Red Hands: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  Maeve had a hell of a head start, but she was sick and scared and confused. Walker told himself he could find her. A quarter hour later, when he came to a place where footprints in half-dry mud had been obliterated with a stick, he actually believed it.

  Staring at those footprints, he felt a little queasy and a shudder went through him, almost as if he could feel the sickness Maeve had left in her wake. Sickness, and something else, a skin-crawling sensation that made him glance yet again at his surroundings. A deep frown creased his forehead.

  The trees on either side of the path seemed lower, denser, as if they might inch closer until they could strangle him. They were only trees, of course. But as he quickened his pace, the whole trail seemed tainted by that unsettling feeling. Walker thought perhaps it wouldn’t be as difficult to find Maeve as he’d first imagined. He also thought finding her might turn out to be an absolutely terrible idea.

  But he kept following the trail.

  Whatever had infected Maeve Sinclair, it couldn’t be allowed to roam free.

  * * *

  Viv Cheng and Leon Lewis had been assigned to Garland Mountain Labs within weeks of one another. Leon had been honorably discharged from a special ops group he was never allowed to mention, but he’d told Cheng as much as possible about his background. Cheng, on the other hand, had only been willing to say that she had done work for Homeland Security. Leon still wondered if that meant something covert or if she’d just been an ICE agent and been fired or quit. Of course, if she’d quit ICE as a conscientious objector or something, she wouldn’t be employed by White Oak Security. The firm provided private armed security for at least a dozen sites on American soil that the government didn’t want the public to know about. They couldn’t use official U.S. military, so they used White Oak, one of several firms that provided what had come to be colloquially known as Blackcoats.

  Most of the time, Leon liked his job. He’d been in blood-soaked deserts and climbed over corpses in ditches, so he didn’t mind putting a bullet into someone for no reason other than that he’d been ordered to do so. But this felt different.

  “You feel all right?” Cheng asked as they moved quietly along the narrow trail Ben Walker had chosen.

  Leon snorted. “Do you? This feel all right to you?”

  He regretted the words the moment they left his lips, but the old cliché about not being able to put the genie back in the bottle had never been truer. Cheng shot him a narrowed glance, and an uneasy quiet fell between them. Not silence. Up on the mountain, in the fucking woods, they would never find true silence.

  Birds cried and wheeled far overhead, barely glimpsed through the branches that wove together to block all but shafts of daylight from hitting the trail. Gray, ugly light from a sky full of storm. Rain pattered the leaves and the trail. The wind kicked up and rustled a million leaves into a rough whisper that almost sounded like a voice. To Leon, it held a beauty he could not deny, the rustling of leaves telling him to breathe. To take it all in. Maybe telling him that this wasn’t the kind of hunting people were supposed to be doing up here, in the quiet of the wild.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Cheng asked at last without glancing over her shoulder again. “I don’t want to have to worry, Leon.”

  “Relax, Vivian. I’m here. I’ve got your back. Walker’s one guy, and he may not like it, but we’re on the same team.”

  Cheng halted, turned to scan his face. “Did you see the video clip? Sinclair touching those people, them falling down dead?”

  “I saw it.”

  “Just making certain. ’Cuz it sure as hell isn’t some D.C. scientist who’s got me on my toes. The Sinclair woman might as well be the bogeyman or the Big Bad Wolf as far as I’m concerned,” Cheng said. “I’ll be honest, man, it’s got me spooked. I’m looking behind every damn tree, worried she’s gonna jump out at me. I’d rather run into a bear than this bitch.”

  Leon had seen the video, but he decided he and Cheng had viewed it very differently. Project: Red Hands wouldn’t be the first science experiment to have gotten out of control and killed a bunch of people. This wasn’t even the first time Leon had to work a containment job, keeping a fuckup quiet and limiting exposure. But the last time had been in Mosul, and the people they’d been hunting—the ones who’d invented the bioweapon—had been terrorists.

  Who were the terrorists here?

  Not Maeve Sinclair. He didn’t like the idea of hunting an innocent woman and certainly not on American soil. Hell, there wasn’t any terrain that felt much more American than this.

  Cheng held up a fist. Leon stopped, listening hard. Sure enough, he could hear a voice drifting back to them, Walker talking on a phone or radio. The guy had paused, and Leon cursed himself for not paying enough attention. They couldn’t afford for Walker to realize he was being followed—not yet. Dr. Vargas back at Garland Mountain thought Walker had an in with the family, that maybe he’d even been in touch with Maeve Sinclair. Cheng and Leon had been tasked with following him, just in case he really did know how to find the woman.

  Cheng motioned for them to continue and started up the trail. Slowly. Quietly.

  Leon started checking the trees on either side of the trail, unsettled by her description of Maeve Sinclair jumping out at them. The woman had done nothing wrong. Garland Mountain Labs had been responsible for everything that happened in Jericho Falls that day.

  But if they did manage to find Maeve Sinclair, and she made the slightest movement toward him, Leon Lewis intended to shoot her in the damn face.

  Twice.

  * * *

  Walker never loved the idea of working for DARPA. They spent a good deal of their budget developing projects that kept him up at night. What got him through to the sunrise was knowing how many lives their science also saved. DARPA had given him more than one opportunity to stave off global catastrophe, and that counted for something. Of late, he’d developed a recurring nightmare about the mass graves that would be necessary if nature ever unleashed a true pandemic, and he told himself those nightmares were reason enough to keep working for the SRC. As long as he could keep the scales tipped toward saving lives instead of taking them, the work was worthwhile.

  And, of course, he liked the toys.

  More than once, he had squirreled something out of the DARPA labs that hadn’t been cleared for real-world deployment. Twice, Walker had been officially reprimanded for his sticky fingers, and once, the Department of Defense had threatened to imprison him if it should happen again. The threat had the desired effect, meaning Walker hadn’t stolen anything from DARPA in about eighteen months, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t occasionally raid the lab like a girl rifling through her big sister’s closet for the right outfit.

  Today, however, the right outfit had been a loan from his new boss. Before sending him off on his flight north, Alena Boudreau had outfitted him with a set of TAGI goggles, newly developed by a DARPA scientist named Arun Lahiri. Walker hadn’t bothered to tell Chief Kaminski about them—he hadn’t wanted to get the chief’s hopes up—but he had slipped them on fifty yards along the Jackrabbit Trail and he’d been entranced ever since.

  TAGI stood for thermal and gas imaging, which seemed a very boring name for equipment that broke every rule. Walker had used infrared and thermal imagers before, but TAGI took the concept much further, able to identify not merely the presence of a heat signature but minute thermal changes in the landscape. Maeve Sinclair had passed this way too long ago to have left her own heat behind, particularly with the rain that had been falling, but in certain places her passing had disturbed the mud and leaves and pine needles, causing the release of small amounts of heat and gases related to the decomposition of the leaves. A broken branch released both moisture and accumulated ethylene gas, and TAGI logged each of these miniscule changes. Walker could not see Maeve’s footprints, but it was evident that someone had come this way quite recently, and given what Ted Sinclair and Chief Kaminsky had said, Walker had to bank on
it being Maeve. He would follow the trail as far as it would take him, and if he lost her, he would have to improvise.

  He jogged along the path, careful not to catch his foot on a root or rock. As he moved, he tapped at his earwig. The comm unit came on line with a piercing electronic shriek. Walker swore, stumbled a bit, teeth bared. He reached up to dig the earpiece out, but the shriek quieted to a crackling noise and then nothing but the shush one might hear on the inside of a conch shell.

  Frowning, he dug the earwig out anyway, studied it, then plugged it back into place as he picked up speed again.

  “Call David,” he said aloud.

  The line buzzed only once before David Boudreau answered. One of the smartest people Walker had ever met, David looked younger than he was, some of that youthful appearance stemming from the chip that seemed forever on his shoulder. His mother had died when he was quite young, after which he had been raised by his grandmother, Alena. At the time, she’d been a globe-trotting scientist and all-around troubleshooter, the kind of person who didn’t have room in her life for a kid. Instead, David had been her sidekick, learned the tricks of the trade, surpassed his grandmother in intellect but not in wisdom. He’d been mauled badly in a gruesome field assignment in the Caribbean, a precursor to Walker suffering a similar but less severe attack in Guatemala several years later. They both had scars, they both took too many painkillers, but Walker could still make himself useful in the field. David hardly ever left the M Street apartment in D.C. where he lived. But he didn’t have to leave to give Walker what he needed.

  “I was wondering when I’d hear from you,” David said.

  “Someone’s trying to block communications in the area.”

  “What, you can’t say hello?”

  “Hello, David.”

  “Hello, Walker. Of course they’re blocking comms. Local phone service in Jericho Falls is out. Cell towers are being jammed. They don’t want residents discussing the details of the quarantine with the rest of the world. More importantly, they don’t want whoever’s up there on the mountain with you—or on the way there—to have an easy time talking to each other, never mind tracking the woman with the death touch.”

  “Speaking of Maeve, could you skip ahead to where you tell me what you know? I’ve got signs of someone on this trail, but there’s no guarantee it’s her. What am I dealing with?”

  “There’s a lot of chatter,” David said. “It’s only been about five hours and the parade disaster clip has had millions of hits online. We’re far from the only people who are going to be looking for her. I gather there are some already on location, but others will be on the way.”

  “Satellite surveillance?”

  “Of course. At least one vehicle entered via a fire road to the southeast. Bolt cutters were used on the chain. They didn’t bother being stealthy or trying to cover their tracks.”

  Walker slowed to a walk, adjusting his goggles as he peered at a heat signature off to his left. It darted away, skittering up a tree—just a red squirrel, terrified and irritated.

  “The quarantine restricts residents to the settled parts of town,” Walker said. “A single vehicle could just be libertarians flexing or a pack of teenagers acting out their rebellion fantasies. I would have been happy to tell the government to screw in a situation like this, when I was younger.”

  “You’d like to tell them to screw now,” David reminded him.

  Walker smiled. As he did, a sound came from behind him. He turned, goggles slipping a bit. As he adjusted them, a hawk took flight from the trees back along the way he’d come.

  “Everything all right?” David asked.

  “Just a bird. Our conversation is disturbing the local wildlife.”

  Walker broke into a light jog, following what he continued to hope was the same path Maeve Sinclair had taken. But he hadn’t gone six paces when he faltered. To the right, a smaller path branched off. Calling it a trail would have been a generous use of the word, but the TAGI goggles showed plenty of disturbed leaf cover and small, snapped branches at the entrance to the path.

  “You still there?” David prodded.

  “I’m here. Tell me about my visitors,” he said.

  “The guys who cut the chain? No idea. A Jeep. We’re working on backtracking it, trying to get IDs on the driver and any passengers. Meanwhile, you have other problems. At least two small aircraft have flown over in the past hour.”

  Walker ducked to avoid branches as he forged his way along this rougher path. “Any thoughts at all about who I’m going to run into out here?”

  “Let me get back to you on that,” David said. “Meanwhile—”

  “Stay alive. I know.”

  The conversation ended. The earwig gave a little squeal of static, but nothing as deafening as earlier. Walker picked up the pace. Wearing the goggles made him feel as if he had slipped into some other world, but the smell of the woods and the mountain air and the solidity of the trail beneath him helped to ground him. He ought to have allies up here. The cops and the Blackcoats and Walker himself ought to have been seeking the same resolution, but he could not allow himself to trust in that assumption. Right now, he could trust only himself, and that knowledge made the shadows in the forest around him seem darker, and the skittering of wildlife in the underbrush took on a sinister quality.

  A low burring noise made him look up, and despite the rain and the looming gray sky, he could make out the small airplane coming in from the north. As he watched, a small figure detached from the underbelly of the plane. Dread began to tighten around his heart. Seconds passed, and then the tiny figure unfurled into a bone-white parachute.

  He bolted along the path, barely paying attention to the heat and gas signatures picked up by his goggles. Chief Kaminski didn’t have enough people to sweep the whole mountain, so he sure as hell didn’t have an airplane or someone willing to jump out of it. The Blackcoats would have come in with choppers, and for the moment, they were also focused mostly to the west, at least for now. Which meant that ghostly parachute belonged to someone else—someone determined to find Maeve, who didn’t care that their arrival would be seen by some of those on the ground.

  People like that were very, very dangerous.

  He slowed his pace. Even if he left the trail, rushed through the trees, he would never be able to pinpoint exactly where the parachutist would land. On the off chance he guessed correctly, he would not reach the spot before the jumper could unbuckle their chute and set off into the woods. And then what? Walker began to think that leaving Ted Sinclair home had been a terrible idea. Injured alcoholic or not, at least Ted knew these paths and knew his daughter.

  Focus, he told himself. Stick to the hunt. He could not allow himself to be distracted by the other hunters. Walker had known governments and spook agencies would send people after Maeve. David’s report about the Jeep confirmed it. He needed to find Maeve before anyone else did.

  Or maybe not. Whoever found her first might not live through the encounter. Maybe he just needed to be the first one to find her and survive.

  11

  Maeve woke to find that the roaring dragons that chased her through her dreams were the grinding, buzzing engines of dirt bikes coming toward the half-collapsed Moonglow Inn. The sound echoed off the walls as Maeve sat up, heart thumping inside her chest. Her head ached and her throat burned, but she propped herself up and listened as one engine seemed to move farther away and the other drew nearer.

  She told herself it must be kids. A couple of teenagers from town, ripping through the woods on their dirt bikes. Her first boyfriend, Rick, had gotten his dirt bike thirdhand. It had been his dad’s, then his older brother’s, and by the time he’d gotten the beast it had been beaten to shit, rusted, and had bald tires. Rick had restored it the best he could, but mostly he only cared that it would run and that it had tires that could tear up the mud and rocket him along the mountain trails, even the ones where dirt bikes weren’t allowed. Fifteen-year-old Maeve Sinclair had
pretended to disapprove, but she’d loved that he liked to break the rules.

  A bout of coughing broke her reverie. Dark spittle flew from her mouth, and a wave of nausea struck her. For a few seconds, she faded out as if falling into a trance. Or a fever. In those precious seconds, the dirt bike roared nearer, loud enough that it seemed to be breathing right outside the door.

  “Idiot,” she whispered, stumbling to her feet. Dizziness washed over her as she started for the broken wall, and she staggered to the right, arms raised as if trying to walk a tightrope.

  The rain began to fall harder, a curtain of noise drawn over the whole mountain. It had a buzz of its own, so as she reached the edge of the broken wall, it took a moment to realize the dirt bike engine had gone silent. Her chest fluttered with the need to cough again, but she stifled the urge.

  The part of the inn that had slid into the gorge had left a ruined, ragged edge, but the broken wall ended a dozen feet from the cliff, so she could slip out into the storm without falling hundreds of feet to the rocks below.

  The wind pushed against her the moment she left shelter. A gust swept through the trees as if it meant to brush her over the edge, but Maeve held her footing. The storm hid the sound of her footfalls. As she reached the front of the old stone building, she glanced around the corner.

  The dirt bike lay on its side as if the rider had ditched it, but she knew that couldn’t be true. Somewhere off in the woods, the other dirt bike’s engine still roared in a rise and fall. The rain had arrived early, but rough weather had been part of the forecast. These riders were not in this part of the woods in the middle of a rainstorm merely for recreation. They were searching for something. They had a purpose, a target.

  She scanned the trees in front of the inn. In the gray gloom of the woods and the rain, the figure near the inn’s façade had to move before Maeve noted his presence. She sucked in a breath as he took a step. The rider moved quietly, carefully, thinking to find her still inside the ruin of the Moonglow. Maeve watched as he reached into his coat and slid out a handgun. The gun glistened in the rain.