Shock Warning by Michael Walsh Read Free Book Online

toward their hotel, the restaurant, the moonlight walk near Fort Point.
    “Hear something,” replied Jade. “I hear something. She’s talking to me. To you. To all of us.”
    Rory looked at the image on the wall. “Awesome!” he exclaimed.
    Protectively, Hope threw her arms around the children. Neither Jade nor Danny moved.
    “What is she saying, darling?” asked Danny. The sirens were very near now.
    Jade moved toward the wall, on which the miraculous image had been projected, and started to put her ear to it.
    The force of the shotgun blast would have taken her head off, but the shot was high and to the right, chipping the concrete and sending it flying. Danny had hardly heard the blast when he jumped on his daughter, the memory of the Grove explosion still vivid in his memory.
    In one smooth motion, he scooped Jade up in his arms while signaling for the others to run. The Mexicans scattered as another blast came—this one hitting the Virgin right in the face. The miracle was over.
    They hit the car running and hopped in. It wasn’t a chopper, but Danny could still make it fly, and they peeled out long before the inevitable third blast—the one directed at them—came. But they were already far away, and the force of the shot dispersed itself into the fetid air.
    “What’s happening, Danny?” asked Hope, but at this moment, he only had ears for his daughter. “What did she say, Jade?” he asked again.
    “Awesome!” exclaimed Rory, as Emma began to cry.
    They were traveling through a nightmare landscape. On both sides of the Golden State Freeway were acres of dead cows, cows stretching as far away as they could see, an endless silent horizontal parade of dead cows. Poison , he thought, but what kind? And how delivered? Was it in the water supply, or just in the troughs and trenches? He wanted to turn on the radio, but he needed to hear what Jade was saying first:
    “Repent,” she said.
    “What else?” whispered Hope.
    Jade turned to the woman who would soon enough be her stepmother, even if neither of them knew that for a fact quite yet. “Nothing else,” she said.
    “Repent?” asked Danny. “That’s all?”
    “Repent,” she repeated. “Over and over.”
    The flashing lights of the oncoming CHP cruisers rushing south gave a ghastly ambience to the scene. The sirens were deafening.
    “What’s going on, Danny?” cried Hope.
    “I don’t know, honey,” he said. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”
    He reached in his pocket and pulled out his iPhone.
    Under the rules, there was no way he could know if his earlier alert had gone through. He was not supposed to follow up.
    Time to break the rules.
    You weren’t supposed to text while driving, but this was another rule just begging to be broken under the circumstances. Quickly, he typed in a single word, a word he’d been told would immediately summon him.
    DORABELLA
    He punched a single key and the word shot into the cloud, was instantly erased from the phone and all the civilian networks. A word that had never existed, but a word that meant so much.
    It would find him, and it would bring him. It had to.

C HAPTER S IX
    Los Angeles
    Devlin got into the backseat alongside Jacinta, who slid over as far away from him as possible—which, given the size of the Cadillac tank, was saying something. The doors locked automatically as the driver slipped the SUV into gear and turned east on Sixth Street. He checked out the driver: an ambulatory refrigerator in a formfitting chauffeur’s uniform. Native American? Samoan? Aleutian Islander? Los Angeles made New York look positively monochrome.
    Riding several feet above the traffic was not his idea of a good time. Most SUV drivers, in Devlin’s experience, fell into three categories: small blond women, small Asian women, and small Persian women. All of them rich.
    “Where are we going?” he asked. If either of his compadres knew, they weren’t talking. No habla ingles. The allpurpose