Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization

by Gavin G. Smith

  As the shaft tumbled around him again, Bloodshot’s nanite-heightened awareness meant that he caught Dalton’s exo-arms lashing out to latch on to one of the girders as they fell past. The ex-SEAL swung round like a monkey, finding purchase among the girders. Bloodshot had a millisecond to register this as the first elevator rose up to meet him.

  Bloodshot felt like fresh roadkill but he forced himself to his feet despite his malfunctioning nanites. He was astonished that Tibbs was still moving, still trying to get up, a tribute to the other man’s resolve, his endurance. Bloodshot could respect that. It didn’t stop him from hitting Tibbs in the implant port that violated the flesh on the back of the sniper’s neck, breaking the port. It had fed Tibbs’s ocular implants, taking visual information from the various slaved cameras and feeding it directly to the visual center of the brain. He knew Tibbs was blind now but the sniper was still trying to get up. Bloodshot pushed Tibbs over with his foot and put a boot on his chest to hold him in place.

  “Just stop,” he told Tibbs. There was nothing personal between him and the sniper, he was just another injured soldier playing the hand he’d been dealt as best he could. “You don’t need this.” He was willing Tibbs to listen, to stand down, not to force Bloodshot to kill him.

  “This is all I got left!” Tibbs cried. He had been a man of action, had been the master of his own destiny, a member of one of the most exclusive and exciting families in the world. Being blinded would have robbed him of much of that. That was the insidiousness of Harting’s offer. That was how he made slaves out of people.

  “Harting can’t fix the part of us that’s broken,” Bloodshot told him. He had no idea where the words had come from but they seemed to be the right thing to say. They were all broken in some way. Without Gina, what did he have, what did any of them have? Service, that was all, and Harting had even taken that from them. Covert operations were often dirty enough as it was but the doctor had perverted that, turned it into something that only served him.

  Tibbs lay down on the roof of the now stationary elevator. Bloodshot could read the defeat in the man’s body language, in his blank stare.

  “You don’t understand,” he told Bloodshot. “We’re not the same, ’cause you can’t see what you’ve lost.”

  Tibbs’s words gave him pause. What had he lost? He had lost Gina before he had died. He had never had a family of his own. He had lost nothing. Except his life. Just for a moment he wondered when he had come to value that so little.

  Then sparks were raining down on him. Bloodshot looked up. Dalton was sliding down the elevator’s cable toward them, tearing it as he went, powerful metal fingers ripping at it.

  “Yeah, well... least you won’t see it coming,” he called.

  Bloodshot watched horrified as the cable frayed and split into metal threads. Dalton braced himself against the wall as the last few threads snapped free.

  Then they were falling. Hurtling downward so fast that gravity couldn’t keep up. The wheels on the emergency brakes were creating a fountain of sparks but the brakes couldn’t counteract the damage that Dalton had done, they couldn’t counteract the sheer momentum. The city streets hurtled up to meet them as they fell past dozens of floors and then hit the bottom.

  Everything went black.

  CHAPTER 47

  Dalton picked his way through the wreckage of the elevator. The impact had broken through the base of the shaft and spilled the debris out into the training gym. The gently soothing radioactive glow from the pool seemed at odds with the metal-and-flesh carnage.

  Dalton glanced down at Tibbs, his body broken, lying amid the wreckage. It was a shame, he hadn’t totally disliked the ex-Delta sniper, but in the end Tibbs had proven too weak for this brave new world.

  Bloodshot’s body was equally broken but Dalton reached down, metal fingers wrapping around the cyborg’s neck, and easily lifted him into the air. Mercury beaded Bloodshot’s skin. Dalton moved one of his exo-arms closer to a metallic crimson liquid cluster on Bloodshot’s neck. Smaller secondary fingers, designed for precision work, unfolded from the exo-arm’s main power-assisted fingers and plucked at the mercury-like fluid. He peered at the liquid, bringing it closer. He could just about make out the tiny machines moving within it, like germs. If the nanites were still alive...

  “Goddamn. You are a hard man to kill,” Dalton said. It wasn’t so much that he was impressed by Bloodshot, or even the tech. It was just that this was what Dalton himself deserved. With this he would never fail ever again.

  Dalton let the body drop back to the wreckage, though he didn’t let go. He dragged the battered body over the rubble like a child trailing a ragdoll behind him. He waded into the pool, remembering after he’d gone a little way to pull Bloodshot out of the water. After all, he didn’t want him accidentally drowning. Dalton found himself smiling at this thought.

  The exoskeleton’s top two arms lifted Bloodshot out of the pool and then pulled the body taut at the wrists. Against the blue light there was something almost religious about it, as though he’d crucified Bloodshot. Dalton hesitated. He felt a moment’s discomfort, a moment’s doubt. He realized just how ridiculous he was being and then he was all smiles again. He was the survivor, the victor, the winner through sheer force of will. He deserved the technological bounty, the power that one way or another he would tear out of Bloodshot. He was going to enjoy this.

  “Now then...” he started. His own armor-clad arms reached behind him to slip into a pair of viciously spiked knuckle-dusters clipped into a slot on the back of the exoskeleton. “...let’s stress test that regeneration of yours.”

  Dalton cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders, limbering up. Then he really went to work on Bloodshot. Four lightning-fast punches to the face, a jab, a simultaneous jab from both fists, crushing Bloodshot’s head between the knuckle-dusters, then a devastating uppercut. Dalton could hear the vertebrae in Bloodshot’s neck crack from this last. As he waded deeper into the pool Dalton worked Bloodshot’s body like a meat-filled punch-bag.

  “Look at you, hero,” a hook to the liver, “ghost story,” a jab, “game changer,” a cross to the face, “you’re a goddamn,” a haymaker that should have taken Bloodshot’s already pulped head off, “waste,” each word punctuated with another body blow, “of time!” Dalton was gasping for breath, exultant, speckled in blood, and if he had been asked right there he wouldn’t have been able to explain why he hated Bloodshot so much. He just did.

  Bloodshot’s chin drooped down on his chest as he hung limp from Dalton’s crucifying arms. Dalton could see his own distorted reflection in the mercury rivulets running down Bloodshot’s face. The ex-SEAL’s eyes were wide and bloodshot, crazed. He didn’t care. The nanites tried to knit the wounds shut but there was too much damage and they had been too badly weakened by the payload in Tibbs’s knives. Bloodshot was little more than a human-shaped sack of jelly, full of ruptured organs and broken bones. That didn’t stop Dalton.

  “Yeah, struggling now ain’t ya?” he screamed. Bloodshot’s broken and bloodied visage, his visible weakness, made Dalton angry all over again. “Killing’s easy!” he spat. “And I don’t need a motivational video for it either.”

  He didn’t even notice the surface of the pool undulating with the shimmering nanite blood.

  * * *

  The battered suffering piece of flesh that opened its eyes was vaguely aware of being Bloodshot, of being Ray Garrison, but mostly there was just pain, unrelenting pain interspersed with new lancing pain as he was hit again and again. He tried to break free of the arms holding him but he didn’t have anything like the strength anymore. A thought beat its way through the haematoma-swollen meat of his brain. Not a thought, a memory. Wigans telling him that he needed to “get imaginative.” The memory disappeared, subsumed by yet more pain as he took a shot to the chin, his head snapped round and he spat out blood. The pool’s underwater blue light glinted off his nanite-infused metallic blood floating on the surface. Each drop of it
containing hundreds of thousands of the tiny robots, all of whom had their own web-connected microprocessor that he could communicate with. Bloodshot sagged in Dalton’s arms. He forgot about the tortured meat, forgot about the pain, and reached out to his millions-strong microscopic army.

  There was movement in the water.

  “What the f—!” Dalton managed before inky nanite parabolas formed across the surface of the pool, spiralling toward him. Viscous, probing tendrils of tech crawled up the ex-SEAL, into the exoskeleton’s spinal nodes, dismantling the suit’s vital components, paralyzing it, trapping Dalton inside a cell only a little bigger than his own body.

  The nanites forced Dalton to drop Bloodshot into the water. His blood was returning to him. Healing his wounds. The red scar burned hot from the nanites’ exertions. Bloodshot stood up, steam rising from his body, resurrected as the last metallic tendrils of nanites returned to his body through his closing wounds, like eels.

  Dalton was staring out at him, terrified. Bloodshot couldn’t keep the contempt from his face. He wound up to punch the ex-SEAL. He wanted to hit Dalton so hard that his hand would go straight through the other man’s head.

  “There it is, that look,” he said, echoing Dalton’s words. “The dumbass catches on too late.”

  Then the anger and the tension just seemed to leach from Bloodshot. Instead, as the picture of calm, he just reached out and poked Dalton gently in the chest. The exoskeleton teetered for a moment and then toppled into the water.

  Bloodshot looked down through the water at Dalton’s face, so close to the surface but trapped in his very personal cell. Bloodshot watched the sick bastard drown.

  CHAPTER 48

  The alarms, the smoke, the sounds of panic and the more distant sounds of violence and destruction – Wigans felt like he should be terrified. Instead, in the false security provided by his gas mask, as he pushed a trolley full of purloined tech around RST’s workshop, he felt like a kid in a toyshop. He only took what he knew he either couldn’t afford, or couldn’t replicate with the resources he had access to, and of course was small enough to fit in the trolley. He had done one full circuit and had come back to the work terminal he’d put his flash drive into. The flash drive contained a payload of particularly naughty programs. Given the choice he would have asked KT to burn the server room last, as what he would get off this isolated terminal would be limited, but it was better than nothing.

  Then he heard movement from behind him. Wigans didn’t muck around, just calmly but quickly clambered under the desk. He saw the figure stalking through the smoke and halon gas. He went cold, felt the sweat beading his skin as the figure stopped by his trolley and stared at it. Even obscured, Wigans recognized one of science’s most psychopathic practitioners, Dr. Emil Harting, rage twisting his features. Harting looked around for the owner of the trolley. Not immediately finding Wigans, the doctor seemed to decide that he had more pressing matters to attend to. Wigans heaved a sigh of relief as, coughing, the doctor stalked back into the smoke and gas.

  CHAPTER 49

  Harting hurried through the smoke-filled corridor toward the ops center. Incandescent rage had been replaced with a cold, diamond-hard fury. Panicked, coughing techs streamed past. He resisted the urge to lash out with his prosthetic arm. They were fools and cowards, each and every one of them. Then he saw Eric among the crowd, scurrying down the corridor toward him, head down, trying not to get noticed. Harting grabbed him just a little too hard with his artificial hand as the tech tried to pass. Eric winced.

  “Where are you going?” Harting demanded.

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” Eric spat, “the building is on fire and your billion-dollar revenge machine is on his way back up.”

  Harting desperately wanted to slap some respect into the tech but he clearly had more important things to attend to.

  Eric managed to wriggle out of his robotic grip.

  “Maybe try cricket!” the tech shot over his shoulder as he scurried away.

  Harting continued pushing through the flow of fleeing techs. Failure was a difficult concept for Harting. Failure applied to other people, not to him. How had it come to this? He heard the question as a scream in his mind. He thought about the lack of vision, the petty spite that had resulted in this, his being forced to watch his kingdom burn. He knew as unpalatable as the word failure was for him, it would be more so for his masters. If he were to die as a result of this act of sabotage then those responsible would have to suffer first.

  * * *

  “KT!” Bloodshot staggered into the main lab/workspace area. He leaned heavily against the doorframe. He was exhausted. The circular scar on his chest glowed red, refracting off the smoke that filled the area. He pushed himself onward, stumbling deeper into the lab. He was wracked with coughs, struggling to breathe. There had been too much damage done to his body for the nanites to do anything about the smoke. Bloodshot had no real idea how he was still upright but he knew that the tech inside him had effectively been taxed to its limits.

  He could just about make out the shadow of a figure striding toward him. KT? The muzzle flash lit up the smoke. The passage of the bullet made eddies in it. Then he felt the hot hammer blow of the bullet hitting him, going through him, taking meat with it. He staggered but managed to remain upright. His tired nanites were already working at the very edge of their capabilities as they tried to repair the damage. As they tried to keep him on his feet and functioning, to a degree, just that little bit longer.

  With a primal scream a much-weakened Bloodshot charged the figure in the smoke.

  Harting caught him, easily, around the throat with his prosthetic hand. A metal spike shot out of the arm, the tip exploding through the back of Bloodshot’s neck, skewering him. Bloodshot spat metallic blood out of his mouth, and more blood oozed from the neck wound.

  “That army in your veins belongs to me, not you!” the doctor told him. Bloodshot gargled blood from his severed windpipe and he couldn’t talk. He suspected the pain would have been worse but he was getting used to being dead or very close to it. “I built them, this place. You!” Harting sounded unhinged. He sounded like a defied god in some mythic melodrama.

  The metallic blood from Bloodshot’s wound crawled down onto Harting’s arm.

  Harting’s grip tightened around his neck. Bloodshot’s chest was glowing like a nuclear reactor now.

  Harting looked down at it, a vicious grin on his face. Bloodshot had defied him so now there must be punishment.

  “That’s right, you’re dying, and they can’t bring you back this time. Your girlfriend’s killed you already. Burnt it all down.” He seemed to take pleasure in the idea that his defeat would be somebody else’s downfall as well. If he couldn’t win then everyone else had to lose.

  The metal spike retracted from Bloodshot’s neck in a spray of blood. Harting let go of him and Bloodshot collapsed to the ground, coughing up yet more blood even as beleaguered nanites tried to repair the damage done by the arm-spike.

  Harting’s arm froze. Harting turned to stare at it. Then the arm started to move of its own accord.

  “How?” he whispered.

  “I opened the box,” Bloodshot told him as he forced himself to stand, the nanites having healed him just enough to talk now.

  Harting stared at his arm. Bloodshot watched the doctor’s sheer confusion at something so fundamental as his own arm defying him. Confusion escalated to panic.

  “Stepped back into the real world,” Bloodshot continued.

  Harting’s eyes went wide as his arm drew his own handgun from his pocket.

  “You can’t control me anymore,” Bloodshot told him. He almost felt sorry for Harting. How small did your soul have to be that you needed to control the people around you to such an extent? But he almost felt sorry for him.

  Harting’s robotic arm lifted the gun and slowly pressed it to his own temple as though he was threatening suicide. The doctor needed to learn that when you tried to control thing
s to such an extent you just bred chaos, Bloodshot decided. Though he reflected that Harting didn’t have much time to learn his last lesson. Bloodshot noted with a degree of grim satisfaction that Harting’s sidearm was a .45. It was identical to the one that he remembered Axe, Baris and the others shooting him with thanks to his implanted memories.

  “What are you doing?” Harting screamed at him. Even now it was clear that the doctor couldn’t understand why everyone and everything around him wasn’t doing exactly what he wanted.

  “Whatever I want,” Bloodshot told him.

  The red scar on Bloodshot’s chest continued to pulse, each flash of light growing dimmer. He could feel himself running out of power, the nanites becoming inert. Without the possibility of being recharged, the microscopic robots were effectively dying. Bloodshot, however, just watched Harting.

  “Stop! Tell them to st—” Harting was staring at the screen on his arm now. From his angle Bloodshot could just about make out the dead eye smiley emoji winking at the doctor from the display.

  Harting brought up his good hand, trying to push the gun away from his head, to remove it from the grip of the prosthetic arm.

  The gun went off.

  A chunk of Harting’s head became a spray of blood, gray matter and bone fragments, and the doctor’s body collapsed to the ground.

  Bloodshot looked down at his dead creator, the man who had so desperately wanted to play god to them all. He wondered what came next.

  The light in his scar went out. Bloodshot exhaled and started to fall. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  CHAPTER 50

  He could see a red flashing light. Somehow Ray Garrison didn’t think it was heaven. Hell was a possibility.

  Garrison awoke with a start. Instead of a cold steel table he found himself lying on a comfortable bed, for a change, in an old camper. The camper would have been quite spacious, for a trailer anyway, but instead was cramped because of all the diagnostic and medical equipment that he was hooked up to.