Darkening Dawn (The Lockman Chronicles Book 5) (16 page)

“Chill out, okay? I’m not going to hurt you…unless I have to.”

His breathing spaced out some, but each one pulled air as hard as before.

“Nod if you understand me?”

His head sort of twitched.

Good enough.

“How many?”

“S-s-six.”

“Where?”

He licked his lips. “One at the gate. Three at the south building.”

The south building must have been on the other side of the landfill, out of sight behind the mountains of trash.

“That’s four. Where are the other two?”

Something hard pressed against the back of Jessie’s neck.

“Right here, bitch.”

Jessie cringed. She felt herself deflate. In a minute she would end up a floppy shell on the floor. What she wouldn’t have given for a little bit of her old self, the self that didn’t need to worry about bullets hurting her unless they were made of silver.

“Drop the gun.” The man behind her had a soft, effeminate voice that didn’t at all match his rough tone.

“Is number two with you as well?”

“Right here.” A woman. Only she sounded more manly than the dude actually holding the gun.

“Do you guys have any idea who I am?”

“I don’t care if you’re Scarlett Johansson. Drop the fucking gun.”

Seriously? Scarlett Johansson? Sure, Jessie had most of her hair covered by the knit cap, but strands of obvious black hung out in spots. ScarJo was a blond.

“You really don’t know?” she asked.

“I’ll give you three more seconds.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She didn’t drop the gun. Dad had taught her enough to know that was a bad idea, especially with the safety off. She set it gently on Nervous Nellie’s desk.

His gaze couldn’t get enough of the thing. It never left, as if he was staring at the Maltese Falcon, only with fear instead of greed.

“Hilton, you want to pick that up instead of gaping at it?” This was from the growly woman. Most of the grit in her voice probably came from too many packs of Lucky Strikes.

Hilton, hands still up, shook his head. “I don’t do guns.”

“Jesus, you pansy.” The woman came around to grab the gun, allowing Jessie a glimpse of her before she retreated back behind her. She wore the same coveralls as Hilton and had her hair pulled back in a tight bun. But with her soft face and blond hair, she looked way more like ScarJo than Jessie did.

“So now what?” Jessie asked. “You call up the Agency goons to take me back in?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. But I am gonna call the cops.”

Jessie scrunched up her nose. Interesting. “You don’t know anything about the Agency?”

“You wanted by the FBI or something?” ScarJo in coveralls asked. Just hearing her gravel voice totally messed with Jessie. It did not match the woman’s face
at all
.

Jessie chuckled. “Yeah, FBI. Sure.”

“Daisy,” the man with feminine lilt—and the gun—said. “Get on the horn.”

“Jesus, who calls the phone a horn anymore? You pop out of a nineteen-fifties army picture? You bring the Duke with you?”

The barrel of the gun poked hard into her neck.

“For a kid caught trespassing with a gun almost as big as she is, you sure have a loose mouth.”

She had to get out of this. Now. But she didn’t see a lot of options. “Look, I haven’t hurt anything. I was just looking for a pair of cheap jeans.”

“Yeah,” gritty ScarJo said. “You look, and smell, like you been crawling around in the fill. You have any idea what’s in that stuff?”

Jessie shrugged. “Not any jeans that fit me.”

“Daisy, call the cops like I told you.”

She made a disgusted grunt, but Jessie heard her feet swishing on the carpet as she walked away.

A clock on the wall—a generic, industrial kind you’d find in every classroom in high schools across the country—ticked away seconds in the silence. Jessie counted eleven before Hilton grew enough balls to open his mouth.

“If you was just trash diving, why do you have a gun?”

Jessie shrugged, keeping it casual even with a gun barrel against the nape of her neck. “I found it. Guess someone threw it away.”

Another jab from the gun. “Bullshit.”

“Believe what you want.”

She observed what she could without moving her head. There was Hilton’s desk cluttered with office supplies, as if Staples had pooped on his ink blotter. Three staplers, a plastic bulk container of paperclips, a stack of five reams of copy paper, legal pads fanned out like a poker hand, pens scattered like kindling, and more pens still sealed in boxes.

Not anything of use, unless she wanted to write up a memo asking the gunman to pretty please let her go. The desk had every office supply imaginable, but nothing like a letter opener.

And what would you do with that? If you went to grab for it, your brains would join the scattered supplies on the desk.

But that was just it. Would this guy, a seemingly average worker bee at a landfill, really shoot her? If these people really weren’t with the Agency—not knowingly anyway—did they really have the stones to put someone down?

Then there was the opposite argument. If they didn’t know who she was, they would have no reason to worry about keeping her alive.

“You know,” she said aloud, “my life sucks sometimes.”

“I feel sorry for you.”

She didn’t have super strength. No fangs. No bullet immunity or mojo to conjure up a light show. But she still knew the moves her dad had taught her.

Time to gamble and hope the gunman didn’t have the blood of a killer.

First, an easy donkey kick, perfect for an assailant coming in from behind.

Jessie’s heel hit the jackpot—nothing but nuts.

The gunman chuffed. The gun came away from Jessie.

She spun around to find him doubled over. She didn’t stop there, though. She threw a roundhouse kick at his gun hand, knocking the weapon halfway across the room.

The gunman howled and drew his kicked hand against his belly. He cradled it with his opposite hand.

But while he stayed on his feet, he stayed a threat.

Jessie snapped her right foot forward as if going for a field goal. She caught him square in the middle of his face. His nose crunched against her boot-tip.

He flailed his arms while staggering backward.

For a second it looked like he might keep his feet. Then he dropped to the floor and curled into a ball, hands over his face, blood dribbling between his fingers.

“Jesus Christ.”

Jessie whirled to face Hilton. He popped to his feet and raised his hands over his head like she still had her gun on him. The red circles on his cheeks bloomed, nearly covering his whole face. “I got no issues with you.”

Maybe not, but the growling ScarJo lookalike did.

Jessie sensed the movement behind her and dropped to a squat.

The sound of the shot buzzed against the drywall. The legal pads on Hilton’s desk exploded. Shreds of yellow paper fluttered upward in a plume like chicken feathers.

Hilton cried out and scampered backward until he hit the wall. The impact shook the clock loose. It skated down the wall and hit Hilton on the back of the head. He pitched forward, covering his head with his hands as if the whole building was about to crumble down on top of him.

Jessie twisted around, still crouching, and charged at Daisy like a linebacker. She kept low, under Daisy’s aim.

Daisy squeezed off another shot.

Jessie’s ears rang, but the gunfire didn’t startle her like it might anyone who hadn’t spent her formative years in and out of countless gun battles. She drove forward and struck Daisy in the waist with her shoulder.

If it had been one of the men, Jessie probably wouldn’t have moved them far. Daisy was light, built a lot like Jessie herself. Jessie knocked the bitch right on her ass and landed on top of her, pinning her down.

The gun—
my gun, damn it
—flew from Daisy’s hands when she hit the floor. And the gun demonstrated exactly why Dad insisted guns never be dropped.

When it landed it discharged.

The next thing Jessie noticed was a chunk of Daisy’s face missing, eyeball hanging loose from a broken socket. A spray of blood dotted Jessie’s face. She felt every warm pinprick on her skin.

“Oh, Christ, no.”

Jessie scampered off of Daisy. Her insides felt twisted, as if every artery was tied around her organs and squeezing so that nothing worked.

The gasp behind her made her spin around.

Hilton stood a few feet away, one hand on the back of his head, the other outstretched as if reaching for the dead woman on the floor.

Tears pooled in Jessie’s eyes. “I…I didn’t mean…”

Hilton’s gaze snapped to Jessie’s gun on the floor. He no longer looked afraid of it.

“Don’t,” Jessie said.

He made the move anyway.

Jessie swept her leg against Hilton’s and took him down.

He flopped to the floor face-first. His head bounced on the thin, why bother carpet with a soft
tock
. His eyes rolled back. He went limp.

This was not how this was supposed to go down. These people had no idea who they were working for. They weren’t soldiers or military bureaucrats. Just folks making a living by shoveling the Agency’s shit.

The gunfire could have drawn attention.

When she glanced out the window, sure enough, the guard from the tollbooth was huffing it toward the building.

As much as she hated what happened here, it had provided her with a distraction.

She retrieved her weapon and hurried down the hallway to the back room, praying she would find another exit there.

The room at the hall’s end was split in two by more chain-link fence. Whoever sold the stuff had made a killing off this place. The fencing cordoned off a storage area full of boxes and a shelf of cleaning supplies, coffee cans, and the sorts of things that would supply the break room half where Jessie stood—Styrofoam cups, a box of salt, paper plates, and napkins.

Such ordinary stuff.

Stuff that Daisy wouldn’t need anymore.

Underneath an EXIT sign with every light out except the X, Jessie found a metal door with a bar handle. She tucked her gun in her waistband and shoved through the door into the stifling humidity. The smell of garbage hit her hard. She had lost her desensitization to it while inside the building.

She gagged as she ran around the building, but didn’t puke, which was a bonus. Sprinting toward freedom while ralphing would have sucked.

By the time Jessie had rounded the building, the guy from the tollbooth had already entered through the front.

She kept running. Straight out through the gate.

Straight into the middle of nowhere, shaggy brown grassland stretching in every direction, encircled by thick woods about thirty acres out. A rough dirt ribbon ran from the landfill entrance off to the tree line, probably connecting to a county road beyond the woods. But who knew how far?

Besides, if she stuck to the road, it would take minutes before she was spotted and picked up for killing Daisy.

You didn’t kill her.

It was my gun.

It was an accident.

Jessie squeezed her eyes shut and drove away her internal argument. No time for guilt.

She turned north. The sun roasted her left shoulder and neck. An hour or two past noon. Another eight hours of sunlight, max.

Jessie hiked up her backpack and jogged north, keeping the sun to her left as a guide.

Get ready for a nature walk, folks.

Chapter Twenty-Six

T
HEY SET OFF FROM THE
dilapidated house in a caravan made up of two vans, a pickup truck, and an old Mercedes spewing diesel fumes out its tailpipe.

Elka sat in the third row seat of the van that brought up the tail of the caravan. The Mercedes drove in front of them and the stench seeped into the van, turning Elka’s stomach. These mortals had no respect for their world.

One of these days, the displaced supernaturals on this plane would inherit the mortal world to save it from self-destruction. Elka couldn’t imagine them allowing themselves to follow the mortals into extinction.

In the bench seat in front of Elka sat a girl barely into her teens. She wore far too much makeup and dressed like Madonna from the 80s, hair teased and stiff with hairspray, sweater with the neck cut large enough to hang off one shoulder. She even wore lace fingerless gloves and gold hoop earrings almost large enough to work as dog collars.

Earl drove. He had the radio tuned to an oldies station. The singer whined in a grating falsetto that didn’t sound musical at all. Elka would rather listen to a horn shaving, the worst kind of sound to her people.

But her father had suffered that sound daily in order to earn the family the privileged life that kept them from wallowing in memories of what their home world used to be like, before the Great Hunt.

Of course, Earl hadn’t shared where he was taking her. But he assured her they were moving to better living conditions.

Elka looked over her shoulder at the city’s distant skyline. They had officially made their way into the suburbs. She’d never spent time getting to know what lay beyond the city, so she hadn’t a clue where she was. She noticed an overabundance of strip malls and clusters of homes with nearly identical design.

It reminded her of the video footage UniLover had pointed her to. But those houses, brick-faced single-story ranch-style houses, looked older than these gargantuan structures that took up so much space, they left no room for backyards.

Elka shuddered at the idea of living in either kind of home. She either belonged in the chaos of city life, or the luxury of a sprawling mansion.

These houses reeked of mediocrity.

When Elka turned back from looking at the fading city, she found the girl—Earl had called her Kit when he had introduced them—staring at her over her seatback.

“What’s up?” Kit asked.

Elka shrugged. “I’m asking myself the same question.”

Kit smiled, at the same time chomping a wad of gum that made her breath smell like fake watermelon. “Uncle Eee, he likes to pretend he’s mysterious. Doesn’t get that mysterious don’t mean not telling anyone nothing.”