Kawosa didn’t exactly disappear from where he’d been, but he did show up in a spot that Randolph hadn’t been expecting. When Randolph tried to follow his prey, he found himself simply looking in the wrong direction. Now that the trickster had built up a head of steam, he had enough speed to put a simple ruse like that to good use. Keeping that in mind, Randolph charged over snowdrifts, leapt over fallen logs, and stormed through forests. Kawosa’s ruse bought him enough time to veer away to the south, but the Full Blood surged onward with enough force to catch up to him. Randolph’s claws snagged the trickster’s tail, but Kawosa ripped himself loose at the expense of his own body and ran away again.
After tossing aside the tail he’d ripped from Kawosa’s body, the pursuit began in earnest.
Chapter Eight
Louisville, Kentucky
When the sun went down on a war-torn country, nearly every city felt the same. After the Breaking Moon, dusk became a universal warning for all living things without claws to seek shelter before the monsters emerged from their holes. There was no shame in running anymore. No pride to be lost at jumping when an unexpected noise rang out. People still conducted their lives, trying not to think about the horrors that had engulfed their former lives. A trickle of humanity went out to eat or worked at jobs they could ill afford to quit. Some children went to school where drills were conducted to teach them where to run if Half Breeds charged toward the playground. The rest sat behind bolted doors, praying.
Rico had given up on anything as comforting as prayer. He sat inside the sloped building on the corner of Spring and Payne, hunched over the keyboard of one of many Vigilant computers, angling his head so the other nearby Skinners couldn’t easily hear him as he spoke into a hands-free phone receiver. Since the windows were all blacked out and barred, he watched the outside world through a small bank of monitors displaying feeds from cameras set up on posts, rooftops, and windowsills within three square blocks of his location. Every so often he would check the faces of the Skinners watching him, and then look back down to the work he was doing. “All right,” he whispered. “What do you want me to do?”
“Are you at the computer?” Cole asked through the headset.
“Yeah, but I ain’t no hacker. If anyone’s tryin’ to hide something about that prison in Colorado, I sure as hell won’t be able to find it.”
“Just type what I tell you and let me know what you find. Look for Hal Waylon. He was the guy who ran the place where I was locked up.”
Rico did as Cole instructed, but Hal Waylon’s name wasn’t easy to find. A little digging into e-mail histories, downloads, and user interface registrations was enough to pull up the name four times. Denver, Colorado, was mentioned, but mostly in connection to the two Full Bloods who’d leveled a supposedly abandoned packaging facility. It was the same bullshit that had been handed to the press, and mentioned nothing of Cole’s escape. The fragments he’d found where Hal Waylon was mentioned were too small to count for anything.
“We need more than that,” Rico grunted.
“Hal Waylon was a Skinner,” Cole insisted. “He mentioned the Vigilant by name and acted like someone who took his sensitivity training from a douche bag like Jonah Lancroft.”
“There are other Vigilant branches out there. I only got a few minutes before I’m noticed here, so make it snappy.”
The two closest to him were from the younger batch who’d been called in to help with Cecile. They were twitchy due to frayed nerves, pale after being out of the sunlight for the better part of a month, and never far away from a shotgun or assault rifle. A few more Skinners walked back and forth between other rooms. Most of the activity was centered on the basement now that there was a live Full Blood to cut and prod as they pleased. Rico didn’t even want to think about what sorts of experiments were being run on Cecile or what samples were being taken.
“Okay,” Cole sighed. “Let’s try a few other keywords. What about ‘tendrils, infected’ or ‘spore’?” He then told Rico how to run the search to look for instances where those words showed up in conjunction with his own name.
Leaning back in the squeaky old office chair he’d been given, Rico said, “Nada.”
“Hey,” one of the younger Skinners said. “You find anything yet?” She usually sat in the spot Rico was using, but wasn’t high enough on the totem pole to do much of anything when he waved her off.
He searched for prison and cells, only to find some notes related to building the holding area in the basement where Cecile was being held.
“Okay,” Cole said. “We need to search for something specifically related to that Colorado facility where I was locked up, but isn’t a high enough priority to be wiped out in an attempt for these guys to make themselves look innocent. Something not very important in the grand scheme of things but that’s still in the system. Maybe something mentioned in low-level messages or a document that wouldn’t have been wiped off the hard drive.”
“You got ten more seconds,” Rico said.
Cole only needed four. “Try ‘Lambert.’ ”
“That’s the other prisoner that broke out with you, ain’t it?”
“Yep.”
“Where’s he been?”
“Good question,” Cole replied. “Haven’t seen him since about a week after Atoka fell. He’s probably holed up someplace to stay out of the line of fire.”
“Join the damn club,” Rico grunted.
Some hits showed up right away. When Rico clicked on them, he got a few e-mails regarding a scrawny man claiming to be a psychic who was brought up on charges for assaulting two people at a bar in West Texas. A half-garbled link to a website brought his attention to a news story about a man arrested for robbing a woman outside a tattoo parlor and trying to escape into the Rocky Mountains.
Cole sifted through his memories of those days he’d spent behind bars. The next few searches were quick and easy.
Frank.
That one came up empty, which wasn’t a surprise. Cole doubted anyone running that prison gave a damn about what Frank’s name was.
Squamatosapien.
Squam.
Lizard man.
None of those words sparked much of anything either. Rico could feel his time at the computer dwindling. It wouldn’t be long before one of the others took it upon themselves to step closer and take a better look at what he was doing. When Cole gave him the next search item, the smile shone through in his voice.
“Try ‘Sweet Sarah Sunshine.’ ”
The computer chugged through its own memories before spitting up one note from a file that resided in a buffer where old documents sat after being placed in a bundle and then stored without being opened for an excessive amount of time. It was an e-mail marked, Prioner description. The simple misspelling in the title was probably the only thing that had saved it from being deleted with all of the other prisoner-related stuff.
“We have a winnah,” Rico declared. It read:
Subject in Holding Cell 4: Adult male, Hispanic, approx. 30-35 years old, 5’9’’ tall, 168 lbs. Tattoo on rib cage reads “Sweet Sarah Sunshine” adorned with lip marks and ladybugs. Low-level psychic ability at close range. Can read thoughts and short-term memories which make him particularly valuable in questioning and categorizing other prisoners. No known family. Recommend he be left in vicinity of cells and terminated when becomes too much trouble. Dissection of brain matter may be useful.The victory Rico felt at finding something faded the moment he realized what it meant. “You were right,” he said under his breath.