Swarm (43 page)

“Did you feel that?” she asked Ethan.

“Like someone punched my brain?”

From Kelsie, a murmur: “Someone just
left
.”

An aftershock, maybe? When that pair of shots had rung out a few minutes ago, a cry had come from Kelsie, and she'd
fallen to the bed of the dump truck, repeating,
Swarm's dead!

Flicker had thrown her vision out into the throng and found Quinton Wallace moments later—shot in the head and in the back. By then the police were waking up, rising from the ground with their eyes casting about in confusion, no longer vibrating with the wild energies of the swarm.

Now, a block away from the Dish, cops milled thickly around someone pinned to the ground. Metal flashed—handcuffs coming out. A few yards away lay Swarm's dead body.

Flicker tried to get her vision into the center of the pack, but it was all a flurry of motion and violence.

“Craig!” Ethan shouted up at the tailgate. “Guys. He's not moving!”

Flicker's vision came reeling back. Shit—Ethan didn't know. He hadn't hunkered long minutes in the truck bed, blood pooling underfoot. Listening to Kelsie fight with all her soul against becoming one with the swarm. Waiting for those zombie cops to rise up and come scrabbling across the tailgate.

“Ethan. He's dead.”

Ethan went silent, and Flicker didn't have time to find eyes on him.

Kelsie was still mumbling nonsense. “When Swarm died, they disappeared.
Hundreds
 . . . and one more, just now.”

None of it made sense. But Flicker still felt that last aftershock, an icicle through her heart.

“
They were
inside
him, the people he killed,” Kelsie said, muffled by Chizara's embrace. “Regular people, Davey, other Zeroes. And now they're all gone.”

“Hang on, Kelsie, please,” Chizara said. “I'm trying to keep from crashing this whole block!”

“He's
dead 
?” Ethan cried.

Flicker took hold of him. “What happened out there? Who shot Swarm?”

“I think it was Nate.”

Another piece of Flicker's heart broke. “
Nate
shot him?”

“It must have been. The cops took him down, hard.” Ethan gripped her arm, started pulling. “We have to get out of sight. They could be here any minute!”

“Why would they come here?” Flicker demanded.

“Ang and Murillo know Nate! The Dish is in the middle of all this, they know it's his club, and he just shot someone!”

It churned through her brain again.
Nate killed a Zero.

She let herself be pulled along, remembering his stone-cold confidence at the Dish yesterday.
I'll handle it.

When he hadn't jumped down into the truck to escape, she'd thought Nate had simply given up. But he'd had a plan. The most basic, awful plan: kill a Zero, along with the hundred stolen souls he was freighted with.

“You get why he did it, right? Someone had to,” Ethan argued with Flicker's silence. He was pulling her toward the alley behind the Dish, and she heard Chizara and Kelsie behind
them. “I mean, he must've planned this all along—charm his way in close, grab a gun, blow the guy away!”

Blow the guy away
—like Swarm had been dead leaves. He was a killer, but also a Zero like the rest of them, born with more power than he knew how to control.

The smell of garbage bags and old cigarettes hit, and the sirens and shouts grew muffled by high brick walls.

“Okay, nobody can see us,” Ethan said. “How do we rescue Nate?”

“Rescue him?” Flicker sent her vision questing out into the chaos.

Among the flashing emergency vehicles, two officers were yanking Nate to his feet. He strained to look back at the Dish—his hair mussed, his face blank, pale where it wasn't bleeding.

They were dragging him toward a police van.

“Too late,” she said. “They're taking him away.”

“We can't let them!” Ethan cried. “You should've heard the theories my mom was coming up with—terrorism, or a gas attack! They'll put him in a supermax!”

“I can crash every engine out there.” Chizara had an edge in her voice, like she was dying to. “Just say the word.”

Shit, thought Flicker. They were talking like she was the leader now. They'd seen how pathetic her plans were. Defeat the Swarm with lights, music, a happy crowd—

When brute force, deadly force, had been the answer.

Focus on the present. Fix this.

She let her vision swell, taking in every set of eyes within her range, block after block of policemen, gawkers, drivers caught in traffic, even people peering down from news helicopters.

It almost burst her head, but it made the answer clear.

“There's nothing we can do,” Flicker said.

“What do you mean,
nothing
?” Ethan yelled. “We have to go and—”

“There are a dozen cameras pointed at him. They know his face, and your mom knows his name. If we bust him out, he'll be a fugitive, a wanted man, forever.”

Ethan's grip tightened. “That's better than doing twenty years for murder!”

“We already tried to take on six hundred cops today,” Flicker said. “And we failed.”

“But we can't just . . .” Ethan's voice faltered. “Nate would never let one of us get taken away!”

Flicker leaned a shoulder against rough brick, too exhausted to stand. But she spoke with all the certainty she could muster.

“Nate would do the smart thing. Even if it sucked.”

“Damn it,” Chizara said. “He probably would.”

Flicker watched them put Nate in the van, and she felt it again, that tearing away. More like she'd lost her true love than a friend. Too much to bear.

Around Nate the crowd was loosening. A few cops in dress uniform moved slowly off in the direction of the funeral they'd abandoned. Others bunched in the middle, making radio calls
and running yellow tape around Swarm's body. Normalcy was returning, which meant they had to move fast.

But she had to watch as Nate was pushed inside the van, and the door slammed closed. It crept through the milling crowd and out of sight.

“Okay,” Flicker said, pushing herself from the wall. “We have to run. But we need a few things in the Dish.”

“MONEY?” CHIZARA ASKED. “THAT'S WHAT
we came for?”

Flicker knelt by the boxes of cleaning supplies, digging for the roll of singles Nate kept so the Dish never ran out of change. His texts had seemed so random yesterday, but they were coming into focus now.

“Yeah, we gotta
run
!” Ethan cried from the alley door.

Flicker didn't answer. If they thought cash wasn't important, they didn't understand how bad this was.

Kelsie spared her the trouble of explaining.

“We need money, guys,” came her small voice from beside Chizara, across the bar from Flicker. “We're not just running away from the Dish. We're leaving Cambria—forever.”

“Wait,” Ethan said. “Which kind of forever?”

“The only kind.” Kelsie's voice was soft, but it echoed across the empty Dish dance floor. “None of us can go home.”

“Why not?” Chizara said. “Those dirty cops know Ethan and Nate, but they never met the rest of us.”

“His sister did,” Kelsie said.

“Crap. She's right.” Ethan's real voice cracked a little. “The second Jess sees Nate's face on TV, she'll spill.”

Flicker's fingers found it—a fat roll of rubber-banded bills. Enough for a couple of tanks of gas, at least. They'd have to risk Ethan's voice for everything else.

This was going to be one hell of an uncontrolled experiment.

“Jess said if anything weird happened, she'd tell Mom everything! Even about our superpowers!” Ethan was hyperventilating. He needed a task to focus on.

“Scam,” Flicker said. “There are some burner phones in the supply closet. Under the paper towels. Get them.”

As he stormed away, Flicker realized why Nate had planned for this escape—because he planned for
everything
.

How was she supposed to replace someone who was born to lead?

“I'll grab you a tee and one of my skirts,” Kelsie said. “You can't go outside covered in blood.”

Flicker nodded. “Two minutes.”

Her hands were sticky too. She moved toward the sink behind the bar.

Chizara was pacing now. “I can't just leave again! After everything that happened today, why would the police care about some kids throwing illegal parties?”

“They'll take a hard look at this club because of Nate.” Flicker ran water and started to scrub. “They'll see thousands spent under the table on electronics. They'll see a Faraday cage to block surveillance, because
every
nightclub has one of those. And reinforced metal doors and windows, enough to withstand a siege from a SWAT team. Does that sound like a
party
to you?”

There was a charged silence as Chizara tried to resist the awful logic of the situation. Flicker had spooked herself, and she cast her eyes outside to see if the police were coming already.

Not yet. Confusion still reigned out there. The media was arriving in hordes, trying to untangle the story. Onlookers gathered, pressed against the line of police tape to gawk at the tape outline of Quinton Wallace's body on dark asphalt.

A command area was already set up—

“Shit.” Flicker turned off the tap. “You should see the texts the police brass are sending each other. CCPD can't investigate what happened, because every cop in Cambria was involved.”

“Of course.” Ethan was back from the supply closet. “They'll call in the Feds!”

“They know it's the same thing that killed Delgado, and that hit the Desert Springs Mall. And . . .” Flicker tried to keep her voice steady. “They're talking about the police station meltdown last summer.”

“No way,” Chizara said. “Why?”

“Because that's how my mom knows Nate!”
Ethan cried. “She tracked him down after I called him from the police station.”

“God,” Chizara said. “Everything we've ever done has made this
worse
.”

“Pretty much.” Flicker shut her vision down, trying to process it all. “Ethan called Nate from the cop shop, and Nate called the rest of us minutes later. Even Kelsie's in his phone records now.”

“We're all connected.” Kelsie's feet were thumping down the stairs.

“Which means we're all leaving.” Flicker fished her phone out of her pocket and put it on the bar. “We can't take these. They're just tracking devices now.”

“I'll nuke them,” Chizara said, her voice hollow. “Get rid of our texts and photos, at least for now.”

As Kelsie's footsteps approached, Flicker turned away from Ethan's voice and pulled off her dress, trying not to get blood in her hair.

A whiff of burned microchips filled her nostrils.

Flicker sighed as she took the shirt from Kelsie and put it on. All that time spent training her voice-recognition software, gone in a puff of Crash juice.

“You're really coming, Zara?” asked Kelsie softly. “Leaving those two perfect little brothers behind?”

“Daughter takes unexplained road trip, or Homeland Security
arrest, her in front of said brothers.” Chizara's voice was flat. “I know which my mom would prefer.”

“Me too,” Kelsie said.

All dressed now, Flicker cleared her throat. “Crash, can you find us a working car?”

“On it.”

Flicker checked her bag. Yes, her folding cane was in there, along with an extra pair of dark glasses. Lots of credit cards that were useless now. Unless she handed them to someone headed in another direction, just to give the Feds some false leads.

“We're going to rescue Nate
soon
, right?” Ethan said from the front window.

“We'll get him out some way.” Flicker put all the certainty she had left into the words. “Without him we wouldn't have survived today.”

“Same goes for the Craig,” Kelsie added softly.

“Oh, crap.” Ethan started to hyperventilate again, as if he'd managed to forget already.

Flicker hadn't—she still smelled his blood, and felt it under her fingernails.

The empty feeling hit again, the one that kept cutting through her. Because this was all her fault. She was the one who'd decided to confront Swarm, when they all should have run the moment he showed up.

“Found a ride,” Chizara said. “Just this side of Hill Street. Is the way clear?”

Flicker sent her vision searching behind the club and found no police barriers. Just onlookers and gawkers, and the slow return of normal traffic.

“Clear enough,” she said.