Strangelets (18 page)

So why was he having such a hard time getting that kiss out of his mind?

Declan shoved the thoughts away. If Sophie had set her sights on the Swiss ponce, that was her own business. He’d be back with Katie soon enough.

By unspoken agreement, they hadn’t discussed the bones they passed on the outskirts of town. Why were they hanging there? A warning against entering, maybe? Well, they were here now, might as well make the best of it.

Nico was already approaching the enormous garage doors. They swung out, like barn doors. He hauled the one on the right side open, grunting as it resisted his efforts.

Declan was hit by a stench. “Jaysus,” he said, gagging. “What is that?”

Coughing and choking, Nico covered his mouth with his right hand as he staggered back.

Sophie had stepped to the side. Cautiously, she peeked into the dim interior. “More food that’s gone bad, maybe?”

Declan pulled his T-shirt up over the lower half of his face and tentatively approached the doors. His eyes watered as he got closer—the reek reminded him of slurry, the caustic mix of piss and manure that Irish farmers used to fertilize their fields, but much worse. It smelled like ammonia combined with wet fur, and something else, something metallic and strange …

It was dark inside the garage. Declan paused on the threshold, thinking that maybe he shouldn’t have left that hoe back in the car. He’d grabbed it that morning, since it
was pretty much the most lethal weapon in the house’s gardening arsenal.

Nothing appeared to be moving, though. And he got the sense that the room was empty. It was a trait he’d honed breaking into houses; he could always tell when someone was in the next room. People were big and clumsy; their physical presence set the air molecules bouncing against each other, and those reverberations reached him through the walls.

The garage floor was covered in the same sort of mossy leaf compound they’d seen in the cafeteria. Ivy snaked up the inside walls, which was odd because he hadn’t noticed any outside the building.

Incongruous shapes were scattered throughout the building, a few feet apart from each other. They were enormous, oblong things that stood shoulder high and seemed to absorb the light from the door.

The really weird thing was that they looked like eggs. Ridiculously giant eggs.

As he watched, something shifted inside one of them. The light from the door penetrated the top half of the shell. Inside, he could make out a dark silhouette. Nico and Sophie waited behind him.

“Oh my God,” Sophie breathed. “What the hell are those?”

“I think we’d best be going,” Declan said in a low voice. As they watched, the nearest egg rocked ever so slightly, as if whatever was inside had become aware of their presence.

“But—”

“Declan is right. Let’s go,” Nico said, grabbing her elbow.

“You don’t have to drag me,” Sophie said, snatching her arm back. “I’m going already.”

They backed toward the car. As Declan drew the garage doors closed, the egg jumped again, and a small fissure
appeared along the front of it. He breathed out hard. Not a good sign. He hustled back to the car. Sophie was in the front seat this time, Nico in the back. Declan struggled to get the engine turned over.
Come on, come on …

On the third try, the engine caught. He ground the gas pedal down, and they jerked out of the parking lot. He didn’t slow until they’d put five blocks between them and the garage.

“At the next intersection, take a right,” Nico ordered from the backseat.

“Got it,” Declan said.

“What were those things?” Sophie asked again. “Do you think … were they the creatures?”

“Their babies, maybe.” His mind leapt to the henhouse at his aunt’s place, the way the hens would attack anyone who got too close to their nests. Glancing back in the rearview mirror, Declan could have sworn he caught a flash of movement in the tangle of trees lining the road. After making the turn, he sped up and said, “Lots of warning before the next one, yeah?”

“Sure,” Nico said. “It’s a few blocks down.”

“Brilliant,” Declan muttered. The sooner they got to Nico’s dad’s place the better.

The fence bowed for
a second, resisting, then gave way with a piercing shriek of shearing metal. It split around them, the ragged edges scraping along the top of the sedan. Anat winced at the sound but slammed her foot on the gas.

On the other side of the fence was a large open parking lot. She kept the pedal floored and the car lunged forward.

Another howl from behind them.

Anat glanced back. The thing was tangled up in the slashed fence, fighting to free itself. She counted three more figures in the distance, a hundred meters behind the lot.

Yosh made a strange noise. Anat glanced in the rearview mirror.

“What?” Anat demanded.

Yosh didn’t say anything, but tears streamed down her cheeks. Anat couldn’t worry about it now—they were far from home free. As their car approached the far end of the parking lot, it shuddered and groaned like a living thing.

“Come on,” Anat hissed in Hebrew under her breath.
“You can do this.” The gate at the far end was open. She tore through it and spun the wheel left. They bounced onto a long road parallel to the one they’d just escaped, past houses that looked long abandoned.

“We need to find that store,” Anat said. “We need guns to fight those things.”

“I know where the store is,” Yosh said in a small voice.

“What?”

Yosh leaned forward. Her cheeks were wet, but she’d stopped crying. “Take a left on the next street.”

Anat opened her mouth to protest, then realized they didn’t have another option. No matter what, those creatures would catch up to them at any moment. She could only hope that at least one had been seriously injured.

“Turn right here,” Yosh said. “It’s on the other side of the street.”

Anat followed her finger and saw a dimmed neon sign with a bullseye that read,
MIDDLE ISLAND GUN RANGE
.

She jerked the wheel left, and the car bounced violently over bumpy pavement. She drove straight to the front door, nearly crashing into it before screeching to a halt. “Come on,” she said, already halfway out of the car. She threw open the back door and yanked Yosh out.

Luckily, the front door was unlocked. The plate glass windows had been boarded over, which was both good and bad. Good, in that it would help them hold off whatever was after them. Bad, in that it meant the store might already have been emptied of inventory.

Once she and Yosh were inside, she slammed the door and bolted it. It was heavy, reinforced steel and had a solid lock. With a shaky exhale, Anat leaned her forehead against it. She took a second to collect herself. Then she turned around.

It was pitch black inside. The darkness reminded her of the tunnel, and for a second she felt as if she were being smothered again, like there wasn’t enough air, and the walls were closing in. She drew a few deep breaths to calm herself down. This was nothing like that. In fact, she reminded herself,
her current situation was much, much worse
.

“First we need to make sure this is the only way in,” she said.

“It is,” Yosh said softly.

“How do you
know
that?” Anat asked.

Nothing but the sound of soft breathing for a minute, then Yosh said, “I can’t explain how. I just know.”

“We’ll check anyway,” But Yosh was probably right—it would be unusual for a gun shop, especially one with an indoor shooting range, to have more than one entrance. Still, better to be sure. “I will try to find a flashlight.”

She extended her hands out protectively so that she wouldn’t smack into anything. In spite of that, a few yards into the store her hip knocked against something.

“Are you all right?” Yosh asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, groping with her fingers. They slid across something that felt like well-worn wood. “I think I found the counter.”

Yosh didn’t respond; it didn’t sound like she was moving. How had she known where the store was? And that whole thing about the exits, what was that? Something about the girl was seriously off. No matter what, she wasn’t going to let Yosh handle a gun.

Anat felt her way along the hard wooden edge of the counter until she reached the end, then eased down the other side. There she felt cabinets—if this was anything like the ammunition depot at her training camp, they would be locked. She took
a deep breath, said a silent prayer, then tried the first handle. The cabinet opened; Anat dug around inside. Her heart leapt: the rattle of boxes filled with ammunition. Now all she had to do was find guns, and, ideally, a flashlight. If only she hadn’t dropped hers back in the tunnel, along with her backpack; she’d had a knife with a serrated edge in there, and some MREs, too. Maybe she would have made a lousy soldier. After all, she’d done exactly what her instructors had warned against, panicking and losing her supplies at the first sign of trouble.

Well, nothing to be done for it now. Anat opened a few more drawers. All were unlocked, but unfortunately most were also empty. In the last one on the left, her fingers finally closed around a hard metal object. She drew it out carefully: a flashlight, she was sure of it. She found the button halfway up the smooth case and pressed it.

Nothing.

Anat cursed under her breath, then tried again. Of course she’d have the bad luck to find a flashlight with dead batteries. Totally useless.

“What’s wrong?” Yosh’s disembodied voice floated out of the darkness.

“I found one, but it doesn’t work,” Anat said resisting the temptation to hurl it across the room.

“Of course it does,” Yosh said. “Give it to me.”

“Why? It won’t make a difference—” She jerked away as small fingers brushed her arm. “It’s just me,” Yosh said in a small voice. “Please?”

Anat hesitated, then handed it over.

Yosh mumbled something under her breath. That was followed by a strange sound, like a small wheel spinning.

“What are you doing?” Anat asked, puzzled. “I told you, it doesn’t—”

A cone of light illuminated Yosh’s face.

Anat’s jaw dropped. “How did you …?”

“It has a crank here, see? In case the batteries are dead.”

Anat squinted. Of course, she should have checked for something like that. Her father had a similar one in their home emergency kit.

“All right,” Anat said, fighting to refocus—the Yosh mystery would have to wait. She held out her hand for the flashlight.

Yosh paused, her eyes flickering. But she handed it over.

Anat panned the beam across the walls. As she’d feared: only empty pegs in the glass cabinets where a wide assortment of firearms had probably once rested. She rifled through the drawers again. Nearly all of them contained boxes of bullets, but no guns. She did find a few novelty items: ninja throwing stars and a set of brass knuckles. Nothing that would be very useful against the thing that had landed on their car, but she tucked them in her pocket anyway.

“
Kus emek
,” she finally muttered after checking the last drawer. “Bullets, but no guns. I’ll have to check the range. Do you want to come?”

“I’ll stay,” Yosh said.

“Suit yourself.”

Anat swung the beam across the store. The floor was old linoleum, so worn in places that bare concrete peeped through. She found a door in the back and pushed through.

It led to a small firing range, just four lanes divided by narrow partitions. At the far end, a few ragged targets still hung. They were pocked with holes and browning, the edges curling up.

Anat swung the flashlight across the partitions: nothing, the shelves designed to hold reserve weapons and ammo were
all empty. Slowly, she ran the flashlight beam across the lanes toward the targets and back: nothing. And the section of the room she was standing in appeared empty, too.

But she wasn’t about to give up; she’d been coached on being meticulous. One of her instructors talked a lot about the things your eyes were trained to miss, ordinary items that you automatically skipped over unless you took the time to examine everything carefully. Going slower on her second pass through the room, she spotted a small pistol on the floor near the far wall. Hurrying forward, she scooped it up: a standard Glock G21. Anat smiled. She’d trained on this gun; it took .45 automatic bullets. And there had been plenty of those stashed in the drawers.

Scattered on the floor around it were shell casings. Another bad sign. It looked like someone had unloaded on something, then dropped the gun.

Not her concern
, Anat reminded herself. She had a real weapon now—that was the important thing.

She hurried back to the front room. Yosh was sitting on top of the counter, swinging her heels. If she was upset about having been left alone in the dark, she didn’t mention it.

“Have you heard anything?” Anat asked, lowering her voice. “From outside?”

Yosh shook her head. “No, but they’re still there. I can tell.”

“We need to talk,” Anat said, panning the flashlight up to Yosh’s face. “Tell me how you know so much.”