by Ike Hamill
Isaac frowned and shook his head. “Trust me, this is the beginning of the end.”
“You’re wrong,” Brook said. “People in Fairbanks have roots here. We’ll die before we give up on this place. Communities don’t just fall apart. They collapse because people let them, and the people I know won’t let that happen here. You coming?”
Isaac looked back to the horizon and then back to her. He nodded.
Chapter 23
{Command}
“DON’T YOU DARE LEAVE my side,” Cleo said. She sat down on the chair behind the desk and tried to pull herself closer to it. The chair didn’t budge.
“Ma’am?” Finn asked from the doorway.
“They’ll be here any second, I’m sure,” Cleo said.
She was right.
Penny and Jack came through the door. Jack closed it behind himself. The four of them were alone in the underground office, tucked below the old law offices. Musty books surrounded them and absorbed the sound of their voices.
“Who wants to explain to me exactly what just happened there?” Cleo asked. Her burning eyes moved to Penny.
Penny stood a little straighter, but looked like she was being careful to not shrink away from the glare.
“Partial success before we were broken up,” Penny said. “I think that we’ve raised a lot of support amongst the citizens who were there. They will be spreading the word to be on the lookout for Jacob and the other dissidents.”
“You mean the ones who survived,” Cleo said.
Penny shifted her eyes. Before she could ask her question, Cleo answered it.
“We raised a lot of support amongst the citizens who were there and survived, you mean?”
“Yes, of course,” Penny said.
“I hope we’re all in agreement that there is little value in being in command of a mostly deceased population?”
“Yes,” Penny said. She looked to Jack and then back to Cleo. “Of course.”
“Good,” Cleo said. She placed her hands on the desk and rose. “So who wants to explain to me what they think was killing the citizens in that meeting we just held? Did you catch that part? When you were congratulating yourself on swaying the people against Jacob, did you happen to notice that there was something killing people?” Her voice was low, but full of power.
Finn looked surprised when his mouth opened to answer. “I saw it,” he said. “I saw it as it took Mason. I’m not sure it killed him. It seemed to wrap his body in darkness, but I could still see his face. It seemed like he was still alive.”
“And the people tumbling from the fire escape, and jumping from the windows?” Cleo asked.
“A lot of injuries, I’m sure,” Jack said.
“We don’t know how many actually died,” Penny added.
Cleo threw up her hands with a disgusted noise. She began to pace in the small area behind the desk. “Who’s coordinating the rally points?”
“I haven’t reassigned that yet,” Penny said. “We stopped assigning that task when we…”
Cleo shook her head and interrupted, muttering under her breath. “Single point of failure. We were too invested in a single point of failure and this is what it gets us.”
Cleo looked up to Penny and pointed. “I’ve delegated too long. One hand didn’t know what the other was doing and then it all fell apart. I’ve got all the procedures up here.” She pointed to her head. “Take me to the Flower Street rally point. We’ll pick up the neighborhood and anyone who fled there for healing. Let’s go.”
“You’re supposed to stay sequestered in the time of…” Finn began.
Cleo slammed her palm down on the desk. The sound shocked everyone to silence.
“I just told you that I know the procedures. We’re going to the Flower Street rally point.”
Chapter 24
{Watching}
MADELYN SCALED THE SIDE of a dump truck, took two running steps across the rusty cab, and then jumped to the roof of the building. Her feet landed like feathers as she sprinted. She leapt across the small gap to the next building and grabbed the brick lip. Even as the bricks came loose, she pulled herself up to the level of the next roof.
She moved to the edge and looked down at the world below.
People were moving through the night—far too many for normal. Some were limping and being helped along. She folded her arms and watched. They were all coming from the same direction, but they were spreading out as they moved through town. She guessed that they were coming from some sort of gathering. It didn’t make much sense—there was no meeting space that she knew about south of the village.
These weren’t her people anymore. That much, she remembered. There were other memories too, but they were still below. They needed time to surface. Madelyn rubbed her neck and thought about Elijah. He had done something to her, and it might not have been the first time. There was something too familiar about her speedy recovery. It was like when he had rescued her from the cabin. After digging her out of all that sand, he had done something to make her bounce back very fast. She should have pressed the issue then.
Down the block, Madelyn saw someone else hiding in the shadows.
He pulled back, away from the street, when a couple of people limped by him. As he poked his head back out, she recognized something about the way the man moved his big frame—it was Logan.
Madelyn nodded to herself. Logan wasn’t too bright, but he would probably be able to fill in some of the gaps for her. And he was clearly avoiding people too, so she might be able to leverage that.
Madelyn ran north across rooftops until she found a place to jump down and sprint across the dark street. Her eyes were working so well that the stars above might as well have been searchlights. She could see everything, even in the shadows. She found her way behind the buildings that ran down Locust Street, and hopped up to the backbone of a rotted fence. Springing from that, she swung from an old power line and landed on the asphalt in a low crouch. Madelyn felt like a supreme predator—the night was her domain.
She stuck to the shadows and ran towards where she had last seen Logan. Approaching from the rear, she could see that he had fled. She saw the puddle and the wet footprints he had left across the concrete walk. Madelyn smiled and followed. She picked up his scent as she followed his tracks. When they dried up, she realized that she didn’t even need them anymore. Her nose told her which direction he had run.
Madelyn tracked him to one of the service paths that people only used when they had big carts to push. The wide path wouldn’t by used by any sane person at night. It was barely used in the middle of the day. She saw a distant shadow and picked up her pace.
Still a hundred meters away, Logan stopped and turned. Madelyn froze. She had forgotten about his supernatural hearing. She could barely hear him, and yet the sound of her running had spooked him. She held her breath and waited, hoping that he would dismiss whatever he had heard.
Logan sprinted off into the brush.
Madelyn ran down the trail. She slowed and then took an angle through the trees. She stayed downwind of him and kept her distance, hoping that the growth around her would mask her sounds. After a couple of minutes of tracking him, it didn’t matter how much noise she made. They drew within the sound of one of the trails being used by injured citizens who were trying to get back to their homes. Those people draped the area with background noise. Madelyn was free to track Logan at will. She drew within a few dozen meters of him and then stopped.
Madelyn listened to his sound. She tilted her head and smelled his scent.
She had intended to intercept him and find out what he knew—when had that changed? Somehow in the course of tracking him down, she had become a predator, trying to sneak up on her prey. It felt good to size up his senses and then move around them. But what was she intending to do? Even if she caught him, he was twice her size and half her age. And the point had been to get information from him.
She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Logan!�
� she said in his direction.
She heard him pause. After a second of deliberation, he ran.
Madelyn smiled in the dark. It was almost better this way. She ran after him.
# # # # #
As Logan circled the neighborhood, Madelyn wondered if he was lucky, or maybe a little craftier than he looked. He hugged the northern edge of the clearing near the grade school. She couldn’t stay downwind and she had to fall back so that he wouldn’t hear her. While she waited for him to gain some distance, Madelyn heard another person on a similar track.
She knelt down in the shadow of a shed and waited for the second person to pass.
It was two people. Madelyn recognized the woman, but not the young man she was with. They passed close enough that Madelyn heard their panting breath and pounding hearts. The two were nearly worn out and making a ton of noise as they fled. When they were a few dozen meters beyond her, Madelyn decided to use them as cover. If the noise spooked Logan, it would do so either way. She wanted to be close enough to keep up if he decided to sprint again.
The two were oblivious to Madelyn. The woman kept whispering instructions to the man, like he needed to know where she was going to turn instead of simply following her.
Madelyn moved to within ten meters of the pair. They had no idea of her presence. They weren’t moving fast enough to keep up with Logan. She circled and ran beyond them. Madelyn’s strides lengthened to insane distances. As her feet touched down, she coiled the muscles in her legs and sprung from them, almost like she was flying through the air, only needing to touch down to the ground occasionally to stay aloft.
The hair on the back of her neck stood up and Madelyn grabbed a tree to stop herself suddenly. She sensed something. In that instant, she knew what Logan was feeling. There was another presence at the limits of her perception. She wondered if it was toying with her the same way that she was with Logan. The thought was disgusting. Madelyn dropped back and the circled around the couple in the other direction, to put them between her and this new presence. By the time she found Logan again, she began to doubt if it had been real. She was a goddess. There was nothing in the night that could be her equal.
Logan stopped.
He was waiting next to an old road. There was nothing coming, so Madelyn was left to guess what he was waiting for. It didn’t take long. Logan sprinted across the old road and made his way in through the doorway of a broken-down brick building. Madelyn watched as he disappeared and then turned back to track the sound of the couple. They seemed to be headed for the same place.
She wanted to catch Logan alone, and there wouldn’t be time before the others showed up.
Curious what they might be up to, she moved south until she could slip across the street and approach the corner of the building. She ducked in through a broken window just as the couple emerged from the woods and trotted across the old road. The room had scattered office furniture on a buckling floor. She found the door and forced the handle until the lock mechanism broke. Madelyn opened the door on a dark hall and saw the dancing static of a completely dark space. She let the edges of the floor and walls emerge from the static and then she started forward. People moved in the building, like rodents in the walls.
It was more than just Logan and the couple. They had been preceded by others.
Madelyn caught a familiar scent as she climbed the stairs.
She smelled Logan, but also someone with a more interesting aroma. In that scent, she recognized something of herself. Her brain figured it out before her nose told her the truth—Jacob was there.
Madelyn moved silently through the dark building to find a place where she could spy on them. She wanted to know what they were doing before she made herself known.
Chapter 25
{Reunited}
JACOB AND HARPER MOVED to opposite sides of the door. She held a metal bar. He had a axe handle. They stood perfectly still and waited in the darkness. The big shape came through the doorway and then stopped suddenly. The form turned.
Jacob slid forward and swung at the body. He wasn’t confident that it would have a head.
“No!” Harper said.
Jacob stopped his arms, mid-swing. The dark shape ducked and raised its hands.
“Logan?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Who’s there?”
“Come in here,” she said. Jacob followed. He knew that his girlfriend was leading the tall man back to where they had stashed their only light. Once they were in that windowless room and had the door shut, Harper turned on the light.
“You okay?” Harper asked.
Logan nodded. Jacob clapped him on the shoulder.
“Good job getting away from those goons,” Jacob said.
“Yeah, you too,” Logan said. “At least you got the vehicle.”
“Not anymore,” Jacob said, shaking his head.
“Listen,” Logan said, “there’s at least one more person coming. Someone might have been following me, or it could have been one of the others. We need to go find out.”
Jacob looked at Harper. They both nodded.
“There’s a place where we can spy on the only two entrances. We locked the doors to the other rooms, so we should be safe,” Jacob said.
Harper reached for the door and turned out the light. They shuffled carefully through the darkness. Jacob took the position at the window. Logan listened while Harper moved down the hallway, holding her bar in front of her.
“Two coming,” Jacob whispered. They waited while Harper intercepted. She came back, leading the two people who found their way inside. They announced themselves with quiet whispers.
Jacob scanned the road and watched the tree line. After he didn’t see anything else move for several minutes, he turned to Logan. “What do you think?”
“I don’t hear a thing now,” Logan said. “Maybe Brook and Isaac were the people I heard.”
Harper turned to Brook. “This building was your idea. Where’s the best place to talk.”
“Downstairs,” Brook said. They followed her lead.
# # # # #
Brook shut the door on the basement room. Harper turned on her light and swept it around the space. Two walls had holes up high. The ceiling sagged from water damage at one spot. Aside from that, the room seemed pretty clean and secure. They had a door on either end of the room.
Everyone besides Brook followed the beam around the room. Their eyes all landed on the same details—vulnerabilities and exits. It was a habit they had grown up with.
Brook was picking through a rack of equipment on one wall. She flipped a switch and the lantern gave them enough light to see everything in the old conference room. Brook used a pole to move the lantern to a hook in the ceiling. Harper clicked off her light.
“We should post someone in case the others come,” Logan said.
“Not likely,” Harper said. “Amelia and Scarlett were going south towards the ice, and Wyatt’s dead.”
The wall thumped as Logan slumped into it.
“Sorry,” Harper said. “I thought you knew.”
Logan’s mouth hung open as he stared at the floor. After a second, he shook his head and straightened himself back up.
“That leaves those other two,” Jacob said. He pointed to Harper. “The two guys from your team.”
“No,” Brook said. “You mean Andrew and Jayden. They sold us out. We just saw them at Cleo’s meeting.”
“There was a meeting?” Jacob asked. “About what?”
“You,” Brook said. “It was about how you are a murderer, terrorizing the population.”
Jacob looked around at their faces. “Murderer?”
“It’s all falling apart,” Isaac said. “They’re looking for a common cause to rally everyone behind. I’ve seen it before. This is how a community tears itself apart. It unravels from the inside out. Rumors turn people into mobs and then the group breaks itself down, bit by bit, until there’s nobody left.”
“That’s not even
our biggest problem,” Harper said. “After what Jacob and I saw tonight, we should be more concerned with the external threats.”
“Like?” Brook asked.
“Corpses rising,” Jacob said. “Ghosts.”
“That’s already happening,” Brook said.
Isaac looked up at the warped ceiling. Everyone else looked at Brook. She told them the story from the meeting. She described the shadowy figure that had snatched Mason and then driven everyone else out into the night.
Then, with deference to Logan’s friend, Harper told the others about how Wyatt’s headless body had risen in the church.
“If my aunt were here,” Jacob said, “she would say that these are hallucinations, brought on by The Wisdom. She described this threat in her videos, and then told me about them in person.”
“I experienced it too,” Harper said. “Not the same degree, but I’ve witnessed it as well. It killed my grandfather after it was done with him.”
“What’s the point of it?” Logan asked. “How do we kill it?”
Nobody answered.
“Come on, Brook,” Logan said. “You science and engineering types are supposed to be working on the answers to all this. What have you been doing all this time?”
“We were working on the Hunters. I’d never seen anything like this before today. How was I supposed to know that there was something worse out there than Hunters?” Brook asked.
“It doesn’t do us any good to fight with each other. There’s no way we’re going to figure out what that thing is if we’re sitting in here,” Isaac said.
“According to my aunt, this is exactly what we should be doing. She recommended we hide underground until The Wisdom passes. She said it was like a weather system. It travels on the wind,” Jacob said.
“If it’s really that cloud thing, then I don’t think the wind affects it,” Logan said.
“This is pointless,” Harper said. “Isaac is right. We’re not going to get anything done by hiding.”
