H.A.L.F.: The Makers (39 page)

By the time he stood and turned around, Alecto had unwrapped herself. She stood as still as a statue, her eyes on him. Her bulbous grey head reflected the dim light, giving her an eerie glow.

“Come on,” he said. He stepped cautiously into the hallway, looking first left and then right. Alecto was at his back.

The corridor was empty and quiet.
Too quiet.
Jack had been sure that Harris would send at least a few more guards to take care of Jack and secure Alecto. He knew Harris had taken off after Thomas.
Is it possible there are less than a half dozen guards in this whole place?

They reached the end of the carpeted hallway. If he turned left, less than thirty yards of marble tiles stood between them and the entrance. There were voices coming from that direction. He couldn’t make them out, but whoever was speaking, it didn’t sound like a friendly conversation.

Jack was fairly certain Thomas had been taken down this large hallway farther down to the right. He needed to find Thomas but wasn’t sure that he was still in the utility and computer room. “Which way to go?” Jack was speaking to himself and hadn’t expected an answer to his rhetorical question.

But Alecto answered. Her voice was raspy like she was speaking through a throat full of crackers. “Go left.”

“I know that’s the way out. But we have to get Thomas first.”

“Go left,” she repeated in his ear.

Jack hesitated. He didn’t trust her. She’d done nothing to help him with the guards. Granted, she had been weakened by the humidity and was wrapped like a burrito. But for all Jack knew, she’d been reprogrammed already and was working for Croft now. She could be leading Jack to a trap.

Alecto pushed past him. “We must proceed with haste. Anna Sturgis is in danger,” Alecto said.

Trap or no, using ‘Anna’ and ‘danger’ in the same sentence got Jack’s attention. “Why do you care about what happens to Anna Sturgis?”

Alecto stopped. “Because Commander Sturgis ordered me to.” She continued on before Jack had a chance to question her further.

Jack didn’t like the idea of walking brazenly through the place without an idea of what they were facing. He preferred to sneak her out if they could rather than lay waste to more innocent men who happened to be working for the wrong guy. “Wait, Alecto. What’s your plan?”

“Follow me,” she said. Alecto walked quickly ahead of Jack, slivers of her pale greyish skin winking out of the tied-up back of her mint green hospital gown. She moved now with the preternatural speed that Jack had seen Tex use, and her bare feet were silent on the marble floor.

He tiptoed after her and tried to keep his boots from squeaking on the stone floor. He stayed close to the wall as they made their way toward the grand entrance to the penthouse.

Alecto quickly ducked into a room on the left. Jack followed and splayed himself to the wall as Alecto had.

“What are we doing?” he asked in a whisper.

“Listening,” she answered.

Jack tilted his head back, held his breath and tried to calm his rapidly beating heart. His shoulder throbbed and blood rushed in his ears. He let out the breath slowly and tried to focus.

The walls between them muffled the voices, but Jack could make out a man’s voice. “You have me, Elizabeth. Let my children go. I’m a much bigger prize to prove to your father your worth.”

The guy’s speaking to Lizzy Croft.
Jack’s heart beat even faster.

A young woman’s voice rang out with shrill laughter. “You, Robert? A prize?” The woman had a British accent. “I think you greatly overvalue yourself,” Lizzy Croft said.

“I have men too, Elizabeth. You take my family, I’ll take yours. We’ll have a right bloody war. Is that what you think your father really wants on the eve of his triumph?”

There was a slight pause and a loud screech of pain. It was a woman’s voice that cried out.
Anna.

Jack began to run to the entryway. But Alecto held him back with her arm. She was surprisingly strong for such a frail creature.

“No. She is not dead.”

Lizzy yelled back to Robert Sturgis. “Stop there, Robert, or they’ll shoot you and I’ll finish her. Do not presume to think you know what my father wants.”

“I know him better than you. After all, you found out you’re a Croft only a few short years ago. I’ve been his ally and partner for all of my adult life and my father was before me. This is not how the Makers do things. We take care of the problems of our own houses. Your father left this mess to me to clean up, not you.”

Jack’s stomach churned with bile at hearing Robert admit that he had come to do exactly what Thomas had told Jack he’d do. Kill his own son. Even though Jack was still mad as hell at Thomas for lying to him, hearing this softened him toward Thomas a bit.
With a dad like that, no wonder the guy’s a lying asshat.

Lizzy’s voice was confident and firm. “You see, that’s the thing, Robert. This is the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. It’s about time the Makers caught up with the times. I’ll usher in a new dawn. And the chain I’m forging will have no more weak links.”

A shot rang out and a male voice screamed in pain.

Robert Sturgis shouted, “No!”

Jack wasn’t about to wait another second. “What’s going on out there?”

“Someone has been shot.”

Erika stumbled out into the bright morning sun and squinted. She found her way to a weathered wooden bench positioned between two palo verde trees. The branches were bare, the tiny leaves covering the rocky dirt. A small, pale yellow butterfly landed on the green-barked tree, its branch so smooth it looked like it was green skin.

She sat down on the bench, pulled her knees up and rested her head on them. She let the silent tears fall and occasionally sniffed. Birds chirped and flies buzzed, but otherwise it was a beautiful, warm, quiet late fall day. It was the kind of day that made desert dwellers gloat about living there.

Erika watched a tiny baby lizard dart across the concrete path. It stopped on the other side in the dirt along the edge and did push-ups. It whipped its tail back and forth then scurried along, oblivious to the huge tear in the fabric of the universe. Well, in Erika’s universe anyway.

A long shadow fell across the concrete. She didn’t bother to look up.

“Want company?” Ian asked.

His voice was music to her ears. It was weak and softer than usual, but it was Ian’s and he was alive and out of bed.

Under normal circumstances she was always happy to spend time with her best friend. But in that moment, she honestly didn’t want company. She wanted to ball up her small fists and punch something – anything – and pound until her hands bled. She wanted to scream until her throat was raw and she could no longer make a sound. And she wanted to run from the never-ending nightmare that her life had become. To get on her bike, pull back the throttle and drive until she ran out of road.

But she didn’t say any of that to Ian. He was still recovering from the nasty bug that had nearly killed them both. He should have been in bed, but he’d wheeled his IV bag with him and hovered beside her, covered only in a thin blue gown and a pair of hospital-issue socks.
How can I say no to him?

Erika scooted over and patted the bench next to her. “Sure.” It didn’t come out as convincing as she’d wanted it to be.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Really. Sit before you fall over.”

“Like my new clothes? It’s all the rage here in Ajo, AZ.” He struck a model pose and sucked in his cheeks to accentuate his cheekbones. He didn’t need to suck in his cheeks. Already high and prominent, his cheeks had become positively angular since that fateful night they had struck out into the desert with Jack.

The look of him made Erika’s stomach churn with guilt and pain for him. But she forced a fake half smile and said, “Lovely. You always were the trendsetter.”

Ian winced as he sat.

“You okay?”

“Not really. But they say I will be. Eventually. The real question is, how are you?”

“They say I’m fully recovered. A bit dehydrated and underfed, but I wasn’t as sick as you or for as long.”

“That’s not what I meant. I know about your mom.” Ian held his arm out and wrapped it around Erika’s bony, quaking body.

She cried into his shoulder until his hospital gown was soaked. Ian cried until the top of Erika’s head was wet.

Erika sniffed and wiped her face with her arm. “I’m alone, Ian.”

“You’ll never be alone.” He hugged her more tightly. “You’re stuck with me.”

She managed a chuckle. “I know. But she was … I’m a freakin’ orphan, Ian.”

“I know you’ll miss her. She was your only mom. But you’ll be okay, Erika. You’ve been taking care of yourself a long time now.”

As usual, Ian had the sum of it. She’d gotten used to being alone. It had never been a problem for her. It was more that now she had no chance to ever know … What? A real family? A sober mom? So many possibilities died with her mom.
I’ll never know what could have been with her.

Ian asked, “What will you do now?”

Erika began to speak but realized she had nothing to say. Her anger at life had been the dam that held back her tears. Her anguish had broken the dam, and now she didn’t seem to be able to stop the steady flow of tears.

“That’s just it, Ian. I don’t know what to do.” Her words came out between choked sobs.

Ian pulled her to him again. She rested her head on his bony chest as his emaciated arms circled her. Arms that used to be strong and solid. The memory of how he used to be – how he used to feel when he held her – made her cry even harder. “We’ve lost so much.”

“Let it out. That’s it. Let it go.”

Erika snuffled. “The thing is, my whole life has been defined by my relationship with my mom, you know?” She could feel Ian nod. “Like most of my life has been about getting the hell away from her.”

“I know,” he said as he stroked her hair.

“Then, while we were at Tro, all I could think was how when I got back, I’d help her. I was going to take her away from here and start over. I was going to save her, Ian, and I failed.”

Fresh tears splashed onto Ian’s wet chest and choked sobs escaped her lips. Ian patiently stroked her hair and let her cry it out. Her throat was sore and her lips parched despite the liquid that ran down her face. “What am I going to do now?”

“You’re going to do what you’ve always done.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“You’re going to cowboy up and fight.”

Erika sniffed. “I don’t feel like I’ve got any fight left in me.”

“Maybe not right now you don’t. But I know you. After some rest, you’ll channel this sadness back into anger and action. And you’ll be pissed as hell at the assholes that did this to me and to Jack and to your mom.”

“And Dr. Randall says if we don’t get Tex out of here, he’ll be taken again and to a situation worse for him than it was at A.H.D.N.A.” Erika’s tears were already drying at the thought of the Makers getting their hands on Tex. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I’ll get mad. Then what?”

“I don’t know what you’ll do exactly. But I know you’ll fight for us – for all of us – and for our survival.”

“I’m not exactly a save-the-world kind of person. I dislike most people, remember?”

“Yeah. Maybe. But you love some of the people. A lot. And you’re not the kind to sit back and watch countless people suffer through this horrible virus without lifting a finger.”

When he put it that way, she knew he was right. There was no way she could just ride her motorcycle into oblivion and ignore the fact that so many people could die from the Conexus virus, as Ian almost had.

Still, she had always lived by the rule of each tending to themselves. She stayed out of people’s business and was happy for people to stay out of hers. Erika took care of Erika, and she expected others to take care of themselves.

“I’m no Florence Nightingale, Ian. I’m a loner. You know that.”

“So don’t look at it as saving the world. For now, just save me.”

Erika raised her head from his chest and looked into his face. His dark chocolate brown eyes were rimmed in red and there were dark circles beneath them. “I thought … you said you’d be okay.” Fear of losing Ian welled up inside her again.

“Oh, I’ll be okay. But I’m not talking about the virus. There’s something else coming, Erika. Something they’re not telling us. And Tex knows about it. At least he knows something about it.”

The feeling of betrayal she’d once had toward Tex came over her again like a dark cloud rolling across the desert floor, ready to burst with lightning and thunder. “Tex knows about it – whatever it is? Are you saying that Tex was in cahoots with the Conexus after all?”

“No, no. I’m not talking about the stupid Conexus. It’s something else. I don’t know what exactly. But while I was visiting him and Dr. Randall, military brass came in to see him. It was all whispers and hush. But they were trying to interrogate him. They asked me to step outside and wait. I put my ear to the door of course and tried to listen as best I could. I didn’t hear much. But I swear one of them asked him about the ship entering our solar system.”

Ian and Erika knew the Conexus were from a future Earth, so they knew that if a ship was entering the solar system, it couldn’t be the little grey bastards. “This doesn’t make sense. If a ship is entering our solar system and it’s not Conexus, why would Tex know anything about it?” Erika asked.

“I don’t know. Like I said, I couldn’t hear much. And they weren’t there long before Dr. Randall brought in another doc and they told them that he wasn’t recovered enough to speak to them. I never did hear Tex talk. He must still be very weak.”

Erika’s head spun. She’d just lost her mom and was trying to wrap her head around being orphaned before her eighteenth birthday. Her mind was still processing that her world was being rocked by a deadly virus the Conexus unleashed. And now a spaceship from another world was entering their cosmic neighborhood? In the grand scheme of the entire universe, they were practically knocking on the door.

And where is Jack?

“I wonder if the military guys were really military or from the Makers?” Erika asked.