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“Goddamn it, Alyson! Come down here!”

Clicking a little, I shook my head, smiling in spite of myself.

Revik exhaled in frustration. “What are you waiting for? What do you need me to say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do!” he said. “What are you afraid of? Do you think I’m going to say something awful to you on purpose? Try to hurt your feelings? Come down here, goddamn it! Be jealous around me… I want to make up afterwards.”

I grunted. “I bet.”

“Don’t be a coward.” His accent strengthened as his voice turned gruff. “I want to see my wife jealous. I want her to yell at me wearing that fucking dress so I can punish her afterwards… for being jealous, for being such a fucking tease in that casino I nearly forgot what we were doing in there. I might make up a few reasons, too…”

“Revik,” I sighed. “You really are impossible. You know that?”

“I’m hanging up,” he said, his voice a warning. “Come down here. Now.”

I felt myself giving in, even before I nodded.

I shivered a little against the cold.

“Okay,” I began. “Just?”

But the line was already dead.

Chapter14

A Problem Of Light

“We’ve been re-routed,” Loki said.

Hefting his automatic rifle, an Israeli TAR-21, orTavor,to his shoulder as he adjusted his headset, he glanced at Illeg. His eyes moved to Jax, who positioned himself on Loki’s other side. All three of them crouched next to a brick wall, part of an alley littered with trash and plants growing through the broken cement.

Most of the trash had already been picked over.

What remained consisted of broken glass, soggy plastic bags, twisted metal, piss-soaked chunks of foam, broken bits of metal and plastic that couldn’t be scavenged for other things. The smell bothered him the most. The remains of what had probably been food, now too rotten for even the truly desperate to eat, filled his mouth and nose.

Much of that rotted organic manner stood in foul-smelling piles at the base of the taller of the two brick buildings, near a metal door.

Restaurant, Loki guessed.

He could smell denser, more cloying types of decay, and knew not all of that had been food. Whenever the wind changed, blowing north between the buildings, the smell of rotting flesh and plant matter grew exponentially worse.

Even most of the human remains got eaten by something, however.

Loki preferred to think most of those scavengers were dogs.

They were in what used to be the borough of Brooklyn in New York.

They were close to the part where it transformed into Queens.

Now, those lines and names were next to meaningless.

New lines snaked around these buildings, drawn by petty warlords, homegrown militias, smaller groups of desperate families and friends just trying to survive.

Half the buildings were already falling down, some from human hands tearing them apart, even more by rising tides. Storms and floods from the encroaching river and sea spilled over the dykes and bulwarks that used to shield Long Island. The energy fields built to protect and reinforce those dykes had failed entirely in the previous however-many months, leaving the residents here vulnerable to the realities of the natural world.

This whole area would be a saltwater swamp in not too long a time.