Scott Sigler - Nocturnal - A Novel

Maybe I’m wrong, please let me be wrong .

“Bryan,” she said, her voice quiet and resigned. She knew. They both knew.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

She shook her head slowly, once to the left, once to the right.

“Not … your fault. Where … is my girl?”

“John! Get the dog!”

Bryan stared down at Robin. Why had it taken him so long to realize what she meant to him? “Please don’t die.”

She coughed. Blood sprayed out of her mouth and onto her chin. Her eyes closed tight as waves of pain ripped through her body, then she opened them. “Bryan, I love you.”

“I love you,” he said. “I always have. I always will.”

Her bloody lips smiled. Somehow, that made it even worse. It opened the floodgates of emotion that had been blocked by the adrenaline. Tears filled his eyes, blurring her a little.

She reached up and wiped them away.

“Tears?” she said. “From you? Nice timing, champ. You got that in just under the wire.”

John stood over them, cradling a whimpering Emma. The left side of her face was a sheet of blood.

Only now did Robin looked scared. “Oh God, is she—”

“Cut on her head is all,” John said quickly. “She’ll be okay.” He knelt down and set the wounded dog in Robin’s lap.

Now Robin smiled at John. She reached up and touched his cheek, her fingers tracing a line of her own blood on his dark skin. “Looks like you’re not afraid to be a cop anymore.”

John said nothing. Tears trickled down his face.

Robin turned her attention to Emma. The dog lifted her torn head and licked Robin’s face. Emma’s blood dripped down to Robin’s chest, indiscernible against Robin’s own blood.

“It’s okay, baby,” Robin said. “It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay.

Robin looked up at Bryan, Emma’s tongue still dancing on her face.

“Bryan, she’s all I have. You take her. You love her.”

Bryan nodded. He wanted to talk, but he couldn’t. His throat locked up tight.

She reached up to him again, her cold fingertips tracing the shape of his eye. “Do you promise?”

Bryan nodded again.

Robin sagged in his arms. Her eyes didn’t close, not like in the movies, but he saw the life in them fade, then vanish forever.

She was gone.

All the Teeth

A hand gently pulled at his shoulder.

“Bryan, we have to go.”

Bryan ignored John. He cradled Robin closer. He should have never let her out of his sight.

He couldn’t handle the whiplash of emotions — fury, blind hatred, a crippling sensation of loss, the desire to punish, to kill . She was gone … he couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything other than to gently rock her body.

“Bryan, I’m so sorry, but we have to go. You’re wanted for murder. Get up!”

Bryan shook his head. “I don’t want to go. I want to be with her.”

Now a hand on each shoulder, lifting him.

“Bryan, she’s gone. Everyone thinks you killed two cops. They’re going to shoot as soon as they see you. Get up! ”

Dead. Robin was dead .

He would make them pay for this. Not an eye for an eye, not a tooth for a tooth — all the eyes … all the teeth.

Bryan leaned in and kissed Robin’s forehead one last time. His lips stayed there — pulling away was the hardest thing he had ever done.

He gently set her down, then he stood.

He looked across the floor at the three other corpses — Max, who hadn’t done anything wrong, the big-headed member of Marie’s Children, and Billy, broken and shot as he tried to avenge his master’s death.

Blood continued to spread across the hardwood.

“John, get Emma.”

“Bryan, we don’t have time to—”

“Get the fucking dog!”

John leaned back, a little scared. Bryan didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t about to ignore Robin’s final wish.

John ran to the sink and grabbed a dish towel. He placed it over Emma’s torn face and scooped her up. Emma yelped horribly, then tried to get away, tried to lurch toward Robin’s body.

“Shhhhh,” John said. He squeezed the dog tighter. “Bryan, I’m leaving. Hurry.”

John ran out of the apartment.

After all the noise and chaos, now there was only silence.

Bryan took a final look at the love of his life.

“All the eyes,” he said. “All the teeth.”

He walked out of the apartment.

The Rude Awakening

Pookie’s eyes opened slowly to nothing but whiteness.

Don’t take me back to the white room …

That’s what Aggie James had said. Terrified, freaked-out Aggie.

Pookie blinked against the pain in his throat. He reached up to touch his neck — his hands felt metal.

A collar.

MMMMM HE’S AWAKE .

Pookie sat up and looked around. He was in a circular white room. All around him were people with collars, chains leading from the collars through metal flanges in the white walls.

Rich Verde.

Jesse Sharrow.

Sean Robertson.

Mr. Biz-Nass.

Baldwin Metz.

Amy Zou, twin girls with black hair on either side of her, clinging to her.

Pookie stood. He looked from person to person. “What the hell is this?”

Rich tilted his head toward Zou. “Ask her,” he said. “She sold us out.”

Zou dipped her head, pulled her girls in tighter. She squeezed them. One of the girls was crying hard, her body shaking with tired sobs. The other stared out with murderous eyes through scattered, heavy black hair, as if she was looking for someone to hurt.

Pookie turned back to Rich. Rich had never looked like a pleasant person, but now he stared at Chief Zou like he’d put a fire ax in her head the first chance he got.

“Verde, what do you mean she sold us out?”

Rich spit in her direction. “Lying whore !”

“Knock it off,” Robertson said. “She had to do it. They killed her husband. They took her daughters. The Mason Tunnel murder was a setup. She called me, Jesse, Rich, Metz, got us all to the tunnel, and then … these things took us.”

Robertson wasn’t wearing glasses, not that they would have fit over his horribly swollen right eye. A cut on his head oozed a thin trail of blood. Someone had worked him over real solid. Pookie wondered what their assailants had looked like. Then he realized he didn’t want to know — his own run-in with beak-nose and the human snake was plenty to think about.

Maybe Zou had had a choice, maybe not. All Pookie knew was she had sold him out, sold Bryan out, and if there had actually been a fire ax within reach, Pookie would have sharpened it, polished it, then handed it to Polyester Rich with a dramatic flourish.

Pookie took a better look around the room. A floor of white-painted stones, walls of the same material curving up to form a domed ceiling, and the white bars of a jail door.

“So where the hell are we?”

Robertson shrugged. “We don’t know. Underground, we think.”

MMMMM MARIE’S CHILDREN HAVE US. WE ARE FUCKED. YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE MONKEY-THING THAT CAME AND TOOK ME. WE ARE SO FUCKED .

At least they’d left Biz his voice box. He had to jam it up under his collar to talk.

Pookie tried the collar again: tight, solid, didn’t feel like he’d be able to get it off. Behind the collar, a heavy chain led back into the wall. There was a way out of this, there had to be — he would not die down here.

Down here … with the cannibals .

“Chief,” he said, “what happens now?” He could judge her later. All that mattered now was getting out of here alive.

She pulled her daughters a little closer, but stayed quiet.