“We need to go,” Carina reminded us. “That bar won’t hold them long. Plus there’s more in there.” She kept her eyes on the higher floors where the sounds of the light explosions had come from. Every once and awhile, a light would flash across a window.
“Do you have a car?” I asked Julia. It was a dumb question. Of course, she did. How else would she have gotten to the hospital from the other one? Walk? “I suggest you get it and drive like a bat out of hell to home or the other hospital. Or, anywhere other than here.”
“I can’t let you two go off on your own,” she insisted. Then, another question pushed that concern to the side. “What are you?”
“Just two kids trying to figure out what’s going on,” Carina said. “You really should go. We can take care of ourselves.”
“No doubt,” the nurse murmured, glancing at me. “Where are you going?”
I glanced a question at Carina. After a pause, she nodded. “Sterling Securities.”
“Why?” Julia sounded astounded.
We all ducked instinctively as another explosion went off in the hospital. A fifth story window blew out, raining glass onto the sidewalk.
“It’s where everything leads to,” I said. “Our friend. My family. They might be there and we’re going to find out.”
“I’ll go with you.”
I laughed. “No. No, you won’t.”
“We appreciate it. We really do, but you can’t go. You need to go where you’re needed,” Carina said. “You might not have those files you were looking for, but your patients still need you.”
The nurse looked at us, chewing her lower lip as she tried to decide.
I put a hand on her shoulder. “You were amazing in there. I don’t know anybody who wields a meaner metal leg, but you need to go back to your patients,” I added with a bit of command in my voice.
She stood undecided for another moment, then her shoulders dropped and she nodded. “I’ll take the Hummer. You two take my car.”
“Why?” Carina frowned.
“If that is Sterling in there, they will know their missing Hummer was here and will be looking for it. You two take my car and I’ll drive this thing.” She patted the monster of a vehicle. “If I get stopped, I’ll just claim I found it abandoned.”
“It’s risky,” I said.
“I’m not the one going straight for Sterling Securities.”
“True,” I granted.
“My car is in the parking lot over there.” She jerked her head to the lot to the right of the E.R. entrance. “It’s a blue Nissan.”
I nodded my understanding. “Be careful.”
She smiled and pulled a set of keys out of her pocket, holding them out to me. “Don’t crash it.”
“Not a scratch,” I agreed with a smile of my own.
She dropped the keys into my outstretched hands. Her smile faded. “Wait, you two are old enough to drive, right?”
“More or less,” I said.
I opened the Hummer door and reached in to grab the little walkie-talkie thing from the center console. Before she could question us further, we ran for her car.
Chapter 32
2:58 a.m.
Carina pulled Julia’s Nissan out of the hospital parking lot and turned in the general direction of Sterling Securities. We weren’t exactly sure where their building was located but knew it was somewhere in the heart of downtown.
That made us nervous. The last time we were there, the strange, mutated kids were mushing into large groups of chaos. We really wanted to avoid as much trouble as possible on the way to the Sterling building because there was no doubt we’d find plenty of it once we were there.
“So, what’s the plan?” Carina asked once we were pointed in the general direction of downtown Salt Lake.
I watched a kid sitting on the sidewalk as we passed. He appeared to be beating at the edge of the gutter with a hammer. He didn’t even look up from his work as we passed.
“What do you mean?” I replied, forcing down a case of the willies.
“What are we going to do when we get there?”
“We have to find the place first,” I said with a shrug.
“That’s not good enough, Conor. We’re talking about a private contract company that’s basically a small army. I don’t think it’s going to be as simple as walking up to the front door and knocking.”
“That’s kind of what I was planning actually.” I smirked when she glanced at me. “Well, I was planning on knocking on their faces, but the concept is the same.”
“Not funny. It’s going to be bad enough that the whole city is crawling with… with those.” She waved a hand behind us. Mr. Hammer hadn’t escaped her notice, either.
“I don’t know,” I said with a sigh. “All I do know is that’s the most likely place we’ll find Nathen. Once we find him, we'll go from there.”
“You make it sound like it’s going to be so easy—like we’re just going to waltz in there and invite him out for a late night munchies attack.”
“I could go for some Taco Bell. I haven’t eaten in forever.”
She sighed.
I echoed it. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, Carina. I’m making this all up as we go. Same as you.”
She nodded and we fell silent. I looked at her across the small car, a huge difference from the yawning canyon that was the Hummer. She stared straight ahead, intent on the road.
I really didn’t want to drag her into whatever was waiting for us. I didn’t really have a choice, though. She was as big of a part of this as me. It was her father who was tweeking on something and Nathen was her friend, too. I just didn’t want her to get hurt. Of course, she was less likely to wind up with major injuries than me, but she had no offense.
I shifted to find a better position without the gun poking me in the lower back and dug the black radio thing out of my pocket. I fiddled with it as we barreled down the deserted road.
If anybody was going to get hurt, it was me. I was fast, but I can’t dodge bullets. Up close, I could work my way around the business end of the gun, but from a distance I didn’t stand a chance and being shot landed very low on my list of things I wanted to experience again. So low, it fell in the never category.
Carina had been shot, too. It hadn’t fazed her in the slightest. But, what was her limit? What if she was shot multiple times? Stone chipped, after all. Would higher caliber bullets chip her stone skin? Would she be missing a large chunk of skin when she converted back to normal skin?
“Conor,” she said.
I realized I had been staring at her and looked away. It turned out she wasn’t creeped out by my leering but trying to direct my attention ahead of us. Lingering in the middle of the street was a group of about ten teens. They didn’t look like they were getting out of the way anytime soon.
“What do I do?” Carina asked. “I don’t like our chances if I stop.”
“Run them over.”
“What?” She nearly shrieked in shock.
“If they won’t get out of the way—”
“No!”
I clicked the one little button on the side of the radio in aggressive irritation. Of course, I didn’t really want her to run them over. What I really wanted was for her to stop so I could jump out and beat each and every one of them senseless.
“Okay, okay,” I growled. “Can you get around them? Go up on the sidewalk.”
She took her foot off the gas to slow our approach. “What if they move to stay in the way?”
“Then I will take care of them,” I grunted through clenched teeth.
She glanced sideways at me but said nothing. She gave the car a little more gas and let it drift left. The group shifted across to that lane. They grinned and leered.
“Conor…”
I gripped the little box tight in a fist, anger building up in me. I felt like if I didn’t jump out of the car door and attack, I’d burst.
Then something weird happened. The teens’ lon
g, grinning faces changed. Their leers disappeared, replaced by confusion as their skin seemed to shrink back into place. They glanced around at each other and then at the oncoming car. With twitching motions, they backed away a few paces before scattering out of the street.
“What in the world?” Carina asked.
“I have no idea,” I replied as I watched them disappear into the night as we passed.
3:32 a.m.
We spent awhile driving around and feeling stupid. With no signals on our phones at all, we couldn’t just plug it into a map app and let it guide us right to them. We had to go on what we knew and that amounted to the general knowledge that Sterling Securities was located somewhere in the heart of the city.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Carina said.
I had to agree. My frustration grew by the second. I stopped clicking the little radio thing and glanced out the window as we crossed an intersection. A few blocks away, a building with the big letters S.T.E.R.L.I.N.G. across the top flashed into view like a big sign announcing “Here we are, you idiots!”
“Wait,” I said. “Back there.”
She pulled a U-turn and put us on course toward our destination. We passed by the building a few streets closer just to scope things out but saw absolutely no sign of life. No men in full body armor. No slack-faced teens sulking about. No movement. No electricity. It was just as dead as every other building in the area.
We pulled into a parking lot with a line of sight two blocks from Sterling Securities. I climbed out and leaned against Julia’s Nissan while Carina came around to gaze down the street at the building.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“It looks deserted.”
I nodded.
“Do you think Nathen’s there?”
“I don’t know where else he could be. It was definitely these dirtbags who took him.”
“What if he was arrested?” Carina said. “What if they took him to the police station?”
That thought hadn’t occurred to me. My gut told me that wasn’t the case, though. What reason did they have to arrest Nathen? It was a mystery as to why they attack us at his house in the first place, but I had just assumed it was because of the things we stumbled on in Mr. Walker’s office. The reason didn’t really matter to me. The building down the street from us would be just a stop along the way to finding Nathen if he wasn’t there.
“I think it’s more likely he’s here.”
She nodded an agreement. “It’s got to be at least twelve stories. That’s a lot of area to search.”
“It’s our best bet,” I said. “Maybe we will find somebody we can ask nicely.”
“Conor…” she started.
“I don’t get some kind of enjoyment out of beating people up,” I lied, “but if that’s what it takes then that’s what I’m going to do.”
“So, if there’s even anybody in there, you’re just going to knock on the door, walk in, and start punching people in the face?”
“No,” I said. “There will probably be some kicking and throwing people around, too.”
“Funny.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
We stared at the building in silence. That was answer enough.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked after a moment.
“What, you think I’m going to let you go in there alone?”
“I just think it would be better —”
“I’m not letting you go in there alone.” She answered her own question.
“What if you’re captured, too?”
“Then you and Nathen can break me out,” she said. “Don’t worry about me, Conor. I’ll be fine. Besides, I’m sure you could use the help.”
I nodded. My arguments were half-hearted, anyway. I knew her well enough to know when she set her mind to something, persuading her otherwise was a fruitless adventure. “Okay, so what do we do?”
“We go knock on the front door,” she said with a smile.
Chapter 33
3:51 a.m.
I watched Julia’s blue Nissan roll towards the short ramp leading down into Sterling’s underground parking garage. I wanted to be worried about Carina, but I kept telling myself she was in a better position to walk away from this than I was.
If all went well, we’d be able to sneak in and back out with Nathen in tow. I wouldn’t mind bashing a head or two, but as little fanfare as possible wouldn’t be a bad thing. I glanced up at the tall building and wondered if we found ourselves in a bind she could jump out a window and survive. I hoped it wouldn’t have to find out.
The lack of any sign of light in the building worried me a little, but I felt sure that Nathen was in there. Maybe it was intuition; maybe it was some deep down need to do something. Anything. I itched for action.
It looked like I just might get it. The building wasn’t as abandoned as it seemed. A black clad figure appeared from the bulletproof gatehouse with a rifle pointed at the driver side window. My heart leaped into my throat and I had to remind myself again that Carina would be fine.
I held back in the shadows of a surprisingly still intact wedding shop entrance a half block away. My strained patience paid off as a shadow shifted to the left side of the car. Same M.O. as the traffic stop.
“Get out of the car,” the guy on the left yelled.
As planned, Carina didn’t move from the car. The guard shifted the rifle tighter against his shoulder.
“Get out of the car or we will open fire.”
A random car pulling into their parking garage in the middle of the night had rightly set them on edge, though it didn’t seem to take much to accomplish that. The guy on the right moved out of the shadows, his gun aimed at the driver side.
That was my cue. I stepped from the store front and ran straight at the Sterling building with a brick in my right hand. As we had hoped, the two guards were too honed in on Carina to notice.
Without breaking stride, I threw the brick at Right Guard as I hit the sloping drive down into the parking garage. It bounced off his head and he dropped.
I angled to the left side of the car and poured on more speed. Like he was in slow motion, Left Guard glanced up as his compadre head snapped back and he dropped to the ground. His head turned my direction as he caught movement out of his periphery. His rifle started to make the same turn when I launched myself feet first at him.
My shoes planted in his chest right below his neck. He flew off somewhere in the dark of the parking garage like he was attached to a bungee cord.
Carina turned from the parking garage to stare at me with her mouth hanging slightly open. The window whirred down.
“Did you have to kick him so hard?”
“Yeah,” I replied honestly.
“But he flew in there like a ragdoll.”
I nodded my agreement as I trotted to the front of the car. Neither Right nor Left Guard were anywhere near the top of my list of worries, so I’d just as soon as forget about them. Out of sight, out of mind.
I grabbed the mechanical gate blocking the entrance to the garage. Without any power to lift it, I’d just have to do it myself. I gave a yank. It didn’t budge. The thing was made better than I thought. What did I expect from a military contract company?
“Let’s just walk, that’s probably better anyway.” Carina started to climb out of the car.
“I got this.” I waved her off and yanked up on the arm, putting more legs into it. Nothing.
“Really, Conor.” She had the door open and one foot out.
I ignored her and strained as hard as I could. Some piece of metal groaned deep inside the arm, but it showed no real sign of giving.
“Conor, come on.” She stepped behind me and touched my bulging arm.
I spun on her, clenching my hand into a fist.
She flinched back.
I blinked, my brows pulling together in confusion. I glanced at my fist, pulled back and ready
to strike. I dropped it and turned away from her.
“Conor,” she whispered.
“Let’s go,” I said gruffly. I ducked under the mechanical arm, wiggling the stiffness out of my fingers.
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