Instinct, Jason Hough [acx book reading TXT] 📗

pull that off? A memory hits me, then, of a banner draped across the mural inside O’Doh’s.

SILVERTOWN OCTOBERFEST—OCT. 8–10

It starts tomorrow, though, doesn’t it? Then I remember something Kyle had said before we’d fallen asleep. Something about a planning meeting, happening tonight. He’d wanted me to come by toward the end.

“No offense, dude, but I’ve got enough on my plate. Not going to get roped into joining some committee.”

“I mean after the business part,” Kyle had replied. “It’s kind of a tradition to sample all the seasonal beers before the rest of the town. Honestly it’s the only reason anyone shows up.”

Of course. O’Doherty’s! Where else could Doc find twenty-plus people in a confined space. All it would take is one of those gangster bodyguard assholes with a menacing assault rifle and they’d get into a line pretty damn quick. A blast of Ang’s drug into their mouths and voila, instant army.

Still, it doesn’t seem right to me. Doc had taken my blood pressure. Weighed me. The works. All to get the perfect timing for Conaty’s message. The idea of them arranging all that for so many people in the time it took me to come up the road seems almost absurd.

Which means…

“Fuck,” I rasp. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

The lab in Ang’s house. The Granston Brewery truck. The chemicals at the water tower. And Ang’s words in the elevator, most of all. One size fits all.

These are pieces of the same puzzle.

Then bringing both Greg and—though it failed—me, into the Broken Nose Gang. Why? To own Silvertown’s police force, obviously. All this right before Octoberfest, when the whole town would be gathered and… drinking.

“Compromised beverages,” I whisper into the cold night breeze, recalling Doc’s note next to Jeff Hall and Katherine Pascoe’s names. This isn’t some kind of sick experiment. It was an experiment, back when Doc was just giving people bogus meds. That phase is over. Now it’s a goddamn distribution.

I start to run, no longer caring about the weeds and blackberry vines clawing at my legs, or the hired guns with assault rifles prowling the main road, or their gang of mindless converts. I have to get to O’Doh’s, and when I get there, I’ll need to spill a whole-fucking-lot of beer.

Two rows of old buildings make up the heart of Silvertown. Other than the original brick facades, most have been renovated at one time or another. Despite more than half being empty, the place looks pretty damn cute from Main Street.

Get around the back, though, and it’s a different story. Everything’s old, falling apart, or functional only thanks to decades of retrofitting modern utilities onto 150-year-old bones.

Then there’s the back alleys, one behind each row. Each is really just a twenty-foot-wide stretch of broken pavement that buffers the buildings from the ever-encroaching forest.

Weeds push up through every crack. Broken glass and bits of rock crunch under my feet, impossible to avoid in the near-total darkness.

“I need help, I need help…” I whisper over and over, forcing myself not to forget.

Coming toward O’Doherty’s from the rear, and from the east, I decide to stick close to the tree line rather than the backs of the buildings. If anyone spots me, it’s three long strides to my left and I’m gone, vanished among the ferns and black gnarled trunks.

The pub is exactly at the midpoint of the row, taking up the first floor of a four-story building. Kyle uses the top floor as his apartment, while the two between are currently vacant. Behind the place is a small parking area for employees, a shed where supplies are likely stored, and a fenced-in area where the pub sometimes puts on barbecues in the summer.

“I need help… I need help.” Repeat it enough and I figure it’ll become impossible to get out of my head, like a song from a Disney film.

A fire escape runs zigzag along the back of the building, all the way to the roof. Kyle might be up in his apartment on the top floor even now, hiding out or simply asleep. There’s no way to tell with the building dark. But even if he’s not there, there is that antique Luger pistol in the gun safe. I saw him enter the combination when he showed me the weapon. If only I could remember what it was! I’d seen him enter the damn numbers but hadn’t bothered to commit them to memory. It seemed… untrustworthy, I suppose, to do so. I have to try, though. Force my mind to see the wheel spin. Or find it written down somewhere. Better yet, find Kyle there, hiding out, waiting for all this to blow over.

The alternative—that he’s with them now—is not something I’m prepared to consider. Greg was bad enough. Doc, too, really. But Kyle?

The base of the fire escape is about thirty feet from me, requiring a sprint across empty concrete and gravel to reach. Crouched between two ferns, I hesitate, listening and whispering my mantra. I’ll try the back door to the pub first, I decide, then climb if it’s either locked or the pub is occupied by any of Conaty’s minions.

I look left, right, and left again, making sure the alley is clear. Then I’m off like a rabbit.

Two steps into my sprint the back door to the pub opens and a man in dark clothes emerges, shining a flashlight beam off to my left. I veer right, and it’s only the creaking old door that keeps me from being heard as I flatten myself against the wall of a building two doors down from O’Doherty’s. The man’s light sweeps in quick jerks. From the barbecue patio to the storage shed to the bushes across the back-alley lane.

Inching backward along the wall, my fingers find a corner and I slink into a recessed doorway, only a split second before the cool white light plays over the ground and the walls. My world fills with brightly