The Serophim Breach (The Serophim Breach Series) (29 page)

After a few moments, Paul whispered, “What the hell?”

Kai barely heard him. He was too busy weighing their options. The last time they had stopped to help someone, they had been robbed and imprisoned. He forced himself to accept that this was no longer the world he was accustomed to functioning in—the rules had changed. The guilt roiled in his throat for a few seconds longer, until he turned to look at his brother. Paul’s chin was swollen terribly, a dark, violent bruise swelling on his jawline, where a gash was still seeping blood. His left eye was swelling too; that must have been where he had fallen to the floor. And with that, a hard finality of choice stamped down on Kai’s guilt, and he knew he wouldn’t struggle with it again.

“Paul,” he said, and his brother looked back at him. “We can’t. If she’s been attacked . . . we just can’t take the risk anymore. We have
got
to get to Sarah.”

He watched Paul as several emotions changed his face, until the same hardness he felt entered his brother’s eyes. A slight nod indicated a decision had been made.

They regrouped in the office to clean and cover Paul’s injury, using the Band-Aids to hold a piece of gauze to the angry wound. After explaining the situation to Jones, who still looked disoriented and in need of sleep, they decided they would have to go out the back door and work their way around the building.

“We stay close together. Don’t take off if you see someone; don’t shout or flag them down.” Kai stood before the two younger men, doing his best to look confident. “As far as I can remember, the police station is only a few blocks away from here. We should have no problem. Just stay quiet, and stay together.”

Finally, he instructed them to find something to use as a makeshift weapon. Paul picked up the tire iron again, and Kai found that Ben had left his bat leaning against the wall near the office door. Jones, looking uncomfortable, unscrewed the handle from a mop and shoved a box cutter into his pocket. Paul gave him a concerned glance, but he shrugged it off.

It took a few attempts to find the right key to open the back door, the tension building in the small office as they waited. Jones shifted his weight from foot to foot every few seconds, swallowing hard.

“You okay?” Paul whispered to his friend.

As he worked at the lock, Kai heard Jones answer with a halfhearted “Yup.”

Eventually, the lock slid open with a thud, and Kai glanced back at the others. They waited with anxious faces, and he gave them a terse nod before pushing the door open slowly.

The wind whipped into the room with a sudden ferocity that surprised him, and brought with it scraps of trash and leaves that scraped along the floor in gusts. After a long look into the darkness, he set his weight on his heels and shoved against the door more confidently, jerking his head so that the others would step out. Paul went first, his bushy hair flattened quickly by a wet gust of rain that splattered down on the grimy alley; Jones followed, his mopstick hefted in front of him, his eyes wide until he stepped out into the open. He spluttered briefly as the wind blasted him, knocking him off-balance. Finally, Kai stepped out and eased the door shut as best he could without an exterior handle and against the ferocious wind.

They stood at very nearly the center of the alley, equidistant from either corner of the building. To their right, a few dumpsters rattled in the wind; to their left, their line of sight was clear. He nodded at the others and headed left, the wind an inconstant, unpredictable pressure on his hips and shoulders, pushing him forward. Paul and Jones fell in behind without forming a true line; instead, they walked shoulder to shoulder.

It would have been difficult to hear any normal conversation with the wind and rain; if they needed to speak, they would have to shout, and Kai wanted to avoid that necessity. So as they neared the corner, he motioned for them to stop.

“What’s wrong?” Jones called out, just loud enough for Kai to hear.

He spun on his heel to hush Jones, and gasped instead. A figure moved behind them in the dark, loping down the alley in their tracks, no more than thirty feet away. Kai could do nothing to mask the look that crossed his face.

“What?!” Jones cried, spinning to look over his shoulder. Immediately he saw the figure closing in behind them, and screamed.

Paul grabbed for him as he bolted forward, but Jones jerked away from his grasp and sprinted past Kai, his mouth a terrified “O,” his eyes filled with panic.

“No, Jones, stay here!” Kai bellowed, but before the words left his mouth, another person shot into view from the opposite direction and tackled Jones to the ground. They slid and tumbled in the wet grime, Jones screaming as he scrambled for the stick that had been knocked from his grasp. His attacker moved with the same brutality that Brent had shown, clutching at Jones’s face as the younger man bucked and thrashed, trying desperately to get to his weapon.

Kai leaped forward into the open, crossing the distance to his friend and raising his bat overhead with a scream of rage. He brought the weapon crashing down with vicious finality into the attacker’s skull, which caved instantly. The body crumpled immediately, its forehead dropping heavily onto Jones’s cheekbone.

“Help me!” Jones was screaming, barely coherent, still scraping his fingers along the asphalt, trying to reach his weapon. Kai was up and ready for the one who had been following them, his bat raised again, but the other figure was gone. Paul was at his side, his body tensed in preparation for the same attack, the same look of confusion on his face.

“Where’s the other one?” he called out over the wind.

“He was behind us,” Kai shouted back. “But I don’t see him.”

Beneath them, Jones’s screams had disintegrated into a series of panicked cries, and he was struggling to free himself from under his now-still attacker. Kai flung the body off his friend and realized with a sickened grimace that the attacker had been the woman with the ruined face. A new rivulet of blood seeped out from the place where her forehead had struck Jones’s cheekbone, the dark blood diluted into pink water by a now steady rain.

Jones shoved himself up to a sitting position and reached a hand up toward his swelling right cheekbone. A few of the capillaries in his right eye had burst, and his left cheek, chin, and forehead were slathered with filth and gravel from the street. He pressed his fingers gingerly against his right cheek, and Kai saw the blood well from a small cut where the attacker’s face had dropped. The younger man hissed in pain, then pushed on his cheek again, forcing more blood from the wound. He pulled his fingers away and studied the blood there, his eyes wide.

“We have to move, Jones,” Kai urged.

The younger man looked up to meet Kai’s eyes, then Paul’s, and back, opening and closing his mouth a few times. Then he turned his eyes to the street, which was becoming ever more obscured by the downpour. Finally, he set his mouth in a grim line and nodded.

~

The cold ache of early morning caught in the back of Gary’s throat as he stood on a street corner, trying to adjust to the scenery. Walking out of the warehouse into the dim gray light of predawn had made him almost dizzy with disorientation—for some reason he had been certain it was still the deepest part of the night—and though he was doing his best to control his nerves, the edge of adrenaline was making it difficult to concentrate. Josie had given him a manila folder with some discs and a few printouts to take with him, wherever he was going. Not one of them had given him a clue of where to start; Hammond had simply tossed him a key and told him he’d find a white Mustang two blocks east of the warehouse. As he was following Grant to the door, Josie had stopped him.

“Be careful, okay?” she had said quietly.

He had nodded curtly, sulking.

“Just drop the info off and tell them it’s an anonymous tip,” she had reiterated. “There’s enough information in there to get them started. You don’t need to get yourself into this any deeper than you already are.”

Over her shoulder, Hammond had watched their exchange with guarded eyes.

“He doesn’t trust me,” Gary had muttered.

She shrugged without turning to look. “Don’t worry about him,” she replied. The concern on her face had been so clear and honest that he hadn’t had the heart to leave without returning her conspiratorial smile.

He peered up at the sky. A milky fog wafted above the buildings, tendrils brushing the rooftops lazily, and although the sun was clearly beginning to rise, it was almost impossible to tell where.

After a few minutes of squinting toward the visible horizon, he finally decided that east lay toward a row of storage facilities, loading docks, and boarded-up auto repair shops. At least, the fog seemed to be lighter in that direction. The stillness of the morning air killed the sound of his footsteps as they fell on the concrete. His legs and ribs protested as he moved, the stiffness of the accident difficult to ignore.

A shiver ran up his spine as he glanced around the empty street. The oppressive atmosphere gave him the unmistakable feeling that he was being watched, in spite of the fact that the buildings and sidewalks in every direction appeared to be completely abandoned. He tried to remember what day of the week it might be, but quickly gave up. He was still struggling against an unlikely mix of overstimulation and overexhaustion.

It was with no small measure of relief that he found the white Mustang. The taillights blinked in affirmation when he pressed the unlock button, and he let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. It was an older model than he’d been expecting, but he was grateful nevertheless for the feeling of protection and capability that warmed him once he settled into the seat.

And then he remembered he had no idea where he was going, and worse, he had no idea where he was. His grand scheme centered on his goal of handing off the story to a news station, but he was entirely unsure of where to begin.

“Okay, get a grip, Gary,” he muttered to himself. Pulling his phone from his pocket, he dialed 411 and asked for the address for the
Los Angeles Times
. He found a GPS device sitting on the dashboard, and once he typed in the address, a female voice enthusiastically reported that he had a forty-five-minute drive ahead of him.

Less than ten minutes later, he was merging onto a bustling freeway, warily keeping to the slow lane as the experienced city drivers blew past him in their sleek, silver cars. He had tuned the radio to the first AM news station that came in, but was disappointed when the commercial break ended, and a shock jock reintroduced himself and a segment called “You Did What?”

A few twists of the knob later, he landed on what sounded like a legitimate news station. The somber-voiced anchor droned about traffic on the 405, a shrill female voice cutting in occasionally to joke inanely about the latest celebrity gossip, all interspersed with diluted political commentary. He saw the drivers around him chattering on their Bluetooth headsets, looking generally irritated and rushed, or glowering behind their too-large sunglasses. He was struck by the banality of the world around him and wondered if Hammond had been right after all. Shoving his doubts aside, he veered off the 405 onto the 110, following the cheerful directions from the GPS.

By the time he pulled into the parking lot at the
Los Angeles Times
building, the skies had begun to clear, and the streets were bustling with cars and pedestrians. He glanced at himself in the visor mirror and put on his best professional demeanor. It was difficult to avoid feeling ridiculous in Reggie’s casual graphic T-shirt and jeans, with a day’s worth of stubble shadowing his bruised face and the feverish look of conviction in his eyes. He took a deep breath to calm himself and headed for the building.

Inside, he wandered up to the front desk and asked the receptionist whom he could leave some information with. She looked him over surreptitiously as she picked up the phone on her desk and pressed a few buttons, then quietly spoke a few words into the receiver.

“If you’ll have a seat, someone will be with you shortly,” she said too warmly, setting the phone back in its cradle.

He waited for ten minutes, fussing with the edges of the manila folder, before returning to the receptionist and reiterating his question. She replied in a forced friendly voice that someone would be right out to help him and spun decisively in her seat to organize some papers. So he returned to his seat and watched the muted television on the wall across from him; a buxom woman gestured in front of a map, where grinning, animated suns pulsed over city names for a few moments until a NEWS FLASH graphic rolled across the ticker, followed by the words “AUTHORITIES SCRAMBLE TO EXPLAIN AND ADDRESS MASSIVE POWER OUTAGE ON HAWAIIAN ISLAND OF OAHU . . . NEWS OUTLETS ON THE ISLAND REPORTING POCKETS OF VIOLENCE JUST PRIOR TO BLACKOUT . . . STAY WITH CNN FOR CONTINUING COVERAGE . . .”

“Excuse me, sir.” A cool voice surprised him. He looked up and found a severe-looking blonde standing over him. She thrust a hand out toward him and raised an eyebrow.

“I’m Carly Romenaro,” she said confidently. “Larah tells me you have some information you’d like to drop off.”

His eyes strayed back to the television screen, the picture now showing a reporter standing on a neighborhood street, the caption reading “MORTGAGE INTEREST RATE DEDUCTION CAP.” It took him a moment to recognize the voice that answered her as his own.

“Actually, I’d like to speak with you if I could. I have some information about the blackout on Oahu.”

Her carefully sculpted eyebrows lifted again.

“Really?” she said, her voice skeptical. She pursed her lips as he raised the manila packet off his lap.

“I’d rather talk in your office, if that would be all right,” he responded. It was difficult not to feel foolish, like a bad actor thrust into the midst of a political thriller.

Carly looked him over carefully, her eyes pausing briefly on the bandage that covered a few stitches on his forearm, and then searching his bruised and scraped-up face. She nodded her head forward to indicate his appearance.