KT finished her routine, pushed off from the bottom and resurfaced before finally taking a breath. She climbed out of the pool and headed down the stairs toward Bloodshot. He wanted to ask her what she had meant but suspected he needed to play a longer game.
“You’re a water bug,” he said instead.
“I love the water. It’s my refuge. A place I can go where no one can touch me,” she told him. She sounded guarded but she joined him on the concrete lip of the observation window anyway. Up close he could see she had more ink spreading out from her sternum, presumably surrounding the breathing apparatus. The suit obscured some of the tattoo but it looked like heavily stylized outstretched wings from what little Bloodshot could see of it.
“You’ve been hurt before.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes...”
It was clear she didn’t want to talk about this, but if he could get her to talk about her past then maybe she would talk about what she knew of his own history. He just wasn’t sure how to get her to open up to this science experiment she’d only just met.
“We’re all damaged goods here,” she said finally.
They locked eyes, just for a moment. She might have been the quietest but she was also by far the least objectionable person he’d met in this freak show since he’d woken up, which made this easier.
KT took something from the pocket of her swimsuit and flipped it to him.
“Here.”
Bloodshot examined the item: a ship’s coin from a naval vessel. He looked back up at KT. It was clear that this was important to her.
“I was the only woman on that ship when I served my first year. Master Chief could tell I had nobody. So he made a point to declare me family. Now you’re in ours,” she told him. It was a generous gift, an act of kindness to a stranger, but it also made a kind of sense. Her Master Chief had given it to her when she had needed it and now she was paying that forward. Giving someone new to their strange little crew something to hold on to. It almost felt like the first piece in creating a new identity. At least Bloodshot hoped that that was what it was all about and this was KT opening up, and not something as crass as a recruiting pitch.
“Thank you,” he said as he examined the coin. He really didn’t know what else to say – despite his reservations he was moved. He still couldn’t shake the feeling that she was holding something back, however.
“I’m sure there’s someone in this world who cares about you a great deal. You just don’t know it yet,” she told him.
He looked up at her again. Not sure if she was playing with him or genuinely trying to be nice. If it was the former then he saw no sign of it on her face.
He heard the ding of the elevator. Moments later Tibbs and Dalton strolled into the gym.
“Chainsaw...” he said as they clocked him.
Tibbs and Dalton exchanged a look.
“We gonna do this or what?” Tibbs asked.
“Let’s show this newb how it’s done,” Dalton said. Bloodshot could hear the relish in his voice.
The side kick that Dalton threw at him was lazy but almost caught Bloodshot by surprise. He only just had time to raise both his hands to block it. Dalton’s cybernetic leg felt like a steel bar across his forearms. He was aware of KT rolling her eyes in his periphery and then he was on his feet dancing out of the way of Dalton’s follow-up kicks, right into Tibbs and his knife. Bloodshot guided the practice knife away from him, putting Tibbs between himself and Dalton before swinging a punch in right under Tibbs’s ribs hard enough to elicit a grunt of pain. He gave himself more room, backing away as “Chainsaw” came after him.
His new family were a motley bunch at best, and he didn’t trust them, but in the absence of anything else they were all he had. He figured he would give them a try. For the time being at least.
CHAPTER 12
Bloodshot walked into the break room. His fist clenched around the ends of a towel wrapped around his neck, fresh from his workout, fresh from Tibbs and Dalton putting him through his paces. Or maybe it was the other way around, Bloodshot thought to himself, smiling.
The break room looked like an industrial version of a high-end coffee shop. More soft blue light shone through the glass that partitioned the room and the adjacent lab/microfactory area. A well-stocked bar ran across the back of the room. Music was playing, instrumental, mellow. It was empty except for KT who was parked on a tall chair at one of the high tables closest to the window. There was a bottle of liquor on the table in front of her.
“Really?” he asked.
She swung around to look at him. Bloodshot was pleased that he was now able to keep his eyes on her face, that they didn’t drift to the breathing apparatus implanted in her neck.
“From the gym to the bar?” he continued.
“Maybe I just like drinking,” she suggested.
“Alone?” He had just enough knowledge to know that this was socially frowned upon.
“Pull up a chair. What’s your drink?”
That stumped him.
“I don’t have a clue,” he said finally.
KT grinned.
“Alright, well. Only one way to find out.”
She got up and moved to the bar. Bloodshot watched as KT started pulling bottles down off the shelves. As she did so he became aware of what each of the bottles contained, its type and relative quality. It seemed that all the alcoholic food groups were represented: scotch, vodka, brandy, etc., and much of it was high-end stuff. Their quarters might be pretty spartan but it seemed that less expense was spared when it came to alcohol for the troops.
“Easy, killer,” Bloodshot told her, sitting down at the table. It felt intimate in the way an empty bar late at night did. How do I know that? The microprocessors? It seemed oddly contextual. Were they adapting to the residual personality he definitely seemed to be manifesting? He wondered if that in itself was some form of memory.
She had assembled enough drink to have killed the average silverback gorilla. He had actually done the math, or at least the microprocessors had.
“If your little bots can’t cure a hangover they’re a waste of a billion dollars,” she told him, as she went about setting up the shots.
Bloodshot filed away the figure of a billion dollars, wondering if it was real. If so then he cost more than a Stealth Bomber to build. The figure was so large as to be abstract. That wasn’t good. With that amount invested RST were bound to feel that he owed them some kind of indentured servitude. Given his skillset he had to wonder what they would want him to do to repay such an investment. He guessed it wasn’t drinking copious amounts of alcohol, so he decided he was going to give that a try.
KT set up two lines of six shots in front of each of them. The ones she poured for him were a taster of six different types of liquor. Hers were all mezcal.
“Arriba,” she raised the hand holding the glass. “Abajo,” she lowered the hand. “Al centro. ¡Y pa’ dentro!” and she knocked the shot back, downing it in one gulp, before flipping the glass and trapping a wedge of lime with all the dexterity of an experienced bartender. It was clear she’d done this before.
“Okay. You’ve got my attention,” Bloodshot told her. He couldn’t quite make up his mind if she was flirting with him or not. He felt comfortable, easy with her, but at the back of his mind he couldn’t shake the suspicion that she was part of the sales pitch, which would disappoint him. She didn’t seem that kind of person, however. From internet research alone he suspected that wasn’t the kind of operator that the US Navy’s Rescue Swimmer program bred. If she was flirting with him then he wondered what it would be like with his seeming total awareness of the workings of his body.
KT lazily slid one of the shots toward him and picked up her second shot of mezcal, raising her glass.
“To finding out what you truly love,” she said.
He smiled at her. It felt oddly like there was something between them. She was attractive, as he understood it anyway, there was no denying that, and go
od company away from Harting and the others. It wasn’t that she was bad company when she was around the rest of Chainsaw, just quieter.
They both knocked back their drinks. The liquor was somehow sickly sweet and harsh at the same time. It burned going down. Bloodshot found himself scowling. He had not enjoyed the experience.
“Okay, not a whiskey man,” KT mused and slid a shot glass of clear liquid that he assumed was vodka toward him. The action was so casual, natural, almost familiar. Thoughts of flirting left him. It was so strange but it felt like there was a deeper connection here, somehow.
“KT, this might sound weird, because we’ve only just met.” He was feeling awkward as he said it. Loss of memory or not, this was the first time he hadn’t felt confident in himself. It didn’t make sense, why was relating to someone else so difficult? he found himself wondering. “But for some reason I feel at home with you.”
KT was looking up him, clearly unsure how to respond. He suspected he had a similar expression on his face.
The music changed.
The billions of tiny microprocessors crawling through his flesh made him aware of the title of the new track: “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads.
The sky burned gold right down to the horizon where it met the liquid metal of the sea. It was beautiful but he only had eyes for the woman in the driver’s seat of the convertible, her hair blowing in the wind as they raced along the coastal highway.
The flash of memory was like a white-hot knife stabbed into his head. Bloodshot cried out, doubling over. KT was already reaching for him.
Another memory. Somewhere else now, cold, he could smell the meat, the blood of slaughtered animals.
“Ray...” the woman said through tears, fear etched into her beautiful face. Her name on the cusp of a storm of memory.
In the break room Bloodshot looked up. Starting to remember. Not wanting to remember.
The wedding band on her ring finger, titanium, the strongest metal, bordering gold. A match for the band on his own ring finger as he thrashed against the restraints securing him to the chair, his knuckles whitening.
Bloodshot was staring at his own left hand. There was no trace of the ring. Not even a white mark on the skin, as though the relationship, the bond the ring symbolised, had been erased, written out of history with the rest of his memories, his identity.
Someone leaning in over him, the light behind them. A garish shirt, the kind only a tourist would wear, a man’s face, not unattractive except for the leer.
“Name’s Martin Axe,” the leering man told him. An Australian accent. Bloodsh—no, Garrison, he now remembered. He knew who he was, who he had been. What the Australian had done. He was overwhelmed with fear of, and hatred for, this man.
Then a barrage of images, including the obscene detail of a shining stainless-steel bolt gun as it was pressed to the woman’s... Gina, the woman he loved, his wife’s head! The release of compressed air. The jerk of the pneumatic cord on the filthy, blood-stained concrete. The metal bolt shooting forward to violate her delicate skull.
Axe’s leering, backlit face, filling his vision, a nightmare, his own personal demon.
“YOU ARE NOTHING! I PROMISE YOU—!”
Bloodshot ground his teeth together like an industrial press. His heart was performing a drum solo within the cage of his ribs despite the best efforts of the nanites.
“I-will-find-you-and-end-you—” he said with barely controlled rage. He was only vaguely aware that KT had rushed to the intercom.
“Get Medical in here now!” Then she grabbed him and was helping him to a chair.
“You better kill me now—” he told her but he wasn’t in the break room with her anymore. He was in a meat locker, the slaughterhouse. It was where he lived now.
“Easy now. It’s me. You’re okay...” KT told him but he was hearing her as though from very far away. At some level he understood the words she said but he could divine no real meaning in them. Gina was dead. Nothing else mattered.
Axe was in shadow now. The barrel of a .45 filled Garrison’s view. Axe’s finger squeezing the trigger like a lover’s caress.
“Thanks for the advice.”
Bloodshot felt the hammer blow of the gunshot, center mass. Felt the heat of the bullet. Its painfully slow passage through his chest as he was flung back into the bar, breaking it. The bullet had impacted right in the center of the hot red circular scar on his chest.
“Hey. Listen to me. Listen,” KT was practically pleading with him.
His head snapped round to stare at her.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to... I...”
How could he have even been thinking about KT like that, when Gina was dead? Murdered.
“Whatever it is, you don’t have to do this. You have a choice,” she told him.
“You don’t understand,” he told her. There was no choice. Someone had to pay.
“I do. More than you know.” It was as though KT was trying to communicate something else to him, something she couldn’t say. It just reminded him of Gina’s last words. His name. The look in her eyes as she tried to convey something more before...
“No. You don’t, KT. I wasn’t forgotten.” He looked her straight in the eyes. Trying to suppress the guilt of the moment they had almost had. “I know why I’m alone.”
He pushed past her, feeling her eyes on him as he walked out of the break room.
CHAPTER 13
Bloodshot strode through the dimly lit parking garage beneath the tower that contained the RST facility. The air was humid, sticky. This felt familiar, somehow. It wasn’t the sterile filtered laboratory air he’d been breathing since he’d woken from death.
He passed a number of expensive European sports cars and a family minivan that looked in desperate need of a clean.
He stopped when he saw the Mustang. Four hundred and eighty brake horsepower of American muscle. Four hundred and twenty pounds of torque, and a maximum speed of a hundred and sixty-three miles per hour. He knew all this for the same reason that he knew where to find Axe. His physical power notwithstanding, it was the information provided by the microprocessors, their ability to go almost anywhere in the net, find out anything, that was truly impressive. Every Tier One operator knew that the scarce resource of solid, reliable, actionable intelligence was true power. It was the microprocessors that hacked the Mustang’s electronic locking and ignition sequence. Bloodshot climbed into the leather bucket seat as the car roared into life. At the back of his mind he knew that once upon a time driving such a fine automobile would have given him a great deal of pleasure. Now, however, he lived in the moment where the stainless-steel bolt met Gina’s head. Martin Axe’s leering face burned into his brain.
* * *
Harting was bathed in the blue glow from the multiple screens in the RST ops center watching Bloodshot drive through the bright neon Kuala Lumpur night on the central bank of monitors. The back wall of the ops center was glass, looking down on the microfactory/workspace area. The servers that provided the vast information storage and processing power requirements for the operation were behind glass in the refrigerated room next to the ops center. There were six tiers of workstations from behind which the techs monitored Bloodshot’s biometrics and energy levels, which were all currently in the green. The active nanite count in Bloodshot’s system showed somewhere in the region of three hundred billion.
Harting grabbed one of the nearby microphones.
“Open a channel,” he said. There was no reply. This irritated him, as he paid the best to, in theory anyway, recruit the best. He turned to look at the person in question: his head technician, Eric. He was a vision of bearded, bespectacled nerdiness in jeans, T-shirt and well-worn gray hoodie. Harting’s irritation deepened as he saw Eric playing a game on his phone, clearly not paying the slightest bit of attention.
Yet presumably he’d complain if I shot him in the groin, Harting thought. Everything about the tech annoyed him. I mean what sort of grown man has
action figures on top of his computer monitor? He chose to throw a pen at him instead. Eric jolted upright, his game forgotten.
“Shit. Sorry. Um...” he started. “You wanted me to...?” It was clear that he hadn’t even heard the instruction, let alone registered that it was meant for him.
“Open a goddamn channel!” Harting all but screamed. Some of the techs, who were of a more nervous disposition, flinched at the sound.
“Opening a channel. On it.”
Harting shook his head. Now he had to see about his seemingly most recalcitrant creation.
* * *
The futuristic city was a glow in the Mustang’s rear-view mirror now as Bloodshot drove the muscle car through the Malaysian countryside. He was making for a particular small but exclusive airstrip that his internal questing microprocessors had found for him.
He winced, gritting his teeth as a high-pitched whine filled his hearing.
“Pull over now.” He was hearing Harting’s voice in his mind. It was disconcerting to say the least.
“Doc? How—” Bloodshot started.
“You’ve got billions of wireless microprocessors in your brain. I need you to come back right now.” Harting’s voice was strangely toneless. It was clear that the doctor was used to being the master of all he surveyed but he spoke without overt authority, aggression, or even impatience, though perhaps a little irritation.
“No. I got unfinished business,” he told the doctor.
* * *
Harting looked up as Team Chainsaw walked into the ops center, looking toward him expectantly. He muted the mic.
“Get prepped,” he told Dalton and Tibbs. They nodded. Harting unmuted the mic. “We are your only business. We are the only people you know.”
“I had a wife. And he murdered her,” Bloodshot growled in reply.
Harting really was impressed with how clear the signal was.
Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization Page 6
