Max Collins - After the Dark

“Let’s pull over,” she said when she felt they were safely out of town, “and get Joshua patched up before we do anything else.”

“Joshua is fine,” Joshua said, the knife hilt sticking out of him like a slot-machine handle.

“Shut-up, Joshua,” Max said.

“Shut-up?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Max.”

“Good.”

“Max?”

“Yes, Joshua?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No, Joshua.”

“Because you said ‘shut-up,’ and Joshua thought—”

“Shut-up, Joshua.”

“Yes, Max.”

Hunkered over the wheel, Mole said, “I know a place not far from here. Nice and private.”

Max didn’t even want to know how Mole knew about places between Appleton and Seattle. Sometimes she had to remind herself that the transgenics hadn’t all moved directly from Manticore to Terminal City.

After pulling off the highway and onto a ramp, then onto a two-lane road from there, Mole took them a good mile from the four-lane before he turned into a field on a tractor-access lane and stopped the car behind a stand of apple trees, ravaged by the recent cold spell; the skeletal trees remained thick enough to block any view of them from the highway, and one of them gave Max a place to sit Joshua down and prop him up, while she did a quick triage.

“Mole, you got your lighter?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Gonna need it. Got a knife?”

Another nod.

Alec shook his head and said to Mole, “What if she’d asked you for a ham sandwich?”

“How do you know I don’t have one in my back pocket?” Mole asked the X5. “Anyway, Manticore did share their motto with the Boy Scouts, ’member.” He gave Alec a little three-fingered salute. “Be prepared.”

Alec gave Mole a one-fingered salute.

“Heat the knife blade,” Max said. “When I pull this thing out, I’m gonna want to cauterize the wound.”

Alec smirked. “You can take the girl out of Manticore, but you can’t take Manticore out of the girl.”

Joshua looked a little dubious, sitting there with his back against an apple tree, the moon illuminating his canine features with a lovely ivory cast. The temperature seemed to be slowly rising. Mole moved the flame over the blade of his knife, and Max could see Joshua staring at it, his eyes growing wider with each passing second.

When the blade glowed red, Max went to work.

She started with the knife in Joshua’s shoulder. “You ready, Big Fella?”

He gulped and said, “Ready, Little Fella,” and Max jerked the knife out of his shoulder. Joshua let out a piteous howl, his eyes growing wide, and he unconsciously started shaking his head as she dropped one knife and held out her hand for Mole to give her the heated one.

His eyes glued to the glowing blade, Joshua whimpered like a puppy.

“Hey,” she said, “who loves you?”

“Y-Y-You d-do?”

“That’s right, Big Fella.”

“Joshua loves Max, too, Little Fella.”

And with his eyes on hers, she grinned, he grinned, then she pressed the hot blade into his wound, and the werewolf howl that roared from deep within him reminded Max of Joshua’s brother Isaac and the screams of pain he elicited when in the throes of his homicidal rage. Surprisingly, the two brothers didn’t sound all that different... which was enough to give Max a little shiver.

She withdrew the knife and, under the flame from Mole’s lighter, inspected her work.

“Looking good,” she said.

Joshua gave her a frown that said he wasn’t as impressed, and that pulling the “Little Fella” limb from limb may have crossed his mind. “Max hurt Joshua.”

“Max had to... for your own good, Big Fella. Hey, it’s going to be all right now. Rest for a little while. I’ll be right here.”

He eyed the knife warily until she handed it back to Mole.

“Rest, I said,” she scolded.

Leaving the beast man to sleep against the tree, the others moved off a little ways and found places to sit on the ground.

Max looked up at a million stars. It was a different sky out here, somehow — more stars, brighter moon, reminding her of the night the twelve of them had escaped from Manticore. It had been a long trip since then, her only goal to find a home, to settle down. Now, in Terminal City, she had a home, all right; but being out here, on the run again, reminded her of how claustrophobic the city had become.

Mole yanked an automatic pistol fitted with a silencer out of his belt and set it on the ground in front of him.

“Where did you pull that out of?” she asked.

Alec smirked. “Are you sure you wanna know?”

Mole tilted his head in the direction of Appleton. “From the Gulliver house. Belonged to our no-neck passenger, in the car.”

Max hated guns. They all knew it; but she also was savvy enough, pragmatic enough, to know that a little firepower could make a difference tonight. And if Mole wanted to go that way, she had no right to try to stop him — not when she was asking him to follow her through the gates of Hell.

“With what we’re about to do,” Mole said apologetically, “I thought it might come in handy.”

She nodded, looking away.

“You cool with it?” Mole asked.

“No.”

“You want me to toss it?”

“Do what you have to.”

“I hate to bring this up,” Alec said to her. “But what exactly is your plan?”

Mole grinned. “Step one, find these assholes; step two, kick their asses.”

“Max,” Alec said, “ is that your plan?”

Cigar jutting threatening, Mole asked, “What part didn’t you get? Step one, or step two?”

Max cut in. “This isn’t about revenge, remember. It’s about kidnapping.”

Obviously not sure he was following her, Alec asked, “Logan’s kidnapping, you mean?”

“No. This time we’re the kidnappers.”

Alec raised an eyebrow. “Well, I guess that’s a step up from your last assignment — body-snatching.”

Max ignored that. “Our target is Lyman Cale’s majordomo, Franklin Bostock. He’s the key. Nothing happens within that compound without his approval. Stands to reason, he’s either a Familiar or in their pocket — he very likely sent those two snake-cult goons to kill that child.”

“And his mother,” Alec said.

Max shook her head. “The mother was just collateral damage.”

Mole said, “What you’re sayin’ is, don’t ice the Bostock dude.”

“Bingo,” Max said. “His sleazy self, we need alive.”

“You think?” Alec asked. “We’re hauling two stiffs around, already — what’s one more?”

Max didn’t know whether to be irritated by Alec or amused — Alec, the guy who always cut corners, who always looked for the angle, was suddenly the conservative of the group. A squeaky-clean Alec was somehow a frightening thought. She was about to give him some good-natured hell about it when her cell phone chirped in her pocket.

She pulled it out and punched a button. “Go for Max.”

“Do you have my son yet?”

Ames White.

As always, that voice sent a chill through her.

“Working on it,” she said. “We know where he is.”

“Clock’s ticking, 452. Only two days to go. You’re going to do the right thing, aren’t you? ”

“Doing my best.”

“ Not playing games? Why do I think you already have my son? ”

“I’m not playing games. But I promise you, we will deliver him.”

Somehow, even though this was Ames White, it sickened her to lie to the boy’s parent — not lie, really, like Original Cindy said... a sin of omission, not commission — when the child lay bundled in a white-sheet shroud in the trunk of a nearby car.