Breaking Point (Article 5 #2)(69)

“Let’s go,” I said.

We returned to the car, and drove north.





CHAPTER


15





I JARRED into consciousness in the cold silence, with the acute awareness that I was alone in the car. An eerie intuition crept over my skin. The others were in trouble. Something had happened.

These thoughts had me out of the door before I drew another breath. It was frigid, but not so much that the puddles on the asphalt had frozen. The air cooled my knuckles, heated and swollen from hitting the fence. I clutched my elbows and scanned the shadowed parking garage, heart racing, furious at myself that I’d fallen asleep. Dawn cracked through the pewter thunderheads outside—I’d been out for three hours at least.

The stolen cruiser was parked beside a tarp-covered vehicle on the bottom floor of the structure. Sinister pieces of rebar and fallen chunks of cement cut jagged angles down the open frame to my side, where the natural light was brighter. Mountains of gravel and rocks outside blocked my visibility, and the breeze blew an instant film of dust over my clothing and hair. It was one thing to see the Wreckage on the news, but another entirely to stand among it, a soft body of flesh and bones. I had the sudden sensation that I had awoken in the mouth of some giant beast; shortly it would crush me in its concrete teeth and swallow me whole.

A huge metallic sign lay strewn across the ground just beyond the exit. It was bent and scratched, but still readable.

CHICAGO MIDWAY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT.

“Chase!” I whisper-shouted. No answer. Panic gripped the base of my neck.

Sean appeared around the entrance. He was back in civilian clothes but for the gun holstered in the belt at his hip, and his face was warped with edgy frustration. He was closer to Rebecca than he’d been in weeks, but she was still just beyond his grasp.

“Good, you’re up,” he said. He tracked my gaze as it rose behind him to the heap of gray rock that was once an airport terminal. “This is where Marco said we’re supposed to wait for a pickup, but the place is a graveyard. Literally,” he added.

I knew he didn’t want to wait for the resistance. I didn’t either. I wanted to get Rebecca and get out, but we weren’t prepared. Tucker had offered some intel on the schematics of the rehab building and the placement of the guards, but Chicago ran this area. We couldn’t encroach on their turf without a formal introduction; Wallace would have called that bad form. And if they really were rough like Marco and Polo had said, we didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot.

“Where is he?” I asked quickly. “Where are they?” I corrected.

Sean pointed around the corner to where Tucker was leaning against the outer wall of the parking garage, sleeping in the dirt with his chin on his chest. The skyline weighed heavily upon us; rain was coming.

“Chase,” I pressed.

“Relax. He’s on point. Over that hill.” Sean motioned toward a rock heap on the opposite side of the building. “He asked me to keep my eye on you a while. I told him I had the first shift, but you know him.…”

I did know him. When his mind was set on something, no one could tell him otherwise. But I sensed something was wrong; he wouldn’t have drifted so far from Tucker otherwise.

I took off in the direction Sean had indicated, noting all the fallen concrete blocking our view. There were walls of it, stained with weather and anti-MM graffiti. Shattered glass was sprinkled across the ground. A hundred eyes could be watching us here and we’d never know; there was just too much to hide behind.

“Chase?” I called quietly, knowing my voice was muffled by the environment, but too wary on this foreign soil to speak any louder. My pulse quickened when I didn’t see him around the first bend. Long grass had grown here, covering the rough road and cushioning my steps.

I held my breath, listening for any noise that might direct me to him.

Gasps, ten yards away. My heart clutched. I surged through the foliage toward the sound without thinking. I found him alone on his hands and knees on the ground, his breathing strained, ragged. One arm locked around his midsection, as though he’d been shot.

“Chase!”

I ran to him. He heard me and jerked up, but not all the way. One hand motioned for me to stop.

“Get back in the car,” he ordered weakly.

I paused, ducking reactively and scanning the field. There was danger here, I could smell it in the electric air.

“Get back in the car!” he said more forcefully.

Scared, I kept looking but saw nothing. I listened, but only the breeze on the grass filtered through my heartbeats. It was just us. We were alone.

“I … don’t understand.”

“Please,” he begged, and fell to his hands and knees again. His back rounded in his struggle, like a dying animal, and I did understand then. There was no threat here but himself.

The fear in his voice was so thick it shook me to the core. He was always so strong, but not now. Now he was falling apart. Like Wallace, on the roof of a burning building, he was pushing me away.

I would not go.

I approached him gingerly, each frenzied breath from his throat striking me like a punch.

His pain hurt me in a way I’d never felt before. It was worse than my own pain. My strength wavered. I felt completely powerless.

I imagined him in the car, acting calm as I fell asleep in the seat beside him, hiding that choking panic until I was no longer conscious. The thoughts that must have filled his head in my silence. My mother, murdered before him. Chasing me to the holding cells, then into the fire at the Wayland Inn. One close call after the next, finally culminating with a chance to reverse it all that had instantly fallen through.