Havoc by Shannon McKenna

15

Mace studied Cait’s profile as she considered his words. She looked startled, thoughtful, but she didn’t have that look he was all too familiar with. The look that sometimes came over people’s faces when certain unspeakable truths of the Trask men’s lives ended up being spoken out loud.

That wide-eyed, let-me-just-back-away-slowly look.

Mace had decided, over the years, that his background was best left un-talked about with sexual partners. The survivalist cult origin story, the grisly GodsAcre fire, facts like those creeped women out. Made them wonder what dangerous lingering effects the trauma might have. He didn’t blame them.

Hell, he wondered himself, in moments of weakness.

But he’d been dreading seeing that look on Cait’s face. He hadn’t seen it yet.

“Well, damn,” she said, her voice thoughtful. “I did not see that coming.”

“You don’t look as freaked out as I expected,” Mace said.

A smile flashed over her face. “My dad disappeared without a trace when I was fourteen years old. I’ve gone weirder places than this in my imagination. I mean, full-on X-Files stuff. Aliens, time travel, portals to other dimensions, you name it. And now you tell me we’re just dealing with a supervillain seeking world domination? How banal. Kind of an anti-climax, if you ask me.”

There were bursts of smothered laughter around the room. Fiona leaned forward and poked his knee. “Hang onto this one,” she said. “She’s a winner. She makes me laugh, and that’s hard to do. Almost impossible.”

“Back off, Fi,” Mace said forcefully. “Don’t jinx me.”

Fiona looked unrepentant. “Sorry, am I oversharing? I’m not overloaded with social skills, or so they tell me.”

“Fi’s like a feral cat,” Mace said. “You just leave out some kitty crunchies and hope like hell she gets out from under the car when you start it up.”

“Rawr!” Fi made mock kitty claws with her fingers. “We are as our lives have sculpted us, buddy. That goes for you, too. As Cait will soon learn.”

“Stick a sock in it, Fi,” Eric said. “Freak out Mace’s lady friend some other time.”

“Or not,” Mace suggested.

“Focus, people,” Cait said. “Back to the Prophet’s curse. Tell me more.”

Demi perched on the side of the arm chair where Eric sat, and sipped her tea. “I take it Mace told you about the GodsAcre fire?”

“Yes, I saw the ruins for myself.”

“Okay, so that’s your backdrop,” Eric said. “Kimball was a late arrival at GodsAcre. When he arrived, he set up a laboratory. A prefab building that they hauled in and set up inside the cavern. He had some sort of agreement with Jeremiah. We think he was working with a virus, or maybe more than one. A few months after he arrived, the death clusters started.”

“Death clusters,” Cait repeated slowly. “That sounds ominous.”

“Yes. Several unrelated people who would die of unrelated causes in a very short span of time. There was a big cluster in Shaw’s Crossing shortly before the fire, and then someone noticed that the people who died had in some way opposed or given trouble to Jeremiah Paley. Who everyone called ‘the Prophet.’”

“Your dad,” Cait said, glancing at Mace.

“Adopted dad,” Mace said. “Unofficially adopted. That was when people started talking about ‘the Prophet’s curse.’ But Jeremiah wasn’t the one who caused these death clusters. He might have had shaky mental health, but he was no killer. Kimball, on the other hand, was a sadist fuckhead monster from day one. When he showed up, everything went to shit. Jeremiah had a mental breakdown, and Kimball took over GodsAcre. People in Shaw’s Crossing were dropping dead of heart attack, stroke, thrombosis, aneurysms.”

“And then the fire happened,” Demi said. “Everyone up there died, except for Eric, Anton and Mace and Fi. The death clusters stopped.”

“Until a few months ago,” Eric went on. “Last fall, Otis noticed something happening up at GodsAcre. He tried to tell us, but he had a stroke before he got a chance. The real estate agent we sent up there to appraise the place died of a heart attack and ran his car off the road. Then Ben Vaughan, Demi’s dad, died of a heart attack. A brand new death cluster was beginning.”

“But Kimball had been killing people all along,” Demi said. “He killed my mom four years ago. Everyone assumed a heart attack, but my mom had just found out about my father’s involvement with Kimball. And Kimball had her murdered.”

“How do you know for certain that your mom’s wasn’t a normal heart attack?” Cait asked. “There are tests, of certain enzymes that can show if there was an actual—”

“They gloated about killing her when they abducted me,” Demi said.

Cait winced. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

“Like I said, all of us have been in his clutches at one time or another,” Fiona chimed in. “They even got Anton once, but they had to run a truck into him to do it.”

“But you all fought your way out somehow,” Cait said.

“Yes, because these GodsAcre types are badass,” Demi said. “Tougher than Kimball. He’s a self-important piece of shit, and so are his people. They’re nothing but trash. They haven’t gotten the better of us yet, thanks to those guys, and Jeremiah’s combat training. We are as our lives have sculpted us, like a wise person once said.”

“Thanks, Demi,” Fi murmured. “I’m touched.”

Anton rolled his eyes. “Could we skip the self-congratulation and concentrate?”

“So what is the Prophet’s curse?” she asked. “An object, an organism, a toxin?”

“Eric and Demi are the only ones who ever saw it being used,” Mace said.

Cait turned to Demi. “So, a physical object, then?”

“Sort of. It’s complicated. When they kidnapped me, they took me up to GodsAcre,” Demi said. “They had this thing, like a slim flashlight or a pen that lit up at the tip. They pointed it at Eric, but nothing happened. They were very startled. They expected him to drop in his tracks. We started calling it the death pen.”

Cait looked dubious. “So you concluded that this thing that didn’t kill you is a biological weapon? Excuse me, but how does that make any sense?”

Demi pushed the laptop across the coffee table toward him. “Mace, show her the security tape from my dad’s house.”

Mace cued the video from Ben Vaughan’s security camera, and set it to play for Cait. They watched Kimball’s guy Felix take out a slender silver rod and point it at the door at chest level for several seconds. Then, they watched the bigger guy, Rocco, peeking inside the window to check on Ben. The two men high-fived, grinning, and left.

“What you just saw was my father’s murder,” Demi said.

“From behind a closed door?” Cait asked. “How can you be sure?”

“I got there a couple of hours later. He was on the floor by the door. My mom died the same way in her bedroom. Packing to run away. They got her before she could leave.”

“And…you think this device killed your father through the door?” Cait sounded as if she were feeling her way with great care.

“I don’t ‘think’ anything.” Tension made Demi’s voice shake. “I know they did, because they told me that they did later on, right to my face. They said he had it coming.”

“But how? What could it be? Some sort of…death ray?”

“When Eric and I were captured, I heard one of them ask if I had been in Shaw’s Crossing during a specific period of time,” Demi said. “The guy answered, ‘yes, I checked the database. She was definitely exposed.’ Those were his exact words.”

“Exposed? To what?” Cait sat up straight, frowning in concentration.

“A pathogen,” Nate said. “I gambled that it was a virus when I drew Kimball out to engage with Elisa’s ex. Kimball took the bait, so we’re guessing a virus.”

“Our working hypothesis is that it’s an asymptomatic virus that lies dormant in the body,” Eric said. “It’s activated by the frequency emitted by that device.”

“Huh.” Cait considered that, her brows knit. “Sounds far-fetched.”

“That’s what I said at first,” Fiona said. “But I’m a believer now. We’ve got all these articles on my microchip about virus interactions with electromagnetic frequencies.”

“Microchip?”

“Kimball put a microchip in my back, when we still lived at GodsAcre,” Fiona told her. “It links to a collection of scientific literature. We’ll show you.”

Cait looked utterly baffled. “Your back? Wait. You mean…”

“Yes, I mean that literally. A sub-dermal capsule, under my skin in my back for eight years. When Kimball abducted me, he tried to carve it out of me, not knowing that I’d already taken it out myself, years before. I’d been wearing it as an earring.”

Cait held up her hands. “Slow down, people.”

Mace reached over, gently squeezing her knee. He was encouraged when she didn’t shrink away. She twined her fingers into his.

Her golden brown fingers looked good, threaded between his scarred ones.

“So…Kimball put a microchip in your back,” Cait repeated. “Why?”

“He was about to marry me,” Fiona said. “He’d made some kind of deal with Jeremiah. I was fifteen. To be honest, I think he put the chip into me because it turned him on. He liked hurting me. Using me like a handbag. That was his jam.”

“That is so fucked up,” Cait whispered.

“You said it,” Fiona agreed. “But the boys got me out, just in time.”

“We think he infected the local population with a virus, and no one noticed,” Demi said. “We think everyone who was exposed to it is vulnerable to this device. My folks, Otis, Terry, and all the other ones in the death cluster.”

Cait chewed on that for a moment. “Weren’t all you Trask guys here in that time period, too? But the device didn’t hurt you?”

“Kimball gave us all a bunch of injections back then,” Anton said. “He might have had an arrangement with Jeremiah, in return for giving him space for the lab, to immunize the GodsAcre people. Jeremiah was convinced that we were the army of the faithful. That we’d rule the new world, after rotten civilization reduced itself to ashes. Then Jeremiah got too hard to control, and Kimball murdered him. Along with everyone else up there.”

“Except for you guys,” Cait said. “What happened to the virus?”

“We brought the mountain down on top of it,” Mace said.

“You brought the mountain down,” Eric said. “Take credit where credit is due.”

“Oh, come on. We all did our part.”

“Not me,” Anton said. “I could barely walk that night. Kimball had just flogged the living fuck out me. Eric was practically carrying me. I just cheered you on.”

“Mace was always best when it came to explosives,” Eric said. “He has a natural talent.” He shot Cait a sly glance. “Need to bring down a city block with some random shit that’s laying around in someone’s barn? Mace is your guy.”

Mace’s teeth clenched. “Eric, do you mind? In the normal world, that’s not a winning calling card.”

“Well, guess what, buddy? She’s not in the normal world anymore, is she?”

“I don’t hold it against you,” Cait assured him. “You’re a professional soldier. Of course you know how to do these things. Someone has to know.”

Mace was cautiously relieved by that. And she hadn’t pulled her hand away.

Cait turned back to Fiona. “You said something about scientific articles. Can I—”

The doorbell went off, a long, angry buzz. Everyone jolted in their seats.

“What the fuck?” Eric pulled up a walkie-talkie. “Jim, who’s at the door?”

“The police chief,” the guy replied. “You told us he could come right in.”

Buzzzz. Buzzzz. Buzzzzzzz.Chief Bristol was pissed. They could feel it.

Demi got up. “I’ll let him in, and put some fresh coffee on.”

“There’s some pastry left,” Elisa called after her. “He loves the cinnamon rolls.”

There was a commotion in the entryway. An older man, clearly agitated. Heavy, clumping footsteps. “…no, I do not want coffee, and do not try to sweeten me up with pastry. He’s gone too far this time!”

Wade Bristol, Shaw’s Crossing’s Chief of Police, stomped into the room. His color was high, and his jaw was thrust angrily forward. His eyes fastened onto Mace. “You!”

Mace put on his most innocent face. “Me?”

“I wake up this morning to hear about cars shot up in the Mountainview parking lot,” Bristol blustered. “I go down to check it out, and surprise, surprise! You checked in last night. Shots fired, in my town, and you don’t call me? What the hell, Mace?”

Mace fidgeted on the couch. “Yeah, Chief. About that—”

“He did it to save me,” Cait broke in. “He saved my life last night. I was attacked, battered, robbed, almost kidnapped. And he stopped them.”

Bristol’s mouth thinned. “I’m very glad for you, miss, but why am I just hearing about this now? Why didn’t I hear about it last night, right after it happened?”

“It was three in the morning, Chief, and I thought—”

“Who asked you to think? I am police chief in this town! I need to know immediately when a serious crime has been attempted in my jurisdiction! Immediately, not when it drifts through your mind like a goddamn afterthought!”

“They got away clean, and I didn’t even have a license plate number,” Mace told him. “There was no one to arrest, so there really wasn’t any point in waking you—”

“That’s not your call!” Chief Bristol bellowed.

Mace stood up, reluctantly detaching his hand from Cait’s. “I respectfully disagree, Chief,” he said, his voice hard. “You and your other officers were here fourteen years ago. You would all be subject to the Prophet’s curse. These bastards could kill you in an instant with their death pens, and you damn well know it.”

Chief Bristol snorted. “I am by no means convinced of your assessment of reality. Besides, what made you think that these attackers were connected to Kimball?”

“I found her in the caverns of GodsAcre,” Mace said. “I stayed to guard her because Kimball would have seen her, too. Under no circumstances would I call you or your officers into a situation where Kimball’s people might engage with you.”

“That’s my decision!” Chief Bristol yelled. “You are not on my payroll!” He swung around to face Cait. “And just what the devil were you doing up at that godforsaken place, young lady? I blocked that road for a reason.”

“I was looking for clues about my father’s disappearance,” Cait said. “Mace offered to let me call you multiple times yesterday. To vouch for him.”

Chief Bristol let out sharp bark of laughter. “Vouch for him? Hah! Cosh him on the head and lock him in the drunk tank, maybe! Vouch for him, my ass.”

Cait looked at Mace, blinking. “You make a big impression on your friends.”

“I said that he’d vouch for the fact that I’m not a killer, kidnapper, or rapist,” Mace clarified. “I never claimed that he particularly liked me.”

“Shut up, Mace,” Chief Bristol growled. “Miss, you need to file that police report.”

“Certainly,” she said. “Whatever you need. Happy to help.”

“Chief Bristol, please let me get you a pastry and a cup of coffee,” Demi urged.

“Fine,” Bristol snapped. “I have a feeling it’s going to be a long day.”

Mace sank back down on the couch. Cait twined her fingers through his again. The gesture was not lost on Chief Bristol, who made a snorting sound, but Mace was heartened.

In the midst of all this toxic bullshit, things were inexplicably looking up.