Délon City: Book Two of the Oz Chronicles (17 page)

Wes’s face soured. He was hurt. “Sure.” He backed out of the freezer.

I turned to Devlin. “What about the people?”

“The people?” he asked.

“Yeah, can I trust the people?”

“You got anyone specific in mind?”

I searched his cloudy eyes. “Lou. I mean what you just told me, it seems she should have known that. She’s been with Roy and Reya all this time.”

Devlin shook his head. “She’s their personal cow. They only deal with her when they...”

“When they what?”

This time Devlin searched my eyes. “When they want to feed?”

My stomach turned.

“Délons crave certain tastes, and certain tastes are reserved for the elite.”

“Tastes?”

“Fear, hate, love,” He grabbed my arm and pointed to my veins. “It’s all running through your veins, and Délons crave it. They live to suck it out of you and taste it, even if it doesn’t last.”

“What was so special about Lou that Roy and Reya kept her around?”

“She has the one taste Délons crave most.”

“What?”

“Hope.”

***

“I’m not leaving him!”

“Damn it, Oz, you’ve got to stop hollering at me,” Wes said. He was testing the air pressure on the tires of his VW bus. He was right. I don’t know why I was yelling at him. He wasn’t the idiot who refused to come out of the walk-in freezer. “That boy in there has been through about the worst kind of hell you can imagine. A body can’t blame him for just wantin’ to crawl up in the freezer and never come out.”

“But I can protect him,” I said.

He tapped the tire gauge with his index finger and peered up at me from his squatting position. “You’re all kinds of smart and brave, Oz, but the truth is it’d take an army the size of Desert Storm to protect that kid. The Délons can’t stand humans. I can only guess that they can’t stand humans who used to be Délon even worse. They know all their secrets.”

I paced in front of him. “There’s got to be something we can do.” I racked my brain for a plan. There was an answer to this problem. I knew it. A thought came to me. “Tarak – he can help us.”

“Not likely,” Wes said standing. “He’s got tunnel vision when it comes to stepping outside of his duties of protecting Nate. One hundred percent of his energies are focused in on that little fella’. That’s why he ain’t here now.”

“Call him.”

“Call him? He ain’t got a phone you know.”

“How do we get him here?”

Wes shrugged his shoulders. “He just shows up when he’s supposed to.”

“I want him to show up now,” I was on the verge of throwing a tantrum like a little kid.

“Look here,” Wes said in as stern a voice as I’ve ever heard him use. “It’s about time you learned that wantin’ something don’t make it so. They’s going to be times when you got to make tough choices, and as much as I hate to say it, this is one of them times.”

My eyes started to well up from frustration. I didn’t know what to do. I heard a high-pitched scream and laugh come from the other end of the parking lot. I turned to see Tyrone and Valerie kicking a ball they’d found in the convenience store. I had an idea. “The kids,” I said.

“Son, there ain’t nothing but kids here, you’re going to have to be more specific”

“Valerie and Tyrone – they can stay and watch over Devlin.” In my mind, it was the perfect solution.

“No,” Wes said flatly. “Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”

“Yes,” I replied, my voice rising above his. “He needs somebody to stay behind. He’s going to run out of food.”

“And what if trouble comes? Tyrone and Valerie will be left to fend for themselves. I ain’t going to have that.” His face was turning red.

“They can take care of themselves,” I said. “They’re warriors.”

“They was kids two seconds ago,” he responded. The veins in his neck were bulging. He was getting angrier by the second.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“No I don’t because you don’t know what you mean!” His voice had finally risen to the level of a yell.

Lou and Gordy stepped out of the convenience store to investigate. The dogs, Valerie and Tyrone – all eyes had shifted to us.

“Then you tell me what to do,” I snapped back.

“Leave him,” Wes barked. His voice rang through my ears.

I stood as I felt the earth spinning out of control. I couldn’t even tell if I had a heartbeat anymore. My breathing was labored. I think this is what my mother used to call a panic attack. I would have fallen to the ground if Wes hadn’t caught me. I heard the footsteps of the others running toward us. I shook my head and gathered my thoughts. I wanted to be standing on my own before the others reached us. Wes let go. He understood that I had to stand on my own. I breathed in through my nose and exhaled deeply through my mouth. It was over as quickly as it came.

“Oz, dude, you all right?” Gordy asked as he approached.

“You should sit down,” Lou suggested.

“I’m fine,” I said. “We need to hit the road. They’re expecting us.” I turned to Wes. “You’ll follow. Not too close. Have you figured out how to get in the city?”

He looked at me confused. He wasn’t sure if the Devlin issue was resolved. “Tarak gave us a contact. Another Keeper. He... or it will know how to contact you once we’re inside the city.”

“Then that’s that,” I said. I walked toward the horses.

“What about Devlin?” Lou asked.

Without stopping I said, “We’re leaving him.”

THIRTEEN

You smell Délon City before you see it. Actually, you can almost see the smell it’s so pungent. The odor was a mixture of raw sewage, burning rubber, and decay. When I got my first glance at the twisted hulk of a city, it looked like it smelled... rotten.

The city was under a dome of death. Carcasses, animal, human, insect, and Délon were woven together into an enormous, macabre shield that surrounded the entire city.

Upon first seeing it, I stopped Chubby. The shunter in my backpack must have sensed we were near the city because it vibrated, twitched, and screeched like never before. I had thought about sticking the little blob in the walk-in freezer with Devlin, but General Roy would have known I didn’t have it with me the second I set foot in Délon City. I would have to deal with the little face sucker when it finally emerged. There was just no way around it.

Gordy rode on, mouth agape, unable to fathom what he was seeing. Lou continued on nonplussed. This was old hat to her. It was so unremarkable to her that she didn’t even think to mention it to us, to warn us of the horror of it all.

It took her several seconds to realize that I was no longer riding beside her. She looked over her shoulder and saw my appalled expression. She quickly turned her horse and galloped toward me.

“I tell myself it’s not real,” she said.

I was dazed. “What?”

“I tell myself that Oz Griffin will make this all go away. He got rid of the Takers. He can get rid of the Délons.”

I shifted my gaze from the death dome to her brown eyes.

“That’s how I’ve been able to survive all this. That’s how I can look at that horrible thing day after day. I knew you’d come back, Oz. I knew it.” She motioned to Délon City. “That place doesn’t exist. One of these days, soon, I’m going to be back on my family’s RV headed towards Disney World just like I was before this all started, and you’re going to make that happen, Oz.”

I swallowed hard. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because,” she said. “Because I know.” She turned her horse back around and headed for the entrance of the city.

Gordy turned to me and shook his head. His eyes pleading. He waited for me to abort the mission and just ride back to Tullahoma as fast as I could. I disappointed him and pressed forward.

The entrance to Délon City was big enough for a tractor trailer to enter. Both sides of the dome opening were guarded by no less than twenty Délons. They watched us enter, but never approached. I was surprised at the variety of their appearance. They were all tall and lean, and they all had the typical spider leg hairdo, but some of them had spider leg beards. I looked for signs that this gave them rank over the others, but it didn’t seem to make a difference.

Lou led us through the now darkened highway. The dome ceiling blacked out the sun, but the temperature inside the city was at least 20 degrees warmer than outside.

The massive skyscrapers that made up Atlanta’s horizon were still present, but they were dying shells of what they once were. A dark purple soot seemed to cover every inch of their exterior.

Abandoned cars, buses, and trucks riddled the highways, just as they had when the Takers were in control, only now half of them were set on fire. I guessed they were used to help keep the temperatures up in the city.

Between the smoke and the smell, it was not easy to breathe, but we managed somehow. Gordy coughed and hacked more than Lou or me, but much to his credit, he kept on pace with us without a word of complaint. It may have been that he was afraid of being left behind if he stopped to protest. After all, we’d left Devlin behind.

There were Délons by the thousands - the tens of thousands even. They were literally crawling all over each other like a colony of army ants. Every once in a while a pair of dead eyes would focus on us as we rode through the streets of Délon City. A Délon would raise its head in our direction and sniff and then return to doing whatever it was doing.

I even saw the occasional Taker. They were obviously subservient to the Délons. If I had to guess, they were being used as slave labor. The spoils of victory. Only the Délons were victorious because I killed the Taker Queen. Never did I regret that more than riding through the streets of Délon City. I had made a terrible mistake. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t do it again.

About an hour after we entered the city, we finally arrived at About an hour after we entered the city, we finally arrived at story building, but the walls of the building were alive with scores of Délons crawling all over each other to the top of the building and back down. It looked like a pointless exercise on their part, but it must have served a purpose.

“We’re here,” Lou said.

“Where?” Gordy asked in between a hack and a cough.

“General Roy’s headquarters.”

“Great,” Gordy coughed. “We’ve seen it. Can we go home now?”

“Our guests!” A voice boomed. Roy stood at the top of the stairs leading to the front door. “We’ve been waiting!” He descended the stairs. I could see his eyes moving as he scanned our numbers. “You’re one short... A Délon short.”

I could hear Gordy swallow. He scooted back in his saddle. Lou looked to me to reply. It was then I wished I had prepared a lie for this inevitable situation. Not a lie exactly. The Délons would detect that. When the truth will get you in a heap of trouble, just give them the facts. That’s what my grandfather used to say.

“We were attacked by Dacs,” I said. “We lost Devlin.” Those were the facts.

“Where?”

“Outside of Dalton.”

The general reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped. He raised his hand. The crawling Délons stopped. They focused on Roy. He flicked his wrist to the right, and a hundred or so Délons broke off from the once crawling mass. They approached their general in uniform columns of four. He flicked his wrist to the left, and the columns sprinted toward the city’s entrance.

General Roy smiled. “He will be avenged.”

“We took care of that,” I said. “I mean we already killed the Dacs.”

He cocked his head and studied us. “Really, just the three of you?”

I didn’t answer.

“You are a great warrior.” He laughed. “There are more to kill,” he said. “On that you can rely.” He held out his hand and motioned us to dismount. “Come, come, I have a few surprises for you.”

The three of us dismounted and slowly made our way to the front door of the building. General Roy held the door for us. When we entered, a sour looking Reya was waiting for us on the other side. She found it impossible to hide her disdain for me.

“Welcome,” she said with no feeling at all.

I didn’t bother returning the fake nicety. Délon Miles waited for us on the elevator. He never questioned where Devlin was. They were inseparable as humans. Now, Miles couldn’t care less where his old friend was.

The six of us rode to the top floor. The elevator doors opened and we stepped into a hallway lined on both sides by Délons. They stood at attention while we walked by with the general, but it felt like a lot of them were looking at Lou, Gordy, and me as food.

Knowing now that the general had concocted the whole king scenario to trick me into leading them to their Source made me feel vulnerable. As soon as he determined I was useless, we were all dead. I hoped to be out of the city long before then. I was here to get Ajax. How I was going to do that, I didn’t know.

We reached the end of the hallway and stood in front of a set of double doors. “Your accommodations,” General Roy said. With a nod of his grotesque head, he ordered Miles to open the doors.

It was an enormous penthouse condominium that was probably one of the premier properties when Délon City was Atlanta. Basically it was intact. The stench of the city still seeped through the walls, but if you just saw it in a photograph you would be wowed. It had marble floors throughout, four bedrooms, five bathrooms, a view of the city that was currently obstructed by Délons crawling up and down the building. The furniture, although covered in the telltale transparent purple slime, looked expensive, like the stuff my mom used to pine over in catalogs.

“I trust this will do,” General Roy said.

“Boy, oh boy,” Gordy replied. “It is good to be king, huh, Oz?”

“Yeah,” I said flatly.

“Well, we’ll let you rest up from your trip,” Roy said guiding Reya and Miles back in the hallway. “We have a special dinner for you tonight with some special guests.”

“Who?” I asked.

“No, no,” Roy said. “It’s a surprise.”

“What about the football game?” Gordy asked.

“Cancelled,” Roy smiled. “In Oz’s honor. We have something much more entertaining in store.”

The three Délons stood outside the doorway looking in the apartment as if we were some exhibit in a zoo. “Come, Lou,” General Roy said. Miles and Reya practically licked their chops.