Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin (13 page)

As we left the office through the bullet-riddled door, we heard yelling echoing up through the vast space under the Capitol dome. Murphy and I paused and shared a look. I’m sure he was thinking the same thing I was thinking: Don had gotten loose and alerted his comrades.

Time to test my confidence in my assertion that the assholes were too few and the Capitol complex too large to prevent our getaway.

I leaned out of the door’s alcove to see what I could see up and down the length of the building.

The third floor was clear. I listened for a moment. I asked, “Hear anything up here?”

Murphy shook his head but continued to scan from side to side.

I left the cover of the alcove, ran on light feet through the hall until I was near the edge of the balcony that circled the rotunda on the third floor. Getting down on my hands and knees and then onto my belly, I got close enough to see the round, decorative terrazzo floor with the state seal at the bottom. Thick stone balusters carved into decorative shapes by the prison laborers and Scottish stonecutters who built the Capitol offered pretty good cover, especially with the nighttime shadows inside the building.

Below, I saw a half dozen armed men surrounding four others with hands bound behind their backs. The four with hands bound were wearing desert camouflage fatigues and boots. Looking disciplined even with no helmets and no hats, they wore nothing on their belts. They stood, not quite at attention but straight up, except for one. He had a familiar odd curve to his stance.

The six surrounding them had the ragtag appearance of most of the other guys we’d seen in the Capitol gang. Some wore military clothing with t-shirts or sweatshirts. Some of them slouched. They fidgeted. They were a rabble.

The guy I assumed was in charge stood in front of the four prisoners, ranting on about something. In the large space with the echoes coming back down from the dome above, it was hard to make out more than an occasional word of what he was saying.

Murphy leaned in close to my ear and whispered. “Not our business. Take off your Null Spot cape and GTF.”

I nodded but didn’t move.

Wait. What?

I looked at Murphy. “GTF?”

“Get the fuck outta here.” He nodded dramatically toward the stairs.

I whispered, “You’re missing some letters in your acronym.”

“Fuck if I care.”

I looked back down at the soldiers on the rotunda floor. Something about that one guy with the unusual stance was familiar, and I needed to figure out why. I got up on my hands and knees and started crawling to another place on the rotunda balcony, one that would give me a better view of the prisoners below.

“Zed,” Murphy hissed. “Zed! What the hell?” He pointed down the hall away from the rotunda.

I ignored him and continued.

Once I arrived at the spot I wanted, I lay down again and looked.

A second later, Murphy was by my side. “We can get down the stairs at the end of the hall and make our way into the annex on the basement level.”

Then I saw it. I pointed, “See that dude there with the soldiers, the one who’s not quite standing straight up?”

“Sure.” Murphy glanced perfunctorily. “Unless that’s the brother you never had or something, we should go.”

Shaking my head, I whispered, “Doesn’t that guy look like Sergeant Dalhover?”

“No,” Murphy told me. “It’s not him. Top is like a hundred years old. He’s out in West Texas. That dude down there is thirty, maybe.” Murphy nodded emphatically toward the stairs again. “GTF.”

“I’m not saying it’s him.” I squinted to try and make out the face. “It
looks
like him is all I’m saying.”

“What you’re saying is never all you’re saying.” Murphy sighed dramatically and shook his head. “You know they have guns, too. This isn’t going to be like shooting Whites. It’s not even going to be like shooting at Jay Booth and his bozos. We’re outgunned.”

I said, “I wonder if maybe that’s Dalhover’s son.”

“Top never said he had a son,” Murphy told me. “Not one word about his family.”

“Still.” The more I looked, the more I convinced myself that the guy down there had to be at least related to Sergeant Dalhover. The resemblance was uncanny.

“Maybe the virus is affecting your vision,” said Murphy, “but that’s not his son. Not unless he takes after his mom because that dude doesn’t look like Top.”

The guy downstairs came to a loud conclusion and pointed. Some of his ragtag band led the four soldiers away.

I looked at Murphy and said, “That may not be his son, but it’s got to be his nephew or something.”

Murphy shook his head. “I hate Null Spot.”

We trotted down the hall, silence more important than speed. I led the way into a stairwell just outside the House Chamber and looked down the gap between the stairs.

Shit.

I leaned quickly back and whispered to Murphy, “Someone is down at the basement level.”

He leaned close to the edge and listened. He looked at me and shook his head.

I peeked over the rail again and saw a light down near the bottom, moving lower. I continued watching until it disappeared into the long basement hallway that ran the length of the building. “We’re cool now,” I said, turning back to Murphy. “Lots of people around though.”

Murphy looked at me and started to say something that I knew would have been rude but chose not to. Instead, he waved me forward and I led the way down the stairs, staying close to the outer wall to ensure that if by chance some of the ragtag bunch of assholes entered the stairwell, they wouldn’t see my white skin in the moonlight coming in through the windows.

At each landing, I paused for a moment to listen. At each floor, I stopped for a peek up and down the hall before proceeding.

Once at the basement level, I took some extra time in examining the long, dark hallway. I saw no light in the blackness, save the little that came down through the stairwells. I gave Murphy a look to let him know to ready himself. I took off at a run.

It was a nervous hundred yards, as I expected the guy we’d seen with the flashlight to come out of any of the doors ahead at any moment.

He didn’t.

At the corner leading up to the central stairs, I turned a little too hard and slipped on the smooth, waxed floor, landing with a slap of skin and a clatter of metal as my machete bounced and the shotgun barrel hit.

I clenched my teeth and squinched my eyes shut involuntarily, hoping somehow to catch those sounds in the air and drag them back before the wrong ear heard.

I held my breath and listened.

Murphy reached down and grabbed me under the arm, yanking me to my feet, seemingly without slowing down.

While I was still trying to catch my balance, he was already bounding down the stairs, waving for me to follow, and mouthing, “Hurry the fuck up.”

I did.

The stairs coming down from the Capitol’s basement led to the underground annex, where I suspected Baird’s ragtag men had led the soldiers.

Murphy reached a landing and stopped as he peeked around a corner.

I came to a stop with my back to the wall as I looked up the stairs toward the Capitol basement. I listened.

Murphy glanced over at me. He grinned.

He was as much a junkie for the adrenaline as I was.

I smiled back and suppressed a laugh. Whoever had been on the basement level with the flashlight was either confused and looking around in the darkness or frightened and peeking around corners for noisy ghosts.

I whispered, “Are they down there?”

Murphy nodded, “About halfway up the length of the annex. Down on the bottom floor.”

“You wanna follow along on the second floor?” I asked, knowing we could take quick peeks over the rail to see them all below.

“Gotta stay quiet,” Murphy told me before rounding the corner.

Running on our toes to keep the noise down, I pulled away from the wall for a few steps and took a quick glance over the railing. Indeed, the ragtag soldiers were leading the real soldiers down toward the helicopter.

Murphy pulled up to stop at a side hall.

Coming up beside him again, I said, “That’s where those other guys were going to get the White Skins.”

Murphy said, “Maybe they’ve converted some rooms down there into holding pens or a jail or something. Do you remember what’s down there? You’re Mr. Capitol Tourist, right?”

I pointed. “Some big ass conference rooms are past the helicopters.”

“If they’ve got a bunch of Whites stored somewhere, it’ll make sense to put them in one big room,” Murphy said. “Easier to keep them corralled that way.”

“Makes sense.”

Murphy took off again, running silently to the next crossing hallway.

From there, we saw directly out into the round atrium. Plenty of moonlight flowed in, casting us in much more light than I felt comfortable with. I crept back further into the hall’s shadows when I spotted loitering movement below and across the atrium. At least one guard was over there. I knew they had to have someone guarding the helicopters, even though I hadn’t spotted them earlier.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“You know the place,” Murphy conceded. “You’re the Mighty Null Spot.”

“Valiant,” I muttered. “The
Valiant
Null Spot.” I pointed down the hallway into the darkness. “If we go that way we can loop around. Judging by where the stairwells came up on the plaza, I think there might be some stairs back around there we can use to get down to the bottom level and maybe sneak up on the guards from behind.”

“Behind?” Murphy asked, shaking his head. “It’s not like the guys will know which direction to guard in.” He pointed all around. “There are stairs in every direction.”

“At least we won’t be coming down the main hall,” I told him. “That seems to be the route everybody uses when they come and go.”

“And when we get down there,” he asked, “then what?”

I shrugged. “Do we ever know?” I took off at a run into the darkness.

We found the stairs, just as I’d deduced. We made our way down to the lowest level undetected, crept silently up a short stub of a hallway and I peeked around a corner at a moment of complete luck.

Two guards were standing less than a dozen feet away, looking across the floor of the atrium toward the main Capitol building as they stood between the helicopter and the stacks of crated munitions. Both men had rifles.

I pulled my head back quickly, my nervousness clear on my face. I raised a finger to my lips so Murphy would know to stay quiet, and I raised two fingers more and pointed toward the corner. I motioned Murphy back toward the stairwell that we’d just used to enter the hallway. Once inside, with the door quietly closed behind us, I whispered, “I’ve got an idea.”

Murphy, never shy about telling me just how bad my ideas were, made every effort to tell me about this one. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a better idea. So I said, “Unless you’ve got something else to say.”

“Yeah,” he answered, “we’re guessing the supposed Dalhover relative is in one of the conference rooms right around the corner.”

“That’s where the guards are,” I told him. It made perfect sense to me.

Murphy glanced up through the stairwell. “Guys were up there too. Were they guarding people hiding in the bushes?”

“Yes,” I told him, pretending complete seriousness with the lie.

“Whatever.” Murphy shook his head and looked around. “Fine. But one more thing.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“We’re gonna run over there and bust those soldiers out because you think one of them kinda looks like Dalhover’s son.” Murphy rolled his eyes at that one. “The thing that gets me is this—you don’t know if these hillbillies around here are the good guys or the bad guys. And you don’t know if the soldiers are the good guys or the bad guys.”

“The good guys or the bad guys?” I interrupted. “This isn’t a cowboy movie.”

“People that want to kill you or not,” Murphy explained.

I understood that perfectly clear.

“What if they all want to kill us?” Murphy asked. “And they all might. You know that’s true, right?”

I nodded. I couldn’t argue. In fact, I more than half expected it. Still, I felt loyalty to Dalhover and if there was a chance the soldier was his son, though I felt pretty damn sure it was, then I had to get him out of a jam. If he wanted to kill me, well, he’d have to do that some other time. I said, “We’ll bust ‘em out, and if you don’t get a warm fuzzy, we’ll go our separate ways once we’re over the wall.”

“Warm fuzzy or not,” said Murphy, “you know as well as I do—matter of fact, you keep preaching it to me—us and normals don’t mix. It only takes time. Before long, things go to shit.”

I nodded. True enough. “We’ll bust ‘em out. Then we’ll split up.”

With all of Murphy’s objections tabled for the moment, I explained the plan. It was simple. They all were. Well, maybe not all of them. The ones that had a chance of working were. In complicated plans, things always went wrong.