Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization

by Gavin G. Smith

  Dalton could understand their awe, he decided, as he reached the alleyway between the hotel and the office block next to it. They must have looked like gods of war to the two police officers.

  The powerful servos in Dalton’s legs propelled him into the air. His prosthetic feet twisted to an angle impossible in nature and extended raptor-like talons to provide extra grip as Dalton bounced between the two buildings, using parkour to ascend the outside of the hotel.

  * * *

  Bloodshot burst out onto the roof of the hotel. Tactically speaking it wasn’t the greatest of ideas but if he could get a moment’s respite, assess the situation from above and work out how they were tracking him, then maybe he could get clear of Chainsaw. Though he would have no problem killing Dalton if the opportunity arose.

  He could see the city spreading out beneath him toward the bright blue of the ocean in the east. He started to turn, to check the roof. Too late he realized that he wasn’t alone.

  “Surprise!” Dalton fired the shotgun at almost point-blank range. Bloodshot saw the tongue of flame from the muzzle flash. Heard the shotgun’s roar echo out over the city.

  It felt like his chest had exploded, literally, as though his insides had burst through his skin, as a writhing civilization of millions of microscopic machine insects poured out through his pores. The nanites rapidly formed geometric structures that branched out into the flames of the shotgun’s muzzle blast. They attached themselves to the electromagnetically propelled shotgun slug and disassembled it in flight. It was only the constituent parts of the projectile that hit the nanite-hardened skin of Bloodshot’s chest and bounced off onto the concrete roof of the hotel.

  Just for a moment Dalton stared at his weapon, confused.

  A moment was all Bloodshot needed. His eyes burned red and he charged the ex-SEAL, tackling him low. Superhuman strength lifted Dalton off his feet and Bloodshot carried him over the edge of the roof, both of them plummeting toward the hot, hard concrete of the street eight stories below.

  The fall seemed to last forever. Bloodshot’s heightened senses meant that he was aware of Dalton hitting the street moments before him. The ex-SEAL landed feet first, his prosthetic legs shattering. He heard Dalton scream, saw him spit blood, and then the street rushed up to meet Bloodshot.

  Somehow he was still conscious. He had felt the sickening impact. Felt his body change shape as bones shattered and pierced organs, bursting through flesh, as he became a misshapen mass of suffering meat too badly damaged to even scream. The nanites burned bright and red under his skin, throughout his flesh, repairing him as fast as they could, reshaping his body back into a human shape, sucking his blood back in under his skin. The process was almost as painful as the impact and took longer.

  Then the pain was gone. He was whole again, moments after trying to turn himself into so much street pizza. Bloodshot rose, looking down at the agonized Dalton writhing around on the street. He almost pitied the fragile, petty little man.

  “That doesn’t look good.”

  Dalton looked up at Bloodshot standing over him.

  “You’re the freak,” he spat. Bloodshot couldn’t help but think that Dalton was trying to convince himself.

  He could hear wailing sirens getting closer, see their lights in the distance. He didn’t even spare Dalton another look as he started to run. Again.

  CHAPTER 34

  Harting punched his prosthetic fist through one of the ops center’s monitor screens, his face a twisted mask of fury. It was enough for KT. She marched toward the exit. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do next, only that she had to find Bloodshot.

  “Where are you going?” Harting demanded.

  KT knew it wasn’t his open-for-reasonable-discourse tone of voice. She stopped and turned to face him, very aware that the rest of the ops center techs were listening even as they tried not to draw attention to themselves.

  “We all know where he’s headed...” she said, trying to keep her tone neutral, unchallenging.

  “No chance,” Harting told her. “I want you on Wigans.”

  “Wigans!” She couldn’t care less about her tone now, it was a bullshit power play from Harting and he knew it. She was being put in her place.

  “I need him out of the picture,” Harting told her. “Clearly he knows too much.”

  “Then send one of the boys. I’m going after Garrison.” This wasn’t what she had signed up for. She was a rescue swimmer, not an assassin. She continued toward the door.

  It took her a moment to realize that the tapping noise was Harting keying in a sequence to the touch screen control panel built into his prosthetic arm. The vents on her implanted breathing apparatus slammed shut and locked. Suddenly all the oxygen had gone. She felt panic hit her like a bucket of ice water to the face. She turned to stare at Harting.

  “You need to remember that I don’t need to ask,” he told her. He sounded calm, matter-of-fact, but even as she felt herself suffocating, even as the implant’s punishment routine purged the residual oxygen in her system, she could hear the undercurrent of rage in Harting’s voice. He did not like to be defied and he had been defied a lot recently. “I ask out of mutual respect. But if you disregard that respect, then I will, too.”

  KT turned blue, scrabbled at one of the workstations trying to stay upright, but couldn’t stop herself from collapsing. Harting stood over her; she wasn’t sure if it was the lack of oxygen playing tricks with her perception or not but he looked maniacal, insane, malevolent. She was clawing at the vents on the implant. Harting tapped the control panel’s screen and air flooded back into her system. She gasped for breath at his feet as he smiled down at her, all benevolence now.

  “Good girl,” he said as he stepped over her prone form.

  KT sat up and watched him as he moved back to his own terminal. She didn’t feel much like a “good girl.” She had considered Harting a necessary evil. His potential for good, the progress that they were making here, the benefits outweighing the shit they had to put up with, even the occasional wetwork. Except since the mass defection, since the purge, it hadn’t been quite so occasional. Now she was starting to realize just how much she hated the god-complex control freak.

  * * *

  KT sat on her bed in the monastic cell that was her room. A cable ran from her tablet to the input port on her breathing apparatus. Sarah, who worked in the ops center, had provided KT with the program. It was something the tech had found on the Dark Web. KT didn’t know that much about such things but this was a “Crack-in-the-Box.” In theory all she had to do was launch the program and if it could it would beat the security on her breathing apparatus command protocols, the protocols that Harting had just used for her punishment suffocation. She tapped the icon to launch the program, letting it run. Hoping that this could free her, release her from Harting’s increasingly tyrannical control.

  “Access denied.”

  It wasn’t entirely surprising. RST’s security protocols had been handed down from on high by their lords and masters, the parent organization that controlled Harting, whoever they were. KT suspected they were on a par with next-generation NSA crypto. Perhaps someone like Eric, working on it full-time, could crack the command protocol security, but not some open source hacker tool from the Dark Web. It might not have been surprising but it didn’t stop the scream of rage tearing itself from her throat, or the tablet being smashed against the edge of her bedside table.

  The worst of it, KT decided, was that Harting probably already knew about the security breach. She felt her skin crawl at the possibility that he might be watching her through some voyeuristic concealed lens, smug in the knowledge that he had crushed just a little bit more of her will.

  KT forced herself to calm down, controlling her breathing using an exercise her therapist had taught her all those years ago in the group home. Under control she turned to look at the read-and-destroy target package for Wigans. It was a wild goose chase and Harting knew it. He was a shady guy inv
olved in a shady business, he was going to go to ground quickly, and he had the entire world in which to do so. If he was smart then he would have helped himself to a whole load of Baris’s money going out the door. KT had seen the stacks of cash and other barter-goods in the footage during Bloodshot’s assault.

  She picked up the target package and spun it between her fingers before opening it. KT looked at the picture of Wigans. An idea started to take shape.

  * * *

  KT was leaning against the corner of a corridor that led to the techs’ dorm area. She had been there a little while now. Harting had been working them hard in the wake of the mess that had been the attack on Baris’s compound. She knew that Harting would want them providing tech support for Chainsaw when they went after Bloodshot. That meant that even Harting would have to relent and let them have a little rest. This theory was borne out when a drawn and tired-looking Eric all but stumbled round the corner. He managed to stop himself just before he walked into her.

  “Hey, Eric,” she said.

  “What do you want?” he snapped. Eric seemed to have two approaches toward dealing with her. Either dickish overcompensation, particularly when he had an audience, or he was utterly intimidated by her and unable to look her in the eyes. KT wasn’t a fan of either approach and there didn’t seem to be any kind of middle ground. It appeared he was stuck in the latter mode at the moment. Still, he was tired.

  “I want to ask you about your slavish fanboy adoration for Wigans,” she told him.

  Eric just shook his head and tried to move past her but she blocked him with her arm, hand on the wall. He stopped and looked up at her, clearly annoyed.

  “You people really are all the same, aren’t you?” he said.

  It wasn’t quite what she was expecting.

  “What people?” she asked. Had he meant Latinas? Women? Ex-military personnel?

  “Just swan around like you own the place, intimidating people to get what you want,” he said nodding toward her arm blocking his way, “pushing them around to make yourself feel good at other people’s expense.”

  She crossed her arms.

  “That’s how you feel?” she asked. He nodded. “You get that I’m not Dalton, right?”

  “There’s a difference?” he asked. Ouch, she thought. It was very clear that this had been on his mind for some time. “You seem to think you’re the beautiful people, treating us like we’re peons, or something,” he continued.

  “Hard time at high school, Eric?” she asked. Her own experiences had been good training for combat. As far as she was concerned she might as well have gone to school in a war zone.

  Eric just glared at her.

  “That’s not how I feel about the techs,” she told him.

  “It’s how you act.”

  “I’ve got respect for you guys in ops, I appreciate expertise in any field,” she told him.

  “Bullshit,” he told her. This time he crossed his arms.

  She was starting to get annoyed now. Eric’s perspective was formed of so many assumptions she didn’t know where to begin.

  “I don’t look down on techies, maybe just sad little nerds who, judging by your contribution to Garrison’s revenge programming, are more than a little bit obsessed with their own micro-penis.”

  Eric stared at her for a moment or two, then, head down, walked around her and made for his dorm.

  Immediately after saying it KT felt like shit. True or not, it was like kicking a puppy. It was something Dalton would say. Like she was the bully, and that had not been her role at high school. She sighed and turned to look at him walking away.

  “Eric, wait, that was out of line.”

  He stopped but didn’t turn around.

  “You’re just saying that because you want something from me,” he said.

  “No, I’m saying it because I’m in the wrong, but you get that you’re not very nice to me, right?”

  Now he turned to look at her.

  “Because of what you are...” he started but faltered. She was pleased that he at least had this amount of self-awareness.

  “We don’t know each other,” she told him.

  “Girls... attractive girls...” he started.

  “Don’t dislike nerds, particularly not these days. They dislike assholes. Why do you think Dalton spends all that time jacking off into a sock?” she asked.

  He at least cracked a smile at this.

  “You saw what Harting did in there,” she said trying not to let the anger creep in. Harting had cut off the air to the breathing apparatus to demonstrate his power over her, and here she was trying to soothe Eric’s hurt feelings. “Is that what you want? Me put in my place.”

  His head dropped. She could read the shame in his expression. Once again she found herself feeling relieved at the display of self-awareness on his part.

  “No, that was pretty messed-up,” he muttered. “What do you need?” he finally said after a few more moments of reflection.

  “Harting has sent me after Wigans. He expects me to fail because I know nothing about him and little about his world. I’ve no idea where he’d go.” She pointed at Eric. “But you do. You know how he thinks. Where would you run?”

  Eric did not look happy. KT could see the conflict on his face and was pretty sure that the tech shouldn’t play poker. She suspected she knew why, as well. They all had their outs, their plans for what to do if RST fell. She had the feeling that Eric’s answer would perhaps shine a little too much light on his own escape contingencies.

  “C’mon Eric, we’ve all got our rat lines, how we’d run. This is just two colleagues talking.”

  Eric slumped against the wall and gently banged his head off the reinforced concrete.

  “With sugar-daddy Baris gone, if I was in his position, and I mean really desperate, I’d go to the Twins,” he told her.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Ciudad del Este.”

  “Paraguay?”

  Eric nodded.

  “The tri-border area,” he added.

  It made sense. The triple frontier between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina was notoriously hard to police and had become a sort of Wild West for tech crime. This was due, in part, to the very porous nature of the three borders in that region.

  “Thank you,” she told him. “This is just between us.”

  He pursed his lips but didn’t really look at her. She turned and started to walk off.

  “Good luck,” he told her.

  CHAPTER 35

  Gina had always talked about Europe. It made sense that she had moved here if she had wanted to get away from San Diego, from the memories. Bloodshot had been to Britain before as part of an exchange training program with the UK’s special forces. Members of the SAS and SBS had taken him out in London. It had been a good time but his memory of Britain’s capital was of a gray and drizzly city. Not so today as he walked down one of Soho’s broad and leafy thoroughfares, past the pavement bars and cafes, it was a beautiful warm summer day. Soho was one of the places he had gone drinking with the UKSF guys and he knew it could get quite hedonistic and tawdry, particularly late at night. Today, however, it just looked like a pleasant vibrant, gentrified inner city neighborhood. He found himself absurdly worried that in London, Gina would be too far away from the ocean. As though she would dry up and blow away, slip through his fingers like dust, a mermaid in some old fairy tale.

  He found her house, 71 Soho Terrace, just past one of the quaint red British telephone boxes. It was an old terraced townhouse, painted white, wooden bars on the ground-floor windows, a Union Jack flag fluttering from a window above. He stopped at the thick wooden double doors, hesitant. It was exactly the sort of place where Gina would have wanted to live in another life. Bloodshot couldn’t wait, couldn’t suppress his excitement. This was what would make all the blood and the pain worthwhile. He had fought a war to get to here. There was just a moment’s hesitation, however, as he raised his hand to press the doorbell. A black
cab went by. He could not face even the idea that this was all a lie, another one of Harting’s cruel jokes. His hand only shook a little as he rang the bell.

  She did not keep him long.

  Gina opened the door.

  She looked different, older. Though it could only have been a couple of months at the longest, but grief will do that. She wore her hair differently as well, and she was dressed down, a green jumper he didn’t recognize, jeans, sneakers. In the past, even dressed casually, she had always tended to make something of an effort for reasons of her own. It could be down to grief, however, or the rose-tinted spectacles of his memory, the pedestal he had put her on. There was a horrible moment when Bloodshot started to wonder just how much of his memory was implanted, was false. He had assumed that most of it was real, but what if it hadn’t been? He pushed his panic down. She was here in front of him now.

  Her expression was the guarded blank of someone answering the door to a stranger. That hurt. Then she recognized him.

  “Ray?”

  He had almost forgotten that was his real name.

  “Gina.”

  He stepped forward and she hugged him. It felt wrong though. She was holding back. This was the hug of a friend, not the hug of a wife, a lover, a soul mate.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Gina, you have no idea what I’ve just been through.” Just for a moment he didn’t know where to start. There had been so much craziness. It was too difficult to explain. It didn’t even make sense to him and he’d experienced it.

  “Well, knowing you it’s classified.”

  This wasn’t happening how he’d envisioned it happening. She seemed defensive, somehow, more surprised to see him than relieved, than happy.

  “That’s right. Crazier than usual though. But I’m home now.”

  She just looked at him. Bloodshot felt the first cracks. There was something wrong here but he didn’t want to acknowledge it.