17. Darkness
DARKNESS
GHOST
The green meter jumped.
It had sat flat on Nolan's screen at nothing for three hours, one dim bar in a dark room. Now it slammed to the top of its little window.
"That's the mic!" Nolan's hand was already moving, one switch, the feed off his headphones and onto the net, and his voice cracked in the middle of the whisper. "It's live—somebody turned it on?—"
A squeal tore through every earpiece on the block, high and thin, a live microphone coming on under a roof full of horns. The squeal died. The wire filled with crowd noise, hundreds of voices at once, and through all of it came the one voice that mattered.
"The answer is still no, you little Gravebitch." My head ran on channels, twelve of them on a bad night, all trying to take over each other. Every single one went quiet.
Caleb. Close against the mic, steady, each word laid down slow so that no man in that warehouse could claim he hadn't caught it.
He wasn't talking to us. He was saying it to Gravedigger's face.
The whole club had spent two weeks braced for a signal, guessing at what the word might be, and whatever any of them had guessed, it wasn't that.
It wasn't Gravebitch through the horns with another no stacked on top of every no that had come before it.
"What the FUCK?!" Irish came off the window two down from mine, his yell strangled down into a hiss. "He's going to get killed before we get in there!"
I turned to Hawk.
Hawk hadn't moved.
A second of stillness from any other man on this floor meant nothing.
From Hawk it meant he was shaken, and nothing shook Hawk.
He'd never asked what the word was. Two weeks of planning, and he'd taken you'll know it when you hear it from us and planned a war around it.
Now the word had arrived, and it had arrived like that, and the prez needed a second to hold it.
"Vega. Santos. Declan. Now!" His hand had reached his earpiece half a breath before my mouth got itself open to demand the order, and the words came out of him loud, actually loud. One second late by my count. Caleb Rossi had managed to shock the prez.
The rifle went off above our heads.
One flat crack straight down through the roof beams, into my teeth, and two blocks away a man started screaming.
I knew the plan by heart. Declan, on the roof over us with Logan on the glass beside him, working the doormen first. Legs.
A bouncer with a hole in his thigh can't hold a door shut against three hundred people, and he doesn't die of it either, and both of those things were the point.
"One down." Declan, in every ear, flat as ever. The rifle cracked again, and a second scream climbed in under the first. "Two."
Then the hiss.
A double hiss, long, rising out of the dark below our windows and gliding away east. Vega and Santos had spent the whole night on the ground floor under my boots with an RPG launcher apiece and an open window each, and I had exactly one heartbeat to brace before the night went orange.
Both corners of the pit's east wall went up at once.
High, where the wall climbed into the roof, two fireballs folding into one, and the light came through every scrape on our floor at the same instant and set the painted panes glowing orange.
The floor shivered under me. Grit sifted down out of our own ceiling.
Down the window line, forearms came up over eyes, shoulders hunching against the glass.
Then the sound arrived behind its own light, a doubled boom that rolled through the room and pressed against my chest.
The corners. Only ever the corners. A rocket through the flat of a wall drops that wall inward on whoever's standing under it, and three hundred people were standing under it.
I hated every wallet in there. They'd paid to watch men like Caleb bleed, and if the ground had opened under the lot of them I'd have called it fair.
But the club had one enemy tonight, and it wasn't the crowd.
So the rockets went in high at the corners, where the brick was thickest, where the old walls would hold and shudder and scare the life out of everyone breathing, and three hundred terrified people would do the one thing a crowd does best.
Leave.
"Everybody out! First floor!" Reaper came off his scrape roaring, his voice riding over the ringing in the room, an arm already swinging the nearest brothers toward the stairwell.
"Hold inside at the doors until the crowd's mostly clear, then we go in on my signal!
" His hand found his ear without slowing. "Blade. Keep us updated."
He was at the stairwell door in six strides. At the seventh he stopped, and his head came around, and across the dark it found Kai.
Kai stood at his folding table with his rows of clamps and gauze, and he hadn't touched any of it.
He was only looking back at Reaper. I've spent my whole life reading what bodies say while mouths stay shut, and everything in Kai read come back.
Reaper held it one second. Then he went through the door, and the room went after him, boots and shoulders, the whole floor moving at once, pouring down the stairs behind its vice president.
"North team copies." Blade arrived in every ear, low and flat. "Door's still dead. If we shoot, you'll hear it."
I took one more look through my scrape. Fire climbed both corners of the pit, smoke leaning off it into the dark, and the first bodies came bursting out of the east doors below the flames.
They spilled through, dragging each other, more of them every second, and the gray arch went over into the dirt under the first wave and stayed down under all the rest. Off to the side of the crowd, two dark shapes rolled on the ground holding their legs and screamed.
"They're pouring out." Reaper again, from below us now, pitched low, counting heads as they ran.
"Hold. Everybody hold." In through the nose, four.
Hold, four. Out through the mouth. I stood at a painted window running another man's breathing drill while a warehouse burned at both corners, and then I was moving for the stairs after the others.
Please be okay. I'm coming.
CALEB
The words were still in the air when the blasts hit.
They came in doubled, two booms almost on top of each other, and the ring shook under my bare feet.
Up on the entrance wall, high, where the brick climbed into the roof, both corners shivered.
The wall nearest the left corner bowed inward a hand's width and held.
Dust came off the ceiling in one long gray sheet, glittering through the sodium light, and in the high windows the last broken spikes of glass rattled loose and dropped, ringing off concrete in the dark.
I thumbed the mic off and let it drop out of my fist into its own coiled cable.
The old warehouse had barely kept its corners. Five days of drilling on this exact plan, and knowing it was coming did nothing at all for my legs.
The crowd screamed.
There were no roars left in them, none of the big OOOHs this place ran on. What came up out of three hundred throats was high and ragged, and the dust cloud rolled down into it and swallowed it whole.
"The wall! The wall's coming down!" A man's shriek, close, cracking apart in the middle. Somewhere behind him a woman was wailing one word over and over. "Out! Out! OUT!"
I turned my head through the falling gray.
People were climbing over benches, over each other, a whole floor of them shoving for the entrance.
Then I saw the doors, and the worst of the fear let go.
Both halves of that massive double door stood wide, and the crowd was fitting through.
Fast, ugly, bodies going down and getting hauled up, but moving.
A single door and half of them would have died against it.
Harlan was gone from the foot of the steps. Somewhere in that river, Cuervo, Norte, Anima, and Faro were swimming with it or fighting against it, and I couldn't spare any of them a look, because the mat still had my people on it.
Renzo had dragged himself to the ropes on his belly and rolled under the bottom one, and he lay on the apron with one arm hanging off the edge, finished. Whatever he had left, it wasn't fighting.
Trenza and Mateo had a man each.
The two enforcers who'd come over the ropes when I grabbed the mic had split, one on her, one on him, and past them two more were coming over the top rope. I did the math without deciding to. Four of them, three of us. Bad numbers.
"What the fuck did you DO?!" The scream came in over the ropes with the man making it.
He planted a hand on the top rope, vaulted it whole, and landed heavy on the mat, and I knew him before his boots stopped moving.
The flat dark eyes. The dense build, my height and an inch under.
The parking structure at UMC, three bikes circling me slow, and this one swinging off the lead bike to hand me two weeks and a threat.
His hair hung loose tonight, long, falling off one side of his skull and curtaining half his face.
"Deadlock, what do we do?!" The man facing Trenza threw it over his shoulder without taking his eyes off her, both hands up, feet stuttering.
Scared. Whatever tonight was supposed to be, this wasn't on the card.
And now the messenger had a name, and the others looked to him when the walls shook.
That put him up the ladder, close enough to the top that Gravedigger let him carry words to hospitals.