Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jefferson Lee Thomas, once the superstud star journalist on the prestigious West American, was terrified. Frightened almost out of his wits and gibbering with panic.
His pulse was racing, the indrawn breath burning his throat. The palms of his hands were grazed and slippery with blood and sweat. His tongue felt like the bottom of a cowboy’s boot.
While running through the burned-out ruins of the old Ghirardelli chocolate factory, he’d fallen several times, bruising his knee and knocking the breath out of his lungs. He had also cracked his broken nose again, bringing scalding tears of pain and a trickle of blood across his neck and chest.
Not far away, on the edge of Fisherman’s Wharf, he could hear his pursuers.
There were about a dozen of them, though there hadn’t been enough time for Jeff to take a careful body count.
Now he knelt beneath the gaping mouth of a shattered window, the fresh salt breeze coming in off the misty bay.
“Why’d I come? Why the fuck did I come here? Knew it was stupid. Don’t care for the chick. Figured my place would be trashed. Nothing here. Why the fuck didn’t I go with Jim? Dad’ll be long dead. Thought I could find some place to start again. Now I’m fucking finished.”
Outside there was an unearthly howling as the pack of hunters drew closer. Jeff shuddered. San Francisco in the middle of October could be a chill, bleak place. But he’d had plenty of friends. Where were they all now he needed them?
“Dead or gone,” he whispered. “Probably dead and gone.”
If only he’d used the stolen mountain bike. The borrowed mountain bike. Taken it and gone south on the side roads and narrow trails along the western flanks of the Sierras, heading out toward the meeting place in Calico on the fifteenth of next month. Where there should be company.
It was funny. The only thing that had been funny in the past couple of days. Not funny amusing. Funny peculiar.
The big white building shaped like a pyramid—what was it called? Didn’t matter. It still stood there, soot streaked, amid the fire-stormed ruins of the central part of the city. On one wall, about eight floors from the point, someone had painted a message in bright red letters.
“1115CACA.”
It had crossed his mind that it could be a runic reference to the date and place of the rumored meeting, a reminder aimed at those who might comprehend it. The fifteenth day of the eleventh month in Calico, California.
“For those who don’t understand, no explanation is possible. If you do understand, then no explanation is necessary.”
Jeff wondered where that old quotation had sprung from, and why he was trapped and hunted in the fabled city of fourteen hills.
“Fuck knows,” he said, actually managing a weak grin at himself….
IT HAD PROVED impossible to get into San Francisco on any form of transport, even on the bike. Every single road was blocked solid with jammed vehicles. And so many dead!
Jeff had dumped the bike into a culvert, carrying on with his lightened pack, and his broad-bladed butcher’s knife stuck in his belt. Hunger was becoming more and more insistent.
He’d eventually entered the city over the Oakland Bay Bridge, walking across the tops of the cars on the upper deck, picking his way in the dark, high above the racing water.
The idea of trying to get to his apartment, and even track down his girlfriend, was seeming more and more ridiculous.
The night wind had tugged at him, and a light mist had coated the rusting metal, making it slippery.
Jeff had reached over halfway, past Treasure Island, when a croaking voice from the shadows nearly made him fall.
“Would you have a can of beans, mister?”
“What?”
An old woman with straggly hair, wearing a thick coat several sizes too large for her, had waved a hand at him.
“Two cans of beans, mister, then? Or could you make it three cans?”
“Bugger off before I slit your throat, you stinking old harridan!”
“You have a nice day, too, mister.” She’d raised her voice. “I can catch the scent of death on you, son!”