Mist City (After The Purge: AKA John Smith) Page 4

  Smith hurried over to her. He tied another piece of tape around her mouth, then used the rest to bind her arms behind her back. He didn’t bother with the rope; it would have taken too long, and tape was more effective anyway, even when you had to reuse it.

  Veronica appeared dazed, her eyes big as saucers as her mind clearly tried to keep up with what was happening. He wasn’t sure if she was terrified of him or—No, that was definitely terror on the kid’s face.

  Another pang of guilt. He hadn’t wanted to do this, but it wasn’t like he was going to harm her. Just the thought of hurting the kid made him queasy. Still, the persistent, frightened look on her face made him feel like a real piece of shit.

  Smith stood up, dragging her up with him. She struggled, but he had a firm grip on one of her bound arms. As soon as she was back on her feet she tried to run off, but he held on and her sandals only slid fruitlessly against the floor, running in place like something out of a cartoon. Smith wasn’t a fan of cartoons, but the other guys at Black Tide Island always used to watch them during downtime in their barracks. The ones with the stupid coyote was always a crowd pleaser for some reason.

  When the girl finally realized she wasn’t going to break free from him, she stopped trying. Instead, her entire body went slack and she started breathing hard—until she stopped breathing altogether.

  What now?

  Veronica was hyperventilating, and he could feel the weakness in her body as she sagged against his hand and back down to the floor. He thought she might be faking it, trying to get him to relax his grip so she could try running off again, so he didn’t let go.

  Instead, Smith crouched next to her and checked her vitals.

  Her pulse was erratic, and it really did look as if she was having trouble breathing. Her face had started to turn blue—

  “Jesus Christ, don’t die on me now, kid,” Smith said as he removed the tape from her mouth.

  That seemed to—

  “Help!” the girl screamed, her voice bouncing off the corrugated metal around them before echoing across the building. “Help!”

  Smith sighed.

  How was it possible that someone so small could be so goddamn loud?

  Five

  The way he saw it, Smith had only two options: He could slap the tape back over Veronica’s mouth to shut her up, but that really wouldn’t do anything. She’d already gotten two—

  “Help!”

  —make that three— cries of “Help!” out while he was still trying to figure out his next move.

  So the cat was out of the bag. How fast Matt and Allison came running would depend almost entirely on where they were in the building at the moment. If they were on the same floor as him, then the answer was pretty quick. But if they were somewhere else—say, one of the other floors—then he’d have some time. If it were the latter, they might not even have heard Veronica shouting for help.

  Was he willing to take that chance, though?

  Not right now.

  Smith’s only other option was to run. That was it. Just abandon the girl and run for it. That would mean leaving her to scream to her heart’s content. He doubted the kid would give chase. Why would she? And why would he care if she did? She was just a little girl. A little girl with scarring on her face and a surprisingly loud scream.

  Damn, she was loud!

  The first choice was the preferable one, but it also came with risks. Veronica had almost fainted the last time he covered her mouth with tape—and he was still pretty sure she hadn’t been faking it, even if she did take advantage of his good deed by immediately shouting for help once he freed her.

  There was something wrong with Veronica physically, well beyond the scars and lesions on her face. The last thing Smith wanted to do was kill her, either accidentally or on purpose. Yes, she and her “brother” and “mom” had almost killed him with that teddy bear of theirs, and God only knew what they had planned for him later, but that didn’t mean he wanted the girl’s death on his conscience. Three bozos with guns in the middle of the night, on the other hand, was a no-brainer that Smith hadn’t lost any sleep over.

  But a kid…

  “Help! Matt! Help! Help!”

  Smith sighed. “Give it a rest, kid,” he said, and rolled Veronica onto her stomach.

  He grabbed the spool of nylon rope lying nearby and tied her legs together, then connected them to her wrists behind her back. He would have gone for a Hondo Knot if he’d had the time, but it wasn’t like the girl was going to be able to squirm out of the one he’d thrown together in about twenty seconds anyway.

  She was still screaming Matt’s name when Smith got up and stepped into the hallway. The battery-powered LED lantern hung from a hook along the wall, providing just enough light—albeit weak—to see with.

  Smith grabbed the lamp and turned right to go up the hallway. He couldn’t see much of anything at the end of the long corridor. No exits, no elevators. Nothing. But the only other way open to him was left, and there was a wall about twenty meters farther down in that direction. It was barely visible in the semidarkness, but it was visible nonetheless. Which meant he was pretty sure turning right would lead to the way out.

  Well, mostly sure. Pretty sure was a bit of a reach at the moment.

  He jogged past row after row of opened units, along with connecting hallways featuring even more storage areas. He stopped long enough to make sure these new corridors weren’t the ones he was looking for, but it was too dark to tell with any certainty. The lamp was too weak to see more than five meters at a time, and the damned thing seemed to get weaker with every step he took, but that was probably just paranoia on his part.

  Probably.

  All of the storage units he passed were opened, their contents mostly visible against his light. Many of them contained boxes stacked along walls, some still unopened. Smith looked for weapons among the junk, spending five seconds at a unit that looked promising, but could only find a heavily-dented aluminum baseball bat and a variety of sports equipment. He took it (Better than nothing) but held out hope for something better. That led to him wasting another thirty or so seconds on a 10x5 unit that only produced clothes scattered around a bulky massage chair.

  Smith kept going, with the only sound accompanying him coming from his breathing and Veronica’s annoyingly shrill voice still shouting for help behind him. The lack of response to her screaming was a good sign. Maybe he had nothing to worry about after all. Maybe Allison and Matt weren’t even on the same floor. If that were the case, the girl could scream herself hoarse, and no one would hear her.

  Even as he thought that, another one popped into his head:

  What are you so afraid of? It’s just a woman and a teenage boy.

  Yeah, but he had no way of telling if that woman and teenage boy would be armed when they came running to assist Veronica. He hadn’t seen either one of them wearing a gun or even a knife earlier, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have them. He was already subdued when they came to see him, so maybe they didn’t think they needed weapons. Still, he was holding out hope that he wasn’t dealing with killers here.

  Captain Optimism, huh? Smith thought, remembering something from his basic training days. His mentor liked to say it to the recruits; the saying itself was an inside joke among the Black Tide commanders, though Smith never found it especially funny.

  A part of Smith wanted to look for Allison—or wait for her to find him—and see if he could convince her that he wasn’t a threat to her and her kids. He’d been wandering around the southwest for a while now, and it was rare to come across a beauty like Allison.

  Maybe—

  Stop thinking with your little head, you idiot!

  He sighed loudly to himself. If he could only convince—

  The boom! of the shotgun blast was ear-shattering, and it snapped Smith out of his idiotic reverie and sent him dropping to one knee. That hurt; his kneecap slammed into the hard concrete floor.

  Ouch!

&
nbsp; Through the jolt of pain, he looked up and to his right—at Allison, standing about twenty meters down the length of a connecting hallway. She was holding a shotgun, and as soon as he saw her, she racked the weapon and an empty shell ejected and bounced off the door of a storage unit nearby.

  Smith spent one—two—seconds trying to understand why he wasn’t on the floor bleeding out. Even a shotgun with limited range should have nailed him with some buckshot. Except he was still intact, and as far as he knew, there were no lead rounds sticking out of any part of his body.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw the big crater in the concrete wall to his left, the obvious result of a slug round missing his head—or whichever part of him Allison had been aiming at—by God only knew how much. Not that he particularly cared about the specifics; a miss was a miss, was a miss.

  Thank God it was a miss!

  Smith said, “Allison, wait—”

  But she didn’t wait.

  Boom! as she fired again, and Smith dove forward and to the floor.

  More sudden stabs of pain as his chest slammed into the hard pavement, but it would have been much worse if she’d taken the time to aim before pulling the trigger the second time. The LED lamp in his left hand went flying, shattering against the floor.

  The light went out, and the hallway dimmed.

  Great. His vision had been shit before, but now he could barely see anything!

  Smith scrambled forward, crawling on his hands and knees while still clinging to the baseball bat. He eventually located his footing, launched himself up onto his feet, and raced down the darkened corridor seconds later.

  Without the lamp, the end of the hallway seemed a million miles away. If there was even an end out there. Thankfully, his night eyes had mostly adapted to his surroundings, and it must have been daylight outside, because there was just enough natural light for him to see with. Not that he was afraid of running into a wall. Public storage buildings like these were always basic in layout, individual units connected by straight corridors. It was all about going in the right direction.

  God, he hoped he was going in the right direc—

  Boom!

  Smith ducked as something large and fast zipped! over his head and struck a wall all the way in front of him—not that he’d seen the impact in the darkness.

  He wasted a second glancing over his shoulder and could just barely make out Allison back there. Somewhere back there, in all that shadow. She might have already transformed into some grotesque Cthulhu tentacle monster from the depths of hell for all he knew.

  Smith was surprised he’d put as much space between them as he had, though. Maybe he was faster than he thought. Then again, running for your life tended to get the adrenaline pumping, he’d found.

  Because he could only guess he was looking at Allison, he hoped it meant she couldn’t really see him, either. Though of course she didn’t need to see all of him in order to hit him with that shotgun. He was just thankful she was using slug rounds instead of buckshot, otherwise he would be dodging bullets instead of just a bullet at a time.

  Allison must have realized he had put too much distance between them, because she didn’t fire again. Either that, or she’d run out of rounds. Had he heard her racking the shotgun yet? He couldn’t be sure. Smith was too busy trying to ignore the pounding in his ears—the result of his own haggard breathing—to really pay attention to any external noises.

  He turned forward again—

  Yes!

  A bank of elevators at the end of the hallway. He would have missed it in the semidarkness if the metal doors weren’t so smooth and hadn’t made them stand out from the wall of black. He’d turned and run in the right direction after all.

  Thank God. Thank God.

  Twenty meters…

  Fifteen…

  Smith was expecting something to pop out in front of him (Any second now. Any second now!) to thwart his escape, but there was nothing. No Matt, no fourth person that he hadn’t seen yet—nothing.

  There were just the elevators to his left, and when he glanced right, one stairwell door. There were two big pieces of lumber over it, held in place by metal brackets that looked as if they had been drilled into the concrete walls. Not very well, too, but they’d done the job. Smith grabbed the pieces of lumber and tossed them to the floor, then threw open the door—

  —and almost ran right into a shelf waiting on the other side.

  Goddammit!

  It was some kind of bookcase made of mahogany wood, and it had clearly been put there not only to stop someone from coming up the stairwell, but also from going down. There was enough space that, if he had time and patience, Smith thought he could squeeze through. Unfortunately, he had neither of those things, so he rammed his shoulder into the bookshelf instead of trying to go around it.

  The big piece of furniture shook and leaned backward slightly, but held its ground.

  He hit it again.

  And once again it moved but didn’t fall.

  Smith took a second to glance down the hallway. He couldn’t see her, but he imagined Allison coming up the narrow passageway toward him, shotgun in hand. She would already know that he’d have to deal with the blockade in the stairs. Chances were very good that she, along with Matt and the girl, had put the shelf here—

  “Ma?” a voice shouted from somewhere down the hallway. It wasn’t Veronica, who had stopped screaming her little head off a while ago, but Smith hadn’t noticed until now. No, it was Matt. “Ma, where are you?”

  “Stay with your sister!” Allison shouted.

  Shit, Smith thought, because Allison had sounded way too close. She wasn’t exactly standing next to him, but was near enough that he hadn’t had to strain his ears to pick up her voice when she responded to Matt.

  “Where is he, Ma?” Matt asked.

  “I said stay with your sister, Matthew!” Allison shouted again. Then, in a lower voice that was probably directed more at Smith, “I’ll handle this.”

  Smith wasn’t so much afraid of Allison as he was wary of that shotgun of hers. He’d seen what a slug round—a much chunkier version of a regular bullet—could do to a human body. It wasn’t pretty.

  Which was probably why Smith began alternating between kicking and throwing his shoulder into the shelf. He thought he could hear Allison getting closer, still taking her time, while he worked on the bookcase. He didn’t blame her for taking her time; why rush it when she knew she had him cornered? Also, she hadn’t brought along any light, so she was moving in the dark as much as he was. The woman was being very, very cautious—and she was definitely getting closer.

  Smith kicked harder and threw himself with more intensity into the shelf. He slammed into it over and over, using his body as a battering ram—

  The shelf, at last, tumbled backward and down the stairs, revealing…

  Mother…

  …even more junk stacked up in piles upon piles on the flights of steps.

  On every single flight of steps.

  …fucker!

  Six

  “Come on out!”

  Yeah, right. That’s not going to happen, lady.

  “I know you’re still in there!”

  You’re just guessing. You don’t know that.

  “I know you’re waiting for me to come in after you!”

  Or do you?

  “Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s not going to happen.”

  Well, shit.

  Now what?

  Smith didn’t move. He hadn’t flexed a muscle for the last ten or so minutes while he waited for her to get closer. Her footsteps had gradually grown louder as she neared, her sneakers squeaking against the hard pavement.

  “Come out!” she shouted again.

  Very, very close to him now. In fact, she was probably right outside the open stairwell door looking in.

  And that shotgun, of course, was likely aimed at the doorway, her finger on the trigger. Allison had already proven herself to be quick
on the trigger. How many shells did she have for that thing? More than what he had, which was zero. He believed that she wasn’t empty because she wouldn’t have chased him all the way down the corridor. Even she would know she had no chance against him without that shotgun. Nothing the woman had done so far had convinced him she was an idiot. Far from it, in fact.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Allison said.

  A deal?

  “Since you didn’t hurt Veronica, I won’t retaliate,” she said. “Come out, and I’ll walk you back down the hallway. I promise.”

  She promises, Smith thought. He almost wanted to snicker. Yeah, right. I was born at night, not last night, lady.

  She was definitely right outside the door, but not close enough that he could see her or her weapon. There wasn’t much of a light to cast her shadow into the stairwell and across the second-floor landing either, because otherwise Smith would have been able to see it.

  “Well?” she said. “Are you coming out or not?”

  That would be not.

  When he didn’t answer, she continued. “Don’t make me go in there after you! If I have to do that, I’m going to be really annoyed!”

  Smith smiled. Like he was ever going to just give himself up. Even if he could believe Allison and her kids had no intentions of harming him, he wasn’t going to surrender to a woman with a shotgun. She’d already proven she didn’t have any qualms about blowing his head off. If she’d been a better shot, he’d be lying out there with a big slug round in his gut right now. Or the side of his head.

  No, he wasn’t going anywhere. If she wanted him, she was going to have to come in and get him.

  And right now, judging by the tenor of her voice and her attempts to lure him out, Smith didn’t think she wanted to do that. She had shown great patience as she pursued him down the corridor. Allison was nothing if not incredibly cautious; annoyingly so, in fact.

  After the last exchange between Allison and Matt, Smith hadn’t heard from the boy again. Even the girl, Veronica, had gone silent. He pictured them back there, watching their “mom” work.