UnDivided (28 page)

He meant to pull out the gun loaded with tranqs, but in the commotion, who could blame him for pulling the wrong gun?

He fires, and the kid's chest shreds into a screaming red Rorschach. Blood splatters everywhere. He's dead before he hits the floor.

“No!” yells the girl. “You bastard!”

It's in that moment, with Nelson holding his gun, and her ready to strike with the wrench, that he realizes who she is. In spite of the hair, in spite of the eye color, he recognizes her—and knows he'll have a new prize today. A very useful one. He wonders how much Risa Ward will be worth to Divan.

Risa comes toward him just as he reaches for his other gun with his free hand. She gets in a swing at his head. It connects with his ear. A solid strike, but survivable, just like all the other blows. He shoves the tranq gun into her gut and pulls the trigger, and she grunts as the tranq embeds deep. He holds her as she slips helplessly from consciousness, the wrench falling from her hand, thudding onto the floor.

Nelson gently eases her to the ground beside the dead boy. Then he turns to the old woman, who sobs from the chair to which she's chained. “Your fault,” Nelson tells her. “Entirely your fault. That boy's life is on your head for lying to me!”

The woman can only sob.

Now that the battle is over, he assesses the damage from the wrench. His shin may be fractured. It's swelling and he can feel his pulse in it. His right ear is hot, and the back of his hand is turning purple and swelling. All in a day's work. The pain will be good for him. It will release endorphins. Make him more alert.

“Please go . . .” wails the woman. “Just go . . .”

And he will . . . but not until he finishes his business here.

There's a torn envelope on the desk and a cigarette lighter in his pocket. He notes that everything around the basement, from the felled bookshelf and its pile of books, to the stacks of paperwork on the desk, to the various wooden antiques—everything in this room—everything in this shop, in fact—is highly flammable.

He grabs the envelope, takes out the lighter, and flicks it until it releases its tiny controlled flame.

“Stop!” yells the woman through her tears. “I'll give you Lassiter! I'll give him to you if you stop this and let the others go!”

He hesitates. He knows this is just another game, but he's willing to play, if only to give him a moment to contemplate the severity of what he's about to do.

“God forgive me,” she says. “God forgive me. . . .”

“At this moment,” Nelson reminds her, “it's
my
forgiveness that you need.”

She nods, unable to look at him, and that's how he knows she's going to tell him the truth. But will it be truth enough?

“He's in your hand,” she says. “He's in your hand, and you don't even know it.” Then she lowers her head in defeat, and perhaps some self-loathing.

Nelson has no idea what she means . . . until he looks at the empty envelope he's holding and reads the handwritten address:

Claire & Kirk Lassiter

3048 Rosenstock Road

Columbus, Ohio 43017

He looks down to the other envelopes on the ground, and he can tell by the handwriting that they were all written by kids.

“You had your AWOLs write letters to their parents?”

She nods.

“What a pointless thing to do.”

She nods.

“And our friend Connor went to deliver his personally?”

Then she finally looks to him, and the hatred on her face is a thing to see: as powerful as a smoldering volcano. “You have what you need. Now get the hell out of here.”

There have been many times in Jasper Nelson's life when choice was taken from him. He did not choose to be tranq'd that fateful day two years ago by Connor Lassiter. He did not choose to get hurled out of the Juvenile force in humiliation. He did not choose to lose his ordinary, respectable life. He does have a choice here however, and it's an awe-inspiring moment—because he knows his choice today will be a defining one.

He could walk away from here and go find Lassiter . . . or he could bring on a little suffering first.

In the end, his sense of social consciousness prevails. Because as a good citizen, isn't it his responsibility to help rid the world of vermin?

Nelson memorizes the address, sets the envelope on fire, then drops it on the pile of envelopes on the ground.

“No! What have you done! What have you done!” cries the old woman, as the fire takes and the flames begin to rise.

“Only what necessity and my conscience dictate,” he tells her. Then he grabs Risa Ward's limp, unconscious body, and carries her out the back door without a stitch of remorse.

How could she have done it? How could she have been such a fool to think he would let them go once he had what he
wanted? She gave up Connor for nothing. It didn't save the kids in the basement. It saved no one.

The flames climb to the curtains, and the stack of newspapers in the corner ignites as if it had been doused with gasoline. Sonia struggles against her chains but succeeds only in upending the chair. Her hip complains bitterly as she and the chair fall backward to the floor, just inches from the building inferno.

Sonia Rheinschild knows she will die. In truth, she's amazed she has survived this long, what with so many other ADR operatives killed in “random” clapper attacks. But to lose the kids in her basement is too much to bear. Poor Jack, lying there beside her, had it easy compared to what the others will now have to endure.

Then, as the heat builds around her, as the air grows inky black with smoke, she hears the most wonderful sound she's ever been blessed to hear. A sound that changes everything.

In that moment, her fears and regrets leave her. She smiles and begins to breathe deep, over and over again, resisting the urge to cough, willing her body to succumb to smoke inhalation so that she never has to feel the flames.

She will go to her husband now. She will join Janson in whatever place, or nonplace, all the living eventually go—and she will go there in peace . . .

. . . because the wonderful sound she heard from the basement below was the breaking of a window.

Cold, confused, and covered with scratches, Grace crawls out of the prickly hedge. Her head spins, and she's terrified because for the first few moments, she can't fathom how she got there.
Maybe she was hit by a car and thrown into the bushes. Maybe she was mugged.

When her memory begins to return, she resists it, because even before it oozes to the surface, she senses it's going to be bad. And she's right.

She saw Argent, but it wasn't Argent, but it was. She screamed and passed out—perhaps from her shock, perhaps from something else. The sky is a bit darker now than when she lost consciousness. It's still late twilight, though. How long was she out? Ten minutes? Twenty?

Her attention is drawn to orange light ebbing and flowing in random surges. Something around the corner is on fire.

Fighting the weakness in her knees, she holds on to a streetlamp for balance, then turns the corner to find Sonia's shop on fire. Grace can feel the heat of the flames all the way across the street. She runs toward the burning building in a panic, but the shop's plate glass window explodes before she can even reach the curb. She's thrown back onto a manhole cover, its hard steel skinning her elbows.

People have come out into the street to watch—perhaps they want to help, but there's nothing to be done. All they can do is stand there with phones to their ears. A dozen simultaneous calls to 911.

“Sonia!” she calls as she gets to her feet, then turns to the onlookers. “Has anyone seen Sonia?”

They answer with helpless expressions.

“You're useless! All of ya!”

She tries to peer into the flames, but all she can see are antiques burning. Then out of the corner of her eye, she sees kids slipping out of the alley behind the shop. She hurries to the alley, to find it's the AWOLs from Sonia's basement, as she had hoped it would be.

“What happened? What happened?” she asks them.

“We don't know! We don't know!”

Farther down the alley, Beau pulls himself out of the broken basement window—he's the last one out. As Grace scans the gathering of kids, she can't find Connor, which means he hasn't returned from whatever secret mission Sonia had sent him on. But Risa isn't here either.

“Grace, you're alive!” says Beau, pleased by the fact. “We've gotta get out of here before the fire trucks arrive.”

“Where's Risa? Where's Sonia?”

Beau shakes his head. “Dead,” he tells her. “Some maniac. We tried to stop him, but we couldn't, and then he set the whole place on fire.”

“A guy with a messed-up face?”

“You know him?”

“No, but I know his face. Or part of it.”

Now the hollow wail of sirens comes to them over the treetops, distant but drawing closer—and as bad as this whole thing is, something occurs to Grace that makes it even worse.

“Where's the printer?”

Beau looks at her as blankly as the fire watchers had. “What? Why the hell do you care about that stupid thing now?”

He doesn't know! They never told anyone else how crucial it was, and so, without Risa or Connor there, there was no one to save it. Connor had said that the gears and mechanics and stuff were broken, but the important part—the
printing
part—was still okay. Maybe. But if it burns, there isn't even “maybe” anymore.

Beau grabs her arm. “Come with us, Grace. I'll find us a place to hide. We'll be okay, I swear it.”

She gently pulls out of his grip. “You be smart with them, Beau. Run north, and maybe east, 'cause most people runnin' away run south or west. Be smart, and keep them whole, you hear?”

Beau nods, and Grace turns and, without looking back, runs down the alley toward the back of the burning building.

The heat is so intense, Grace can't even get near the back door. A few feet over, low to the ground, is that solitary window into the basement. Rather than spewing smoke, it's drawing in air, breathing in oxygen to feed the flames above.

She gets down on her knees and peers in, but can't see a thing—which means that there's no fire down there!

Not yet, anyway. It may be too late to save Sonia and Risa, and for all she knows, Connor is dead too. She may be the only one left who knows of the printer's existence.

Something heavy crashes in the shop. The flames crackle with nasty, vicious greed.

The window is so small, and she's such a big-boned girl, she's convinced there's no way she can fit through the window—but she has to try. How terrible it would be if everything were to be lost because the window is too small and she's too big. The odds are even money she'll fit, and even money she'll get to the printer before the floor above her collapses. That's a 25 percent chance. Lousy odds, but they get worse the longer she hesitates.

Shutting down her survival instinct, she dives headfirst into the little rectangular hole.

As she suspected, she gets only partway through. Her hips are caught by the rigid wood, so she wriggles and squirms. The heat around her head is unbearable. And now there's light. The angry fire spies her through the slats of wood up above, like sunlight sneaking through a closed blind.

She grabs a support beam and with all her might pulls on it, until she falls into the basement, cutting herself on broken window glass on the floor.

The air is almost entirely clear down here, because smoke only knows up—but the heat! She can feel the skin on her
scalp blistering. She keeps as low as she can, rounding a corner, and there, in the place Connor left it, is the box filled with all the broken parts of the organ printer, waiting patiently for their chance to burn.
Ain't gonna happen.
She grabs the box, then opens the stasis container, which is too large to take, and digs into the thick green gel to pull out the slimy ear, shoving it into the pocket of her blouse. Then she heads with the ear and the box of printer parts, back to the small window.

Behind her, a support beam gives way and the remains of the shop up above drop to the basement. The flames, fed by the oxygen-rich air, leap forward, flooding the basement like water. Grace reaches the window, shoves the printer through, then begins the monumental task of getting out the way she came in.

There's no leverage outside. Nothing to grab on to. She's stuck halfway in, halfway out, and she can feel the flames on her feet, melting her shoes.

“No!” she screams in furious defiance. “I won't die this way! I won't, I won't, I won't!”

And suddenly her deliverance arrives in the form of a stranger grabbing her arms, and pulling. “I've got you!” he says. He tugs once, twice, three times. It's the fourth tug that dislodges her.

The second she's out, she kicks off her burning shoes, and the man helps to stamp out the fire at the cuffs of her jeans. She has no idea who he is—just a neighbor man—but she can't help herself from throwing her arms around him. “Thank you!”

The sound of sirens now fills the air, coming from many different directions.

“An ambulance will be here in a second,” says the man. “Let me help you.”

But Grace is already on her feet and gone with the box of printer parts clasped to her breast like a baby.

“There are places you could go,” Ariana told him, “and a guy as smart as you has a decent chance of surviving to eighteen.”

He's back at the freeway overpass, on the ledge behind the exit sign. It was once his favorite escape spot/make-out spot/danger spot. This time, it feels like none of those things. And this time he's alone.

He has been to many of the “places” Ariana had referred to. None of them were as safe as he wished they'd be. He did survive to eighteen, though. That should be enough, but it's not. Twilight gives way to night as he nests there, on the overpass, gathering fortitude.