Tremor (2 page)

The echo of a cough was heard.

Then all hell broke loose.

When Faith blew open the two metal doors, it was like a bomb going off: washers and dryers were ripped to shreds; shards of metal and knobs and wires flew everywhere, exploding into the air. But Faith's show of bravado was her first mistake, because Meredith had secretly placed a dozen more bowling balls in the meat locker. They were black, which had made them harder to notice in the dim light of the room full of meat hooks. Before Faith could turn around, all ten balls were slamming into her back one after the other, pushing her out onto the warehouse floor like a tin can being kicked down the street.

“Hey, take it easy—” Dylan started to say.

But Meredith was having none of it.

“Stay out of this.”

As soon as she had Faith off guard, she started piling the appliances on top of her, quickly burying her under a mountain of junk. There was silence in the warehouse as the drifters looked on, unable to stop themselves from smiling. The pile began to move, slowly this time, as Faith glided up through the tower of metal. She hovered in the air, holding a ball and staring at Meredith as if she was planning to knock her down like a bowling pin. She was about to say
Is that all you got?
And she would have, but Meredith had one more trick up her sleeve, and the time had arrived to use it.

A giant swath of netting dropped from behind an exposed beam in the ceiling, then spun like a corkscrew, tangling into a knot around Faith's body. That was followed by a thick rope, which spun around and around Faith so fast she couldn't stop it. She hung in the air, struggling to get free, like a caterpillar helplessly trapped in a cocoon. She flew back and forth, banging into walls and concrete pillars, a rage-fueled menace without a chance of setting herself free. When she finally gave up and fell to the floor, Faith was so exhausted she couldn't even scream in frustration.

Meredith looked at Faith and thought of the first words Hotspur Chance had said to her all those years ago:

Think about the object you want to move. Look at it. Now control it.

Meredith rolled and tumbled Faith across the floor like a sack of potatoes, hauled her into the meat locker, and hung her on a hook. Then she slammed the metal door shut.

“She's going to be pissed off,” Dylan said. “I'm not sure the hook was such a good idea.”

Meredith turned toward a door behind her, opened it, and disappeared inside.

“Clean up this mess,” Dylan heard her say. “We'll try again tomorrow.”

Chapter 3
The Looney Bin

A half hour later Dylan had freed Faith from the tangled netting and together they'd cleaned up everything. Faith didn't say a word until they were finished, and when she finally did speak, it was short and to the point.

“She tricked me.”

Dylan agreed, but he also knew they were living on borrowed time. The day was coming when the luxury of training days would come to an end.

“She's only trying to make you better. We all are.”

“Easy for you to say,” Faith mumbled. “And stop acting like my teacher. I thought we were past all that.”

Dylan knew better than to push too hard when she was angry. She had a certain look that said
Are you seriously doing this right now?

“Come on; let's head over to Six Flags. It'll be dark soon. We can take a break like we talked about.”

“I've got somewhere to be,” Faith said. She leaned in close and gave him a kiss on the lips, which felt about as warm as a handshake on the receiving end.

“Where are you going?” Dylan wanted to know.

“Just something I need to do. I'll catch up with you later. Promise.”

“Look, I'm sorry, okay?” Dylan said. But by then Faith was already walking away in the same skinny jeans she'd worn at Old Park Hill all those months ago.

 

Three states away, in what remained of Florence, Colorado, Hawk and Clooger were hiding out in a cemetery. The city was what they called
zeroed
, or 100 percent deserted. There were plenty of vermin and wild animals roaming around, especially at night, but the only humans were buried under the ground where they were hiding out. They had to be careful in places like this, because there tended to be packs of wild dogs and wolves roaming around. They could be vicious, but more importantly, the wild dogs barked like crazy if they so much as smelled a human. Sound traveled surprisingly well in a zeroed city, because the normal layers of noise Florence used to have—cars going by, the hum of streetlights, voices—all that was gone. A pack of wild dogs could be heard for miles, and that's exactly what they didn't need.

“Any heat out there?” Clooger asked.

“Yeah, plenty,” Hawk replied, glancing at a Tablet screen covered in a geological map. There were tiny hot spots of glowing orange in some areas. “But we've got four or five miles of perimeter. We're okay for now.”

Clooger was talking about large animals. One of the scariest things about zeroed cities and deserted quadrants was the predators: cougars and wolves and bears prime among them. Something had happened to these species in the emptiness of North America. Predators didn't avoid humans like they used to; they aggressively sought them out in remote locations. People hypothesized that officials of the States had something to do with this phenomenon, but no one could prove it. Had they used DNA-altering drugs to make certain species more aggressive in order to help keep those areas zeroed? It sure seemed like it.

“I remember when a guy could walk around in the woods all day and never see so much as a chipmunk or a deer,” Clooger groused. “The big animals were out there, but the last thing they wanted to do was cross paths with a human.”

Old Park Hill and places like it were spared, because the last thing the States needed was a lot of bad press about a whole town of people on the outside being attacked by wild animals. It was more evidence that they, the States, were in control of whatever was happening on the outside.

Hawk was along for the journey with Clooger in order to make sure they stayed hidden from people and the occasional presence of something that could rip their limbs off, such as a mountain lion. Clooger also liked a little company on an expedition when he could get it, and Hawk was a good traveling companion. They had a nice routine going, and Hawk often had information Clooger needed.

“Distance to target?” Clooger asked. He was staring through a pair of infrared goggles, which covered most of the exposed skin on his face. Between the dreadlocks, the beard, and his enormous size, it was fair to assume Clooger's first cousin was, possibly, Bigfoot.

“It's 2.4 miles by road,” Hawk replied. “But you could trim that to 1.5 miles if you cut across the open field. Let's say you walk at a brisk pace, keep it real quiet. With your stride, you'd travel the road in about thirty minutes, an hour round-trip; figure ten minutes to observe the location and take a few pictures. That's seventy minutes.”

“And the shortcut? How long would that take?”

“Assuming you don't get eaten by a pack of wolves, you're all in at forty-five minutes.”

“Risk assessment?” Clooger asked.

“You're doing that
Star Trek
commander thing again.”

“Am I?” Clooger hadn't noticed.

“It's okay; I like it.
Distance to target, risk assessment
—you're cracking me up. I think you could have been a comedian, actually.”

No one ever called Clooger funny, and he hated the idea of making people laugh for Coin, especially if it was at his own expense.

He glared down at Hawk and asked for the risk assessment again, which only seemed funnier to Hawk.

Hawk sniffed the air like a bloodhound.

“I smell a skunk, and if there's one, there's a hundred. Getting that smell out of your hair if you end up crossing a skunk in that field—no way—it would all have to go. Dreads, beard, the whole crazy mess.”

“Stink risk if I take the shortcut, high. Got it.”

“Or a shaving risk, depending on how you look at it.”

“Anything else?” Clooger asked.

Hawk took a bite of a protein bar, his third one of the day, and tapped commands on his Tablet. He'd set the screen to dim, so it barely put out any light at all, but he still used it sparingly. Light was scarce at night outside the States, and they were, he hoped, in enemy territory.

“Access on the field side is darker; that's a plus. But there's no doubt about it; the shortcut will have animals in it. You could run into a mountain lion or a cougar. Either one of those things could be watching us right now, just waiting for you to wander into a death trap. Still, the field side is faster; always better to be out in the open as little as possible. Overall, I'd say fifty-one percent for the shortcut, forty-nine percent for the road.”

“Elections have been decided on thinner margins,” Clooger observed, returning his gaze to the collection of buildings huddled together off in the distance. He scratched his beard thoughtfully and looked down at Hawk.

“Be ready to leave in forty-five minutes.”

Hawk was happy to hear Clooger's decision, because the idea of standing alone in a cemetery at night at the edge of a ghost town wasn't exactly on his list of things to accomplish before his fourteenth birthday, which just happened to be right around the corner. The faster this was over, the better.

After ten minutes of waiting alone, he snapped his Tablet to pocket size and put it away, then sat down on a gravestone and took off his shoulder pack. Inside were more protein bars, a bottle of water, and a printed copy of the picture book
The Sneetches and Other Stories
. He'd had to go back to the old grade school library in Faith's neighborhood and take the only other copy, because Faith had ripped up the one he'd had before.
Thank God for libraries that kept multiple copies of popular titles,
he'd thought when he'd gotten his hands on it. For all Hawk knew, it was the last copy of
The Sneetches and Other Stories
on Earth. It had become his most prized possession through everything that had happened in the intervening months. By now some of the pages were torn, and the corners of the cover were marred by damage.

The half-moon cast a pale light strong enough to read by, and Hawk made the mistake of turning to a story in the
Sneetches
book called “What Was I Scared Of?” In the story, the narrator repeatedly meets up with an empty pair of pale green pants. Given Hawk's situation, it was, quite possibly, the scariest thing he had ever read. By the time Clooger reappeared a half hour later, Hawk was ready to jump into his arms and cry like a seven-year-old. And he might have done it were it not for the fact that Clooger smelled like something out of a horror movie.

“If it hadn't been for the skunk attack, the expedition would have been a complete success,” Clooger said.

“You gotta be kidding me.”

Clooger began walking through the cemetery, which put Hawk downwind of a soft breeze.

“You smell like zombies,” Hawk said.

Clooger didn't say anything until Hawk jogged closer beside him, pulling his T-shirt up to cover his nose.

“I found what we came looking for,” Clooger reported without a hint of emotion. “Time to go home.”

 

While Clooger and Hawk were preparing to leave Colorado, Faith and Glory were sitting in a mostly empty Claire's jewelry store in the abandoned mall just south of their headquarters. Only one light was on, right over the top of them both, and everything outside their little halo of light was quiet and lonely. Empty mall stalls stood like tombstones in the shadowy light as the buzzing of a tattoo needle started.

“Tell me why you want this, and I
might
do it for you,” Glory said. She was testing out the instruments, making sure everything still worked as she rummaged through her bin of inks and dyes.

“Is there some unwritten code of tattoo ethics I don't know about?”

“You mean, do you have to tell me?”

“Yeah, that's what I mean.”

Glory stopped looking through her bin of supplies and focused her attention on Faith.
Such a pretty girl,
she thought.
Blond haired and blue-eyed and tall as a Kansas cornstalk, like someone out of a magazine.

“What's goin' on inside that head a yours, Faith Daniels?”

Glory's eyes were large and bright against her dark skin, and when she looked at Faith this way, it was always hard to keep secrets. But on this night Faith was particularly uninterested in any kind of criticism about her motives or her feelings. She didn't answer.

“So the hammer didn't hurt enough?” Glory asked. “Now you wanna put a tattoo on your tattoo?”

She'd asked Glory to add a white letter
C
over the ball and chain she already had etched into her skin. The chain ran circles around her forearm, tangled with green ivy, and the ball at the end lay on the softest part of the skin on her wrist. That's where she wanted the white letter
C
tattooed, right on top of the ball.

“The
C
is for
Clara
,” Faith whispered, her voice cracking under the weight of the words. Her heart was like a cauldron of sadness and rage whenever she thought about Clara Quinn. She'd killed Faith's best friend with a hammer throw, killed her without thinking twice about it. “It's for Clara Quinn.”

Glory didn't reply; she just sighed and shook her head softly. She quietly went about the task of preparing a small portion of the titanium dioxide she would need to etch the white letter, and then she went to work on Faith's wrist.

“You ready?”

“Yeah, I'm ready.”

As a second pulse, Faith had to clear her mind in a certain way in order to let the needle in, and this she did.

It wasn't a lot of work, just a simple letter
C
. And it wasn't very big, only a half inch high and thin. But Faith had never felt such a shock of pain in her life. Faith was sure Glory was digging the needle deeper than she needed to, but she couldn't bring herself to tell her to stop. The searing pain lingered across Faith's wrist, and, looking up, Glory saw how much pain she was inflicting.

“Revenge hurts, don't it? And not just the one on the receiving end.”

And still Faith said nothing. She would endure this pain, even take pleasure in it, until the deed was done.

“We through,” Glory said a few minutes later. “You know the drill: keep it clean; give it some air.”

Faith's hand was shaking as she brushed away a tear. Her wrist felt as if it were on fire, as if the mark were burning a
C
-shaped hole all the way through to the other side.

“I'm sorry,” Faith said. She didn't know why she said it, but there it was. She got up and walked alone through the empty corridor of the mall, farther into the darkness, and, looking back, saw that Glory hadn't moved at all. She looked like an angel who wasn't quite strong enough to break through the shadows and save Faith from herself.

 

Six Flags Magic Mountain had been, at one time, one of the more popular Southern California theme parks for teens. Disneyland was fine if you were a kid, but Magic Mountain had the really badass thrill rides, the ones that made your pulse race just by looking at them. With names like Viper, Dive Devil, and Drop of Doom, these were rides with the kind of muscle that routinely turned varsity football players into babies screaming for their moms.

As Faith flew over the wide, looping roller-coaster tracks, she wondered what it would feel like to ride the rails, looking down at the park as she screamed and laughed. It was possible. She could get the coaster moving with the power of her mind, but the risks had been deemed too high by the almighty Meredith. What if someone saw them, reported them, came looking for them? There was too much at stake to risk revealing their hidden location to take chances on something as stupid as a glorified fair ride. And so Faith had been careful not to let herself think too much about sitting next to Dylan, hanging upside down at the top of the world, holding on to each other for dear life.

Faith landed in the park and felt an immediate surge of adrenaline that put her senses on alert. It was always dark at night in the park, and it was pushing midnight. She hadn't seen any patrols from the white State vans in weeks, and they'd settled on the location so close to the rising tide of the ocean for a reason: no one had stayed. Valencia, and Magic Mountain along with it, were zeroed. It wasn't people Faith was worried about; it was animals. Wolves, coyotes, packs of rabies-infested dogs, and some alarmingly huge cougars that had taken over the whole city long before Faith and the other drifters had arrived.