Ghost Hold Read online

  I jammed the keys into the ignition of the van and turned it on. I thrust the stick into drive and, with one foot on the brake and one on the gas, I revved the engine.

  Marcus paused in unbuttoning his shirt and glanced at me, looking annoyed. Then he turned back, resuming his little striptease.

  Shotgun and his buddies were eyeing me, but they couldn’t seem to keep their eyeballs from straying back to Marcus.

  They were all right there in front of me. I could take them out like bowling pins. Yes, Marcus might get hurt in the process, but probably not fatally, and he could always reboot. The hillbilly brothers might get off a shot or two, but Marcus wasn’t a complete idiot. I had noticed earlier the tiny little labels on the van’s windows indicating they were not only tinted, but bulletproof.

  I revved the engine again.

  Marcus unfastened the last button of his shirt, and it fell open.

  2

  WELCOME TO THE WARREN GUN CLUB

  Shotgun’s eyes went wide, and he used the end of his gun to move the edge of Marcus’s shirt aside. Then he gave a low whistle and a smile blossomed across his face. “I’ll be damned,” he said, his eyes gleaming like he’d just met his favorite celebrity. “It’s true.”

  The other two good-old-boys stepped forward, also exclaiming and staring at Marcus’s chest, and for a minute it looked a little like a close encounter in a gay bar. But the guns were all down and the smiles were up, so I took my foot off the gas and let the van’s engine ease back to idle.

  Jason looked at me, a question in his eyes.

  “I guess they like his chest,” I said, pulling the keys from the ignition.

  “Anne,” Marcus called over his shoulder as he buttoned his shirt back up. “Get everyone out here.”

  Obviously, we were playing our new aliases starting now, even if he wasn’t.

  “Remember who you are,” I said softly to the van in general. I nodded at Yale, and he opened the side door as Jason and I piled out of the front.

  I marched over to Marcus, mightily resisting the urge to smack him in the back of the head.

  “This is our group,” Marcus said, introducing us to the country boys with a wave of his hand. “We all need to be trained and armed.”

  “You got it,” Shotgun said, looking us over. His eyes stopped on Jason’s hunting rifle and he said, “Nice Marlin. You know how to use it?”

  “Yeah, I know how to use it,” Jason said, jutting out his chin.

  “Okay then,” Shotgun said, “Let’s get you all to the shooting range, and see what you can do.” He turned, waving us toward the long building, and we began to follow.

  Nose, Jason and Passion were ahead of me, traipsing behind Shotgun and his buddies, but when I looked behind me, Yale and Marcus were still back by the van, staring each other down.

  I stopped, not sure if I should leave them alone or try to intervene.

  “I’m not doing this,” Yale hissed, glaring at Marcus, his face flushed with anger. I’d never seen Yale angry. He was a laid-back guy, but he also had a major thing against guns.

  “I understand,” Marcus said calmly. “You don’t have to. You can wait out here. It’s your choice.”

  Shotgun and the others had reached the door of the shooting range and were going inside. I saw Passion glance back at us and hesitate, but I waved her on.

  “Damn right it is,” Yale snapped, “and if you’re seriously going to arm underage kids, you’re a fucking idiot.”

  Kids? Yale was barely older than me. Yeah, he was eighteen, and I was still seventeen for another month, but I certainly wasn’t a kid. At sixteen, Jason was the youngest of us and probably the least kiddish of anyone I’d ever met.

  “You saw what happened in Greenfield,” Marcus said to Yale. “Besides, we’ve been armed ever since we stole the hunting rifles. How is this any different?”

  “We snagged those rifles so we wouldn’t get shot leaving the game reserve,” Yale argued. “And the same with Mike Palmer’s gun. If Nose hadn’t grabbed it after he shot you, Palmer would have shot us all. Those were defensive moves. But this—” he gestured at the farm and the gun club buildings. “This is completely offensive. You’re gearing up your own little militia, and you know it.”

  “This is about self-defense,” Marcus said. “No one is going to shoot anyone unless they try to shoot us first.”

  “Having guns automatically escalates it to that level,” Yale said, throwing his hands up in frustration.

  “It’s already gone there,” Marcus said, sounding just as frustrated. “The CAMFers took it there, not us. We have to be able to protect ourselves.”

  “Not like this,” Yale said, his face tight and grim.

  Marcus simply stared at him until Yale turned silently away and marched back to the van, his back a barrier between them. Yale climbed into the vehicle and slammed the sliding door shut with a bang.

  Marcus turned and saw me standing there watching him.

  “Are you going to give me a hard time about this too?” he asked, eyeing me warily.

  “No.” I shook my head. “But you could have warned me. I almost ran you over with the van.”

  “Thanks for not doing that,” he said with a sigh, walking to me and putting his arm over my shoulder. “I didn’t tell you, or anyone else, because I was afraid Yale wouldn’t come with us to Indy if he found out.”

  “Will he come now?” I asked, glancing back at the van. “He seems pretty upset.”

  “I don’t know,” Marcus said, looking too. Then he turned back toward the gun club building. I could tell he was torn.

  “Do you want me to go talk to him?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, propelling us both toward the gun club. “I need you to learn this. I wish I didn’t, but I do.”

  “Who are these guys?” I asked, as we walked in tandem. “Are you sure we can trust them?”

  “As sure as I can be,” Marcus answered. “And who they are is complicated. They’re basically the opposite of CAMFers.”

  I was about to ask what he meant by that, when the blast of gunfire filled the air. I instinctively flattened my body against the building, pulling Marcus with me. And then I felt like a complete idiot. We were at a gun club. Guns were going to be fired. When had I become as paranoid as Jason?

  “You okay?” Marcus asked, putting his hands against the building on either side of my head and looking down at me. His body was pressed against mine like a shield, his eyes full of concern.

  “Yeah.” I nodded, the calmness of his presence seeping into me and wiping away the memory of him crumpling to the ground, a bullet through his chest. “It just startled me.”

  “You sure?” he asked.

  “I’m good,” I assured him, and he pulled away, taking my hand in his.

  Together we entered the rickety old building to find Shotgun waiting for us with a toothy grin, holding two pairs of safety goggles and some earmuffs.

  I’d never been to a firing range, so I really didn’t know what to expect, but I was pretty sure the Warren Gun Club was not your typical establishment. There was a big red sign on one wall that read Welcome to the Warren Gun Club and a big yellow placard fixed underneath it titled Gun Club Rules and Etiquette. Someone had spray-painted the words “Don’t be an Asshole” over the whole thing, obscuring the previous rules one through twelve.

  The lobby, if one could call it that, was lit with dangling fluorescent panels, one flickering sickly in the back corner. On a table to Shotgun’s right, there was an assortment of guns, arranged haphazardly next to a large army bag they had apparently been dumped from. And beyond that there were eight long well-lit aisles, partitioned off at the front, each with a man-shaped target dangling off in the distance at the back of the building. Nose and Jason were already set up in the lanes marked as seven and eight. Their targets were pulled forward and they were comparing the damage they’d inflicted on them with one of Shotgun’s minions standing by. Passion was in lane three holding
a little black handgun, the other guy looming at her back and helping her position her arms correctly.

  I slapped on my earmuffs just before her little gun rang out five shots in quick succession.

  “How did that feel?” Passion’s gun-tutor asked her.

  “Freakin’ awesome,” Passion said, grinning from ear to ear as he pulled her target forward.

  “For you,” Shotgun said, his voice muffled but audible, as he picked up a gun exactly like Passion’s and held it out to me butt first. “It’s not loaded yet, but always treat it like it is.”

  I put on my goggles to get them out of the way and took the gun, careful to keep the muzzle down. It seemed tiny and light, almost like a toy, but the spacing of the grip fit my gloved fingers perfectly.

  “It’s a Walther 9mm,” Shotgun said, looking down at the gun in my hands. “And those will help,” he said, eyeing my gloves. “The slide can tear up the web of your thumb sometimes, if you’re not careful. But it’s still the best purse gun out there.”

  “Purse gun?” I asked, looking at Marcus.

  “It’s just what they call them because they’re small,” he explained.

  Shotgun reached down and picked up some sort of giant action hero weapon. “The AR15 semiautomatic,” he said, handing it to Marcus.

  Passion and I got purse guns and Marcus got an assault rifle? What the fuck?

  I ended up next to Passion in lane four, with Shotgun helping me.

  Marcus went over to lane six to join the guys and the real guns, one expert shared between them because, you know, they were guys and obviously genetically predisposed to be bad-asses. Passion and I, however, each needed our own personal gun instructor to learn how to wield a tiny hunk of metal because we had, unfortunately, been born with vaginas. God, it pissed me off. I barely heard Shotgun as he showed me how to load the gun, and hold it, and look down its dainty, feminine sights.

  Still, I took aim at the target. It was more than an outline. It was some cartoonish fifties guy complete with slicked back hair, a bad sweater, and wrinkled pants. He also had a gun in his hand, and a shaded oval over his head, torso, and other various crucial spots, including the middle of his forehead and the center of his crotch.

  I aimed for the crotch, pulled the trigger, and the gun tried to jump upward right out of my hand.

  Something hit me on top of the head, and the spent shell went ricocheting off my noggin.

  “You pulled up,” Shotgun said, sounding annoyed. “Did you listen to anything I said? Don’t pull the trigger, squeeze it. And hold the gun gently but firmly, like you’d hold a kitten that’s trying to escape.”

  “A kitten?” I repeated, staring at him. “Is that what you tell the guys? Be sure to hold your assault rifle like a fucking kitten?”

  “Hey. Calm your tits, Sweetheart. I’m trying to help you here.”

  Calm my tits, Sweetheart? Was this guy for real? No, he couldn’t be. They must have cloned him from the sketch of Fifties Guy on the target. I glared at him, noticing the insignia on the front of his brown coveralls for the first time. It was a circle with the outline of two hands inside of it, clutched in some kind of arm-wrestling hold, and it looked kind of fifties era as well. I suddenly felt a sense of deja-vu, like I’d seen it before in a dream or something.

  “You can’t shoot angry,” he said. “You won’t hit anything.”

  Determined to prove him wrong, I took careful aim at the target’s crotch again and let fly with four more bullets. I held the gun gently and firmly this time, but NOT like a kitten.

  When I was done, Shotgun shrugged and pulled my target forward.

  There was one hole in it, almost completely off target to the left.

  “Shit,” I said, reloading the gun with the ammo on the little shelf in front of me. Some part of my brain must have been paying attention earlier because I got that right.

  Shotgun marked my one shot and sent the target back again.

  Off in the distance, Fifties Guy taunted me with his outdated gender stereotypes.

  “Here, stand like this,” Shotgun said, moving behind me and knocking my feet farther apart with a nudge of his boot. “Put your arms like this.” He reached his arms around my body, almost embracing me as he bent one of my arms a little and straightened the other. His chest was right up against my back and I did not like it. “Shake yourself loose,” he said into my ear. “You’re too stiff. Shooting is not a mechanical thing. It’s organic. Like music or fu—painting.” Was this guy coming on to me? Ew. Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t working. The next five shots didn’t even hit the target. I could see that before he pulled it back to us.

  “Let’s try something different,” he said, pulling the paper target off its track and scrawling something on it with a black marker from his coverall pocket. When he hung it back up on its clip, Fifties Guy was sporting two very large black balls and a herculean dick.

  “Um, gross,” I said, staring at it.

  “Women are 57 percent more accurate when male nudity is involved,” he said, like he was quoting The American Journal of Science.

  “And how much more accurate are men when female nudity is involved?”

  “You don’t want to know,” he said, smirking. He sent the target back to the end of the lane, and he didn’t touch me this time as I stared down the sites of my purse gun.

  The first shot hit Fifties Guy square in chest, exactly where I’d been aiming. The next three didn’t miss either. And the fifth shot straight to his crotch made all the men in the building audibly groan.

  “See what I mean?” Shotgun said, giving me a friendly pat on the back.

  After that, I didn’t miss.

  Shotgun switched out the guns so I got to try the AR15, a shotgun, and a couple of rifles, but I had to admit that the Walther was my favorite. Passion liked it too, and she was as good with it as I was. We decided to have a target war, and Shotgun and the other guy left us to it, walking away shaking their heads and grinning.

  “You can go first,” I called to Passion from my lane, clicking my safety on and setting my gun on the weapon shelf.

  “Thanks,” she called back.

  Her first shot was dead on the target’s throat, a killer shot. The second was directly in his forehead. She was going to be hard to beat, unless she made a mistake soon. The third shot was accompanied by a cry of pain from Passion. It went wide, missing the target completely, and I heard her gun clatter to the floor.

  “Hey, are you okay?” I bolted around the lane partition to find her clutching her right hand in her left, the gun at her feet.

  “My hand got caught in the slide,” she groaned, pain written across her face.

  “Let me see,” I said, reaching out.

  “No.” She turned away from me, still clutching her hand. “It’s fine. It was just a pinch. I’m good.”

  “Everything all right?” Shotgun called from the other end of the lanes. “Anyone bleeding?”

  “I’m fine,” Passion called, but I could tell she wasn’t.

  “I’ve got a first aid kit around here somewhere, if you need it,” he called back.

  “No really. I’m good,” Passion assured him, her eyes catching mine.

  I could see fear in them, even though she was trying to hide it. For some reason, she didn’t want anyone to see how hurt she was, and I suddenly thought of her cutting. She must be used to hiding it all the time. And for all I knew, she was still doing it. She still wore long sleeves around camp. Maybe she didn’t want to explain the marks on her arms and wrists or see the look of dawning realization on someone’s face when they saw them.

  “There’s a first aid kit in the glove box of the van,” I said to her softly.

  “Thanks,” she whispered, nodding at me. Then she folded her thin body over her hands and quickly walked to the door, exiting into the sunshine.

  I reached down, picked up the gun, and flicked the safety on. When I set it on the weapon shelf, the fingers of my glove came away slick
with some dark substance—Passion’s blood mixed with grease from the slide of the gun maybe.

  “Hey,” Marcus said, poking his head around the partition, AR15 in his hands. “Is Passion okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, wiping my fingers on my jeans. “I think so.”

  “Good,” he said, “because it’s time to pay these guys, load up, and get out of here.”

  3

  A STRANGE EXCHANGE

  The illegal arms deal that preceded our departure was a fairly casual affair. At least at first. Marcus showed Shotgun his fake ID and a gun permit, though that seemed to be a mere formality. Money exchanged hands, a pretty significant wad of it, and then the two purse guns, several other hand guns, a Remington shotgun, and the AR15 were stuffed back into the army bag, along with a large and varied array of ammunition. Then Shotgun’s men, Nose and Jason in tow, lugged the heavy bag out the door and headed to the van.

  “And one more thing,” Shotgun said, reaching into his coverall pocket and pulling out a minus meter.

  I didn’t even think about it. One second I was standing next to Marcus, the next I was between him and the meter, my ghost hand extended through my glove and wound around Shotgun’s neck like a boa constrictor.

  “You turn that on and you die,” I told him. A minus meter had killed Marcus’s sister Danielle by draining her PSS. Marcus had been tortured with one in Greenfield. And I’d had a small taste of that agony myself when Dr. Fineman had turned his on me. I wasn’t taking any chances with this one.

  “Olivia,” Marcus whispered in my ear, his arms reaching gently around me to take hold of the meter. “He’s giving it to us. I bought it from him.”

  After Greenfield, we’d talked about trying to get our hands on one to see if we could figure out how it worked, maybe even find a way to defend against it. But dammit, Marcus could have told me we were getting one here. And what was Shotgun doing with a minus meter anyway?