Tibbs was watching him, still spinning the bali-song knife, letting it click shut and then open again. If he was army, and RST only took Tier One, then that suggested that Tibbs had been a Delta sniper, which meant he was good, really good. A cable ran from the harness that the lenses were mounted on to a port implanted into the flesh at the back of his neck. The lenses were moving of their own accord as though studying Bloodshot. He wondered what Tibbs saw through those lenses. Could he see the armies of tiny nanites flowing through Bloodshot’s veins?
Harting led them to the treadmill that the big white guy was using.
“Finally, Corporal Jimmy Dalton. Former Navy SEAL. Lost both feet to an Afghan IED, so we engineered him another set,” Harting explained.
Dalton made no secret of looking Bloodshot up and down from the treadmill.
“Part of Team Six. Took out Bin Laden,” he said, his voice a deep rumble designed to intimidate.
“Yeah, you and every other SEAL,” Tibbs said shaking his head.
Bloodshot looked around at them all, taking them in one by one. KT, Tibbs, Dalton.
“Wounded warriors—” he started.
“No longer wounded,” the doctor told him. “Enhanced. Improved. This is the message we send to our enemies: Injure us, we return far more powerful.” There was something more than enthusiasm in his voice. Fervor. “They are: Chainsaw.”
Bloodshot had to suppress a laugh.
“What? Why?” he asked.
Dalton punched the treadmill’s stop button and turned to look at Bloodshot.
“Because it sounds cool,” he said. It was clear he had made up the name and was more than a little sensitive about it. This time Bloodshot didn’t bother supressing his laughter.
“We’ll start you with basic stress testing,” Harting was all matter-of-fact, “free weights, reflex reaction times—”
“Ho, hang on,” Bloodshot told him as Harting stammered to a stop, looking genuinely surprised that the new member of his high-tech Addams Family had actually interrupted him. “Chainsaw? Bloodshot? No. I may not have my memories, but my instincts are alive and well. And didn’t you hear, my game’s over.”
“The technology in your veins is not a game. It’s a game changer,” Harting told him. He sounded frustrated that Bloodshot didn’t seem to share his enthusiasm for this brave new world of technologically reincarnated soldiery.
Bloodshot just shook his head, turned and headed back toward the exit and the elevator lobby beyond.
“Sales pitch needs work, doc,” Bloodshot threw over his shoulder.
“Where are you going?” Harting called.
“Back to sleep! Or hopefully I’ll just wake up.”
The doors to the gym slid shut behind him and he pressed the button for the elevator.
* * *
“What now?” KT asked. She could remember her emotions on waking up to feel the implant in her neck: a mixture of fear at this violation of her flesh but also relief at still being alive. Then had come the slow realization of the cost. Dalton had embraced his newfound power, since despite being an ex-SEAL he had always seemed to be compensating for something. For Tibbs it had always been about a continuation of duty. For Bloodshot it was clearly much more complicated. He might look like the most normal member of Chainsaw on the outside, but he was far and away the most changed.
They heard the ding of the elevator from the lobby beyond.
“Let him recover,” Harting told them. “Dalton, take him to his room.”
The big ex-SEAL trotted after Bloodshot on his prosthetic legs.
CHAPTER 10
Bloodshot was coming to the conclusion that the facilities were a little bit too minimalist as he stared at a panel of red and green LEDs where the floor buttons should be in the elevator panel.
Dalton’s imposing bulk stepped into the elevator and swiped a card over the panel.
“Residential,” he said, turning to stare at Bloodshot. It was schoolyard intimidation, and they both knew it. Dalton just wanted to let him know where he was on the food chain. He suspected Dalton was one of those guys that just tried way to hard. It didn’t make the ex-SEAL any less of a threat and Bloodshot had already decided on the quickest, most efficient way to take him down if he had to.
As the elevator started to rise back into the sunlight Bloodshot found himself wondering what was on the other floors they passed. The elevator required a pass-card and possibly voice recognition as well. It was clearly a secure building. Was it all RST, he wondered? If so the scope of their operation beggared belief.
Bloodshot did his best to ignore the other man until the elevator came to a halt and the doors slid open.
* * *
Dalton had accompanied him all the way to his bunkroom. More minimalism: a single bed, a nightstand, and a small pile of folded, utilitarian clothes on the bed. It looked and smelled the way Bloodshot imagined a hospital room would and there were no windows. Its one standout feature was a dent in the metal bedpost. Bloodshot found himself wondering who had done that.
He sat on the bed, testing it with Dalton towering over him. When he checked the drawers he saw they were empty.
“Wow. Looks like Harting spared every expense,” he joked.
Dalton didn’t even crack a smile. He just glowered down at him.
“We just met. Why do I get the feeling you already don’t like me?” Bloodshot asked.
“’Cause I’ve met enough guys like you,” Dalton told him.
Reanimated corpse soldiers with nanites for blood? Bloodshot wondered; he supposed anything was possible. His patience was wearing thin, however. He had woken up dead with no memories and there had been kind of a lot to take in today. He was finding it hard to care much about what this guy thought of him. He also had the feeling that this sort of macho bullshit wasn’t a good way to run a team of Tier One operators. After all, they were all carnivorous apex predators. He should keep the big dog nonsense for the little leagues.
“Yeah, what kind’s that?” he asked instead.
“Kind that takes what doesn’t belong to him.”
Bloodshot gave this a moment’s thought.
“Tell me something, if I’m such a taker...” he gestured round at the room, smiling, “how did I end up here?”
Dalton just ignored the question.
“When you’re done with your nap, we’ll be downstairs doing our jobs.”
“I don’t even know what the job is...” Bloodshot told him. They weren’t really selling it to him either. Besides, it was all too much. He needed some time to process it all. Decide what his next move was. He didn’t want to be anyone’s pet science experiment but he didn’t know what his options were. If he even had any. It was clear he had value to Harting and his crew. People only parted with things they valued as a result of money or violence, and he didn’t have any money…
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Dalton told him and walked out of the room.
The moment the door slid shut Bloodshot sagged, his smile gone. He’d managed to bull through everything since he’d woken up. He guessed it was some kind of residual personality of the person he’d once been, but left alone he realized that was exactly what he was: alone. Completely and utterly. No life, no real family, no past, no memories, or real identity beyond that of a science experiment. He sagged further. Lying on the bed it felt empty. Something... (someone?) was missing. The dent in the frame felt like a promise of violence that made him uncomfortable, though for all he knew it was the result of a simple accident. He felt like a man trying to recall a vanishing thought, except the thought in question was his entire life, and it was just gone.
* * *
The dream was a series of images. Jarring fragments like a film edited out of sequence. He saw a steam-filled bathroom, a mirror shattering the reflection of an indistinct face. The sounds of fighting, chaos, battle. It was a familiar sound. Heavy slabs of meat swaying in a slaughterhouse as though recently disturbed. Bloody wrists secured to cha
irs, more than one person, a man’s wrists and a woman’s as well. Struggling to break free. A total loss of control, flailing in helpless panic without understanding why. Except... it wasn’t himself he was frightened for. Whoever “he” was. The tongue of fire from a muzzle flash. The hammer blow impact of a bullet hitting him in the chest. Heat. Everything slowing down so he could appreciate the feeling of a bullet burrowing through flesh, bone, internal organs...
* * *
Bloodshot’s eyes flickered open and he took a millisecond to assess the situation. Someone was standing over him, a very real-looking .45 in their hand. Bloodshot swung out with his fist, moving faster than he ever thought possible, feeling newfound power despite the awkwardness of the swing. The figure was a ghost, however, a shadow. His fist flew through the phantom gunman and slammed into the metal wall.
Drenched in sweat, gasping for breath, wide awake now and very much alone, he forced himself to calm down, controlling his breathing. Looking between the bloodied dent he’d just made in the wall and the similarly shaped one on the bedpost.
It hadn’t been a dream. Somehow he just knew that. It had been too real. The images he had seen were memories. He had been involved. Thanks to either residual knowledge or a bloodstream full of microprocessors, he knew about post-traumatic stress, he understood flashbacks. Bloodshot needed to discover more but he found himself fearing sleep as though he instinctively knew the series of events he had seen in his dream did not end well.
He looked down at his knuckles, clenching his fist as the nanites did their work in knitting the self-inflicted wound back together, making it good as new.
He stared at his newly healed knuckle for a moment or two. Felt a hot under-the-skin itch. It was all too much. He rolled out of bed and was pacing backward and forward like a caged animal. His instinctive knowledge of the internal workings of his own body meant that he was aware of his adrenaline spiking. Fight or flight. Where was Dalton when you really needed him? No. He had to get out of here.
Where you going to go? a voice that sounded just like his asked him. He had no identity. He had none of the connections that defined an actual person in any conventional sense. He did not exist. He would have to start from scratch.
He needed to be patient. RST wanted things from him. If that was the case then quid pro quo, but for now he needed to burn off energy, or he might just kill the next person he saw. More than anything it was the thought that killing someone wouldn’t bother him that made him worried.
Then the door to his bunkroom slid open as though reacting to his very thoughts. He left the room.
CHAPTER 11
Bloodshot was sure that the crystal-blue light shining from the swimming pool was supposed to be atmospheric and soothing. It reminded him of radioactivity, however, though he did wonder if it was the microprocessors in the nanites rather than himself that were actually making the link. Other than the light from the pool the gym was dark, deserted, as Bloodshot made his way toward a punch-bag. He was far from on board with Harting’s Chainsaw crew. He didn’t feel like jumping through hoops and balancing a ball on his nose (that was for SEALs). He was, however, interested in finding out the limits of his reanimated body and the tech it contained inside. He made a fist and swung a punch at the heavy bag. It moved slightly. Bloodshot looked at it, less than impressed. Then, remembering the dent he’d made in the metal, he corrected his stance and swung in hard and fast. His hand punctured the bag and sand exploded out of it. Bloodshot looked at the hole and decided to find out if there were any limits to his capabilities.
* * *
He found a floor mat and taped it to one of the concrete columns near the center of the gym. Bloodshot stepped to the column as though the inanimate lump of concrete was an opponent. He adjusted his stance until it felt instinctively correct, presumably the result of repetitive “muscle memory” training, though the stance gelled with the information his nanites had provided by cross-referencing thousands of unarmed fighting techniques. The latter process was almost instinctive now as well. Bloodshot swung in a vicious hook with as much force as he could manage. He almost cried out, grimacing as he broke his knuckles and a number of the bones in his hand. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as it should have. He could already feel the strange crawling itch of the nanites repairing the damage to his fist, he watched as the wounds closed, heard the crunch of knuckle bones clicking back into place. He had to admit he was disappointed.
Bloodshot took a moment to compose himself, looking at the blood smear on the mat. The microprocessors in the nanites were busy calculating the molecular strength of reinforced concrete, the power required to damage it, the strength of the material, in this case flesh and bone, required to deliver such a blow. Bloodshot swung again. He felt something happening inside the flesh of his clenched fist in the moment before it hit: a restructure of flesh and bone to reinforce it for the impact. It still hurt. Bloodshot looked down at his fist; there was definitely less damage this time. He went to work on the column swinging in haymaker after haymaker, putting all the force he could muster into it. It felt good, even through the pain, his fists remaking themselves, strengthening themselves after each blow. Concrete dust filling the air, he didn’t even notice the whole room shuddering with every impact, the barbell racks vibrating, each punch harder than the last. With a roar he landed one last powerful hit and the column cracked. A savage grin on his face. He looked down at his fist. The blood was gone, and other than a coating of powdered concrete it looked fine.
What else can I do? he wondered and then blew the powder off his fist.
* * *
Bloodshot walked the rack of dumbbells. Fifty pounds, a hundred pounds, a hundred and fifty pounds. The final pair was a huge three-hundred-pound set. He wrapped his hand around one of them and tried to lift. Gritting his teeth, feeling muscles tear, but again it was not as painful as it should have been. Then came the electric itch of the nanites repairing the damage even as the microprocessors began to calculate how to achieve the strength and structural support required to lift such a weight. In addition the tiny machines collated all the scientific and medical information available as regards power lifters. Bloodshot’s biceps swelled, the nanites reinforced the bones in his spine and legs, strengthening the muscles in those same areas as well. It seemed an imperfect science, much like his experiments with the concrete pillar, but they were learning quickly. Bloodshot tried again, and this time he lifted the dumbbell.
* * *
The treadmill whined under Bloodshot’s feet as he ran. He could feel the rate of his heartbeat but it was well within the parameters of a strenuously exercising human. Likewise the burn in his lungs, the shortness of breath, the pain in his legs, all of it normal for sprinting on a treadmill. Again he only had this baseline thanks to information that the microprocessors had mined from the net. What wasn’t normal was the speed he was sustaining on the treadmill. He couldn’t quite believe the figure on the digital readout: twenty-eight miles per hour. He lengthened his stride, pumped his arms, really pushing himself. The treadmill protested, its machine whine rising in pitch underneath him. Twenty-nine miles an hour, the same as the fastest man on earth. Thirty miles per hour, the speed of a galloping horse! Now, he was really starting to feel the burn.
* * *
Bloodshot sat on the concrete lip of the pool’s observation window, bathed in the cool blue light from the sub-surface illumination. He was recovering his breath far faster than he should have in view of the workout he’d just given himself. He felt a lot better for it. It was clear he’d been wound as tight as a spring; waking up dead could do that, he guessed. The dream hadn’t helped either. He’d needed to work out that pent-up aggression, get it out of his system before he next had to deal with some hyped-up cyborg ex-pipe-hitter like Dalton trying to establish his alpha dog credentials. Bloodshot found himself smiling at the thought, particularly after what he’d just done.
“So that’s what that was.”
Bloodsh
ot looked up sharply. KT was inspecting the damage to the concrete pillar. She wore a swimsuit with a towel wrapped around her waist. Her suit covered the breathing apparatus. Bloodshot watched as she moved around the raised edge of the pool above him. She had a tattoo running up her right arm, an abstract pattern that at first he thought resembled a curved feather but on second look decided it was a tentacle. As a rescue swimmer something related to the sea made more sense.
“You’re up early,” she said.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“If I was dead this morning I probably wouldn’t sleep either,” she told him.
“I had a nightmare.” He was looking for any reaction from her. “Or maybe I’m starting to remember. That’s progress, right?” Anything at all. It was clear that Harting and his crew knew more than they were telling him. Harting he could understand, he was king of all he surveyed and liked it. Dalton and Tibbs were exactly what they seemed to be, semi-intelligent well-trained muscle, and Dalton was at least loyal to Harting. But KT he couldn’t quite make out. Part of it was the way she went very quiet around the others.
“Soon you’ll remember enough to wish you could forget it again,” she told him.
Bloodshot laughed, as she dropped the towel and dived into the water with effortless poise and elegance that suggested she was born to the element. Bloodshot got up and walked over to the observation window to watch. It looked as though KT was doing some kind of martial arts kata on the pool’s floor. She looked more comfortable in the water, at home. She caught his eye and winked, showing no sign of surfacing for air. He assumed it was the breathing device on her neck that enabled her to stay underwater for so long. He was trying to make sense of what she’d just said: that he’d remember enough to wish he’d forget. There was something else, however, some connection between the feminine and water. Less of a memory. More of a feeling. A faint echo of a woman who loved the ocean but as soon as he had thought that, it was gone, like water through open fingers.
Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization Page 5
