Frozen: Heart of Dread, Book One (5 page)

“T
HAT HER?” WES ASKED, PEERING THROUGH
night-vision ’ocs. The green screen on the binoculars showed a slim, dark-haired girl walking down the street. She wore a long dark coat and a wool cap pulled low on her forehead and a scarf that covered most of her face. He handed the glasses to Shakes, who stood next to him on the balcony.

“Yeah, that’s her.” Shakes nodded.

Wes frowned. Well, what did you know, it was the blackjack dealer from the Loss—the same one who had thrown him off his game, the reason his team had lost faith in him. “You think she’s for real?”

“Pretty sure. Couldn’t have been easy, letting me win with all those cameras around. Not really sure how she managed it in the first place.”

“Maybe she was setting you up,” Farouk called from inside the small apartment. The kid was always butting in where he wasn’t invited.

“And maybe you talk too much,” Shakes grumbled. “She’s the reason you didn’t eat goop tonight, you know.”

Farouk put his feet up on the shabby couch. “So, she let you win a few credits, so what. So we got steak for dinner.”

“Yeah, we don’t owe her nothing,” Daran agreed, taking the binoculars for a look. But he didn’t seem to recognize her from the other night.

Farouk let out a large burp and Shakes grimaced. “She can pay, and god knows we need the work.” He’d outlined her proposal to the team earlier: She needed a military escort, protection through Garbage Country, passage out to the sea as far as New Crete. She would pay them half now and the rest once they arrived at their destination.

“She’s not marked, is she?” Zedric asked. “You know we don’t mess with ice trash.”

“What did they ever do to you, man?” Wes asked, annoyed.

Zedric shrugged. “They breathe. It’s unnatural what they can do . . . they have no place in this world, and you’ve heard what they say happens to them . . .” He shivered and looked away.

“Relax, her eyes are gray,” Shakes explained.

Zedric sneered. “Rets can be faked.”

“Not easily,” Shakes argued. “I’m telling you, she’s legit.”

“Why New Crete?” Wes wanted to know. “Nothing there but penguins and polar bears.”

“You know why,” Daran said. “Probably another delusional pilgrim looking for the Blue, but she just won’t admit it.”

Wes sighed. He knew Daran had guessed correctly. There was no reason to go halfway around the world except in search of paradise. There’s nothing out there, he wanted to tell her, and looking for something that didn’t exist was a waste of time and heat credits.

Maybe he could sell her on the tent cities in Garbage Country instead. Try to talk her out of risking the black waters.

He thought of the last girl who’d asked for his help to the Blue. Juliet had also wanted out, but he’d turned her down. He wondered what happened to her; rumor had it she died during the bombing at the Loss. Jules did like her cards. He didn’t want to think about what that meant, if she was truly gone. But what else was new. Everyone he loved was dead or lost. Mom. Dad. Eliza.

“We don’t need this job, man. Remember there are
things
out there in the Pile. We barely made it out last time, and the water’s even worse.” Daran flexed his muscles, and the scars on his hands turned pink at the effort, souvenirs from the region’s insurrections.

Wes agreed with him. He knew what was out there. And even if they made it through Garbage Country, the corsair ships would be circling the toxic oceans, ready for fresh meat, fresh cargo for the slave holds. It was getting harder and harder to evade them.

“What’s your gut say?” Wes asked Shakes again. He trusted Shakes with his life. They’d been through a lot together since they were rooks, especially that last deployment when they were sent down to what the government called a “routine police action” and what everyone else called the Second Civil War. Texas had been the last holdout to sign the new constitution and was punished for its insurrection. What was left of the state that wasn’t covered in ice was covered in blood, its militia utterly decimated during the final battle at Santonio.

“She said she has the credits. I believe her,” Shakes said.

They were in a standard-issue apartment, in one of the new developments off the Strip. Casino dorm. Much nicer than that hovel where they bunked. Wes looked west, where the shining lights of the casinos glowed in the gray sky. In a few minutes, as it did every night,
Kaboom!
would play on the main stage at the Acropolis, reenacting the huge blast that had torn a crater-size hole in the Loss the other week. “Excitainment” it was called.

Wes checked his watch and looked through the binoculars at the girl again. She’d pulled off her scarf, and he could see her face clearly now.

“How much did she say?”

“Told you—twenty thousand watts—half now, half when it’s done,” replied Shakes.

Twenty thousand watts. A king’s ransom for safe passage through the Pacific. How could a lowly blackjack dealer have enough credit in her account to offer them a payday so big they wouldn’t have to work the rest of the year?

Twenty thousand watts.

Wes inhaled sharply, remembering those glittering five-thousand-credit chips on the table.

There had been exactly four of them on the stack.

He hadn’t swiped them, but somehow they had disappeared. Carlos told him that table had come up short exactly that amount, so where was his cut? Wes had told the security chief he had no idea what he was talking about, if he had it, he’d give it, and of course, Carlos hadn’t believed him. Wes had been puzzled at first, but as the week wore on it became clear that Carlos was serious, that his old friend wouldn’t cover for him. The credits were gone and he expected Wes to cough them up, favor or no. Wes would have to find a way to pay him off soon, or get out of the city if he knew what was good for him.

Wes hadn’t been sure before, hadn’t believed she had the audacity to pull it off, but now it was obvious he had underestimated the pretty dealer.

Nat hadn’t returned those chips to the casino after all—she’d
taken
them. Somehow, she’d intuited that the blame wouldn’t fall on her. Why not let him take the heat for it; what did she care? He was nothing to her.

Wes was impressed. He’d thought he was running a game, but he had been outplayed.

Natasha Kestal. Blackjack dealer. Pilgrim. Thief.

W
ES WAS NOT ONE TO TAKE A JOB
unprepared, and he’d had Farouk check out Nat, not that there was much to find. No school records, no military ones either; she hadn’t been recruited for officer training and she hadn’t volunteered. A civilian. With no record, no online profile. As far as they could tell, she’d only arrived in New Vegas a few weeks ago.

Those credits she was offering as payment were rightfully his, Wes thought, but now she was making him work for them. He had to hand it to her—that took style.

She’d let Shakes win a few big hands as an apology, and while it would be enough to feed them for a few more days, after that, they would be hungry again. Their Fo-Pro card was fake, and it would be deactivated soon, just like the others they’d forged. They weren’t eligible for real ones, not with their records. Since he’d rejected Bradley and forsaken the death races, they were living on fumes.

“What’s the holdup? We already agreed, we’ll take the bounty, that’s a meal ticket for sure. And when we turn her in, if she’s got the chips on her, we’ll take them, too, along with whatever’s left in her apartment,” Daran argued. The military paid a reward of five hundred credits for each potential fence-hopper, and the plan was to turn her in so they could collect, as well as rob her in the process. “Pilgrims talk a big game; we’ve been taken for a ride before by people who can’t pay.”

Wes had to admit Daran was right, that was what they had agreed. It was even Wes’s idea to turn her in, but that was before he had recognized her through the binoculars.

Down on the sidewalk, Nat crossed the street and disappeared from sight.

Wes studied the glittering landscape of New Vegas, the casinos, old, new, destroyed, and refurbished. Thank god for the Hoover Dam. The fossil fuels left were only available to the military or to those who stole from or bartered with the military, but hydroelectricity let Vegas pay its electric bill.

Wes had been an errand boy for several bookies before he was ten. He understood New Vegas was a cockroach; it would endure through greed and lust. It had shrugged its sequined shoulder at the Big Freeze. Wes respected the city that had shaped him into a survivor.

He had to make a decision.
Kaboom!
was about to climax with a massive explosion, and the noise would be loud enough to drown out their assault. Wes looked down at the floor that was rigged with bombs, enough to create a hole in the floor and drop them through the ceiling below, where they could snatch her, haul her in for the reward, and take whatever she had on her. It was getting harder and harder to disappear someone these days; the city had cameras on every corner, every bridge; otherwise he’d have just taken her off the street.

The team looked at him for orders. He had to decide.

Farouk knelt by the complicated mess of red and green wires. It would be easy enough to patch up the hole and leave no trace of their operation. When they were done, she’d be just another missing person, a flyer on the wall of a bus stop, a photo on the back of a Nutri carton. And they would be five hundred credits richer, more if they believed Shakes.

“’Rouk?” Wes asked.

“Say the word and we can blow the joint and be inside in fifteen seconds.”

“Think she knows we’re right above her?” Wes asked. Nat had crossed the street to enter the same building they were in; she lived in the apartment unit located directly below them.

Shakes grunted and spoke in a low tone so only Wes could hear him. “Don’t take the blood money. Snitching on border jumpers is for cowards. We’re no thieves. C’mon, boss, let’s do the job. Think of what we could get with twenty thousand watts. A warm bath, and not just at the hostel either, but at a real hotel. The Bellagio even. The Sweet Suite.”

“It’s too risky,” Wes argued. “We can’t all die because she wants out.” It wasn’t just about the credits. He couldn’t put their lives on the line. He knew what awaited them in the black waters, and he had no desire to see if Bradley had found someone else to do that job. If he took her out there, they would be targets, vulnerable to scavengers and opportunists, if they even made it that far, if the food didn’t run out . . . “She seems like a nice kid, but . . .” He understood Shakes’s desire to help out, he really did, but the journey was too uncertain, no matter how badly they needed the watts. “Farouk, on my count—”

“Wait! Boss, hold on, hold on, hear me out!” Shakes protested.

Farouk looked up at Wes questioningly. Wes waved off the assault for now. “What is it?”

“I heard she might have the map,” Shakes whispered urgently.

Wes stared hard at Shakes. “And you’re just telling me this
now
?”

His friend looked chagrined. “I know it sounds crazy, so I didn’t want to mention it earlier, but . . .” He looked around to make sure the rest of the team couldn’t hear him.

“Did she show it to you?” Wes asked. “Was it like some kind of stone or something? An opal or an emerald?”

“No. She didn’t even mention it. I was talking to Manny the other day, and he asked me if I knew what the police were looking for in Old Joe’s place when they took him. Seemed real important since they tore the place apart. Whatever it was, Manny thinks maybe she has it. He saw Joe hand her something at the casino, right before he disappeared.”

That got his attention. Like Shakes, Wes had heard that Josephus Chang had won Anaximander’s Map in a legendary card game.

The map the whole world was looking for.
But there is no map, because there’s no such thing as the Blue,
Wes thought. It was wishful thinking on everyone’s part. Escape to another world. Anaximander’s Map was the biggest scam in New Vegas if Wes had ever heard of one.

But Joe had insisted the map was real. The old shark was one of the best poker players in Vegas, and supposedly he’d won it from a guy who had given him a bushel of apples as proof. The genetic code for the fruit had been lost for years; there were no more apples since the Big Freeze. Wes always wondered why Joe had stuck around, why he didn’t just up and leave immediately if he had it in his possession.

So they’d gotten to Old Joe but hadn’t been able to retrieve the treasure he’d held. Now, that was something to think about. If Nat had it, she was worth much more than mere bounty money.

“How much do you think we’d get for it?” Shakes asked.

“Who knows,” said Wes.

“What do they want it for anyway?”

“Isn’t it obvious? This world is dead. If there is another world out there—with blue skies, fresh water,
food—
they’re going to take it. They wouldn’t even let Texas leave the union, and there’s nothing there but frozen cow dung.”

“Let’s take the map,” Shakes said. “Could solve all our problems. Keep the crew happy, keep the military off our backs.”

“I thought we weren’t thieves,” Wes said with a crafty smile.

Shakes returned it with one of his own.

“So we play the long game,” said Wes, nodding. He saw the truth in it. If he took the map, handed it to Bradley, they would have work, credits; he’d be able to run an even bigger crew, maybe set themselves up as a private security force, have a real future in Vegas. Enough begging for scraps, enough humiliation, enough of the food lines forever.

But he wasn’t a thief. If he took the map, and if the Blue was real . . . it was Santonio all over again.

Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe he was damned either way already.

And even if this blackjack dealer did have the map, Wes didn’t think she would simply hand it over. She was too smart for that . . .

The team looked to their leader.

Wes clasped his hands. Map or not, she was still asking a lot of his men. When they joined his team, he’d promised to keep them alive as best as he could. “All right. Let’s put it to a vote. We get in and take her out, collect the bounty, or we do what she wants, do the work, and get paid.”

“Heard they’ve upped it to eight hundred a head for a jumper these days,” Daran sniffed.

Zedric nodded. That made two votes for bounty.

“How d’you plan on getting across the ocean anyway?” Daran asked.

“I’ll figure it out when we get there.” Wes shrugged. He’d never been one to plan ahead. “Shakes?”

“You know what I think.”

“Two for blood, one for life. ’Rouk?” Wes asked.

“Screw it. I wanna see the black water, why not.” Farouk shrugged.

Kaboom!
This was it. Sparks flew from the Acropolis stage. The sound was deafening; even the air vibrated from the force of the explosion.

“Your orders, sir,” Farouk yelled.

“We do the deal,” he said finally. “We take her where she wants to go and we all come back rich and alive.” When it came down to it, Shakes was right, trading her in for bounty money was a coward’s move. The trip would be dangerous, sure, but in the end, they needed to work, and she had the credits. And if she had the map . . . well . . . he would keep his cards close to the vest for now.

He stared Daran in the eye. “You in? Get out now if you’re not.”

Daran held his gaze, then looked away, shrugging.

Wes nodded. Daran would follow orders like a soldier. Wes had taken the brothers on his team when no one else would—he’d heard of their reputations as burnouts but he thought he could rehabilitate them into better stuff—and so far, as surly as they were, they hadn’t failed him.

The team exhaled. Shakes smiled. Farouk began dismantling the bombs.

Wes took a comb from his back pocket and smoothed his hair. “Let’s go knock on her door.”