* * *
Baris was shaking the EMP’s remote as he heard the two mercenaries outside the door die. The progress bar showed eighty-five percent.
“C’mon... C’mon...” he willed it to go faster even as he took a pistol from a desk drawer and checked there was a round in the chamber.
* * *
Bloodshot kicked the double doors in, taking one of them off its hinges. He saw Baris, the man who’d haunted his dreams. The man who’d killed Gina, sitting behind a heavy desk.
“You murdered my wife,” Bloodshot told his nemesis.
Baris fired. Bloodshot barely even felt the bullet.
“Shot her in the head,” Bloodshot continued. His body burned hot as the nanites sought to heal all the damage he’d taken.
Baris fired again, hitting Bloodshot center mass to no determinable effect. The progress bar on the remote was at eighty-six percent.
“I never met you or your wife,” Baris cried.
It was the blatant lie that made Bloodshot lose it, or rather to make the rage he felt externalize.
“I was there! I saw you!” He reached the heavy desk that his nemesis was hiding behind and kicked it, bouncing it off the wall, pinning Baris. The gun clattered to the table, as did whatever the remote device was.
“You were casual about it. Like she didn’t matter at all,” he told Baris as he stalked closer. He picked up the pistol on the table, examining it. He was faintly disappointed that it wasn’t the .45 the other man had used to execute him back when he was Ray Garrison. The weapon he’d gotten to know intimately in his dreams as he’d stared down its barrel.
“She mattered to me,” he said quietly and then looked up at Baris. The other man was terrified. That was good. There was something else there as well. Confusion. Bloodshot was peripherally aware that the remote device was now showing a full energy bar, the figure of a hundred percent flashing on its display.
“It’s all bullshit. They’re lying to you. I can help you. You need help!” Baris was begging now. Too late Bloodshot realised that Baris had managed to reach the remote. He pressed the button on the device. Nothing happened. He looked up. It was in his eyes. The tech crime lord knew he was about to die.
“Thanks for the advice,” Bloodshot said. He leveled the gun at Baris and squeezed the trigger. The body hit the table. Bloodshot turned and made for the door. The lights went out. There was just a moment when he felt his legs go from underneath him.
Then everything went black.
He didn’t even have time to hope it was death come for him now his job was done.
CHAPTER 28
Harting found himself staring at blank screens. The CCTV, Baris’s laptop camera, even the feed from Bloodshot’s nanites, they had all gone down, as had all comms.
“Shit...” Harting whispered.
Pandemonium broke out in the ops center as Eric and his crew of techies desperately tried to re-establish visual contact with anything or anyone...
“Where’s Bloodshot?” KT asked.
“Give me something... an image...” Harting demanded. He was working his own terminal, moving through secondary and tertiary comms systems for the Bloodshot platform. All were dead, his multiple redundancies apparently redundant.
“Switching to satellite...” Eric called.
“I got black!” Harting snapped. Then he took a moment to study the satellite image. The satellite was working, showing a live feed of the Hawequa Mountains.
“Shit. Not a light on for miles,” Eric said, staring at the screen.
Harting was staring as well. Of course it was the EMP. The reality was sinking in now. Bloodshot burning out was one thing. Another player taking possession of his tech... that was something completely different.
CHAPTER 29
In Baris’s office Bloodshot’s eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed to the floor. His skin turned cadaver gray.
* * *
Under the bone shelter of his skull a civilization of microscopic insectile robots flickered on and off as they tried to reboot. Slowly the flickering became less and less frequent, as one by one they gave up the ghost and became still.
* * *
In the waiting darkness, a tender whisper: “Husband, wake up.”
* * *
He can feel the sheet against his skin. The bright early morning sun is streaming through the thin cotton to light up his beautiful wife’s face. Heaven, or as near as he can get. Gina is an angel with bedhead.
* * *
Then God hits fast forward. He wants to scream “No!” He’s good here, he could stay here, there’s no need for anything else. Instead:
Wind on his skin as the Mustang convertible speeds down the coastal highway, the sun sinking into a liquid gold ocean. This is good, he can stay here but...
He’s in bed with his wife, holding her tight, sweat beading their entwined bodies. Here, here, he can stay here...
Baris holds the bolt gun to Gina’s head, taunting him.
Garrison tells her it’s going to be okay.
He lies.
Baris tells the truth: “Bad news, baby. It’s not gonna be okay.”
Then Martin Axe tells her the truth: “Bad news, baby. It’s not gonna’ be okay.”
Then an older Chinese man tells her the truth: “Bad news, baby. It’s not gonna be okay.”
A young man with a goatee and glasses: “Bad news, baby. It’s not gonna be okay.”
Faster and faster to a soundtrack of “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads. Except the song sounds hollow somehow, as though he’s hearing it underwater.
A chorus of men’s voices: “Thanks for the advice.”
Then a gunshot.
CHAPTER 30
Bloodshot’s eyes fluttered open. He felt like crap. Groggy, weak, drained like a battery. He tried to move but it was clear that he had been restrained. Just for a moment he wondered if he was in the resurrection room but it smelled wrong, there was no sterile antiseptic smell, instead there was only the scent of dust and old wine.
He heard metal sparking on metal. He could feel the bare bed-frame he was strapped to pressing uncomfortably against his back. There was a bearded man standing over him. Everything about the man screamed “tech geek,” from his woolly bobble hat to his ridiculous trousers. The geek was holding a positive jumper cable. The other, negative jumper cable was clipped to the metal frame of the bed. The geek moved to touch the positive jumper cable to the bed. Bloodshot opened his mouth to tell him to stop but he was too late.
Electricity surged through his body, forcing his muscles to contract, arcing his spine away from the live metal. He twisted, trying to escape the electricity, the pain, trying to break free. He could barely breathe.
“Good. You’re awake,” the geek said.
Bloodshot just screamed at him. He was pretty sure he could taste blood.
“Shhh, it’s okay. I’m saving you.”
The geek electrocuted him again. Bloodshot spasmed hard enough to shift the bed but he felt something move inside him, an insect itch in his ribcage, where his heart lay, and then...
* * *
...he was tied to a chair. A balding Chinese man was pointing a .45 at him, finger curled round the trigger, already squeezing.
“Thanks—”
* * *
Agony as electricity burned through him.
“You still with me?” the geek asked.
Bloodshot tried to count the ways he was going to hurt this man.
The geek shocked him again. He felt his chest burn and assumed it was a heart attack but there was a red light coming from the scar there.
* * *
The slaughterhouse again. A blond man. Eyes the same gunmetal blue as the .45 he was pointing at Bloodshot.
“Thanks,” German accent, “for the—”
* * *
Back on the bed. The-soon-to-be-in-a-great-deal-of-pain geek peering down at him. Bloodshot strained at his restraints, fighting to get free so he could
snap something.
“Hello? Rise and shine!” The geek had a British accent.
Bloodshot just glared at the man.
“Maybe a higher voltage?”
And Bloodshot began screaming again.
* * *
A young man with glasses and a goatee. He looked barely old enough to be pointing the .45 at Bloodshot.
“Thanks for the advice—”
A gunshot and everything goes black.
* * *
With a shout Bloodshot broke free of the bed, snapping the chain on the restraining cuff and tumbling to the cold, hard stone floor.
“It worked!” the British geek cried.
“Yeah... the first time, asshole,” Bloodshot spat, rubbing his wrist. He had to suppress the urge to pick the man up by his neck and shake him. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m sorry, how rude of me,” he extended a hand that Bloodshot pointedly ignored. This didn’t seem to bother the geek, however. “Wilfred Wigans. Bit of a superhero-type name and I suppose my superpower is coding. Not the most exciting of superpowers. Baris found it useful though. Sadly.”
Bloodshot ran through the flood of words he’d just heard as he struggled to get his bearings.
“You... you work for Baris?” he managed. Looking around he seemed to be in some kind of jury-rigged laboratory, though it looked less like a workspace and more like a technological nest. He suspected it looked like what RST would have looked like if their equipment had been purchased from Radio Shack and garage sales.
“Well, no. Yes. Define work for?” Wigans asked. Bloodshot was giving renewed thought to punching him. “My situation’s more like indentured servitude. Don’t do drugs, kids, they say. But did I listen? No.” Bloodshot didn’t particularly want to listen either but that didn’t seem to deter Wigans: “Adderall. Uppers. Those aren’t really drug drugs, just something to keep me awake so I can code. Except they are real drugs, I’m afraid. Next thing you know I owed Baris many, many thousands of dollars.” Bloodshot wondered if there was an end to all this. “I’ve been looking for a way out and then you came along like a knight in shining armor.” It seemed there wasn’t. “Except you don’t really wear armor, do you? You sorta just let yourself get shot. A lot. Have you thought about wearing any?” Bloodshot was wondering if Wigans had an off switch. “That was tough to watch, actually. Rough stuff. Particularly the part where they shot you in the head and your brains spilled out and formed a little puddle on the floor.” Bloodshot supposed he could always just knock Wigans out. “You’re exceptionally good at not dying, by the way.”
“I felt like I died,” Bloodshot managed in the brief calm during the storm of verbiage.
“Yes, sorry ’bout that. Baris had me build that little device. It’s an EMP. I build things, too. I’m kinda handy that way. Not in the way I imagine you’re handy. Right... anyway, Baris wanted me to take you out but... well...” Wigans pointed at his monitor screens, all of them dead, and then waved a remote that was a duplicate of the one that Baris had. “I wouldn’t let him until you did your business. Which you certainly did.”
Bloodshot felt like shit. He was struggling to follow Wigans’s verbal diarrhea but it sounded like Wigans had made it possible for him to kill Baris and then triggered the EMP to take him down. The world was starting to spin; despite the electric shocks, or perhaps because of them, he was still feeling weak as a kitten.
“You alright?” Wigans asked him.
“I saw my wife again,” Bloodshot told him. He wasn’t sure why he told him, except Wigans didn’t seem to want to cause him any pain or suffering, at this particular moment in time anyway. “Like a dream.”
“Oh good,” Wigans offered, smiling encouragingly.
“I saw her murdered in front of me.”
Wigans’s smile disappeared from his face.
“No that’s not good at all, is it?”
“But it’s a different person, every time.” Bloodshot wasn’t even sure he was really talking to Wigans so much as working his near-death dream through in his head.
“So that’s how they did it!” Wigans sounded triumphant, as though he’d experienced a significant revelation. He got Bloodshot’s attention.
“Did what?” Bloodshot asked.
Wigans looked reluctant to say anything. Bloodshot was sure that he wasn’t going to like what the geek had to say.
“Tell me,” he demanded.
Wigans sat down heavily on an office chair. For the first time Bloodshot realized just how weary the tech geek looked. He wondered how long the coder had been living on bad coffee, cheap drugs and his nerves.
“There’ve been stories. Ghost stories. A hired killer. Wiping out defectors of RST. But each time it’s like a vendetta. Like it’s really, really personal,” Wigans told him.
Bloodshot stared at him. Now it was starting to make sense.
“How many have I killed?” he asked.
“At least six,” Wigans told him.
Six targets... no, victims, people he had murdered. Add to that their small armies of bodyguards and mercenaries, and, if his adventures in Baris’s mansion were anything to go by, he suspected that the body count started to look like that of a small war. Baris’s last words: he’d been telling the truth.
Bloodshot stood up and started to pace. He felt like a caged animal. He could practically smell the blood. His jaw clenched as he tried to think through the implications. He felt Wigans’s eyes on him.
“Harting, he used me,” Bloodshot managed through gritted teeth.
“Yes,” Wigans told him simply.
“Lied to me. To my face. Over and over.” Bloodshot was just stoking his own fire. Because if Harting had lied to him then that meant Chainsaw had lied to him as well. Tibbs and Dalton made sense. Tibbs was loyal, and Dalton was an asshole, but KT? In many ways that betrayal felt like the worst.
“Yes. Repeatedly,” Wigans confirmed. “He seems remarkably convincing.”
“Told me my wife was...” Then it hit him. He stopped pacing. “Gina... I never looked for her because I saw her die. What if...? I have to know if she’s out there.”
Wigans stood up and stepped in front of him, his arms held up.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa... not yet. I brought you back, you owe me,” Wigans said.
It appeared the tech geek had found some hidden reserve of bravery. Or perhaps just didn’t realize how much danger he was in.
“Owe you what?” Bloodshot demanded.
“Maybe,” Wigans said as though thinking, “a sample of your blood...”
It only took a moment’s consideration. Bloodshot snatched a knife off a nearby workbench and stabbed himself in the palm of his hand. It happened so quickly that it made Wigans jump. Grimacing slightly, though he barely felt the pain, Bloodshot wiggled the knife in the wound and then held his clenched fist over an empty beaker. With a thought he ordered the nanites not to fix the wound immediately. He didn’t so much bleed the crimson and mercury fluid as extrude it.
“That enough?” Bloodshot asked.
“I mean... Yes?” Wigans’s eyes had lit up with a techjoy nerdgasm, staring at the wound in the gray flesh of Bloodshot’s hand as it sealed itself up. Finally Wigans picked up the beaker almost reverently, looking at the metallic blood inside in awe.
“Amazing. I had heard the stories. Your whole system is programmable...” He was more talking at Bloodshot than to him.
“Apparently,” Bloodshot said. Then something else occurred to him. “It’s how they control me...”
Wigans looked away from the beaker of nanite-infused blood to Bloodshot himself.
“No,” he said simply. “That’s what they want you to think. Don’t you get it? You’ve got an army inside you. Your army. You control them. If you want my advice: get creative.”
Bloodshot let this sink in. He wasn’t really sure what to make of Wigans. He seemed an odd little man who wasn’t really on anybody’s side but loved the tech for the sake of it. Briefly he
wondered just how bad an idea it was to give him a blood sample, but Bloodshot decided he had more pressing concerns. He turned and made for the door of the wine bottling room-cum-ad hoc lab.
“Hold on,” Wigans called. “I have something for you.” He scurried over to a huge and ancient-looking lead-lined fridge and opened it. It was full of all sorts of tech that the lead and the Faraday Cage qualities of the metal fridge had protected from the EMP. Wigans pulled out a cell phone. Bloodshot, however, was already at the door.
* * *
Baris’s underground garage was clearly the old wine estate’s warehouse. Between the concrete pillars were racks full of wine, various contraband, including stolen art, stacked crates of the ubiquitous drugs and guns, and even a gold horse. There was also a row of expensive and mostly European sports cars: Lamborghinis, Maseratis, an old Porsche and even an aging, British, six-wheeled Saracen armored personnel carrier. Bloodshot stopped by the Lamborghini, a small smile playing across his face.
He heard someone hurrying after him and turned to see Wigans, bearing a flashlight because, unlike Bloodshot, he couldn’t see in the dark, trying to catch up.
“Could I interest you in something with a little more vintage, and possibly no electronic parts?” a breathless Wigans asked.
Of course, the EMP would have junked all the electronics in the modern vehicles.
Wigans pointed at the old, and very small, Porsche.
Bloodshot sighed.
Wigans tried to hand him the phone after Bloodshot had managed to squeeze into the tiny antique Porsche.
“You can use this when you’re clear.”
“Don’t need it,” Bloodshot told him. “The nanites will connect me to the web.”
But Wigans was already shaking his head.
“No, the nanites will connect you to an RST server. They can track you. Fill your head with bullshit. You don’t want that.”
Bloodshot looked up at the tech geek from the cramped confines of the Porsche’s driver seat.
“How do you know so much about these guys?”
The geek’s nervous good humor seemed to disappear.
“What I know would terrify you,” he said, suddenly sounding very earnest. Wigans looked down at Bloodshot as though reconsidering his words. “On second thought, I don’t imagine there’s much that genuinely terrifies you.”
Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization Page 13
