Getting chummy to soften me up would never work. “None of your business.”
“Is that any way to talk to your new ‘friend’?” he asked, faking disappointment.
I tossed a quick look at the sky and clapped my hands. “Chop-chop, Nichol. I don’t have all day. Give me the money, and you can take your prize.”
He frowned. “A girl of so few words. I like your style, uh...You never told me your name.”
“Sarah.” I didn’t see the harm in telling him. “Sarah Daggot.”
His eyes squinted in thought. “Now I recognize the rig. Your dad is George Daggot, right? The storm chaser?”
I swallowed. How the hell would he know who my dad was? “Okay, time’s up. My prisoner and I are leaving.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. My solar car is modeled after your dad’s design. That jalopy there,” he said, sweeping his hand at my Trooper, “is the original prototype?”
“Going once,” I said, edging over to Ian and crouching down as if to drag him to his feet. “Going twice—”
“You young people have no patience.” He trudged down the hill toward us.
When he got halfway, I said, “Stop right there. You have the money?” I flicked a glance at the sky and saw brilliant red glitter floating slowly toward us. Just another minute or two. “Let me see it.”
“Or what?”
I showed him the syringe. “Or I kill him.”
“You’re one cold bitch.” He tossed an envelope on the ground at my feet. “How do I know he’s not already dead?”
I nudged Ian with my foot, and he groaned. “See? He’s not dead. Not yet, anyway.” I picked up the envelope and thumbed through the bills. Wow. Money could still buy a lot of stuff, like food and medicine. Lodgepole would put this to good use.
Nichol glared at Ian. “You have him trussed up a bit tight, don’t you think?”
“Had to,” I said. “He’s a Kinetic with the power to make weather. I can’t be careful enough.”
He frowned at me. “You keep checking the sky. What do you see up there, huh? I haven’t seen a wild bird in—” Nichol shot a look above him and bent backward to look higher. His hat fell to the ground, unveiling his shiny, hairless scalp. “Holy shit! Sparks!” He twisted around and ran for his vehicle.
Ian whipped his hands free of the tape, and they became a blur of motion as he made circles in the air. A gust of wind spun a dust cloud tight around Nichol’s ankles, holding him in place. The sparks were closing in.
Nichol couldn’t break out of the cyclone that spun around him the way cotton candy twists around a paper cone. His eyes widened as he stared at me. “You planned this. You’re a Kinetic like him.”
“Not quite like him, but the sparks can’t hurt me.”
“You knew when and where this storm would hit. That makes you...” He laughed. The crazy bastard laughed while lethal radiation was about to sprinkle down on his head. “You’re the one. The two of you together, that’s what’s supposed to do it.”
I was dying to ask do what? but the sparks were dangerously close to him now. “Ian, close up the cyclone. We got his attention.”
“Do you think so?” Ian asked. “I’m not so sure. He doesn’t look compliant to me. Are you compliant, Agent Nichol?”
Nichol smirked and stood perfectly relaxed, as if his life didn’t teeter on the brink.
“Ian, seriously. We didn’t come here to murder the man.” I stared hard at Ian, whose expression held rigid determination. “Ian? Don’t do it.”
“Why not? This asshole treated me lower than dirt. He abused me. Give me one good reason not to let the sparks have him.”
“That’s not up to you,” I said, hoping my words sank in. I understood Ian’s desire for revenge, but I hadn’t believed he would act on it. If he killed the agent, Ian would be signing his own death warrant.
Ian’s shoulders heaved with a sigh, and he nodded. The cyclone, thick with spinning dirt and small rocks, grew taller around Nichol, and was now up to his waist. Once it encircled him from head to toe, the sparks couldn’t touch him.
Nichol’s raincoat flashed open, and his hand dove into an inside pocket. He yanked out a square pistol and pointed it at Ian. Then fired.
The bullet hit Ian square in the chest. The cyclone evaporated in an instant. I screamed and ran to Ian, ignoring the fleeing agent, but Nichol’s shouts jerked my focus back to him. He’d hardly taken two steps when a blanket of red sun sparks coated his body.
Agent Sam Nichol rolled on the ground as if trying to rub off the miniscule sparks that glommed onto him like fleas on a dog. His thrashing didn’t last long. Within seconds, the storm ended, and the remaining sparks vanished into the ground. He lay unconscious.
The electric bullet stuck to Ian’s chest like a wasp with an embedded stinger. It pumped him with current, and the voltage twisted his muscles, forcing him to convulse. I yanked the bullet free and tossed it away as far as I could.
“Dead?” Ian asked, the word like a harsh whisper.
“You? No. Nichol? Not yet, but he will be in a matter of days.” How could our plan have gone so wrong? As much as I disliked Nichol, I didn’t want him dead. It was apparent, however, that Ian did. “Were you trying to kill him?”
“No,” Ian said, but his denial sounded fuzzy around the edges. “I was mad enough to kill him, but I’ve never taken a life and don’t intend to start with a bottom-feeder like Nichol.”
We locked eyes, and I saw the truth there, and the regret. “Why did you wait so long to close the cyclone?”
“I wanted him to feel as helpless and trapped as I was when he used me as his personal weather-maker.”
“But he never tried to kill you, did he?” I asked.
“He needed me alive, but there were times I’d wished I was dead.” He stood over Nichol and stared down at the unconscious man. A purple-veined rash covered Nichol’s face and scalp. “He drugged me, starved me, even withheld water when I didn’t do what I was told. He’s a monster.”
I gazed down at the sick agent, whose exposure was acute. He wouldn’t last a week. “We have to take him with us.”
Ian jutted out his chin and clenched his jaw. I knew bringing the agent along was the last thing he wanted, but we couldn’t leave the man here in the middle of nowhere. He was a dead man walking, but it would be inhumane to make him suffer any more than he had to.
Ian rubbed his chest. “That bullet was set to kill,” he said. “If you hadn’t yanked it out when you did, it would have juiced me with enough current to stop my heart.”
So I guessed Nichol hadn’t wanted Ian as badly as we thought he had. Or, more likely, the shooting had been a desperate act of last resort. If Nichol couldn’t have him, no one would.
“We’ll take him to the hospital,” I said. “The staff there will make him comfortable as possible until he slips into a coma.”
Ian eyed the black solar car. “That’s mine now.”
“As it should be.” After what Nichol had put him through, Ian deserved compensation. “We’ll sedate him and tie his hands, just in case. Irrational behavior often comes with the fever, and from what you told me, he’s crazy enough as it is.”
“What happens to us once he’s taken care of?” Ian asked.
“We head south to Colorado Springs.” We might as well join our fellow Kinetics and get the answer to what Nichol was babbling about. You’re the one. The two of you together, that’s what’s supposed to do it. The one to do what? I really wanted to know.
I followed Ian back to Lodgepole and tried not to worry about him driving off to parts unknown, then dumping the agent in a ditch along the way. We hadn’t known each other long, and he’d deceived me once, but since then he’d proven to be a man of his word. He wouldn’t try to trick me again. In an odd sort of way, Ian and I were partners.
He pulled the agent’s solar car into the hospital’s emergency entrance and parked it there while he went inside for a wheelchair and to alert staff of th
eir new patient. While he did that, I checked on Nichol, who was now semiconscious.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, knowing full well he felt like shit. He was at stage one of the illness, his fever only starting, and the rash must have been itching like crazy. But he didn’t scratch. He grimaced as if he wanted to, but some apparent deep-seated determination helped him resist the urge. His tolerance was impressive.
“Not good,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Thanks to you.”
I shook my head. “If you’d stood down, we could have protected you from the sparks.”
Eyes narrowed with suspicion, he said, “Matthews wants me dead.”
“Can you blame him?’
Nichol glared at me.
I started to walk away, but he reached out to grab my arm, his fingers pinching me hard enough to bruise. “It’s been scrubbed.”
“What’s been scrubbed?” He was talking nonsense now, a symptom of the disease. I peeled his fingers off and shoved his hand away.
“Kinetic program. Hundreds of them.” He paused to take a breath. “Need only a weather Kinetic. And a storm forecaster. Stop the storms.”
He was making no sense. “What do you mean stop the storms?”
A medical technician came out to help Nichol into a wheelchair.
Completely bewildered, I followed behind the tech as he wheeled Nichol into the hospital. “Agent Nichol, I don’t understand. Are you talking about the base in Cheyenne Mountain? The plan for the Kinetics there?”
He was weak and had trouble holding his head up, but he managed to look at me sideways. He smiled. “If they only knew. About you.”
I wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t as if there was any kind of mass media anymore. I was tabloid news, and the tabloids had been extinct for some time. A freak in a dying world wasn’t much of a real news headline. “Then maybe I should tell them.”
His broad grin revealed bloody teeth. That was just the beginning of his hemorrhaging. There would be more. “Go ahead,” he croaked. “They’ll take you apart just like the others. See what makes you tick.” He chuckled and began to cough.
“Sarah,” the staff doc said. “He needs rest.”
That was the doc’s polite way of telling me to leave. “Okay, I’m going, but this man is a criminal and needs to be restrained.”
“This man has Sun Fever. He’s not strong enough to be dangerous to anyone.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I told the doc. “He’s sly and he’s smart. You’ll need to strap him to his bed.”
“I’m not strapping down a dying man.” The middle-aged doc looked down at me through glasses perched on the middle of his nose. “We’ll sedate him for his own comfort. He’s not going anywhere.”
Sedation would have to do, but I doubted it would be enough. Nichol wasn’t the type to give up.
After parking the Trooper in the ambulance bay, I saw Ian walking circles around Nichol’s SUV, rag in hand, as he wiped road dirt from the rig’s solid steel body.
“Nichol has been admitted.”
He grunted. “That psycho should be committed.”
“Probably, but this will have to do.” I walked around the shiny black solar car, admiring its sleek design. So this was fashioned after my father’s storm-chaser. I never would have guessed. I hadn’t paid attention to the interior while focused on Nichol, so now I took the time to gaze through the tinted windows and get a closer look.
When I glanced up at Ian, he melted my heart with his lopsided smile. “Want to sit inside?”
How could I resist? “Sure do.”
He opened the passenger side door for me to slide in. The upholstery was black leather with thick cushioned seats, and the dashboard had more dials and buttons than a jet cockpit. “Wow.”
Ian got in on the driver’s side. He slipped a key into the ignition and the engine whirred to life. Cool air poured from the vents in the dash. I could live in this car.
“What do you say we give your dad’s vehicle a rest and take this one instead?”
“Sounds good to me. Where are we going?”
“Where you suggested we go, the military base in Cheyenne Mountain.”
I immediately thought of what Nichol had told me just now. If there was a thread of truth to what the agent had said, going there could be a mistake.
After I told Ian what Nichol had told me, he said, “Sarah, you should know better than to believe him. He’s a chronic liar.”
“I didn’t say I believed him, but it got me to thinking. I’d rather not take a chance of getting captured and used as a guinea pig for a government experiment. Or worse.” And getting locked up at a secure base inside a mountain would keep me from chasing storms. I’d go mad.
“We should at least go to Colorado Springs, maybe ask the locals what they know about the base. Couldn’t hurt,” Ian said. I could tell by the look of determination on his face that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He was a stubborn man. “We won’t get caught. I promise.”
I sighed. “Deal. But if a storm pops up in the meantime, I’m chasing it.” I gave him a piercing look to let him know I meant business. “Since you’ll be driving, you have to take me to wherever the storm hits.”
He nodded, his eyes gentle with understanding. It felt good not to have to go into long explanations with him. We were on the same page.
He tapped one of the glass-domed gauges. “The level of juice is above the green line, so I imagine the solar tank is full. I have no idea how long it will last in a rig this size.”
“There’s no shortage on fuel,” I said, squinting out at the cloudless blue sky on the horizon. “Recharging won’t be a problem, but Nichol’s SUV is larger than mine. It may require more power than what we’re used to.”
He shrugged. “We’ll take our chances.”
We retrieved our supplies, including the alert siren, from the Trooper and packed them in the agent’s car, which now belonged to Ian. It felt odd to be traveling in a strange vehicle, and odder still not to be the one driving.
We’d barely driven through the alley behind the hospital when the heat of warning from a coming storm sizzled inside my skull. My heartbeat picked up speed along with the car as we headed out of town. The energy felt amazing, and my body lapped it up like a cat lapping up milk. My hands shook from my premonition, and I gazed down at the red smoke curling from my fingertips. I couldn’t stop it, and I couldn’t excuse it to Ian or anyone else. This was who I was and if Ian had a problem with that, well...
“You okay?” he asked, giving me a sideways stare that showed curiosity rather than horror. The light of understanding shone in his eyes. “Ah, I see. You’re forecasting.”
As soon as I was physically able to speak, I said, “A typical day in my own personal freakdom.”
He chuckled and returned his attention to the road.
“It doesn’t bother you? My transformation?”
Shaking his head, he said, “Nope. I think it’s hot.”
My smile widened. He thought I was hot. Still flushed from my premonition, I don’t think he noticed my blush. His compliment flustered me, but my forecast took priority over everything else I was feeling. “The storm will strike in Morrison.” I consulted my mental map that showed grid lines and topography, as if it was imprinted on the inside of my eyelids. I knew the area well. It was on the way to where we were going. “It’s a small town just south of here. Maybe ten miles at most. The storm won’t hit for another three hours, so we have plenty of time.”
“I know where it is,” Ian said. “I stayed there a few weeks before moving on to Lodgepole.”
“I haven’t been to Morrison since my mom was alive. What’s it like now?”
He hesitated. “Dirty. Broken. Mostly empty.”
I figured as much, which meant the people there must be warned about the coming storm. “But someone lives there, right?”
Tilting his head from one side to the other, he said, “Not sure I’d call i
t living.” He coughed and jerked his chin toward the backseat. “Can I get a water?”
I turned around to grab a couple bottles from a case on the floor. There was also a plastic basket with a lid. After handing Ian his water, I turned back around to investigate the basket. “Berserkers, huh?”
“Yeah. Quite a few.” He took a swig from his bottle.
There were apples in the basket. Real apples! And ham sandwiches made with white bread and green lettuce, wrapped in plastic. Nichol had packed himself a lunch. He must have had connections. I wiped drool from my lips as I turned back around to sit with my treasure in my lap.
Ian slowed the car while turning down a wide street I recognized. It led through a suburban neighborhood on the way to the outlet mall. I remembered hearing about the homes here having suffered a severe fire. It didn’t look like the same suburb. Husks of houses with charred frames and exposed plumbing poked up from the blackened earth like rows of broken teeth rotted with decay. A child’s plastic tricycle sat in the middle of the street, its melted wheels fused to the asphalt.
I gazed, horrified, at the devastation that went on block after block. “Ian,” I said weakly, my mouth dry even after taking a sip of water. “Tell me about the people here.”
His attention remained on the road ahead. “The few I’ve seen may look like people, but I’d hardly call them human. They were closer to being animals.”
Berserkers to the extreme. I’d never seen them that rabid. The ones I’d encountered had a mob mentality, but I hadn’t considered them especially dangerous.
Ian steered the car down another deserted street that was as burned out as all the others. I got a view of the mall at the other end. “I’ve seen it before, in other towns I’ve passed through.” He twirled his finger beside his head. “Their brains are scrambled worse than Nichol’s. Some people just snap.”
I thought of my father, who hadn’t snapped, but his mind had been adversely affected by the storms. I think having me with him kept him sane. “I wonder why news of the Berserkers never hit the monthly newspaper.”