The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage (29 page)

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twenty Four

Another three hours and change on the road, and I found the place. The clock on the dash said six-twelve, but I hadn’t moved it back an hour to account for the fact that I was in a different time zone. It seemed way too light out for being almost a quarter after six.

Funny what you remember.

I pulled into the parking lot and drove around the back of the Super 8 motel. The motel was on my right. The left side of the lot ended near the start of a low hillside.

Through the windshield of the Olds, I saw Denver’s white Econoline van right away, and pretty much right after that, what do you know, a motel room door opened, and here comes Denver himself, in his wheelchair, pushed by the gray-haired lady I recognized from the weird videos.

And hello…next out, all crouched and nervous, came my dad.

I did it. I found him.

I didn’t know if I should honk, or park and come over to them totally casual, or what. I grinned like a kid at Christmas.

Then a section of doorframe right next to my dad’s head exploded.

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twenty Five

My dad leapt back into the room so fast it was like he’d disappeared. The lady, ducking low, hustled Denver behind the van.

I slammed on the parking brake and got out of the car.

A little puff of disintegrated stucco blew off the wall of the motel just beyond the door frame. From my left, somewhere on that hillside, came a very faint, sharp
pft
and a louder noise like a crack.

My sensitive olfactory nerve registered, almost as faintly, the tangy, smoky smell of gunpowder.

I put the two together. Whoever was shooting was on that hillside, hidden from sight.

Who could that be but Lou from PrenticeCambrian, Lou from the answering machine…Lou with the dirty pictures of his roommate?

Lou. Shooting at my dad. Well, fuck that.

I ran across the parking lot toward the chain-link fence marking the base of the hill. I’ll never be as fast as my dad, but I’m pretty damn quick, especially in a sprint. Even so, I kept expecting the guy to turn his gun on me.

He fired again, all right, but he was still aiming for my dad. I wished I could spare a glance toward the motel, but my sensorium had done its work.

I knew where Lou was.

A second leap, and I was on the edge of a concrete drainage ditch running horizontally along the hillside.

A third leap, and I was on his back.

I don’t want to make it sound like I’m some kind of action hero. That’s not how it was. Not even.

It’ll probably take you longer to read all this than the time that passed from when I got out of the car to when I reached the guy.

Also, I’d just spent several hundred miles and pretty much the entire day thinking about what would happen when I saw my dad. The idea that one of these PrenticeCambrian assholes would kill him before that could happen was so far off the table, it was, like, ridiculous. Offensive, even.

My head went like this: hey, my dad! Hey, someone’s trying to kill him! Fuck that! Make it stop!

Adrenaline kicked in. My crazy augmented muscles got me where I needed to be. I even got my hands on the barrel of the rifle and managed to yank it out of the shooter’s grasp.

I didn’t expect it to be so hot. I tossed it away by reflex.

While I was doing that, the guy twisted around and kneed me in the nuts.

Another heartbeat, and I was on my back in the drainage ditch. I hit the back of my head on the concrete and saw stars even as he got on top of me and started pounding me with his fists.

He was heavy. Like, overweight-heavy. But he was really strong, and he knew just where to land those punches on my chest and gut and sides.

Pain was everywhere and kept coming. I felt pinned by the sloping sides of the ditch.

I finally got my arms between him and me. I pushed; he got off of me.

In the scrambling moment it took for me to get off my back and onto my hands and knees, fire wracking me all up and down my torso, barely able to draw a decent breath, he was up and ready.

He’d also managed to pull a pretty big knife. I didn’t know shit about such things and still don’t, but it sure seemed to me like he knew how to use it. And planned to.

I couldn’t get to my feet. I was freaking out.

“She’s dead,” I barked to buy some time. “She’s dead!”

“What?”

“I killed her, all right?” Something in me insisted I say her name. “Evelyn. She’s dead.”

His face, which had been red from our struggle, paled a notch. His small eyes widened. His mouth dropped open.

I recognized his reaction as a vulnerability. The wild part of me took over in that thin slice of time. Pain flew out of me in a red rush that seemed to close around my head and narrow my vision down to nothing but this man who had just turned into prey.

I knocked him back, and we played our previous scene with the roles reversed. He lost his grip on the knife. I got on him and started to punch and kick with zero finesse, not that I really had any to display. I sucked at fighting, this was clear, but my augmented strength and speed and reflexes made up for it.

I was crying.

I don’t know why I didn’t use my fingernails on him. That would have been it, right then and there, and I would have had another death on my hands in every sense of the word.

I’ve given that a lot of thought. Things would have turned out very differently if I’d just hooked my hands and given him a couple of slashes across his throat in that mossy, cold, wet gutter. That would have been it.

Instead, I hit him and screamed at him and cried like a crazy person. He did his best to fight back, but I was too fast, too strong, too out of my head. Pretty quickly, it was all he could do to curl into a fetal position and cover his soft parts.

Something very strong gripped my shoulders, pulled me off the guy, and spun me around.

I found myself staring through my tears at my father’s face.

“Stop,” he said. “Stop it now.”

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twenty Six

The last time I’d seen my father in the flesh, his hair had been a long, dreadlocked, filthy mess tangled with an equally long, dreadlocked, filthy mess of a beard. His clothes had been layers of rags. He’d stunk like a mildewed pile of feral old socks and trash bin meat.

The man who stood over me on the hillside next to the Super 8 motel bore a scent that was something like my own, something like the warm, vaguely comforting smell of a dog just a few days past its bath…with just a hint of soap. Not rangy or unpleasant at all.

His hair was gray and closely cropped. His bare face was pale and surprisingly smooth.

I knew him by his eyes, though. Green and vibrant, red-rimmed and wide. Half, or more than half, crazy.

He looked past me to where his would-be assassin lay curled up and groaning on the damp concrete of the drainage ditch.

“Didn’t remember you as much of a fighter.”

I looked at the guy named Lou and fought the black urge to keep going on him. At the same time, I was almost giddy to see he was still breathing.

“Sorry,” I said.

“What for?”

My father crouched down on the balls of his feet, wrists on his bent knees. He sniffed at the killer, who looked at him with one swollen, bright eye full of fear and tried to curl into an even tighter ball.

My dad grabbed him by an ear and lifted his head off the ground. “Wonder…should I finish?”

“No!” The thought of seeing another death, of seeing my father kill, of hearing the sounds and smelling the blood and shit and terror…it was terrible to consider. “No! I…I think we should, like, question him. Besides…I thought you didn’t want me to hurt him anymore?”

“Didn’t want
you
to do it,” he specified. “Still wanna
do
it. Tried to shoot me!”

From the parking lot, I heard Denver’s voice. “Nate? Jesus Christ, what the hell are you doing here?”

I turned and looked down the slope at Denver and his friend. “I…I came to find you guys. To, um…go with you.”

Andrew straightened up and stood over the assassin guy. “How’d you do that?”

The woman with Denver scowled. “There’ll be plenty of time to catch up later. We have to go.”

I noticed more than a few people watching us from their motel room windows. Some were trying to be careful about it, peeking around curtains. Others just gawked. It was easy to guess that someone had called the cops.

“We should take him with us,” I said in a rush. “He’s some kind of spy or something. For the people behind the whole thing…the same company as Brenhurst.” I looked from Denver to my dad and back to Denver again. “I totally think we should take him with us to the Institute.”

From the ditch, Lou coughed. It was a wet, painful sound. He sobbed, “Evelyn!”

Chills ran down my back. “We can’t leave him!” He’d talk to the cops if we did. And they’d know to check the house in Kirby Lake. And I’d be fucked.

My dad nudged him in a rough way that wasn’t exactly a kick. “Should finish him.”

Denver leaned forward, his hands tight on the arms of his wheelchair. “Are you nuts? You can’t just kill people, Andrew! Come down, both of you.” He shook his head and muttered, “Damn kid. Damn kid,” but if he was hoping I wouldn’t hear him, that was just stupid.

“We have to go right now,” Denver’s friend said again.

My dad’s head tilted, and his eyes widened even more than usual. “Yep. Gotta go.”

I heard it a second later. Sirens. Far away, but coming closer, fast. That settled it. We’d have to leave the PrenticeCambrian assassin there to be found by the cops.

“Get in the damn van!” Denver started to wheel himself away from his friend.

She grabbed the chair. “We can’t take the van! The hotel has the license number.” She shot me a no-nonsense look. “How’d you get here?”

I pointed to the Olds, which was right where I left it, the front door hanging open and the engine running. “Right there.”

Denver looked pissed but resigned. He didn’t waste any time wheeling over to the car. “Open the trunk and throw the chair in. One of you will have to put me in the car. Who’s driving?”

I started to reply, but his friend cut me off with a tone not too different from how my mother sounded when she wasn’t interested in my opinion, only the results she wanted.

“I am. Nate, open the trunk and give me the keys.”

I did it. I was well-trained.

It irritated me all to hell. But I did it.

My dad carried Denver to the shotgun seat. We got out of there.

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twenty Seven

Denver’s friend was named Sandy. She got us out of the parking lot of the Super 8 and back on the 15 headed north without running into the cops.

The atmosphere in the car was pretty tense for a while. For the first half-hour or so, Sandy’s observation that the Olds “beat the shit out of that old van” and Denver’s grouchy “that was
my
old van, and leaving it was a mistake” were the only things anyone said.

I sat on the wide back seat, leaning against the door. It felt strange not to be driving. With Sandy driving, Denver sitting next to her, and me in the back, I had the odd sensation this was what most kids experienced the whole time they grew up: two parents in the front and you in the back. Not me, though.

My whole life, I’d been told my father had died in a laboratory experiment back when I was a baby. In truth, he’d been driven out of his mind after undergoing something called the “augmentation regimen.” It altered his physiology to be more like a hunting animal than a human being. Before long, he shook off his handlers and lived like a hobo, or a hermit, or whatever, for the next fifteen years or so.

Now he was a few feet away from me, on the far side of the car, staring out the closed window at the darkness and the lights.

Somebody had to say something. I voted for me.

“So…what do you think will happen to that Lou guy?”

I saw Denver and Sandy look at each other. My father, still staring out the window, grumbled, “Shouldn’t be here.”

“Who?”

“You,” he snapped.

I waited for more. A mile went by. I got tired of waiting.

“I knew that guy was coming for you,” I said.

“Could have handled it.”

I didn’t understand why I was getting attitude from the crazy man.

“Really.”

He looked at me. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I…” Frustration welled up in me, and with it, to my horror, tears. “I fucking saved your life!”

“Could have handled it.” Broken record.

“You hid in the room!” It took deliberate effort to keep my voice steady. I would not lose it. I didn’t even understand why I was so worked up…unless you count the twelve hours on the road, the fighting off armed killers, seeing my father again, and so on and so forth. “You have no fucking idea… what I did to get—!”

He turned to the window again.

From the front, Denver said, “Nate, how in the heck did you find us, anyway?”

“I came to Kirby Lake looking for this asshole.” No reaction from my father. “I…” How much to tell? It would all come out eventually. I wasn’t ready. “I figured out where you guys went.”

“How?”

“Just kind of…put it together. I saw his hair and old clothes in the trash—"

“You went through my trash?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I guess.” I took a breath. “I knew he’d been there, and now you were all gone—well, I didn’t know about you, Sandy,” little lie, “but I, um, like, waited around, and kind of just put it all together.”

Denver looked over his shoulder at me. “You put it all together.”

I nodded.

“How’d you manage that, exactly?”

“I…saw your notes. With the freeways and the motel.”

His voice had a little iron in it this time. “How, again?”

What the hell.

“I kinda broke into your house.”

Who really cared, now?

Denver squinted at me, scowling, before turning back to face the front of the car.