The kid had me.
My body was racked with pain and still in shock from the fall. He’d only clipped me with his first shot in the hallway. There wasn’t a snowballs chance in Hell that I would dodge this one.
“Get up, Ash!”
I didn’t bother answering Nami.
The kid in the window smiled at me. I was getting really fed up with all these sick bastards giving me that devilish grin. At least I wouldn’t have to see it again.
A gun went off, and I braced myself for the end.
And then a red splotch blossomed in the kid’s chest and he staggered away from the window, his smile gone.
I craned my neck around and saw a man standing beside Nami, her pistol in his hand. He had it aimed at the window for another second before lowering it and looking over at me.
“What are you waiting for? Get your ass up!” He was also a big man, though he didn’t come close to approaching the size of good ol’ Butch.
What the hell are they feeding these guys around here?
Sunken, bloodshot eyes stared at me. Half a dozen holes had been burned into the mechanic’s shirt he wore. Soot covered his face and hands. The slide on Nami’s pistol had locked back, the mag empty. The man gave it a quick glance before tossing it to the sidewalk.
“Get moving!” He turned and fled into a house behind him. A yellow sign hung above the door that read Johnson, Johnson, & Associates. It was a row home that had been converted into a business.
Nami stayed on the sidewalk, waving for me to get up. “Let’s go!” She hopped on her toes twice, pigtail flying.
Butch appeared in the window, ducked down so he could see out. His giant melon filled the majority of the open space. He bellowed into the street, “They’re going into Johnson’s!”
I rolled onto my shoulder, grunting and hissing at the myriad of aches in my torso. Dehydration, exhaustion, and utter misery sapped my strength. The railing of the fire escape had blunted some of the impact from the fall, but it had still kicked the shit out of me.
Shouts came from the streets lining both sides of the apartment building and pharmacy. The clatter of dozens of people melding into a murderous mob drew closer as I got to my knees.
Butch roared again, his rumbling voice echoing through the town.
Nami ran into the lawyer’s office, disappearing into the darkness beyond the doorway. I staggered after her, holding a hand against my chest, just under my ribs. Something hard was grinding into something soft in there.
I plunged into the building and saw Nami hang a left at the end of a hall. Headshots of lawyers and politicians lined both walls as I ran by, my left shoulder brushing against several of the frames, canting them at odd angles. My back straightened out a little more with each laborious step, the pain ebbing incrementally.
The house had high ceilings, wood floors, high-end furniture, and antique lights. The lawyers had a decent business going despite the depressed nature of the area.
“Hurry the fuck up,” Nami yelled from somewhere ahead.
More people shouted from the street behind me, their voices getting closer. I gritted my teeth and pushed on. A dining room that had long ago been converted into a conference room opened up at the end of the hall.
I banked left through an open door, stumbling into yet another hallway. Nami stood at the end, her tiny frame silhouetted in a doorway leading outside. She watched me over her shoulder before plunging into the blinding light outside.
I followed her into a small parking lot behind the townhouse, having to squint against the sunlight. The man who looked like he’d taken a roll through a barbeque pit waited for us in the entrance of an auto-repair at the far end of the lot.
“Move!” he hissed. He held the glass door open for Nami and beckoned me to hurry with a few quick waves of his hand.
I obliged.
The voices behind me bounced through the townhouse, bleeding into the parking lot.
As I ran past him, the big man pulled the door closed behind him and clicked two locks in place. “Follow me.”
He brushed past me, and I caught a whiff of singed hair and burnt clothing.
Nami stepped aside as he lumbered through the receiving area of the repair business. A counter stood in the middle of the floor, papers covering it. A light blinked on an LCD monitor on a desk against the far wall.
The man paid little attention to anything as he hurried through the darkened space. Only natural light spilled inside from the glass door and a lone window in front of the counter. The lights were off, which I hoped might keep the mob chasing us from checking inside.
I followed Nami through two more offices before we speed-walked into the garage part of the shop. Disassembled cars sat atop lifts, their tires dangling uselessly in the air.
The place reeked of grease and gasoline.
“Over here.” The man jogged past two cars and stopped at a third.
It was parked on the floor, the hood popped, cables hanging from the engine. A grate was open underneath the front of the vehicle.
“Climb in there.” The man gestured to the tight space.
Darkness waited below.
“Hell no.” Nami shook her head, pigtail flying. “We’ll be trapped down there.”
“I’ve already been hiding in there this morning.” The man looked past me at the offices. “Get in or get out.”
That was all the prodding I needed. From the sound of it, half the town could be descending on us soon. Even John Rambo wouldn’t have liked those odds.
I dropped to my ass and tossed my legs over the side. Grease and dirt mixed with my sweat, adding yet another nasty color to my skin. Add some long hair and I would have looked and smelled like a yeti.
The shadows under the car swallowed me as I slid into the space. The walls ran three feet down to the floor with an oily screen in the center.
Nami climbed in after me, bitching the entire way.
I couldn’t even imagine what this man had thought when he saw the two of us together. In a normal situation, in which an entire town hadn’t lost its collective sanity, someone would have seen us and assumed a homeless man had kidnapped a little black girl.
As I crawled further under the car, the big man dropped in behind Nami. He grabbed the metal grate on the garage floor and slid it into place above him, bathing the small space in darkness.
The glass door at the front of the office shattered a few seconds later.
We sat and listened.
My breathing sounded impossibly loud.
Footsteps clomped into the garage.
Angry voices bounced off the cinder-block walls and concrete floor.
“I told you I already checked the garage,” a man said. He had the gravelly voice of someone who had spent decades damaging his throat with whiskey and cigarettes. “No one came in here today.”
“We heard ya the first time,” a woman said. “But Butch saw Jim Picking in the street, and he works for you. Stands to reason that he would hide out here.”
“But—”
“Shut up and search the cars. I’ll check the back.” The woman’s voice moved past our hiding place. “Yell if you find ’em.”
The way they spoke to each other took me off guard. I’d expected to hear something more aggressive, more nonsensical. These people were chasing us with murder on their minds, but they spoke as if they were just passing the time.
The grating above us had tiny slits in the metal. As my eyes adjusted to the low light, I could see the faint outline of the front end of the car. I quietly moved past Nami and stopped behind the man I assumed to be Jim. The silhouette of his head was just barely visible as he stared out into the garage.
Shuffling footsteps moved across the dirty floor, heading toward the first car. A door opened, then slammed shut a moment later. The man cursed and meandered back to the second car.
I could hear him huffing as he got closer. His heavy, quick exhalations made me picture a fat man who didn’t want to be bothered searching around.
“No way they could have climbed up there,” the man mumbled to himself. “This is such a waste of my goddamn time.”
His steps came directly toward us.
I held my breath.
Stared through the grating.
Waited for the moment when he would reveal our hiding place.
My muscles tensed, legs coiled under me. If the grate moved, I planned to explode out of the space, fists flying in a tornado of badassery.
I’d probably get shot between the eyes for the effort, but that beat getting killed while hiding in an oil pit.
One of the car doors above us opened. The door ajar alarm dinged.
The lighter, less plodding steps of the woman came from behind us. “What about under the cars?”
“What?”
“Don’t you climb in those spaces underneath them to change oil or whatever?”
The man sighed. “I think I’d see them if they were under there.”
“Not the one you’re standing by, dummy. It’s covered up.”
Jim Picking, the Human Barbeque, shifted his weight. He turned his head and looked at me. I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but I could only assume that he was grimacing the same way I was.
“Fine.” The man’s feet slid on the floor as he moved to the front of the car.
I balled my hands into fists.
His fingers appeared above the grating, reaching down.
“We got someone down here!” a voice yelled from the front of the garage. “Another one for the feast!”
The outline of the man above us stepped back. “Told ya they weren’t in here.”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s go get us a piece of that little black one.” The woman ran from the garage, giggling maniacally.
The man followed her, his shuffling gait a bit faster than it had been during his search.
I waited for a full thirty seconds before letting out a long sigh.
Jim pushed the grate up a few inches and peeked into the garage. His eyes darted around before he slid it aside and climbed out.
I hopped out of the space and turned around, proffering my hand to Nami. She took it, and I hauled her up from the darkness. My hand consumed hers, and I was shocked again at just how tiny she was.
Here I was, a fairly big, well-trained telepath, and I was scared shitless. I couldn’t even imagine what she felt at that time. I could handle myself in a physical confrontation, but Nami would have trouble fighting off a declawed kitten.
“What the hell is with these people?” Nami asked. “Haven’t they ever seen a black woman before?”
“I’m more concerned with the fact that they’re hunting us down, not calling you names.” I looked at Jim, who stood off to my left. “Thanks for that. You really pulled our asses out of the fire.”
I grimaced at my stupidity then. I’d just thanked a man who looked as if he’d spent the morning in a frying pan for not letting us get burned.
He grunted and then headed for the rear of the garage. “Follow me.”
“Where are we going now?” Nami asked.
“The boss has an office in the back with some monitors for the security cameras. We’ll see if anyone comes in again.”
Not knowing what else to do just then, I decided to keep following his lead. I had no clue as to what was going on or why, and the Human Barbeque seemed to know his way around.
We quickly walked to an office at the rear of the garage. It was a small room with three chairs, a tiny desk, and a bank of three monitors against the right wall. The office had two windows with blinds drawn in front of them.
Jim maneuvered around the desk and carefully eased himself into the leather chair behind it. He hissed quietly as his back came into contact with the seat.
I quietly closed the door and sat in one of the two chairs in front the desk. Nami hopped onto the other one, her feet swinging freely above the floor.
“I’m Ash, and this is Nami.”
“Jim.” He turned on the monitors on the wall and stared at them as they powered up.
“Like I said, thanks for the assist back there.”
Nami leaned forward. “Fuck the pleasantries. What in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is going on out there, Jimbo?”
Jim squinted at her. “In the name of what?”
I said, “She’s weird—ignore her.”
“She yours?”
Nami’s mouth dropped open. “Say that again?”
“You his kid?”
I shared a glance with Nami, struggling not to break out in a fit of laughter. The mortified look on her face made it even harder not to burst into giggles.
Masculine, testosterone-fueled giggles, that was.
“I’m in my thirties, goddamn it.” Nami crossed her arms over her chest. “And we aren’t even the same race. Do I look like his kid?”
Jim shrugged and looked back at the monitors. “Thought maybe you were adopted.”
I checked out the screens as three separate images appeared on them. The first was of the front office. Glass littered the floor in front of the broken door.
The second monitor showed the garage. The camera sat high on one of the walls, near a corner. It angled down, pointing in the general direction of the cars atop their lifts.
The final camera pointed at a door in the rear of the building, an exit sign glowing in the semi-darkness.
For now, at least, we didn’t have anyone chasing us with pitchforks.
“Do you have any idea what’s going on around here, Jim?” I cocked a thumb at Nami. “We drove into town and stumbled into a bunch of people who were trying to kill us.”
We’d been on the run since we’d left the police station, and I hadn’t been able to stop and consider what had happened to everyone.
“Welcome to the club.” Jim swiveled his chair around so he faced us. His eyes kept cutting back to the monitors as he talked. “Everyone in the whole town has lost their minds.”
“Do you know what caused it?”
“Damn right I do.” Jim bobbed his head. “I was in the gas station getting some breakfast when everyone’s cell phones rang at the same time. Everyone but me and Bob, the dick who runs…” Jim paused and looked down at the desk. “Who ran the station. We didn’t answer the call, but everyone else did. It came from an unknown number. When they answered, their faces just went blank.”
I leaned back in my chair, my face scrunched in confusion.
Jim continued, “A few women in line in front of me just stood there like robots that’d been switched off.” He snapped his fingers. “Then they came back, all at the same time. And they were all bat-shit crazy. One of them hosed me down with pepper spray.”
Nami gaped at him. “You’re telling us that these people answered their phones and then started killing each other?”
“No. They didn’t start killing each other—they started killing everyone who didn’t answer their phone. They beat Bob’s face in with a baseball bat.” Jim gestured to his burned clothing. “A few guys outside at the pumps started spraying gasoline everywhere. That’s why I’m a little well done.”
“We saw the gas station burning. How did you get away from them?” I asked.
“Ran like a son of a bitch. The place blew just as I got out the back door. The explosion must have blown me twenty, thirty yards through the air. I was on fire the whole way.”
“Stop, drop, and roll,” Nami said.
“Bet your ass.” Jim checked the monitors again. “Took me a while to get my senses back. I had walked halfway back to town before I could really think right again.” His throat worked. “And that’s when I saw everyone killing each other. Mothers shooting daughters, sons cutting up their dads.”
I really struggled to wrap my mind around Jim’s play-by-play.
The story fit what we’d experienced since we’d driven into town, but the whole thing was so fantastical. Even still, that didn’t keep me from believing it.
Nami shook her head. “No way. A phone call couldn’t make everyone lose their religion. It’s not possible.”
I agreed, but that didn’t change what was happening in the streets. “Is it any more ridiculous than a man controlling the minds of Secret Service Agents?”
“This is different.”
“Good argument.”
“Kiss my ass.”
“This happening when Smith’s men are in town doesn’t strike you as a bit of an odd coincidence?” I asked.
“Of course, but how could Smith pull off something like this? Are you saying he’s somehow weaponized a cell phone signal? He can reprogram people’s brains with a sound?”
Jim held his hands up. “What’s this now? Who is Smith?”
Nami turned her attention to him. “We’ll get to that in a minute. How did you get here?” Her feet kicked incessantly under her chair. “Why come into the middle of town? Shouldn’t you have run the other way?”
“I would have, but someone spotted me. They chased me toward downtown for a long time before I finally lost them. I might be getting old, but I keep myself in decent shape.” Jim looked around the office. “And I work here. I knew I could hide out in the garage better than anywhere else. Figured I’d hole up and wait for help to come.”
“And you ended up with us,” I said. “Lucky you.”
“Yeah. I was searching through Jim Johnson’s office for the pistol he keeps stashed in there when I heard the fire escape crash into the street and decided to see what was happening out there. That’s when I saw you two.” He raised his eyebrows at Nami. “I thought you were just a little kid. I couldn’t watch a girl get killed so close to me without tryin’ to help. Can’t believe I had to shoot the Briar boy. He was a bit of a troublemaker, but not a bad kid.”
I didn’t have to be a telepath to know the regret he felt. He hadn’t shown it while we were on the run or hiding under the car, but now that we had a chance to catch our breath, his emotions were creeping up on him. I could relate. The face of the boy I’d shot in the woods kept popping up in my mind.
In one of the monitors, someone carrying a scythe like the Grim-fucking-Reaper walked in front of the building. They paused, looked into the smashed door, and then kept going. I tried to pretend that I didn’t notice the Reaper was a teenage girl who’d barely hit puberty.
Nami kept fidgeting in her seat. “We’re so screwed. We can’t fight off the whole town, Ogre. How in the hell are we going to get out of this one?”
“Who are you people?” Jim asked. “If you didn’t know that everyone had gone nuts, why were you carrying a gun around?”
“I’m a federal agent,” Nami said.
Jim chortled. “Seriously, who are you?”
“I’m a federal agent, goddamn it.” Nami’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t give me that shit about looking like a kid. I’ve been involved in some situations in my life that would make you piss in your pants.”
Jim looked to me for help.
“You don’t watch the news, I take it.” I pointed at my face. “Don’t recognize my handsome mug?”
“Don’t have time for that nonsense.”
“Well, our situation is a bit complicated. I’ve been living outside of Arthur’s Creek for a while now. We think some men who want me dead might have caused all of this.”
“You’re talking about terrorists? Terrorists want you dead?”
“Yup. My life sucks.”
“So all of this is because you live here?” Jim gave me a hard look.
I could tell that he was used to intimidating people with his size and gruff personality. That shit didn’t work on me, but the little guilt trip he’d just thrown in my lap sure did.
“I think so.”
“Sitting in an office with you probably isn’t good for my well-being, is it?” Jim slowly lowered his eyes. “Not that the odds are in my favor anyway.”
I spotted a mini-fridge in the corner of the room and practically exploded out of my seat. The door damn near tore off as I ripped at the handle and peered inside. A handful of water bottles and cans of soda sat on two shelves. Three pieces of cake were on a paper plate.
The first bottle of water went down in a hurry. The second didn’t take much longer.
I’d stuffed half a piece of cake in my mouth when I noticed that Nami and Jim were staring at me. The cake had to be a week old, at least. It was stale, the edges of the icing hard.
At that moment, I didn’t care.
I’d have chomped on roadkill.
I needed the calories.
“Be careful not to eat your hand.” Nami shifted in her seat. “It looks like you’ve never seen food before.”
The second piece went down even faster. It tasted like cardboard and settled in my stomach like lead. I washed it all down with a soda.
Then I belched. “Nothing burps better than old cake and soda.”
They continued staring at me.
“Jimbo, we need to get to Fine Cuts Barbershop. I know where it is, but there are a few dozen crazy people in the way. We need another entrance to the place other than the front door. Any ideas?” I knew how to get there because of what I’d seen in Allison’s mind, but I hadn’t dug deep enough to learn about alternate routes.
Not that she would have known about them anyway. Her husband had frequented the place, but she hadn’t even stepped inside. We couldn’t chance walking up to the front door.
Jim’s brow furrowed. “Barbershop? I’m pretty sure they’re closed from now until the end of time.”
“Sarcasm. I like it.” I gestured at Nami. “They have an internet connection that is still working. We think. Short Round can call in the cavalry if we can get close enough for her to reach out and touch someone.”
“Depending on how powerful their router is, we might not have to even get inside. The building beside it might work.” Nami slid out of her chair and adjusted her backpack. “Judging from the rest of the town, I’m guessing they aren’t using top of the line WiFi, but I’ll figure something out. Just get me close.”
Jim stood up, wincing as his singed flesh peeled away from the chair. “You two really are from the government?”
“I am,” Nami said. “Ogre is from Drunksville, population him.”
I nodded my agreement. “That about sums it up.”
“If I get you to the barbershop, you’ll make sure that I get out of here in one piece?” Jim asked. “I’m in the first ambulance, cop car, or helicopter out of this dump, agreed?”
“Sure.” I shrugged. “But we’re just trying to get a message to the outside. What happens after that is beyond our control.”
Jim slowly nodded, his brow furrowed. “Follow me.”