Strike

  “There has to be a way,” I say. “We can sneak back over after midnight. Something.”

  My dad’s face is right up against my cropped hair, his beard against my ear. “We. Can’t. Go. Back. Once Leon Crane wants you dead, you die. Game over. He knew I was going to your trailer. Someone probably saw us leave together. The people in the tent city—they get gifts for snitching. And the guy who ran away just now—he might not know you’re with me, but he knows I’m on the way to Cannon land. And he knows I was willing to kill my friends to escape.”

  “Let me go, Dad.”

  “Promise you won’t go back.”

  I exhale, long and slow. “Promise.”

  He releases me, and I stand. There has to be a way. If we can’t go to them, can we make them come to us?

  “Okay, so do you have anybody over there you can trust?” I ask him.

  He chuckles darkly. “Not anymore. If Hartness was pointing a shotgun at me, they all are. I was the best man at his wedding.”

  “Can we deliver something to Crane Hollow? Like, a pizza?”

  “Honey, do you honestly think anybody’s getting past Leon’s guard at the road? Do you know the number of a pizza place? Do you have a credit card?”

  I pull the phone out of my pocket and scroll through the contacts. “Last time I called Leon, he let me speak to you.”

  “He didn’t know you were my daughter. The only reason you’re on his radar is because you brought the laptops, you lived through Valor, and you get on his nerves. He might’ve grabbed Karen to control you, but he doesn’t know that you and I are connected. He knows we’re together now, though, and that we just killed three of his boys. You call him again, you’re just going to piss him off. Unless one of your friends has a phone and you trust ’em with your life, there’s nobody to call.”

  “I wish Matty could hear me,” I whine, knowing how pathetic it sounds.

  But my dad cocks his head and grins. “Aw, Patsy. I always knew you were a goddamn genius.” He tugs my hair and pulls a burner phone out of his coat pocket. “What’s your phone’s number?” I find it and read it off to him, and he programs it into his phone. “Now, for this to work, I need you to do exactly what I say. Can you do that?”

  I nod.

  “Then I need something that smells like your boy. Wyatt?” I nod. “You got anything of his?” He’s excited, but there’s this weird Dad tone to it, like he doesn’t want me carrying anything that belongs to a boy, that might smell like a boy. I pat myself and pull off the scarf.

  “This is his.”

  “Then here’s what we’re going to do. You climb back up into that deer stand and stay hidden. I’m going to get as close to Crane Hollow as I dare and give a special whistle me and Ash taught Matty, how we call her when we’re hunting and she’s too far off. If I can get her to come to me, I’ll let her smell the scarf, wrap it and the phone around her neck, and hope to hell she understands that she’s supposed to go back to Wyatt instead of following me back to you.”

  I chuckle, thinking about my fat, silly dog. “Uh, you know Matty’s dumb as a post, right?”

  “She’s not dumb, honey. She’s a hunting dog. When she’s on the hunt, she’s sharp. When she ain’t hunting—that’s when she’s dumb. She’s smarter than you think. Now, can you stay up there? Because if she sees you, she’ll forget what she is, and this won’t work, and your boy’s gonna be in bits and pieces come sunrise.”

  I shudder, thinking about what a bomb could do in that cheap-ass, bullet-riddled trailer. “Yes, sir,” I say, climbing obediently up the ladder and flattening myself on the boards. He turns to walk away, and I call, “Wait!”

  He turns.

  “What happens if it doesn’t work? What if Wyatt won’t let Matty out of the trailer? What if you don’t come back?”

  He blows me a kiss. “If she hears the whistle, she’ll eat through the door to get to me. And if I don’t come back, then you do what you’ve been doing. Just stay alive.”

  Then he’s gone, and I’m alone in the forest. I roll onto my back on the platform and stare at the sky. The trees are stripped bare but for a few stubborn, crisp leaves that shake and rattle in the wind. The sky is deep ink blue, a few puffy clouds traveling fast, left to right, as if they’re being chased by the slivered white moon. I find Orion, forever striding, and the crown shape that I think might be Cassiopeia. A bobwhite calls, sounding lonely and bereft. I turn my head sideways, hunting for the Big Dipper, and my mom’s rosary slides down into the hollow behind my ear. Pulling it off over my head, I can’t help thinking of my mom’s puffy fingers counting the beads as she muttered under her breath. It calmed her, gave her a routine to help lessen the pain, gave her hope for a better tomorrow. I wonder what she’s doing now, if she misses the comfort of the faceted black stone.

  “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,” I start, my breath ragged, just barely a whisper between me and the sky. I know the “Apostles’ Creed” and “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” well enough from the days when my mom used to drag me to church, but things get sticky when I get to the Mysteries and all the numbers. Whether I’m doing it right or wrong, it starts to feel right, and I keep going. The stars seem closer, brighter, like I could reach out and touch them. I haven’t really thought about this process before, never had the time to stop and listen to the words. When I get to the part, “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen,” a chill washes over me.

  I still remember being very small in an uncomfortably fancy dress and too-tight shoes as my mother let me hold her rosary and explained how it worked. We were sitting on a stone bench in the garden outside church, and she said that when you first started praying the rosary, it was common to ask for something miraculous and receive it. She told me that she met my dad after praying a rosary.

  “Our Lady wants to bring you closer,” she said—I remember that part. So as I murmur the prayers and run my thumb over each bead in turn, I concentrate hard on what I want most: my parents, Wyatt, and Matty, all together, somewhere safe. I can see it in my mind, this big group hug. Chance and Gabriela and Kevin and Rex are suddenly there with us like actors walking onstage. All these people—I want them safe. I lost Jeremy and I lost part of myself, but I want everyone else to walk out unscathed.

  Something howls far off, a dog or a coyote, and I forget where I am and hold the rosary to my chest, tears filling my eyes. “Please let them be safe,” I say. “Let us be okay.” And then, so small under the yawning sky: “Please forgive me for what I’ve done.”

  The howl turns into barking, and I know it’s Matty, and I roll over and sling the rosary back around my neck and under my shirt to watch. But she doesn’t show up, and that’s because she’s not supposed to. She’s not supposed to see me, to smell me. Her bark carries far in the still night—that’s all. It feels like forever before I hear boots in the leaves, and then my dad is calling me down from the deer stand.

  “It worked?” I ask, bouncing on my toes.

  “The first half of it did. I got her to come out to me, and I tied the phone up in the scarf and tied that to her collar, then sent her back. Thank God for a fine hunting dog.”

  “Was she okay? Did she seem happy?”

  “She’s a dog with a job. Of course she’s happy.”

  He rubs my back through the jacket and inclines his head toward the woods. The whole time I was here, I forgot there were three dead men lying on the ground beneath me. Everything feels haunted, all of a sudden, and I’m all too glad to follow my dad deeper into the forest, away from all things Crane.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “It’s a secret.”

  “Um, aren’t I going to find out sooner or later?”

  He chuckles. “Yeah, but I want to see your face when you do. Keep close, okay? It gets a little tricky in here. Lots of pricker bushes. At least the snakes are asleep, right?”

  I hurry, trotting on his heels, close enough to
touch his jacket. I have no idea how he’s navigating in the dark. The starlight gives everything a blue-white glow, sharp shadows cutting the forest floor into strips of black and blacker black with silver edges keen as a razor blade where frost glints on wet leaves. There are no marks on the trees that I can tell, no orange flags or carvings or the typical ruined fences and outhouses to mark our way. But my dad walks steadily on as if we were following a GPS in broad daylight, holding branches out of my way and pausing as I duck under fallen trees or edge around thick clusters of laurels. At one point, he hops onto a mossy tree to cross a creek, and I almost slip and fall into a gleaming pool surrounded by jagged rocks.

  “Whoopsy daisy,” he says, like I’m still five. Who knows? To him, maybe I still am, even if I stank of sex the first time we knew each other for who we were.

  He’s stuck in the past for me too. He was godlike, then, and now he seems smaller, tenser. Just a man. And I want to ask him so many things, but I’m out of breath and running for my life, even if we’re not actually running. Until I talk to Wyatt, until I know our people are safe, I can’t just dive into thirteen years of What the hell, Daddy?

  My lungs feel thick and sluggish from pumping the chilled air. My stomach is empty and acid-sour. I want nothing more than to lie down somewhere soft and warm and sleep forever. And that’s when my phone rings.

  I fumble for it and open it, and my dad grabs it out of my hand. “Who’s this?” he says, all gruff. When I try to grab it, he turns away, one furious finger up in a “wait a minute” stab. I hear Wyatt’s voice frantically gabbling on the other side, and my dad rolls his eyes and hands me the phone.

  “Where’s Patsy? What did you—”

  “I’m here! Wyatt, I’m here. Are you okay? You have to get out. Okay? Right now.”

  “What? Out of where? Where are you? What the hell? There were gunshots, and Matty clawed the door until I opened it and then ran off, and I thought she just had to pee, and now she’s back with my scarf, and you’re gone, and—”

  “Wyatt, listen. I don’t know how many minutes this phone has. Those nut cans are bombs. There’s one in my backpack and two more in the big house and Gabriela has a bag full. They’re going to explode at six in the morning, and if you can’t get the cans out or the people out, they’re all going to die. Kevin’s in there with one, and there’s one in the room next to him, and . . . I don’t know how to get you into the house, but you’ve got to get Kevin out, if nothing else.”

  He swallows audibly as Matty whines and slobbers in the background. “Bombs? You’re sure?”

  “My dad says so. Leon built them.”

  “But why would Leon lie about that?”

  He sounds so innocent. Just like I did before Leon sent goons with guns after me. “Because we wouldn’t have planted them if we knew for sure. The ones at the mall, at least—the workers won’t be there when they go off. Maybe they’re just supposed to blow up the stock. Like, so people can’t buy stuff. An eff you to Valor, or whatever.”

  “Patsy,” my dad says gently, twirling his finger in a “wrap it up” gesture.

  “So here’s where they are.” I tell Wyatt where all the cans are and to write down my number, just in case something happens.

  “Give me the phone,” my dad says.

  I turn around like a hunching vulture, but he snatches it from me.

  “Okay, so the blast radius is pretty big. You can’t just toss the can out of the trailer—you need to get it at least a football field away from anyone. They’re made to shred everything in their path. Don’t open the can. Don’t try anything stupid. Just get the cans away from people. We’re going somewhere safe. We’ll call you tomorrow for a rendezvous point. You’re going to run when they start exploding. And one more thing.” My dad glances at me and tugs at his beard. “Leon’s got Patsy’s mom Karen somewhere. We don’t know where. Not in the big house. And we need to get her out. When you come find us, I want her with you.” He pauses, frowns. “I don’t know, kid. Figure it out. If my daughter likes you, you must have a brain. So use it.”

  Before my dad can click the phone shut, I yelp, “Be careful! I love you!”

  He slides the phone into his pocket and gives me a dangerous glare. “You love him?”

  At first I look down, embarrassed. But then I remember who I am and what I’ve been through, and I square my shoulders and meet his eyes. “Yeah, I think I do. Wyatt’s saved my life a dozen times. Shot a guy who was going to rape me, charged into two gunfights, paid a vet to fix my dog. He’s done a lot more for me than you have, so you don’t get a say in it. Now, where the hell are we going?”

  My dad looks me up and down like I’m some weird new species he’s never seen before. I can’t tell if he’s going to lecture me, hug me, or slap me. And then he points at the ground.

  “We’re here.”

  “If this is the surprise you were waiting to see on my face, prepare for disappointment.”

  That gets an actual laugh out of him as he sweeps leaves and pine straw away with his feet to reveal the last thing I expected to find out in the middle of the forest, in the middle of a small clearing: a manhole cover. Soon he’s got it pried up to reveal a hole into the ground. He flicks a light switch, and fluorescents buzz on, leading the way underground.

  “There we go. That’s the surprise I was looking for,” he says. “I’ll go first.”

  He starts climbing in like it’s totally normal, and I find my tongue.

  “Dad, what the hell is this?”

  “This is your grandfather’s nuclear fallout shelter,” he says. “On the other side of this hill is the old Cannon house where me and Ash grew up. Now, watch your language and come on down.”

  18.

  It’s cold underground but not nearly as gross as I was expecting it to be. The fallout shelter is like a long, metal pill, and it has a built-in ventilation system that hums as it churns fresh air through, although it does smell a bit musty. As soon as he’s made sure everything is safe and functional, my dad climbs back up to close the cover and lock it. And that’s when it begins to feel like we’re buried alive.

  “Should I ask why you have a fallout shelter?” I say, leaning back on a narrow bed set into the wall. It’s as flat and crisp as a hospital cot, and the guns stuffed in my waistband are instantly uncomfortable, so I put them on a little shelf set overhead. Everything in here is white or beige and strictly utilitarian. As soon as I see the brown marks my muddy sneakers are leaving, I shuffle them off guiltily and curl back up.

  “My father was a very paranoid, vindictive man. He had this shelter built back in the nineties in case something happened. Y2K, zombies, whatever. He wanted a place to hide. I think it was left over from the fifties. I only know about it because there was a land dispute and I managed to hack into his files.” He brushes off his hands and ducks farther back to open and close doors. I hear a toilet flush, water running. I guess he’s making sure everything works. A few moments later, he reappears with a flat package in each hand.

  “What are those?” I ask, and he hands me one.

  “MREs. Meals ready to eat. They’re for troops in combat. Twelve hundred calories to keep you fighting, including dessert. Open it up. You’ve got to be hungry.”

  I flip the package around and dump a pile of dark brown plastic squares on the bed. “What’s it made of? Is this even food? Is it safe? Wait. How old is this thing?”

  Of all the questions I’m dying to ask him about where the hell he’s been, I can seem to focus only on the immediate. Maybe I’m not ready for what he has to say.

  My dad’s already flopped down on the identical bed across from mine, eating something that smells like tuna out of one of the bags, and I want to gag. He shrugs and gives me a crazy grin. “Oh, it’s safe. Would the government do something that was bad for you?”

  I poke through the bags. No way I’m touching that chicken à la king. I pull out some crackers and a bag of M&M’s that looks weirdly off. The first piece of ca
ndy is yellow, stale and dry, but still chocolate enough to work. I dump them out in my hand and look up at my dad.

  “Since when do they make tan M&M’s?”

  “They stopped before you were born.”

  I pour the candy back into the bag, tuck everything back in the package, and decide I can wait for real food. My dad watches me, his eyebrows scrunched down, and abandons his meal to bring me a bottle of water.

  “At least stay hydrated.”

  I check for weird inscriptions before drinking it.

  The shelter is strangely impersonal, quiet and cool. I get the idea that anyone trapped down here for very long would go insane, despite the bookshelf set into the wall and boasting hundreds of slender paperbacks, mostly science fiction and thrillers. I don’t really know what to say, don’t know where to start, but my natural instinct is to let my dad go first. Let him do the work. After all, he’s the one who left.

  I expect him to apologize, to tell me how good it is to see me, or to ask what my hobbies are or if my grades are good or what I want to be when I grow up. But I’m dead wrong.

  “So why do you have my brother’s dog?” he says, eyes locked on mine over his bag of tuna.

  I swing my legs over the side of the bed to face him.

  “This is how you want to start? You’re gone for thirteen years, and you want to know about your brother, who you saw six fucking months ago?”

  He puts down the tuna, wipes his mouth on a paper napkin, and turns to face me.

  “My brother would die before he let that dog out of his sight.”

  “Then I guess you know what happened.”

  He pulls off his beanie and runs a hand through wolfish hair gone salt-and-pepper, though still mostly pepper. I can tell he’s chewing the inside of his cheek just like I do when I’m pissed and at war between what I want to say and what I should say. This is not how I dreamed our reunion would go, every word fueled with anger, suspicion, and blame.

  “How’d he die? He was supposed to stay out of this mess.”

  “You want the full story?”