Nomad (34 page)

A fit of laughing erupted downstairs and Jess stiffened, adrenaline pumping, bolting upright and stepping into the shadows of the hallway. She glanced around the corner, down into the main hall. Four men at the card table now, more empty bottles littered around them than before. Where was the fifth?

Enzo came up maybe fifteen minutes ago? She needed to hurry. So far they hadn’t seemed to notice the light show going on in the sky. If they had a TV or radio on, there had to be announcements of the destruction that was already happening on the other side of the world.

The scientists knew it was coming, but there were too many conflicting estimates. Jess wasn’t even sure her father’s time estimate was right until she saw the water draining from the bay. The speed of the water disappearing gave her a frightening estimate of how close Nomad might already be.

But these guys, drunk and playing cards, were isolated on this island. They had no idea. Jess needed to keep it that way as long as possible.

Creeping down the hallway, she pressed her ear against the first door. Silence. At the second door she heard shuffling, then the sound of muffled crying. She tried a few of Aberto’s keys before the lock clicked over. Ever so slowly, she opened the door.

There, inside, Hector was on a cot, his knees pulled up into his chest, his eyes wide. Jess held a finger to her mouth—
quiet, be quiet
—and motioned for him to come. He uncoiled his legs, his small chest heaving in and out with quick breaths, and slid off the cot to take a step toward her.

“Come on, it’s okay,” Jess whispered. “We need to go.”

He stopped two feet from her, his lips trembling. Jess held out her hand. He stared at her, then lifted his hand and pressed his cold little fingers into hers. Jess scooped him into her arms.

“Giovanni?” Hector whispered.

Jess closed her eyes, gripping Hector tight.

Giovanni.

He almost got her killed. He hid things from her, even as she risked her life. Why didn’t he tell the truth? An ugly surge of spite rose up in her ancient brain-stem.

But then again…

Truth was a slippery thing. Sometimes, our lies became our lives. Jess knew that more than anyone.

“Which room?” she whispered to Hector.

He pointed at the second door down the hallway, near the end. Jess listened to the voices downstairs while she crept along the hall, fumbled with the keys until she found the right one.

The door swung open.

On a bare metal cot, Giovanni was tied up with rough yellow nylon cord. His face purple and swollen from the beatings, he opened one puffy eye, barely even registering surprise at Jess standing in front of him with Hector in her arms.

“Go,” Giovanni whispered from cracked lips, “go without me.”

“You’re coming with us,” Jess whispered back, putting Hector down and pulling the knife from her back pocket.

She raised her eyebrows at Hector, nodding at the door.
Keep watch
, her eyes said. Hector nodded and tiptoed to the door, peering out. Jess cut the ropes binding Giovanni, and he winced as he sat upright, rubbing his wrists.

“Can you walk?” Jess whispered urgently.

“I think so.”

“Then let’s go.”

35

I
SOLA
G
IGLI,
I
TALY

GIVING GIOVANNI THE knife, Jess pulled Enzo’s handgun from her front pocket and led them out the door, sneaking across the landing. Giovanni pointed at the slumped body of Aberto, thinking him asleep, but Jess shook her head, don’t worry, keep going, she mouthed silently.

As they passed Aberto, Jess fixed her eyes on the staircase down, listening to the voices. Giovanni stared at the inert body of Aberto, glancing back at Jess, then back at the dead body.

Hector crept along between them.

Out onto the terrace and down the exterior stairs, Jess led the way. She limped on her unfamiliar prosthetic, while Giovanni stumbled behind her, wincing in pain on every step. He stared up at the glimmering light show in the sky but said nothing.

“What are we going to do?” Giovanni whispered as they reached the cover of the trees. “Is there a boat?”

“I don’t think so.” Jess pressed forward, the hair on her neck prickling in anticipation of shouting behind them. Just a few hundred feet to the dock from here.

“Then we swim?” Giovanni tripped on a root and tumbled into the ground, cursing. He got onto his knees, his bloody face contorted in agony. “It’s a kilometer to the shore. I can’t swim that, not now.” He waved his hand at Jess. “Give me the gun. I’ll hold them off while you take Hector.”

Jess hauled him to his feet. “We’re not going to swim.”

Giovanni doubled over, panting. “Then what?”

“We walk.”

“What?”

Jess grabbed Hector and marched forward to the edge of the trees.

“Have you lost your mind?” Giovanni hissed, staggering behind her. “How do you expect to…”

Jess pointed at the water. Or what was left of it. Wet mud glistened in reflected pink and greens from the lights in the sky, rocky outcroppings covered in seaweed dotting the almost empty bay.

Almost empty.

A thick band of deep water still stretched in a channel between the island and shore, but the water was still draining out—churning whitewater visible over the rocks even from this distance.

“We walk,” Jess repeated, grabbing Hector’s hand. “And we need to hurry. Nomad will be here in four or five hours.”

“Four or five HOURS?”

“How is this a surprise? It’s almost exactly as my dad predicted.”

They reached the edge of the tree cover, and she put a hand out, telling Hector to stay. She looked cautiously from left to right before stepping out of the shadows and onto the dock.

“When the water comes back, it’s not going to be gentle. Not like the way it left.”

“What are you doing?” Giovanni hung back in the shadow of the trees by the side of the dock.

Jess hurried to a small wooden shack near the end, the tire of the dirt bike still sticking out from behind it. The keys were in the ignition. Finally, some luck. She wheeled the bike out and down the dock, scanning the villa up on the rocks for any sign someone saw them. Still nothing.

“Come on, let’s keep moving,” Jess urged as she passed Giovanni and Hector, pushing the bike off the dock, down across seaweed covered rocks and onto the sandy mud.

In her mind, Jess visualized the Earth, their location spinning toward Nomad as it raced at them from behind the sun. What time was it? Past three a.m.? The tidal forces still emptied the bay, but soon it would reverse as they rotated toward Nomad. “We don’t have much time.”

She glanced up at the light show, pulsing and glowing, building in intensity, then at the village across the bay, lights twinkling in some houses. Nobody was outside looking up. The town looked deserted. Even here they must have heard what was coming. The men in the villa, though, they were disconnected. Unaware.

Too bad for them.

“Thank you for rescuing me,” Giovanni said as they plodded forward.

Jess didn’t reply. She kept her head down and pushed the bike, keeping an eye on Hector. She didn’t want to start the bike, not yet. The whine of its engine would alert the men. Still too close. The sandy bottom near the shore gave way to thickening mud less than a hundred feet from shore. On each step, Jess had to pull her feet from the muck, and she felt her prosthetic almost coming away more than once.

“Thank you, Jessica,” Giovanni repeated.

They trudged past a mound of seaweed covered rocks, crabs scuttling away from them. The moon had already set. It would have been pitch black save for the ghostly light show above their heads. Coming over the ridge of a sand bar, a large fish flopped back and forth, its mouth opening and closing.

Giovanni grunted and took three quick steps toward Jess. “What’s wrong? Are you mad at me?”

Gritting her teeth, Jess shoved the bike forward, but Giovanni put a hand on her shoulder.

“Jessica?”

She turned to him. “When were you thinking of telling me?”

Giovanni stared at her, pressing his swollen lips together, grimacing but saying nothing.

“That our families are mortal enemies?” Jess snorted and turned away, pushing the bike up across a sand bank and sliding down the other side into a mess of mud and seaweed. “Didn’t you think that might have been an important detail?”

It all made sense now. Why Giovanni acted strange when her mother first said her maiden name, and why he locked her and Jess up when Hector was kidnapped. Why didn’t he just say something?

“I’m sorry.” Giovanni hurried behind Jess.

“Sorry? You’re
sorry
?” She waved a hand at the luminescent sky. “It’s a little late for sorry, no?”

“This thing, it consumed my father. I think it was how my mother was killed, when I was a child.” Giovanni did his best to run forward, to get in front of Jess. “But I wanted no part of it. It’s why I was always away, why I wasn’t here when my father died.”

“Is this some kind of game to you?” Jess pushed past him, climbed onto the top of another sandbank. “Were you and I some kind of twisted part of it?”

“No, no. I had no idea this feud was still going on, didn’t suspect until Hector was kidnapped. But even then, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to spoil—”

A brilliant green ribbon of light flared through the sky, interrupting him, bathing them in radiance. As they watched, the ribbon wobbled and split into orange and blue, fluorescing the heavens with neon tendrils. Beside them, in a dark pool, fish tried to splash away. The twinkling lights in the houses of the village winked out. Jess glanced behind them, at the villa. The lights went out there as well.

And someone yelled.

Men stood on the terrace of the villa, three hundred yards away. One of them pointed at Jess and Giovanni, the others staring into the sky. Another man came out, holding what looked like a broom handle. He pointed it their way.

A chunk of rock exploded next to them, followed by a sharp crack.

Not a broom handle.

The man reloaded his rifle.

Turning, Jess raised the gun still in her right hand. She fired four, five times. The men scattered. Jess swung her right leg over the bike, jammed the muzzle of the gun into her pocket and reached to turn on the ignition.

“Get on!” Jess kicked the starter down. The engine sputtered.

Another bullet thudded into the sand at her feet. She kicked the starter down again as Giovanni deposited Hector on the seat behind her. He jumped on himself, grabbing tight to Jess’s waist, cradling Hector between them. The engine roared to life and Jess clicked it into gear, spraying up sand. Glancing back, she saw men sprinting onto the dock, not more than two hundred yards away. They jumped off the dock into the mud, running at them.

Jess coasted across the sand, lit in orange and greens from the glowing skies, and looked for a way through the channel of water still separating them from the shore. The waters weren’t receding anymore; the churn of whitewater out of the bay had stopped. She gripped the throttle, pulled it all the way back, her fear of the men behind her eclipsed by the fear of what she felt was coming.

Scanning the thick band of dark water, Jess saw no way through.

She raced along the edge of it weaving past rocks, crab traps and piles of discarded fishing nets, and there, in the distance, by the breakwater of the fishing village, a path of dry ground. She’d need to backtrack a half mile, but there wasn’t any other way. Crouching low, feeling Giovanni’s fingers digging into her stomach, she gunned the throttle for everything it had.

Behind them, the running men reached the channel of water. They saw what Jess was doing, realized they could cut her off by wading and swimming through the channel to run up the bank to the other side.

Pulling up to the jetty beside the breakwater, Jess slowed to pick her way through the rocks, trying to keep her balance. More than once, Giovanni kept them upright, bouncing his legs beside the bike.

They reached dry pavement as a deep reverberation shook the ground. Seagulls squawked, birds filling the dark skies above them. The roar came from the ocean, but Jess didn’t look back. She clicked the bike into its highest gear, held the throttle all the way back, and kept her head low.

Speeding past the pickup truck that she’d been dragged here in, Jess glanced left, at the men from the villa scrambling up the rocks from the bay. They weren’t more than fifty feet away, but they didn’t stop to shoot at Jess and Giovanni.

Jess saw the terror in their eyes, and she allowed herself to look behind them. An explosion of glowing foam, hundreds of feet high, burst around the villa, still nearly a mile away. A wall of black water surged behind it, towering above them.