No Dawn without Darkness: No Safety In Numbers: Book 3 (11 page)

M
A
R
C
O

STAIRWELL NEXT TO THE BOWLING ALLEY

I
almost trip over my feet going down the fire stairwell. But I can’t slow down. I go faster, jump flights, land at the bottom and burst out the door into the thick darkness. Fifteen paces in, I hit the fender of her car. I open the door and the dim overhead light blinks on.

Lexi.

She groans, her head rolls away from the light.

“I have something for you,” I say.

I crawl into the back of the car, and dribble some of my Tylenol-Sportade concoction between her lips, just to get her in the drinking mood. Then I slip the syringe into her mouth and press the plunger.

Lex, no matter if this stuff works or not, you have to know that I’m the one who saved your life. Not your mom, not your friends—me. Marco Carvajal. Life saver.

I’m the one who found you in that stockroom, curled under a shelf and wrapped in bubble wrap like a blanket, so still I held my cheek to your lips to make sure you were breathing.

Why did you stay there? If you felt sick after you left the party, why not come back to the IMAX? I could have helped you. You may have dropped me like a bad habit, but I would have taken you back.

This is your fault, Lexi. If you had listened to me, if you had trusted me, this never would have happened. But you had to believe Goldman. You thought I was the liar. Well, now you know. I may have lied, but not like him.

Ginger says I failed you. She doesn’t know a goddamned thing.

Come on, Lexi! It’s been five minutes. Why aren’t you responding to the drugs?

You have to respond to the drugs.

You know what, Lex? If you wake up, I’ll let them go. That’s the deal. If you get better, they can go free and do whatever they want. Call the senator, jump out a window, it doesn’t matter to me. But first, Lexi, you have to wake up.

You should have stuck with me, Lex. Look where I am now, and look where you are. I survived, am surviving.

I know, I know. You never would have gone in for this. You chose Burton’s
Batman
—I’m with Nolan:
The Dark Knight
. You would have balked the first time we had to kick some teeth in to get more food. No way you would have eaten a guinea pig. No way you would have done the things I had to do to make sure that we survived.

Come on, Lex. Wake up. Your friend gave me this stuff. She called it a cure. Just open your eyes. Something. Anything. Some small sign of life and I’ll let them go.

If you’re just going to die, why’d I bother dragging your ass down here to this Caddy? I could have just left you in that stockroom. Maybe your friends would have found you—eventually. Hell, if I’d left you alone entirely, you’d be with your mom, safe in the HomeMart. You would never have come to that party. You would never have gotten sick.

But you wanted to be with me, right? You could have left me alone. I was good at alone.

What did I know about friends? What did I know about anything?

Fine, I admit it. I was a bad friend to you. I asked you to do favors for me, to take chances for me, then lied to your face. I screwed you over, Lexi.

There, I said it. Now wake up. Wake up, and I’ll give you one free shot at me. Wake up and you can punch me in the face.

This isn’t a cheap offer, Lex, not with how fried my face is. I can’t open my mouth or even breathe without pain. It hurts to swallow. And no way this heals normal. Punch or no punch, I’m going to be a freak for the rest of my life.

The thing about you, Lexi? You wouldn’t care about that. You
liked
the freak in me. Hell,
you’re
a freak. You play Minecraft, for Christ’s sake. You know how to hotwire a magnetically sealed door.

The freak in you is what I liked too. God knows what you saw in me. It certainly wasn’t what you saw on the outside that kept you coming back. I mean, let’s be honest—we can be honest now—I wasn’t much to look at, even before I turned into Two-Face. When you kissed me, it was dark. If there had been lights, you probably would have come to your senses before you closed the deal.

Would you have, Lex? Would you still have kissed me?

Wake up, Lexi. Please, wake up.

• • •

“Marco?”

It’s Rafe. I slip out of the car and close the door, returning Lexi to the dark. “What?”

“There’s some kind of fire,” he says. “The third floor is filling with smoke. Mike says we have to go down a floor, but we haven’t gotten word from Heath that the Green Faces are cleared out.”

“They’re as good as cleared out,” I say, grabbing his arm and heading up the stairs two at a time. “Where’s the fire?”

“Mike says Baxter’s.”

How the hell does Mike know this? And why did he not tell me about the fire before it’s choking us out?

“So we have some time,” I say. Baxter’s is half a mall away from us.

We’ll move the weapons first, then we find a new command center. Hopefully before the fire burns all our food to a crisp.

Just when everything’s coming together, some snag has to come in and rip my carefully wrought masterpiece to shit.

S
H
A
Y

BOWLING ALLEY

M
arco just walked out on us. Not a word. Just left.

“There’s a back door,” I say.

“On it.” Ginger crosses the room to the short door marked
PINSETTER
.

It opens to some sort of catwalk spanning the glittering maze of machinery that covers the floor. And on the catwalk is a guard, whose headlamp whips around and blinds me. “Going somewhere?” she asks.

We close the door. Back in our room, I climb on top of a tool chest tucked between spare parts to check the drop ceiling.

“No go,” I say. “The wall extends up into a cloud of smoke.”

“Then we go out the front door,” Ginger says.

We hear Marco on the other side shouting orders in the hallway.

“He’ll come back for us,” I say, eyeing the tool chest.

“No doubt,” Ginger says.

There’s nothing weapon-like in the chest. Marco’s gang must have cleaned it out long ago. All we find is a tape measure. Ginger pockets it.

“I need the mask,” Ginger says, hand out, and I take it out of my bag.

“You wait by the door,” she says, putting the mask on. She then climbs up into the drop ceiling.

As expected, Marco does not leave without saying good-bye.

“Shay,” he says as he walks through the door.

Ginger drops down onto him and I shut the door so none of his thug friends can see.

“You’re going to walk us out of here,” Ginger says, crouched on top of him, the metal strip from the tape measure held taut across his throat.

Marco elbows her in the chest, but Ginger doesn’t even flinch. She digs her knee into his spine.

“I was coming to let you out,” he says, gasping.

“Right,” I say, peeking out the door. Headlamps slice the air like a laser show. The gang is shouting at one another; no one would notice if Marco screamed. There’s a door across the hall marked
FIRE
. “We’ll take the stairs,” I say to Ginger.

She pulls the nail gun from Marco’s homemade holster and slides it across the floor to me. Then she drags him by the throat to his feet.

“Seriously,” he says. “You don’t have to do this.”

“One more word,” Ginger says, “and I will choke you.”

The headlampers seem more interested in running down the hall than in watching us, so we cross into the fire stairwell without incident. Marco doesn’t even fight us as we stumble down through the darkness, pushing him out front in case the place is booby-trapped.

We reach the first floor.

“Keep going,” Marco says. “Go to the parking garage.”

“Yeah,” Ginger says. “Let’s follow the killer’s advice.”

“Please,” Marco says. He sounds so earnest, I almost want to believe him.

“Did they take your flashlight?” I ask Ginger. The service hall beyond the door is pitch-black and I’m sick of being jumped.

“Yeah,” Ginger says. “You have a light, tough guy?” The tape measure clicks tighter.

“I’m clean out,” he says. “I will help you, but you have to go to the parking garage.”

Do we want any kind of help Marco could offer?

“I could have gotten away from you at any point,” he says. “But I’m still here.”

“What’s in the garage?” Ginger asks.

“My gang’s last-ditch escape plan.”

We go down the last flight of steps with Ginger still holding Marco by the throat.

“You open it,” I say to Marco when we reach the door.

The handle squeals. The parking garage is as dark as the stairs, the air still and musty as a tomb.

“Walk forward about twenty feet,” he says.

We do, pushing him out in front of us, until he stops.

“Open the rear door.”

My fingers feel smooth metal, then glass—a car door? I find and lift the handle, and the car’s interior light pierces the dark. There’s a body in the backseat.

“Lexi!” Ginger shouts. I hear the metal strip snap back into the tape measure. Marco’s free.

Ginger climbs into the car’s backseat. Marco stashed a dead body in the car, and Ginger is now hugging it.

“Don’t hurt her,” Marco says, pulling Ginger off.

“What did you do to her?” Ginger growls.

“I saved her life,” he says, and shoves Ginger out of the car. She just stands there, stunned.

Marco lifts the girl—Lexi—in his arms and carries her to one of several motorcycles standing in an odd formation just to the right of the door to the fire stairwell. “You can drive this across the mall to the HomeMart. My only condition is that you take her with you.” He slides Lexi’s leg over the seat, then sits her gently against the cushioned metal backrest.

“Either of you ever ridden a motorcycle?” he asks. As he speaks, he pulls off the harness he had the nail gun in and slips it over Lexi’s head, strapping her to the bike.

“My cousin’s moped in India,” I say.

“Probably the same kind of thing,” Marco says. “One of my guys hotwired all these for us. In terms of riding, from what my boy says, you just squeeze the clutch, which is this metal bar here—”

“I can manage this,” I say. It’s enough like the moped that I can get us across a parking lot.

He looks up at me. “I still think your plan sucks.”

“I don’t care what you think.”

Ginger slips onto the seat between me and Lexi. “Let’s go.”

Marco hands me a walkie-talkie. “It’s the one we took off the cop, like a hundred years ago when we got our all-access key card,” he says. “I saved some battery, for what, I have no idea. Maybe it will help get you inside.”

I pass the walkie-talkie to Ginger, then check the bike’s in neutral and turn it on. I want to ride away, but that feels wrong. I can’t think of anything else to say, so I say, “Thanks.”

He winces half a smile, then nods. “Yeah.” He takes a step back toward the door, pauses to brush a piece of hair from Lexi’s mouth. “I hope you make it.”

Hope
. For all the asshole posturing, Marco hopes.

“The mall offices,” I say. It’s a chance, but I decide to take it. “Preeti’s in there. She’s sick, and there are others. If the fire gets bad, please help move them.”

Marco sighs, continues toward the door. “I can’t promise anything.”

It’s done. He’ll do whatever he’s going to do.

“Hold on,” I say to Ginger. I let out the clutch and we roll into the dark.

M
A
R
C
O

PARKING GARAGE

S
hay’s motorcycle is a point of light in the black. I did everything I could to save you, Lexi. Not that you’ll know about it.

Back to phase two.

It looked like the gang had cleared the weapons room as instructed, so now it’s just a matter of wiping out the green-face threat and securing a new command center on the second floor.

No sense walking into battle when you can ride. I grab the nearest bike, start the thing up, then navigate my way to the central pavilion. Mike told me he punched an SUV through the glass, so I easily make it to the steps. Heath gave us a lesson on riding, but this is the first time I’m really doing it. The engine buzzes between my thighs; the wheels scream on the tile. I bounce up onto the first floor.

Funny, this all started with Mike and a bike. Ha! It rhymes.

I am a comet, blasting down the hall, swerving around crap, my headlight carving tunnels of light through the dark to the escalator. The bike flies off the top step onto the second floor.

Down the hall, the food court is on fire. Meaning the second floor might not be the best place for a new command center. Scanning the floor above, I see most of the third floor from the T. J. O’Flannigan’s on back is
en fuego
. So we have very little time before we must be cleared out of the bowling alley.

My team is supposed to regroup in the Abercrombie. But as I drive up, the place is a ghost store. I continue down the hall, toward the food court, and discover why.

Anarchy. Mayhem. Garden-variety vandalism. Heath and another guy are torching the horses on the carousel.

“Where the hell is everyone?” I yell, pulling alongside the broken fence that once held a line of squalling kids.

“Here!” Heath yells back, waving his hand, which grips an ax. “At the party at the end of the world!” He returns to chopping the head from one of the ponies.

There’s Laila, flinging flaming tennis balls from her slingshot at Donna, one of our own. They’re both laughing, even though Donna’s hoodie has caught on fire. And there’s Jake and Neil dragging some helpless douchebags from a store. Where’s the discipline? What about the freaking plan?

And then I see Mike standing over a girl he just felled with one swipe of a bat. He’s laughing, even as I see a guy slam him in the back with a two-by-four.

If they think I’m giving up, giving in to this place, they are insane.

I gun the engine, stall, restart the damn thing, and fly toward the escalator. I jump onto the third floor and ride into my bowling alley, down my hall, to my stockpile of food.

The smoke is so thick, I can barely breathe. I heft the bucket of dried eggs, and get five feet before I’m sucking wind.

How could they give up? After everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve done to get here?

I drag that damn bucket to the front of the bowling alley. My lungs burn—screw my lungs, I keep going. Haul the box of chips, the crate of water. Only when I cut my hand open on the edge of a flat and there’s no one to catch the pallet before it drops onto my boot do I admit it: I am no longer good at alone.

The entrance to the bowling alley glows orange as I approach out of the dark. Human screams, some from pain, some not, compete with the voiceless roar of the fire. It’s close enough for me to feel its heat.

I get on the bike and ride across the hall, down the hallway, and stop in front of the mall offices.

“Ryan?” I yell, punching open the door.

A metal pole whacks me across the chest.

“Get the hell out!” the douche screams.

“Shay told me to come here,” I say. “She asked me to—”

The punch glances off my cheekbone, scraping the charred flesh of my skin, and I black out.

Water splashes across my skin and Ryan shakes me back to life. “Can you ride that bike?”

“So much of me wants to kill you right now.” I push my body upright. My cheek pulses with pain.

“We have to move these people,” he says, shuffling down the hall. “And I don’t know how to work a motorcycle.”

A half-dead book light hangs from a ceiling tile and illuminates several prone bodies. Ryan backs out of the dark at the end of the hall, dragging a girl by the ankles. “There are four including her who can’t walk down,” he says, laying her at my feet. “You take them on the bike. I’ll follow with the ones who can move on their own.”

It’s Shay’s sister, Preeti. She’s sick, probably not going to make it to the end of the day, and really, are any of us?

“Why are you even bothering?” I say. “If you’re not burned in the fire, you’ll be choked by the smoke. Even on the lower floors, it’s just a matter of hours.”

“Tell me now if you’ve given up,” he says. “I’m moving these people with or without you.” He shuffles on his makeshift crutch back into the dark.

I hate him more now than ever.

But I still lift the girl in my arms, place her on my bike, then go back to get another.