Free Extinction Agenda by Marcus Pelegrimas Page A

and a door beneath a white awning. Both structures were painted the same shade of faded gray. Across the street was a small liquor store, a neighborhood bar on the adjacent corner.
    “What were you expecting for a meeting place used by a militant splinter group of Skinners?” Paige asked. “A fort?”
    “No, but maybe something more strategic.”
    “Bars are perfect cover,” she explained. “Noisy at night and plenty of places to post lookouts posing as regular customers. The liquor store is a good addition too. Especially if it gets robbed a lot. At the very least, there’s enough foot traffic to keep any more from being noticed. You pay the owners of either place enough and they’ll keep an eye on your front yard along with theirs.”
    “You seem to know a lot for a woman who lived in an abandoned restaurant.”
    “It took a lot of work to scope that place out. Now come on. Let’s meet us some heavily armed nut jobs.”
    As they approached the building on the corner, Cole wasn’t exactly sure who would greet them. The fact that they weren’t welcomed with open arms, however, was no surprise. The two who showed up first looked to be no more than twenty years old. Skinning werewolves didn’t have an age restriction, but even the newest recruits usually had a little more hair on their faces than the two young men who rushed outside carrying shotguns.
    “That’s close enough,” one of them said.
    Paige raised her arms, so Cole followed her lead. “We’re not going to hurt anyone,” she said.
    “And you’re not about to take any of our supplies neither. What the hell do you want?”
    The one who’d done the talking so far was a burly kid who looked like he’d spent his time playing football and partying before the world went to hell. He looked back at his partner, a taller kid with long hair and baggy jeans riding low on bony hips. Both wore matching sweatshirts that had probably been taken from a rack at the same Salvation Army store. Either that or the randomly raggedy look had become fashionable.
    “Tell Jessup we’re here,” Paige replied. “It’s not safe to stand out in the open for this long.”
    The guy spoke into a radio that was slightly bigger than a cell phone. “These two say . . . yeah. Okay.” Grudgingly, he looked at them and waved them through. As he moved past them, Cole noticed that neither of the younger men had any scars on their hands that would mark them as having been trained with a Skinner’s shifting weaponry.
    The main room of the largest building reeked of kerosene, burnt gunpowder, and charred wood. Although Cole couldn’t spot whatever traps had been set to turn the entrance into a kill zone, he was fairly sure they’d already been sprung several times. Although his knowledge of Skinner runes was still far from complete, he had no problem picking out the ones etched into the splintered door frame. The room was barely the size of a walk-in closet and was sealed off by a thick wall supported by steel posts. The clatter of teeth braided into leather cords announced Jessup’s arrival through a narrow gap between two of the posts on the far side of the room. He was an older man with a grizzled beard and scarred skin. Even without the tanned werewolf hide vest decorated with teeth and claws, he looked like someone who was never meant to leave a desert. He nodded toward the two shotgun-wielding Junior Varsity athletes who’d answered the door and said, “You boys can go check the perimeter. These two are all right.”
    The ferocity on the younger men’s faces was obviously a tired facade, and they didn’t do much to keep it up as they turned their backs on the Skinners and headed outside.
    Jessup studied Paige with a gaze that had been hardened by more than his share of nightmares. Although most of the people in the country were building a gaze like that, Skinners had been working on theirs for a whole lot longer. “We’ve tried contacting you two for some time.