“I had a bottle on me,” Will said.
“What, no ‘Hey, how you doing?’”
“Hey, how you doing?”
Mason grinned. “That’s better.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the familiar white bottle. He shook it, the pills clink-clinking inside. “This one?”
“That’s it.”
“You need it?”
“I could use it.”
“Say ‘please.’”
“Please.”
“Pretty please with a cherry on top?”
Will gritted his teeth. “Pretty please with a cherry on top.”
“Good boy.”
Mason tossed it over to him. Will caught it with both bound hands. He was surprised when he twisted off the cap and saw the pills inside and not the small rocks he had been expecting. For some reason, he didn’t think it would be this easy, and Mason, smirking at him from across the room, seemed to get a kick out of proving him wrong.
“Thanks,” Will said.
He tilted back his head and dropped two of the pills into his mouth, then swallowed without chewing.
“Damn, just like candy, huh?” Mason said.
Will ignored the comment, said instead, “You want it back?”
“Nah. You look like you need them more than me.”
“That’s awfully civilized of you.”
Mason chuckled, then took a big bite out of the apple. Juice flowed down his chin and he wiped at it with the sleeve of his shirt. Will’s stomach might have growled a bit at the sight.
Definitely not officer material, this one.
“Hey, we’re all just trying to get by, right?” Mason said.
“Absolutely.”
“Besides, she made it pretty clear she wants you alive. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Will said.
It took a while before he finally matched Mason’s voice to that of the man who had given the orders earlier when they pulled him out of the truck. Mason was the one who had responded, when asked about pursuing Danny and Gaby’s vehicle, “Don’t worry about them. They’re not gonna get far.”
Officer material or not, the man was definitely in charge. Or, at least, in the daylight.
“What about my friends?” Will asked.
“You should be more worried about yourself right now,” Mason said.
“I’m multitasking.”
“Be careful; you can get hurt doing that.” Mason shrugged, giving the impression of indifference, even though Will suspected the man knew — and cared — more about what was happening around him than he wanted to let on. “Don’t worry about your friends. I know it looks like we’re running a Scooby-Doo operation around here, but there are actual brains at work. What, you thought we were just going to let you get to the interstate and keep going after last night?”
“I was hoping.”
“Hope springs eternal. But no.” He took another large bite of the apple. “What you saw out there when you tried to come through was just a small part of it. We have people everywhere. If you’d tried to go back to Dunbar, it would have ended the same way. Even if you’d tried to bail through the fields? Same difference. You wouldn’t believe the number of guys with rifles I got running around out there. Like cockroaches. With, you know, assault rifles.” He chuckled. “You really thought we’d just leave you alone after last night?”
“So you’ve got it all figured out, huh?”
“Not me. I’m just following orders.”
“Hers,” Will said.
Mason grinned. “Yeah. Hers.” Then, as if he were conspiring with Will, he leaned slightly forward. “You know her, don’t you? I mean, really know her.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess she wasn’t always like that. What do you people call them? Ghouls?”
“Sounded like a good name at the time.”
“Well they are a little…ghoulish. The black-eyed ones, anyway. The others, like her? I don’t even know how to describe them.”
Mason had gone back to chewing on his apple when the radio clipped to his hip squawked and a male voice said, “Mason, come in.”
Will didn’t recognize the voice, but the reception was staticky, clearly transmitting just outside the two-way portable’s range.
Mason unclipped the radio. “How goes it out there, boys?”
“I just got word from Reeves,” the voice said.
“And?”
“He just reached the ambush point, and he says they’re gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
“The others,” the man on the radio said. “They made it through the ambush.”
“They.” He means Gaby and Danny.
Will almost smiled outwardly, but managed to hold it in just barely.
He watched Mason closely instead, waiting to see the flash of anger, but the man’s only reaction was to curl one corner of his mouth into a half-smirk. Will had always thought of the collaborators as more opportunists than true believers; people who were in it for themselves, using the situation to their advantage. He’d always believed there were more Kellersons among them than Joshes. Mason, without a doubt, fell into the former group.
“Well, shit,” Mason was saying. “How’d they do that?”
“Reeves found Harry and Douglas dead,” the man said through the radio.
“What about the targets?”
“They ditched the Titan and took one of our vehicles.”
Something seemed to bother Mason, or occurred to him suddenly. “Wait, weren’t there supposed to be three people down there?”
“Yeah. Nate’s missing.”
The name made Will straighten up slightly. He hoped Mason hadn’t noticed.
Nate? Did he just say Nate?
“Reeves wanted to know what he should do now?” the man on the other end of the radio asked.
“I guess he better find them again,” Mason said.
“We have more people waiting in Salvani, right?”
“Last time I checked.” He glanced at his watch. “Whatever you do, you better do it fast. You have exactly six hours before it gets dark, and then you’ll be answering to her.”
“Me? Why me?”
You’ve got them running scared, Kate. Didn’t anyone ever tell you a scared soldier is a poor soldier?
“Hey, I did my part,” Mason said into the radio. He looked amused, like all of this was fun and games. “I got what she wanted. You’re the one who screwed up with the girl.”
‘Girl’? Were they talking about Gaby, or Annie, or one of the kids?
Will sat silently and waited for more clues.
“You heard what I said?” Mason said into the radio.
“Yeah, I heard you,” the other man finally answered. “Out.”
Now that’s one hell of a chain of command there, boys.
Mason put the radio away and gave Will that smirk again. “These radios don’t work for shit. We had to put in relays just so we can keep in contact with the ones spread out too far. What do you guys have on that island? Ham radios? Now, that’s smart.”
“Thanks.”
“Maybe that’s why she wants you so bad. To take over this sad mess we have going on here. You think?”
Will shrugged.
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Mason said. “All that stuff’s way above my pay grade, anyway.”
“I’ve always wondered what they’re paying you.”
Mason grinned. “Life.”
“Life?”
“Duh. I get to live. Self-preservation, my man. It’s a hell of an incentive to do anything, but especially these days.” He glanced over his shoulder at the store for a moment before looking back at Will. “Damn, no rest for the weary. We’ll have to continue this chat later. I hope you don’t mind, but I never had the privilege of asking an Army Ranger for advice before, and I wanna pick that brain of yours later if you got the time.”