The Breaking

Chapter Sixteen

There was a campsite about five miles west of Walsenburg, over twenty miles from the truck stop where Lambert had picked up their supplies and clothing. It was a nice, scenic area with two lakes nearby and plenty of spots for families to set up their tents or park their campers. Cole wanted to get farther away from Canon City, but Jessup had insisted they meet at the motel near Lake Meriam. Too tired to argue, Cole removed the license plates from the hatchback, parked on an access road, and stayed close enough to the nearby families to avoid too much suspicion. He and Lambert changed their clothes and Frank slipped into the lake itself, where he settled in like a rock and didn’t come up again.

“Good,” Lambert grunted. “Hope he drowns.”

“Any reason for that or are you just being an asshole?”

After a brief consideration, Lambert shrugged. “Just bein’ an asshole I guess.”

“Fine. Pass me those beef sticks.”

They changed into their new clothes, rinsed the old ones in the modest restroom facilities, and more important, Cole was able to take a shower. The stalls were basically cement closets with little hot water and a curtain that wasn’t large enough to fully cover the opening, but the running water was a blessing. The only thing that felt better was being able to lay down in the backseat of the hatchback and catch some sleep. He and Lambert traded lookout duty, tapping the glass to wake the other one up if anyone official-looking came around to look at the car. It wasn’t until the following morning that they had to do anything more than take a walk to avoid campground police.

“Fuck,” Lambert snarled as he watched a man in a brown uniform take a notepad from his pocket. When he bent to look at the car’s plates and found only empty bumper space, Lambert hissed, “We should take that guy out.”

“Right. That’s so much better than letting him go through the motions of reporting an abandoned car. He may not even file that report for hours. We’ll be gone by then.”

After the uniformed man moved on, Cole and Lambert drove a little farther down the road to a motel overlooking the modest lake. Since he didn’t have any more money or anything else of value tucked away inside his dirty prison-issue clothing, his only option was to use Brianne’s debit card again. He’d spotted her along the side of the road when he went back to check after leaving the truck stop the previous day, and Lambert couldn’t pick up any deception when Frank made his report, so there was every reason to believe that the police had been notified about her encounter with the escaped prisoners. That was why they’d slept in the car, which didn’t seem as attractive now that Jessup still hadn’t showed up.

When he spotted a man in a rumpled business suit stepping out of a room on the back side of the motel, he looked over at Lambert and said, “Stay here. I’ll take this guy.”

“What for?” Lambert asked. “Let’s just sit tight until that friend of yours gets here. Hell, we could just walk around until he gets here. Worst comes to worst, we drive away.”

“No,” Cole snapped. “We need another place to wait before someone starts asking too many questions. The car’s been reported stolen, so we should ditch it. We need a place to stay until Jessup gets here. We take this guy’s room and keep him here for no more than a day, sleep on a real bed, maybe catch up on some news.”

“We’re on the run, buddy,” Lambert said. “That kinda means we gotta rough it.”

“If this doesn’t work, then drive away. Just don’t bother coming back to ask for more help, and good fucking luck convincing Frank to go with you.” With that, Cole stormed out of the car and headed across the parking lot. Even as he strode toward the man in the rumpled suit, he replayed Lambert’s words in his head. They made sense. A lot more sense than what he was about to do. If only good sense could cause the cinching pain in his gut to subside. Either they’d burned through the blood he’d taken from Chop or they were becoming something more than just remains of a dead spore, because he could feel them slicing into his stomach and along the upper portion of his throat.

The man in the business suit looked at him suspiciously and quickened his steps toward a tan car with a sticker on its bumper bearing the name of a rental company. He had keys in hand, flipped through them and found the one that would unlock the trunk.

As Cole got closer, the pain inside his throat cut even deeper, until he could feel a jabbing ache reach up to the back of his eyes.

“Back off, guy,” the man in the business suit said while taking a defensive posture near the open trunk. When Cole kept coming, the man reached in past a suitcase to a tire iron strapped to the spare.

Cole slapped the keys from his hand and grabbed him by the neck. The man had gotten to the tire iron and barely pulled it from the trunk before Cole slammed the back of his head against the edge of the trunk lid. When he placed both hands around the man’s neck, he felt strong enough to push his thumbs all the way through to his spine.

“Don’t have to …do this,” the man croaked. “Take …car. Money. Take it.”

Cole eased up for a second and looked around. The door to the guy’s room was held open by another suitcase, so he dragged the man away from the car and marched inside. Like any of a hundred rooms he’d rented over the years, there was a TV on a long dresser to his right, table and chairs to the left, and a bed farther in on that same side. Directly ahead was a mirror, sink, and foldable luggage rack. The bathroom was to the left, in the rear corner of the room. While shoving the guy toward the bathroom, Cole made the mistake of letting his eyes linger on the mirror.

The reflection wasn’t the one he was used to.

It wasn’t inhuman, but wasn’t anything he’d seen before.

What rattled him most was the hunger written across his face. A minute ago he was hurting, tired, hunted, and close to panic, but the same man he’d always been. The thing staring back at him now was ruled by a lingering presence that tightened until he thought his insides would rupture. Was this what the Nymar felt? Did it make a difference?

Someone stepped into the room. “Just stay back, Lam,” Cole snarled. “I need to do this.”

“What in the hell are you doing to that fella?”

The voice wasn’t Lambert’s and it wasn’t Frank’s. It came from a big man wearing a leather vest that rattled noisily as he stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. In one hand he carried a bulky revolver, and the other was wrapped around the wooden handle of a small hatchet. Cole’s eyes fixated on the blood dripping from the hatchet handle. Part of his brain was relieved to see the sign of another Skinner, but the rest could only long to taste the drops that hit the carpet.

“Who the hell are you?” Cole demanded.

The man in the vest rushed up to Cole to place the edge of his tomahawk against his neck and crack the side of his pistol against the temple of the man in the suit, who’d been knocked out by a hatchet blow to the head. “Show me your hands, boy.”

Cole lowered the suited man to the floor. “Jessup?”

“That’s right. Ain’t seen you since you threw that yard sale at the Lancroft house.”

“You blew that place up, right?”

Jessup’s laugh sounded like it had been dragged over broken glass and doused in Southern Comfort. “Ain’t no better way to close down a yard sale. Who’s that fella down there?”

The hatchet blow had opened a gash on the side of the unconscious man’s head, but it wasn’t anything serious.

“He’s one of the Shadow Spore,” Cole bluffed while dragging the guy toward the bathroom.

“Yeah,” Jessup said. “I heard of them. Even took out a few dozen up in Montana, but they still wound up taking Helena and a few other cities. He must be a new one, though, since he still hasn’t shown any markings yet.”

Cole looked down. The unconscious businessman lay in a section of the room just dark enough to have brought out the tendrils of a true Shadow Spore. The teeth woven into the leather cords on Jessup’s vest rattled as he stepped up to place the barrel of his .48 holdout revolver against the base of Cole’s neck. The gun moved down just enough to lower Cole’s collar and expose the jagged black lines that snaked up from where the tendrils inside him were nestled.

“Shit,” Jessup growled. “You’ve been turned?”

Cole’s jaw tensed, and when he pried it open, he found his tongue darting out to brush along the edges of his teeth. There were no fangs and no spore connected to his heart to make them grow. There were only the shredded tendrils attached to him, instinctually slicing into his digestive tract like piano wire. Instinct, much like the sudden irresistible force that had brought him to the point of terrorizing an innocent man like just another one of the bloodsucking assholes he was supposed to hunt. “I’m not a Nymar,” he said.

Keeping the gun pressed against Cole’s chest, Jessup raised his hatchet and said, “I heard about what happened to you.”

“From who?”

“Rico.”

“That asshole tried to kill Paige,” Cole replied. “He’s a fucking traitor!”

“At least he ain’t a Nymar. Show me your scars.” When he didn’t get a response, Jessup thumbed his hammer back. “Don’t make me ask again.”

Cole recognized the look of a hunter preparing to kill its prey. Straightening up to his full height, he held up the hand that had previously been wrapped around the businessman’s neck and showed his scarred palm to Jessup. Almost immediately Jessup eased the .48’s hammer down and stuffed the gun into the holster clipped to his belt.

“See there?” Jessup said. “Just what I hoped. You’re a Skinner.”

“No I’m not,” Cole sighed. “This Nymar shit’s got a hold of me.”

“But you’re not a Nymar. You can’t be turned.”

Shaking his head, Cole felt the pain in his throat lessen while the cinching inside him became worse. “It’s the Shadow Spore. It can take root in a Skinner.”

“Sure it can. I’ve seen it happen to the rest of the Skinners in Helena.”

Cole’s head snapped up. Even though he thought he’d had a good grip on a bad situation, it had suddenly gotten worse.

Jessup nodded. “Oh yeah. It took some doing and surprised the holy hell outta me, but it happened. Some multiseeded bitch made the rounds and infected as many of us as she could. Those other Skinners got sick, tried to fight it off, but they were lost before we could do much about it. Soon as they sprouted fangs, their scars healed up. Don’t know if the spore was clearin’ out what it thought was an infection or that was its way of wiping out every bit of Skinner that was in ’em, but it happened across the board. It didn’t happen to you, so you still got a chance.”

“But you just said I can’t be turned,” Cole pointed out.

“That’s what you need to keep tellin’ yerself the next time you get an urge like the one you got here,” Jessup replied while nodding down at the unconscious businessman. “Just because those bloodsuckers infected you don’t mean you need to give in to it.”

“It …hurts,” Cole said through gritted teeth. Ashamed by hearing himself say those words, he walked away from the man on the floor.

Jessup didn’t miss a beat before kneeling down to the businessman. “You know what’ll hurt worse? When I jam this hatchet through your chest like I did to the folks in Helena who used to be Skinners.”

Before that had a chance to sink in, Lambert shouted from the parking lot. It was an excited yelp, followed by the slap of hurried footsteps that brought the inmate to the door of the motel room. “This asshole kidnapped a girl!”

“What?” Cole asked.

Jessup stomped across the room toward the door. Although Lambert steeled himself to stand in his way, he changed his mind when he saw the tomahawk clutched in Jessup’s fist. “Did she get away?” Jessup asked. After shoving Lambert aside, he started cursing in a raspy snarl.

“Check that,” Lambert said. “He didn’t kidnap her. Just hunted her down …again.”

“What are you?” Jessup grunted. “Psychic?”

“Yeah.”

“Then tell me which way she went.”

Lambert screwed his face into a defiant, jailhouse sneer and looked to Cole. “Remember that young one the Full Blood was talking about? That’s her.”

“Take the car and get out of here,” Cole said to the inmate.

The older man seemed to be favoring his left leg, but that turned into a more pronounced limp as Jessup circled around to the driver’s seat of a pickup truck parked next to the businessman’s car. “Best get out of town altogether,” he said. “No tellin’ if those cameras are workin’ or who was watching when this one here decided to assault a paying customer.”

Cole looked up and around to find a few clunky surveillance cameras mounted to the corner of the overlap of the motel’s roof. Not even the painful hunger he’d been feeling was a good enough excuse for that kind of recklessness. Tossing the car keys to Lambert, he grabbed the passenger door of the pickup that was still swinging on its hinges.

“Where the hell am I supposed to go?” Lambert asked.

Before Cole could come up with something, Jessup said, “Raton. It’s about two hours from here, just across the New Mexican border. Just take 69 to I-25 and head south.”