Smoke hadn’t hired anyone new since Dor turned the operation over to him. He was looking for one more, someone to start on nights, but he’d told her it was important to get this one right, to pick someone who’d fit the crew. He said he was waiting for someone who had never been in the service. He gave a variety of reasons, but Cass was still waiting for the one that sounded like the truth.
Charles laid down a card with some authority. “This guy, he was big. Built, you know? And carrying. We took a Heckler & Koch MP5 and a clean little Walther off him.”
“They’re not there now.” Three-High jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the locker where everyone but the guards were required to check their weapons upon entering the Box. “I was in there half an hour ago, didn’t see ’em.”
Faye to set down her cards, eyebrow raised.
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Shit, Faye, I-”
“Okay, okay,” Faye said. “Don’t cry or nothing. I just meant I didn’t see him come back out.”
“Probably day shift checked him out,” Charles suggested.
“Maybe.” Faye seemed skeptical. “But still, that would have been a short visit.”
So none of them knew the visitor had been a Rebuilder. Of course, if they had, word would have been all over the Box as soon as he’d come through the gates. The stranger must have saved that information for Dor, who’d either killed him or found a way for him to leave without drawing attention.
The former was unlikely, since the Rebuilders always had a plan-plans. If the man didn’t make it safely back to his rendezvous point, they’d return in larger numbers, make a show of force, demand a meeting. Or maybe they’d escalate straight to armed conflict, and either attempt to take prisoners, or simply burn the place down.
The peace between the Rebuilders and the Box was uneasy. No one liked it, except possibly Dor, who, as far as Cass could tell, was without loyalties to anyone but himself and his meticulously tracked empire. But everyone realized that the balance was a delicate one, and any provocation would end up with a lot of dead on both sides. The Box was recognized as neutral, and while the Rebuilders no doubt intended to take it someday, for now they would have a hard time outgunning Dor’s arsenal and security force.
Cass decided to keep the information to herself, at least until she knew what the hell was going on.
“Maybe we didn’t have whatever he was shopping for,” Three-High said, yawning. “Kinda thin stock these days.”
Feo, finished with his snack, wriggled off his lap and darted away without a word. It was his way; he was a restless boy, frequently affectionate, but easily bored. No one tried to get him to sit still, especially not his self-appointed guardians, who saw nothing wrong with his prowling and occasional thieving and who had made him a bed in a staff bunkhouse, where they could hear him if he cried out in his sleep.
“What are you talking about, the shed’s practically full. And we got a shitload of new stuff this morning from those guys from…where was it…Murphy’s?” Faye ticked items off on her fingers: “Tampons and toilet paper. Tea bags, olive oil, a couple dozen of those South Beach bars, liquid soap and detergent, all that shampoo. And an unopened bottle of Kahlúa and a case of Diet Canfield’s and twenty-two bottles of Coors Light.”
“That stuff tastes like piss,” Three-High said.
“You’d drink it, though-tell me you wouldn’t.”
“Hell, yes, I’d drink piss if it got me buzzed.”
The raiders had recently cleared a house where Beaters had been nesting on the far east side of town, and they’d come back with a good haul, but they’d lost a man in the raid. They missed a Beater who’d been sleeping in a powder room. It was weak and injured, bones showing through its flesh in several places and one foot twisted at an odd angle, and the others had probably left it behind when they moved on. It had taken only one bullet to kill, but not until it had clamped its festering jaw on Don Carson’s ankle.
It had cost a second bullet to take Don down.
The raiding was growing more dangerous. When Cass had first arrived in San Pedro in the summer, Dor’s people had cleared the town of nearly all the Beaters. The Order in the Convent paid well enough for live Beaters to use in their rituals that it was more worth Dor’s while to scour the streets for them. But trade with the Order had dried up, and as the weather turned cold, Beaters had begun stumbling their way south, apparently traveling by some instinct unknown to their human brethren. With their preference for more densely populated areas, Beaters were quick to nest once they reached San Pedro, and quick to hunt. Dor still kept the main roads clear, and the guards picked off any who came too close to the Box-but come in on any of the less-traveled paths and you were taking chances. The Beaters had learned to stay away from the stronghold, though they roamed just out of sight. You could sometimes hear their moans and nonsense jabber carried on the winds.
When they caught someone, you could hear the screaming, human and once-human.
Recently it seemed like they were getting bolder. Last week Cass had been trudging back from the bathroom shed at the first light of dawn, the Box still silent and asleep, when she heard a shout at the fence. For a second she hesitated, shivering at the chill snaking up under her nightgown, and then she’d loped silently along the fence toward the sound, the tongues of her undone boots flapping.
She reached the source of the commotion, across from the rental cots near the front of the Box, in time to see the worst of it. George, the guard on third shift, had been backed up against the wall of a two-story brick building that once housed a jewelry shop on the first floor and accountants’ offices on the second. Cass put it together immediately-she knew the guards sometimes smoked in the space where the stone steps met the wall of the building, where an overhang provided protection from rain and the curving staircase blocked the wind. They’d even dragged a chair there, and everyone used it to take breaks between laps around the Box.
Which was fine, unless you fell asleep.
George usually didn’t take the third shift. He was covering for Charles, who was laid up with food poisoning puking his guts out, and as the long uneventful night stretched toward dawn he’d taken a break. Maybe he’d just closed his eyes for a moment.
Long enough for the four Beaters to prowl down the streets and alleys from wherever they’d carved their nest and find their victim practically gift-wrapped, to seize upon their prize with shrieks of delight and hunger before George had time to reach for his gun or even the blade at his belt.
When Cass arrived, heart pounding in her throat, Faye and Three-High had left their posts at the front gate and run down the block, but it was too late. The first bite was enough to doom George, but the Beaters would not finish him here. After a few slobbering crowing nips they hoisted him between them, each holding an arm or a leg in their scabby festering fingers, to drag him back to their nest where they would feast undisturbed. First they would chew the skin off his back, his buttocks, his calves, kneeling on his arms and legs so he couldn’t move. Then they’d turn him and eat the other side, and as he weakened and his screams grew hoarse, they’d nibble at the harder-to-reach skin of his face, fingers and feet.
George knew what his fate could be. You could hear it in his screams. As Cass watched-others running toward the commotion, those who were already awake, those who heard the screams through their sleep and bolted out of bed-Faye and Three-High shot at the Beaters. And when George’s screaming abruptly stopped she knew they’d been aiming at him, too.