Stirred (36 page)

The best option was to run, if you could. Next would be to get something between you and the blade.

I couldn’t do either, which left two choices. Immobilize the knife hand, or strike.

Working against me was my pregnancy and exhaustion, and worse, that I wasn’t facing some puny switchblade. If Mathis got lucky, this folder could conceivably take a limb off.

She closed the five feet between us faster than I expected, stood sideways with her left shoulder facing me, and lunged, the big blade coming straight toward my stomach.

I staggered back, breathless, more than a little stunned at how close the tip came to my bulging belly.

“You better take this seriously,” Luther said.

I’d barely recovered before Mathis came at me again, this time with a wild, downward slash. With the darkness quickly falling, I didn’t trust my eyes to judge the distance, so I scrambled back as the tip slashed inches before my eyes.

Mathis seemed to be getting more comfortable in her role as attacker.

As she righted herself, an idea came to me—I might not even have to touch her.

I turned and ran as fast as my chubby legs could carry me, shoes threatening to slide on the wet metal grate.

Mathis pursued, her footsteps pounding the catwalk behind me, but my fleeing had taken her off guard, and I had a couple steps’ head start on her.

I came around the other side of the water tank and spotted exactly what I’d hoped to find—the bolt attached to the chain, which hooked to the collar around Mathis’s neck. I squatted down, fighting a bout of dizziness, eyes burning with sweat, as she stormed toward me, slashing like a swashbuckler.

I grabbed the chain and wrapped it around my forearm as she drew within five feet.

It was the only time in months I could remember being thankful for gaining all this weight.

I jerked the chain as hard as I could just as Mathis swung the blade.

Her head went back, shoes coming straight off the catwalk, and her shoulders slammed flush and hard against the metal grate, the breath bursting out of her lungs.

I hurried over and bent down for a hard, immobilizing palm-heel strike to the face, but I froze with my right arm cocked back.

The Espada lay beside Mathis on the catwalk, its blade blood-darkened.

Cynthia clutched her right side with both hands, groaning, like she was trying to hold something in. A steady stream of blood like a faucet not quite shut off trickled through the metal grate and fell in a shower of raindrops toward the concrete slab below.

Even in the low light I could see the blood was bright red.

An artery.

I dropped to my knees. Her eyes were wide. Not with pain, but with surprise.

“I don’t want to die.”

I lowered my hands to her side and said, “Here, let me.” When I applied the pressure, I could feel the blood pulsing between my fingers. Lots of it. She’d cut herself badly. I pushed harder and she cried out.

“She’s injured, Luther.”

“I know. Do you have any idea how much all of these wireless cameras cost me?”

“I don’t give a shit about your cameras. She needs medical attention right now.”

“How does it feel to kill her, Jack?”

“It was an accident. And she’s not dead yet.”

“But you’re the one that did this.”

“No, Luther.
You’re
the one that did this. Help her. Please.”

“See her knife? Toss it over the side of the tower.”

I complied.

“Now step away from her,” Luther ordered.

“She’ll bleed to death.”

“I promise you. She won’t.”

I hesitated, then took my hands off her pulsing wound, backing away.

There was a
CLICK
, then a
BANG!
like a gunshot.

Cynthia’s head rolled off her shoulders and off the catwalk, smoke curling up from the remains of her collar.

“Explosives in the collar,” Luther said. “Instant, and fatal. I told you she wouldn’t bleed to death.”

I felt like screaming, crying, and collapsing from exhaustion, all at the same time.

“Don’t mourn her, Jack. She tried her best to kill you. Cynthia was always cutthroat in her career, always out for herself, but I never expected her to take it to heart like that.”

“How is this crazy game of yours supposed to end, Luther?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Maybe I’ll surprise you, by jumping off this tower.”

“No you won’t, Jack. You’re a fighter. I haven’t broken you. Yet.”

A disgusting waft that smelled like sewage swept over me.

“What is that?” I asked.

Already, I could see a viscous sludge creeping around the curve of the water tank across the catwalk, some of it dripping through the metal grate, most of it moving along at the speed of molten rock.

“I would get down off the tower if I were you, Jack.”

“What is it?”

“What does it smell like?”

“Shit.”

“Cynthia was at heart a flatterer. She exploited people with language. In the second bolgia of Dante’s eighth circle, flatterers were steeped in human excrement, as Cynthia soon will be. I’d start descending if I were you.”

I hurried back around to the ladder, dodging sewage that was streaming out of a pressure valve and expanding to cover the catwalk.

Using the railing, I carefully lowered myself down onto the ladder.

There was plenty of fear, but no hesitation this time. I descended as fast as I could manage and was halfway down when the first gob of excrement landed flush on the top of my head.

I only froze for a second, then continued to down-climb as sewage trickled down out of my hair, along the sides of my face, between my eyes.

It was raining now—a literal shitstorm—fat brown drops falling all around me, specking my arms and head, slickening the metal rungs. There was a temptation to look up, to see what was coming, but the prospect of getting any in my eyes—or worse, mouth—kept my head down for the duration of the descent, until I’d reached the tower’s concrete base.

I finally touched solid ground, covered head-to-toe in human waste, and when I stepped off the lowest rung of the rope ladder, my legs gave out, and I collapsed onto the fractured concrete.

Every muscle in my body trembled uncontrollably, and I couldn’t close my hands into fists—the tendons so stressed from gripping the rungs.

I lay on my side, moaning, and I could’ve stayed there for hours, but the sewage was dripping all over me.

I grabbed the rope ladder, used it to haul myself onto my feet.

My knees quivering.

I gazed off toward the west as the sun sank over this corpse of a town, and felt my soul grow cold. I wasn’t sure how much more of this I would be able to take, but I knew there was a lot more to come.

Luther had recreated Dante’s Inferno, just for me.

And there were six circles of hell still left.

• • •

I stepped down off the tower’s foundation and crawled back through the hole in the fence.

The rain had stopped, and in the puddles of standing water, I glimpsed unbroken reflections of the sky.

In the wake of the rain, water still poured out of a gutter on a building up ahead, and despite my complete exhaustion, I hobbled toward it as fast as I could until I was standing under the waterfall.

For several minutes, I let it pummel every square inch of my body until it had rinsed away the filth.

At last, I stumbled away, clean but soaking wet and already beginning to shiver.

In the last five minutes, the clouds had gone from pink, to purple, to blue, to a dark, steel gray that would be sheer black in a matter of minutes.

The prospect of being in Luther’s playground after dark added an entirely different component to the terror.

“Can you still hear me? Does the earpiece still work?” His voice startled me.

“Yeah.”

“See the factories in the distance?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Start walking toward them.”

The factories—what little I could see of them in the fading light—resembled a steampunk skyline. Soaring chimneys, vents, buildings behind buildings. A labyrinthine maze of vacated industry.

After five minutes, I emerged into a parking lot dotted with light poles, most of which had long since toppled or snapped in half, succumbing to years of rot.

The downed electrical wires lay serpentine and thickened with rust—long brown worms frozen mid slither.

An intense chill descended over me.

I felt a cold draft funneling through a tear in my windbreaker where Cynthia had sliced the fabric with the knife.

I was coming up on a three-story brick building—the first in a series of many which, from the top of the water tower, had appeared to interconnect.

“See the double doors?” Luther asked.

My heart rate quickened and it wasn’t merely from the exertion.

“I see them.”

“Head on through. Hope you remember the code from the water tower. Shame if you had to climb all the way back up there in the dark.”

Earlier

H
e hurt.

He hurt like hell.

The pain meds they’d stashed away were supposed to last for two weeks. But it had only been two days and they had already gone through half of them.

They’d gotten in last night, cold and hungry, down to fumes in their gas tank. Once more they were forced to sleep in the car. Donaldson was constantly being woken by Lucy’s snoring. It wasn’t her fault—along with her nose, part of her septum was missing. Still, more than once that night he’d considered murdering her.

An especially pleasant thought, because not only would it slake the bloodlust that had been building up inside him for years, but it would also mean he wouldn’t have to split the meds.

But he’d sat on the urge.

If everything went according to expectations, he’d get to kill someone today.

Kill someone in a much slower and more painful fashion than boring old strangulation.

Besides, in a twisted kind of way, that girl was growing on him.

Donaldson had never spent this much time with anyone in his entire life. Especially someone he understood on such a base level. He and Lucy had the same needs, same hopes, same fears.

It was truly a match made in hell.

When they woke up that morning, the duo spent the day exploring the deserted town. That fat bitch, Violet King, had sent them here, but hadn’t been specific on where to go. So they had been driving around, cold, hungry, in pain, and growing increasingly frustrated.

By dusk, they hadn’t found anything.

That’s when they’d run out of gas.

Donaldson was revisiting his thoughts of strangling Lucy when they saw the explosion on the other side of town. It was followed sometime later by several gunshots.

They closed in on the action on foot.

“You’re going too fast, D.”

Lucy’s limp had gotten worse, and if she moved any slower she’d be walking backwards.

“We’re so close, Lucy. Don’t give up now.”

“I can’t keep up.”

“Then don’t come,” he snapped. “See if I care.”

“D, please…”

Donaldson stopped. He’d never heard Lucy use the P word before.

He turned around, looked at her, saw the pain etched on her face—

—and he felt bad for her.

Donaldson couldn’t remember sympathizing with anyone, ever. Countless people had begged him for mercy, and all that had done was turn him on.

But Lucy’s “please” didn’t arouse him. Instead, it made him want to help her. Comfort her.

How bizarre.

“Want to rest for a minute?” he asked.

She nodded.

They parked their sorry, lame, mutilated bodies on a decaying bus stop bench.

“Need more meds?” Donaldson asked.

“We’re going through them too quickly.”

“I know. But we can deal with tomorrow when tomorrow comes.
If
tomorrow comes. Let’s worry about today, today.”

They each dry-swallowed two Norco.

The rain had stopped and the sun was setting. It was almost pretty.

“What do you want to do, D? When this is over?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what next? We’re escaped fugitives, and it’s not like we can blend into a crowd. We can’t run forever, can’t hide. They’ll find us.”

“Canada,” Donaldson said.

“How are we supposed to make it on our own? Get jobs?”

“Why do you assume we’ll be together?” Donaldson asked. It came out too harsh, not like he’d intended.

“You mean, when this is done, we split up?”

“We’ve been forced to work together, Lucy. Once we finish this, we can go our separate ways.”

Donaldson waited, hoping she would object, wondering why he cared so much.

“If that’s what you want, D.”

It wasn’t what he wanted. In fact, it was the last thing he wanted. He wondered why he’d said something so stupid.

“We’ll, uh, talk about this later. Right now we have business to attend to. You up for it?”

Lucy nodded.

“Gonna be good to kill someone again, don’t you think?”

She put on a pained smile. “Definitely.”

They walked another block, their shadows growing longer and then disappearing along with the sun. The only flashlight they had was the novelty one, shaped like a frog, on the car keychain.