The Gates of Byzantium

CHAPTER 22 BLAINE

They appeared as soon as the sun abandoned the world for another day. They weren’t just on the rooftop of the Sortys department store, they were all around them. He couldn’t see them, so he didn’t know how many there actually were, but he could hear and feel them along the walls, the floor, and every inch of the building, and that told him everything he needed to know.

Sandra lay on the couch in his arms, as quiet as he had ever seen her. With the painkillers still kicking around in his system, Blaine didn’t feel a whole lot of pain, but the drugs also kept him wide awake for most of the night, listening to the ghouls as they traveled back and forth, through, above, around, and, he swore, underneath him, too.

He tried not to think about what was happening on the second floor of the mall. He tried not to picture those poor souls up there. Did his best to shut out the images of teeth marks along arms and legs and necks of prone victims, hanging somewhere between life and death.

Did they know what was happening to them? Were they crying out right now, tormented by the fact that no one could hear them?

His skin rippled with a sensation Blaine hadn’t felt in a long time. A combination of fear and shame and hopelessness.

“Is it the pain?” Sandra asked.

“No,” he whispered back.

“Oh.”

It stayed with him until he finally fell asleep around three in the morning. He closed his eyes, and when he woke up, the feeling was still with him, in his mouth, like a lingering bad meal regurgitated over and over.

He also felt the renewed, unwanted sensation in his side. He quietly pulled his pill bottle from his pocket and shook two pills out, then popped them into his mouth.

“Go easy on them,” Sandra said, lying against him, her eyes still closed.

“Just two.”

“How many do you have left?”

“Not a lot.”

“Go easy,” she said again.

They heard footsteps approaching, and Sandra untangled herself from him and stood up just as the door opened and Mason came in. He was wearing his hazmat suit, but not the gas mask, looking absurd with his head sticking out of the shiny gray uniform. Maddie was behind him, but Lenny, who sometimes watched the door, wasn’t outside this morning. Blaine had learned last night that the yahoo with the country accent was Gerry. He wasn’t there, either.

“Rise and shine,” Mason said. “Decision time. Are you with us or are you against us?”

He smiled at them, but Blaine didn’t believe there was anything remotely heartfelt about the smile. Just to prove Blaine’s thoughts correct, Mason casually laid his right palm over the butt of his holstered Browning.

Blaine looked past Mason at Maddie. The two of them were almost the same height and looked like teenagers playing at being soldiers. Maddie was clearly uncomfortable with what was happening, but she looked committed nevertheless. If not to Mason, then to survival, and that meant standing behind the man with the gun.

Blaine wondered if he could get to Mason and end this, but the man was too far enough away. Even on his best days — and he was far from that at the moment — there was no way he could take that distance before Mason shot him dead.

“I don’t think we have much of a choice,” Blaine said.

“You speak for her, too?” Mason asked, eyes going to Sandra.

“Yes,” Sandra said quietly.

“Are you sure?” Mason smiled. “You don’t sound like you’re very sure.”

He sounds like a fucking game show host. All of this is just fun and games to him.

“Yes,” Sandra said again, louder, though not necessarily with any more conviction than the first time.

“All right, then.” Mason clapped his hands. “First order of business is breakfast. Then we’ll get the two of you fitted for suits. You look like the kind of gal who could make the color gray work. You certainly got the tits and hips for it.”

Sandra glanced over briefly at Blaine and frowned.

He tried to smile reassuringly back at her.

God, I hope this works…

It didn’t take much to convince Blaine that Mason didn’t really trust them. For one, the man wouldn’t give them their guns back. Or let them carry any kind of weapons at all. The only thing he issued them, other than their ugly gray hazmat suits and gas masks, were radios.

“What about our guns?” Blaine asked.

“You won’t need them,” Mason said. “You see anything, you hop on the radio and we come running.”

“You get guns when you prove you deserve them,” Gerry added.

Mason left them with the cowboy, who sat by himself at a table across the food court from them. Gerry ate greedily from a can of SPAM. Blaine wondered how long it would take before the cowboy accidentally stuffed too much of the canned meat into his mouth and choked on it.

With my luck, never sounds about right.

“When would that be?” Blaine asked instead.

“When you deserve them,” Gerry said. “Which part of that don’t you understand? You want I should speak slower so you can habla?”

Blaine grinned back at him. He wasn’t sure which part of Gerry he disliked more — his face or his country twang.

“What exactly will we be doing?” Sandra asked Maddie, who was sitting at another table nearby.

Sandra sat next to Blaine, both of them in their hazmat suits, the gas masks on the round metal table in front of them. The seat was uncomfortable and dug into Blaine’s ass even through the suit. He picked at the can of tuna with a flimsy plastic spork while Sandra ate a can of chicken. There was plenty of canned food to go around, Maddie told them, showing them boxes and boxes of the stuff in a storage room next to the Sortys employee lounge.

“Guard duty, mostly,” Maddie said.

“Without weapons?” Blaine asked.

“Guard watch,” Maddie corrected herself. “You don’t need weapons for that.”

The food court was next to the non-working escalator they had previously taken up to the second floor, and Blaine could see the guy Maddie had been standing guard with yesterday still up there. His name was Bobby, and he had yet to take the gas mask off, so Blaine still didn’t know what he looked like underneath it.

“It’s not that bad,” Maddie said. For a second, Blaine thought she was trying to convince herself more than them. “After a while, you get used to it. It’s boring work. When it’s your turn, you stand on the second floor and watch the sleepers. That’s what we call them.”

“Food” is more like it.

“What happens if one of them wakes up?” Sandra asked.

“They don’t,” Maddie said.

“But what happens if they do?”

“They don’t,” Maddie repeated. “At least, none of them have woken up before in all the time I’ve been here.”

“You don’t know what the ghouls did to them?” Blaine asked.

“Not a clue,” she said. Then, “‘Ghouls’?”

“That’s what they look like to me,” he lied. “Ghouls.”

Maddie smiled a bit. “Yeah, you’re kind of right. They are ghoulish looking, aren’t they?”

Everything about this is ghoulish.

“What now?” Blaine asked.

“I’ll show you the rest of the mall first,” Maddie said.

“Bullshit,” Gerry said, his voice coming out of nowhere. For a moment Blaine had forgotten he was even there. “Why the fuck are you showing them where everything is?”

Maddie flashed him an annoyed glance. “They already joined us, dickhead. What’s the point of hiding things from them now?”

“Just because they say they’re ‘with us’ doesn’t mean they’re actually with us, you idiot.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Maddie spat back.

Gerry shot up from his seat, so fast he almost knocked the can of SPAM from his hands. Blaine instinctively reached for his hip, for the gun that wasn’t there. Not that Maddie needed his help. She sprang up from the table and glared back at Gerry.

Blaine was wondering how badly this was going to go when all of their radios squawked at the same time, and he heard a male voice that was new to him: “They’re moving.”

“Where?” Mason’s voice responded through the radio.

“Leaving, I think,” the man said.

“Who’s that?” Sandra asked.

“Dirk,” Maddie said. “He’s the one Mason sent to watch over the people who came through here yesterday, before you guys showed up.”

Will and the others.

“He’s watching them now?” Blaine asked, trying to sound as neutral as possible. He could see Gerry, still standing and wound up, watching him closely from across the food court.

“He’s been watching them since yesterday,” Maddie said.

“Yeah, they’re definitely moving,” the man named Dirk said through the radio. “If you want to do something, this is going to be it. We’re going to lose our chance in a few hours.”

“No,” Mason said. “Stay out of sight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Did I stutter?”

“Come on, we can take them,” Dirk insisted.

“Stay the fuck out of sight,” Mason said.

“Okay, okay,” Dirk said, and the radio went quiet.

Maddie picked up her can of tuna and tossed it into a trash can that was almost topped off. “Dirk’s an okay guy. He can be a bit of an idiot sometimes, but he’s a guy, so that comes with the territory.”

“Tell me about it,” Sandra said.

The two women exchanged a brief knowing look.

“Come on, I’ll show you where everything else is,” Maddie said.

Blaine and Sandra got up and followed Maddie away from the food court. He could feel Gerry’s eyes, like lasers, burrowing deep into his back the entire way.

“SPAM can last for over five years if you store it right,” Maddie said. “Of course, whether you want to still be eating SPAM five years from now is another matter entirely.”

“You sound like you know this from experience,” Blaine said.

She laughed. “Yeah, we weren’t exactly the richest people in our county.”

“Where you from originally?”

“Travis County. Around the Austin area.”

“I thought Austin was a rich city,” Sandra said.

“I said around the area, not actually in it. We didn’t have a lot, so we made do. I also grew up hunting. I killed my first deer when I was thirteen. I’m pretty handy with a hunting rifle, but this assault rifle stuff is all new to me. It kicks like a bastard.”

“What about the country boy?” Blaine asked. “Gerry.”

Maddie snorted. “He’s mostly talk. Don’t let him get to you.”

“He got me pretty good yesterday,” Blaine said, feeling the soreness in his side all over again.

“Yeah, he’s good with the cheap shots, too, you have to watch out for that.”

Maddie led them back through the Sortys department store, where the group made their base camp. They passed racks of clothing and shoes and towels sitting undisturbed on the same hangers from eight months ago. There was just enough sunlight from the windows up front to navigate by.

“Why Sortys?” Sandra asked.

“Mason decided,” Maddie said. “It’s close to the food court and it faces the highway. Other than that, I don’t know.”

“Does he decide everything?” Blaine asked.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Who put him in charge?”

“He was the guy who made the deal with the creatures. The ghouls.”

“How did that happen?”

“I don’t know. Bobby and me met up with him about two months after everything went tits up. He already had it set up pretty good here, with Gerry and Dirk, and a few other guys.”

“Lenny?”

“No, Lenny came later. I don’t even remember those other guys’ names. Dan or Phil or something.” She shrugged. “Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes. They’re dead now, anyway.”

“What happened?”

“People driving by, like you two. That’s why Mason pulled up on you like he did. He doesn’t want to take any more chances. The last time he did, his guys got killed.”

“Is that why he didn’t attack the other people who rolled in before us?”

“Pretty much. He’s an asshole, but he’s a smart asshole. He doesn’t fight battles he knows he can’t win.”

“I guess that’s why he decided to betray his own kind,” Sandra said.

Blaine saw Maddie physically flinch next to them.

Oh, Sandra, you gotta learn to stay quiet, baby. This is no time to be riling up the only person who may be our friend in this entire place.

He said quickly, “He was trying to survive. Hard to blame him for that. We all do what we have to do.”

“That’s right,” Maddie said.

Sandra looked over at him, half angry and half questioning. He shook his head back at her, thankful Maddie had moved farther in front of them and couldn’t see.

They eventually reached a back hallway in the department store Blaine guessed used to house the Sortys staff.

“This is where we stay,” Maddie said. She led them past a half-dozen rooms, all offices that now held sleeping bags and sofas and boxes of food and supplies. “I guess eventually you’ll be able to grab one of these rooms.”

“When Mason’s sure we’re fully onboard,” Blaine said.

“Yeah, something like that.”

Maddie led them to the very back and pushed open the door into a room about the same size as the employee lounge. There was a bank of security monitors along one side of the wall, and a half-circle desk and a small jail on the other side. Half of the jail cell contained boxes, the other half housing five, maybe six plastic moving crates filled with weapons. He saw shotguns, handguns, and hunting rifles. Everything was just far enough away from the bars that he wouldn’t be able to reach in and grab a gun.

“Store security,” Maddie said. “Cameras don’t work anymore, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with the jail. All the weapons and ammo we could find from the mall and from the buildings around the city we’ve been able to search so far. People out here really like their guns.”

Blaine spotted his Remington 870 leaning against a crate.

“Yeah, that’s yours,” Maddie said. “You’ll get it when Mason says you can have it back. Before then, I can’t help you.”

“Who has the key to the jail cell?” he asked.

She smiled at him. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Is that an invitation to search you?”

She laughed. “You wish.”

Mason has the key. Of course he does.

“Come on,” Maddie said, and headed back to the door.

Blaine and Sandra followed her out, and when Maddie had gotten far enough ahead of them, Sandra said in a low voice, “Are you trying to piss me off on purpose?”

“What?” he said, matching her quiet pitch.

“First that bullshit with Mason out in the hallway, and now the flirting?”

“Flirting? I wasn’t flirting.”

She rolled her eyes at him and walked ahead. “Whatever.”

Blaine followed her, wondering if she was right. Was he flirting with Maddie? He didn’t think he was. He was being friendly, trying to win her over. That was the point, wasn’t it? She was the only person here who was a potential ally, and he was doing his best to bring her over to their side. If he was flirting at all, it wasn’t on purpose.

Or at least, he didn’t think it was.

Blaine was still trying to justify himself in his own mind when he heard two soft, faded pop-pop sounds in the distance.

He stopped and listened and heard the echoes.

Maddie and Sandra heard them, too, and also stopped in the hallway.

“Was that…?” Sandra said.

“I think so,” Maddie said. She pulled her radio free and keyed it: “Did anyone else hear that? Were those gunshots?”

“It’s Dirk,” Mason said through the radio. He sounded more annoyed than angry. “That son of a whore. I told him to stay the hell away from those people.”

“Stupid Dirk,” Maddie said, looking at the dead man lying face-down on the floor, still wearing his hazmat suit. The man would look like he was sleeping if not for the two holes in his back and the blood pooled inside his suit.

They were inside some kind of clinic along the highway, across from where Will and the others had spent the night before. That was according to Mason, who had been tracking Dirk’s movements since he had sent the man out here to watch them. As for Dirk, he did something Mason told him not to — he showed himself to Will’s group — and ended up dead for his efforts.

The lobby showed signs of a struggle, with a couple of overturned chairs and blood that wasn’t Dirk’s, because all of Dirk’s blood was in his suit. There were two shell casings, so Dirk had never even gotten off a shot, though his killers had taken his gun.

Gerry came out of the hallway behind them, holding a radio in one hand. “The moron turned off his radio and left it in one of the rooms.”

“Dumb bastard,” Mason said. He looked up at them. “See what happens when people don’t do what I tell them? I told Dirk those people were too dangerous, but he didn’t listen. This is what happens when you don’t listen to me.”

They were all wearing gas masks, and it was odd seeing the world through the clear lens. He could tell from the way Sandra fidgeted in her suit next to him that she felt the same way. The suit was surprisingly comfortable in the sun, which he supposed was the point of the special fabric. The gas mask was another story. Besides the fact that it made his voice sound strange, he didn’t like the feel of the plastic pressed against his face. Maddie and the others didn’t seem to even realize they were wearing masks anymore.

“You sure you don’t know who they were?” Mason asked Blaine.

“Yeah,” Blaine said. From his experience, people who couldn’t lie tended to over-explain things, so Blaine kept his answer as short as possible.

“Doesn’t matter. They’re gone anyway.”

“We should go after them,” Gerry said.

Mason glanced over at him. “Why the hell would we want to do a fool thing like that?”

“They killed one of us. We can’t just let them get away with it.”

“He was an idiot who didn’t follow orders. You want to disobey orders, too?”

“That’s not what I said,” Gerry said, and Blaine could hear his voice getting softer, less confrontational. “I’m just saying, this sets a bad precedent.”

Mason laughed. “Precedent? You’re out of your mind. Just do what I say. Shit, I’ve kept you people alive for this long, haven’t I?” He looked over at Blaine and Sandra. “The noobs get manual labor duty. Bring him back to the mall.”

Mason turned and left, with Gerry following silently.

“Were the two of you friends?” Blaine asked Maddie.

Maddie looked down at Dirk. “I wouldn’t go that far, although he wasn’t really that bad a guy. Probably a bit too high-strung and thought too much of himself, but that doesn’t make him much different than the rest of these bozos. But friends? I wouldn’t say that, no.”

She followed the others out of the clinic.

Blaine and Sandra exchanged a look, then glanced down at the dead body. They had seen plenty of dead bodies, but never one in a hazmat suit before.

“Maybe we can find a wheelbarrel to move him,” Sandra said.

“Or a shopping cart,” Blaine said.

Sandra sighed. “You take the arms and I’ll take the legs…”

They didn’t have to go far with Dirk. The others were waiting outside in a red Ford truck. Sandra and Blaine grunted their way from the clinic to the parking lot and tossed Dirk into the back, where Gerry was sitting. He moved away as the body landed near his legs and shot Blaine a look. Sandra and Blaine climbed into the truck and sat across from Gerry while Mason drove them back to Willowstone Mall.

Back at the mall, Sandra and Blaine followed Maddie to the second floor, where she introduced them to Bobby. He was a young kid with long blond hair and dark brown eyes, and he looked much older than his twenty-two years. But then again, they all looked older.

Bobby had shown up in Beaumont with Maddie, the two having met on the road. He was also mute, which explained why he was always so quiet. He nodded to them when Maddie introduced him, then drifted off, turning back to the sleepers scattered about the second floor.

“That’s just how he is,” Maddie said. “But if you need someone to watch your back, you won’t find a better partner. Plus, he won’t talk your ears off.”

Blaine glanced over, wondering if Bobby had heard, but the young man didn’t react if he had.

“How many of them are up here?” Sandra asked.

“Thousands,” Maddie said. “I tried counting a few months ago, but I stopped around 2,000.”

“Over 2,000?”

“Yeah.”

“Where do they come from?”

“I don’t know. Most of them were already here when I arrived with Bobby. The rest were brought here by the ghouls. Sometimes they’d show up with just one, sometimes dozens at a time. You never know.” She shook her head, and he thought she looked almost sad. “Try not to think too much about it. After a while, you get used to it.”

Maddie turned and walked back down the escalator.

Looking after her, Blaine wondered if Maddie really had gotten used to it, or if she was putting on a front for them. He hadn’t heard a whole lot of conviction in her voice and thought it was probably more of the latter.

Maddie is the key.

They spent most of the afternoon on the rooftop, wearing their hazmat suits and occasionally taking off their gas masks to drink warm water or eat canned fruits. Guard duty meant watching the empty highway and the wind picking up debris and tossing it around the empty city. Blaine had never felt so alone as he did sitting up there with Sandra and Maddie, guarding a city that had housed over 100,000 souls at one point.

Every now and then, Mason, Lenny, or Gerry (sometimes a combination of the three) would leave the mall, but they were always back less than an hour later. Each time they left, Blaine found himself wondering if he could hurt Maddie, take her gun, and escape with Sandra. He probably could, even in his condition.

But how far could he and Sandra go on foot? Their Silverado was parked in front of Sortys, but there was no sign of the key. Without the Silverado, they would have to take one of the other cars in the parking lot. And if they couldn’t find one with the keys nearby and a working battery under the hood, they would have to look farther out. Blaine wondered if Mason would let them go if they did make a run for it, the way he had refused to confront Will’s group. That was the best-case scenario. The worst case had Mason taking it personally and committing to chasing them down.

No, not yet.

If things went sideways, he could consider that option. There was still another way, one that didn’t involve hurting Maddie. One that involved convincing her.

“You and Bobby came straight to Beaumont?” Blaine asked Maddie.

“We spent a few weeks in Austin, gathering supplies,” she said, between spoonfuls of pineapple dripping with syrup. “Then there were smaller towns between here and there. We thought about trying Houston, but it was too big. You know what big means, right?”

“A lot of them.”

“Right. So we mostly avoided Houston. I know this guy with a cabin near Sabine Lake. It has good hunting grounds, and there aren’t a lot of people there. We were headed there when we stumbled across Mason in Beaumont.”

“He introduced himself with those rifles, too?”

She snorted. “Yeah. He made us the same offer he gave you. It looked like he had a good thing going here. Plus, you know how it is on the road. It’s sleep with one eye open, always looking over your shoulder at the sky.” She put down the spoon and looked off at the highway in the distance. “If I’m really, really lucky, I’ll make it another year. Meanwhile, I don’t want to spend every second of it wondering when they’re going to get me. You know? That’s no way to live.”

Sandra watching Maddie closely, and maybe he saw her soften a bit toward the other woman. It was hard not to. Maddie wasn’t a monster — not even close.

“You did what you had to,” Blaine said.

“Yeah, I know,” Maddie nodded. “But like you said, it’s a hell of a way to survive.”

They sat on the hard roof and said nothing for a while. Blaine thought he heard car engines in the distance, but noticed he was the only one who turned his head. He waited, but nothing appeared, and he chalked it up to his imagination running overtime.

Maddie saw his face and smiled. “It’s the quiet. It plays with your mind. Makes you think you’re hearing something that isn’t there. Pretty soon you’ll start to see things, too.” She handed him a pair of binoculars. “Use them before you grab the radio. It’ll usually turn out to be nothing.”

“How many people come through here a day?” Sandra asked.

“Once or twice a week is more like it. Yesterday was the first time we saw two groups of people in the same day.” She narrowed her eyes amusedly at Blaine. “You sure you don’t know those people?”

“What did they look like?” he asked.

“Doesn’t matter. They’re gone. Probably in Louisiana by now if they keep on the I-10.”

“What about this cabin at Sabine Lake?”

“What about it?”

“You don’t want to find out if it’s still there?”

“Oh, it’s still there. Where’s it going to go? It’s a cabin.”

Blaine caught Sandra’s eyes, and knew she understood where he was going.

“You don’t think it’s worth getting to anymore?” Sandra asked. “The cabin?”

“Compared to this?” Maddie said. “You know how many of them are out there. It’s going to take a fortress to keep them out of a cabin, even one that remote. Sooner or later, they’ll find it.”

“What about an island,” Blaine said.

“Island?” Maddie looked over at him. “What about an island?”

“I bet an island could keep the ghouls out. Even better than a cabin or a mall could.”

“Yeah, sure, but where would you find an island?”

“Let me show you something,” Blaine said.

He found a ham radio in a Best Buy next to the Sortys, then grabbed a handful of new batteries from a rack near the cash registers. He made sure Gerry, Mason, and Lenny were nowhere to be found before he powered the ham radio up and hunted down the FEMA frequency.

“What am I listening for?” Maddie asked.

“Give it a minute,” Blaine said.

He stopped fiddling with the dial when he heard the familiar female voice:

“…Song Island on Beaufont Lake in Louisiana. We are broadcasting on the FEMA frequency to any survivors out there. We want you to know there is hope. There are survivors on Song Island. We have food, supplies, electricity, and protection against the darkness. If you are receiving this recorded message, we encourage you to make your way to us. I repeat: we have food, supplies, electricity, and protection against the darkness. Hello. If anyone can hear me out there. This is Song Island on Beaufont Lake in Louisiana. We are broadcasting on the FEMA frequency …”

Blaine was watching Maddie’s expression the entire time, trying to gauge her reaction to the message. At first she looked confused by what she was hearing, but that quickly gave way to shock, followed by…hope?

Or maybe he was reading her wrong. He was never particularly good at reading women. Sandra knew that firsthand.

“Is it true?” Maddie asked, once the message started repeating itself.

“To be honest, I don’t know,” Blaine said. “But if it is true…?”

“What about the water? The ghouls can’t cross water?”

“I don’t know that, either. But they’ve been on that island for months now, and they’re still out there.”

“But you don’t know for sure,” Maddie insisted.

“I don’t know anything for sure, no,” Blaine said. “I just know that this message has been repeating for months now. Every day, without fail.”

“It could be on some kind of a loop.”

“I’m sure it is. But the fact it’s running in a loop at all…”

“Power,” Maddie said, the realization dawning on her. “They have power.”

He could see it. He had her. Or he was close. “Exactly. They have a power source. You can’t run a radio tower without electricity.”

“It could just be an emergency generator. We have them here, too.”

“Sure, but to broadcast continuously, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for months now?”

She nodded. “That’s a good point.” She went quiet for a moment, lost in thought. Then, “It would be nice to have power again. Plumbing. Running water…”

“You could come with us,” he said.

She looked up at him with genuine surprise. “Where? Song Island?”

“Why not?” Sandra said. “You and Bobby. You wouldn’t have to do this anymore. I know this isn’t something you want to be doing for the rest of your life.”

They didn’t have to be mind readers to know how Maddie felt about doing this forever. They could read it on her face.

“Come with us,” Sandra said.

Blaine was glad to let Sandra make the invitation. It wouldn’t have sounded nearly as believable or sincere coming from him, even if he did mean every word of it. He was never particularly good at playing the softy, either.

“Bobby, too?” Maddie asked.

“Yes, of course, Bobby, too,” Sandra said.

Maddie nodded. But she didn’t answer right away.

Blaine exchanged a quick look with Sandra. “We’re almost there.”

“I need to talk to Bobby about this,” Maddie said.

It took her less than thirty minutes to talk to Bobby.

Blaine took that as a good sign, though he could have been very, very wrong. Fatally wrong. But Blaine didn’t think he was. Still, the idea of putting his and Sandra’s fate in another person’s hands made him skittish. In those thirty minutes of waiting, he went through every possible scenario, most of them ending with him realizing, too late, that he had read Maddie wrong from the very beginning.

By the time Maddie climbed back up to the rooftop of the Willowstone Mall where he was sitting with Sandra, it was two in the afternoon, and the sun was at its full force, blasting away at everything under it. Even inside the protective hazmat suits, Blaine could feel sweat dripping along his armpits and back.

He heard sneakers crunching gravel and looked over as Maddie walked toward them. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t read the expression on her face. He wondered if she had gone to Mason and sold them out, or if he had cemented a new ally.

God, don’t let me be wrong about her.

“Did you talk to Bobby?” Blaine asked.

“Yeah,” Maddie nodded.

She paused and seemed to look off at the highway in the distance. He imagined she was trying to work her way up to something.

Blaine exchanged a worried look with Sandra.

Finally, Maddie said, “We’re going to have to kill Mason and the others, you know that, right?”

Blaine nodded. He fully expected that. “Yeah, we know.”

This time Maddie looked over at Sandra when she said, “Because he’s not going to let us go. Not without a fight. And if we leave him alive, he’ll come after us. Sooner or later, we’ll have to deal with him, and it might as well be now.”

“We understand,” Sandra said. “How are we going to do this?”

“Depending on when we leave, I’ve got a few ideas.”

Blaine grinned at her. “You’ve been thinking about this for a while, haven’t you? How to take out Mason and the rest?”

She grinned back at him. “Maybe.”

He listened to her lay it out. It was a pretty good plan. He was right; it was obvious she had given it some thought even before they had shown up. The more he thought about it, turning it over in his head as they stood up there on the roof discussing it, the more Blaine was convinced it could work. All they really needed was a little bit of luck and some timing. And if push came to shove, it was four against three, so the odds were in their favor.

It was a good plan.

That is, it was a good plan, until Lenny decided to fuck everything up.