Red Hands: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  Rue managed to make all of that sound almost rational in her mind, as long as she didn’t let her thoughts stray to the tragic flaw in her logic. It was simple enough to believe Garland Mountain had made such breakthroughs, malicious mad scientist bastards that they were. But it was one thing to believe an infection could be transmitted so quickly, another thing entirely to swallow the idea that it would travel through the human body fast enough to kill in an instant. Absorbed through the pores, carried into the bloodstream, surfacing as suppurating sores, corrupting the lungs … she couldn’t call it impossible because she had seen it. The effect was demonstrable, and Rue had no doubt that if Maeve touched her now, she would die the same way and with equal swiftness.

  It just wasn’t logical.

  “It hurts my fucking head,” she whispered.

  “What’s that?” a voice said behind her.

  Rue jumped up from the sofa, turning around, one hand over her heart. “Jesus, Ted, you scared the life out of me.”

  He smiled weakly. “There’s enough of that going around.”

  Rue’s eyes widened at the poor joke, and Ted, realizing what he’d said, lifted a hand to cover his mouth. Grief clawed at the expression on his face, but he shook it off with a huff.

  “Any word?” he asked, still muzzy from the whiskey.

  There were dark circles under his eyes, and she couldn’t help wondering if there were pills of any kind in the house. All he’d taken for the pain of his injuries had been whiskey and ibuprofen, and the allure of a stronger painkiller had to be powerful, especially for someone with an addict’s memory of drug-induced bliss.

  She pushed the thought away. Ted was stronger than that. He had to be.

  “Nothing,” Rue said, closing her notebook.

  Ted shook his head sadly. “I should have gone.” He shot her an accusatory glance. “I should be up there right now.”

  “You’re not in any shape to do that, Ted. And there are dangerous people up there—”

  “That’s exactly why I should have gone. My daughter is—”

  “Maeve is one of those dangerous people,” Rue said. “She needs you alive. She needs you here when she comes home.”

  They had been friends a long time, but Rue had never seen him like this. Tormenting himself. Hating himself.

  “You’re a good man,” she said. “You always were. You’ve suffered loss today that most people can’t even imagine. Nobody expects you to—”

  Ted threw up his hands. Tears came to his eyes. “Jesus, Rue, don’t you get it? I expect me to. I need to be a better father than this. Ellen would have expected me to be stronger than…”

  He trailed off, wincing and favoring the side where he’d cracked three ribs.

  “Who am I kidding? Strong people don’t become addicts. Strong people don’t have to tell themselves they can give up drinking whenever they want.”

  Rue went to him, took his hands, forced him to look into her eyes. “You’re a sensible man, a good man, a good father. Addiction is complex, but I know this much—it had its claws in you pretty damn deep, and you ripped those claws right out. I saw the way it hollowed you out, Ted. But you came back to life.”

  He smiled softly, still half-drunk, pale with pain and grief. “Nice try, Crooker. But I’m still a drunk.”

  “One monster at a time, buddy,” she replied, tapping a finger on his chest. “One monster at a time.”

  “You don’t think I’m letting them down? Letting Ellen down?”

  “She’s gone,” Rue said. “She and Logan both. But her daughters are alive. Ellen would want you to do what was best for them, and you know it. I don’t have kids, but I know it must make you want to scream, just sitting around and waiting. But we’ve covered this. You were hit by a car. You’re a wreck. They could be anywhere by now. Just stay here. Be the sanctuary they will need when they come down off the mountain.”

  “A whiskey-soaked sanctuary.”

  “If that’s the way it has to be,” she replied.

  Ted looked as if he wanted to argue, but instead he pulled her into a quick hug, rested his head on her shoulder a moment, and then turned away.

  As he did, the doorbell rang.

  Rue turned toward the sound, but Ted rushed by her, hurrying out to the foyer fueled by hope and desperation. She arrived in his wake, just as he opened the front door. Rue would have told him to be careful, all sorts of dark fears surfacing in the back of her mind, but the door already hung open and she looked over Ted’s shoulder at Chief Kaminski.

  Ted stared at him. “Please tell me something good—”

  “No news either way, I’m afraid. Not yet,” Kaminski said. He looked past Ted. “It’s actually Rue I needed to see.”

  Ted visibly deflated. He turned and wandered back into the living room as if he’d forgotten Kaminski had arrived. Rue watched him go, tempted to get him another glass of whiskey, hating that temptation.

  She looked at the chief. “What’s going on?”

  Kaminski reached into his pocket and withdrew a small nub of black plastic. “Communications earpiece. You ever use something like this?”

  Rue took it, brows knitting as she lifted it to the light and turned it over. “Not exactly like it, but I have AirPods for my phone.”

  “Same basic idea. Walker asked me to give you this. Hoped you’d use it, monitor, wait for him to be in touch.”

  She held it in her palm. “He wanted you to give this to me?”

  “Said he might need someone with your science brain down here, in town. Seemed like a compliment to me.”

  Rue closed her fist around the little plastic nub and shook it like a die. “I suppose. The kind of compliment that could get a woman killed. But I’ll help however I can. I don’t think this thing’ll do much good, though. The cell towers are jammed.”

  Chief Kaminski smiled. “This one doesn’t need cell towers. I’m headed back up the mountain. Someone’s got to keep the damn Blackcoats from pushing my officers around. Meanwhile, give Walker a call. Maybe he can put a stop to this clusterfuck before it gets any worse.”

  * * *

  Priya would never tell Rose, but she had begun to give up hope. The day had started hot, but once the wind and rain arrived the temperature had dropped precipitously, and up on the mountain with the breeze and the clouds, soaked to the skin, she felt a chill settling in. The humidity made it hard to breathe. Her feet squelched inside her shoes. She would have sold both kidneys for a cup of coffee.

  Half an hour earlier, they’d heard what sounded like a bear lumbering through the trees, and she had spotted a deer a few minutes later, but the animal had bolted. Other than that, the nearest living thing seemed to be the pilot of the helicopter that made regular sweeps over the mountain. Priya didn’t mention it to Rose, but the presence of the chopper reassured her. If they were still looking for Maeve, that meant she hadn’t been captured yet and hopefully that she was still alive.

  She exhaled, tugging on Rose’s hand. “Sorry. Can we take a breather?”

  Rose kissed her fingers. “Of course.”

  Grateful, Priya sat on a large rock and scanned the trees around them. Water dripped off the leaves. Little streams ran along the path, pooling beside thick roots, finding a path down the mountain. Pine needles and leaves were carried away.

  She looked up to find Rose watching her. “What?” she asked.

  “You’re going to make me say it? That we’re wasting our time?”

  Priya exhaled. It was one thing to think it, another to hear the words spoken aloud. “I’m not going to say that. I’m with you, no matter how long we’re up here. But I admit I’m worried about the rain. Even if we knew how to track someone, we’re just guessing.”

  Rose turned to stare along the trail in the direction they’d been headed. “If she started on the Jackrabbit Trail, she’d have kept going east. That’d bring her to the gorge eventually, and she knows the gorge from fishing with my dad. She knows there are caves down there. She�
�s going to need time to figure out her next step, somewhere to sleep tonight, out of the rain. If it were me, that’s where I’d go.”

  Priya felt a flicker of hope. Or maybe it was just that she had faith in Rose. “The gorge it is,” she said, rising from the rock. “You know how to get down there from here?”

  Rose shrugged. “More or less.”

  Priya saw motion out of the corner of her eye, a ghostly figure that seemed to separate from the trees without a sound. The white woman couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. The silver of her shoulder-length hair might have been natural or come out of a bottle, but either way, it added to her haunting pallor, as did the gleaming silver pistol in her hand.

  “Hey, no,” she muttered, holding her hands out to make sure the woman knew they didn’t represent any kind of threat.

  Rose stepped between Priya and the gun. “Who the hell are you?”

  The little silver-haired killer ignored the question. “You’re Rose Sinclair. Your sister is Maeve, the woman from the video. The one with the death touch.”

  They weren’t questions.

  The killer lowered her weapon, but it hung at her side, deceptively loose. Just from the way she stood and the dull, dead light in her eyes, Priya knew the gun was far from dormant. It might as well have been a snake, coiled to strike.

  “You can call me Agatha,” the woman said, with an accent Priya didn’t recognize. “I’m bored to tears, honestly. Sick of trailing you two. I’m glad to hear you’ve got at least some idea of where to look for your sister; otherwise, I would have been very angry.”

  “What do you want with Maeve?” Rose asked.

  Agatha lifted the big silver gun again, the barrel’s mouth giving them a dark wink. “Lead the way, Rose. If I get the impression you’re intentionally wasting my time, I’ll put a bullet through your pretty girlfriend’s head.”

  “You do that,” Rose said, “and you’ll never get what you want from us.”

  Priya grabbed a fistful of Rose’s shirt and whispered to her. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  The woman grinned, left eye half-hidden behind the silver hair the rain had plastered across her face. “Let me tell you something now that may help you later on.”

  The gun barely twitched before she fired a bullet into the ground. It kicked up dirt and rainwater just inches from Rose’s left foot.

  “I kill for a living, and sometimes for pleasure. It took more effort just now for me to avoid killing you than it would to put a bullet in your heart,” she said. “So let’s go, shall we?”

  Rose touched Priya’s arm, encircled her wrist, and gave her a tug. The echo of the gunshot still rang in her ears as she turned to follow Rose along the trail, with Agatha—whoever she really was—keeping pace ten feet behind. Whoever she was, Priya had no doubt this woman intended either to capture Maeve or simply murder her, and there was no way she could let that happen. Rose had lost enough.

  Contrary to her own advice, Priya had a feeling she was going to have to do something very, very stupid.

  13

  Walker slid the TAGI goggles down to hang around his neck as he trekked through the rain. Any hope he’d had of following Maeve’s trail had turned to mud, just like the ground underfoot. He had seen that parachutist floating toward the trees and he’d needed to make a split decision. Whoever had that chute would also be searching for Maeve, and he’d banked on them having more intel than he did, or at least a more efficient way to track her. It was a thin strand of hope to hang on to, but for the moment it was all he had.

  Which troubled him.

  Where are the satellites? he thought. American spy satellites could focus with such clarity that surveillance could count the whiskers in a man’s beard. In the rain and through the trees, that might be more difficult, but Alena should be able to get some satellite surveillance of this damned mountain, give him some help.

  Walker wondered if he’d been set up to fail. According to her reputation, Alena Boudreau didn’t operate like that, but his doubts grew with every step. He had anticipated field support, more intel, more everything upon his arrival here. Instead, he had been dropped into town with zero guarantee of backup, and when he’d called in, the person on the line had been David Boudreau, Alena’s grandson. The assignment felt very quiet, very insular, and it had his thoughts awhirl.

  Whoever the parachutist was, they wouldn’t have dropped onto the mountain without some sense of Maeve’s location. Walker figured they had their own satellite surveillance working for them or some other way to find her. Which meant they either weren’t American, or the Department of Defense didn’t know Alena had sent Walker onto this mountain.

  Or both.

  He didn’t like where this train of thought was heading, but he couldn’t stop its progress. He had gotten himself into hot water with his bosses, and they had benched him until they felt they could trust him again, which he had known might be never. His employers had been furious at him for dropping the only sample of a potentially deadly bacterium into the ocean, but mostly because they wanted that contagion for themselves.

  Of course they had sidelined him. The fact they hadn’t court-martialed him or found some other way to lock him up could only be ascribed to their own self-preservation. He had saved a lot of lives, but even his friends had told him he would never be put into the field again, that nobody would trust him.

  Yet here he was. In the field, alone, at the behest of a woman who claimed to have been put in charge of a new operation—the Global Science Research Coalition—just yesterday, and who needed his help.

  How many times had Walker slipped something useful out of DARPA because nobody had been paying attention? Because, in that moment, it was an item nobody needed? That was him, Walker knew. Put into a box on a shelf or stored away in some climate-controlled warehouse like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders. And Alena Boudreau had sneaked in and snatched him off the shelf.

  Soaked with rain, sick of trudging, covered with scratches, he knew the conclusion was inescapable. Alena had sent him up here because she didn’t have anyone else to send and because he was expendable. She’d also sent him because he had a history of rash behavior, and if he fucked up, she could say it wasn’t her fault, that was just Walker being Walker.

  He trudged onward, growing more determined. One man, by himself, without a trail to follow, had almost zero chance of locating Maeve now, if she didn’t want to be found.

  But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try.

  Walker slowed his pace, quieting his steps as he drew toward the area where the chutist had landed. From a distance, it was always difficult to gauge perfectly, but he felt he must be very close. Pausing, he closed his eyes and listened. Sure enough, he could hear the patter of the rain striking smooth nylon, and he started off to his left, slightly northward. Fifty feet through the trees and over a fallen oak, he saw the chute tangled in the trees. Whoever had arrived had dropped to the forest floor and run off into the woods.

  He reached up to slide his goggles back into place and tapped the side to power them on again. Instantly, the new arrival’s footfalls were revealed. A smile lifted one corner of his mouth as he followed the trail of broken branches and the heat of the chutist’s passing. Given how quickly he’d closed the distance, he gauged he wasn’t more than ten minutes behind.

  Walker inhaled the scents of the forest and the rain, and his mind went back to the way this day had begun. He should have been in Virginia, camping in the mountains, swimming in the river with Charlie. If he closed his eyes, even for a moment, he could see the frustration and disappointment on his son’s face. Charlie had grown up with broken promises and long absences that must have seemed like disinterest. Walker loved his son, but it wouldn’t have felt like love to Charlie. Quite the opposite. In the nine months he had been benched, he had worked hard to repair their relationship.

  Walker’s own father had let him down so many times, in so many ways, that he always promised hi
mself he’d never inflict that kind of hurt on Charlie. For years, he had told himself his situation was different. As a child, he had felt invisible in his own house. His father had been there in the flesh, but emotionally absent, usually halfway drunk and surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke. He’d been afraid of his own shadow, and his cowardice had filled him with such self-loathing that he’d gone off to Iraq to prove he could muster up some courage when his country needed him.

  He’d died there.

  Every time Walker lost himself in his work, every time an assignment took him away from home for weeks or months at a time, he told himself it wasn’t abandonment. Lied to himself to make it okay. Good thing I don’t need you, Charlie had said today.

  Walker’s father had been frightened of shadows, but Walker himself only feared one thing—that Charlie had been telling the truth.

  He hadn’t forgotten the exchange he’d had with Amanda this morning, either. It had been three years since their split, and he still remembered the smell of her hair and the way she had curled against him in the middle of the night, and the times he’d woken up with her nestled into the crook of his arm. There had been women since Amanda, one in particular. Seong didn’t want anything to do with him now, and that was all right. He understood the choice she’d made. Amanda, though …

  Walker wanted to get off this mountain.

  His earwig buzzed. He tapped it.

  “I’m here.”

  “Is this Dr. Walker?”

  A woman’s voice, but not Alena’s. It took him a second to realize who it had to be. “Dr. Crooker?”

  “Any luck in your search?”

  Walker saw the bright flare above the path that indicated a branch had broken, and he frowned. The parachutist had gone this way, no doubt, but Walker did not want to catch up with him while talking to Rue. He slowed down, glanced both ways through the woods. If the chutist was close enough to hear his voice, he would hear the noise if the guy made a run for it.