Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands

by Meredith, Peter

  Cole took the gun from her, lifted her and ran to the passenger side of the squad car. He set her on the brass casings that were strewn across the seat, and ran around to the two bodies, taking their carbines and ammo, and rifling through their pockets. For the keys, he told himself, and yet he also snatched their wallets, hoping for enough money to get him out of the trap he found himself in.

  It was wishful thinking. Still an extra forty-two dollars was nothing to spit at. He left the dead and drove the cruiser out of there with the lights off and the siren dead silent.

  “You’re not hurt?” he asked Corrina again, giving her a quick look. She turned her bleary face toward him and then glanced down at herself.

  “I dunno. I don’t frink so. Oh, my knees hurt a little but that’s from…” Realizing what she was saying, she stopped speaking abruptly; a guilty look crossed her face. He picked up on it and growled out a long string of curses, thumping the wheel with his fist between each. “Whadja es-pect?” she demanded. “I thought you was dead and a girl’s gotta make a livin’ shum-how.” She took a huge breath and went on with a grin, “Sides, I barely didn’t do none of that stuff. I had a newer, uh, better-er idea.”

  She sucked in another long breath, which was just long enough for her to realize that her new and better idea wouldn’t be well received by Cole. Her third “customer” the day before had gotten rough with her, which was nothing new, but when he tried to walk off without paying, she got angry and pulled the .32. Just like that, she had discovered the time honored “trick roll.”

  And she liked it.

  Instead of making fifty cents a pop on her back or a quarter on her knees, she was getting a dollar or two just by waving the gun about. Now she had four dollars in her pocket and half a quart of gin running through her skinny body. But she wasn’t about to tell Cole that. He’d just take her money and give it to some orphan, which made no sense since she was an orphan, too!

  She glanced over and saw that Cole’s were lips moving. She gave him a huh? “I said, although I’m not happy that you’re drunk, I’m glad it isn’t mule.”

  Corrina plastered a fake smile across her face. It felt like it stretched all the way to her ears, and she put her hand up to check as she said, “Yeah, no. No mule for me. Ha-ha!” Of course, she had tried to score some Rican Mule. It had been months since her last hit, but the aching hunger had never left her and when she saw Cole being beaten to the ground by the police, it had come roaring back like a monster. With Cole gone, she hadn’t seen the need to fight it.

  After dropping her britches for the first guy she came across, she had taken her fifty cents to the nearest dealer, who had promptly fucked her over. What he had sold her was not mule and had done nothing for her besides make her thirsty—and thus the gin-fizzes. Those had been real enough. They helped to drown out the hunger, but they came with a price.

  “I’m gonna be sick.” She turned and scratched at the door, hoping it would have one of those fancy gizmos that made the window go up and down with a press of a button. It didn’t and the window was only half down before she vomited out another gout of red. Half went on the door; the other half splashed down her front. “Sawwy,” she groaned before closing her eyes and resting her head on the wet window. It had been over two days since she last slept. She blamed the fake mule for not being able to close her eyes, but the truth was she’d been aching inside.

  An overwhelming fear had enveloped her when Cole had been taken away. She knew a set up when she saw one, and she knew how the justice system operated. They were going to kill him, and she would be left alone. She had been alone her whole life and had managed to build up a skin as thick as the cop’s armor, but somehow Cole had destroyed that armor in the last six months, and she hadn’t been ready when he was dragged away.

  She hadn’t been able to close her eyes because what if…? There were a thousand answers that could fit the blank end of the question, and each was terrifying to the little girl. But now he was back, and it didn’t matter that he was in even more trouble. All that mattered was that she was safe for the moment. Corrina closed her eyes and passed out, her cheek smearing the red window.

  “What am I going to do with you?” Cole asked himself. He needed a permanent solution before he went after the Dead-eyes. But none came to his tired mind. It was not like he had actual friends and he didn’t have enough money to buy any.

  A yawn split his face wide and he realized that even if he had a friend, there was no way he could pawn off a drunk, vomit-covered whore on them. He had to clean her up and that meant ditching the squad car and getting a room. Before he torched the car in a back alley, he took a pair of radios and three neuro-toxin smoke grenades out of it. Sadly, he had to leave the carbines behind. Flagging down a taxi would be hard enough without a pair of rifles slung over his shoulders.

  He took one taxi east and another south before he had the driver pull over in the middle of a block. From there he carried Corrina down an alley and to a brutishly ugly building that was one of the last holdouts from before the apocalypse. It had once been forty stories of gleaming glass and steel-girders, but was now four stories of tin sheeting and slapped over what was left of the girders.

  After the nukes turned all of Jersey into a brown radioactive wasteland, the heights of the city were gradually abandoned as people felt that they were too exposed to the radiation storms.

  For decades the remnants of New York’s once great skyline sat like monuments to a failed civilization. Over time the radiation made their steel bones brittle and the constant deluge ate away at their foundations. They began to topple one after another, with three or four falling every year. After the Chrysler Building collapsed, Krupp Metalworks was founded and with bribes paving the way, became the sole reclamation service in the city. They got it both ways. Not only were they paid to take the buildings down, they were also able to corner the metals market by having millions of tons of reclaimed steel and iron to sell at virtually no cost to themselves.

  Some buildings, like the one that housed the hotel, were not cut down all the way, and for reasons lost to time, left like the stump of an old oak.

  Cole was oblivious to the history of the building and only cared that its owner was discreet and never asked questions of his tenants. A dollar and a half got him a room with a shower. He bathed a bleary, half-conscious Corrina first before he let the hot water run down his body until the owner banged on the door and threatened to kick him out.

  With a death sentence hanging over his head, sleep did not come quickly. He would have one shot at this. There’d be no going back and forth this time. Once the people at Krupp got wind that he was there they would lock down the place, hide their zombies and hunt him mercilessly.

  And that would be the easy part of all of this.

  If he lived long enough to take them down, he would then have to face the police, the courts and the mob…oh, and the Tinsleys. They were as dangerous and psychotic as any of them. All except Ashley. Picturing her, Cole sighed and rolled over, making the rusting springs in the bed creak and crunch. She had saved him six months before when she could just as easily have had him strangled and tossed down into the Infinity Pit never to be seen again.

  Any other vamp would have killed him, and where was his thanks? Here he was looking to destroy not just her family’s company, but her as well. She had become the Tinsley heir the moment he had killed her older brother.

  “Maybe she doesn’t know about the zombies,” he whispered, staring up at the peeling paint. It looked like only cobwebs were keeping some of the longer strips from falling on them. It was possible she didn’t know. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl who’d enjoy getting her hands dirty running the day to day operations of a giant, filthy, stinking factory. He tried to picture her strutting past the blast furnaces in a floor-length evening gown with a glass of Carolina red in her hand, but couldn’t.

  His mind could not recapture her beauty, mainly because he imagined how angry she w
ould be. She would take it personally if he inconvenienced her in any way. It wouldn’t matter a whit to her that his life was being held hostage and that his future could be measured in hours. Vamps were not long on empathy.

  He fell asleep picturing her: the ever-changing eyes, the stunning, over-the-top outfits, her feline form beneath it all, and most of all, that enigmatic smile of hers. He slept long and deep, and with Ashley slipping through his dreams, his deadline didn’t haunt him like he feared it would.

  Corrina’s vomiting woke him just as the sun was going down on the prettiest day New York had seen in decades; Cole was glad he had missed it. “You okay?” he called out.

  “No! Where are my clothes? You didn’t undress me, did you?”

  “You puked on yourself. Your choice was to sleep in the hall in your clothes or in bed in your underwear. Trust me, I didn’t look at anything.”

  She appeared in the doorway, draped in two towels. “Why not? Do you think I’m ugly?”

  Cole rubbed his forehead, closing his eyes. “No, of course not,” he said, lying through his teeth. Normally, she was “cute” or if she wore one of the dresses he had bought for her, she could pass for pretty, but just then with blue bags beneath her eyes, her face whiter than the old sheets on the bed, a bruise on the side of her cheek and her hair, what hair she had, that is, limp and plastered half across the bald side of her head, she was fairly ugly.

  “It’s just that you’re my ward, and you’re a girl.”

  “But you would’ve looked if I was a boy?” she laughed lightly. Her mouth smiled but her grey eyes clouded over in pain.

  “If you were a boy, we would never have had this conversation. Hell, if you were a boy, Father James would’ve taken you off my hands ages ago.”

  She tried to smile again, but the effort was too much. “He likes boys, does he? I was wondering why he never took me up on any of my offers.”

  Cole had been reaching for his pants and nearly fell out of bed at this. “Offers? What offers? Don’t—don’t tell me you solicited Jimmy!” Her eyes slid to the side as she tried to think up a lie through the pounding of her head. Cole groaned and grabbed his pants. “No wonder he always had an issue with you. What were you thinking?”

  “That I could make a little extra dough on the side,” she shot back, heading for the closet where her red jeans were hanging. “He’s a man ain’t he? And it’s what I do, so I didn’t see the problem. You know what I think? I think if a guy don’t use his thing, it stops working right? Clearly, Father James gots a problem and maybe you do too.”

  “What are you saying?”

  She shrugged in the midst of hopping into her pants and almost fell over. “Just that it’s been a while for you.”

  “What are you saying?” he asked again, aghast, clutching his clothes in front of him.

  “I didn’t mean with me. That would be gross! I meant with a normal…I mean, you know, a regular woman. What about Anuba? She called you handsome.” Quickly, she added, “Though I don’t know why. Pity maybe. Still, she’s pretty. You should ask her out.”

  Cole laughed ruefully at the idea, thinking that the only place he could ask her out to would be to his funeral. He sat on the bed and got dressed with his back to her. “Yeah, that would be nice, but I don’t think so. Things aren’t in such a good spot for us.” He ran down what had happened to him since being arrested. As he spoke, she sat opposite of him, facing away.

  Instead of cursing their bad luck, she started hunting for solutions. “We should go to Krupp but instead of going after their Dead-eyes, we tell them what’s up. I bet Ashley would give us a big cash prize or something. Maybe it’ll even be enough for us to get out of the city.”

  “And let the orphanage burn down? We both know how these mob guys are. When have you ever heard of one of them not carrying out their threats? Besides, if there are Dead-eyes in Krupp, they have to be taken out. They’re a real threat to the city.”

  “Fuck the city!” Corrina spat. “I hate this place. The people are crap. What have they ever done for us? Nothing, that’s what. We should try to get outta here, Cole.” She hurried around the bed and sat down next to him. “Me and you, we can make it. We’re a great team. If anyone gets in our way, we shoot ‘em down, just like them cops.” Cole began to shake his head when she cried, “We could steal a boat! We could get all the way to Texas with a boat.”

  The idea had so much appeal that Cole didn’t immediately shoot her down. In his imagination, he saw himself at the wheel of one of the big trawlers on a calm green sea with a brilliant blue sky above him. In the picture there were no slag pirates, no Carolina patrol boats, no radiation storms, no hurricanes, no forty-foot waves. In his imagination he was able to pilot the ship with no sea-going experience and no knowledge of diesel engines. Cross currents and lee shores meant nothing. He imagined something akin to a floating vacation.

  It was a pipe dream and he knew it. “And what about visa costs? Approval and entrance fees? The bribes alone run well over a thousand dollars per person.”

  “Okay, maybe we hide in the city then. This is a big place and the Fantuccis only run one part of it.”

  “The cops and the courts are everywhere. And what about Father James and the orphans? If I go into hiding, nothing will save them.” He paused, not wanting to go on. “But maybe hiding will save you. If you pawn the Crown and the Forino, you could live okay for a year or two until you got a real job somewhere.”

  She glared. “I have a real job. Keeping you alive is my job. It doesn’t pay shit, but it’s the only…one of the only things I’m good at.” He thought she meant that if he died she would go back to turning tricks but she was done with working on her back. Robbing people was much more lucrative. But that was a last resort. Now that she was sober, she knew that she had an expiration date as a criminal. She’d be able to get away with it for only so long before she pulled her gun on the wrong man. There were truly dangerous people in the world and she wasn’t one of them.

  Her chin dropped and he glared at the top of her head, angry that she wouldn’t listen to reason. No, he was angry that nobody in the entire city would listen to reason. Dead-eyes were a deadly peril to all of them and yet, Hamilton took the news that there was a nest at Krupp with that ugly smirk on his face. Julius Fantucci only cared about becoming a vamp. The Tinsleys only cared about making money. And the damned governor only cared about pretending the problem didn’t exist so he could get reelected in three months’ time.

  And Corrina…she only cared that nothing happened to him. The glare morphed into a hound dog expression. One way or another, Corrina was doomed without him and that meant she was simply doomed.

  “We could get lucky,” he muttered under his breath.

  “When have we ever been lucky,” she said, just as quietly.

  Never, and they both knew it.

  Chapter 14

  The two ate what felt like a condemned man’s last meal for what passed as their breakfast. They did not speak while they gorged themselves on a dozen drumsticks, five patties of sardine sausage and half a loaf of Carolina butter bread. Cole drank cup after cup of coffee and Corrina guzzled water. He had offered her a fizz, but she had gone grey at the idea.

  When Cole paid the bill, a dollar and ninety-two cents—an outrageous sum for a single meal—he sighed and asked, “You sure you want to come? It’ll be dangerous.”

  She nodded, still feeling like warmed-over death. “How we getting in? The tunnels?”

  “I wish.” There were secret ways into and out of the sprawling factory. He and Corrina had escaped through a hidden tunnel the last time they had been to Krupp. It led to a door so ingeniously camouflaged that it had disappeared the moment Cole had closed it. The door had opened directly on a warren of tunnels that had been so maze-like that it had taken hours for him to find the surface. He had been so battered, broken and bleeding that he knew he’d never be able to retrace his steps.

  “We’ll go in through the fron
t door.”

  A groan escaped her. “They hiring honeys now? Ha. They prolly need to, but it don’t matter one way or the other. I don’t even have my work license no more. I ain’t been legal in years.”

  “We’ll get you a fake.”

  “They don’t hire girls unless they can read or cook or something. I can’t do none of that. And what happens if they got wind of any of this? We don’t look like anything but what we are.”

  He’d been worried about that, too. People talked, even mobsters. If someone thought they could come out a nickel ahead by making a quick phone call to Krupp, they would. “That’s why we’re going to Anuba’s from here. We’re going to need a drastic change in our appearance.”

  Corrina pictured Cole all tatted and fake-slagged, and agreed. They taxied south into Dragon territory and slipped through the wig shop to the back rooms where cadaver hair was being threaded into mesh skull caps by tiny Mandarins, all of whom peered suspiciously at Cole through slitted eyes. He looked like a cop to them, which was the main reason he was there. He needed to pass for a down-on-his-luck slag who was so far gone that he was willing to shorten his life by a decade working for Krupp.

  Anuba, petite and pretty with masses of flowing black hair, gushed over Cole when she opened the door to her tiny, box of a room. “My favorite customer is back after so long. I was afraid that you had forgotten about me.” She took him by the arm and escorted him the five feet from the door to the chair in the center of the room. “What is this?” She touched his cheek where the bruising had turned purple and green.

  “Part of the job,” he told her.

  She humphed at this as she helped Cole out of his over-sized coat and sat him down. She then fussed over him, caressing the bruise all the while exclaiming how awful it was that such a handsome face was so abused. Corrina wore a raised eyebrow the entire time as if a fishhook had pierced it. See? She likes you! her expression practically screamed. Cole shot her a glare when Anuba wasn’t looking, but that only egged the girl on more and she had a grand time teasing him in pantomime while Anuba inked him and transformed him into a dull-eyed slag.