Ballistic: Icarus Series, Book Two (16 page)

“Liv?” Zander asked nudging my arm as he ran next to me.

“Sorry, we need to go right. Up there by the brown house,” I gripped Riley’s hand tighter and pressed on. “Turn onto Blackhawk Drive.”

I cut across the street, jumped the curb, and looked back over my shoulder to make sure everyone was still there. The way I was clamped onto her, Riley had no choice but to keep up with me. Zander and I were shoulder-to-shoulder, but the rest were a good ten paces behind. Despite carrying another person dangling from his shoulders, Ty was at the head of the pack. Jake and Falisha were right behind him. Eli had fallen behind considerably.

“Get it in gear, Eli,” I shouted back. He shot me a nasty look but doubled his speed and soon caught up to the rest of us. “We are almost there!”

Oh, God. We are almost there.

Until that moment, it hadn’t really dawned on me that we were running towards, rather than just away from something. After everything my brother and I had been through…after all that we had lost, we were finally going to see each other again. Only four more blocks of death and destruction stood between us now.

Just four more blocks.

I picked up the pace without realizing it. Before too long, we were on his street. Chestnut Street looked like it was once a happy place. The houses were nice, and they all had really big yards. If I closed my eyes, I could easily picture the lush, green lawns that blanketed the ground around the wooden play sets, flower gardens, and basketball courts.

Expensive SUVs and minivans sat idle in their respective driveways or parked on the street, but only a few had the black spatters. I guess these people had stayed in their homes. Bicycles, scooters, and wagons scattered the decimated sidewalks and grounds. My breath caught in my throat. So many children died here. What if…

No!
I mentally slap myself and ran even harder.

“Liv, please slow…down,” Riley gasped. “Some of us…have short legs.”

“Sorry,” I said forcing myself to run a bit slower. Just a bit.

“There!” I shouted pointing toward the end of the block. “There it is, 302 Chestnut.”

Less than a minute later I found myself (and a very breathless Riley) standing in front of a nice brick house with a matching attached garage. A newer looking blue minivan sat in the middle of a smooth concrete driveway. The lane was lined with those expensive lava rocks that probably cost more than my parents’ house had. Thankfully, there were no signs of that horrible black spatter inside of the van.

“Liv, look,” Zander panted dragging me toward the front entrance.

The green door, which dangled precariously from its battered brass hinges, matched the vinyl shutters perfectly. The house had been tagged; a bright red 4/5 stared back at me. Hope sprang in my chest, and I lunged through the doorway, into the shadows beyond.

Chapter 13

So Close

“Beans!” I yelled as I tripped and stumbled my way into the Fosters’ living room. “Beansie, I’m here!”

“Is he here?” Jake ducked in through the doorway after us.

“We don’t know,” Zander muttered. “I’m going to check for a basement.”

“Hello? Is anybody here?” I cupped my hands together and screamed. “Beans!”

I yelled out for my brother as if he were lost beyond the gates of Hell, rather than hiding somewhere inside a single story ranch in the middle of the burbs. The census numbers on the house told me he might be here. 4/5 it had said, but had he been
the one
?

“Whoa,” Falisha said gaping at the destruction around us as she stepped through the threshold and into what had once been a very nice home. Bella ran past her and started sniffing at anything that couldn’t bat her away. “What the heck happened here?”

“This place is totally trashed.” Christa shook her head as she looked around the room. “No way there’s anyone here after all
this
went down.”

“Hush,” Ty whispered.

She was probably right, though. The furniture was bare to the frames. The cushions and pillows were strewn carelessly about the room. Pictures, papers, and broken knick-knacks lay shredded to pieces on the floor. Every single drawer and cabinet was flung open and stripped clean. All that remained were a few cracked dishes and empty wine bottles. The refrigerator lay on its side, the door left wide open. The last of its contents, which wasn’t much aside from a few half-empty condiments, had spilled onto the kitchen tiles and dried to a filthy brown crust.

I stepped over a pile of discarded magazines and books and made my way over to the large entertainment center that held the Fosters’ now useless plasma television. Someone had raked each shelf clean leaving shards of broken glass and metal frames in a heap on the floor. I crouched down and flipped over the largest of the frames, shaking it free of the broken glass plate.

“Maybe, it’s the wrong address. It could be a mix-up or something.” If Jake was trying to reassure me, it was not even close to working. He was more on edge now than I was and kept rubbing anxiously at his neck. “You know how those state places are. Employees are overworked and underpaid. Always making mistakes and stuff. I mean, they could have said Chestnut Street instead of Chestnut Avenue, or Chestnut Place, or maybe Chestnut—.”

“
Oh, my God
,” Christa cut him off. “She gets it, you spaz. Jeez.”

“It’s the right place, Jake,” I said holding up the scratched photo.

Had it not been for my brother’s cherubic little face staring back at me, the picture could have easily been mistaken for one of those stock images that come with the frame when you buy it. You know the ones. The perfect family, wearing perfect clothes, smiling their perfect smiles in the middle of an open field of flowers.

But there he was; my little brother. He looked happy and well fed (though still very much in need of a haircut). He was under the arm of someone who was not my mother, standing next to a man who was not my father. An adorable little girl who looked she may have Down’s Syndrome hugged his arm. Her smile beamed back at me from beneath two perfectly parted little braids. A cute Asian boy stood smirking with his arm perched on Beans’ other shoulder in front of a man with a sincere grin.

My brother’s foster dad was tall and lean with broad shoulders and jet-black hair. He had one of those bright smiles that you can’t help but notice and striking brown eyes. He was pretty handsome for an older guy, actually. He and his wife (literally) made the picture perfect couple. Mrs. Foster was slight and slender with blond hair and kind eyes. Judging by the rather large diamond studs in her ears, and the Tiffany necklace she wore, my brother’s new family had apparently been rather well off.

Beans looked so happy in that picture, so completely carefree. I suppose I should have been grateful that they had taken such good care of him. They were probably amazing people with hearts of gold, but I found myself hating her all the same. I hated her for all those months she shared with my brother; months that had been taken away from
me
. I hated her for her easy smile and her perfect family.

But mostly I hated that she looked so happy.

It was unreasonable and immature, I know, but after all this time away from Beans, I was past the point of being logical about any of it. We had come all this way, made it through so much and lost so many, and for what? My brother wasn’t even here. I knew it in my bones the second I walked in the doorway.

“Where the hell are you?” I yelled at the ceiling and kicked the pile of shattered frames. The pieces scattered across the floor and skittered to a halt at Zander’s feet as he strode back into the living room. I rushed to his side, my last ounce of hope dangling from a thin thread.

“Z?” Jake said nervously as he stared out through the front door. “Please, tell me you found a basement.”

“I did, but— well, it was completely empty.” Zander put his hand on my lower back. “I’m sorry, Liv. There’s nobody here but us.”

My heart shriveled in my chest.

“That doesn’t matter, right now,” Jake shrieked rubbing furiously at the back of his neck.

“How can you say that?” I stormed toward him. “My brother is—”

“Not relevant at the moment, Liv,” Jake cut me off his eyes wide as he waved me toward the door. “We have a much bigger problem right now.”

The rest of the group had congregated by the door and were gaping out at the sky in awe. The wall of clouds that had been growing above us had closed off the rest of the sky, turning the entire thing an eerie shade of dark green. Lightning flashed from its depths, and the entire mass was moving in a rapid spiral directly overhead.

The sky was all that moved now; there was no wind, no bursts of white-hot electricity raining down around us. The rest of the world on the ground had gone completely still.

“Basement?” Jake’s voice shook.

“Crap,” I said, my stomach sinking to my feet.

“That’s insane,” Falisha said as she stared up at the spiral of flashing chaos above us.

“Where’s the basement,” Jake growled.

“Jesus,” Eli hissed. “We are in the eye!”

“Basement, now!” Jake tugged on Zander’s arm and started ushering the group away from the door.

“Right, right. This way, guys,” Zander said scooping up his bag as he grabbed my hand. Falisha shouldered her pack and grabbed Bella’s collar, and she and the others followed behind Zander. When we reached the heavy metal door that led below ground, he shouldered it open. “Everybody in.”

“Go,” I said pushing Falisha and Bella ahead of me, then Riley, Ty and Christa, Eli, and finally Jake. Zander shoved me in after them and closed the massive door behind us.

He pulled a coil of wire from his pack and started wrapping it around the door handle and each of the locking mechanisms. Once he had them wrapped, we wound the wire around a nearby joist and an exposed pipe, then tied it back off around the handle.

“I have never seen a door like that in a residential home,” Eli said looking back over his shoulder as he descended into the dark basement. “Usually you only see that in hospitals or government buildings.”

My eyes adjusted to the darkness immediately. Jake, Eli, and the others were huddled in the middle of what had probably once been a very cozy family room before the raiders had gotten to it. Now it looked like a war zone. No care had been taken in whatever search took place here. I couldn’t imagine what they had been searching for that could be so important as to destroy everything in their efforts. Pictures lay in pieces around the room. Cushions, movies, and broken electronics littered the floor at their feet. Everyone looked lost and scared.

“Which of these rooms is closest to the center?” Jake swung his light around him in a shaky circle. “We need…we have to get as close to the center of…which is it for Christ’s sake?”

“Easy, Jake. Come on, it’s down here,” Zander gestured toward the hallway off what appeared to be a media room.

There were four doors in the corridor. The first was plastered with Star Wars posters and a large pink flower with
Jazz
written on it in purple glitter. Across the hallway was a plain wooden door with a small white board attached to it with a message scrawled in red;
No jerks allowed
. A few paces down the carpeted hall was another door that appeared to lead to a furnace room and storage area.

The last door was painted navy blue and had glow in the dark stars and planets stuck to the front of it. The stars formed the letters L, U, C, A, and S.

This is where he’d been since the day they took him from Brigham House and out of my life. This was his home. He had a safe place. I reached toward the knob with a shaky hand but pulled away at the last second. “I…I can’t.”

“The hell you can’t,” Jake said as he threw the door open.

He shoved me through past the threshold and the rest of the group poured in after me. Bella wove her way through the pack and hobbled to my side whimpering up at me. The second Jake closed the door behind us all hell broke loose. Thunder and lightning blasted overhead, and the walls started shaking as the skies let loose a fury to shame the gods.

Chapter 14

The Message

There was no way to know for sure how much damage had been done by the storm or whatever that had been, but one thing was for sure, it wasn’t over. The wind howled, and the framework shook within the foundation. The ground quaked around us, and it sounded like it was raining stone over our heads. It felt like the end of the world all over again. As much as I wished he were here, part of me hoped my brother was as far away from this as possible.

Bella paced back and forth at my feet. She shuffled and sniffed at my brother’s bedroom door, whining at an almost imperceptibly high pitch. It grated on my nerves. I didn’t blame her for being uneasy, but it certainly wasn’t helping my own nerves one bit. The next time she passed me, I grabbed her collar and led her toward Beans’ bed.

“Lay down, girl,” I said firmly. “I know you are scared, Bells, but pacing is not helping any of us.”

She looked up at me and cocked her head to the side. With a huff, she lowered herself at the foot of my brother’s bed and stared at the door from there. I scratched her behind her ear in a silent apology and walked away.

Christa and Ty had curled up against the wall by the closet in the corner, and Jake and Falisha sat on the desk near them. Riley was sitting on my brother’s bed hugging his pillow against her chest. Though his room was larger than the vault had been, there was no doubt in my mind it felt like just as much of a shoebox to Riley. She hadn’t said a word since the door had closed behind us.