“You catching a little nap there, little girl?” he said, grinning down at her.
“Oh, God,” she said, and hurried up to her feet, the sound of loose gravel crunching under her boots. “Nate…”
She didn’t have to look far to see him leaning against the counter where she last saw him, his head lolled slightly forward. He was snoring softly yet somehow still clutching the rifle resting across his lap.
She shook off as much sleep as she could and picked up her rifle from the floor, feeling simultaneously embarrassed and angry with herself. “I’m sorry, Danny. I must be more tired than I thought.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it, Tex,” Danny said. “No harm, no foul.”
She snapped a quick look at the front wall across the lobby, at the undisturbed barricade and the pools of moonlight coming in from the openings above. Still dark, and nothing had come in while she was asleep.
Stupid. So stupid.
“I’m sorry, Danny,” she said again.
“Stop apologizing,” he said. “Nothing happened. Everything’s hunky dory.” He took out a bottle of water and handed it to her. “Partially my fault. I was too preoccupied in the office, didn’t think to check up on you lovebirds until now.”
She chased away more of the grogginess with the water before handing the bottle back to him. “Any progress?”
“If you call the fact that we had a nice, long chat progress, then yes.”
“He’s talking now?”
“Lips grew back.”
“So they can regenerate flesh.”
“One second he’s mouthless, the next he’s making sounds. Or hissing, anyway. Musto presto, new lips-for-you-to.”
“What did he — it — whatever — say?”
Danny sat down and she did the same, her eyes wandering back to the front wall again.
“It’s him. One hundred and twenty-two percent,” Danny said. “He knew things I never told anyone. About me, about us.”
“Like what?”
“Afghanistan. SWAT. This really hot blonde who I picked up at a bar and was convinced I was going to marry, only to find out — Well, you don’t need to know all the details. Point is, he knew things that only Willie boy would know.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not.”
“But what if.”
“We already went over this, kid. You just have to trust me. I’m not wrong.”
“You’re that sure?”
He nodded. “Sure as sure can be. Surest, if you will.”
“That’s pretty sure.”
“You’re damn straight.”
She managed a half-smile. “What is he doing right now?”
“Recuperating. He took a pretty solid beating before he dropped in on us. It was apparently quite the death match on the rooftop, with attempted quartering and such. Real serious shit.”
“So he’s really hurt.”
“On a scale of Ouch and FUBAR, he’s about plus ten beyond FUBAR.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“Nope. That’s why I dug him out of the rubble to help him heal faster.”
She must have gasped out loud, because Danny chortled and looked barely able to contain himself.
“Relax,” he said. “It’s free, and as you can see, I’m still in one piece and adorable.”
“You should have waited for us.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know; watch over you in case it tried something?”
“It didn’t.”
“But it could have.”
“But it didn’t,” Danny said. “It’s Willie boy. He’s skinnier — okay, he’s basically skin and bones — and he’s seen better days hair-wise. But you have to admit, he looks pretty snazzy in that trench coat.”
“That’s a trench coat?”
“Well, it was, about a few million pieces ago.”
“Why was it — he — wearing a trench coat?”
Danny shrugged. “Fashion sense?”
She sighed and shook her head with exasperation, not sure if she was angry with Danny or unable to wrap her mind around the fact that there was a loose blue-eyed ghoul behind her right now, with nothing between her and it (him?) but a single door. She had seen what they could do back at the farmhouse and last night. How fast and strong and so goddamn hard to kill they were unless you got them in the head, and that was so, so much easier said than done.
“Did he tell you how it happened?” she asked.
“He said it was Kate’s doing.”
“His Kate?”
“One and only. That night, after we ran the gauntlet from the farmhouse…”
She nodded. How many times had she relived that day? Too many to count.
“She got to him, then,” Gaby said.
“Yeah,” Danny nodded.
He didn’t add anything else and she had difficulty finding the right words, so the two of them sat in silence and listened to Nate snoring lightly next to them while staring at the barricaded wall. She knew Danny was thinking the exact same thing that she was: That day after the farmhouse, when they lost Will to the roadblock…
After what seemed like hours, though it was probably just a few minutes, she said, “So what now?”
“We wait until sunup, then go home,” Danny said.
“What about him?”
“He had a pretty interesting story to tell me. Once a Ranger, always a Ranger, as the saying goes. New Willie has been reconning the enemy, gathering intelligence. Apparently he’s made himself such a nuisance that the enemy cooked up this little scheme and stalked us all the way from Starch just to use us as bait to lure him here.”
She looked over at Danny. “So does he? Know something they don’t want us to know?”
Danny grinned back at her, his blue eyes glinting with mischief — or maybe that was just the moonlight reflecting off them.
“Well?” she said. “Does it — him—Will know something or not?”
“I guess you could say that,” Danny said. “Does knowing a way to save the human race count?”
23
Keo
“This feels familiar,” Erin shouted about two hours into the trip.
She stood behind the helm of the twenty-footer, the balaclava that covered almost her entire face except for her eyes playing tricks with her voice. If he were sitting anywhere on the fast-moving vessel besides a few feet in front of her on a narrow bench, he might not have heard a single word she said.
He pulled his balaclava down slightly to shout back: “Yeah, but this time I’m not in any danger of getting tossed overboard.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
He grinned and pulled the mask back up, leaving the cold wind to smack against the exposed parts of his face.
The offshore boat they were moving in had a T-top, but the canopy was missing. Even so, it was the best and fastest vessel Hart had to offer. If anyone were around to see them, they would spot a long, white object slicing at fast speeds across the wide-open Gulf of Mexico. There was absolutely nothing else around them, the Ocean Star having faded into the distance (Probably for good) a long time ago.
Keo was looking forward when Erin appeared next to him and said, “Move over.”
“The fuck?” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the empty helm.
“Relax; it’s on cruise control,” Erin said, laughing behind her ski mask.
“I didn’t know this thing had cruise control,” he said, scooting over on the bench to give her space.
Erin sat down with a heavy sigh. “The girl told me about it before she gave me the keys.”
The girl was Faith, James’s girlfriend. The two made for a nice-looking couple, and Keo found himself wishing them well as he and Erin set off. He was, though, resigned to the realization that he would never find out how they did, because chances were very good he wasn’t going to ever see them again. Not them or Lara or anyone else on the Trident, for that matter.