Reapers (Breakers, Book 4)

by Edward W. Robertson

  She gasped at the ceiling. "You son of a bitch."

  "How do you feel?"

  "Like I got to pee."

  "Good news is your room has plumbing," he said. "Bad news is that when you stand up, you're going to wish you could pass out."

  She eased up on her elbows. "You got running water?"

  "The Feds charge a president's ransom for it. We're in the wrong racket."

  "Which racket's that, extorting protection money from farmers?"

  "Question the ethics as you please. All I know is I've had to treat a lot fewer clubbed, stabbed, and shot farmers since the Kono brought order to the park." His brows pushed together. "You need a hand? Or were you planning to wet the bed?"

  With his help and a lot of sweating and pain, she made it to the bathroom, then tottered back to bed, legs quivering. "What now?"

  "Think of it like a hospital. Where you're under house arrest." He tapped her shoulder with his fist. "Cocktail hour."

  "Are you sure you're a doctor?"

  "That's what my degree says. That reminds me." He dug into his pocket and held up a coin-sized lump of gnarled metal. Its base was largely intact, cylindrical and copperish, but its tip was mushroomed and leaden. "I imagine you're the type of girl who'd like to keep this."

  He deposited it in her palm, walked out, and locked the door from the outside. She slept again. When she woke, a sandwich and a glass of water waited on the nightstand. She ate ravenously.

  She didn't see another person until the day after that, when Ash swept open the door. "Lucy, I'm home!"

  She eyed him. "Like I ain't heard that a hundred times."

  "Doc said you're recovering like a champ." He clicked across the room and scootched his rear into the windowsill. "Our deal stands, right?"

  "Sure."

  "How about a hint?"

  She laughed. It hurt. "Not until I feel good enough to fight back."

  He sighed and flicked at a cobweb on the curtains. "I don't like this deal anymore."

  He'd no sooner left than Brian entered with scrambled eggs and toast that even bore a faint smear of butter.

  "They got you as my nursemaid?" Lucy wriggled upright. "How you feel about that?"

  He set down the plate. "I haven't had much of a role at all since you shot Duke."

  "I'd say I was sorry, but he tried to turn me out."

  "I know."

  He walked out. Her room didn't have electricity, so when he came back with lunch, she asked him for some books.

  "What kind?"

  "I don't know," she said. "Got anything with pirates? Or dinosaurs?"

  "They don't write many books about dinosaurs."

  "Then what good are they?"

  He left again. That night, all he brought was dinner. Onions, potatoes, and bread (all of which she would eat a lot of in the next couple weeks). She figured he'd forgotten about the books, or didn't give a shit, but the following morning, he walked in with a cardboard box of paperbacks and set it on the foot of her bed.

  "Enjoy." He wiped the dust on his hands and locked the door behind him.

  She spread them out. He'd found a few with pirates—though most of them were the kind with bare chests, curly locks, and a woman draped over their arm in a posture so traumatic to the human spine you could almost hear the vertebrae cracking—but one of the books had the silhouette of a T. rex skeleton on the cover. While snow fluttered past the window, she read it from front to back. It was the first book she could remember finishing.

  A couple days later, Brian walked in with a chess set. "Do you play?"

  She shook her head. The light in his expression went out. She rolled onto an elbow. "Got checkers?"

  He did. She could tell he found the game mechanical and predictable, but he seemed to enjoy himself anyway. Lucy chatted him up about life outside the apartment, but between the snow and the Kono saving their juice for the intel Lucy was sitting on, hostilities between them and Distro had simmered down to mutually nonviolent disdain.

  The Doc came for her stitches. With her special bandage affixed to her chest this whole while, it was the first time she'd gotten a good look at them. She was horrified. The black threading looked like a mummy's mouth.

  Doc offered to let her keep those, too. She declined.

  She rolled the bullet around her palm and watched the snowy streets. This part of town showed much more life than down around the piers. At the bar, people came and went, glad for the chance to grab a meal they didn't have to cook themselves. Every morning, a horse-drawn wagon clopped west toward New Jersey, returning in the afternoon full of split wood. The woman who drove it dickered with one of the Kono over the woods' price every single time. Initially, Lucy resented the yammery back-and-forth—Christ on a cracker, choose a rate and stick with it—but the daily bargaining session soon became just another thread in the weave of uptown life.

  Between her injury and the bed rest, Lucy had lost a lot of strength. Once the stitches were out, she paced around the room. Pushups were out of the question, but she discovered that so long as she was careful, she could get away with sit-ups, lunges, and jogging in place. When she wore out, which was much too damn fast, she read the other books in the box, but none were half as good as Jurassic Park.

  Three weeks after she'd walked up to their front door, Doc came in with a stethoscope and some rubber tubes and pumps Lucy didn't like the look of at all.

  "You get that out of a museum?" she said.

  "Some of it." He listened to her pulse and her breathing and had a look at her incision, which had closed right up without redness or much in the way of discharge. "You heal like the devil."

  "Am I ready to once more face the world?"

  "I wonder if it's ready to face you." He frowned distractedly at her boob, which under any other context would have been disconcerting and might well have earned him two black eyes. "I'm a little concerned about the lung. It sounds good, but these things can take a couple months to heal. Go easy on it." He looked up at her; if he'd been wearing glasses, he'd be gazing over the top of them. "If you're capable of such a thing."

  He left, locking the door as always. Hours later, Ash walked in for the first time since his initial visit where he'd asked her for a hint.

  "Doc says you're cleared for active duty," he said. "Time to pay your bill."

  Lucy walked to the window. The first snow had melted a few days after she'd been shot. More had replaced it the week after that, but there hadn't been a fresh fall in days and the slush in the streets was grimy and black.

  "You got a boat?"

  Ash arched one brow. "You said I wouldn't need one."

  "I said you wouldn't need a fleet. We can walk there if you like, but two days from now, when your shoes are soaked, your ears are numb, and you're tramping around in the pine barrens wearing fifty pounds of guns, ammo, tents, and—"

  "I have a boat," Ash cut her off. "I've got shitloads of boats. If you need a submarine, I'll get you a submarine. Just get me to their source."

  Lucy primly laced her fingers together. "Anything with a sail should do fine."

  He grabbed her wrist and pulled her to the door. "Real battle plans are drawn up over beer."

  She got her shoes and the hoodie Brian had brought her when she'd mentioned the room had a draft. After three weeks in the musty apartment, she stepped into the dingy hall with the zeal of a conqueror. Downstairs in Sicily, Ash grabbed them a booth and the two of them drank beer from bottles that had lost their labels long ago. Men and women glanced over each time Ash gestured or raised his piercing, androgynous voice, which was often. Lucy got the idea he was something of a live wire. His unpredictability could throw a wrench into her plans, but it was easy to stir such people up and unleash them in the general direction of whatever you wanted destroyed.

  The plan didn't take long to hash out. She didn't tell him where they were going or what they'd see. Just that it would require a boat and some troopers and that it might devolve into a shootout. />
  "You are intransigent," he said over his bottle. "If you're withholding details because you're lying about the whole enterprise, I'm going to send you to sleep with the fishes. Starting with your toes. I will personally slice you into chunks and put your chunks in a bucket and chum you across the Upper Bay."

  He swilled down the rest of his beer and smacked it on the table. He had everything ready by the following afternoon, but they hung around Sicily until dusk, meaning to sail past Distro's Chelsea holdings under cover of night. The boat was several feet longer than the one Kerry had led down to the New Jersey coast. Possibly to make room for all the guns, which included a rocket launcher, and the bevy of passengers, which included Ash, Lucy, Brian, four men, and three women. Lucy didn't have so much as a knife. If they turned on her, she'd either have to loot the cabin's armory, or jump overboard and see how long she could hold her breath.

  They pushed off. A modest wind blew from the land. A few lights pricked the skyline, evidence of the sporadic power the Feds provided those who could afford it, but that just made the city's black towers all the bleaker. The crew passed Chelsea Piers in perfect silence.

  Once they were out of hearing range, Ash grinned and spat into the river. "Bozos. We'll clean their clocks."

  Lucy let the captain know to head out to sea and swing south along the coast. They scooted out the channel and hooked to the right. The Jersey shore was nothing but a bunch of dark lumps. After a few miles, Lucy told the captain to make way for High Bar Harbor.

  The boat pitched on worse waves than she'd faced on the trip down with Kerry. She went down the steps to catch a nap. She woke as the captain wrangled his way through the channel to the bay. The man's expression was as tight as his knuckles.

  "Pay no mind to Captain About-to-Shit-His-Pants," Ash told her. He waved his hands down in a swimmy motion. "He's scared it might be dangerous to sail into an unfamiliar harbor at night."

  "It hasn't been dredged in years," the man muttered, glancing between the shores bracketing them to right and left.

  "What's the worst that happens? We run into some sand? If the Bedouins aren't afraid of sand, why should we be?"

  "The Bedouins never had to swim the Atlantic in December."

  They were operating silent and without lights. At one point the captain got in a hushed yet heated argument with Ash about dropping a pole into the water, but Ash made a series of obscene threats and the captain relented, though not before promising that, should they run aground, he would leave the Kono to start a new life in the Rocky Mountains, as far from the sea as he could climb.

  After some more grumbling, he sailed around the long spit extending north from the yacht club, then maneuvered into the artificial residential canals on the western side of the small blob of land. They tied up parallel to shore. The captain slumped in his chair, mopped his brow, and fetched a pint bottle from the pocket of his pea coat.

  "Land ho," Ash said quietly, voice hanging in the cold, damp air. He clapped Lucy on the shoulder. "Ready to spill the beans?"

  "Funny you should say that," Lucy said. "Follow me."

  He climbed down from the boat, then offered her a hand, which she declined. He was armed with a pistol and he brought along a silent man with a black assault rifle. The others remained onboard. Lucy led the two men through the decaying houses and into the salt marsh. A dusting of snow lay on the solid parcels of ground, helping Lucy to pick her way through the darkness. Between the snow and the gloom, she had to circle around a couple times before she found the parallel ruts in the soil.

  She eased herself to one knee and pointed along the lines. "You see?"

  "Incredible. You've discovered dirt."

  "Right. Now check out the tracks in the dirt. Now imagine the helicopter that made those tracks."

  Ash's frown deepened like the approach of twilight. "You think Distro is bringing their goods in via helicopter, then shipping them from here to the city?"

  "That's how they bring in so much exotic wares. And why they always know exactly when it's supposed to arrive. They don't have to worry about storms and winds and shit. They're flying it in as close as they can get without exposing their system to you guys."

  "And they're using this patch of ground—which you could slip through a regulation-sized mail slot—instead of the streets right over there." Ash gestured across the field toward the houses standing between them and the yacht club. "How many can an average boat carry? Would you call it a boatload? Now imagine your helicopter. How much weight do you think it can carry?"

  "Maybe they make multiple trips." Lucy brushed away the snow and bent close to the ground. "I found coffee beans. Right here beside the tracks. If they're not offloading the goods right here, how the hell did those beans get spilled? Did a Colombian albatross stop to take a dump?"

  Ash turned to his soldier. "What do you think?"

  The man sniffed. "I think they're using boats."

  "Interesting you should say that. Because if they're using boats, and we knock out this harbor, they'll just set up another somewhere else." He brought his face inches from Lucy's. "You told me you knew how to destroy them."

  "You see a lot of functioning air power these days? If you knock out their whirlybirds, the city's yours." Lucy's mind raced. "Today's Thursday. New shipments came in every Saturday morning. If I'm right, the shipment will land here tomorrow."

  "If it doesn't?"

  "Then you can take back my life that you saved. But you remember one thing: I want Nerve dead just as bad as you."

  "Oh, I doubt that." Ash bounced to his feet. "Back to the ship."

  They sloshed through the marsh to the boat. Ash ordered two of the soldiers to scout the marina, then told Lucy to get downstairs. The man with the assault rifle came down and watched her from a padded bench.

  Some time later, boots thumped around above deck. Voices murmured. Lucy couldn't make out their words. She wasn't too happy with herself. The street would make a much better landing pad than some soggy old field. And if you ruled out the field, that meant the coffee beans were a red herring. Her whole theory collapsed.

  Troops took turns watching her. She managed to sleep some. Right before dawn, she woke to the sound of boots on the steps. The soldiers and crew were all piling below, getting out of sight. Ash and one of his men stayed up in the cabin, presumably to watch the skies. When Brian came downstairs, he gave her a long look, but said nothing.

  The Kono stayed belowdecks the whole day. Pissed in a bucket and left it by the steps. Every few minutes, Lucy was sure she heard the whop of a chopper, but it was her ears being tricked by the wash of the tide, the stirrings of the two men above. The soldiers murmured to each other as if she wasn't there.

  It was one of those days that lasted forever yet was over in a blink. After nightfall, Ash called the crew upstairs. Ropes and feet thumped around. The boat swayed away from the dock.

  "Sorry," Brian told her.

  "If you're that sorry, go talk to him. Tell him we got to stay another day."

  "We did talk. His mind's made up."

  She stared at the plain white ceiling. "He's making a mistake."

  "He's not afraid of making mistakes," Brian said. "He's afraid of standing still."

  The boat pulled away from the dock. It leaned to the right, swinging around the spit, then leveled out, cruising toward the open sea. Waves knocked against the hull. And then she heard the sound of the surf, except instead of waxing and waning, it climbed and climbed until she could feel its thunder in the healing wound in her chest.

  "It's not a helicopter." Lucy's jaw was somewhere around her ankles. "It's a jet."

  22

  "Get down," Ellie said. "We're not alone."

  She ducked behind a sedan angled on the shoulder. Dee and Hobson moved in beside her. She got out her binocs and gazed down the lanes spanning the river. Past the latticed steel tower near the far end, concrete barriers choked the road. Behind these, a man turned his back to her. She could just make
out the black line of a rifle spiking from his shoulder.

  "Two of them," she said. "Armed."

  "Can we use another bridge?" Dee said. "Holland Tunnel?"

  Hobson took off his bowler and inspected the brim. "Logically speaking, if they're guarding one of them, they're guarding all of them."

  Dee peeped around the side window. "If they wanted to kill us, wouldn't they ambush us? And not stand right there in the open?"

  "Listen to that," Hobson chuckled. "How does Deputy Dee sound?"

  "Absolutely not." Ellie put away her binoculars. "Well, come on."

  She led the way onto the bridge. They had spent the night in a neighboring township and the morning light was flat and gray. Snow plastered the rooftops across the Hudson, but the wind had swept most of it from the bridge's surface, leaving slicks of black ice that left Ellie's snowshoes skidding. She tottered forward, glancing between the guards at the other end and her unsteady footing.

  The guards noticed them within seconds. One produced binoculars. They left their rifles on their shoulders as Ellie and crew moved within hailing distance.

  "Hello, ma'am," one of them said. He had the spontaneous patter of a salesman. "And sir. And other ma'am. Could you stop right there? I'd love to let a couple pretty girls inside, but unfortunately, the nation of Manhattan's tourist season is now closed."

  "We're not tourists," Ellie said.

  "We're also closed to business, pleasure, passage, and to anyone who isn't a documented citizen of the island."

  "You're with the government?"

  He grinned. "What tipped you off? The uniforms, or the refusal to let you get anything done?"

  "Then I would like to file a formal complaint against the human traffickers operating in your city."

  "Human traffickers?" The soldier exchanged a look with his partner. "I don't think we got any of that going on here."

  Ellie stepped forward. "Several weeks ago, my daughter's fiancé was kidnapped from Saranac Lake. We've tracked him to the city. I don't care if it's tourist season, flu season, or C.H.U.D. season. I'm coming inside."