“Well,” said Billy Ray. “This has been a fun visit.”
Franny held her while she cried herself out. It took a long time.
She felt small and fragile as he held her shaking body. When they’d all headed off to be big damn heroes in Talas she’d been a rather zaftig armful but the events of the past days had stripped all that away. Even the tough-girl act was gone. She wailed like a lost child and despite everything she had done—to the jokers, to him—Franny felt pity.
“Mollie. He knows. He knows,” he said softly. That made her cry all the harder.
He wondered who this Ffodor had been. Boyfriend, lover? Clearly a partner in crime. He had obviously been the object lesson that convinced Mollie to work for Baba Yaga.
Baba Yaga had gone back to making phone calls. Billy Ray was muttering into his cell phone. All of them oblivious to the devastated girl huddled on the floor. Anger stirred in Franny’s breast, but he accepted the reality. Against a threat that could destroy the world this one suffering girl meant nothing.
Her sobs began to subside. Franny stood with a grunt of pain, went into the bathroom, and grabbed a handful of tissues. As he passed Ray, the man grabbed his arm, and hissed into his ear.
“You know what we need. Get it done.”
Franny gave a sharp nod, tore free from the older man, and returned to Mollie. She accepted the tissues and mopped her face.
“Come on,” Franny said gently. “Let’s get out of here.”
Michelle was suffocating.
That cunt had buried her alive. There was a limited amount of time before she ran out of breath. The last breath she had.
Blindly, she began a barrage of bubbles. They hurt as they exploded, but she didn’t have time to think about that. About what that meant. She hoped like hell she was bubbling through to the surface.
She couldn’t hold her breath anymore. It released and instead of a mouthful of air she drew in a mouthful of dirt and started choking. With the one last blast of the power she had left in her now skinny body, she punched through something and her lungs filled with stale air. She began coughing out sandy dirt. It felt as if she were suspended by her lower body, but that couldn’t be right.
Then she fell.
She slammed into something hard. Rock, maybe, or concrete. It didn’t matter because she couldn’t see a damn thing anyway. She was in total darkness. Darkness so heavy it was like a weight on her eyes.
Not the dark, she thought. Anything but the dark.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, something said very softly, Move.
She got to her feet, then reached out. Her hands touched nothing. She took a step to her left, and her foot splashed into water. It almost sent her off balance and tumbling, but she recovered.
Where am I? she wondered frantically. And then she remembered hazily from that other place before Talas—that place that must be a dream—that there were catacombs under the city. She’d forgotten about them.
GodOhGodOhGod don’t let me be stuck in the dark. Because she remembered what she had forgotten. No, never forgotten, just shoved away far and deep. They’d locked her in the closet. And left her there for hours at a time. No light reached inside. And things were in there with her. Things that only lived in the deepest, darkest blackness. She may have been a child, but she knew that much.
“Shut up,” she whispered. She hit herself in the face. “Shut up. Shut shutupshutupshutup.”
And then things began slithering.
Fear and a sick rage combined in her. She didn’t have much fat, but she could kill whatever it was in the dark. Can you? Can you kill what you can’t see?
Whatever it was, she would make it bleed. And that made her smile.
Move, the voice said.
Michelle cocked her head the way a dog might at a confusing command.
Move.
Something scuttled in the dark. There was a whisper of air as it brushed past her. She shrieked and let a tiny bubble escape. It burst against a wall, and for a brief moment there was a tiny flash of light. What she saw was an eyeless creature. Its body was the shade of necrotic flesh. It had long, vicious claws, a dent where its nose should be, and razor-sharp teeth.
Can’t hurt me. Can’t hurt me. Yes, yes it can. No. No! NO!
The fear was like a live thing inhabiting her chest. It was sucking the air from her lungs and it felt as if a stone had settled on her chest.
Move, the voice said again.
She took a large step to her right; this time her fingers touched a wall. It was rough and the edges bit into her fingers. That was good. It hurt a little, but it gave her a minuscule amount of fat. Little bubbles, she thought hysterically. Little bubbles are all I got.
She took a tentative step forward. Then another. She giggled as she realized she could be stuck down here forever—or until she died of starvation. At least there was water. Foul-smelling, stagnant water. No doubt with some kind of blind fish living there. Or maybe something worse. Something with teeth and claws and malice.
The pounding in her head was still there. The buzzing was back, along with those chanting, humming voices that had never quite gone away. They made her furious, and she hit herself in the face again and again. Sadly, it didn’t add any fat.
Stupid, she thought. So stupid to come here. Fucking Jayewardene. If she ever got out of here, she would kill him. But slowly. She might not even use her bubbles. There were so many more painful ways to kill someone.
It was Jayewardene’s fault she was in here. His and that fucking Adesina. A faint whisper inside her said, Adesina. I love her. And then the thought was crushed by her fear and rage.
Move.
Down in the hospital commissary, Franny bought her a cup of burnt coffee and a slice of cheesecake. Mollie took one bite of the latter and pushed the plate aside. The cheesecake tasted like ass.
“Want to talk about it?”
“No.”
She concentrated on stirring her coffee. Stirred half a shaker’s worth of sugar into it. The commissary only had skim milk so the coffee had that disgusting not-quite-black-why-even-bother color and taste. She’d been with Ffodor the first time she’d had coffee with heavy cream in it, which had ruined her for anything less ever since. Krémes kávé, he’d called it. The memory of his weird Hungarian vowels tugged at the corners of her mouth. She licked her lips. Tasted salt from her tears.
“What happened?”
“I told you I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay. I’ll talk about it. I think I can piece it together. Months ago you guys decided to rob Baba Yaga’s casino—”
“It was my idea. Ffodor wasn’t crazy about it at first. I’m not talking about this.”
“—but it went wrong. And she caught you. How am I doing so far?”
“Wow. You could make a kickass detective someday. Oh, wait, there aren’t any more somedays.”
Franny continued in the same level tone of voice. “So what happened then?”
Mollie set her cup down so hard that coffee slopped across the table. “You want me to say it? Fine. I abandoned him. I left Ffodor behind. She caught us and I ran away.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised,” he said. Sipped his own coffee. Grimaced. “Where’d you learn to pick the lock on a pair of police-issue handcuffs, anyway? That’s supposed to be almost impossible.”
“Ff—” Her voice hitched. “Ffodor taught me.”
“You two must have been a hell of a team.”
“He was good to me, you know? He was the only person who didn’t treat me like a disappointment, like my parents do, and not like I was just somebody to be tolerated and used, like Berman did. He cared about me. Taught me stuff.”
“He saw your potential.” Franny gave up on the coffee. Jesus Christ. It had to suck if a cop wouldn’t drink it. “There’s a lot of it. But you keep channeling it in unfortunate directions.”
“If that’s a fancy way of calling me an asshole, I already know it.” She sighed
. “Escaping. That’s my power. I can run away from anything, so I run away from everything.”
“Well, nobody can run from this. Not forever. Not even you. Not unless we find a way to fix it.”
“Well, then I’d say we’re all fucked.”
“Not necessarily.”
She looked up from the mess on the table. “You guys have a plan?”
Mollie looked up at him and there was a flare of hope in her green eyes. Fuck no, they don’t have a plan! is what Franny wanted to scream at the girl.
“Get it done.” Ray’s cold command. Franny didn’t want to die in horror and madness, twisted and deformed like the people inside that spreading zone of darkness. Mollie was a Hail Mary pass, but he’d take any chance no matter how remote.
And there was only one way to accomplish that. He was going to lie to her and manipulate her and use her the way everybody had used and lied and manipulated her. He would be deformed, but it would be hidden from everyone except him. This deformity would twist his soul.
In that moment he hated himself.
“Nope. Not yet. And I’m sorry I can’t do anything about your friend. He’s past the point of being able to forgive you. You can’t help him, either. But you can still redeem yourself. If you help us you’ll be helping so many more people than you’ve hurt. Me included.” Franny sighed, shook his head. For a moment, he looked much much older, as though a tremendous weight had aged him. He spoke like a man confessing to his priest: “I’m the one who caused all this … by blundering in there. Maybe you can help make it right.”
Mollie squinted at him. He was always such a Boy Scout. But when she examined his eyes, she saw a shadow scudding behind them. The mark that Baba Yaga had mentioned. He worked hard to hide it.
“You’ve seen it, too, haven’t you?”
He nodded. “But not from the inside. Not like you have. But it was touch and go getting out of Talas. I saw people do … very bad things to each other.”
Mollie hugged herself. Don’t think about the baby don’t think about the baby and pitchforks and intestines just don’t don’t don’t think …
“Franny, I…” Ah, screw it. “I’m sorry I left you behind. I didn’t know it was going to be like that.”
He dipped his head, a gentle nod. “I appreciate the apology. Not, you know, a lot, since you did strand me in a foreign country without my passport in the middle of a mob gunfight. But I guess it’s something.”
Mollie took a deep breath. Held it. Exhaled. Tried to calm herself. It didn’t work. Tried to find something to hold on to, something that would keep the fear at bay. But she came up empty. She started to tremble. Her shivering rocked the table and sent rivulets of spilled coffee under the paper napkin dispenser.
Though she already knew the answer, and it filled her with terror, she asked, “This help you’re trying to wheedle out of me. It means opening doorways into the evil insanity zone, doesn’t it?”
“Probably.”
The pressure in her bladder suddenly surged. For a moment it felt like she was going to wet her pants. But she’d already humiliated herself in front of Franny enough for one day. Gritting her teeth, she said, “Oh, joy. I can’t wait.”
Franny pulled out his phone. “I’ll let Billy Ray know you’re on board.”
Marcus, Vasel, the Handsmith, and a joker named Bulat had gone ahead of the caravan to plan. They stood over a map laid out on the road, the edges of it pinned with stones to keep it from blowing away in the dry morning breeze. Before them, a crossroads. One track of parched pavement bisected a smaller dirt road, running over a flat stretch of scrubland that stretched all the way to the horizon in both directions. The dirt road was a continuation of the one they’d followed here. It meandered into a stand of hills and veered out of sight.
Vasel jabbed at the map with a finger and said something in Russian. The Handsmith and Bulat exchanged wary glances. Bulat, one of the village elders, was a thin man with a weatherworn face, black mustache, and hair. He wore a long Kazakh jacket and a hat that to Marcus looked like some variation on a sailor’s cap. Glanced at in the right moment, he looked like a nat. But that’s only if you didn’t notice the small, lizard-like head that moved under the thin membrane of his skin. The head appeared and disappeared. It shifted from cheek to cheek, down the neck to his chest, up to protrude from his temple. It snapped flies out of the air whenever they got close enough.
Bulat said something that the Handsmith grunted agreement with. Vasel let flow with a string of words. The two men suffered his rant in silence, heads down. Clearly frustrated with them, Vasel turned to Marcus. Gruffly, he spoke English. “This way. To the A-2. Then M-32. Is the best way.”
“To the highway?” Marcus asked. “You saw what it was like coming out of Talas. We get on the highway, going slow, most of us jokers and all the crazy shit that’s been going on … That’s asking for trouble.”
Vasel scoffed. “Trouble I can handle. This snail’s pace I cannot. We can’t keep moving like this.” He gestured down the road they’d traveled on, disgust in the flick of his fingers.
“I should never have agreed to this,” Vasel said. “These jokers…”
“Don’t forget why you agreed,” Marcus said. “And anyway, they saved Olena, and they took us in more than once. You claim to love your daughter; if so, you owe every person in that village.”
“Person? I hardly see a person among them.” As the procession of jokers neared them, Vasel leaned in to Marcus and said, “And fuck you, black mamba. I know more about my daughter than you ever will. She is my blood. Don’t forget it.”
Olena’s truck inched up to them, leading the weary group of travelers. They’d kept moving all through the night, many walking, others catching what sleep they could in the jolting vehicles. With the truck idling, Olena opened the door and half swung out of it. She looked between the two men a moment, one eyebrow crooked. She’d been up all night as well. Marcus knew she must be exhausted, but she made a point of not showing it. “So, which way?”
Fifteen minutes later, with the whole group caught up and with vehicles and carts, people and animals, clogging the intersection, the answer came to them. It rolled in from the far horizon in the form of two Kazakh troop transports. The vehicles came on hard and fast, and didn’t slow until the last minute. The grid of the first truck pressed dangerously close to Vasel, who stood waiting for them. The driver of the first truck leaned on the horn and shouted out the window at the same time. Through the ripples of hot air billowing off the engine, Marcus saw a host of soldiers stand up in the back of the truck, all of them armed with machine guns. He muttered, “Shit.”
Out of the corner of his mouth, Vasel said, “I smell no shit. Just opportunity.”
The officer climbed down from the truck, gesticulating angrily, shouting in Kazakh and clearly telling them to move out of the way. Vasel listened for a time, face incongruously calm, as if the man was making polite small talk instead of ranting at him with a host of young, armed thugs at his back. His coin was in hand again. He placed it between his front teeth and bit down, lightly, on it. When the man paused, Vasel pulled the coin away and said something in Russian. The officer switched to that language and started up again.
Marcus had never felt more mono-lingually American. If he ever got out of this, he’d learn a second language, or three or four.
“They are going to the A-2,” Olena translated, “rushing to get to Talas.”
“My daughter is correct,” Vasel said. “Very good of them, don’t you think? Noble of them. They are going to save the day. So many noble soldiers. How many do you think there are?”
“What?”
“How many? Count them with me.” Vasel palmed his coin in his left hand. The fingers of his right, held above it, tapped on his thumb. A coin appeared and dropped to clink against the others. “As many of them as we have walkers, I think.” Another coin dropped. Clinked. And then another.
The officer shouted something, a singl
e clipped word that brought all the soldiers’ rifles up, aimed at point randomly at the jokers.
“Vasel,” Marcus said. He moved closer, speaking low. “Come on. Let these dudes pass. Slow and steady, you know? We’ll make it.”
“Slow and steady,” Vasel said. He dropped another coin into a hand that, to Marcus’s surprise, was overflowing with coins. There were so many there now that it seemed incredible none slipped off. “The only thing I do slow and steady is fuck. Other things, I do fast and furious, like the movies, you know? Don’t blink; you’ll miss the moment.”
Marcus didn’t miss it, though it happened fast and furious, as the gangster promised. One of the soldiers fired, probably by accident, a nervous pull on the trigger that would’ve put a chunk of steaming lead into Timur. Vasel snapped a coin from his right hand. It moved so fast Marcus didn’t see it, not until it and the bullet from the soldier’s machine gun dropped dead in front of Timur, right before his large feet. The next instant Vasel flung his handful of coins. Some of them caught other bullets from the sudden barrage that followed the first shot. The rest flew like an angry swarm of hornets. They sliced through the soldiers, right through them, liquifying them and then curving into another and another. Bodies dropped. Machine guns shot uselessly into the air as they fell. A chaotic couple of seconds. When it ended, the transports carried only steaming piles of liquified humanity, the clothes they’d worn, and the weapons and gear they’d carried.
Into the stunned silence that followed, Vasel piped, “Like I said, opportunity.”
Barbara stood at the front of the conference room, pointing at the map projected on the wall. Ink and Secretary-General Jayewardene were physically present in the room, as well as Snow Blind, Toad Man, and Wilma Mankiller—the B-team of the Committee, she thought unfairly. How can you even think of sending them, when Klaus, Michelle, Ana, and all the others failed.