Red Hands: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  It felt nice.

  Better.

  Shouts from overhead made her twist around to stare at the Blackcoats gliding down into the gorge on ropes. They shoved off the wall, dropped swiftly, and the first to reach the ground unclipped themselves from the ropes, reaching for their weapons. Idly, it occurred to her that they were going to kill her, and that would be all right.

  But they would also kill Rose and Priya and Walker.

  And they worked for the motherfuckers who had infected Oscar Hecht.

  She ran toward the soldiers who had dropped into the gorge about fifty feet away. Others were still rappelling down the rock walls. Maeve smiled to herself as she leaped from stone to stone, closing the distance between them with inhuman speed. Inhuman. She embraced the word and the savagery that went with it.

  Soldiers saw her coming when she’d crossed half the distance already.

  Somewhere behind her, Rose and Priya and Walker would be watching, or maybe they would be in the midst of their own fight. A tremor of shame for what she had become passed through her, but she pushed it away—too late for that.

  Bullets strafed her from above, chipping away at the rocks behind her. Too slow to catch her. The hunger of the Red Death ached in her bones, no longer a gnawing in her gut or a whisper in her skull but part of her now. Or simply … her.

  The first two soldiers to unclip from the ropes let their guns hang from the straps around their necks, reaching for Tasers instead. They had time to take aim and fire, the Tasers stinging her. They were eager, ambitious, and they had thought to capture her alive.

  In gratitude, she smashed their skulls against the stone wall of the gorge.

  “Holy—” a Blackcoat shouted, a dozen feet to her right. The woman shouldered her weapon, pulled the trigger, interrupted herself so that she never finished that sentence.

  Maeve wondered what the next word would have been. There were so many possibilities.

  Instead, bullets sprayed the gorge. The woman’s eyes were narrowed with purpose. Instead of fear, the Blackcoat had determination, and Maeve admired that. A bullet tore through her right side, cracked bones, skidded along her rib cage, and exited out her back. Another tore off her left ear.

  Then Maeve landed on the Blackcoat, ripped off her face mask, and spit in her eyes.

  She threw her head back, screaming in triumph and ecstasy as infection raced through the Blackcoat’s body. Bloodstream. Lungs. Skin. Brain.

  The Red Death sprang up from the shuddering, dying woman and turned to look up at the other soldiers as they descended.

  They were coming for her.

  She eagerly awaited them.

  24

  Walker could have made the river. He knew it. The water ran deep and fast; more importantly, it ran south and away from this shitshow. If he ran, dove, swam underwater for as long as he could hold his breath, and if they didn’t have a sharpshooter with a scope talented enough to pick him off when his head bobbed above the water downriver … he could survive this.

  Gun in hand, he tried and failed to catch his breath. He’d been under fire before. Nearly died multiple times. Inhaled the presence of evil. Climbed down a mountain with a demon trying to murder him. Been in an ordinary firefight, caught shrapnel from a terrorist’s roadside bomb, watched a woman’s bones crack and shift under her skin while she turned into something inhuman, and heard a nest of tiny, winged serpents whisper his name. But this was the first time his own government had tried to kill him, and it really pissed him off.

  Go, he thought. For Charlie’s sake.

  “Walker!” Rose screamed.

  He spun to see her glance around the side of the slab that blocked the cave entrance. Walker wanted to shout to her that she and Priya needed to get inside, but he would only be telling Rose something she already knew. She was a grown woman.

  “Give me a goddamn gun!” she shouted.

  He frowned. As if he had a gun to spare.

  Rose shouted again, something different about her voice this time. He glanced back and saw her pointing, looked up, and saw two soldiers coming down into the gorge right above him. One of them had a weapon aimed straight down at Walker. The show-off thought he lived in a James Bond movie, that he could actually manage to track a steady aim while bouncing off the rock wall.

  The Blackcoats overhead shouted something at Walker, ignoring Rose and Priya because they were unarmed. Walker put his hands up as if he meant to surrender. The show-off barked orders down at him. A third flare burst into the air above the gorge. The second had faded almost to nothing, and now Walker got a good look at these two guys who were coming for him and he scowled. The jackass showboating while he rappelled couldn’t have been more than twenty-two.

  Walker shot him in the ass.

  He’d been aiming for the leg, but in the midst of his fear and desperation, he found room to laugh as the Blackcoat shouted in pain, arched his back, and tumbled off the wall. The rope had a safety line that snagged him ten feet from the ground. He jerked and bounced on the line, upside down, eyes rolling in pain. His hands dangled underneath him, gun drooping.

  “Careful,” Walker called up to him. “You’re gonna drop that.”

  He jumped up and tore the gun from the Blackcoat’s hands.

  The second one kept shouting his partner’s name—Puglisi—and trying to get a clear shot at Walker, who stayed under Puglisi like the guy was his umbrella. Puglisi bled on him, swore at him, called angrily to God to damn Walker for shooting him in the ass and how could being shot in the ass hurt this goddamn much.

  Walker didn’t have an answer for him, but he used the time wisely.

  Holstering his sidearm, Walker opened fire with the HK the Blackcoat had so kindly brought to him. Bullets had been chipping away at the rocks around him for minutes now. More Blackcoats were coming down into the gorge. The moments when he could reasonably believe they had any way out of this disaster were ticking away, but he kept firing. In his mind, he pictured General Wagner burning in hell. He hoped it existed, hoped the general found his way there.

  “Rose!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Priya! We’re going into the water! It’s the only way!”

  “You’re fucking crazy!” Rose called.

  Up to his left, bullets chipped stone. Several of the Blackcoats had gotten into position where they might actually kill him. He had stuffed himself between a slab and the wall, with Rose and Priya sandwiched between the next slab and the cave opening.

  He should have run the seven or eight steps and launched himself into the river. He knew that. His son waited at home, and he had spent enough years nearly making Charlie fatherless while trying to save some other kid’s parents or some other parent’s kids.

  Maeve had been his assignment, and he had been determined to get her off the mountain alive, but he peered around the corner of the slab and saw her along the riverbank. She had a Blackcoat by the collar and smashed his face against the wall again and again, crushing his skull and pulping his face.

  Is that even Maeve? Or is Maeve already gone?

  More of them dropped toward her. Walker exhaled. They were so focused on her that he might have been able to get away, but if he left Rose and Priya to go home to his own son, he wouldn’t ever be able to hold his head up. There was only one way to make it home to Charlie.

  He took aim and pulled the trigger again, wondering how many Blackcoats he would have to kill.

  His earwig buzzed. David Boudreau, he figured. Or Joel, or Rue Crooker.

  “About goddamn time,” he muttered as he tapped the plastic nub in his ear. “Whoever this is, you’d better have a way out of this.”

  “Hello, Benjamin,” a soft voice rasped. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you.”

  “Alena?” Walker snapped. He took aim and shot another of the Blackcoats descending toward Maeve. “That was the world’s longest fucking meeting. Tell me you got the DoD to override General Wagner!”

  “Oh, I did,”
Alena assured him. “But our friend the general has stopped answering his calls. He’s ignoring the chain of command.”

  Walker sighed, ducking behind the slab again. He looked up, searching the dying flare light for any movement overhead. The Blackcoats were more interested in Maeve than they were in him or Rose and Priya, but that wouldn’t last forever.

  “Fantastic,” Walker growled. “Now what the fuck are we supposed to do?”

  “Keep your head down.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to—”

  “Dear Benjamin,” Alena said. “I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely forthright with you.”

  As if that had been a cue, a fresh round of gunfire ripped through the gorge, but these bullets were coming from the north. Blackcoats rappelling down the wall took heavy fire. Some were shot and others tried to take cover behind ledges and outcroppings. Walker looked up at the western rim of the gorge, saw a Blackcoat jerk backward, clutching his chest, and tumble over the side.

  “Alena,” he said.

  No reply. His earwig fuzzed with static.

  The call had ended.

  The fight continued.

  * * *

  Rose helped Priya back into the cave. The bullets could not chase them in, but the sounds followed, echoing and ricocheting loudly enough to hurt their ears. In the darkness, the mouth of the cave glowing with the flickering red light from the flares drifting down into the gorge, they held each other. Rose could feel Priya’s heart beating against her chest, warm breath on her neck. She cupped the back of Priya’s neck and clasped her even more tightly, as if the two women could merge if only they loved one another hard enough.

  Rose sank into Priya’s arms, wishing she could stay there, but instead she pulled away.

  “No,” Priya said, grabbing her wrist, eyes blazing. “We stay here. It’s not us they’re trying to kill. They don’t care about us. We stay here until they find us or until the sun comes up and it’s all over. Do you understand me?”

  Rose did understand. She averted her eyes. “Maeve…”

  “You can’t save her!” Priya snapped, wincing at the pain in her wounded shoulder. She released Rose’s wrist and took hold of her face instead, forced Rose to meet her gaze. “She’s been dead since the parade—since that asshole infected her. You know this. She’s too sick to carry this for long. One way or another, she’s as good as dead. But you…”

  Priya’s sternness collapsed into a sob. She pressed her lips together in a tight line. “You’ve lost so much. You and your dad, that’s all you have left. And me, Rose … you have me. Just stay here with me, quiet. Just hold me till it’s over.”

  Rose had never wanted anything more in her life. For a few seconds, she even thought she might do it. But as she inhaled the scent of the one she loved, images burst through. Memories of her mother and Logan. Of her dad and Maeve.

  Maeve.

  Grief opened under Rose like a gravity well, yet she knew her anguish must only be a pale shade of the pain Maeve felt. The horror and guilt and regret. And Maeve had that sickness rotting her from the inside, eating away at all the things that gave her identity. That gave her life.

  “I’m sorry, love,” Rose said quietly, the words almost obliterated by gunshot echoes. “You’ll be safer here. I’ll be back for you.”

  Priya sighed, breath hitching. Tears spilled from her eyes, shimmering in the red flare light.

  Rose kissed her, lingering, and then pressed her forehead against Priya’s for a few moments before she pulled away and stepped out of the cave without a backward glance.

  Screams and bullets soared through the gorge. Rose slid along the side of the stone slab that blocked her view, lay flat against it, and crawled up far enough to get a glimpse northward. She spotted Walker immediately, sheltering behind the next slab to the north. He leaned out, assault rifle in his hands, and opened fire on two Blackcoats who were still descending.

  Rose climbed up a bit farther. She heard screams and managed to peer over the top of the slab, where she had a view of the floor of the gorge and the broad swath of rocks and slabs that made up the riverbank. She saw Maeve there, fighting, half a dozen dead men strewn around her as if she were building herself a fort out of corpses.

  One of them moved.

  Not dead yet.

  Gun out, taking aim.

  Rose screamed as the Blackcoat fired. Bullets stitched across Maeve’s back, punching her forward. She arched, let out a plaintive sound that carried through the gorge in spite of the barrage of gunfire, and then she sprawled onto the ground amid the scrub grass. In the guttering light of the bloody-red flare, Rose could see her sister’s body jerking, legs twitching, as if she were trying to move, trying to rise, trying to keep fighting.

  A fresh pair of flares soared into the air over the gorge, tiny red suns that cast their crimson glow over the grotesque panorama playing out below. Rose blinked, felt little breaths escaping her body, lay on that stone slab and stared at Maeve. She remembered what her sister had told her, the way Maeve had described the visions she’d had. “Like little glimpses into someone else’s hell,” Maeve had said.

  The flares colored the night red, and Rose knew she was staring into her sister’s hell.

  Rose pushed up onto her feet, standing atop the slab. Gunfire echoed around the gorge, but it seemed far from her now, as if she were already a ghost and such crude violence existed in the land of the living.

  “No!” Priya screamed, stumbling from the cave. “Rose, don’t—”

  But Rose had already dropped over the edge of the slab. By the time Priya scrabbled up to the perch she’d vacated, Rose had already clambered over the next one. Walker had been hiding behind it and must still be somewhere nearby, but the aperture through which she viewed the world had narrowed to include only Maeve.

  Rose ran to her, hoping for the impossible.

  The men who’d shot Maeve turned toward Rose with their guns, and she ignored them, calling her sister’s name. When she reached Maeve’s body, already thinking of it that way—her body—she halted, staring down at the blood pooling on the dirt and scrub grass. The Blackcoats barked at her to back away, to put up her hands or she would join her sister, and that sounded all right with Rose, but somehow she managed to raise her shaking hands. She tasted salt on her lips and only then felt the warm stripes of tears on her cheeks. There had been so many tears that she idly wondered if it was possible for a person’s tears to run dry.

  “Maeve?” She knelt beside her sister.

  The gunmen screamed again. Shifting position, taking aim, growing shriller the way some men did when they weren’t being obeyed.

  Rose saw all of this in her peripheral vision, her conscious mind only vaguely taking note.

  Maeve groaned. She struggled to roll onto her side, shuddering, blood burbling from her lips. As Rose reached toward her, Maeve managed to shake her head, eyes full of sorrow. In their lives, they had shared the joy and anger so many sisters felt, closeness that outsiders could never understand, mutual hostility that made for fragile reunions, laughter over jokes no one else would find amusing, the pain of watching their parents’ marriage decay and collapse.

  “Don’t,” Maeve said.

  Dying.

  The men with their Kevlar armor and their guns kept shouting. One of them took a knee, aimed straight at Rose’s head, roared at her to back away from the body.

  The body, and Maeve wasn’t even dead yet. Rose had thought of her that way, but this felt different, offensive. Intrusive. Rose did not want Maeve to be the body, but this man, this hollowed-out, blackhearted bastard, had the gleam of excitement in his eyes. Thrilled to lay claim to the body.

  Rose met his gaze. There were others around, more than she’d realized. Beyond these two were three more, two of them women. Others rappelled to the floor of the gorge just thirty feet to the north.

  Maeve would not live.

  Rose knew that.

  But she’d be damned if the people w
ho had created the infection that killed her would ever lay a hand on her.

  Rose heard Priya crying out for her. She wished she could tell herself Priya would understand, but knew she never would.

  Rose did it, anyway.

  Slid forward and put her sister’s head into her lap.

  The Blackcoat’s finger tightened on the trigger. Rose flinched as gunshots cracked the air close by, but it was the Blackcoat who jerked backward. His gun flew from his grip, and then a second bullet struck him in the left cheek and he fell dead to the ground. Two other Blackcoats died, bullets tearing into them, and the rest lunged for cover.

  “Rose, what have you done?”

  She didn’t turn, but she knew the voice belonged to Walker. He had been there, behind the stone slab, fighting. He’d been shooting at the Blackcoats at the rim of the gorge and the ones coming down the walls, trying to keep their bullets away from the Sinclair sisters. But Rose didn’t care about bullets anymore.

  She caressed Maeve’s face, wiped her tears and blood. Rose would have forgiven her, but there was nothing to forgive. Maeve had been wild with grief, needing someone to blame for the deaths of their mother and Logan, and Rose had wanted to hate her. Now she only wanted Maeve to feel loved, to know she was not alone in the end.

  Rose watched the light dim in her sister’s eyes and then go out. Maeve’s head lolled to one side, her body going slack.

  Then Rose’s hands began to itch and grow warm. She felt a twinge in her gut.

  Was that a whisper she heard, inside her skull?

  Rose thought it might be.

  * * *

  No. You can’t have her.

  Maeve had never been pregnant. She didn’t know what it might feel like to have life grow within her. She imagined the thing inside her as more like cancer—not a single tumor but tendrils of it, vines of black rot sending shoots through her bones, wrapping around her arteries, rooting in every muscle. Life, though. Sentient, the way a fetus might be. And like a fetus, it had been growing stronger and maturer, developing into something aware and full of purpose.