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“NO, JOSEPH,” RAMIREZ said, “don’t turn around.”
I aborted mid-spin and wound up in a spastic shuffle-step. The night air, which had seemed so bracing and cleansing moments ago, now chilled like the breath from an open tomb. I faced the road in front of me. My new Journey to the Unknown was being swallowed by Hell’s Highway. The miniature bottles of alcohol clinked in my pockets, creating a strong urge for a drink.
“Hey, Ramirez. I was about to call you.”
He snorted. “I’m sure that’s true.”
“Well, I admit, I was a little distracted by your guys trying to shoot my ass off.”
“That was,” he deadpanned, “unfortunate.”
We traipsed to the corner of Michigan. I joined a group of people waiting for the light to change and sensed Ramirez slither up behind me. He stayed quiet, a pause that allowed me to rack the scattered pool-balls of my thoughts into a tight triangle. Keeping my head still, I studied the area: Homeland guys flitted around the Drake like a swarm of bugs circling a light. If I ran, Ramirez wouldn’t have to raise his voice, and five agents would drop on me with excruciating suddenness and wanton vigor.
He had me. Any way I looked at it, Ramirez won. My window of opportunity to run for Canada had slammed shut. For now, at least.
The light changed, and the walk signal chirped. Our little cluster of pedestrians crossed the six lanes of Michigan, many of them chattering about the police activity.
“—was fifty terrorists—”
“—In downtown! Can you believe it?—”
“—you see the shooters? I think they were Revvies—”
“—sad about Danion—”
“—I know! I wanted to scream when—”
I lengthened my stride and distanced myself from the clot of nattering idiots, smiling at the image of Ramirez having to double-time to keep up.
“Turn in here,” the agent ordered.
Here turned out to be an alley between a chic clothing store and a sandwich shop franchise, both closed for the night, but lit up on the inside. The alley, on the other hand, was dark as six feet up a black cat’s ass. I barked my toe on a pallet and stifled a curse, picking my way with extra care until Ramirez commanded a halt.
“You made contact with MacCauley,” Ramirez said. As my eyes adjusted, his short silhouette materialized, haloed by the light spilled from the street.
“I did, thank you very much.” My tone was both bitter and reckless. Truth be told, I was tired of dangling on this asshole’s strings. “And your people nearly managed to kill us all on the first night.”
“Did you find the replication site?”
I shook my head before I realized he couldn’t see the gesture. “No. She came to me at... at, uh...” I didn’t want to give up Franklin Rogers and Momma Rose to this scumbag. “At the... at the place where I waited.”
“In Cabrini-Green?”
Shit. So much for playing coy. “You know about Cabrini?”
“About Franklin Rogers and the cult of rebels he controls? Of course. Their time is coming, believe me.”
The absolute-zero chill in his voice left me no doubt that Rogers was deluded in thinking the feds had forgotten him and his people.
“Yeah, well.” I shuffled in place, the junk in my pockets clinking. “That’s as close as I can get right now. I’m not exactly high on the guest list.”
“But you will be, Joseph. Correct?” Ramirez didn’t wait for an answer. “And when you are, I expect to hear about it. Much sooner, and in a more effective manner, than how I heard about this.” The outline of one hand stirred in the darkness. I couldn’t read the gesture.
“Uh, yeah.” A thousand objections flitted by. I wanted to whine about how hard it was to get as far as I did, that they’d nearly killed me, and that I was still on probation with Millie. In the end, I kept that to myself, exactly like I kept to myself John’s slip of the tongue about a tun, by which I inferred he meant a tunnel. “I’ll have my people call yours. We’ll do lunch.”
Ramirez slithered closer. The sweet smell of cannabis-laced gum wafted from him. “Joseph, you are not a funny man. I do not appreciate your flippant attitude. You will contact me as soon as you’ve located the Children of Liberty’s computer lab, office, or workshop, and you will locate that very quickly. Your friends’ lives are forfeit, as is yours. Are we clear?”
I stared at the outline of the Homeland agent, unable to see his eyes in the dark. Just as well. I expected I’d see those dead-shark eyes of his. “We’re crystal.”
“Good.” He paused. “I have another item for you to consider.”
“Hmm?”
“We have located Ms. Schweitzer.”
I blinked. Twice. “Chelle?”
“Yes, look.” Light bloomed from a handheld vid display. It showed a silent movie of Chelle, working in some office building, pushing a cleaning cart through cube-lined rows. Her slack expression showed none of the spark I’d come to associate with my one-time fiancée.
“She’s a Revivant.”
“For now.”
“For now?”
The agent’s footsteps clicked as he minced away. “Nothing is permanent, Mr. Warren.”
***
I MADE MY WAY BACK to Cabrini. Gun-toting bangers picked me up at the border and escorted me to a furnished, unoccupied one-bedroom apartment in Momma Rose’s building. In daylight I saw the sign out front. Oak Street Apartments. Unoriginal, yet mundane.
People came at six o’clock in the morning, bearing a dry biscuit and cold coffee, which I finished as they marched me to Rogers’ office.
“So what are you good for?” Franklin Rogers demanded.
My legs wobbled, and my stomach churned, the aftereffects of slamming back three packages of roasted almonds and a small arsenal of miniature liquor bottles the night before. No matter how much I drank, sleep had refused to come. Every time I tried, Goldie’s exploding head, or Chelle’s smooth blank face, showed up on my internal screen.
As a result, I swayed a tad as I contemplated Rogers’ question. “What am I good for?”
“Yes, son, what use are you?”
“Umm.”
“Do you cook?”
“If you put me in a big enough pot.”
“Can you shoot a gun?”
“Hah!”
“Unarmed combat? Martial arts?”
“I’m pretty good at Frenzied Ferret Fu.”
Rogers blinked. “Do you have any skills at all, Mr. Warren?”
“Building things,” I said, after pausing for a fiery ball of stomach acid to slide back down my gullet. “I worked construction. Went to college on an electrical engineering scholarship, coupled with the insurance money from my parents’ death.”
“Interesting.” Rogers leaned back in his chair and scratched his chin. I stood—more or less—in front of his immaculate desk, its surface so clean, a dust mote would die of shame. Where did he hide his computer and screen? Where—
“How are you with solar inverters?” the ex-Major asked.
“Umm, I can’t build one from scratch, but I can add one into a building’s power supply without frying myself to a crisp.”
“Excellent.” Rogers bounded to his feet. “Walk with me.”
I tagged along after the energetic dynamo as he strode from the office. I caught up to him at the elevator, where he punched the button and bounced on his toes, clearly impatient.
“What we have,” Rogers explained, “is a powerful, ahem, a powerful shortage of trained electricians.”
“Powerful shortage. Got it.” Great. Suddenly Rogers wanted to be a comedian.
“Parts we have. Inverters, wire, panels, batteries—”
“How old are the batteries?”
“Ahhh, good question.” Rogers flashed a grin. “Maybe too old, huh? Well, you’ll sort that out for us.”
He said no more, and I didn’t feel like talking, so we rode the elevator to the ground floor and exited the building in silence. I flinched when the morning sun beat me over the head. In contrast to the chilly night breeze off the lake, the day had broken out sunny and hot. I shaded my eyes as I kept pace with the shorter man, not really bothering to keep track of our route.
We turned this way and that until Rogers stopped in front of a metal door in a grimy, three-story brick building. To the left, a rollup door rusted in silence, and on the right, chicken-wire-reinforced windows clung to wood-rotted frames. Crud crusted everything like icing on a decomposing cake. Rogers touched his thumb to a nearly new thumb reader. A lock hummed and clicked.
“We’ll get this keyed to your print.”
“Okay,” I said.
Inside, lights flickered on, revealing an aircraft-hangar-sized space crowded with benches, racking, shelves, and towering piles of equipment. Every shelf, rack, and square inch of floor space was covered with components, boxes, dangling wires, cable spools, and tools. I almost swooned when I spotted a red tool chest higher than my chin and wider than a city bus, parked against the left-hand wall by the door.
“Is it...?” I crept closer, not daring to hope, and slid open a drawer at random. “Oh, sweet Holy Craftsman.”
Rows of old but cared-for screwdrivers in every conceivable make were aligned in descending size and arranged by type. From stubbies to crowbar length, Phillips to flathead, power to manual.
In another drawer, wrenches. Another held sockets. Pliers. Hammers. Conduit tools. Crimpers and splicers. Saws.
“I think I love you, Rogers.” My fingers flexed, and I caressed a set of perfectly aligned hex bits.
He bellowed a laugh. “I wondered what it would take.”
“Take?”
“To claim your soul, boy!”
“Where do I sign?”
“Take a look around, figure out what’s here. We have an inventory of buildings that need converting to solar power. I have them prioritized from most important to least. We should have enough parts to do many of them, if not all.”
“Where’d this stuff come from?”
“Mostly government grant money, help the po’ folk become self-sufficient, that type of thing. Per usual, money spent equaled no results. I’m going to go get that list now. I’ll bring it over when I get your students.”
He was halfway through the door before my brain caught up. “Wait, my what?”
Rogers paused in the threshold, the sun backlighting him so I couldn’t see his face. Was he kidding me?
“I told you,” he said. “We don’t have any trained electricians. I need you to show some kids how to not kill themselves when you’re gone.”
I let the student part slide past. “When I’m gone?”
“Somehow I don’t see you staying here in Cabrini forever, Mr. Warren.” Rogers tossed off a casual wave and tugged the door to close it. “I expect Ms. Millie’s gonna want you to join the pack, sooner or later. G’day, sir.”
“Yeah,” I said, but he was already gone. The door shut with a thunk and a click.
I turned in a slow circle, taking in the floor-to-rafters piles of equipment. Sooner or later, he’d said. Sooner or later I’d have the chance to betray 3M and John. Kill their dreams and destroy their hopes.
My voice sounded flat in the cavernous warehouse. “Yep, can’t wait.”
***
I STOOD KNEE-DEEP IN inverters by the time Rogers came back, towing a troop of young men and women. I recognized Domino, the kid who’d performed street surgery on my back with a wicked-sharp knife, but the other five were strangers. All black, all dressed in work clothes and boots, and carrying sullen the way a person carries a heavy sack.
“Joe, meet your students,” Rogers announced. Pointing at each one, he rattled off their names, none of which I remembered two seconds later. He slapped a piece of paper down on a nearby table and said, “Here’s the list of buildings. These guys can show you where to start. Good luck!”
And he left.
Six pairs of dark eyes studied me the way a wolf pack regarded a limping sheep. Only with less compassion.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Joe.”
Crickets.
“What do you guys know about electricity?”
Domino put his hands in his back pockets. One of the other guys crossed his arms. Somebody sniffed.
“That much, huh? Okay, then.” I gestured at the pile of equipment stacked around me. “Before we start on the hard stuff, we need to get this organized, find out what we have. You plug the wrong thing into the wrong hole, you get a popping sound and a barbequed electrician. Heh-heh.”
No one laughed with me.
“Well, let’s get started.” I pointed to a kid in the middle with shoulders big enough to pick up a dumpster. “What’s your name again?”
“Mycroft,” he rumbled. “But people call me Bears.”
“Bear?”
“Bears. For the Chicago Bears.”
As in all of them, I supposed. “Gotcha. All right, Bears, you’re with me. We need to sort out these inverters by wattage and start making stacks along this wall. One of you grab a broom, somebody else get some dust rags and cleaning supplies. Take everything off the shelves and dust it down. We’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right, which means a clean workspace, and an organized, efficient plan of attack.” I met each of their eyes in turn. “Well, okay then, let’s get to it.”
I turned my back to the predators and went to work. To my everlasting surprise, so did they.
Although Domino sidled up to me five minutes after we started. His voice hissed in my ear. “I cut you once, asshole. You fuck up, I be happy to do it again.”
Bears rumbled, “And I hold you down.”