Her fingers were playing across the tablet.
“You done?” she asked.
“Look I realize that your question wasn’t an invitation for me to talk more but what you have to understand, what you have to know is that he’s a monster.”
“I know,” she told him. Then she lifted up the tablet so he could see the screen. The words “Access Denied” were emblazoned across it. “I was wondering if you could help.”
Wigans looked at the screen and then up at her.
“And if I do, what then?” he asked.
“I’m going to burn it down,” she told him. “All of it.”
Wigans managed to keep his mouth shut as he considered this.
“So this is a negotiation?” he asked.
“I guess,” she said, “though if you can’t help me then I gotta turn you over to him.”
“I don’t want that,” he muttered, mostly to himself.
“What do you want?” she asked.
It was a question he hadn’t been asked in a while. His most recent employers had mostly been about what they wanted, they seemed to see him as some kind of technological serf, a peon. Despite how fast his mind moved, even without drugs, it took him a moment or two to come up with the answer.
“I want to be here when it happens,” he said finally.
The woman just nodded.
CHAPTER 42
Dalton was waiting for her when the elevator door slid open in RST’s minimalist corporate lobby. KT stepped out of the elevator, her kitbag over her shoulder. Dalton had a big shit-eating grin on his face. That tended to mean that someone, somewhere, was suffering.
“Just in time to see your boyfriend,” he told her.
KT sagged, felt her heart drop. Dalton’s smile only widened. She would have quite liked to wipe it off his face.
“He’s back?” she asked instead.
“On the table now,” he told her. It was Dalton’s favorite part of the Bloodshot cycle. That said something about just how sick he was. It was a shame he’d survived Bloodshot dropping him off a hotel.
She walked away from the ex-SEAL.
* * *
KT walked into the medical hub and looked down at the currently exsanguinated body of Bloodshot lying on the table in the resurrection room.
“Wake him back up,” KT told Harting. The doctor was working at his terminal, monitoring the process.
“Why?” Harting asked, an edge in his voice. Eric and the other techs put their heads down, desperate not to be noticed as they went about their work. KT could understand; everyone who worked at RST knew that Harting did not like being challenged, and knew what happened to those who did so.
“You know why,” KT told him, crossing her arms, determined to stand her ground.
“What I don’t know is why we’re still talking about this.” Harting tapped away at a few more keys, finishing the current process before moving across the hub to where she stood, getting up in her face, glaring at her, eyes full of menace. “I brought a man back from the dead, KT. It seems you forget that sometimes.” It was clear he was indulging his god complex even more than usual today. That he had brought Ray Garrison back from the dead and therefore owned Bloodshot seemed to be his thinking. He stared pointedly at her implant. “Seems you forget a lot of things,” he added before returning to the monitors. “So yes, he can choose differently someday. If it serves the greater good. Until then, let’s stick to the script.”
KT just stared at him, her face expressionless.
Harting tapped a few more keys before turning back to look at her.
“Bunkroom,” he told her.
She stared at him just for a moment or two longer. He held her glare. She knew he was expecting her to fold. That in his world he would win any challenge because he held all the pieces, all the power.
KT broke eye contact first.
Harting turned back to his monitor, apparently satisfied.
But as KT left the medical hub she knew now was time to burn Harting’s kingdom down.
CHAPTER 43
Harting stared at the close-up of Bloodshot’s pale, lifeless face on his monitor.
“Initiate sequence,” he told the room.
This was still a thrill. Every single time. Coaxing life from dead flesh.
* * *
Garrison leaned casually against the alley wall. He was concealed by deep shadow, watching a stray dog trot through the floating trash in last night’s rain puddles.
He was watching a surprisingly solid-looking door in the wall of the dilapidated two-story tenement building opposite his position. The ground outside the door was littered with cigarette butts. He knew it was only a matter of time before one of the tangos would need a smoke.
* * *
Harting checked another monitor. The reading showed twelve percent complete.
The genius of it was not just the science of making the dead function again. It was the control of the Bloodshot platform’s environment. He honed the man who had once been Ray Garrison, just as the master craftsmen of feudal Japan had honed their near-perfect swords.
* * *
Garrison removed a flashbang grenade from a pouch on his tac gear. He pulled the pin, let the spoon pop but kept hold of it, cooking it, counting. At the very last moment he flung it through the hole the Russian mercenaries’ blind firing had made in the door. The grenade detonated in midair, bright phosphorescent light leaking through Garrison’s closed eyes, concussive thunder temporarily deafening him. Less than a moment to recover and Garrison swung round and advanced through the perforated door, M4 at his shoulder again.
Situational awareness: some kind of large open storage area, collapsible chairs around a firepit to keep away the chills of the cool African night, the early morning sunlight streaming down through the skylights, illuminating motes of dust in the air and the two stunned gunmen staggering around, their assault rifles empty.
The recoil from the M4 was somehow comforting as the weapon’s butt punched back into his shoulder. Two short efficient bursts, the muzzle flash lighting up the storage area, the bullets caught the gunmen center mass. He kept moving, stepping over their bodies.
* * *
KT strode into the imaging lab cubicle off the main laboratory. She slid the door shut and locked it behind her. She turned to look at the complex helix of cameras and the surrounding monitors. It was the apparatus that Harting used to invade Bloodshot’s mind. She dropped her gear bag on the floor.
* * *
In the medical hub, Harting checked the progress again. Twenty-eight percent.
Harting knew there had been mistakes along the way but science was not the exact, precise process that people thought it was. There was always an element of trial and error. Sure, Bloodshot had run them around a little, but that was what contingencies were for, and so far those contingencies had held up pretty well.
* * *
Up on the second-story walkway a loosely held AK-47 appeared in an adjoining doorway as a third gunman fired blindly, spraying bullets. Garrison didn’t stop, holes appearing in the wall all around him. A stray round caught him in the shoulder, beating his body armor. He grunted in pain, grimaced, but it was clean, through the meat, he knew the difference. Unpredictable amateurs, he thought as he suppressed the pain. He got an angle on the shooter, squeezed off another three-round burst and another body hit the floor.
Moving quickly, legs bent, providing a stable platform for his weapon, trying to ignore the pain in his shoulder, the blood trickling down under his body armor, Garrison was round the corner and into a ratty-looking apartment. Slashes of light shone through the gaps in the boarded-up window revealing peeling paint and plaster, exposed cinder block, and a woman standing there in the center of the room. Unarmed. No hostage. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed and had an athletic build. He had been around enough navy operators to recognize a swimmer’s body. She had some kind of apparatus fused with the skin of her neck. Garrison leveled his M4A1 carbine at h
er. Her body flickered. It looked like interference on an old-style cathode-ray TV. Or as though she somehow wasn’t fully manifest in this reality.
He was surprised. No doubt about that, but he was still pro enough to check the rest of his surroundings.
“Alpha One—” he said into his tac radio.
“No one’s coming, Ray,” the woman said. She was clearly American.
“How do you know my name?” he asked. That wasn’t good. If she was a bad guy and if she knew his name that meant she could get to Gina, and that couldn’t be allowed to happen.
“Because we know each other. Because I’ve been lying to you. But I can’t do it anymore.”
And the strange thing was, somehow what she said rang true with him.
* * *
KT stood alone in the helix of cameras. The monitors were on now, showing the projected image of herself in the ratty Mombasa apartment talking to Ray Garrison as was. She clutched the remote control in her hand.
In the medical hub alerts were starting to sound. Harting changed screens on his monitor, checking Bloodshot’s biometrics; his vitals were spiking massively.
“What the hell is happening down there?” he demanded. He glanced down through the glass floor of the medical hub but Bloodshot still looked like a corpse. His blank dead expression offered nothing.
“His brainwaves are all over the place,” Eric called from his workstation.
* * *
The walls of the apartment twitched, rippling like spasming flesh. Garrison tried to keep his eye on the ghosting woman. Tried to suppress his rising panic as he finally encountered a situation that he couldn’t even understand, let alone handle.
“Ray, I’m so sorry,” the woman told him.
“I know you...?” he asked, for something, anything to say.
He moved closer to her, though he had no real idea what he was going to do.
* * *
In the medical hub an alarm, one with a very unique tone, broke through the subdued cacophony of all the other alerts going off. Eric turned to look at the monitor that showed the diagnostic feed from the simulation.
“Someone’s altering the sim,” he said reluctantly.
Harting turned to look at the same monitor and then he checked the information on his own terminal.
“How is...?” he started. Then it hit him. “KT.” He turned to one of the techs. “Call Tibbs and Dalton to Command,” he snapped. Then he was striding toward the door. “Armed!” he added. Then he pointed down at Bloodshot’s body lying in state in the resurrection room beneath them. “And shut him down!” He felt his vaunted control slipping away.
* * *
Garrison was inches away from the woman. He was not trying to intimidate her or invade her personal space. There was nothing approaching fear in her eyes despite the fact he was armed and armored for war. Somehow this felt alright, if not normal. A thought was trying to beat its way through the bruised meat of his brain. Recognition.
“KT?” he asked.
“Yes,” she told him.
He could hear someone pounding on a door in the distance.
“KT! Open this door!” A man’s voice. He sounded angry. It came from her world. He recognized the man’s voice as well. A name came to him: Harting. Garrison was pretty sure that he didn’t like this Harting, didn’t like him at all.
“What are you doing here?” he asked KT. It was so strange. He could still feel the humidity on his skin, smell the alley outside, the three corpses he’d left cooling on the floor.
He noticed that KT was holding some kind of remote control.
“Letting you make a real choice,” she told him. She pressed the button on the remote control.
It hit him all at once: waking up from death, KT, RST, the labs, the training center, his wife’s murder, the rampages, Baris, Axe, all the others he had killed, swirling around him like an army of ghosts. All of it came flooding back in one go. Short violent bursts of activity, of being conscious, and then Gina telling him she hadn’t seen him in five years. Her children, and with that the realization that nothing he knew was real. And at the center of it all, like a spider with a human face, weaving a web of lies, monarch of his own kingdom of bullshit: Harting.
* * *
In the medical hub, Eric stared at Bloodshot’s biometrics. Where they had been spiking before they were now going utterly crazy. He glanced down through the glass floor and liquid nitrogen mist at Bloodshot shaking and twitching violently on the table. Every single muscle was taut and all his veins were popping. Horrified, Eric turned back to his workstation, frantically keying in a sequence that he hoped and prayed would cut Bloodshot off from the hacked simulation. He keyed enter and then looked down again. Bloodshot collapsed back onto the steel table, becoming dead still.
“Oh Jesus,” Eric managed, relieved.
* * *
In the apartment in Mombasa, Garrison swayed a little, breathless, his pulse racing as though from a spike of adrenaline. Like combat. He was desperately trying to process the mass of information that had just been uploaded straight into his brain.
Then KT was yanked away, as though torn out of reality itself.
The world exploded. Walls ripped away, the furniture flickering out like a TV set being switched off, his clothes seeping away to become a plain white T-shirt and trousers and he was standing alone in an otherwise featureless white room.
“Remember me.” KT’s voice echoed from somewhere else, from beyond this tiny four-walled reality.
* * *
Bloodshot—no, Ray Garrison’s eyes flickered open on the cold steel table in the resurrection room. He sat up. He did not fall or flail around. He was strong, fully able, and more to the point he knew who he was. What he was. He had purpose.
He stood up, and then, very slowly he looked up. Through the mist, past the track lighting, the insectile ceiling-mounted robot arm, to the mirrored panels. He stared through them to the medical hub beyond.
* * *
Eric, peering over his workstation, looked down through the glass floor at the resurrection room and found a red-eyed Bloodshot looking up. Somehow the tech knew that the killer cyborg was staring straight at him.
“Oh Jesus!”
CHAPTER 44
Among the black equipment cages of the RST armory, Dalton was gearing up. Weapons were slid into holsters, body armor was buckled on, pouches were checked to ensure that the magazines were securely in place.
Tibbs, all business, was doing similarly, sliding knife after knife into sheaths on his load-out vest. All of them were of the same type as the one he’d used on Bloodshot in the UK. The knives were sleek, high-tech weapons.
It still galled Dalton that Tibbs had taken Bloodshot down in London. Tibbs hadn’t said anything but Dalton could practically feel the ex-Delta sniper’s smugness. Even as Dalton prepped he couldn’t stop thinking about South Africa, about the eight stories onto concrete. He had won that battle by any reasonable standard. He had hunted Bloodshot down and found him. It wasn’t rational to throw yourself off the roof of a building. The shotgun’s anti-nanite round should have worked had it not been for Bloodshot’s “superpowers.” It wasn’t his fault. Harting should have warned him about the full extent of the capabilities of the nanites in Garrison’s bloodstream.
Situations like that seemed to be the story of his life. He excelled. The screw-ups of others dragged him down. It was like the helicopter crash. Burning avgas had prevented him from going back for Bobby and Jem. It had been about to blow. What use were three deaths instead of two? If you can’t look after yourself then you’re no use to anyone else. That was why he’d been running when he had trod on the improvised mine. Didn’t stop the rest of his team from holding him responsible. They had ghosted him. Not one of them had come to see him in hospital.
This bullshit stops now, he decided. He turned to look at the exoskeleton in its cage. The multi-limbed, armored, experimental fighting suit would go some of the way toward leveli
ng the playing field. This time instead of making stupid jokes about his not “running toward” things, Harting would come to understand his value. That he deserved to have the Bloodshot technology, because unless they cheated, there was no other operator here with anything like his capability. He was also going to hurt Bloodshot, a lot. It wasn’t that he was sick, or sadistic, or anything like that. It was just that people needed to understand their position in the food chain, which Bloodshot did not. He was a loser, a victim, an insect and he was about to get stamped on.
Dalton stepped backward into an exoskeleton. He grimaced at the strange and uncomfortable sensation of the exoskeleton’s brace points corkscrewing into the implanted nodes that ran down his spine, among the skeletal reptile tattoos that decorated his skin. The connection was momentarily painful. When he was fully one with the exoskeleton he clenched his fists, feeling the power of the machine, relishing it, reveling in it. He was going to pull Bloodshot’s limbs off like a nasty little boy with a spider and he was going to enjoy doing it.
* * *
Harting used the control panel in his prosthetic arm to override the electronic lock in the imaging laboratory. He burst in to find KT sliding a ballistic plate into her body armor. He was incandescent with rage. She was like a child running around setting fire to things, no actual understanding of the importance of what they were doing here, the future they were building. More than anything it was the expression of defiance on her face that infuriated him. She actually thought she had done the right thing, something clever.
“Why?” he managed.
“He deserved the truth,” she told him.
It was something a child would say. He couldn’t believe that after all this, after everything she had seen of the world, that somehow she was still this naïve.
“The truth! Whose truth?” he demanded. He was vaguely aware that he was spitting when he talked. He didn’t care, he couldn’t recall ever being quite this angry. She fundamentally didn’t understand the world she lived in, the world beyond the luxurious kingdom that he – Dr. Emil Harting – had built for these spoiled and ungrateful children. Even a casual glance at the news made nonsense of her assertion. “No one cares about the truth anymore, people want someone telling them what to love and who to hate... that’s what I’m doing! They don’t want to make real decisions!” The real decisions had to be left to those who rose above the herd, like himself, or more accurately his masters. “They just want to feel like they are!”
Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization Page 18
