Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Assuming a flood of slayers didn’t flush out of the vault door.
“Goddamn it.” Vishous straightened. “Whoever set this up knew what they were doing. I’m not getting in with the usual hacks. It’s encoded that well.”
Zsadist eyed the steel oval. “If I try to blast this open, I could end up bringing the entire building down. But if that’s where we’re at… that’s what I’m going to do. Lash is using this tunnel to move through the city—and I wonder how many others he has.”
Vishous took out a hand-rolled and nodded. “Set the charge and blow it. We can watch the show from a block away.”
As the others covered him now, Z took out the rest of the C-4 he’d brought with him. Just as he was considering whether he needed to dematerialize back to the off-site garage to grab some more, he stopped. Looked around. Measured the distance to the stairwell, the elevator… and the contours of the tunnel’s steel portal.
“I have a better idea,” he said softly.
* * *
Under the bridge. Of course.
As Evan stepped out of the tidal wave of men and women, he looked up at a rumbling sound overhead. A semi was going across the suspended strip of asphalt above him, and he measured the reinforced beams and pylons that held the Northway up. Then he refocused on the homeless camp that had taken over the two-block area underneath. In between the tents and the shopping trolleys full of dirty clothes and sleeping bags, there were people standing bent in half, their addled bodies drifting like seagrass in the still, stinky air. Others were wandering with restless compulsion, their withdrawals animating them even through their malnutrition and illnesses.
It was bleak. It was sad.
It was the perfect cover for an army of darkness to funnel through because nobody was paying attention to anybody else’s business.
And while the soldiers wove around an obstacle course of humans they didn’t acknowledge, they headed toward the row of crumbling, vacant brick buildings that had been built in the early nineteen hundreds for manufacturing businesses. The fighters seemed to make a point of keeping their paths uncoordinated and crisscrossing, and they filed into various entrances along the waterfront’s collapsing facilities.
Like they were attempting to escape notice.
Evan’s body wanted to go with the others, like any herd animal corralled through a gate with its kind.
He fought the pull, however, backing off until he tripped over something and landed on a rotted-out wooden pallet. As a rusty nail pierced his palm, he lifted up his hand.
That godforsaken black blood gleamed in the ambient light and he thought of the scarred man who had promised to kill him for reasons he did not understand.
“I don’t want this…” he moaned.
As emotion overtook him, Evan endured another spin of his inner roulette wheel of humiliation: Uncle calling him a pussy. His father telling him he was a waste just before the man died. The lieutenants at Bathe rolling their eyes at him.
Mickey pushing him down in the snow when he’d just wanted to protect his cousin.
It was hard to say exactly when Evan’s pain turned to anger. Later, he’d decide that the shift started as he looked at the ones who were like him, even though he hadn’t chosen this transformation.
There was no going back, was there. No undoing what had been done to him.
He was stuck.
So even though there was that true-north pull in the center of his chest, the fury he felt overrode the instinct to stay with the others.
On a surge of aggression, Evan got up and stood on his own two feet. Then he pivoted around and strode against the tide. As he passed the soldiers, they looked at him. He looked back.
He almost wanted one of them to stop him—and not because he was seeking to have his mind changed.
He wanted to… kill something all of a sudden.
The instinct was so foreign to him, he should have been shocked. He wasn’t. The urge seemed as natural as following the others.
And as he considered the disrespect his uncle had always paid him? It was going to come in really fucking handy.
Before he knew it, he was running, and he paid attention to the pounding of his boots, the resilience in his legs, the calm breath going in and out of his lungs. Emerging free of the bleak landscape under the bridge, he linked up with the alley he and that woman had come down, and he went faster and faster, until the buildings were a blur and so were the burned-out car carcasses and the decaying dumpsters he dodged around.
Without any thought at all, he found his way back to the female soldier’s shitty apartment building, and he knew the way inside the walk-up’s sturdy outer door. It was as if he’d been shown everything before, especially where the hidden locking mechanism was, and what code to punch in so the entry would give way. Once inside, he jumped down the stairwell to the basement instead of taking the steps, and as he landed in a crouch, he held his breath and listened. Then he jogged over to the flat’s door, and started to punch in a code—