to the least amount of potential damage. He figured why barge in the front door and face guns pointing at your face when you can sneak in and out of the back door before anyone has seen you?
But there was no time to be calculating. Jack pulled the door open and strode to the host stand with as much confidence as he could muster. The restaurant was nearly empty. A group of four portly men sat at the back table. They talked loudly and laughed. No one was at the host stand. Jack made a show of checking his watch and huffed loudly with impatience.
The bartender called out to him, “Wach’ya need?” The guy’s voice didn’t sound very enthusiastic about helping Jack.
Jack pitched his voice high. “I’m meeting a friend here and she’s late. Well, actually, I’m late, shame on me.”
The bartender extended his arm and gestured around the room. “You see anybody you know in here?”
Jack shook his head. “Maybe she was here and left. She’s tall – for a girl. And long blonde hair. Did you see her come in?” Jack searched the room with his eyes while they spoke. There was a long hall in the back and an exit sign. Why would she go out the back when she was the one who told me to meet her in the front? The twitchy feeling was still there.
The bartender flipped up a piece of counter and came around the bar. He wiped his hands on the white apron sitting just below his oversized belly as he approached Jack. “No broads been in here today.” He looked Jack up and down. It was more of a search for an arsenal than an appraisal of his fashion.
“I’ll take a quick peek in the back. Maybe she tucked into the powder room to freshen up.”
Jack stepped forward, but the bartender did too. His wide body blocked Jack’s path. “I told you. No chicks come in here today. So take your fruity ass outside before I kick it out.”
Jack let out another forced nervous giggle. “No need to be rude. Obviously I have the wrong place. She probably meant the café on the corner.”
The bartender stopped his approach and crossed his arms on his chest.
One of the loud guys in the back rose from the table. “You okay up there, Carlo?” The man didn’t wait for Carlo to answer. He dropped his napkin on the table and walked toward them. His lips were pulled in and his brow crinkled, hooding his eyes.
Jack didn’t need another hint to hightail it and run. He wasn’t going to get any answers from this mob squad. He backed toward the door, keeping his eyes on all the men in the room. He counted six. He hoped there weren’t more in the back.
“Wrong restaurant. Just leaving.” Jack turned to go up the stairs.
The portly man called out, “Nab him, you idiot.”
Jack pushed through the door and walked briskly into the midday lunch crowd. The door opened behind him and he broke into a full-on sprint. The middle-aged bartender with the fat tire around his middle didn’t stand a chance against Jack’s eighteen-year-old legs.
Jack felt like he was playing Frogger as he dodged the heavy traffic to get across the five lanes and to the car. He wished the car he was driving wasn’t as old as he was. He got in and prayed that the son of a bitch would start. He turned the key and the engine whined. “Come on, you P.O.S.” His adrenaline told him to keep pumping the accelerator. But he knew better. If he kept giving it gas, he’d flood the engine. Jack locked the doors and counted to thirty while he watched the rearview mirror.
Carlo went back inside the restaurant and Jack breathed a sigh of relief. He tried the ignition again. This time it rolled over but didn’t quite catch. Jack checked the mirror again while he waited to turn the key. Carlo had apparently not given up on catching Jack. He came out of the restaurant with two more guys and a billy club in his hand. All three crossed to Jack’s side of the street.
The men were closing in, now less than twenty yards to the rear of his car. One of the men pulled his suit jacket to the side to reveal the pistol strapped to his waist. The crowds of people on the sidewalk didn’t seem to notice the weapons. They had their faces buried in their phones or their eyes fixed forward.
“Come on, you piece of crap. Start.”
The engine cranked and spit but died before he could shift it into gear. He considered abandoning the car but decided to give it another try. It’d be easier to outrun a bullet in a car than on foot.
Carlo stood outside the passenger window. “Come on, boy. Get outta da car.” He pulled the door handle and, seeing that it was locked, smashed the billy club into the side of the door. His face was red and his mouth set in a snarl.
Jack’s hands were clammy on the key as he turned it, his heart a herd of buffalo in his chest. “Come on,” he whispered.
There was a loud crack, and for a split second, Jack thought they’d shot at him. But the engine vibrated at his feet. He threw the car into gear and pulled out into traffic without looking. Carlo fell into the street from the sudden loss of the car against him.
He missed hitting a white car by a hair. The driver laid on his horn, and when Jack looked in the rearview mirror, the driver of the white car flipped him off and was
mouthing words Jack didn’t have to be a lip reader to understand. And the three men who’d been after him gestured at him as well. Jack pulled across two lanes on the busy one-way street and drove as quickly as the traffic would allow.
He drove without knowing where he was going. He came to a large bridge and crossed it, figuring the further away from Manhattan he got, the better. He kept himself wedged in traffic like one of a herd. He’d have given anything to have his phone with him so he could pull up his map app and get directions to Thomas’ apartment.
Skyscrapers receded in his rearview. He had no idea which borough he was in. With any luck, he’d chosen the correct bridge.
Jack didn’t look forward to telling Thomas what had happened. The dude was tethered to reality by a frayed thread. He didn’t want to see the mess the guy would be in when he found out that Anna was missing.
Another woman has vanished before my eyes. He had no way of helping Erika, wherever she was. He didn’t know what had happened to Anna either, but he was pretty sure the trouble she was in was at least terrestrial.
I’ll find you, Anna, even if you are a Sturgis.
32
ERIKA
Erika walked as quickly as she could through the maze of hallways. Dr. Randall barked directions to her from behind. It was like déjà vu all over again only Dr. Randall carried Tex rather than Dr. Dolan. I hope it doesn’t end for Dr. Randall as it did for Dr. Dolan.
She’d worried about leaving Ian and Xenos alone. Xenos, always timid, had been zapped of energy by the higher humidity.
Her heart leapt into her throat as they neared the door to where she’d left Ian and Xenos. The door was blocked open by two bodies. In the dark it was hard to tell who the lumps were.
Erika approached the doorway cautiously. She lifted her rifle slowly to her shoulder. There was no movement. Whoever blocked the door, they were definitely dead. As she got closer, she let out the breath she’d held. The beings were small and thin. Conexus. The bloodstains on their tunics made it clear that they’d been shot. I didn’t think Xenos had it in her.
Dr. Randall breathed heavily as he caught up to her. Tex’s head bobbed up and down like a rag doll’s. Erika put up her hand in a ‘stop’ motion then put her fingers to her lips. She hoped he could see these hand gestures in the dim light.
She flattened herself to the wall beside the door, caught her breath and cautiously stepped inside, her gun in her hands. “Xenos?” she whispered.
“Yes,” Xenos replied.
Erika let out a sigh of relief. “Did you kill those Conexus?”
Xenos was pushing herself up to standing. She looked wobbly on her legs as she shook her head.
“If you didn’t, then who did?”
There was a shuffling of feet and someone grabbed her arm. She was jittery and tired and stressed to levels beyond the breaking point. It took great restraint not to shoot whoever had grabbed her.
“Calm down there, Annie Oakley,” Ian said.
“Ian! Oh, thank God. You’re okay.” Erika hugged him despite the rancid smell that emanated from him.
His arms wrapped around her. They were thin and shaky, not firm and strong as they had been before. “I’m not sure I’m okay yet. More like just not dead.”
In the low light Erika couldn’t see detail, but she could tell that Ian was not himself. None of them had eaten a real meal in weeks. Ian’s six-foot-three frame was skeletal. He hadn’t started out with much fat to lose. He had dark circles under his eyes, but whether it was anemia or dried blood, Erika didn’t know. His hair was scraggly and greasy. His chin sported a full beard, not a neatly trimmed day’s growth that looked cool on him.
There was nothing she could say to comfort him, to make any of it better, because it sucked. “You’re alive. That’s something.”
Dr. Randall tottered into the room, and Erika helped him ease Tex to the floor. He was still unconscious but alive. For now.
Erika gestured back toward the door with her head. “I see you had visitors. I didn’t think you could sit up let alone shoot a gun.”
Ian shrugged. “Doesn’t take much strength to pull a trigger. And I had help. When I woke up, Xenos was beside me – healing me.”
Erika’s heart swelled with gratitude. “Thank you, Xenos. I’m – I’m so grateful to you. You may have saved his life.”
Xenos pulled her lips back in what appeared to be an attempt to smile. She was clearly unpracticed at it. The mirth never reached her eyes.
“So what’s going on? I woke from a nightmare of crazy dreams and wicked bad aches in my whole body. Xenos was here, but you were gone.”
Erika helped Ian sit down to rest then filled him in on all that had happened while he fought his fever and illness. “You’ll recover, I think, now that you’ve gotten the injection of antiviral,” Erika said.
“That’s good? I’m not going to die quickly of a virus so I can die a long, slow painful death from starvation,” Ian said. His nostrils flared.
“A simple ‘thank you, Erika, for saving my life’ would have sufficed.”
“Oh, I’m supposed to be grateful that you convinced me to come to hell with you then laud you when you save me from dying quickly only so I can die slowly?”
Ian might as well have smacked her across the face. Anger made her skin flush hot and her shoulders tense. Erika gritted her teeth and bit back a retort. “You’re hungry, tired and cold. We all are. And you’re still sick from the virus. It makes you edgy. You want to blame me for all this? Fine. But be pissed at me another day. Right now, I need you to cowboy up so we can get the hell out of this place.”
“You’re telling me to cowboy up?”
“Yeah, you heard me.”
Ian chuckled, but it wasn’t a warm or joking laugh. “And I suppose you and the great Tex there, lying like a limp carrot, are going to lead us to some other grand place? Can’t wait, seeing as how this trip worked out so well.”
“She didn’t pull you onto that ship by a leash,” Dr. Randall said. “And a caustic attitude will not further our shared goal of getting back to our own time.”
Ian didn’t answer, but his mouth remained pulled back in a sneer, his eyes dark and brooding. Ian was pushing all of Erika’s buttons like he wanted to egg her on to a fight. Erika wasn’t in the mood to spar. “We’re going home, Ian. You can either come with us or stay here and die in a pool of your own puke. Your choice.”
She didn’t wait to hear more snark. Erika went to Dr. Randall to check on Tex. “Is he doing any better?”
“His breathing is more regular, not as shallow. Of course, I couldn’t possibly know the extent of the damage here in the dark and without my medical equipment. My guess is that he’s not out of the woods yet. We need to get him and Xenos to Aphthartos. Soon.”
“I do not have the strength to heal him now, Erika. I am sorry. The water … it makes me weak,” Xenos said.
The room where they’d been kept had been as arid as the desert when they first arrived. But the walls were now wet with dewy moisture and the floor slick with a thin film of water. It wasn’t as bad this far away from the waterworks, but Erika assumed that was only because the water hadn’t had time yet to fully penetrate the dirt and concrete.
“We all need to leave here before the place caves in,” Erika said.
Dr. Randall nodded.
“Okay, it’s now or never. Ian, can you walk on your own?”
He stood and didn’t fall over.
That’s a good sign. “What about you, Xenos?”
Xenos tried to take a few steps, but her wobbly legs gave out on her and she fell to the floor.
“We’ll take that as a no.” Erika bent to help her up, but Ian got to her first. He gently tugged her arm and allowed her to lean on him. I guess his anger is directed only at me.
“I’ll take point,” Erika said. She handed Ian one of the guns she had slung across her back. “I know you’re mad at me, but please don’t shoot me in the back with this.”<
br />
Ian’s face softened a bit.
Erika picked Xenos’ gun up off the ground and slung it over Xenos’ slight shoulder. “Just in case.”
Dr. Randall was resting, his back against the wall. Tex was still out of it.
“I hate to tell you this, Doc, but you’re going to have to carry him again. Do you think you can?”
“Is there another choice?” He stood up, took a deep breath then knelt and scooped the skeletal Tex into his arms. “I suggest we walk as quickly as we can before my old knees give out on me.”
Erika poked her head out into the empty hall. She turned left as Dr. Randall directed, back toward the junction of three halls that Xenos had been leading them to when they were taken by the Conexus and infected with the virus. The small band of humans and half humans walked and tripped along the soggy corridors toward the vast underground city once called Aphthartos.
33
JACK
Jack checked his rearview mirror but didn’t see anyone following him. Even though the immediate fear that Carlo or one of the other guys would gun him down was over, his heart still raced. He continued to drive aimlessly for close to half an hour while he thought about what to do.
With the gas-tank needle moving toward E, he stopped for gas. He dug Anna’s cash stash out of the glove box. It was only a hundred fifty, but it was enough to tide him over until he found Thomas. He wanted to call Thomas, but realized he didn’t know his number. He rifled through the glove box and Anna’s things stashed in the car, but there was nothing with his number written on it.
Jack put twenty toward gas and found a dusty map of the city in a rickety wire rack. He hadn’t used a paper map since he was a kid. He sat behind the steering wheel and unfolded the map completely to see the whole city. Seeing it all splayed out in front of him helped him get his bearings more than seeing bits of a map on a tiny phone screen allowed.
H.A.L.F.: The Makers Page 21
