Arkadium Rising (15 page)

At the head of a narrow game trail, Marcus motioned for them to stop so he could listen for movement. And then he heard it, a single set of footsteps, light strides, no discernible pattern.

"Let's go," Marcus whispered and removed the hunting knife sheathed to his hip. He picked up his pace with Austin and Hector close behind. He soon saw a slim girl standing in a rocky clearing. She was staring up at the sky. When Marcus looked up, he had to pause as well. The sky had become brighter, yellow-tinged.

What the hell?

He was mesmerized for a few seconds before snapping out of it.

First things first…

He raised his knife hand and charged. The girl barely registered his presence by the time he was close enough to touch her, and when he wrapped his arms around her to subdue her, her legs went out from under her, and they both tumbled over. He covered her mouth to silence her screams but she made no sound; he landed with his full weight on her, sending her breath rushing out from her lungs. He rolled off of her, regained his feet, and sheathed his knife.

"I'll do it," Hector said, his knife hand twitching at his side.

"No. She's stunned and no danger to us." He stood over her as she writhed, struggling to breathe. She was a sweet young thing; dirty blonde hair, a skinny build but with curves in the right places. He could think of a dozen fun things to do to her, but right now he couldn't focus on his own desires. No, he was a leader and his people were counting on him. "Stand her up. Let her get some air."

Austin grabbed one of her arms and Hector the other, and together they hoisted her to her feet. As their eyes roamed her body, they both looked like they'd had similar thoughts as Marcus. He would have to do something to keep them in line. Throw them a bone every once in a while. After all, a distracted soldier was no soldier at all.

The girl gripped her belly with both hands even with both men holding her at the elbows. Her eyes rolled back before settling and focusing on Marcus's face. Her breath rasped in her throat.

"Shh… sorry about that, darlin'." He lifted her chin with his index finger until he could look into her eyes. "Didn't mean to knock the wind out of you. I know how that can give a person an awful fright. Give her some room guys. She's not going anywhere. And we're not here to hurt her. Are we?" He looked to each in turn.

"No." Hector released her.

"Of course not," Austin said after a slight hesitation.

"Can you speak yet? I really am sorry about that." Marcus shifted his weight until he was down on one knee in a perverse imitation of a wedding proposal.

The girl shook her head and again rasped as she tried to speak.

"You see," Marcus continued, brushing a lock of blonde hair from her eyes, "we were wandering around out here in the woods and got turned around. When I saw you in the distance, I didn't want to lose sight of you, so I ran. My big clumsy feet must've tangled on a stick or rock and I fell right on top of you."

"Uh…" She waved him away. "'I'm all right."

She gave him a hint of a smile that stirred something dark and hungry in him.

"My name is Marcus. This here is Hector and Austin. We might look scary," he said and leaned over to her ear and whispered, "but that's just because we're scared." He chuckled and her smile brightened.

"My dad is out there. And there's a fire in the distance where that plane crashed. He's a voluntary fireman, so he wanted to see if he could help anyone, but even still…"

"This is no place for a girl alone. How about we get you back to the house?"

"Marcus?" Hector said.

"We could use some water," Marcus said, creating a backstory on the fly. "Once we're topped off, we'll be on our way. We have a family farm out in Cherrington, and we'd like to get there sometime tomorrow."

Even though Hector was some kind of spic and Austin was short and had ginger hair and freckles, Marcus could see the girl bought it. A family farm? The three of them?

She nodded. "I'm…" She cleared her throat and then said with more authority, "I'm Kylie. Let's go."

The girl led the way back down the narrow path to the side yard. Marcus followed at her side with the others trailing. "This is kind of you. The world's gone to shit and you've shown us nothing but kindness, even after I knocked the wind out of you."

"I've seen you around town," she said, throwing him for a loop. "You work for the city, right? Mowing, maintenance, that sort of thing?"

"Well, I guess that's what I used to do. Not sure if there's much reason to show up to work on Monday. For all we know the power isn't coming back anytime soon."

"I thought that was you. I remember seeing you down by the Perkins Pharmacy. Lloyd Toussaint, he used to work with my dad when I was little, he got his walker caught in the storm drain and traffic just whipped by like he wasn't even there."

"I remember that." Marcus could picture it as if it were yesterday.

"And you stopped your mower over at Centennial Park and ran across the street to help."

"Wasn't a big deal. I just pictured my old man stuck like that and no one even slowing down."

"What I remember most is once you got his walker free and up on the sidewalk, you flipped someone the bird when he honked his horn at you."

Marcus laughed hard and easy. The girl laughed too, and his mind started whirling through possibilities that would extend their stay beyond refilling their canteens.

"That sounds like Marcus, all right!" Austin added.

"Well, Marcus," she said, "I think helping Mr. Toussaint earned you some cold water."

Kylie stopped in her tracks when she noticed the group of people milling under the windows on the side of the house.

"They're with me," Marcus said, unsure what her reaction would be. "We had trouble in town, and we weren't sure if you were nice people or not."

"Okay…" She hesitated and her guard went up. Once she saw that the group appeared to be fairly innocuous—an old man and woman, a girl not much older than herself, and a haggard-looking guy around thirty, she seemed to relax. "I guess we have water enough to go around."

1.

When Marcus, Austin, and Hector left to track down whoever had been lurking at the edge of the woods, Jason's plan had been to run in the opposite direction. Just take off.
Go!
But, for some reason he found it difficult to move from the sheltering copse of bushes next to the sprawling Georgian. He supposed he somehow felt responsible for Eldon and Mandy as they waited for Marcus to return. He didn't really know them, but they'd already been through a lot.

Eldon and Mandy sat on the thick patch of garden mulch, facing each other, cross-legged. Eldon held Mandy's hands as they prayed softly together. When the armed mob closed on them in downtown Concord, the two oldest members of Marcus's group had been able to do little to help their cause. They seemed like good people. They weren't like Austin, who was a trigger-happy hillbilly. They weren't like Hector, who was so at ease with the automatic slung from his shoulder. They were definitely not like Delaney. No one in the group was like Delaney.

He watched Delaney watching for any sign of Marcus, her eyes darting about with manic intensity. He couldn't look at her without feeling a small amount of pain and an even more prominent embarrassment. So he glowered at her, examining the constellation of blood spatters on her cheek, dredging up every little amount of distracting emotion he could muster. Sure, they'd shared an intimate encounter in the janitor closet at Happy's Qwik Serve, but every moment of it had been a performance on her part, a ruse.

He wasn't fooling himself; he couldn't cling to the hurt and rejection to chase away what he didn't want to face. It was a horrible and immutable fact: he had killed at least two men just hours ago. He was a coldblooded murderer.

He shook his head, but the memories lingered. He couldn't help recalling the reverberations of Henry's skull (
good God, why did Dylan have to know him by name?
) when Jason had tackled him into the concrete wall of the loading dock. Even now he could feel the crunch of bone on concrete through his limbs, could hear it in his ears. And the other man he'd killed, the man named Brad, the one with the bloody dimple that appeared as if from out of nowhere to mar his unblemished temple? Jason didn't think he could ever forget seeing him collapse and leak blood until he was well beyond hope, until he stopped moving and became just another lifeless mass of organic matter for the earth to reclaim.

He blinked and saw the bloody dimple. Blinked again and saw Dylan staring lifelessly into the bright blue sky. He closed his eyes once again, clenching against the tears that were forming, and only looked upon the world before him when he heard a rustling in the leafy underbrush. A waifish blonde girl stepped clear of the darkness, soon followed by Marcus and his men.

"Marcus!" Delaney called out and broke into a fluid run. She gave the girl a condescending once-over and possessively took hold of Marcus's hand.

"I've been gone, what, ten minutes?" Marcus sounded put-off by Delaney's attention.

"And you found…?" Delaney asked.

Mandy and Eldon stood from their quiet prayers as the others approached.

"Everyone, this is Kylie," Marcus said. "This is her house."

"I never said that."

"Oh, really? I just assumed…" Marcus said.

"I live next door. The Thompsons' live here. Everyone else is inside. Why don't we head in for that water?"

Austin flipped the safety off his AR-15.

Kylie gasped.

"That won't be necessary, Austin." Marcus pressed the barrel of Austin's weapon toward the ground. "Right, Kylie?"

"Of course not—"

"It's just, like I said earlier. We had an unpleasant interaction with the people downtown. Just look at what they did to my big brother, Jason."

Jason felt like a spotlight had been pointed at him, highlighting the wounds Marcus himself had given him.

"Oh, that's horrible," Kylie said.

"We don't want any more of that. We're good people, and we just want to get to a place we know is safe."

"Right, I totally understand. It's a scary time."

"Good. So, how many people are inside?" Marcus smiled. "And how many are armed?"

2.

"I can't believe I didn't know that a pro ballplayer lived right in town!" Marcus took a sip from his lemonade. He gave Jason a look over the lip of his glass that probably no one else noticed. But Jason knew that look, that flash in his brother's eye, the slight curl of his lip. Not quite a smile—not a real smile, at least.

"We've been here for years," the teenager named RJ said. "It's not like my dad hid the fact, and the people in town have always been cool with it and given him his privacy."

Everyone had formed a nervous, uncertain semicircle in the living room. Kylie's mom, Linda, appeared not only nervous, but a bit unhinged. She had been dusting when they entered through the front door, and even now as she paced along the outside of the gathering, she still clutched the dust rag in her fist. Jason could tell his brother didn't trust her by the way he kept her in his sights.

"Well, I've only been here a few months," Marcus said evenly.

"Dad's been on the road pretty much since Spring Training started."

Marcus snapped his fingers and pointed at RJ. "That explains it." Marcus's smile faltered and tension filled the room.

As if sensing it, Kylie said, "I've seen Marcus working in town."

"Yeah, right, right," Marcus said, picking up the story. "I work for the city, mowing and landscaping, and I was hoping to do the snowplowing this winter. But looks like that won't be happening."

"Don't talk such talk," RJ's stepmother, Monique, said from her reclined pose on the couch. She was the only person in the dozen or so people who was seated. Judging by the empty wine bottle on the end table and her slightly slurred speech, she was trying to escape from the reality of their situation. "Power'll be back on in a day or two."

RJ looked at Marcus to measure his reaction. Marcus replied with a knowing nod.

"Can I get you some more to drink, Marcus?" RJ said. "I see you have a canteen. I'd be happy to fill it for you."

"That'd be great." Marcus turned to Jason. "Your canteen is empty,  too, isn't it, brother?"

"Sure." Jason didn't want to make a scene, so he followed RJ. He knew how dangerous his brother could be, but these people surely didn't.

When Hector and Austin started to follow, Marcus shook his head. "Why don't you guys make sure everyone out here is comfortable?"

Hector looked hurt for being left out, but Austin seemed more than happy as he sat on the couch near Monique's feet. He bit his lower lip and nodded toward her flirtatiously, but she barely acknowledged his presence.

The smaller group reformed around the enormous kitchen island. Jason had never been in such an opulent home. He watched his brother sizing up the place, wondering what they were doing here. If he wanted to rob the Thompsons' estate, Jason didn't see the point. What would Marcus do with expensive kitchen appliances that were now little more than giant paper weights? Jason had seen a painting or two that might've fetched a tidy sum a few days ago, but he didn't think they would be worth much in the aftermath of the EMP and the rise of the Arkadium.

"This is some place you have here, RJ," Marcus said.

"It's not my place…" RJ said coolly, and then added, "but thanks. My dad's worked hard for a long time."

"Well, I wish he was here so I could get an autograph!" Marcus guffawed.

RJ didn't seem to buy it. He stared for a moment at Marcus's blacked-out tattoos as if trying to decipher what was hidden beneath. "So what are your plans, Marcus?"

"Boy, that's a good question."

Jason couldn't tell if there were any racial undertones to how his brother addressed RJ. Regardless, Marcus was leveraging for the upper hand.

"Because the power isn't coming back on, no matter what my stepmother seems to think."