Catacomb

  He clapped a hand over Jordan’s snoring mouth, listening to the grass swish under two pairs of shoes. The yellow circles of light on the tent wall grew as the people got closer. Dan strained to hear their voices, his heart hammering up into his throat.

  Get up. The watchers will find you.

  How could the Micah impersonator know?

  “We shouldn’t be here,” one voice was saying, a soft voice, almost sweet, maybe belonging to a young woman.

  “I have to see,” another voice responded. This one was low and decidedly masculine. “He might be my only shot.”

  Could they mean Dan? Or maybe Jordan? Dan felt his friend try to twist out of his grasp, but Dan couldn’t let the snoring sabotage his eavesdropping.

  “You can’t sneak up on folk like this. It ain’t right.”

  The masculine voice let out a sigh, and Dan watched the flashlight beams halt and then finally retreat. The voices grew softer, too, muddling with the hush of the grass as the strangers turned and left. “You’re right. There’s a better way.”

  So they weren’t going to be ambushed and killed in the night—that was a plus. But Dan wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to know who was following them. He carefully eased out of his sleeping bag and the tent, pocketing his phone to use as a light. He had to be quick, but also quiet. The last thing he wanted was to alert them to his presence.

  What if they were armed? What if they abducted him? Jordan and Abby would wake up and think he had abandoned them in the night.

  My parents were brave. I can be brave, too.

  He followed the flashlight beams as they bounced along the ground. The campsite was mostly empty, just a field at the edge of a dense wood, barrels for trash cans and streetlights marking the boundaries of the dirt parking lot. Dan followed, low to the ground, then dashed for the cover of one of the tall, wide trash bins.

  The beams showed little, but in the parking lot they shone over the wide hood of a red muscle car, a Mustang or a Charger or one of those. Abby was the one who knew cars—maybe she could figure it out from the description. The doors closed and the car pulled out without turning on its lights. There wasn’t much in the way of moonlight, but now Dan could tell that it was definitely an old car.

  His palms slipped down the side of the trash bin, slick with frightful sweat. He was being followed. Hunted. He wondered if one of those two had been the motorcyclist, and why they had come to find them in the night only to leave without accomplishing anything.

  Dan sighed and kicked at the grass, standing and making his way back to the tent.

  Abby and Jordan were waiting for him outside, peering at him with groggy eyes.

  “What’s going on? Why were you smushing my face while I slept?” Jordan asked, pressing a yawn into the crook of his elbow.

  “We had visitors,” Dan said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. “Two. I woke up to another message from Micah. He said something about watchers finding me, and then immediately I heard someone approaching the tent.”

  Abby reached for Jordan’s forearm, clutching it. “What?”

  “I know,” Dan said, glancing back at the parking lot. “I don’t like it either. But I don’t know. They didn’t seem hostile. And they left right away—just went back to their car and took off.”

  “Okay, that’s it, we are getting our asses to Steve’s right now,” Jordan said hoarsely. “I don’t care how many speed limits I have to break. I’m fed up with drive-through food, I’m fed up with sleeping on the ground, and I am sure as shit fed up with being followed.”

  Jordan tossed up his hands and stomped back into the tent, gathering his sleeping bag in a frenzy.

  But Abby lingered outside, nervously tugging at the edges of her shirt. “Dan . . .”

  “Jordan’s right. We’ll be safer at Uncle Steve’s. I don’t like being out here in the open, and it’s a five-hour drive to New Orleans.”

  She nodded, reaching out and touching his shoulder lightly. “Do you think this thing with Micah is, well, real? The timing just seems so strange for it to be someone pulling a prank. And if you really did have a vision at Arlington School . . .”

  That unlikely and unpleasant thought had crossed his mind.

  “I have no idea. I just wish I knew how to stop it.”

  The moonlight grew muted, white light turning to silver and then gray as clouds settled in heavy clumps in the sky. Abby squeezed his shoulder, but in the darkness, he could barely see her as she ducked into the tent to collect her things.

  He looked down at his phone again, staring as it lit up—another message indicator pulsing above the time, the weather, the date . . .

  Biting down hard on his lower lip, Dan read the new message.

  t urn ba

  ck turn b a ck or be foun d

  in t h e i r territory

  “Their territory? What the hell does that mean?” Jordan swerved dangerously, punctuating his questions with the beat of his fist on the wheel.

  Dan watched the fields and trees of northern Louisiana give steady ground to the spindlier flora of the bayou, the trees oddly thin and anemic. Long spits of water came up alongside the road, then sometimes dashed under it as the pavement transitioned seamlessly into bridges and then back again.

  Still flat, though. Still disgustingly humid.

  His head stuck to the window as he tried to peel it away, and the sigh he gave glazed the glass in a tepid fog. “I don’t know, Jordan. I’ve gone over it about a thousand times in my head and it’s not getting me anywhere.”

  “Uncle Steve was in the Special Forces. He’ll know what to do,” Jordan said, but Dan didn’t see how that solved anything.

  “Plenty of retro cars around,” Abby said from the backseat. She had decided to point out every single vintage car that drove up next to them or trailed behind. After a dozen or so of these alerts, Dan reminded her that he wasn’t at all sure what make or model they were looking for. Abby was unperturbed. “Not seeing many black motorcycles,” she said.

  “Can we turn the AC up?” Dan groused.

  Jordan’s phone jingled merrily and he nodded toward Dan. “Check that, will you? I put a notification on new emails in case Maisie Moore gets back to me.”

  “Probably just your clan leader again,” Dan muttered, but he picked up the phone anyway.

  “Guild leader, and so what if it was? I am like ten Ultimates away from full one-eighties and that jerk Raptus isn’t going to kill himself—”

  “Holy crap,” Dan said, sitting up straighter and silencing Jordan’s rambling. “She wrote back. Hold on, let me see what she has to say.”

  Abby crawled up close to read over his shoulder. Her long dark hair brushed his arm as she leaned in.

  “‘Thanks for getting back to me so promptly. You can understand that with the personal nature of those letters I would prefer to discuss them face-to-face,’” Dan read. “‘Every once in a while I think about Evie and Marcus and my heart just dies a little. They were two of the best I ever worked with, real journalists, real investigators, the kind you don’t see in the click-bait age. But that’s a discussion for another time.’” Dan took a deep breath. “‘You said you know their kid? That’s amazing. I’d love to meet him. I’m free most of this week for a lunch meeting.’” Dan paused. “You told her about me?”

  “Why not? I thought it was a good angle to get her talking.”

  “Looks like it worked,” Abby pointed out with a laugh.

  “She actually knew them. I mean, it sounds like they were more than coworkers. I wonder if she knows. . . . Gah. I’m getting way ahead of myself,” Dan said, staring down at the email, a little awestruck.

  “Someone sounds excited,” Abby said. She poked him lightly in the ear, giggling as he flinched away.

  “I guess I am. I’d just like to know what happened to them, why they—” Dan cleared his throat, putting Jordan’s phone back in the cup holder to charge. “Where they went.”

  But he had a gut feeling t
hat where was not a place, but a state of being. Seeing his father in the school had all but confirmed their fates.

  “Try not to be disappointed if she doesn’t know all that much,” Abby said softly. “It sounds like they haven’t worked together in a very long time. There’s a chance she lost track of them completely.”

  Dan nodded, wanting badly to take Abby’s advice but feeling his hopes rise all the same. “And anyway, I’m not just here to meet Maisie Moore. We’re here for Jordan. We’re here to have fun in a whole new city. I’ll have plenty to keep me busy,” he said, forcing a smile. The alert on his phone signaled it was time to take his meds for the day. He fished the orange pill bottle out of his bag and noticed the MARCUS DANIEL CRAWFORD folder next to it.

  His hopes had been raised and dashed and then raised again. He hoped this Maisie woman wouldn’t be another dead end.

  “Are you sure that’s not the ocean?” Dan pressed his nose flat to the window, staring out at the endless stretch of blue water. If he looked down, it made him dizzy, the glassy surface of the lake right there, just a sheer drop down from the bridge.

  “Yup, I’m sure,” Jordan said. “It’s a lake. Wanted to bring you guys in this way even if it adds an extra thirty minutes. It’s way more impressive to take the Pontchartrain Causeway.”

  Dan had never seen anything like it in his life, the causeway running over the lake in a clean white curve that subtly rose and rose, dark blue water surrounding them and stretching to the horizon. It felt like an alien world, like civilization had disappeared underneath an apocalyptic level of consuming water.

  “My mom hates it,” Jordan added. “Makes her feel claustrophobic.”

  “I can understand why.” Abby sounded less than thrilled from the backseat. In the rearview mirror her complexion had taken on a green tint. “What happens if there’s an accident? Or your car breaks down?”

  “Do you really want to know?” Jordan asked.

  “No.”

  Twenty visible miles of utter isolation. For the first time in days, Dan felt himself relax. Nobody could get to them here. Who would want to? They could just drive and drive, nothing but oblivion on either side.

  But the causeway didn’t last forever, and soon ragged green strips of land reached out toward them like fingers from the mainland. Boats large and small cluttered the shore; rickety docks, some half-demolished, stuck up from the murky low water.

  To the left, a few tall buildings crawled out of the misty humidity, and then the city sketched itself in beneath them. It was a low city, but it still made an impression, and everywhere Dan spotted the same kind of Southern idiosyncrasies he had seen since they’d hit Kentucky—old brick architecture sliced up here and there by the odd modern building.

  And as their destination, it brought along a breath of relief. Jordan was right, there was only so much fast food and camping a person could take before he started to go a little crazy.

  They stopped outside of town for breakfast, convinced by Jordan that the hotdog-in-pastry rollups he called kolaches were suitable for any meal. At least they were fast. Then it was back on the road to head east and into New Orleans proper.

  Dan had seen plenty of photographs of the old quarters of the city, but nothing could prepare him for the feeling of the place. A streetcar jingled by, tourists clinging to the posts and windows as they ogled the bright, plant-strewn balconies ringed in white filigree ironwork. It was about as close to Europe as one could get in the United States, Dan decided, that feeling from the Pontchartrain Causeway returning—the sense that he was in a foreign world, a place where he maybe didn’t belong but wanted to.

  Even the streets were odd, cobbled and bumpy. The roads were charmingly crooked, some of the signs as off-kilter as the tourists sloping drunkenly down the sidewalks. It wasn’t yet ten in the morning, but that didn’t seem to be stopping anyone. Maybe these people still hadn’t gone home from the night before. Dan peered down the alleys and streets, hearing snippets of music starting to seep out of storefront niches, songs as good as anything he’d heard on the radio recently.

  “Oh my God,” Abby said from the backseat. She had rolled down the window, Dan saw, and she was busy snapping photos from the car. “I love it already.”

  The street music died down as Jordan navigated them through narrow, busted-up streets cluttered with pedestrians who took their time moving to the side. Most of the roads were only wide enough to allow one car and a bicycle through at the same time, and it was slow going, giving Dan plenty of time to take in the archways and stonework, the white plaster statuaries and planters tacked onto almost every pillar and post.

  “It’s like Disney World,” he whispered.

  “But with more drunk people,” Jordan finished for him.

  Uncle Steve lived in the French Quarter, which Dan had always imagined to mean the nice part of town. But his building, which had no parking except for on the street—a situation that made Abby understandably nervous about her car being sideswiped—looked a lot less glossy and tourist friendly than some of the others they had passed on the way in. The red brick, two-story apartment building was right next to a tobacco shop and something called Hernando’s Hideaway, which, judging by the chintzy window decor, was almost certainly an adult movie shop.

  Jordan carefully parallel parked the Neon, easing into a precariously small spot a few yards down from his uncle’s door. Like Disney World but darker, Dan thought, climbing out of the car and slinging his backpack over his shoulder. He was caught between two impulses—one to set off in any direction and just see what he could see, the other to dash inside and email Maisie Moore to set up a meeting immediately.

  The humidity sucked his breath away, and he wiped at the sweat on his forehead while he waited for Jordan and Abby to join him on the sidewalk. He turned in a slow circle, taking in the opposite building, a squat, black, brick affair with white graffiti marring the side of one entrance. All of the windows and doors looked condemned. This was not Bourbon Street—no parade would turn down here during Mardis Gras. Dan stared at the graffiti, a stark white skull with its mouth open wide. Someone had spray-painted ne parlent pas mal, les artistes d’os viennent between the jaws.

  Dan took a step off the sidewalk to get a closer look.

  “You coming?” Jordan asked.

  Turning, Dan found his friends waiting for him on the cement steps leading up to Uncle Steve’s door. He’d have to ask Jordan for the translation of the graffiti later. He nodded and lurched forward, catching his foot on the curb, narrowly regaining his balance before he face-planted on the sidewalk.

  Jordan chuckled, watching him flail. “He’s beauty, he’s grace, he’s Mr. United States . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Dan said, flushing. It never felt great to make a fool of himself in front of Abby. “Give me a break. It’s been a long trip.”

  “Too true,” Jordan agreed, smacking him amiably on the shoulder and hustling him toward the front door. “But now we’re here and I get to settle in.” His jaw quivered a little as he stared up at the house. “Dear me,” he said. “Welcome home.”

  “Hey, hey!”

  Dan had hardly crossed the threshold into the house before he was swept into a bone-crushing hug. Uncle Steve descended on them like a patchouli-scented giant, tall and broad, with the look of a former athlete gone to good food and cheap alcohol. This was Jordan’s former Spec-ops uncle? It was hard to swallow. He had bright, glittering eyes and iron-gray hair swept back lazily from a receding hairline. There was a startling resemblance between him and Jordan. They had the same big, round eyes and thin-lipped smile. The same nose, too, although Uncle Steve’s looked as if it had been broken and never quite reset.

  “The three musketeers arrive,” Steve said, looking at his watch. “A few hours earlier than expected, too, but I’m not complaining.”

  Jordan stood there holding his bags. He didn’t seem to know quite what to do. This was his new home, but it probably didn’t feel like home yet. br />
  For more reasons than one.

  Dan glimpsed a few recycling boxes in the front hall filled to the top with margarita-mixer bottles and beer cans. The only things missing were a surfboard and maybe a bong. “Don’t mind the mess. Had a bit of a get-together last night, you know how it goes.”

  “Totally,” Jordan said, nodding slowly. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Right? Too long, man, too long.” Uncle Steve pushed back his hair in exactly the same way Dan had seen Jordan do. Then he motioned them deeper into the house. “Well, come on. Shoes off, okay? I’ll give you the big tour and then—have you had breakfast? Oh, kolaches? Good man. Okay, then maybe we can help J-man start unpacking.”

  “Do you mind if I take a shower first?” Abby asked shyly. “It was a long drive.”

  “Sure! Of course, of course, my bad,” Steve said, chuckling and bringing them through to a formal dining room that wasn’t, at present, looking so formal. A card table was covered with a wrinkled tablecloth, and dollar-store votive candles were sprinkled about the room. Dan got the feeling Steve didn’t spend much time in this part of the apartment.

  Still, the floors were wood, and ponderous old chandeliers hung in most of the rooms. In the study adjacent to the kitchen, Steve showed them his jam spot, a cluster of South American drums and flutes collected on a frayed shag rug.

  “Some buds come over on Friday nights to jam out,” Steve told them, hands on hips. The jam spot was clearly a point of pride. “We won’t keep you up too late. Or, hell, you can all join in. Sorry, heck.”

  “It’s okay, you can swear. Mom and Dad aren’t here to throw a fit,” Jordan said, grinning. “Good thing, too, they’d probably try to Pottery Barn the bejesus out of this place.”

  “Not my style, man, not my style.” Steve led them into the kitchen. His worn flip-flops pitter-pattered on the hardwood floors, his loose cotton pants pooling over his feet. “While you’re here, help yourself to anything in the fridge. The, uh, grown-up stuff, too, just don’t get too wild about it.”