Chapter 2: Whispers in the Dark
LORENZO
Sala Jihan’s Fortress
Date Unknown
The shackles bit into my wrists as the soldiers pulled on my chains. I stumbled through the dim hall, pain tearing through me with each halting step, trying to keep up. If I fell, they’d just drag me. I knew from experience that would probably reopen my wounds, but my legs were too weak. When I fell my captors didn’t even bother to slow down, and my arms wrenched in their sockets as the chains snapped tight. My stitches pulled, scabs broke and wept blood, but the slave soldiers didn’t care. They dragged me until stone turned to soft dirt, and out into the searing daylight.
It really wasn’t much light, just a hole in the roof above. I’d been kept in the dark for so long that my eyes were having a hard time adjusting. I couldn’t see where I was, but the slaughterhouse smell gave it away.
We were back in the pit.
Time didn’t mean anything here, but it had probably been weeks since my last fight. I told time by how healed my wounds were. What would I have to fight today? Slave soldiers? Other prisoners? More vicious dogs?
The soldiers hauled me roughly to my feet and began unlocking my shackles. I didn’t struggle. I’d need the energy for whatever was going to come next. My abraded wrists throbbed. My ankles burned where the irons had rubbed off my skin. The soldiers’ cheeks had been branded with Sala Jihan’s mark. Their eyes were emotionless and vacant as they took the chains away.
There was one other door into the pit, but it was still closed. My opponent hadn’t arrived yet. Blinking against the sun, I looked up and tried to see him.
As usual, I could see nothing but shadows inside the observers’ alcove above. Was the Pale Man here? That was the worst part. Each time I was tortured or made to fight something for Sala Jihan’s amusement, I didn’t even know if he bothered to watch.
The other heavy door creaked open. More slave soldiers dragged in another prisoner. His tattered rags had once been a North Chinese uniform, but he was fighting the guards, and appeared healthy, so he hadn’t been here long. A deserter? A border guard who’d crossed the Pale Man somehow? It didn’t matter. Nobody here retained their identity or their sanity for long.
I had nothing against this man. I didn’t know him or anything about him, but if I wanted to survive one more day I’d have to kill him.
A slave soldier dropped a knife at my bare feet. “Pick it up,” he ordered in Mandarin.
I looked down at the little knife, stuck point first into the dirt. The handle was antler, wrapped in leather strips, stained with dried blood. Last time I’d been forced to fight it had been with bare hands. The time before, I’d been given nothing but a sharpened stick.
I left the knife there. “Why doesn’t the Pale Man just kill me and get it over with?”
The soldier backhanded me hard in the face. It barely registered. Blood dripped from my split lip and down my rags. I knew if we didn’t fight, they’d just execute other prisoners in front of me until I provided them a good show, women, children, they didn’t give a shit. “Pick up the knife.”
Instead, I shouted at the alcove. “Why won’t you kill me?”
Surprisingly, there was movement in the shadows above. “The better question, Lorenzo . . .” Sala Jihan’s voice was cold, distant, ominous. “Is why won’t you die?”
I picked up the knife.
“I’m Lorenzo,” I said through the crack in the wall. “What’s your name?”
The prisoner in the next cell didn’t respond, but I could hear his labored breathing. I’d heard him in there for the first time today. There were no lights in the cells except for what the guards brought with them, so I’d never seen the man, had no idea who he was, but was extremely thankful for the company anyway.
“I was part of the Exodus mission to assassinate Sala Jihan. We got our asses kicked. Never even saw it coming. I got shot a few times on the mountainside trying to get away. How about you?”
Still no answer. Keeping my voice down, I tried a few other languages. The guards didn’t tolerate noise, and I was in no condition to take another beating.
“Do you know what day it is? What month?”
More breathing, sort of wet and gurgley.
“Yeah, me either.”
I’d been delirious from blood loss and hypothermia when Jihan’s men had carried me off the mountain. I’d woken up in surgery. Well, surgery is an overstatement. No anesthetic. Just some slaves yanking bullets out of me with pliers, and piecing me back together with needles and thread. Even then, barely coherent and half dead, I knew Sala Jihan was keeping me around only because dying quickly was too good for a trespasser.
Healing, I’d spent days in the dark, alone, with no sense of time. Unidentifiable, tasteless food had been shoved into my cell. Occasionally I’d wake up to someone tending my bandages, but asking them questions always ended with a beating. They would give me shots, probably antibiotics, because dying of infected gunshot wounds would be insufficiently painful.
Once I was healed enough to handle the stress, the torture had really begun.
It was purely for sport. They never even asked me any questions. Thankfully they didn’t cut any parts off of me, break any bones, or drill any holes. The really invasive stuff tended to kill the subject, so I figured they’d work up to that eventually. It had been things like electrical shocks from a car battery or drowning me in a bucket over and over. Then they’d drag me back to my cell, burned or soaked, and leave me all by myself in the dark for who knew how long. Once I was recovered, they’d do it again.
But the worst part wasn’t the torture, it was the noise. I can’t explain the sounds in this place, or what made them, but they never stopped. They were always there, just past where you could make sense of what they were saying. Sometimes there was chanting, even singing, but the only sounds I could tell for sure were human were the screams.
“Do they make you fight in the pit too?”
The other prisoner panted and hissed.
“I don’t have a choice.”
Fighters who refused got shot in the head, and then they’d just haul in the next one. Those that didn’t have the will left to put up a fight simply got murdered by their opponent, and I’d seen some savage bastards in the pit. Fighting was the only time I’d interacted with anyone else, but I’d quickly discovered that many of the other prisoners in this place were mentally gone, full-on psycho killers, little more than animals. They’d been here too long, the constant whispering burrowing into their heads, twisting everything. Hell, when I put some poor bastard out of his misery in the pit, I was doing them a favor.
Wheeze, gurgle.
“Don’t judge me.”
I wouldn’t break like the others. I couldn’t die, because I had things to do. I was going to find a way out of this hole. I was going to find my brother, stop Katarina, and get back to the woman I love. Love was an alien concept in a place like this, but when the anger and determination ran out, it was all I had left. I’d spent most of my life alone. To survive as a criminal at my level, you had to be willing to abandon everything as soon as you sensed danger. I’d always thought that falling in love was a weakness. Only now, when there was nothing else but the darkness and the whispers and the pain, remembering Jill, imagining her alive and happy somewhere beneath the sun . . . It kept me sane.
The other cell was silent. The breathing had stopped. He’d either died or melted through the floor, I couldn’t tell anymore. I was alone again.
Sala Jihan had seen right through my disguise, even recognized what I was, and called me son of murder. He’d warned me not to come back here. I should have listened.
Without any sort of reference, it was impossible to keep track of time. When you can’t even tell if it is night or day, scratch marks on a wall are pointless. Food came at random times. The temperature never changed. It was always hot and muggy. It stank like a zoo, that kind of cloying, rancid, primal stink of spice and fear and waste. There was a pipe in the floor for waste. When it would rain, water would trickle down through the rock and make a puddle in my cell. That was the closest I came to bathing, well, that and the occasional waterboarding.
Blind, I explored every single inch of my small cell with my fingertips. I knew every crack and bump, but there was no discernible weakness. My chains were heavy-duty and sunk into the rock. I had no tool that could pick the lock on the shackles. It would be virtually impossible to break free, but I picked what I thought was the weakest link, and then I spent most of my time rubbing steel against steel. I had nothing but time. The chains were thick enough to pull a truck, but I worked on them constantly anyway. I did it so often that I could reach down on instinct and immediately find the right link. I’d rub them together until the metal was so hot from friction that it burned my fingers, but I still kept going. I didn’t know what would erode first, that metal, or my sanity.
The bad thing about working on the chain was that while my hands were busy I couldn’t put my hands over my ears. I was blind, but I wished I was deaf. That damned indescribable background noise never stopped. I tried to make plugs out of scraps from my ragged clothing, but I could still hear it. It was like the noise got inside your head. I slept with my hands clamped over my ears, and if I did it tight enough, the sound of my own pulse would keep the haunted noise out of my dreams. Sometimes.
I seriously contemplated scratching out my own eardrums, but truthfully, part of me was afraid that even then the noises wouldn’t stop. I was already mostly deaf in one ear, but even in that one I thought I could hear the whispers. And if I did destroy my hearing, but the voices were still there, then that meant this place had succeeded in driving me crazy.
The only time I saw light was in torture sessions or when they’d drag me into the pit to fight. Even then there was no schedule to it. Strangely enough, I started to look forward to the fights. Despite it being bloody, horrific, and awful, at least I knew it was real. And for a few brief minutes, at least I didn’t have to listen to that damned chittering in the walls.
The food was cold slop with chunks in it. It was so devoid of flavor I couldn’t tell if the chunks were animal or vegetable. I was so malnourished that I was having a hard time concentrating. I hadn’t had much fat on my body to begin with, but there was nothing left now. There were barely enough calories and nutrients in the gruel that I could still fight in the pit, but that meant I was strong enough to get out of here.
After enough time passed for the gunshot wounds to harden into scar tissue, I was ready to escape. The instant I was given an opportunity, I’d take it.
Then one day the chain broke.
When the guards came for me again, I made my move. Their light was blinding, but I was used to not being able to see. I struck the first one in the throat hard enough to crush his windpipe. I beat the second one over the head with his big aluminum flashlight, plunging us all back into the dark. I caught the last one in the hall and choked him to death with my broken chain before he could scream for help.
I swear, as I killed those men, the noises in the walls got louder. I dragged the bodies inside my cell and closed the door. They’d only had the one, now broken, light, so I had to blunder around in the dark, hands on the stone walls, looking for a way out. The prison was a maze. There was no rhyme or reason to the layout. I knew where the pit and the torture room were, and that was it. As I moved through the darkness, I couldn’t tell if the voices were cheering me on or ratting me out.
Another guard died by my hand before I found the stairs, but at least now I had another flashlight. The crumbling prison was a maze of passageways. This place had to be ancient, and put to use more recently by the Pale Man. I found rooms filled with nothing but dried blood and scraps of clothing. There was an empty wheelchair in the hall. Eventually I found a set of stairs. The noise seemed to be louder downstairs, so I went up.
The cells on the next floor were separated by iron bars, and each one was packed with people, children mostly. The older males would go to the mines to be worked to death, the younger branded and brainwashed into the ranks of Jihan’s army. The females would be sold to vile, horrible men around the world. They stared at my light, fearful, but I was in no position to do anything for them. Exodus had tried to save these people, and gotten themselves slaughtered for it. The only reason I was in here was because I’d been soft and stupid enough to make myself into a distraction to buy time for the Exodus survivors, and I didn’t even know if any of them had made it out.
I knew Jill had escaped though. Sala Jihan had seen us together. So if he had caught her, he would have taunted me about it. If he’d killed her, he would have showed me her body. No matter what Jihan did to me, she was beyond his reach, and knowing that was plenty to live for.
They caught me before I could find the way out. I never figured out how they tracked me down, but somehow they knew right where I was. Maybe the whispers told on me. Despite me doing my best to gouge their eyes out, the slave soldiers fought like fanatics and accepted their casualties, determined to take me alive.
It seemed the Pale Man wasn’t done with me yet.
Ears ringing from the beating, I woke up chained to a different wall, but from the humidity and the animal stink I knew I was still in the same prison. There was light here though, coming from a bright orange fire burning in a nearby metal tub. There were guards there, and one was holding a metal rod in the fire, the end glowing red hot.
Branding irons. This was new.
I was hanging there, arms stretched overhead. There was no give when I tested the chains. The guards noticed I was awake, but paid me no heed. I was no threat. My body was covered in fresh bruises, cuts, and scrapes. My muscles were cramped and trembling. I was so weak I could barely think. If they were going to burn my face like they did to mark his slaves, there wasn’t much I could do about it. The ringing in my ears subsided enough that I could hear the crackle of flames, and then I could barely make out that damnable noise, the whispers and mutters. It was like they were laughing at me.
The door creaked open.
There was one man there, wearing a long black coat, leather and fur, with the hood up. The guards saw who it was and silently bowed their heads. In the shadows beneath the hood I could only make out his jaw, skin deathly white around neatly trimmed black facial hair. He studied the scene for a moment, before pushing back the hood with one gloved hand. His skin was somewhere beyond albino but his eyes were black holes. It was the Pale Man himself.
A feeling of terrible dread formed in my stomach and radiated out through my limbs as Sala Jihan entered. His age was impossible to guess. Neither old nor young, he just was. He’d claimed for himself the name of a villain from local folklore and lived at the bottom of an abandoned missile silo. He was a man who had built a kingdom in place where there was no law, reigning over people who believed he wasn’t a man at all. The mountain tribes thought of him as a vengeful demon from their past, and feared him accordingly.
The first time I’d met the slave-trading warlord, I tried to tell myself it was all an elaborate act, a mind game to fuck with his opposition. That was before he’d slaughtered the Exodus strike team sent to kill him, and before I’d been exposed to this godforsaken place.
The Pale Man didn’t speak for a very long time. He said something to the guards in a language I didn’t recognize, but probably meant leave us.
The guards closed the door behind them, so it was just me alone with the devil.
“Just kill me already,” I croaked, my mouth so dry that I could barely talk at all. “Get it over with.” At least then the whispers would stop.
He tilted his head a bit to the side, as if listening. “What whispers?”
I didn’t remember saying that part out loud.
Sala Jihan came closer, smelling like wet earth. He muttered something else, but it was in no language I recognized, and I’d heard them all. He grabbed me by the hair and violently jerked my head back so he could better see my battered face. Holy shit, he didn’t look it, but he was incredibly strong. Somehow I knew he could twist my head off if he felt like it. Those terrible black eyes cut right through me
If I’d had enough saliva, I would have spit in his face. Sala Jihan noted my effort however. The warlord wasn’t used to such disrespect, but he refrained from snapping my neck. He spoke in clear, precise English. “What am I to do with you, son of murder?”
“Unlock these chains and fight me like a man.”
“I am not merely a man, and you are only a serpent. You invaded my home and killed my servants. You have deserved all of this suffering and more.” His words were calm, measured, aloof, yet threatening at the same time. “What you have experienced thus far is nothing compared to the punishments I could inflict next. You exist entirely by my whim.”
“Fuck you.”
Jihan showed very little reaction, he seemed more curious than anything. “I’ve known many like you, wretched hashishin, wolves who hide among the sheep. Death follows wherever you go. Friend or foe, it does not matter. Yet you are special, a unique variable.”
“What the hell are you jabbering about?”
“Fate has not determined a path for you. The son of murder is outside of destiny. Even when captured, you remain defiant, tempting me to end you. I did not because you could still prove useful. If your escape had not failed, what would you have done with your freedom?”
As tempting as it was to talk more shit, I told him the truth. “I’d run as far away from here as I could go.”
“And then?”
There was no point in lying. The Pale Man would know. “Find Katarina Montalban and kill her.”
“Yes. The woman who was deluded enough to think she could steal my kingdom. Her treachery is the reason you are here. Is it only your desire for vengeance so strong that it has kept you from breaking in this place?”
I clenched my teeth together. The Pale Man could never know what I still lived for, because he’d find a way to take Jill too.
“I know there is more, son of murder. Do not mistake my idle curiosity for caring. Love and hate are equally meaningless to me. I do not care about your motivation, merely the outcome. After you finished killing off the Montalbans, would you return and try to take your revenge upon the great Sala Jihan?”
“No.” Even if I managed to survive taking on the Montalban Exchange, I was never coming back to this hell hole. “I swear.”
“I believe you mean that, for now.” Sala Jihan actually seemed pleased with my answer. “Katarina Montalban did not merely betray you and Exodus, she betrayed me as well.”
He had been Exodus’ target because he was an evil, slave-trading madman. Kat had nothing to do with that. Exodus was gunning for him no matter what.
“Exodus has tried to destroy me before. They have, and always will be my enemy. Thus, they are irrelevant. Now, I speak only of you. Katarina made you believe it was I who stole your brother. She tried to silence me, to usurp my throne. You were merely her weapon. She was naive enough to think she could use you to destroy me.”
The first time we’d met, the Pale Man had told me that though death had always been my servant, in this place, death only answered to him.
“Yes . . . In this place.” Jihan slowly lifted one gloved hand and gestured around the room. “For now my kingdom ends at the borders of the Crossroads. Yet, I desire revenge on Katarina Montalban. I do not like wanting things I cannot have. She must pay for her trespass, only she has moved beyond my reach.”
The idea that there was a limit to Sala Jihan’s dominion would make me sleep a little easier, at least until the whispers invaded my dreams and turned everything to blood again. “Let me go . . . I’ll take care of her for you.”
“An intriguing offer, only because the time of her triumph draws near. The Montalbans’ plan, this Project Blue as you have heard it called, is far more ambitious than you can imagine. Eduard Montalban tried to enlist my aid in this plot. He intended to buy my allegiance with this.” The Pale Man pulled a small object from the interior of his coat. There was a slight golden glow between his fingers. “This, too, had once been beyond my reach.”
In the palm of his hand was an ancient piece of jewelry. I recognized it immediately. It was the Scarab.
I’d stolen it from a Saudi prince’s vault. Being coerced into that heist was what had dragged me back into Big Eddie’s world. A lot of people, including two of my best friends, had died to get it. We never even knew what it did. The last time I’d seen the Scarab it had been inside an abandoned building in Nevada as it burned to the ground. How had it survived? How was it here?
“That is not your concern.” Sala Jihan closed his fist and the Scarab disappeared. “All that matters to you now is that it serves as evidence of your ability to reach that which I cannot. This was kept from me for a very long time, until you freed it.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You would not be so flippant if you understood what you have done.” He sneered at me, but I had no clue what that thing was for. “I am patient. I waited a lifetime to retrieve this device. I would do the same to have my revenge on the Montalban family. Only Katarina is too impetuous. She will act soon. If she is triumphant, the balance of power will change. Old orders will fall into chaos. That I will not allow. It appears once again the son of murder must go where the Pale Man is barred, and take for me that which I cannot take myself.”
Between the beatings and my overall awful condition, I was having a hard time following the creepy weirdo. Were we cutting a deal? “Take her life?”
The Pale Man nodded slowly. My freedom in exchange for assassinating Kat? That was a no-brainer. Or was he was he dangling freedom in front of me, just long enough to give me hope, only to snatch it away and toss me back in the dark? Was this just a creative new form of torture?
“In exchange, I grant your freedom and declare your punishment fulfilled.”
“Agreed.” And as soon as I said that, it felt like I’d literally made a deal with the devil.
“I suspected it would come to this. The only reason I did not have hot ash poured down your throat was so that you could still speak your lies. The only reason I have not castrated you was so that you would not lose your will to fight. I left your fingers so you can hold a blade and eyes to find your prey.”
Jihan went over to the fire and pulled out the branding iron. He held up the orange glowing metal, the firelight dancing in his black eyes, and satisfied that it was hot enough, turned back to me.
I cringed back as far as I could as he held the hot metal next to my face. So close that it singed my beard and I could smell burning hair. “We have a deal!”
“You still have a face, only because my mark would make it difficult for you to disappear amongst the sheep.” Jihan slowly pulled the glowing metal away from my eyes. “You will need all of these things where you are going.”
He jammed the branding iron against my chest.
I screamed and thrashed as my flesh sizzled. With shocking force, Jihan held it there, crushing me back against the stone. I screamed until I couldn’t scream anymore. When he finally pulled the glowing metal away, a lot of skin went with it.
I must have blacked out, because by the time I came to, Jihan had put the branding iron back into the fire and the whispers had turned to shouts. Hanging there limp, I retched against the stench of my own charred flesh. If there’d been anything inside my stomach, I would have vomited. If I hadn’t been so dehydrated, I would have wept.
“Because you would die rather than break, that is not a mark of ownership.” The Pale Man returned, crouching next to my sagging body, so we could be eye to soulless black eye. I was flickering in and out of consciousness. “This mark is my final gift. You say you will not return to my kingdom, but I know that in time vengeance would tempt you. Fear would fade. Memories would grow dim. Then you would come back for me, and I would utterly destroy you. Thus I bestow this scar upon you, so wherever you go, for the rest of your days, you will never forget the cost of trespass against Sala Jihan.”
Daylight . . . actual daylight.
At first I wasn’t sure if I was alive, dead, or back in my cell hallucinating. The pain convinced me it was real. Moving at all caused unbelievable agony as the burnt hole on my chest pulled on the raw red skin around it, but despite the pain, I still had to raise a hand to shield my eyes from the piercing light.
I’ll be damned. That really was the sun up there.
I was on an uneven metal floor. There were great jagged tears in the roof above. There were holes—bullet holes—in the walls. Motes of dust swam through the beams of light. When I shifted my weight a bit more, I found that there were shell casings beneath me. Everything was covered in rust, vines, and cobwebs. When I lifted my aching head, there was a human skull watching me. There were mice living inside of it.
I’d been here before. This was the old crashed Russian bomber I’d taken cover in while running from Jihan’s soldiers. They’d left me in the exact spot where they had captured me. I listened carefully. There were birds singing and bugs buzzing. The wind rustled and sighed through the trees.
There were no whispers.
I couldn’t believe it. For the first time in months, there was quiet. I was out of the prison. It had to be some sort of trick.
Pulling myself up the wall, I saw mountains and trees through the bullet holes. Through the front of the cockpit, I could see the slope I’d climbed up from the river. There was the boulder where I’d been shot in the arm. My eyes weren’t used to all this glorious unimpeded vision, so they began to water badly. Okay, maybe part of that was emotion, I’ll admit it.
I reached out and touched one of the jagged bullet holes. One of these had pierced my leg. The last time I’d been here, this valley had been covered in snow. Now it was hot. Things had grown, and begun to die. It had to be late summer. That meant I’d been in Jihan’s prison for at least four or five months.
It was amazing that I’d survived that long.
Slowly, I dragged myself to the twisted doorway, and flopped through onto the dry grass. Everything hurt, especially the fresh burn on my chest, but I’d been burned before. I’d live. I lay there for a long time, just feeling the sun above and the grass below. Sala Jihan had actually let me go. Either that or this was just a twisted game, and slave soldiers were going to show up any second to take away my last shred of hope.
No . . . If I’d learned anything over the last few months, it was that Sala Jihan was tyrannical and evil, but there was a twisted code of honor in that madness. He’d said he’d set me free in order to stop Kat only because he couldn’t. The Pale Man wasn’t a liar. He didn’t need to be. But he’d also left me miles from civilization, injured, tired, hungry, dehydrated, barefoot, and in rags. So, the Pale Man may have had a peculiar code of honor, but that didn’t make him any less of an asshole. I was in no shape to make it out of this forest.
I laughed for a few minutes straight. And then I wanted nothing more than to sleep.
Focus, Lorenzo. Kat and Anders were going to do something horrible, and then they were going to murder my brother and pin it all on him. I couldn’t stop them by sitting here on my ass. The Pale Man wouldn’t have let me go if there was time to dick around. I didn’t just survive a stay in hell to die of exposure on a mountain or get eaten by a fucking wolf, so it was time to man up and get the job done.
Besides, I really wanted to murder Kat.
And once that was done, I could find Jill. My time with her had been the best days of my life. Was it possible to actually be happy again? I’d been living off of stubborn determination and hate for so long that I’d forgotten what it felt like to hope.
Ignoring the pain, I forced myself to stand up. I knew jack and shit about wilderness survival. I was more of an urban survivalist, but I remembered the maps of the region from when we’d been preparing for the raid. The nearest settlement was Sala Jihan’s compound, but I would be avoiding that haunted shithole. If I followed the river, it would take me back to the Crossroads. Once I was back in a town full of criminals I’d be in my element.
I limped toward the Crossroads.
It took two miserable days to reach the Crossroads. When you haven’t seen the sun for months, you sunburn like a bitch. After roasting during the day, it still got damned cold at night. There wasn’t a security system in the world I couldn’t circumvent, but I didn’t know how to rub two sticks together to make fire. Bob had been the Eagle Scout, not me. Sure, I’d been a mercenary in Africa, but we’d ridden in trucks to battle, and when we did occasionally have to sleep in the wilderness, I’d had a lighter. So, fireless and miserable, I huddled next to a tree and shivered the night away. Even then it was the best night’s sleep I’d had in a long time because of the real actual quiet.
In the morning I took what was left of my shirt and wrapped the rags around my feet because I swear the canyon was covered in sharp rocks, just because Mother Nature is a bitch. On the bright side, the horrific burn on my chest was so incredibly painful that it distracted me from torn feet. Yeah, I’m an optimist like that.
There was plenty to drink. The river water was wonderful, colder, clearer, and fresher than the cups of brackish sludge I’d been given in the prison, but I was still weak with hunger. Luckily, I found a fresh animal kill, half eaten. I don’t know what killed it, and don’t even know what the animal was—what was left had hooves kind of like a little deer—but it wasn’t rotten, and that’s all I cared about. I used to be a connoisseur of exotic food, the weirder the better, and Carl often said that I could eat things that would make a goat puke, but let me tell you, you’ve never really vomited until you try to choke down chunks of bloody raw meat after months of eating nothing but gruel. On the second try I kept some inside, and that gave me enough calories to make it the rest of the way. I’d probably get some parasites and microbes or shit, but if I could get back to civilization, they had pills for that.
The Crossroads may have been run by a bunch of criminals acting like competing fiefdoms, but it was a real town. I was going to find some criminal faction to con or suck up to, get myself real food, see a real doctor, then find a way to steal some clothes, shoes, money, and a ticket back to the world. Then I was going to find Kat’s people, and torture them until one of them gave me her location, so I could shoot her in the face. Then I was going to find my woman, put this place behind me, and never think about it again. I was really looking forward to my exciting new life plan.
But when I got there, the Crossroads was gone.
Well, not gone, but mostly underwater and abandoned. Many of the buildings were still standing, but they were flooded, only the roofs or second stories sticking out of the new lake that had formed where a city had been. There were still people living around it, mostly in yurts and shacks made out of scavenged materials, but the criminal empire, the trading houses, the chaotic businesses, the gun runners and drug dealers, the world’s best illicit flea market, it was all gone.
There had been tens of thousands of people in this boomtown just a few months ago, now it was maybe a few hundred, tops. Before, there had been representatives of every regional group. Now they appeared to be mostly nomadic traders. Men with rifles watched me suspiciously as I approached their settlement.
The rail line was on the high ground, and since plants weren’t growing over the rails, I assumed trains still passed through here. When I got closer, I saw that the train station had been burned down, and all that remained was an ashen wreck with a collapsed roof. What the hell had happened here? Last I’d heard, the Montalban Exchange was supposed to have made a move against Sala Jihan’s garrison in town, but they’d chickened out. Had the Pale Man run everyone out after that? But the Crossroads didn’t feel like the victim of a battle, more like a derelict ghost town, and where had this friggin’ lake come from?
I hailed the nomads when I got close enough. They didn’t shoot me, probably because it was obvious the emaciated scarecrow hobbling in on bloody feet wasn’t too much of a threat. I went through a mishmash of languages until they responded with really bad Russian. I had nothing to offer, nothing to trade, but I hoped they’d show some hospitality to a starving man.
When I got close enough that they saw the brand on my chest, they fled in terror.
It wasn’t what I expected, but I could work with it. As the nomads retreated toward the other yurts and huddled there for safety, I went to the closest tent and started looting. I was too worn out to run, and if they were going to come back and shoot me, I’d at least die with a full belly. There was a pot of rice, still warm, and I sat down and ate it with my fingers.
While I ate, I looked over the new lake. Though it was leaning to the side now, the Montalban Exchange building was only partially submerged. It had been built to look sort of like a pagoda. My search for my brother had brought me there, and it was only later that I’d learned he’d been prisoner there the whole time, locked in a cell in the basement. I’d thought Bob was in Sala Jihan’s compound, and he’d been right there, under my nose the whole time. I’d visited the Montalban Exchange building several times during the preparation and planning for the raid. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Anders, being a dick, had taunted Bob about my searching for him the whole time.
Looking at that lopsided pagoda gave me an idea though. Bob was crafty. Everywhere else he’d gone, he’d tried to leave bread crumbs. Why not here?
A few minutes later a single nomad approached. Dressed in lots of wool, leather, and strangely a really faded Chicago Bulls t-shirt, he was probably in his forties, so close to my age, though it was hard to tell because he was so incredibly weathered by the sun, and I couldn’t even guess which of the minor regional groups he belonged to. He had an old Mosin Nagant rifle in his hands, but he was polite enough not to point it at me. He stopped near the tent and squatted there. “We are not enemies or friends, but you may eat this meal.” His Russian was pretty good, which meant he was probably their leader, or at least their main trader or negotiator.
“Thank you.”
He pointed two fingers at my burn. “You are the one he freed?” the man asked suspiciously. I hate the pronoun game, but in this case there was no doubt who he was.
“I’m guessing that doesn’t happen often.”
“You are the first. Enjoy our hospitality, and then be gone. You cannot be our guest. We do not want his eyes upon us. Everything he touches is cursed.”
“Agreed.” I kept chewing. “When does the train pass through?”
“Toward Russia or China?”
“Either.”
He pulled back a sleeve and checked his watch. I don’t know why it surprised me that a nomad at the ass end of the world had a big fat digital watch. “About three hours.” I grunted acknowledgment and kept shoveling rice in my face. I was probably going to get sick, but it was worth it. The nomad seemed happy that I would be leaving. After a minute passed, he got up the courage to ask. “My people tell stories about his prison. Are they true?”
I didn’t know what the stories were, but I could guess. “Worse.”
He nodded thoughtfully, expression hard to read, but I suspected he might be taking pity on me. He went into the tent and came out with a can of some Russian soda. He tossed it to me. I cracked open the warm can, took a drink of the Motherland’s version of Mountain Dew, and it was so magical, it made my teeth hurt. I’d always been a health nut, but I’d missed sugar.
“Oh, man. Thank you. You have no idea. Thank you so much . . .” Right then it felt like the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. “So what happened to the city here?”
“The night they attacked the Pale Man, they hurt the dam too. A bomb started it leaking. It could not be repaired. The city began to flood. The criminals fought each other. Business slowed. The bazaars moved elsewhere.”
Blowing the dam must have been Exodus’ backup plan. If they couldn’t kill Sala Jihan, at least they could cripple his empire. That explained why Ling and Valentine hadn’t been on the raid, too. The sneaky bastards had managed to shut the whole place down and keep the death toll to a minimum. I had to hand it to Exodus, that was clever.
The nomad gestured toward the leaning pagoda. “A year later, it is like this.”
A year? It was summer. I’d been captured in spring. That couldn’t be right. “What’s today’s date?”
The nomad looked at me funny, then he checked his giant watch again. Of course it had the date on it. “It is the twenty-second of August.”
So I’d been captured five months ago . . . But if the Crossroads had been abandoned too long, that made no sense. “What year?”
He told me. It took a moment for it sink in.
I’d been in prison for almost a year and a half. For a long moment, I couldn’t even wrap my brain around the number.
“Are you alright?” the nomad asked.
I didn’t know. A year and a half . . . Damn. What else had I missed? “I will be.” I looked toward the leaning Montalban building. I’d noticed something when the nomad opened to tent flap to get the soda can. “Can I borrow that flashlight?”
I swam through the flooded hallway, the borrowed LED flashlight cutting a narrow beat through the dark. Silver fish scattered ahead of me.
This was stupid. Repeatedly diving into the lower floors of a flooded, rotten, collapsing building would have been dangerous with a wetsuit and an air tank. Doing it while freezing and holding your breath, when you were already in bad shape, was suicidal. I swore, not for the first time, that someday I was going to choke the shit out of Valentine. In the most convoluted way possible, he’d once again managed to make my life more difficult. I wasn’t going to leave the Crossroads emptyhanded, though, one way or another.
This was my fourth trip down. Most of the lower rooms had been easy to reach, but none of them looked suited for holding someone prisoner. The Montalbans had left all of their furniture behind. It wasn’t as if once you betrayed Sala Jihan, there was much time to pack, so it was pretty easy to tell what each room had been used for, and the ones I could reach had been barracks for their employees and hired muscle mostly.
Part of the ceiling had collapsed, so I had to squeeze between the boards. I stuck the flashlight between my teeth, and used my hands to pull myself along. I cut my thumb on a protruding nail, but I got through. I’d have to squeeze back out though, which would take even more time, so I couldn’t spare a second in this next room.
It was eerie as hell down here. The water was fairly clear and free of sediment so I wasn’t blind, and the flashlight helped a lot. Sadly, nomadic traders in the Golden Mountains didn’t stock swim goggles, but I could see well enough to get by. The flood had been so gradual that it hadn’t even knocked over chairs. There were still billiard balls on the pool table, though the cues had floated away. Things were starting to decay and the walls were getting fuzzy with moss. There was still a TV mounted on the wall. I’d found the Montalbans’ rec room. Useless.
My lungs were starting to hurt. I’d been a damned good swimmer, but it had been a long time. By the time I squeezed back through the debris a little bit of panic was starting to build in the back of my mind. I’d pushed too far. I was going to run out of air and die down here. I swam down the hall as fast as I could, passing other rooms I’d already cleared. As the pain grew, I cursed myself. It figured that I’d be the one to survive a prison that no one ever survived, only to drown myself inside a house two days later. Desperate, I reached the stairs, got my hands, then feet on them. The glue had melted so the carpet was a floating bubble, tacked at the edges. I half swam, half walked the last few feet, and gasped in precious air as my face broke the surface.
Dripping and gasping, I stumbled out of the water, sank to my knees, and lay down on the damp floor.
Damn it. That was as far as I could go, yet I’d found nothing.
I began to shiver uncontrollably. We were way up in the mountains, so even in the summer the water was cold as hell, and I had no insulation left. There was a fireplace ten feet away, but no way to light it, and everything here was too soggy to burn.
There was one more room past the rec room, but I couldn’t reach it. I knew my brother. If Bob thought there was any way Exodus could find him, he’d leave a clue. He was so dedicated to his investigation, so worried about Project Blue, that he’d been willing to sacrifice his life—and mine—to stop it. Bob had months to piece together more about Blue after those journals of his I’d read, plus he might have learned something from Kat and Anders, or maybe even had an idea of where they would be taking him next. He had to have left something in there. I knew it.
Bob wasn’t a quitter. It ran in the family. I’d not given up in the dark for a year and a half—that still boggled my mind—And I wasn’t going to give up here either. I was getting into that last room one way or the other, and if there was nothing, then I could get on that train knowing that I’d at least done my best. The Montalban Exchange was big, but it was just a fancy house. I hadn’t given up when I was surrounded by solid rock. There was an iron poker next to the fireplace. I got up, went over, and picked it up. It was rusty, but that was fine. I just needed it to last longer than the soggy floorboards.
I made an educated guess about where the last room was, and went to work on the floor. Smashing into the Montalban Exchange gave me a chance to think, and to focus my rage. If there was no clue, no bread crumbs, no answer, then I’d just declare war on the lot of them. I used to work for Big Eddie. I used to know some of his operations and many of his lieutenants. Some of them still had to work for Big Eddie’s psychotic little sister. I’d pick them off, one by one, until somebody gave up Kat.
As I pounded the floor into splinters, I had to stop to rest several times. It gave me time to think through the repercussions of going to war with an organized crime family. I’d been elated to get out of the dark, but enthusiasm can only get you so far when you’re trying to kill a bunch of professional killers.
There were good odds I’d die. Kat was damned good at her job, and Anders was probably better. Anyone who helped me would be in danger. Kat knew what Jill meant to me. I’d stayed alive for Jill, but once the Montalbans knew it was me, they’d go after her again. I had to keep her out of this. I had to keep Reaper out of it. They were probably still in hiding. They needed to stay that way. Big Eddie had targeted my family to manipulate me once, and if Kat found out I was still alive, she’d do the same thing. Right now, my best defense was them thinking I was dead.
I had to do this the old way, the way I used to operate, back when I truly did not give a shit about anyone or anything. When I was a ghost, faceless and living job to job, doing whatever it took to win, without mercy, without thought, without hesitation. The only way to beat them would be by being worse than them.
Jill had helped me become a better man, and I loved her for it, but being a decent human being was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I had to become that perfect killer again, and that meant I had to be alone. If I was going to do this, I could afford no distractions.
In my condition it still took me a while, and by the time I’d pried up enough floor to squeeze through, I was exhausted again. I was going to be cutting it close on catching that train, and if I missed today’s, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of the nomads just decided to kill me in my sleep to keep life simple. Hospitality is nice and all—until it draws the Pale Man’s eye.
Making the hole had at least warmed me up, so it sucked extra when I lowered myself through the moldy insulation and back into the frigid water. I took a deep breath, and dropped into the last room. My vision was blurry, but when I shined the light around, I knew that I’d hit the jackpot.
The four walls were made of solid wooden beams instead of sheetrock like the rest of the place. The door was metal, and looked like it had been looted from an old Russian military bunker when they’d built this place. The only piece of furniture left was a metal bed frame. There were leather straps bolted to the side of the frame. The Montalbans had probably used this room for interrogations. Someone could have screamed their head off in here and the people upstairs would have never known.
If Bob had been here, there hadn’t been much to work with in the way of tools, but he would have improvised something. He couldn’t have done anything in the open, or they would have seen it when they took him away. I swam down to the bedframe and put the flashlight between my teeth so I could use both hands again. The little flashlight had a yellow plastic body, so at least it was soft enough not to chip my teeth. It still tasted better than Jihan’s gruel.
I felt around behind the metal bars. Sure enough. One of the bolts was really loose. That had been his tool. He’d been smart enough to stick it back in the frame so they wouldn’t notice. Anders was observant and smart, but Bob was smarter.
My chest was starting to hurt. I felt along the wall. It reminded me of exploring my cell in the dark, looking for any vulnerability I could exploit. There. Something was scratched into the wood, placed at an angle that any guard who entered wouldn’t see it behind the frame. I had to practically drag myself beneath the bed to get eyes on it. It was too blurry to read, so I had to feel it out with my fingertips. It was rough, and must have taken him forever to do it with the end of a bolt.
Varga.
I knew that name. I swam for the hole. I had a train to catch.