Concrete Underground, Moxie Mezcal [best books to read for teens .TXT] 📗

me as soon as we hit the ground.

"You set us up," he growled and managed to land two crushing blows to my face before I could get my hand with the knife free. I jabbed blindly into his side, repeatedly digging the small blade into his skin.

It was enough to throw him off balance, and I was able to topple him over and break free. I ran about a dozen yards before my legs gave out and I face planted into undergrowth.

A voice called out from behind me, "D, look to your left - ten o'clock." I lifted my head and caught sight of something blue and shiny hidden in a shrub. Reaching my hand through the small brittle branches, ignoring the pain as they poked into my skin, I wrapped my fingers around the cool metal. I pulled the object free and raised it up to examine it in the moonlight. It was a gun with a casing cast from blue metal.

I spun around to find Anthony staggering towards me and unloaded the clip at him frantically. I wasn't sure exactly how many of my shots hit, but it was enough to send him collapsing to his knees.

As Anthony dropped, he revealed Violet limping towards us behind him. She walked right past the crumpled, hacking form of her husband and threw her arms around me.

A wet, gurgling laugh bubbled up from Anthony's throat. "I knew you were in on this from the beginning. I tried to warn him, but he wouldn't listen." He let loose a raspy cough, spraying blood onto the ground, and added bitterly, "Either wouldn't listen, or didn't care."

"Kill him," Violet said softly and cast her eyes down at the gun in my hand. "There's another clip in the bushes."

I stared at her blankly for a moment, then she sighed and knelt down to fish the second clip out of the undergrowth.

I snapped the new clip into place and cocked the slider to load a round into the chamber. Slowly, reluctantly, I raised the gun and pressed the barrel into Anthony's temple. He bared his teeth and let out a loud, earth-shaking roar that echoed through the night. I pulled the trigger.

He toppled back and landed on the ground with a thud. Violet rested her weight against me as I clicked on the safety and slid the gun into the waist of my jeans.

"Where is everyone else?" she asked.

"Max took off that way, back up the embankment. The driver from the blue car ran after him."

"Any sign of Columbine?"

I pushed her back gently. "I think we're past the point of pretenses."

"I suppose so," she replied while nonchalantly lowering her eyes to the gun. "So you've figured it out, then?"

"Enough of it," I said and took her hand. "Come on, let's go find them before Max's goons show up."

We ran deeper into the woods, following the trail of blood and broken branches that Max and his pursuer had left behind. The uphill climb and uneven terrain would have made things rough even if we weren't tore up. As it was, my legs burned, my body ached, and my vision was blurred by the constant trickle of blood rolling down my forehead and into my eyes. Violet didn't look much better, her limp growing more pronounced as she leaned on me for support.

After about fifteen minutes, we finally found Max sitting on a small landing where the ground had leveled off. He was propped up against a tree, panting heavily, his face caked with mud and blood.

"Where is she?" I asked.

He pointed to a spot where the landing dropped off sharply a few yards further past his tree. I made my way over and looked down. The corpse in the trench coat laid sprawled at at the bottom of a steep, rocky embankment. "I guess he lost his footing," Max explained.

We trekked back to find and easier way down, Violet still leaning on me while I kept Max two paces ahead of us, where I could keep the gun trained on him.

As we approached the body, it was obvious the neck was broken, with bone poking grotesquely through the taught skin just as it had in McPherson. The Luger had landed on top of a rock a couple feet away.

I knelt down and flipped the body over. The expertly applied latex makeup was already partially ripped off, the bulbous prosthetic nose dangling off to one side. I peeled the rest of the latex away, exposing Columbine's face underneath.

The shock in Max's face was palpable. Of course, there wasn't even feigned shock in Violet's face, which was chillingly emotionless.

"Makeup and prosthetics," I explained as I handed Max the remnants of the nose. "The suit was padded to give her bulk, and the elevator shoes gave her height." I kicked her feet. "They're probably what killed her, too."

"They certainly couldn't have made running across that incline any easier," Max agreed.

Something blue sparkled in the moonlight from around Columbine's neck. I picked it up and realized it was a sapphire necklace, almost identical to the one Jacinda had been holding in my dream, but for the color of the stone. It even had the crowned globe symbol etched onto the back.

I stood up and held it out for the two of them to see.

"That was the necklace her mother left for her in the doll," Violet explained.

"The necklace in Jacinda's hand was meant to send you a message," I said to Max. "It's just too bad you didn't figure out everything it was meant to say."

Max shook his head in disbelief and opened his mouth, but all he could manage to say was a single word: "Why?"

Violet chimed in bitterly, "Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you helped her mother abandon her and hid that knowledge from her for years despite being one of the few people in this world she could supposedly trust."

Max shrugged apologetically. "No, I get that. I just meant, I don't get why all this smoke and mirrors - the disguise, the blue car."

It was my turn to jump in. "It's like you said - imagine you're rich and bored, what would you do for fun? You have an overactive imagination, a flair for theatrics, and a past riddled with abuse and abandonment. You're like a child stuck in arrested development, and you truly believe it when someone tells you that life is just a game."

Max chuckled, trying desperately to hang onto his mask of practiced indifference, but the grief twisted his face into something pathetic and detestable. He dropped to his knees and cradled his friend's lifeless head, and for the first time ever I realized I was witnessing a one-hundred-percent genuine human reaction from him.

I glanced up and saw the twinkling of flashlights along the top of a distant ridge, heading our way.

"We better move," I said to the two of them. I lowered my head to give Columbine's body one last forlorn look, then noticed that the Luger was missing.

I looked up just in time to see Violet pressing it into Max's temple.

She squeezed the trigger. It clicked; the chamber was empty.

"What the hell are you doing?" I yelled.

"What do you think I'm doing?" she replied. "Give me your gun."

"No," I blurted out, more in surprise than protest. "He's unarmed and defenseless. We're not going to just shoot him in cold blood."

"What do you suggest we do with him?" Violet asked, her voice cracking in exasperation. "He is going to kill me the first chance he gets - probably you, too."

Max nodded his head and cracked a rueful grin through the blood dripping down his face. "I could deny it, but honestly, who am I trying to fool?"

I looked down at the blue gun in my hand contemplatively. "No," I finally said, trying to sound as resolute as possible. "I need him alive."

Violet looked at me incredulously; Max, curiously.

"He has to show me what's hidden under the Asterion storage facility in Room 33."

38. Stop!

We were able to drive right up to the Asterion facility without any interference from security, which I saw as simultaneously good and bad. Good because I didn't actually have a plan for dealing with them other than putting a gun to Max's head and praying that they wanted to keep him alive more than they wanted to keep me out. Bad because I felt fairly certain it meant we were walking into a trap.

"Open the door," I said to Max.

"I don't have my key," Max replied, staring blankly at me.

"Then how can I get in?" I asked.

"Why don't you try using yours?" he said in a tone that suggested the answer should have been obvious.

I dug the Abrasax keycard out of my jacket pocket and swiped it in the card reader. The door opened slowly while emitting a low mechanical buzzing sound.

The three of us walked into the cavernous lobby and found the same elderly receptionist sitting behind her desk, not looking up from her knitting even to acknowledge our presence.

Behind her, the wall of CCTV screens were all showing black-and-white static. She didn't seem to notice them, either.

At the far right end of the room were three metal doors, each one differently colored: the one on the left was red, and I recognized that as leading to the hallway with the operating room where I'd been last time. The middle door was white, and the right one was black.

Max walked over to the black door and opened it outward, holding it for us to enter. The door led down a flight of stairs. I looked at Violet, who looked silently back at me, and then started down the stairs. Violet followed behind me, and Max brought up the rear.

The stairwell continued on for several flights, enough that I lost count. When I finally reached the bottom, I found a blue door with the Highwater globe and crown sigil drawn in metallic silver paint. It was modified, however, so that the crown was positioned below with its apex overlapping the globe, as if penetrating it suggestively. A small number 1 was painted below it. As I opened the door, I felt a blast of cold air.

We entered into a long hallway whose walls were lined with computer racks filled with servers, switches, cables, and various other tech equipment. Both the ceiling and floors were solid concrete, reminding me uncomfortably of a fallout shelter. The hallway extended like this both directions as far as I could see.

Max pushed us aside to take the lead once again. He started down the hallway to the left. "Stay close. You don't want to get lost down here."

"What is all this stuff?" Violet asked.

"This is Abrasax's server farm," Max explained.

"So this is where you keep all the data you steal from your customers when you spy on them?" I said.

"Yes, D, this is where we keep it," Max replied patronizingly, then turned right abruptly where there was a break in the server racks. He snaked a twisted path through the labyrinthine rack setup.

"This place is like a