Aside from the lamp affixed to his head, he couldn’t see much in the dark, and he squinted down at the dog, who was trussed up in cabled bonds and making weird noises in its throat. The thing had needed a rest, even though it could move surprisingly jiffy when properly motivated.
Cedric smiled. Stamp had told them that they could throw around some payback tonight. The scrubs were territorial, the boss had said, and putting them on warning obviously hadn’t been enough. They needed a stronger lesson in being good neighbors, so the crew had gone to the compound, thinking to lure one of the scrubs out by using a visz lens that the gang had already found. But then a dog had emerged instead of any humans, and Cedric had drugged it before it could bite, then taken what they could get for a captive.
“Tym 2 go,” he said to the dog.
The critter didn’t move, but Cedric hadn’t expected it to. Lazy-donna was potent stuff.
He fired up the power on the jet-propelled speed braces he’d fitted over his boots tonight, then fixed his taserwhip to the creature’s bound muzzle. All set now, he sprang away, hitting the ground running, dragging the dog behind him.
His soles skimmed the ground, and they traveled in leaps and bounds, the sound of his running like quick flaring gasps. The FlyShoes elevated him about two feet off the ground and dug into his calves, up to his knees, but they felt like an extension of his legs, too.
In the meantime, the dog tumbled behind him, and Cedric toyed with the notion of turning on his whip to give it a good shock.
He saw a rock jutting out of the ground ahead and, electing a different mode of
giddy-up, dog
, he headed straight for it, knowing he could clear it while the canine would get a sharp thunk to the hide.
Pushing off with one foot, Cedric sailed up, yanking the dog with him. He landed, expecting to feel the airborne animal wiggling on its whip-leash, then crashing to the ground.
But he didn’t feel anything, and he slowed down, then came to a skidding stop. When he jerked at the taserwhip to retrieve it, the lash snicked right back to him, as light as could be.
Empty.
He stared at it, then ran a hand along its length to the end, where it was frayed.
Damn it, he’d havet a new one, and they didn’t come cheap.
Grunting, he turned back to where the dog had probably gotten caught on the rock, then took an aggressive leap back toward it.
Something came toward him—a thick branch?—and Cedric caught it in the stomach, flipping, head over heels, then smacked the ground face-first.
As he lay there, his nose, chin, and cheeks vibrating to numbness, he thought he heard a mumble. A chewing wordy sound.
He was barely able to glance up, where the cracked lamp attached to his head showcased the dog, who stood in wobbling, drugged confusion while it moved its whimpering mouth like a drunkard.
Its unbound mouth.
Cedric absorbed that. Had the rock snagged on the muzzle and stripped it off?
But what about the dog’s other bonds? What’d happened to . . . ?
He never finished the question, because a grating laugh took its place.
It’d come from behind Cedric, and shivers spiked every inch of his flesh.
While wincing and semibarking, the scared dog backed away from whatever it was.
Then the creature made a seething sound—an awful hiss—and the dog scrambled, fell down, and began crawling off, impeded by the drugs.
Cedric stared after the critter, his mind taking a million years to catch up until he heard footsteps behind him.
Slish, slish,
they went over the dirt.
As Cedric foggily watched the canine stumbling even farther away, he felt the thing behind him going through his pockets. It found the silver teeth, then tore off a piece of material from Cedric’s shirt, as if it were reluctant to touch the objects.
The teeth jangled, and Cedric let loose with a curse. Fuck these stupid animals out here in the Badlands. When he got up, he was gonna . . .
Then Cedric felt one of those teeth placed against the back of his neck, where it was traced down his spine, creating a batch of chills.
But he wasn’t going to be a pussy.
“Cut it ot,” Cedric said. His lips didn’t work so well. “Im gonna work u ovr whn I . . .”
He choked on a fragment and realized it was part of his own incisor.
The thing removed the silver tooth from Cedric’s spine, and silence followed.
More silence. And more.
Then, after a few heartbeats, Cedric told himself it was gone.
He was just preparing to push off the ground to get back on his feet when something punched into his back and jerked his spine out, surprising him for the last time ever.
14
G
abriel
Three Hours Later
A
fter Gabriel returned from tracking Chaplin, he found Mariah in the common area, safe and sound, sitting on a crate in a corner, wrapped in an all-encompassing gray thermal blanket and wearing a knit hat that pulled over her ears, as though she wanted to shut everything out. Her neighbors surrouded her, and all of them—including two denizens he’d never met before—looked up at his entrance, sticking close to Mariah, still cocooning her.
Their faces were a study in unreadability, though Mariah’s own features practically screeched of the terror that even now dogged her.
Gabriel froze under the larger unresponsiveness, because it looked a whole lot like a prelude to group accusation, as if they were thinking that he might’ve brought all this trouble from Stamp down upon them.
Or maybe he was imagining it. A guilty, blacked-out, blood-glutted conscience tended to do that when it had no other explanations for those two dead bodies that’d been found before tonight—the reason Stamp had descended on them now.
Gabriel endured the scrutiny, until, from behind, Chaplin came stumbling out of the tunnel as best as he could while still under the effect of the drugs that Stamp’s crew had used on him. When everyone saw the dog, the room came alive, the neighbors separating from Mariah as she stood.
“Chaplin!” she said as the dog accelerated and then jumped at her, knocking her to the floor so that she was turned away from the rest of them, allowing for a private moment. She opened her blanket to embrace the dog, not even seeming to mind that his coat was damp from the quick shower he’d taken after Gabriel had escorted him back home.
Earlier, when Gabriel had found Chaplin, his fur had been matted with dirt, which the canine had coated himself with to distract from the scent of his blood out there in the night. Chaplin had initially warned Gabriel away, telling his temporary master that he was bleeding from being dragged along with a taserwhip, so Gabriel had kept his distance while ushering him back. Then, while Gabriel had checked Mariah’s common-area visz to see that she was secure among her neighbors, Chaplin had used the sensors in the cleaning station to water the blood off him, and Gabriel had lent a hand in toweling the dog dry. All the while, Chaplin had kept fixing a cryptic half-angry, half-regretful look on Gabriel.
No telling what that had been about, but it made Gabriel think that something had really changed between him and Chaplin, who was blanking him out yet again. Something bigger than Gabriel was grasping.
Now, in the common area, the weight of all these silent stares from the Badlanders pressed him near to the ground, too.
One by one, he met their heavy gazes: Zel, Sammy, and the oldster, people he’d already met who suddenly came off like strangers. Then he acknowledged one of the new people who’d joined the crowd tonight—a short, hardy woman with doe-brown eyes and dark skin who wore a brownish-gray scarf that covered her head, plus matching robes that swathed her body. She was holding hands with a man wearing khaki trousers over his long legs and a brown henley over his barrel chest, his hair brown, his skin a natural tan that was made all the lighter by time spent under the ground.
Was this Hana and Pucci, the neighbors who didn’t leave their shelter as often as the rest?
Speaking to the group, Gabriel jerked his chin at Chaplin, where the dog was licking Mariah’s face and she was hugging her friend as if he’d come back from the dead.
“I found him making his way back to the sanctuary,” Gabriel said, “all padded down with blood and grime. Your delightful neighbors shot him up with drugs and bound him. They were taking him back to Stamp’s place, probably so they could get some captive leverage in this war they’ve declared.”
From beneath Mariah’s blanket, where she was still cradling her dog, he heard Chaplin talking.
Zel translated. “He says that Chompers was wearing FlyShoes when he captured him, so he was dragging Chaplin along the ground until the ropes rubbed off and freed him. He hid from the thug until the guy just gave up and left.”
As Gabriel watched Mariah and Chaplin in their corner of the room, he felt cold to the bone. For some reason, he doubted the dog’s story. Chompers had just given up and left? Right.
But even under the thrall of drugs, Chaplin’s mind was strong enough to bar Gabriel. Maybe, when the dog could think straight, he’d let his temporary master in again.
The oldster stood by Zel’s side, his spine curved as if in protective caution as she fired off what everyone else in the room had to be thinking.
“We thought you might not be coming back, Gabriel. You were gone a real long time.”
The comment didn’t exactly condemn him, but he thought it might lead to a sort of trial—one that could include questions about where he’d been on the nights when the first victim, and then Whale Hide, had perished. One that would explain how the community had found itself in Stamp’s vengeful sights tonight.
Maybe his time here had come to an end, Gabriel thought, but he wasn’t going to go that easily. Not without knowing more about Annie.
“After I came across Chaplin,” he said, explaining just what had taken him so long out there, “we almost ran into a party of Stamp’s men on their way back from messing with you all. They were about a half mile from the community, laughing and springing around on their FlyShoes, acting like little kids until they ran off and left the way clear for us to get the rest of the way here. I’m guessing they were going back without another captive because of that gunshot I heard early on.”
Sammy was watching whatever he had in his palm—the item that Gabriel had seen him with earlier, over the visz. Now Gabriel realized that the man
did
have a portable screen in hand, and that he was monitoring the outside with it.
“Zel scared them off with a warning shot,” he said. “It was enough to give the thugs some distance but not enough to make them run all the way home, because they taunted us from a spot where they felt safer. ‘C’ot, c’ot,’ they kept yelling. ‘Cum git ur woofwoof.’ They had on those FlyShoes, so they moved fast. We didn’t engage them, especially since Mariah said you were out there on Chaplin’s path.”
So that was what the shot had been all about, Gabriel thought. And here he’d toyed with the idea that maybe
Mariah
had sucked it up and gone outside to defend her home.
He watched her, disappointed that she hadn’t emerged yet—not from those blankets, and not from much else. Maybe she never would. But he wouldn’t think of her as a coward, because she’d been the one to save his hide by letting him into her shelter. All the same, the notion that she might be yellow underneath it all had already carved its way deep into Gabriel.
Everyone was watching Chaplin, whose muzzle was peeking out of Mariah’s blanket, just over her shoulder. He was nudging aside her knit cap and whispering something to her while keeping his mind closed.
Zel obviously heard what he said, and her gaze whipped over to the others, her jaw tight as she clearly strove for composure of some sorthe cursed, making Gabriel flinch, and turned her back on the dog and his mistress.
Mariah’s face only lowered farther into her blanket.
What had Chaplin told them?
After several beats, Mariah rested her forehead against her dog’s.
Gabriel caught her raised profile. She wasn’t crying now. Actually, he found a sort of strength in her that he thought she’d been missing lately.
A desperate resignation, though he couldn’t say why.
Gabriel was just about to ask what Chaplin had said when Zel stepped in front of Mariah, canceling Gabriel’s view. “I think it’s best that you say your good-byes now. The more strangers that come into this territory, the more the wildlife comes out to prey. We’ve handled the situation well until Stamp came here. Before . . . you came, too.”
Along with the oldster, Sammy backed Zel up, his eyes dark.
“You have no idea,” Zel added, “what kind of damage is going on and how you only make it worse.”
Gabriel got the feeling that no one was blaming him for those deaths now that they’d already come to a vigilant acceptance of possible danger as a course of living out here. But like Stamp, Gabriel had interrupted that flow of survival. He was an interloper—a symbol of the change that was ruining their lives.