Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 91423 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91423 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
“Sorry,” I say. “I lost my temper.”
“I get it,” Luke says. “But I might hold onto this for a while anyway.”
The phone rings.
He answers it.
“Oh, Eric. Hiiiiii,” he says in the way only the youngest brother of a family can. He is slipping back into that role now. Teddy had it for years, but before Teddy was born, Luke honed that role, really made it his.
“Hi, yeah, no, he can’t come to the phone right now.” Luke says. “Why? Well, I think it’s a case of Uranassholeitis. Yeah. Look it up. Okay, bye.”
“That was immature,” Leo says from the rear.
“Do we care? Is there a prescribed response for talking to the guy who just tried to kill you?”
“We’re giving him too much information by talking to him, and the plane will have been tracked. It has a transponder. And now we’re calling and talking to him, from the plane. So either we ditch these phones and move now, or we’re going to have another set of visitors very, very soon would be my guess,” Leo points out.
“Here’s what we do,” Leo continues. “We lay up for a month. We take up residence in a fucking bunker. We heal. In another thirty days, I’m going to be fit again. Then when all three of us are ready, we start wiping this son of a bitch off the face of the planet, one thing at a time.”
He’s right. We have to move.
All phones and personal effects are left on the plane. We take the car, along with the pilot and the doctor. Nobody can be left behind.
We start driving through the night, aiming as quickly as possible for an interstate. We need to blend in with the rest of humanity, and we need to do it fast. We also need to swap the cars, which is doable. Eric will have access to satellites, and it won’t be easy to ditch him, but I suspect he won’t take that direct hit approach again.
He was trying to scare us. The gun men stayed at a distance, fired in a pattern that wasn’t particularly effective. If he’d wanted us dead, they would have laid in wait, and that airport would have lit up on both sides as soon as we came to a halt. A rocket launcher to the fuel reserves would have done it.
This is a game. A sick game played by a sick man who thinks that everybody he’s ever interacted with is a toy that can bleed for him. I used to think that we could escape evil by just getting powerful enough. Now I know the more powerful you become, the more evil there is. It collects in places of influence, extending tendrils throughout every interaction until everything is corrupted.
We need a fucking exorcism.
CHAPTER 19
Ella
I’ve been a part of some fucked-up things before, but this is quickly becoming the most fucked-up thing that has ever fucked. The British guy seemed chill, but I should have listened to the Levin brothers’ warnings. They told me he was dangerous, and all I could think about was how polite he was. Lesson learned.
We get onto the highway, and at some point I fall asleep. All the excitement has left me exhausted. I wake up when the vehicle starts to slow, and we go over a speed bump outside what looks to me to be one of the world’s most rundown motels. Dawn is breaking, and the sky has that faintish pink but mostly gray hue that comes with a day where there is probably going to be some light rain clearing to a fine morning.
“We’re going to stay at a roadside motel?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Aiden says mysteriously.
The car is garaged in a small concrete building, a garage that’s been weathered by decades of deprivation, or looks that way, at least.
We get out, go around the back, and underneath a lean-to structure that provides shade and I guess protection from spying eyes, there’s what looks like the doors to an ice cellar. Aiden pulls them open. There’s no ice. There are stairs.
We go down.
The air should be stale and damp down here from all the moisture that trickles into places like these over time, but it’s crisp and clean smelling. It’s being purified and circulated. Interesting.
We go through another set of doors and find ourselves inside a home.
“Oh, my god, it’s a bunker!” I don’t mean to squeal, but this is quite exciting. It seems to have all the creature comforts you can imagine: a television, couches, rugs, a kitchen. It’s all slightly dated, but I’m not complaining about that. Retro is fun.
There are four bedrooms, too.
The pilot is no longer with us. We must have dropped him off along with the doctor, who decided that he didn’t enjoy being shot at for money as much as he used to, which is a very reasonable response.