Signal Boost, page 2
A voice rough with strain breathed into my ear. “Please stop struggling.” There was the hint of an accent but I was too panicked to place it.
“Yeah, that sounds like a great plan, just lie here and let some crazy vegetable thief have his way with me,” I said as I pushed back against him, trying to throw him off. He was immovable. I waited for him to stab me or punch me or do something to quiet me, but instead he chuckled. The sound reverberated against my back, and the sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant. How fucked up was that? I struggled some more but stopped when my ass pressed into his groin and something pressed back, something that made my dormant libido rise and do reconnaissance. He angled his hips away quickly, and I exhaled a shaky breath.
“I have a pretty good hold on you. You’re not going anywhere,” he said, and then sighed. “I’m sorry I tried to steal from your garden. You caught me, so now I’ll just get up and go. No need to battle to the death over a tomato.”
“That depends on whether you ganked an heirloom.” Arden’s voice carried over to me just as fluorescent light flooded the garden. I glanced at the front door and saw her silhouette, armed with the shotgun. “Get off him.”
He released me, and I scrambled from beneath him, turning to glare at him and completely unprepared for what I saw. I looked up into the face of the garden interloper in the bright light of Arden’s lantern, and my heart stopped. Floppy dirty-blond hair hung down over eyes that were large, cornflower blue and strangely cool for a man who was staring at a woman with a gun. His cheeks were flushed from our grappling, matching the rosy pink of his wide mouth. His nose was large, and there was a certain jut to his brow and cheekbones that hinted at some Slavic background.
He was gorgeous. I mean, the sparse growth along his upper lip showed there was at least one person in the world who had more trouble growing facial hair than I did, but I wouldn’t hold the patchy mustache against him.
Maybe it was the adrenaline rush or the fact that he was no longer a threat—or that I hadn’t been around a man who didn’t share genetic material with me in months—but I suddenly regretted I wasn’t still beneath him.
“What are you doing here? Are you alone?” Arden asked, scanning the darkness. I pulled myself up into a crouch; there might be others closing in on us.
The intruder ignored Arden and squinted in my direction as I went to step forward, and then those impossibly blue eyes widened with fear. “Wait, don’t move!” he cried, lunging at my feet.
Why, you idiot? I felt an odd twinge of sadness when he jumped my way. Arden was going to shoot him, and even if he was a thief he was the most beautiful man I’d ever laid eyes on. It was entirely selfish, but I didn’t want him to die. I also didn’t want Arden to have to shoot anyone else.
My foot came down on something hard, and whatever it was broke under my insole with a loud snap. At the same time, the man’s warm hand landed on my ankle, encircling it as he gazed up at me in despair.
“My glasses!”
Arden came to a running stop behind him; she held the rifle by its muzzle but stopped midswing. I lifted my foot, and he released his hold on me, gathering the remains of his glasses as if it was a fledgling bird that had fallen from its nest.
He’s gentle too. The long-dormant romantic sector of my brain really was stupidly choosing now to kick back into gear.
He rocked back onto his heels and blew out a sigh of relief that ruffled his unruly locks.
Adorable. Dammit.
“They broke evenly in half,” he said with a grin, as if we were all buds. Dumbly, I fought the urge to grin back at him.
“You didn’t answer Arden’s questions,” I reminded him. “What are you doing creeping around here?”
“I was trying not to starve to death. I can’t be the first post-Flare survivor to arrive looking for food. I would have asked, but it’s the middle of the night and—” He raised one half of his broken glasses to his eyes and looked at Arden. He scrambled backward then and came to a stop against the cornstalks. “Holy shit, you have a gun? You have a gun. Why do you have a gun?”
“Exactly how blind are you without your glasses?” Arden asked.
My question was right on the heels of hers. “What do you mean by ‘post-Flare’?”
We’d interacted with some of our neighbors over the past few months. We’d even bartered for some necessary items; my life was slowly becoming a role-playing video game. But no one had mentioned anything about flares.
“Are you going to shoot me?” he asked, holding half of his broken glasses by the arm to gaze up at us. He looked completely vulnerable, with one eye magnified so it appeared even larger, and I wanted to reassure him he had nothing to fear. But then I remembered the crazy assholes we’d encountered over the past few months. Some of them had tried to kill us, and they’d come very close to succeeding. My head throbbed at the memory of our arrival at the cabin, although I actually couldn’t remember a thing since I’d been knocked unconscious by scavengers. Hot or not, we couldn’t take any chances. The bumbling European tomato thief act could just be a clever ruse—if he wanted our trust, he’d have to earn it.
“Not yet,” I said, answering for Arden. “Answer our questions and when we’ve determined you’re not a threat, you can go.”
“The Flare was a solar event that initiated a large-scale geomagnetic storm,” he said. “That storm hit Earth at maximum power and fried our electrical grids, at least in the northeastern section of the Americas. I’m assuming this was an Earthwide event, given that we haven’t received reinforcements from other countries and I haven’t seen military reinforcements or nongovernmental organizations. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but there you go. Pre-Flare life was normal. Post-Flare, I have to scrounge around in random gardens risking my life for subpar tomatoes.”
“Hey,” Arden said, sounding wounded.
“Can I go now? I’ve answered your question.”
I shook my head as he moved to stand. He stopped, and I realized that for the moment at least, this stranger was in my power. Nausea streaked through my belly; I didn’t want this kind of power. I’d sometimes resented my older brother for always wanting to be in charge, but now I was in awe. I couldn’t understand how Gabriel handled this kind of responsibility on a day-to-day basis.
“Why should we believe anything you’ve said?” I asked. Whether I wanted the responsibility or not, I was the one who’d intercepted the floppy-haired thief and I was the one who should make sure he wasn’t a threat. This was what I got for dramatically fleeing from Arden.
“Because I’m an astrophysicist,” he said with that grin of his. “Kind of. An almost-astrophysicist.”
I channeled my inner Gabriel and met his cuteness with a stony look.
“Okay, okay, I haven’t gotten my PhD yet, so I’m technically just an astronomer, but—”
“Get up,” I said. “We can’t let you go until we’re certain you’re alone and not dangerous.”
He seemed harmless enough, but we had to be sure. There was no way we could just release him into the night to go to tell his theoretical cronies that there was house that had a bangin’ garden and people who looked well fed and had weapons. I grabbed a coil of rope that had been left over from sectioning off the garden.
“You can’t be serious,” he said. His grin was gone now; I’d killed it.
“Arden, keep the gun on him while I tie him up.”
“John, are you sure?” Her voice was laden with shock—she was supposed to be the badass, after all—but I didn’t know what else to do. My stomach was churning with anxiety and I could feel a headache building, which happened much too often since my head injury. I needed to do something.
“Dammit, no I’m not, but I can’t let him go if there’s a chance he’ll hurt us!” I exploded.
“Okay,” Arden said. “I understand.”
“What? I don’t understand,” the stranger said, panic rising in his voice and thickening his accent. “I’m not going to hurt you. I swear on my didus’s grave. But I’m not going inside with you either.”
I inhaled deeply, steeling myself against his reaction. I didn’t know what a didus was, although it sounded like an uncomfortable bowel movement, and I didn’t care.
“Hand over your glasses,” I said. The side of my nose itched, but I didn’t think scratching it would make me look scary or commanding, so I ignored it.
The look of fear that crossed over his face at that moment was something that would haunt me forever. It was as if I’d asked him to hand over one of his vital organs. “Are you crazy?” His voice was even higher, reaching falsetto levels. “I can’t see without them. No way.”
“Look, I don’t want to do this either,” I said. “If you give me the glasses, you can’t go anywhere, so I won’t have to tie you up or anything drastic. You’ll get them back.”
“Why should I believe you?” he asked, throwing my own question back at me.
“I don’t know what you’ve seen out there, but in our experience people show their hands pretty early on in the game,” I said. I realized I was rubbing the spot where I’d been hit by the rock and pulled my hand away from my temple. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d be hurting right now. Let’s go.”
“Well, then do it.” His gaze was intense as it bored into mine. There was fear, but more than that, there was honest challenge and a hint of something wild and desperate that told me he wasn’t bluffing. “Just shoot me, because I’m not going in there with you.”
“You’d rather die than come inside and answer a few questions?” I asked.
His reply was a stare that chilled me to my core.
Fuck. Sweat broke out along my hairline, even though the night was cool. I reached out to grab the gun from Arden, but when I pulled, she stubbornly held on. I turned to see what the problem was and found her staring at me, her eyes wide and glossy. Her voice was small when she spoke, how she sounded when she cried out in the nightmares that now plagued her. “Please don’t.”
The world really was upside down if I was playing bad cop and Arden was playing good, but then I remembered that she was the one who had to deal with the memory of being held hostage by strangers. She was the one who knew what it meant to end a life.
“Geez. Just take them, okay?” He handed me the two pieces of his glasses and put his hands behind his head. I didn’t know why he caved, but Arden’s posture slackened with relief, and I certainly wouldn’t complain about not having to kill the first guy I’d met in months.
“I know this is scary, but as long as you don’t have any plans to hurt us, we won’t hurt you,” Arden added as we headed for the house. I glanced at his expressionless profile. I didn’t think he was the kind of guy who cared about such warnings.
I nudged the stranger forward through the door into our sanctuary and hoped I was making the right decision.
Chapter Two
Stump was sprawled on a quilt that had been placed on the floor near the couch. Arden handed me the gun before rushing over to lift him up and out of the stranger’s reach.
“I’m going to go get Gabriel,” she said, giving me a worried look as she jogged out of the room.
I gestured for Chez Seong’s first ever hostage to sit on the sofa, but he stood in place, squinting around the room like Mr. Magoo’s hot grandson. He hadn’t even been able to see my very obvious hand motion. I’d always had twenty-twenty vision, and just thinking of being stuck in a world like this, one without law and order, and possibly being unable to see was enough to make my skin crawl.
He raised a hand to his face and made a circle with his thumb and index finger as if making the sign for “okay.” For a millisecond I thought he was giving some kind of signal, but then realized two things: one, no one could see into the living room, since the windows were boarded up, and two, he was peering through the little O formed by his two fingers.
“Doesn’t look like the headquarters of a cannibal cult,” he mused. “Kind of reminds me of my grandparents’ living room.”
“I thought you couldn’t see without your glasses,” I said, tensing.
He turned toward me, hand still hovering in front of his eye.
“Right now I’m using my fingers to create a pinhole lens. It’s simple physics, really. The small opening filters out the light entering my retina, focusing it in a way that makes everything less blurry,” he said. His tone had taken on the same nerdy affect as when he’d described the so-called Flare, and Lord help me but it was the sexiest thing ever to hear a man talk knowledgeably about physics.
“Like a camera aperture?” I asked.
His eyebrow rose from behind his fingers, and he nodded. He continued to stare at me, and it occurred to me how ridiculous this scene was, or should have been, but ridiculous was the last thing I felt as he looked at me. I knew he was just keeping an eye on the strange Korean dude who’d taken him prisoner, but the tingle of awareness that slowly passed through me was something different. It was the same sensation of eyes meeting in the cereal aisle at the supermarket, or in a bar full of straights, or in the quiet corner of a library. It was that subconscious level of gaydar that was always sending out subtle waves and that only registered when it received a ping.
PING.
Arden hadn’t been gone long enough to make it to the Shag Zone. Nonetheless, she and Gabriel entered the living room, putting an abrupt end to our little moment.
Arden always said she thought Gabriel and I were more alike than I realized, even that we looked alike, but I think she was just confused by her love for me. Seeing how he handled his entrance alone made it abundantly clear that the Seong badass gene had missed me on the Punnett square. He walked ahead of her, his gait slow as if he was taking an evening stroll. His face was placid, but his eyes were intense as he kept his gaze on the stranger. I was the one who’d jumped the man, held him at gunpoint and taken him prisoner, but I could see him submit to Gabriel’s control just as everyone else did. He dropped his hands to his sides and sat down on the couch. I don’t think anyone saw me rolling my eyes because they were too busy staring at the older, hotter Seong.
“Gabriel was coming to see why I’d been gone so long,” she said. “If the electricity weren’t dead, I’d swear he has some kind of surveillance system set up.” I’d thought she would be more relaxed now that he was with her, but she nervously jiggled a disgruntled Stump, who’d had enough adventure for the night and was ready for bed. “I gave him the short version of the story.”
“That you found me in an indiscreet position with a stranger in our cabbage patch?” I asked. “Wouldn’t be the first time he’d heard that.”
The interloper’s head turned sharply in my direction, but Gabriel smirked and Arden’s baby-jiggling slowed down, which was wonderful because she’d essentially been priming a projectile vomiting machine. I took a few steps away so I was out of the line of fire.
“No, she mentioned that you claim to know what happened to cause the electricity to stop,” he said to the guy. He grabbed an ottoman and took a seat, placing himself between the stranger and Arden. “Can you tell me more about that?”
If the tomato thief had shown up a few months ago, he likely would have been beaten to a pulp by now. However, Arden’s magic hoo-ha had apparently given my brother at least some basic lessons in diplomacy. I could see from his stance that he was ready to strike if necessary, but he was listening first.
“My name is Mykhail, by the way,” he said, his tongue darting out to swipe over his lips. His lips really were exquisite. He had a wide mouth with a pillowy bottom lip that pretty much guaranteed he’d make a good kisser, or at least provide good fun for someone who enjoyed nibbling like I did.
Mykhail.
“Okay...that’s not what I asked,” Gabriel replied. The little tendon along his jaw flexed, showing he was irritated, but he didn’t say anything else. In the first few weeks after he and Arden had become official, I’d teased Gabriel about going soft. I quickly learned that just because he now joked and shared his emotions with us didn’t mean he was no longer a hard-ass—it simply meant that he cared enough about Arden to try harder to control his reactions. If only Pavlov had known that love could engender the same change in behavior over a couple of weeks that took years of work with an annoying bell and smelly dog food.
“I know, but it seemed impolite not to introduce myself. Besides, it’s harder to torture or maim someone whose name you know,” he said with a shrug. Again, I noticed that hint of an accent, the way his tongue seemed to shape rounded vowel sounds just a bit strangely.
“Names don’t mean squat. The last guy I killed was named Dale, and this is his baby,” Arden said, offering Stump as exhibit A.
“Was he your ex?” Mykhail interrupted. “Because I can see a bit of resemblance between you and the little one. You guys have the same...nose.”
“No!” Arden said, but I could tell she was biting back an exasperated laugh. “Look, I actually don’t enjoy killing people, so if you do something stupid that forces my hand, I’ll be sure to end you in the most painful way possible, just out of spite.”
Mykhail nodded, and I saw his Adam’s apple bob in that long neck of his. Little did he know that a threat from Arden was a term of endearment; I wasn’t the only one being charmed. He gave Gabriel the recap of what he’d told us about the Flare, minus his dig at Arden’s tomatoes.
“How do you know this? And how could something like that happen without the government being prepared for it? It doesn’t make sense,” Gabriel said.
“Well, I know because I saw it. I was looking at the sun through my telescope—”
“As one does,” I interrupted. I winced and shook my head at him. “Wouldn’t that burn out your retinas?”
“Maybe that’s why he needs glasses,” Arden contributed.
“Will you both shut up and let the man talk? It would be nice to have this settled before everyone else wakes up,” Gabriel said, and then sighed deeply and muttered, “Too late.”
