Bloodshot pulled the door closed.
“Thank you,” he told Wigans.
“Thank me?” Wigans said, beaming. “Are you kidding? Baris was an asshole. They’re all assholes. If you hadn’t come along I never would have left that basement. I saved you but really you saved me. I’m your Sandra Bullock. Or you’re mine. Except we’re both black. Are we both black? I’m definitely black. Either way, good luck and Godspeed, my friend.” It seemed the verbal diarrhea had returned.
Bloodshot started the Porsche, exchanged a smile with Wigans, dropped the antique car into gear and pushed down on the accelerator. The car leapt forward like it had been stung and Bloodshot wrestled it out of the garage and into the African dawn.
He couldn’t help noticing that the skin on the hands that gripped the steering wheel was gray now.
* * *
Wigans watched the Porsche scream out of the garage in a cloud of entirely unnecessary tire smoke. As he turned to make his way back toward his lab/nest the beam of his flashlight played across a pallet full of packages wrapped tightly in blue cellophane. At first he thought it was just more bricks of cocaine or some opiate destined for distribution throughout South Africa. The wrapped packages looked a little too regular, however, their corners a little too close to right angles for that.
Wigans found himself looking around despite being very conscious that he was in a mansion full of dead people, which, if he was honest, was freaking him out. Seeing nothing moving he produced a pocket tool and, moving over to the pallet, cut one of the cellophane bricks open. It was full of what he assumed was unlaundered money, pounds sterling.
“Oh.”
CHAPTER 31
One billion dollars. The sum kept on bouncing around Harting’s head. In many ways it was a paltry sum compared to what he had achieved with the Bloodshot program, and those to whom he answered were aware of this. That was a different consideration to Bloodshot falling into someone else’s hands, or even worse, going rogue. That they would not tolerate, as it would result in proliferation and they needed to be the only ones with this particular technological advantage for what lay ahead. The next arms race, after all, would be in human augmentation.
What was worse was that this had come at the end of the debacle with Baris, Axe and their network of lowlifes. Baris had proved useful in providing resources that would have been difficult to come by through normal channels. The black marketer had overstretched himself, however, when he had employed Russian mercenaries to steal from a Silicon Valley-based biotech company that was refusing to provide its proprietary tech to Harting no matter how much he offered for it. What should have been a subtle heist resulted in a gun battle with multiple fatalities and RST having to relocate to KL. Had Harting not sold it as a blessing in disguise, an opportunity to field test the Bloodshot platform, he almost certainly would have disappeared.
Looking around the ops center, he saw that Eric and the rest of the techs looked spent, exhausted, and for what? An EMP was an EMP. All their vaunted technological superiority was for naught if they couldn’t bring it to bear, because there were no working electronic systems in the target area that they could access. Ground zero of the EMP had effectively been forced back to the Stone Age in terms of technology. All they had was the satellites, and nothing was moving at the moment, and boots on the ground in the shape of the unimaginative but dogged Dalton and Tibbs. The rest was just busy work.
Harting was sipping his third coffee of the night. Each one had tasted progressively more unpleasant. He was aware of Eric straightening up at his workstation, studying the screen that showed the feed from an NSA spy satellite.
“We’ve got movement,” Eric announced.
Harting moved closer to Eric’s workstation as the tech zoomed in on the image, a pair of headlights in an otherwise dark landscape. The doctor noticed that KT was paying close attention to the image as well.
“Is that him?” Harting asked.
“Has to be,” Eric suggested. There was more than a little bit of desperation in his voice. It didn’t have to be Bloodshot at all. It could have been anybody. Still, Harting felt that same desperation. There would be no coming back from this if he had lost the Bloodshot platform. After all, there were other geniuses waiting in the wings. They would not be of his caliber but they would be able to build on the work that he had already done. Meanwhile his own retirement plan would come in the shape of a suppressed 9mm bullet to the back of his head. He was aware of it having happened before.
“Hail him,” Harting told the tech.
Eric keyed in a sequence. Nothing happened. He tried again.
“We have no connection, the network’s not responding,” Eric said. He sounded utterly despondent.
Harting was aware of KT watching him as he grabbed the microphone.
This is not good, he thought, not good at all.
* * *
Tibbs was soaking in the warm Cape Town early morning sun on the airstrip’s asphalt. Dalton was next to him. Both of them were in full tac gear. They were leaning against the cab of the armored truck that had been purpose-built by RST for dealing with threats from bleeding-edge weapon systems. At least that was what they had been told it was for, but Tibbs had to smile at this. He had long known that the truck was designed to capture and contain rogue RST projects that had gone off reservation.
Tibbs had said nothing about Project Bloodshot. It wasn’t a soldier’s job to interfere with policy. He knew that RST was a private concern but they were inexorably linked to the US government and he felt that at some level he was still serving his country. He was thankful for the second chance. Few soldiers got one. That said, he’d watched the contortions Harting and RST had to go through to get Bloodshot to do their bidding. He didn’t really understand what the problem was. Why was Bloodshot such a snowflake that he had to be tricked into working for a living? He understood that the tech needed to be tested but had there been nobody more prepared to serve, to understand the boon of a second chance? He could think of a dozen brothers more deserving of that opportunity than whoever Bloodshot had been. Besides, if RST really wanted people like Axe and Baris dead, why not just put him and a railgun anywhere within a two-mile radius of them. Failing that, Tibbs thought, get him within a few feet with a blade and he could have done them up close and personal.
“Dalton. Tibbs. Our dog is off the leash,” Harting said over comms.
Tibbs turned to Dalton. The ex-SEAL had a big shit-eating grin on his face as he climbed up into the cab of the truck, firing it up. Tibbs was of the opinion that Dalton was a competent enough operator but he liked the action too much, or rather relished the hurt he dished out. It made Tibbs nervous, or as nervous as he got. He’d known guys like Dalton. They either burned out or became irredeemable monsters.
Tibbs climbed up after Dalton into the armored truck’s passenger seat.
“Remember, he’s one of us,” the sniper told the ex-SEAL. His misgiving about Bloodshot’s preciousness aside, he had been a brother soldier once. Though he was starting to suspect that Bloodshot had been a marine, which would go some way toward explaining why he was so difficult.
“Was. Now he’s a problem.” Except that judging by the smile on Dalton’s face, he was relishing the problem. “Cheer up. Finally get to use this shit.” He gestured back into the truck’s cargo area: rack after rack of next-generation combat gear, blades, body armor, drones, small arms and not so small arms. There were enough sophisticated weapons in the back of the truck to knock over a small country. Secured in the center of the cargo area, covered by a tarp, was The Wraith.
CHAPTER 32
The Porsche raced out of the darkness and onto a well-lit road as Bloodshot sped toward Cape Town. He could see the flat top of Table Mountain rising out of the city in the distance.
Guessing that working streetlights meant that he was beyond the range of the EMP, Bloodshot tried the phone that Wigans had given him. The phone blinked into life. Driving one-handed, Bloodshot
navigated through the phone’s menu to a search screen and typed in: Gina Garrison. A number of different options appeared. Then he saw her. His hand shook as he pressed on the thumbnail and then suddenly her image filled the phone’s screen.
The relief, the joy that she wasn’t dead was almost primal. He wanted to cry out. Gina was alive!
* * *
Bloodshot had a plan now. He knew exactly where he was going, what he was going to do next, as he steered the antique Porsche through the rain-soaked, densely packed warren of houses that was one of Cape Town’s Eastern Suburbs. He had found a private airstrip. It wasn’t going to be too difficult to slip a fake flight plan into the air traffic control system.
I get to see Gina! he thought as the Porsche splashed through a puddle to pull up at a stoplight. He found himself smiling, hunched over the steering wheel in the tiny sports car.
Someone crossed in front of the Porsche on the rain-slick street. Just for a moment Bloodshot imagined it was Gina, but then she was gone.
The stoplight shifted from red to green. Bloodshot pressed down on the accelerator and the car moved out into the junction. He had just a moment to register something large, white and armored in his peripheral vision, before he felt an impact that would have broken the spine of an unaugmented human. He heard the shriek of tortured metal and then the car was in the air, tumbling and bouncing.
* * *
Dalton watched the wreckage of the antique Porsche tumble across the intersection from the driver’s seat of the armored truck. He glanced at Tibbs and then climbed down from the cab and strode through the puddles toward the wreck. The crumpled Porsche was on its roof. Dalton crouched down to check the interior. Bloodshot was gone.
“He’s not there?” Tibbs asked over the tac radio.
Dalton straightened up, looking around, before finally turning to face Tibbs, who was still in the cab of the truck.
“Goddamn! Those little bugs fix him fast,” he told Tibbs.
“He’s getting better at it,” the sniper replied over comms.
Dalton tugged the bulky, intimidating electronic shotgun from his back. It looked like a futuristic oversized assault rifle. With an electronic whirr followed by a click he chambered an anti-nanite round. He was going hunting.
“We’ll see about that,” Dalton replied. “Get your eyes in the sky.”
* * *
Tibbs ducked from the cab into the cargo bed in the rear of the truck. He took an angular, black smart helmet from a shelf, pulling it on over his head and strapping it in place. He grabbed a large-barreled cannon-like weapon from one of the racks and then tore the tarpaulin from The Wraith. The motorbike looked like someone had taken an F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter and redesigned it to travel on two wheels. Angled polycarbonate panels that were embedded with tiny cameras protected the rider. The cameras fed to the smart helmet’s sophisticated optics, which in turn wirelessly linked to Tibbs’s own cybernetic optical implants.
Tibbs straddled the bike as the armored truck’s rear door opened. He gunned The Wraith and the bike leapt out of the back of the truck like a wild horse. Tibbs yanked on the brakes hard, skidding the bike round as he brought it to a stop. This was what he lived for, the thrill of the chase. With a smooth motion Tibbs unclipped the cannon. With its drum magazine the weapon looked like an oversized tommy gun of the type a gangster would have used in Al Capone’s Chicago. He fired the weapon six times, in quick succession. The cylindrical projectiles arced into the air like grenades from a launcher. For a moment it looked as though they had exploded as the cylindrical shells fell away, rotor blades spun up and the Soul Seeker surveillance drones were revealed. If this was a hunt then the drones were the hounds.
“Goddammit, Tibbs. Where’s my rabbit?” Dalton demanded over comms.
The helmet fed a dizzying array of aerial perspectives from the drones through to Tibbs’s optics. Then the images merged to form a spherical, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree composite of the surrounding area. Tibbs spotted Bloodshot easily. He was the only human running at close to thirty miles an hour, or he would be until Dalton got started, anyway.
“On the run. Ten blocks west,” Tibbs told the ex-SEAL.
Over by the wrecked Porsche, Dalton exploded into a full sprint. Disappearing into the west, going deeper into the city at a frightening speed, this was literally what he had been (re)built for.
CHAPTER 33
Bloodshot’s lungs burned as he sprinted down the street, vehicles and buildings passing in a blur, his mind racing as fast as his legs. He’d seen the high-tech armored truck. It had to have come from RST. That meant Dalton and Tibbs were hunting him. He wondered if KT was with them as well, as he leapt across an adjoining road over the hood of a rapidly braking car. A gunshot, the sound meaty like a shotgun, and something hit the brickwork next to him. He caught the flash of a red LCD glow spelling out the letters “ERROR” along the length of the projectile that had just missed him.
Bloodshot peeled out across the road and into traffic. Tires squealed as drivers braked to avoid him, he heard the impact of cars sliding into other cars. He hurdled another vehicle. Something hit him hard in the shoulder, spinning him round, and then he was stumbling at over thirty miles per hour.
Bloodshot hit the front door of a roadside house, hard, smashing through it, destroying internal walls in explosions of plaster as he tumbled through them, bouncing hard enough to hit the ceiling before rolling to a halt.
His body screamed at him in pain. The nanites rushed to fix contusions and fractures as he pushed himself up through the dust and onto his knees. He could feel something lodged, painfully, in the flesh of his shoulder. Saw the red glow coming from the projectile. He groped around for it. His fingers found something the size of solid slug from a twelve-gauge lodged in his shoulder. Then he watched, appalled, as his arm turned pale, veins blackening, muscles and skin shriveling as the limb withered in front of his eyes. He cried out in pain and yanked the shotgun slug from his shoulder. The LCD screen on the projectile was counting down. Three. Two. Bloodshot crushed the slug before it reached “one.” He gritted his teeth as nanites rushed to painfully rebuild his arm.
* * *
Tibbs roared through the city on The Wraith. His full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision made him feel omniscient. The ultimate voyeur. Like God.
“Tell me you’ve still got eyes on him,” Dalton asked over comms.
Tibbs checked the footage from the Soul Seeker drone closest to their target. He traced the path of suburban destruction from Bloodshot’s wipe-out.
“He’s in the building, about to exit left,” Tibbs told the ex-SEAL.
Except Tibbs hadn’t expected Bloodshot to exit through the stucco wall. The cyborg killing-machine timed it perfectly. Tibbs got to see it from all angles as Bloodshot slammed into him like a freight train. The impact knocked all the air out of the sniper, as Bloodshot’s shoulder checked the bike so hard that it spun into a wall, and then Tibbs couldn’t see anything at all.
* * *
Bloodshot ran. Dalton was on him now. The ex-SEAL had practically run over his unconscious partner lying under the wreckage of the mangled bike. As fast as Bloodshot could run, Dalton’s prosthetic legs meant that the ex-SEAL was closing the distance. Bloodshot pushed harder, pumping his arms and legs as fast as he could despite the whispered warnings in his mind from his already taxed nanites. He was reaching the edge of what human flesh, despite the technological wonders contained within, could tolerate. This was less an issue for Dalton. His legs were made of steel and composites.
Bloodshot saw the corner. Saw the police cruiser pickup truck parked there. He tried to swerve around it but human bodies just weren’t meant to turn at that speed. Bloodshot lost it and hit the police pickup hard enough to crumple the door panel, smash the side windows and make it jump on its suspension. His nanites reacted as fast as they could, reinforcing the impact areas in his body to prevent his bones from snapping.
The look of shock
on the two police officers in the car, covered in their own coffee, was quickly turning to anger.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” one of them shouted at him in Afrikaans, the nanites translating instantly.
Bloodshot reached in through the broken window and pushed the officer’s head down. The man tried to resist but Bloodshot had been a strong man when he’d been Garrison, before they’d pumped all the tech into him. He yanked one of the R5 carbines out of the gun rack between the two front seats.
“Borrowing this,” he told the police officers in Afrikaans.
The closest officer scrambled to grab him, the other officer reaching for his sidearm. Bloodshot kicked the pickup with enough power to send it spinning out into the road he’d just run down. He walked out after it, keeping pace with the car, using it as cover as he rapidly fired burst after burst from the R5 at the pursuing Dalton. The automatic gunfire echoed down the streets as people scurried for cover. The ex-SEAL dived behind a parked car, the bullets puncturing the bodywork, smashing windows and deflating tires. The last shell casing from the thirty-round magazine hit the ground and the hammer clicked down on an empty chamber. The two terrified police officers were just staring at Bloodshot. He nodded his thanks and gave them back their carbine. Then he was running again. Frustrated. He was sure he’d tagged Dalton but he suspected that his pursuers were wearing some next-generation RST body armor. Also the man was as fast, if not faster, than Bloodshot was himself.
* * *
Dalton emerged from behind the bullet-ridden car.
“He’s in the hotel stairwell.” Tibbs still sounded groggy from his meeting with the wall but at least he was up and contributing again.
Dalton slung his electronic shotgun and sprinted toward the police cruiser now blocking the middle of the road. He caught a glimpse of the two shock-paralyzed police officers sat in the vehicle as he leapt into the air. One prosthetic foot touched down on the roof of the police pickup, denting it and smashing the windscreen.
Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization Page 14
