After the Dark (15 page)

She was about to turn and ask Mole a question when she saw a sudden illumination in a second floor window, as if someone had taken a picture with a flashbulb . . .

. . . and Max was running toward the house and up the lawn even before she heard the report.

The X5 knew a muzzle flash when she saw it.

“Gun!” she yelled over her shoulder, but the others were in action already, too, even as she saw another flash, and they heard a second report from upstairs, terrible momentary thunder in the otherwise quiet night.

She shouldered through the locked door and on inside, Joshua on her heels, Mole and Alec taking off around back to block the shooter's retreat to the rear.

The stairs were immediately to the right, and she hit the fourth step just as a head peeked around the corner at the top, a stocking-capped head that looked like it belonged on the body of a big man, which it did. He stepped forward, showing off a linebacker's frame and, more important, a nine millimeter automatic in his right hand.

Taking the rest of the stairs in a single bound, she leaped, landed at the top on one side and swung her leg around, her foot catching the man in the face. He backed up but neither flinched nor dropped the gun.

Shit
, she thought, noting the lack of reaction; any normal human would've dropped in pain.
A Familiar!

Had a squad of cultists been sent to guard Ray? And if so, why didn't Ames White know where his son was?

Pressing her advantage, she punched him six quick times, backing him up toward the door of the room from which they had seen the gunshot flash, outside.

And if the Familiars were guarding Ray, who the hell were they shooting at in that bedroom?

The Familiar brought the pistol up again, and this time Max grabbed his arm and spun, the barrel of the pistol pointing directly at Joshua, who had followed her up the stairs but was now facing her.

At the last second Joshua dodged to the right as the Familiar pulled the trigger two times, the shots blowing through the front wall of the house and into the night.

Max heard Joshua growling, but there was no way to let him by, and she didn't want to, anyway . . . not until she'd disarmed the Familiar. She crashed the man's arm down on her shoulder and heard a satisfying crack as his arm broke at the elbow, the pistol slipping from his grip and
thunk
ing on each stair as it bounced to the bottom like a heavy Slinky. The Familiar made no noise when his arm snapped—pain just didn't seem to register on these bastards—swinging the limp limb like a whip. The open other hand caught her on the side of the head and sent her tumbling down the stairs, as if following the gun.

Somehow, Joshua got past her, grabbed the Familiar around the waist and forced him toward the far end of the wall. Rolling into a combat stance, Max rushed back up the stairs and pushed her way through the closed door into the bedroom. The window was smashed and any Familiar that had been in here was gone.

All that remained were Sara Gulliver and her “son” Lemuel, aka Ray White.

And they were both dead.

From the hall, Joshua roared with rage, then Max heard another nasty crunching sound . . . then silence.

Heartsick, she spun into the hall and found Joshua, blood running from a wound in his shoulder. The Familiar hung limply in the Big Fella's arms, head lolling like a Christmas goose with its neck broken.

Forcing herself back into the bedroom, Max gaped at the horrifying sight before her. On the floor, their hands tied behind their backs, gags in their mouths, the woman and the child both lay facedown, a single bullet hole in the back of each of their heads.

Executed.

Alec and Mole came pounding in from outside.

“Bastard got away,” Mole said. “We were around back, he went out the front! He was one fast son of a . . .” The lizard man's voice trailed off as he took in the bodies on the floor. “Oh, God.”

Pushing by him, Alec saw the carnage. Shaking his head, he turned away.

Bending down, Max touched Ray's face. It was still warm.

Why would the Familiars kill Ames White's son
?

This made no sense at all to her! Not only had they killed White's boy, they had taken the only bargaining chip she had left. She stroked the child's head, his hair, and she wept.

She wanted to be tough.

But with the dead child, and the realization that Logan was going to die—and that there was nothing she could do to prevent it—these things and every other thing she hadn't cried about for all those years, all the way back to Manticore, came pouring out.

She knelt there, one hand on Ray's head, the other on her forehead as she wept. Tears ran freely, her body wracked with sobs.

“Let it out, Little Fella,” the gentle giant said, kneeling beside her now.

Max wondered if she ever could, though—there was too much to let out, there had been so many wrongs, so much pain, with no end in sight. Was this the normal life she'd hoped for, this endless parade of pain?

At least little Ray White could sleep through it all—his pain, his travels, over.

Chapter Eight

JOSHUA FIT THE BATTLE

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
DECEMBER 22, 2021

Eventually, as Max's sobs began to abate, Alec stepped forward and placed a hand on her shoulder.

Max glanced back at the X5, surprised by the gentleness of the gesture and the genuine sorrow on the handsome face. She swallowed, nodding to him a small “Thank you” for his concern.

His hand was still on her shoulder as Max—making no effort to rise—looked down again at Ray, as she continued to run a soothing hand through the boy's hair, her fingers inches away from moist, matted blood.

He looked just as she remembered him, a bright-looking boy, hair cut short like his father's, the color more the blond of his late mother's. Rather small for his age—some of White's fellow cultists had doubted the boy had it in him to belong in their “exalted” ranks—he might have been asleep, but for the hole in his head.

“Max,” Alec said, “we gotta haul—somebody in the neighborhood must've heard the noise, and we got three dead people here.”

“Three?” she asked absently.

“I broke one,” Joshua said, furry face matted with tears. “Did I do wrong, Max?”

She glanced at the beast of a man next to her, and it came back to her, Joshua bleeding, wounded, breaking that Familiar's neck. Kneeling next to her now, as if they were both taking communion, Joshua seemed oblivious to his own wound, much less the knife blade still in his shoulder.

“You okay, Big Fella?”

He shook his head. “Too late,” he said. The eyes brimmed with more tears. “Boy shouldn't have to, Max.”

“Have to . . . ?”

“Take one. For the team.” And the tears overflowed.

She removed her hand from the dead boy's head and stroked the side of Joshua's warm, wet face.

Alec squeezed her shoulder. “Max!”

“You're right, Alec. Let's shake it.”

She rose, self-control flooding through her; she willed herself into a coldly businesslike state. Her sense of purpose had returned, in spades. She quickly moved out into the hall, where Joshua had left the limp figure with its broken neck, a fact made obvious by the severe impossible angle of it, as that neck was almost nonexistent, the large head sitting on broad shoulders. The man's wide eyes peered out emptily through the eye holes of the stocking mask.

She knelt over this corpse with considerably less compassion than she had the child's. The Familiar wore familiar TAC fatigues, and Max had a pretty good idea what she was going to find even before she jerked the stocking cap off the man's big head.

The blond guard from the Lyman Cale estate.

Otto. Or was it Franz? She didn't remember.

Not that it mattered. She felt it safe to assume his partner, the dark-haired one—Franz, or Otto, whatever the hell—had been the one to escape through that bedroom window.

She stood.

Alec said, “Max . . . come on! We gotta blow this pop stand.”

“Shut-up,” she said. “I'm thinking.”

“Maybe you could do that in the car.”

“Alec, shut-up.”

What the hell was going on here? The Familiars, working for Lyman Cale?

Only, Lyman Cale was a vegetable, a CGI image in public, and in private a husk hooked up to life support . . . No one really worked for him, did they? That security team, including the two brawny ones—Familiars—reported to Lyman Cale's private secretary, that slick ever-so-helpful bureaucrat, Franklin Bostock.

Was Bostock the answer?

A strong possibility, but Alec was right—this was not the time or place to work out all the maybes; they indeed needed to haul. Far away, but getting closer, sirens wailed mournfully, as if knowing in advance about the child's tragic death.

“Company comin',” Mole growled, at her side.

“Okay,” Max said. “Joshua, can you carry this guy?”

Still ignoring the knife in his shoulder, Joshua responded by reaching down, grabbing the corpse and tossing it over his good shoulder, like a sack of grain.

Alec's eyes widened and his mouth dropped like a trapdoor. “What the hell . . . ?”

“Mole,” Max said, no-nonsense, “get the boy. Wrap him in a white sheet.”

Mole's cigar fell out of his mouth. “No freakin' way! What kinda ghoulish shit—”

Max thumped the lizard man's chest with two fingers. “The kid is dead. When I said we wouldn't trade the boy for Logan, I meant a
breathing
Ray White. It's not going to hurt that poor boy now, taking a ride with us.”

Alec, his eyes as horrified as they were huge, stepped up. “Max, have you completely lost it? This plan
beyond
sucks!”

She latched onto Alec's shoulder with a hand that was nowhere near as gentle as his had been. “Toughen up, girls! . . . Ames White's going to want proof of what happened here. That it was the Familiars who betrayed him, not us!”

“You mean, the boy . . . his body . . . is evidence,” Mole said, picking up his cigar.

“You're goddamn right he's evidence!” a wild-eyed Alec said as the sirens grew more insistent. “You're gonna put two corpses in our car, what, in the trunk?”

“That's the idea,” Max said.

“And if we get stopped by the cops,” Alec said, “how do we explain that?”

“Firmly,” she said. “Mole, Alec—do it . . . or bail. If you're not prepared to follow my lead,
right now
—bail.”

Alec swallowed and sighed . . . and nodded his commitment. Mole was already heading back into the bedroom, to prepare the small sad package.

And Max was no longer a distraught young woman, nor was Joshua an upset oversize teddy bear—all four of the transgenics made up a highly trained combat team again (Thank you, Colonel Lydecker, Max thought, for small favors), and nothing the Familiars and/or Ames White had to throw at them was going to stop them.

They were out of the Gulliver house in less than a minute, and—with the two bodies, the boy's sheet-wrapped, tucked in the trunk of Logan Cale's car—they took off, but carefully, Mole scrupulously obeying the speed limit. Though the sirens increased, Max and her unlikely teammates never even saw a squad car.

When they hit the edge of town without being stopped, Mole sped up a little, but he kept within a few miles of the limit.

“Where to?” the driver asked at last. “Or are we just gonna cruise around with our passengers until they start gettin' ripe?”

“Three Tree Point,” Max said.

Mole shot her a look.

She gave him a sharp glance back. “Do I stutter?”

“Why in the hell?”

“Someone we need to talk to.”

Alec leaned forward from the backseat. “You need to talk to somebody on Lyman Cale's estate, right?”

She half turned. “Not bad, Alec.”

Mole, not taking his eyes off the road, said, “What?”

Alec explained. “There's no other reason to go to Three Tree Point than to steal a boat and head for the Cale mansion.”

Max smiled grimly. “See, Alec? You're not just a pretty face.”

“And you really do have a plan that doesn't suck,” he said with his own grim smile.

Catching up with them, Mole said, “So, then . . . the guy in the trunk who needs a chiro—he's from Cale's, right?”

She nodded, and quickly filled them in.

“So,” Mole said, “since Joshua killed Tweedledee, and since Tweedledum got away from us . . . they're probably gonna be waitin' for us.”

“With bells on,” Max said.

A grin creased Mole's reptilian features. “Just think how sick they're gonna look when we kick their asses, anyway.”

With the exception of Joshua, they all smiled at Mole's bravado. Max only hoped it wasn't misplaced.

She had fought Familiars before and was amazed at how much pain they absorbed with seemingly no response. She had seen Ames White shoot himself in the arm and not even flinch. Two of them had ganged up on her when she tried to free Ray the first time, and no matter how hard she'd fought, they hadn't even seemed to notice her efforts.

She also had no idea how much of the security staff on Sunrise Island belonged to the Familiars. The burly boys, Otto and Franz, were obvious snake cult candidates. But Familiars didn't always look like top physical specimens fresh from the gym. White himself was of rather average build, and yet in combat against him, she'd had plenty of trouble.

Granted, she and Joshua and other transgenics had scored a victory over White's snake-cult SWAT team that time at Jam Pony; but every fight with the Familiars had proven to be arduous, to say the least—you had to beat them into unconsciousness or cripple them or kill them to take them out.

She wondered what the four of them could manage if the Familiars seriously outnumbered them on Lyman Cale's private island.

“Let's pull over,” she said when she felt they were safely out of town, “and get Joshua patched up before we do anything else.”

“Joshua is fine,” Joshua said, the knife hilt sticking out of him like a slot-machine handle.

“Shut-up, Joshua,” Max said.

“Shut-up?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Max.”

“Good.”

“Max?”

“Yes, Joshua?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No, Joshua.”

“Because you said ‘shut-up,' and Joshua thought—”

“Shut-up, Joshua.”

“Yes, Max.”

Hunkered over the wheel, Mole said, “I know a place not far from here. Nice and private.”

Max didn't even want to know how Mole knew about places between Appleton and Seattle. Sometimes she had to remind herself that the transgenics hadn't all moved directly from Manticore to Terminal City.

After pulling off the highway and onto a ramp, then onto a two-lane road from there, Mole took them a good mile from the four-lane before he turned into a field on a tractor-access lane and stopped the car behind a stand of apple trees, ravaged by the recent cold spell; the skeletal trees remained thick enough to block any view of them from the highway, and one of them gave Max a place to sit Joshua down and prop him up, while she did a quick triage.

“Mole, you got your lighter?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Gonna need it. Got a knife?”

Another nod.

Alec shook his head and said to Mole, “What if she'd asked you for a ham sandwich?”

“How do you know I don't have one in my back pocket?” Mole asked the X5. “Anyway, Manticore did share their motto with the Boy Scouts, 'member.” He gave Alec a little three-fingered salute. “Be prepared.”

Alec gave Mole a one-fingered salute.

“Heat the knife blade,” Max said. “When I pull this thing out, I'm gonna want to cauterize the wound.”

Alec smirked. “You can take the girl out of Manticore, but you can't take Manticore out of the girl.”

Joshua looked a little dubious, sitting there with his back against an apple tree, the moon illuminating his canine features with a lovely ivory cast. The temperature seemed to be slowly rising. Mole moved the flame over the blade of his knife, and Max could see Joshua staring at it, his eyes growing wider with each passing second.

When the blade glowed red, Max went to work.

She started with the knife in Joshua's shoulder. “You ready, Big Fella?”

He gulped and said, “Ready, Little Fella,” and Max jerked the knife out of his shoulder. Joshua let out a piteous howl, his eyes growing wide, and he unconsciously started shaking his head as she dropped one knife and held out her hand for Mole to give her the heated one.

His eyes glued to the glowing blade, Joshua whimpered like a puppy.

“Hey,” she said, “who loves you?”

“Y-Y-You d-do?”

“That's right, Big Fella.”

“Joshua loves Max, too, Little Fella.”

And with his eyes on hers, she grinned, he grinned, then she pressed the hot blade into his wound, and the werewolf howl that roared from deep within him reminded Max of Joshua's brother Isaac and the screams of pain he elicited when in the throes of his homicidal rage. Surprisingly, the two brothers didn't sound all that different . . . which was enough to give Max a little shiver.

She withdrew the knife and, under the flame from Mole's lighter, inspected her work.

“Looking good,” she said.

Joshua gave her a frown that said he wasn't as impressed, and that pulling the “Little Fella” limb from limb may have crossed his mind. “Max hurt Joshua.”

“Max had to . . . for your own good, Big Fella. Hey, it's going to be all right now. Rest for a little while. I'll be right here.”

He eyed the knife warily until she handed it back to Mole.

“Rest, I said,” she scolded.

Leaving the beast man to sleep against the tree, the others moved off a little ways and found places to sit on the ground.

Max looked up at a million stars. It was a different sky out here, somehow—more stars, brighter moon, reminding her of the night the twelve of them had escaped from Manticore. It had been a long trip since then, her only goal to find a home, to settle down. Now, in Terminal City, she had a home, all right; but being out here, on the run again, reminded her of how claustrophobic the city had become.

Mole yanked an automatic pistol fitted with a silencer out of his belt and set it on the ground in front of him.

“Where did you pull that out of?” she asked.

Alec smirked. “Are you sure you wanna know?”

Mole tilted his head in the direction of Appleton. “From the Gulliver house. Belonged to our no-neck passenger, in the car.”

Max hated guns. They all knew it; but she also was savvy enough, pragmatic enough, to know that a little firepower could make a difference tonight. And if Mole wanted to go that way, she had no right to try to stop him—not when she was asking him to follow her through the gates of Hell.

“With what we're about to do,” Mole said apologetically, “I thought it might come in handy.”

She nodded, looking away.

“You cool with it?” Mole asked.

“No.”

“You want me to toss it?”

“Do what you have to.”

“I hate to bring this up,” Alec said to her. “But what exactly is your plan?”

Mole grinned. “Step one, find these assholes; step two, kick their asses.”

“Max,” Alec said, “
is
that your plan?”

Cigar jutting threatening, Mole asked, “What part didn't you get? Step one, or step two?”