Max Collins - After the Dark

“I broke one,” Joshua said, furry face matted with tears. “Did I do wrong, Max?”

She glanced at the beast of a man next to her, and it came back to her, Joshua bleeding, wounded, breaking that Familiar’s neck. Kneeling next to her now, as if they were both taking communion, Joshua seemed oblivious to his own wound, much less the knife blade still in his shoulder.

“You okay, Big Fella?”

He shook his head. “Too late,” he said. The eyes brimmed with more tears. “Boy shouldn’t have to, Max.”

“Have to...?”

“Take one. For the team.” And the tears overflowed.

She removed her hand from the dead boy’s head and stroked the side of Joshua’s warm, wet face.

Alec squeezed her shoulder. “Max!”

“You’re right, Alec. Let’s shake it.”

She rose, self-control flooding through her; she willed herself into a coldly businesslike state. Her sense of purpose had returned, in spades. She quickly moved out into the hall, where Joshua had left the limp figure with its broken neck, a fact made obvious by the severe impossible angle of it, as that neck was almost nonexistent, the large head sitting on broad shoulders. The man’s wide eyes peered out emptily through the eye holes of the stocking mask.

She knelt over this corpse with considerably less compassion than she had the child’s. The Familiar wore familiar TAC fatigues, and Max had a pretty good idea what she was going to find even before she jerked the stocking cap off the man’s big head.

The blond guard from the Lyman Cale estate.

Otto. Or was it Franz? She didn’t remember.

Not that it mattered. She felt it safe to assume his partner, the dark-haired one — Franz, or Otto, whatever the hell — had been the one to escape through that bedroom window.

She stood.

Alec said, “Max... come on! We gotta blow this pop stand.”

“Shut-up,” she said. “I’m thinking.”

“Maybe you could do that in the car.”

“Alec, shut-up.”

What the hell was going on here? The Familiars, working for Lyman Cale?

Only, Lyman Cale was a vegetable, a CGI image in public, and in private a husk hooked up to life support... No one really worked for him, did they? That security team, including the two brawny ones — Familiars — reported to Lyman Cale’s private secretary, that slick ever-so-helpful bureaucrat, Franklin Bostock.

Was Bostock the answer?

A strong possibility, but Alec was right — this was not the time or place to work out all the maybes; they indeed needed to haul. Far away, but getting closer, sirens wailed mournfully, as if knowing in advance about the child’s tragic death.

“Company comin’,” Mole growled, at her side.

“Okay,” Max said. “Joshua, can you carry this guy?”

Still ignoring the knife in his shoulder, Joshua responded by reaching down, grabbing the corpse and tossing it over his good shoulder, like a sack of grain.

Alec’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped like a trapdoor. “What the hell...?”

“Mole,” Max said, no-nonsense, “get the boy. Wrap him in a white sheet.”

Mole’s cigar fell out of his mouth. “No freakin’ way! What kinda ghoulish shit—”

Max thumped the lizard man’s chest with two fingers. “The kid is dead. When I said we wouldn’t trade the boy for Logan, I meant a breathing Ray White. It’s not going to hurt that poor boy now, taking a ride with us.”

Alec, his eyes as horrified as they were huge, stepped up. “Max, have you completely lost it? This plan beyond sucks!”

She latched onto Alec’s shoulder with a hand that was nowhere near as gentle as his had been. “Toughen up, girls!... Ames White’s going to want proof of what happened here. That it was the Familiars who betrayed him, not us!”

“You mean, the boy... his body... is evidence,” Mole said, picking up his cigar.

“You’re goddamn right he’s evidence!” a wild-eyed Alec said as the sirens grew more insistent. “You’re gonna put two corpses in our car, what, in the trunk?”

“That’s the idea,” Max said.

“And if we get stopped by the cops,” Alec said, “how do we explain that?”

“Firmly,” she said. “Mole, Alec — do it... or bail. If you’re not prepared to follow my lead, right now — bail.”

Alec swallowed and sighed... and nodded his commitment. Mole was already heading back into the bedroom, to prepare the small sad package.

And Max was no longer a distraught young woman, nor was Joshua an upset oversize teddy bear — all four of the transgenics made up a highly trained combat team again (Thank you, Colonel Lydecker, Max thought, for small favors), and nothing the Familiars and/or Ames White had to throw at them was going to stop them.

They were out of the Gulliver house in less than a minute, and — with the two bodies, the boy’s sheet-wrapped, tucked in the trunk of Logan Cale’s car — they took off, but carefully, Mole scrupulously obeying the speed limit. Though the sirens increased, Max and her unlikely teammates never even saw a squad car.

When they hit the edge of town without being stopped, Mole sped up a little, but he kept within a few miles of the limit.

“Where to?” the driver asked at last. “Or are we just gonna cruise around with our passengers until they start gettin’ ripe?”

“Three Tree Point,” Max said.

Mole shot her a look.

She gave him a sharp glance back. “Do I stutter?”

“Why in the hell?”

“Someone we need to talk to.”

Alec leaned forward from the backseat. “You need to talk to somebody on Lyman Cale’s estate, right?”

She half turned. “Not bad, Alec.”

Mole, not taking his eyes off the road, said, “What?”

Alec explained. “There’s no other reason to go to Three Tree Point than to steal a boat and head for the Cale mansion.”

Max smiled grimly. “See, Alec? You’re not just a pretty face.”

“And you really do have a plan that doesn’t suck,” he said with his own grim smile.

Catching up with them, Mole said, “So, then... the guy in the trunk who needs a chiro — he’s from Cale’s, right?”

She nodded, and quickly filled them in.

“So,” Mole said, “since Joshua killed Tweedledee, and since Tweedledum got away from us... they’re probably gonna be waitin’ for us.”

“With bells on,” Max said.

A grin creased Mole’s reptilian features. “Just think how sick they’re gonna look when we kick their asses, anyway.”

With the exception of Joshua, they all smiled at Mole’s bravado. Max only hoped it wasn’t misplaced.

She had fought Familiars before and was amazed at how much pain they absorbed with seemingly no response. She had seen Ames White shoot himself in the arm and not even flinch. Two of them had ganged up on her when she tried to free Ray the first time, and no matter how hard she’d fought, they hadn’t even seemed to notice her efforts.

She also had no idea how much of the security staff on Sunrise Island belonged to the Familiars. The burly boys, Otto and Franz, were obvious snake cult candidates. But Familiars didn’t always look like top physical specimens fresh from the gym. White himself was of rather average build, and yet in combat against him, she’d had plenty of trouble.

Granted, she and Joshua and other transgenics had scored a victory over White’s snake-cult SWAT team that time at Jam Pony; but every fight with the Familiars had proven to be arduous, to say the least — you had to beat them into unconsciousness or cripple them or kill them to take them out.

She wondered what the four of them could manage if the Familiars seriously outnumbered them on Lyman Cale’s private island.