Nocturnal (66 page)

Bryan reached out and ran his fingertips along the bow. He had to admit that it was a beautiful, elegant weapon. “Maybe I’ll work my way up to that. Got anything else that would give me a little range?”

Adam pointed to a drawer. “Stun grenades?”

“In a hospital?” Bryan said. “I don’t think so.”

Adam nodded. He walked to another drawer and pulled a contraption of straps, buckles, and a lethal-looking blade packed in on top of a compressed metal coil. “Spring-loaded knife,” he said as he handed it over. “Six-inch titanium blade that will arrive at its destination with an agenda and a bad attitude. And before you try to test the edge, genius, the answer is
yeah
, it’s poisoned.”

Bryan strapped it underneath his left forearm. Adam showed him the mechanism — a rapid wrist-flick up would fire the heavy blade.

Alder tapped his cane twice on the floor. “And now for the
pièce de résistance
.” He walked to a cabinet. With great dramatic flair, he opened the cabinet and pulled out a green cloak. He held it forward, a proud smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

“Inspector Bryan Clauser, this cloak is the mark of the Saviors. We are asking you to embrace this role, to become one of us.”

Bryan stared at the cloak. “I’m going into a hospital,” he said. “I don’t think Sherwood Forest is on the way.”

Adam started laughing again. He covered his face with his hands, as if to say
oh man, you stepped in it this time
.

Alder’s face screwed up into a mask of contempt. “A half hour ago, Inspector, I could have shot you as a monster. Now you are a Savior, and you won’t wear the cloak? Just who in the
hell
do you think you are?”

Bryan tried not to laugh, but he made the mistake of looking at Adam who still had his face in his hands and was shaking his head. Despite the mutant chromosome, the killing dreams, a ruined career and a trail of corpses, Bryan couldn’t suppress a smirk as the situation’s absurdity caught up with him — this old man not only wanted to dress Bryan up like a superhero, but he couldn’t fathom that Bryan wasn’t oh-so-excited about the idea.

Alder held the cloak up again, as if Bryan hadn’t really seen it the first time. “But it’s bulletproof.”

Bryan tried to squeeze back the laughter, but he couldn’t. “Uh, can’t I heal real fast?”

“Of course,” Alder said. “But healing won’t put your liver back in your body if they shoot it out of you.”

Bryan stopped laughing. “The monsters use guns?”

“Of
course
they use guns,” Alder said. “Guns work. They’re monsters, not idiots.”

So they could claw him, bite him,
and
they could put a couple of rounds in him as well? As Pookie would say,
awesome
. Still, though, the cloak was too damn conspicuous.

“As far as I know, Chief Zou is going to throw me in jail the second she sees me,” Bryan said. “So I’ll stick to my usual clothes.”

Adam took the cloak from his mystified grandfather and hung it back up in the cabinet. “If you change your mind, cop, I’ve got some other stuff you could try.” He shut the door.

Alder huffed. “Adam, he is not going to wear that ridiculous outfit you came up with. We have
tradition
. The disrespect of today’s youth, I swear.” He turned back to Bryan. “And don’t you worry about Amy Zou. I’ll handle her. We’d best get to the hospital.”

The old man was right. If Bryan wanted to help Erickson, he couldn’t do it from the Jessups’ basement. Like it or not, Jebediah Erickson was Bryan’s brother. He was
family
, something that Bryan wanted desperately.

“Okay,” Bryan said. “Let’s do it. Am I driving, or do you guys have a car?”

Adam started laughing again.

D
uring Rex’s tour, he’d seen that the people of Home made do with very little. Some had electricity, but most did not. Dampness hung in the air. Gleaming moisture covered many walls. In some places tiny streams trickled along eroded rivulets in tunnel floors. For most, Home was whatever they carved out of centuries-old landfill.

That made Firstborn’s quarters in the
Alamandralina
look like a palace.

Rex knew the room wasn’t part of the original ship, because the floor was level. The wood here was beautiful — deep browns sanded smooth, any holes long-since filled in, glossy lacquer reflecting light from both the electric chandelier hanging above and the dancing flames of dozens of candles in each corner. Thick rugs lined the floors. Decorations hung on the walls, mostly designs carved into human bones and skulls. Where there weren’t bones, Rex saw maps: tourist maps, Muni maps, hand-drawn sketches, a map of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, another of Alcatraz Island — and every map showed hand-drawn tunnel systems.

The maps illustrated something Sly had said: there were many places to hide.

Rex sat at the head of a long, black table. Behind him and to the left stood Fort, Sir Voh curled up on his thick neck. Behind and to the right stood Pierre, who held a shotgun with some kind of a drum clip. It was a big gun, but in his hands it looked like a toy.

Sly sat at the right side of the table, Hillary at the left.

Firstborn sat on the other end — no weapons for him. Was he still a threat? Sly thought so. Rex trusted Sly, but he had to figure this out for himself.

The black-furred man was the oldest of them all except for Mommy. It wasn’t just his age or the gray muzzle — he had this air about him, a sense of importance. He really was like a knight, plucked right out of a movie and brought into the modern world.

“I have stuff I want to know,” Rex said. “First of all, what’s happening to me? I’m getting stronger, I can feel it. And I can heal, like,
really
quick. I wasn’t like that before. How come I am now?”

Hillary answered. “If you had grown up here, you would have been strong and fast like the other children. It’s because of smells. Down here,
smells are everywhere. Up there, no smells, so you were like
them
. But I knew where you were, my king. I waited until the right age to send Sly up to put smells by your house.”

“Smells,” Rex said, the word drawing forth the wispy memory of a strange scent. “Wait a minute. Before I got real sick, I smelled pee around my house. Are you saying I changed because someone
peed
on my house?”

Sly stood and bowed dramatically. “I had the honor, my king. I’m so proud to know my scent brought you to us.”

“But that’s gross,” Rex said. “Totally gross.”

Hillary laughed. “Smells are just another way of talking. Soldiers mark their kills, a way of telling everyone
I am the one that did this
.”

That made Rex think of Marco peeing on the dead cop. Poor Marco.

Firstborn stared at Sly, slowly shook his head. “I should have known it was you, Sly.” He looked at Hillary. “You told Sly to do this?”

She nodded. Hillary glared at Firstborn with defiance and anger, but also a bit of fear.

Firstborn cracked his knuckles. His every motion drew tense looks from Pierre, Sir Voh and Sly.

“You said he wasn’t the first, Hillary,” Firstborn said. “Have you really been doing this for eighty years?”

Her smile widened. “You think you know everything, but you know
nothing
. Eleven kings I smuggled out, right under your nose. Some I lost track of. Maybe they were taken away by the people who took them in as their own. Some I could not find until it was too late, until they had passed the time that matters for becoming a true king.”

Firstborn leaned toward her. Rex heard the shotgun rattle lightly as Pierre adjusted his grip on the weapon.

“But
how
?” Firstborn said. “How could you get them out? How could I have never learned of this?”

“I have secrets,” Hillary said. “Secrets I will keep. We can’t have new queens without new kings. The people know this, Firstborn, and they hate you for trying to stop it.”

His fist banged against the black table. “With your own eyes, you saw the death that a king brings. We don’t need new queens. We are fine here.”

“Fine?” Hillary scowled. She spread her arms out, the gesture clearly indicating the ship and the caverns beyond. “There is more to life than
this
. Even if we get a new queen, she will never change if she can smell Mommy’s scent. If our kind is to spread, we must send kings and queens to new cities.
That
is why I took Rex away.
That
is why I had soldiers watch
him grow.” She looked at Rex again. Her warm smile returned. “If we had waited too long, you would not have the power to call others to you, to
bind
them to you.”

The power to call others — Rex had done that before his fight with Alex Panos. “My dreams. Were my dreams part of calling to others?”

Hillary nodded. “Yes. A king must get the smells while he is young. By fourteen or fifteen years old, if you have not changed, then the ability to call is gone forever.”

Fourteen or fifteen was too late. Maybe it had something to do with puberty. Was there science behind it, or was this some kind of magic?

“But
how
does it work?” he said. “What changes me? And how do you know what to do to make someone like me change?”

Hillary clasped her hands in front of her. “It happens because it is God’s will. It has always been this way. I know how to make someone change because Mommy told me how when I was little. It was before, when her words still made sense.”

God did it? Rex had seen many wonderful things, but he wasn’t sure if
God’s will
explained all of it. Could it be that his people really didn’t know
why
they were so strong, or
how
they changed? He would have to worry about that later — what mattered now was finding out if Firstborn could be trusted.

“Firstborn,” Rex said, “what did you mean when you said
the death a king brings
?”

Sly leaned back and crossed his big arms, as if he’d heard this story so many times it bored him. Hillary grew quiet.

Firstborn closed his eyes. “King Geoffrey was born after we arrived in America. San Francisco was much smaller then. It was lawless. Every day, ships brought more people. I was young then — I felt Geoffrey’s dreams in my sleep, felt his visions when I was awake.”

His shoulders slumped. He looked so sad.

“What about
my
dreams?” Rex said. “Did you get visions from me?”

Firstborn shook his head slowly. “I did not. Perhaps I am too old. Perhaps it is because I did not go up to the surface enough. But I know the power of a king’s mind touching mine. I felt it from Geoffrey. We would hunt together. I was by his side, always, but death came when Geoffrey grew so proud he abandoned our rules.”

Sir Voh scrambled down Fort’s chest and jumped onto the table next to Rex.

“The
rules
,” he said. “The rules make us cowards.”

Rex looked from the shriveled man with the big head back to Firstborn. “What are the rules?”

Firstborn opened his eyes. He stared at Rex with a pleading expression that said
listen and truly understand
.

He held up one black-furred finger. “
Never
hunt those who will be missed — take only vagrants, immigrants, people with no home and no one to report them missing.” He held up a second finger. “
Never
allow a soldier to be seen. Because of cameras and cell phones, this is a far greater challenge now than when I was young.” He held up a third finger. “Finally,
never
let the humans know we exist. We are stronger and faster, we prey on them, but they are so many. Mommy told us stories from the Old Country, handed down for generations, stories of times when the people forgot the rules, and of how the prey would rise up and overwhelm us with numbers. We survive, my king, only because they don’t know we exist.”

Firstborn looked off to a corner of the room. He stared at a tall candle burning there.

“Geoffrey was arrogant,” he said. “He ignored the rules. He let the people hunt openly. Instead of culling the herd for the weak and the unwanted, we took whoever we liked. Some of us were seen. The
police
”
—
he spat the word like it was poison — “they found us. Them and the Saviors. They attacked us,
butchered
us. They captured Geoffrey and dozens more — soldiers,
ouvriers
 … even our children. I saw them tied to poles, some with ropes, others with shackles and chains. I saw the townsfolk gathering wood, saw them light the flames. Sometimes when I sleep, I still hear the screams of our people and it makes me want to claw out my own ears.”

Rex thought of all the people he’d met down here. He thought of Sly, Pierre and Hillary, the children, the
babies
, all tied to poles and set on fire. Only animals would do such a thing.

That was what humans were … 
animals
.

“Why didn’t you do something?” Rex said. “Why didn’t you save them?”

Firstborn hung his head.

Hillary stood. She walked to Firstborn and hugged him. He did not look up.

“He saved Mommy,” she said. “And he saved me. I was just a little girl. Firstborn was so
brave
. He killed so many to get us away. He saved the queens so our kind would live on.”

Firstborn nodded. A black-furred hand covered his black-furred face.
“Mommy was smaller then, but it was still difficult,” he said. “We had to start over.” He looked up. Rex saw the pain in his eyes, the fear that all his work would be for nothing and the people would die out.

“The city was changing,” Firstborn said. “The ships that brought us and thousands of others, they had been buried in landfill as the city expanded the shoreline. I dug down to one of those ships and made a burrow in the captain’s cabin. I brought Mommy down there and sealed her in.”

Rex leaned back. “Wait a minute. The ship she’s in now, that’s the same one?”

Firstborn nodded. “She hasn’t moved from that room in a hundred and fifty years. I brought her new grooms. She gave birth to
ouvriers
, to ringers and soldiers. Hillary raised the
ouvriers
until they were old enough to work, while I taught the soldiers how to hunt, taught the ringers how to be our eyes on the surface. We survived. We rebuilt.”