Vegas Run

by Rachel A Brune

  It shouldn't have been freaking me out for them to draw maybe a half a pint of blood. No big deal. But the way Gratusczak just stood there and waited told me he planned something worse.

  I tried to catch Karen's eye again, but now she actively avoided me. I didn't want to look at Gratusczak, so I settled for taking an eye around the room. It was big, and dark around the edges. My forte was sudden and brutal violence, not biochemistry, but to my admittedly unexperienced eye, this place looked like MONIKER had spared no expense in getting this guy back up and running as soon as possible. It looked almost exactly like the place we'd raided in Germany. I wondered if Gratusczak had even had time to fart before MONIKER put him back in business.

  Gratusczak ran his thumb around my forearm. Oh hey, creepy. It got even more freaky when he paused and massaged an area close to my elbow.

  "Good," he said, almost absentmindedly. "It stayed put."

  The touch of his skin on mine had the change howling and scratching inside me, going crazy at not being let out.

  "This is a new device," he continued. I thought he was talking to me, but he looked up at Karen. "I wasn't sure if it would stay where it was supposed to."

  Oh great. Nutballs here gave Karen experimental tech to shoot me up with and he wasn't sure if it would even work. Jesus.

  "I'm finished." Karen capped the last vial. She extracted the syringe from my arm, retracted the needle, and took the whole tray to the long table. Grabbing a rack to hold the vials, she began labeling and placing them in a specific order.

  All this time, Calix hadn't said a word, just hovered around.

  "You have anything to contribute?"

  She didn't answer, just smiled at me. Sharp white points in the darkness.

  "Dr. Willet, the cart, if you will." Gratusczak kept rolling the pad of his thumb over and over my forearm. The strap kept me from flinching. I flexed my fingers, willing the claws to grow from them, but the silver cuff did its job.

  Karen rolled over a cart with two levels. On the bottom, several piles of gauze, sterile bandages, anything you might need to staunch a flow of blood. On the top tray, all the tools a crazy horror-movie doctor might need to start the blood flowing.

  By now, I'd already started sweating. I hoped, just once, to catch a flicker of a nod or wink to clue me in that the old Karen rattled around in there, or maybe the new Karen had just the slightest bit of hesitation about what she was doing. But all I got was a blank stare and the smell of more than one beer on her breath.

  "What … um … what are you doing?" I finally asked. "What is all this for?"

  Gratusczak smiled, like I was his favorite pupil in a class full of people smarter than me.

  "This agency has all manner of intriguing research," he said. "They have been studying you for many years, and just to have access to their data…" For a moment, I thought I'd lost him as he stared off into the distance. His jaw hung slightly agape, and his tongue flicked out, caressing his top canine. "It was all very fascinating. Of course, John Tell had provided me with most of what I required. But the archives here … most helpful. Most helpful."

  He came back to himself and sniffed, then pored over the tools on the cart, hovering his hand over each of them like a chef selecting the perfect knife.

  "Ah." The scalpel he selected was basic, but very, very sharp. "And yet, the samples they had collected were minimal. Most were so old as to be completely useless."

  The scalpel was so sharp that at first, I didn't feel it slicing into my skin. The numbness lasted a few seconds before the pain made itself known. I screamed, arching my back up, straining against the straps that held me securely. I couldn't move, and I couldn't escape the pain.

  Gratusczak moved slowly and deliberately as he made another cut, then took two clamps, opening up the flesh on my arm to the bone. I screamed again and couldn't seem to stop. I've felt some pain in my life, but Gratusczak took it to another level. To add insult to injury, these were the people I'd just agreed to work for. I'd better get some fucking hazard pay.

  The doctor paused in his surgery, and I panted hard, trying to get beyond the pain. I couldn't even formulate a wiseass crack, just sit there and hope it would be over soon.

  Carefully, deliberately, he cut thin slice after thin slice of flesh, affixing them to slides and passing them to Karen to be labeled and catalogued. By the time he finished, I couldn't scream anymore. Instead, a continuous keening whimper echoed around the room. Apparently, it came from me.

  When he finished, he took the tray from Karen and went back to this table. She took over, cleaning the wound, stitching flesh, placing the sterile pads and winding them into place with gauze.

  By this time, I wasn't sure if my face was wet from sweating or because I was crying from the pain. It didn't stop after she finished, either. Just kept going on and on. I wanted to make some smartass remark, but the old Karen was gone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It took three days for my damn arm to get to the point where I could move without snarling or whining at the pain. Not only did the cuff hold me back from the change, but apparently it slowed the healing process I usually relied on. All my carefully laid plans and sworn goals had faded into one simple one. Get this silver abomination off.

  At least I had the run of the facility. The architects had built into the side of a mountain, with large, south-facing glass windows to take advantage of the desert sun. If you don't think I wouldn't try to launch myself through those windows first chance I got … let me just tell you, MONIKER thought of everything and coated them with a thin film that incorporated silver as a base element. I bounced off of it, dislocating my arm in the process.

  When I first came back to MONIKER, they'd prepped a room in the training facility meant to keep me in one place long enough for them to continue their research. It mostly consisted of re-asserting my control over the change and acclimating me to a new chemical they claimed they'd discovered another agency formulating. Back then, I should have been entirely more suspicious about their claims. Now, walking through an entire building designed to function as that small basement had, I couldn't keep the chills from crawling over all my skin.

  More than ever, I found myself reaching for the change, no matter how many times it ended in frustration.

  After a day of aimless running, getting the lay of the land, I ended up mostly just sitting in the large solarium. It was a circular room, surrounded on three sides and three-quarters of the ceiling by glass. I had a view of the Spring Mountains and not much to do. Up here, a layer of snow covered the ground, and the pine trees clustered thickly in clumps all around. I wasn't going to get much closer to home for a long time. Or so I thought.

  Dmitri would stop by when I hid there, reading a book, mostly to shoot the breeze. At first, I remained deeply suspicious of any information he shared freely.

  About a day later, listening to him talk about what sounded like old history, I suddenly realized he was briefing me on mission background. Instead of PowerPoint, he chose to do it over coffee and a Danish. Much preferable to other techniques, and it kept my mind off the pain in my arm.

  At this moment, he was telling me about his time in Germany. Home. He sat on a long, low white couch, legs crossed, sipping an espresso. I lay on my back under a palm tree–real, not fake–and tossed a stale pastry in the air, catching it and tossing it again with my good arm.

  "There was a little place on the corner of the street where I lived, had the most amazing sandwiches." Dmitri spoke softly, but I heard every word. When we were together, he spoke in Russian, and I answered in German, sometimes switching it up. Felt good.

  "I miss real bread." I caught the pastry, sniffed it. "Not this American Scheisse."

  Dmitri raised an eyebrow. "Much superior to the Soviet xleb." He sipped his espresso. "I don't know if you were aware of this, but I was stationed there not as a spy, but as a propagandist."

  "No shit?" I tossed the pastry back into the air.

  "Indeed."
His eyes went dark, and in the middle of all the sunshine, I felt a chill. "That was of course the excitement generated over finding a creature such as you."

  That was a new one. MONIKER was so used to thinking of me as a sort of supernatural nuke, I hadn't gotten out of the habit of thinking of myself as a weapon. "How so?"

  "Well, can you imagine?" The look on Dmitri's face reflected less nostalgia between two old soldiers, and more regret at missed opportunities. "The new Soviet superman, half-man, half-beast, capable of great feats in honor of the Motherland. The great Russian wolf against the corrupt American eagle. Oh yes … it could have been amazing."

  "I'm not Russian," I said, for lack of anything better to say. "It would have been the German wolf. You guys needed to find a bear or something." I tossed the pastry in the air again, this time with some extra added emphasis.

  Dmitri shrugged. "Eventually." He finished his espresso and set it to the side. "Without our test subject, the research stalled and was lost. Sold, I imagine, sometime in the nineties when everyone got rich selling old Russian weapons and tech to the highest bidder."

  "And you?" The pastry came down faster than I expected and nailed me in the face. So much for wolf-like reflexes.

  "When the wall collapsed, I was on assignment in Germany," Dmitri replied. "Bavaria." He switched to German with a perfect southern accent. "I assumed the role of a middle-class university intellectual and influenced students to reject the capitalism of their parents."

  "Seems a waste of your talents."

  "There are always opportunities for talented men." Again, the shark smile. "I was married, had a daughter. When the wall fell, the Russian government … forgot about me."

  "That's it?" I asked skeptically. "They lost some paperwork or something?"

  "They might have had some assistance."

  I believed him. Dmitri had the connections and the wherewithal to fade away, out of the reach of his former organization. Perhaps I should ask him for a few tips.

  "This is the daughter we're tracking?"

  "Yes." He leaned back in the sofa, draping one arm alongside the back. "We named her Sofiya. But she doesn't use that name anymore."

  "Well, if they don't let me out of here, I'm not going to have much of a chance to help you with your mission."

  Dmitri raised an eyebrow. "All organizations are the same. They can't see beyond what they want. We have the advantage here, because we know they are no longer working for their best interests."

  I sat up, brushing crumbs from my shirt. "What are you talking about?"

  "Surely you don't think that Director Ramirez is the one calling the shots here?"

  "Seemed like the one in charge to me."

  Now Dmitri frowned at me like a professor whose pupil had once again proven to not be paying attention. "You've seen the research facility downstairs?"

  "Intimately."

  "Do you think a man like Doctor Gratusczak obeys the petty commands of a man who wears red flannel?"

  "You think G is calling the shots?"

  "I wouldn't put it quite that way, but I will tell you this." He coughed and cleared his throat. "In the late nineties, as the gangsters and former KGB were consolidating their hold on the Russian Federation, a group of men–opportunists, soldiers of fortune, former security services–started an organization called Chernaya Gora. Black Mountain."

  Pretty sure I growled at the mention of their name. The change roiled inside me. I couldn't seem to stop calling it, and every time the silver blocked it from responding, I got a little more crazy.

  "I see you've heard of them."

  "Same outfit killed my pack up in the north," I told him.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  "Two helicopters full of fat men with rifles and a couple security escorts. They're dead."

  "I assumed that would be the case." Dmitri nodded. "When I learned that MONIKER sought your existence, I saw … an opportunity. They needed you, you were already being tracked by the Black Mountain corporation. There was an opportunity to work together."

  "How so?" I still didn't quite get it.

  "My daughter is extremely smart," he said. "I say that as both a proud father, but also as someone who grew up in a place where knowledge and intellect, coupled with a certain crafty nature, could guarantee political success."

  I rolled over and got up, stretching.

  "She graduated uni with very high marks, speaks a number of languages, and took to tradecraft like a fish to water," Dmitri said. "Black Mountain recruited her almost as soon as she walked off the graduating stage."

  "Your daughter works for the Russians?"

  "Against my hopes and my wife's wishes, yes, my daughter worked for the Russians." Dmitri's face hardened. "We were very close. She grew up with stories of what her father did, had no illusions as to the man I am. Although she went to work for the new Russians, she never went more than a few weeks without meeting to talk shop with her father."

  "How long has it been since you heard from her?" I asked.

  "More than six months," he answered. "After two months had passed, I began my own inquiries."

  He paused, but I didn't interrupt. We had skirted around this topic probably about a dozen times in the past two days. He would approach it, and then back off, telling me another story about the old days, mostly about the interrogation work they'd done, or what they'd been attempting before I fell into their hands. On one level, I recognized Dmitri as a master manipulator, and the fact he'd made me feel so at ease with him was a sign I should be running, screaming, for the hills.

  On the other hand, we were already in the hills, and I wasn't running anywhere, so unless I wanted to hide in my room and scream until they strapped me to another kind of table, I might as well enjoy the camaraderie. I certainly wasn't getting it anywhere else.

  Dmitri cleared his throat, and I realized I had zoned out. "Sorry, got lost in my own thoughts. You started an inquiry? It go anywhere?"

  "At first. Then, I hit a wall." His upper lip curled slightly. "It's madness how quickly the Russian people forgot their history and elected another preening strongman. It … complicated … old loyalties."

  Man, did I know that feeling.

  "I eventually found a former handler of Sof–Maria's, and applied some persuasive techniques," Dmitri continued. "He told me that she had been assigned to a special project. A retrieval of a research scientist who had been working on a project so secret that it wasn't even named on her orders. One day she was there, the next, she was gone. But, he said, you can't stop rumors and for a while, they had been talking about a project called Byeli Volk."

  "That sounds familiar." It was Russian for "White Wolf." Although to be honest, I'm more of a tan and grey fellow, being of central European descent and not one of the far northern packs.

  "So you see, the sins of the father come full circle." Dmitri dug in his pocket and pulled out an old cell phone. By the dings and scratches on the abused device, I recognized it as mine.

  "Your country retrieves you, shapes you. My country, or rather, the businessmen running it, attempt to steal you back." He tossed me the phone. "And my daughter is sent to seek you back out."

  "Wait." I started pacing, tapping the phone against my thigh, too caught up in thought to wonder how he got his hands on the device. "Is Doctor Gratusczak–was he working for this Black Mountain outfit when Tell sold me out?"

  The people he'd been working with had introduced themselves to me as "The Collective," but names were interchangeable labels, and Black Mountain Holdings struck me as the sort of organization to have very many subsidiaries.

  "I would assume so." Dmitri cocked his head. "But I do not think he was loyal to the company. He is a man of science and persistent vision."

  "He's an asshole."

  "They are not mutually exclusive. But you may want to check your messages. We're about to have company, and I do not expect they will let you keep that if they see it."

  Weird. But all right. I
flipped the phone open. One whole voicemail message. It was a new record. If I hadn't recognized the number, I would have deleted it, but the tiny letters informed me Randall had tried to get in touch. I pressed "Play."

  Hey buddy, it's me. Listen, I got some news, could be good, could be bad. That skinny blond dude I was telling you about, took your shift, John Pell or whatever, they found him dead up past the ridge we were working. Said it was some kinda animal attack. I don't know. That could be bullshit. I remembered you knew him or something, so I wanted to let you know. If you're coming back, I can get you back on the team, Lara says hi by the way, so if you come back up let me know, we'll get–BEEP.

  The machine cut him off. Man did not know how to stop talking.

  "They're here," Dmitri said.

  Quickly closing the phone, I slipped it into my pocket.

  "Calix and your friend Karen," he added.

  I looked around. No one else in the room. After a short moment, Karen walked in, followed by the other woman. Not for the first time, I wondered if Dmitri was completely human.

  "We have some new information," Karen began.

  "You've found John Tell's remains, and you think they might somehow be connected to this other organization that is also pursuing the fabrication of the beast-change," Dmitri said, face completely unreadable. "So, you are going to tell us that this might be a lead for us to follow up in the search for my daughter."

  Karen stared.

  "I'm not so naïve as to think you agreed to help me in exchange for the simple favor of tracking Rick down," Dmitri told her. "You also hope to learn as much from me as you can in order to control Gratusczak and his research."

  Karen didn't react, although Calix raised an eyebrow. The faintest hint of a grin played around her mouth.