Head Rush (18 page)

No, he doesn’t know. It’s just fear. I steady my breath. He couldn’t know. The shower is running. Though he sometimes comes in and talks to me.

“Hello?”

I freeze. Eyes wide.

“Right,” he says. “Fine. Then do it over.”

I nearly implode in relief. He’s on his own phone. I sit there, praying it’s not a conference call. Sometimes he comes home to take conference calls, and they can last for a long time. I shift uncomfortably as Otto talks about handing out leads, distributing them evenly.

“They can get their own if they’re unhappy, but beggars can’t be choosers, can they?”

There’s a silence. He’s agreeing. This doesn’t sound much like a conference call. It sounds like a sales call, what with all the talk of leads.

“Maverick’s stadium,” he says. Then, “Yup, and the old mill.”

I wait. The shower can’t stay on forever.

“Add the Mav’s outbuildings,” he says.

The old mill? Mav’s outbuildings? These are abandoned places. Is it possible he’s rattling off disillusionist prison locations? It’s almost too good to be true.

“No,” he says, “No underground parking structures.”
Grunt
s. “Aboveground. Fine, right. No low ceilings. Immediate full-court press. I mean it.”

Silence.
Creak
. Another
creak
.
Grunt
s. Rocking back in his chair. “I could see him there. Put it down. Sure, the Tanglelands. I don’t care—any urban ruins,” he says. “Anything with some degree of openness, ideally, an open sky above.” Silence. “Canine would be excellent….No, excellent. Yes, speak with Chuck.” He laughs here. “Mongolian Delites? Certainly not. The only way he’s going back there is feet first in a box. I don’t need his sight to know that.”

Shivers crawl up my spine. He’s not rattling off disillusionist prisons; he’s directing the Packard manhunt. Otto said that same thing to me once, that Packard would never set foot back in Mongolian Delites while he’s still alive.
His sight
is Packard’s power of psychological insight.

“No,” he says. “Yes. Six. Thanks.” A
click
.

Tap
-
tap
-
tap
.
Creak
.

He mentioned the Tanglelands too. Is Otto having people search the Tanglelands? With canine units? I have to warn my friends.

My legs are losing their feeling; I could probably move without sound, but I don’t want to chance it.

A familiar ringtone startles me. His phone. “Hello. Yes. Coliform? How much? What’s the standard.” Silence. “Federal side? Right. Okay.” I gather it’s one of the city engineers. A municipal water problem—they’ve shut down one of the city wells because of unacceptable levels of something. Apparently there are ten wells. Otto has a lot of questions. Somebody is going to investigate something. He got two phone calls, and only the city business one rang; the other must have vibrated, and that was anything but city business. He has a secret, second cell phone. Of course.

Otto makes another call about the water. Questions about testing.
Click
. Shuffle. Chair
creak
. Footsteps to the door. Door open and shut. Lock
snap
.

I sneak out, grab my phone, and shut it off, and then I stand there, trying to recall if I heard his footsteps
after
he shut the door. I tiptoe all the way to the door and put my ear to it.

I wait. Listen. Silence.

What if he’s right on the other side, waiting quietly? I hold still, wishing for something definitive: his voice far away, or a
swish
of cloth against wood.

Nothing. I can’t wait forever. I take a breath and turn the handle, easing the door open, tensed for a surprise. I’m relieved to find the hall empty. I shut the door, sneak to the master bedroom, and find it empty, too. I rush into the bathroom, rip off my clothes, get wet in the shower, and immediately get out, winding a towel around myself.

Everybody’s gone when I emerge from the bedroom, dressed, but with conspicuously wet hair. When I call Shelby, I go straight to voice mail again. Maybe she’s in the Tanglelands with Packard and Jordan. That’s good and bad. Good because I can find them. Bad because whoever Otto has searching can find them too.

Chapter Ten

I tell Max I’m going to Shelby’s to handle some last-minute girl-hairdo plans. He’ll follow me, of course, and wait outside. Let him.

I’m wearing a yellow dress, my black cashmere coat, and fancy boots, but in my bag I have rugged, waterproof layers and SOREL boots, plus jeans and a normal sweater and jacket, my flashlight, my blonde Halloween wig, my stun gun, and the pearl-handled lady’s revolver Otto bought me for my birthday.

I park at Shelby’s and climb the stairs to her place. She doesn’t answer my knock, so I use the key from under the mat to let myself in, and quickly walk across to the window to wave to Max—that’s our sign that all is okay. I change into my more rugged clothes, put on my wig under my hat, and skulk out the back way of her apartment building. I don’t see anybody watching. If they are, they won’t recognize me. I creep behind dumpsters and go over another street, and then across the garbage-y wasteland and into the darkness of the Tanglelands.

It’s scarier to go into the Tanglelands this time, because Shelby isn’t nearby, and I haven’t just zinged out all my fear. In fact, my fear has built up quite a bit in the last twelve hours, almost to my usual crazy levels. I trudge on, thoroughly disgusted with myself. Will I ever be free of this madness?

I take off my itchy wig and pull my hat down over my ears. Cars drone dully overhead. The place is lighter at least; shafts of pale gloom stream through the gaps between the roadways overhead, illuminating the steam, or maybe I should say noxious vapors, that rise from the puddles of slime. Voices sound out at one point and I lose time hiding in a gully while a trio of bedraggled men tromp around. I can tell by the way they move that they’re not sleepwalking cannibals. But they’re in the Tanglelands, which means they’re trouble. My knee screams with pain.

As soon as they head off, I continue down into the gully, over the rubble hills, and in through the cave-like passageways, trying not to bend my leg much. I finally reach the giant cavern with its roadways corkscrewing madly overhead. But when I peer across the expanse of slime to where Packard and Jordan were last night, there’s no fire, no sign of life whatsoever. I want to call out, just in case they’re laying low, but that could attract attention of the wrong kind.

So I set off around the slime lake, navigating the tires and blocks of broken road that compose the ridge, amazed that I somehow picked over it in rollerblades last night. I have this idea that if they’re not there, I’ll find some indication of where they went, or maybe I’ll touch the fire scar and decipher how long they’ve been gone. Like I’m this woodsy scout. Soon I’m hoisting myself over a concrete barrier and into the little encampment.

Deserted.

I touch a charred piece of wood. One piece seems warm, but what does that mean? It would help if I knew how long a piece of wood stays warm after a fire is out.

Something green sticks out from under a square of corrugated metal. I go grab it. A big, sturdy, green cotton glove I recognize as Packard’s. Worn on the fingers. Frayed on the cuff. I sit down on a rock by the fire scar and press it to my face, breathing in his cinnamony scent. Sure, maybe he uses me, tricks me when it’s convenient, but I feel this love for him all the same. And he’s out there somewhere with a reward on his head, hunted by elite cops and soldiers. With dogs. I have to find him, but where do I even look?

And Otto and I have those plans to go and get my dad tonight. And the wedding tomorrow! How long can I keep up this pretense? I have to see Packard. I have to decide what to do.

“So that’s where it went.”

I spring up. “Packard.” Reddish curls sneak out from under his black winter cap, and his beat-up canvas coat is full of dust and dirt. And he’s grinning, of course, because he saw me smelling his glove.

I feel like an idiot and I throw it at him. He catches it, grinning still. I can’t help but smile back, because it feels so good to see him, just plain old good. Like a simple little daisy atop a mountain of angst.

“You thought about it,” he says. “You’re with us.”

“You know, a person gets tired of being a predictable puppet.”

His eyes twinkle, green and alive. “I knew you’d come through. That hardly makes you a predictable puppet.” He pulls on his glove and pauses, as if to study it. “Did anything else…” he looks up. “Did anything else come to you?”

“Like what?”

He looks thoughtful, and I can see right when he decides to tell me. “Justine,” he says, super serious—like he’s preparing me for the worst.

“Wait,” I say, losing my nerve. I feel good for once—do I want to ruin it by learning more awful things? “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“You don’t?”

“I think I’ve had enough tumult for now,” I say.

“Okay,” he says softly.

And then Jordan and Shelby are scrambling down from a shade-shrouded nook in the wall beyond where we stand. “Wow,” I say. “It looks like pure wall.”

Jordan has her tracker-finder device.

“You guys have to clear out,” I say. “This place is going to be searched.”

“Already been searched,” Jordan says. “Now pipe down and hold out your arms.”

I comply. “It’ll be searched again,” I say. “I overheard Otto having a conversation about it. The old stadium, the docks, all urban ruins, including this place. With dogs. Canine units, to be specific.”

“Clean.” Jordan sinks to a seat and looks up at Packard. “That could be effective down here. Very effective. If they give the dogs something of ours.”

“Is too dangerous at night anyways,” Shelby says. “With sleepwalkers.”

“
You
sleep here too?”

“If I am here too late to cross back.”

“Any time frame on that search?” Jordan asks.

“The term ‘immediate full-court press’ was used,” I say. “Otto has dangerous mercenaries working for him. We’re talking about a militia working on an ASAP basis. That’s your time frame.”

“How did you overhear this?” Packard asks. “Justine, you can’t be taking chances.”

“I’m not taking chances; I’m taking care of business. I was revised. A day was stolen from me and my head was filled with lies. I’m not exactly in the mood to go out and get that French manicure, you know?”

Shelby says, “But you are a bride tomorrow.”

Packard shoots me a look.

“So it seems,” I say.

“Let’s concentrate on getting out,” Jordan says. She heads to a corner and moves some cinder blocks.

“We’ll go to my place,” Shelby says. “Until we can think.”

“Not safe,” Packard says.

“It’s not like we can check into a motel,” Jordan says, pulling bags out of a hole in the wall. “And we’re not leaving the city. Leaving our people behind.”

“There’s one place he won’t look,” I say. “Otto said so. One place”—I use quote fingers here—“
he’d
only go into feet first.”

Shelby widens her eyes. “Yes of course! Are you not hungry for kebabs?”

Packard isn’t amused. “No kebabs. We’re splitting up. It’s too dangerous to be with me.”

“You don’t have to split up if you go to Mongolian Delites,” I say. “It’s the perfect place. You can go there and be invisible.”

Packard stares hard into the distance. “We’re splitting up. It’s me they’re hunting.”

“Packard, it’s not like it was. The force fields are gone. It can’t trap you. It’s nothing but a
restaurant
.”

“Nothing but a restaurant?” His gaze is diamond-like. “I spent eight long years there. Eight dark years. You don’t know what one minute in that place will do to me. It was more than my prison. It was…” he looks around, as if he can’t locate the fitting term. “I’m not made of steel and circuit boards, Justine. To say it’s nothing but a restaurant, that’s like saying, ‘this operation is nothing but a lobotomy,’ or that death is nothing but the end of life. There are some places a man won’t go. Otto is right. I can’t go back there. God forbid even feet first…”

“
Pashu!
” Shelby plows into us with violent force as something crashes loudly into the wall behind us.

“Whoa!” I fall on my ass and Packard stumbles, then the three of us crouch behind the cement girder. Jordan shimmies over and crowds in next to us.

Pashu.
‘Heads up’ in Shelby’s native tongue?

“It looked reddish. Like a brick,” Packard says.

Another projectile smashes onto a concrete support behind us.
Smashes
, as in breaks apart. “If it’s a brick,” I say, “It’s being hurled with a hell of a lot of force.”

“Telekinetic attack. We are doomed now,” Shelby says.

“Is there a way out?” I ask. “That hole up there you guys came out of—where does it lead?”

“Nowhere. There’s no back door,” Packard says. “The good thing about this place is that it’s a hill against a wall. And it’s surrounded by slime. Easily defended—you have to pick around that ridge to get here, and that’s more trouble than it’s worth for most predators. The bad thing is that it’s a hill against a wall. And our weapons are up there.” He looks up at the hole.

“You must not,” Shelby says.

Packard springs up and leaps to the hole.

I gasp.

Shelby grumbles.

Packard leaps back down with a duffel bag and dives onto the ground as a brick curves in, but it looks like it catches him in the arm. He scootches in and throws down the bag.

“You hit?”

He touches his bicep. “Superficial.”

Jordan and Shelby pull some of those Scorpion guns out of the bag.

I take out my small revolver, and click off the safety, eyeing the blood spreading across Packard’s shoulder.

“We’ll handle it later,” he says to me.

“Or when you pass out from blood loss,” I say, “whichever comes first.”

Shelby peeks up over our barrier, then ducks back as another brick whizzes overhead. We scramble apart as it curls back around and smashes into our barrier, right about where my head was. “He is in crevice by red barrels,” Shelby whispers. “Peeped his head out.” She turns to me, gestures, “Perhaps, five or seven lengths of car. Down there.”