Tanner stiffened, looking out the window. “Baxter came through,” he said softly, whistling under his breath.
Sure enough, in front of the park across the street, a familiar dark sedan idled. While they watched, Baxter got out of the car and scanned the interior of the park.
Tanner put some bills on the table, loaded the laptop into the backpack, put it on, and they headed for the exit.
“Tanner …”
“Hmm?”
She took a deep breath. “If—when—we get out of this, remind me that I have something to tell you.”
“You can’t tell me now?” Tanner said, holding the door open for her. Outside, dawn was breaking, the sky streaked with pink and gold. Behind Carina, a woman carrying a purse and a coffee cup smiled gratefully as Tanner held the door for her too.
Carina might have told him—what he’d come to mean to her, how close to giving up she’d come. That she needed him and couldn’t imagine life without him.
But as she opened her mouth to speak, the woman who had been behind her stepped in front of them, and her head exploded.
The woman fell facedown on the asphalt, twitching spasmodically. Screams erupted inside the restaurant. Only the fact that they were blocked by the open door had protected Carina and Tanner from the blood and gore that splattered the ground. Hovering in the air a few yards away was what looked like a huge black insect with four wings protruding from its body, each with whirring antennae, holding it aloft. As Carina watched in horror, the flaps folded in with a mechanical whir, like an origami box made by invisible hands. The thing darted left, hovering for a second, then sped away, flying up and over the roof of the building, disappearing into the lightening sky.
“Drone!” Tanner yelled, grabbing her arm. She didn’t need to be told that it was time to go, and she ran alongside him in a frantic exercise that was becoming all too familiar: putting the latest danger behind them and praying they weren’t headed into another. They raced across the parking lot, over a grassy berm in front of an office building next to the strip mall.
“Why’d it take off?” Carina asked as they leapt over a winding stone path, their movements in tandem, a stride that would have had them both placing in any long-jump event from the last track season. “I mean, it got the wrong target, right?”
She winced as she said the word. It hadn’t been a target—it had been a woman, a living, breathing human being.
“Don’t know, but I’m guessing it’s because it only had the capacity to fire one explosive. Once it delivered the payload, it’s probably programmed to return to its base.”
“So it’s like a little flying robot?”
“Yeah. And it probably isn’t the only one.”
Terror seized Carina’s nerves, turning them to ice. She stopped under the overhang at the entrance, scanning the few people outside. A custodian smoked next to his supply cart. A man with a briefcase opened the door with a key.
Frantically, she looked around, and when she saw it—a tiny dot still so high in the sky it looked like nothing more threatening than a bumblebee—she gasped.
“We have to get inside that building!” she said, pulling at Tanner’s hand.
“Car, wait—it’s going to follow us. One of us must be wearing a tracking device.”
“What? How?”
“I don’t know, but—”
Carina didn’t hear the rest because she was backing away in horror, putting distance between her and Tanner and the other people gathered near the building. There was no sign of Baxter; glancing down the street, she didn’t even see his car.
If there really was a tracking device, it would be on her, because she was the one they wanted dead. And there was no way she was risking another innocent person’s life. She didn’t know much about drone technology, but it must not have been perfected yet, since the other one had hit the wrong target.
So she would just draw it away from everyone else and then … do something. Her mind was blank, but she still had a few seconds to come up with a plan.
Except the thing was coming closer, bearing down on them at what looked like twenty-five or thirty miles an hour.
And it was headed for Tanner.
“Watch out!” Carina screamed. Tanner hadn’t seen it yet; he was crouched in a ready stance, looking all around. The drone was twenty feet away and closing in fast, and Carina did the only thing she could think of.
She raced toward it, raising her fist in the air. When she got between the drone and Tanner, it was only a few feet away, and she was close enough to see that the flaps on top had opened and a metal structure with a blinking red light had risen from its center.
The light was pointed straight at Tanner.
Carina leapt into the air, pushing off with her calves from the balls of her feet, throwing her head back and propelling herself harder than she ever had. As her momentum carried her forward, she swung her fist, and in the slow-motion shutter click of time that she had come to recognize as the virus’s way of handling sudden bursts of exertion, she saw it make contact with the drone, striking the open flaps. It careened over and over, away from them, knocked from its trajectory but not from its programmed task of firing a kill shot, because a split second later there was a crashing sound and a chunk of the overhang fell to the ground. The drone wobbled, making a sound like a shorted fuse, and fell jerkily to earth, its flaps fluttering uselessly. Carina ran to it: up close, it looked like a child’s toy, well under a foot long, its firing mechanism broken as though an overly energetic eight-year-old had played with it too zealously.
Tanner reached her side in seconds. “I don’t see any more,” he said, helping her up. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
The two men near the entrance were staring at the piece of the overhang that had fallen. The man with the cart started backing toward the side of the building, then turned and took off running. None of them seemed to notice Carina and Tanner or realize they had been the targets of the drone. Off in the distance they heard sirens for the second time that day, screaming toward the poor woman lying dead in front of the Denny’s.
They ran.
The park no longer offered the safety they needed, and Carina and Tanner hurtled down the street looking for shelter. As they passed shops, a bank, early-morning joggers, Carina’s mind raced just as frantically to figure out where they could go to be safe, without endangering others. A bunker would have been nice—some steel-walled, underground barrack where they could wait out the attack.
But the Albanians seemed determined enough to keep trying new tactics until they found one that worked. What would be next—robots armed with flamethrowers? An armored tank?
Second best would be an empty, windowless building. If nothing else, they could buy some time to figure out what to do next. But there were innocent people around: delivering newspapers, opening bakeries and coffee shops, walking to the bus stop. Carina thought of taking shelter in a car, but the risk was too great that the vehicle’s owner might come out and put himself in the line of fire by accident, even if they could find one that was unlocked.
But suddenly, up ahead, she saw a man unloading crates of soda from a truck parked outside a 7-Eleven. He positioned a final crate on a wheeled dolly and began pushing it toward the entrance.
“There!” Carina yelled, and Tanner nodded, veering off toward the truck.
Tanner kicked the ramp leading from the truck so hard that the hinges broke and it clattered to the street. He slammed the doors shut, creating an even louder commotion, and Carina knew they had very little time.
She raced around to the driver’s side, already hearing the driver screaming at her from the sidewalk, praying that the truck wouldn’t have a manual transmission. She pulled herself up and into the driver’s seat and let out a sob of relief upon seeing the keys dangling from the dashboard. Tanner was pulling himself into his own seat when she started the truck. She veered off into the street, one back wheel going over the curb and causin
g the truck to shudder and bounce. Horns blared as a pickup swerved to make room for her. She was sure they would draw the attention of any cops around; she hoped they were all responding to the Denny’s incident and the gory scene that awaited them.
“Down that side road!” Tanner yelled, pointing at the mall in the next block.
Carina swerved into the nearly empty parking lot. Along the side of the anchor store, a service lane led around to the back. She turned down it, glancing in her rearview mirror to make sure no one was following. The owner of the truck was surely calling it in right now, and as Carina pulled around behind the building she breathed a sigh of relief: with any luck they could stay hidden here for a little while.
She pulled up next to the graffiti-covered metal doors behind a kitchen-supply store and turned the engine off. For a moment she just sat with her hands glued to the wheel, breathing hard, not from exertion but from anxiety.
“Way to go, Dale Earnhardt,” Tanner said. “Didn’t know you had it in you.”
“Me either.”
Carina turned to face him as he unbuckled his seat belt, that trademark crooked grin looking only a little worse for wear.
“We lost Baxter somehow,” Carina said. Tanner pulled off the backpack and opened the top. Rummaging around inside, he handed her the disposable cell phone.
“Carina,” Tanner said softly. “It’s too late for him to help.”
Tears filled her eyes as she realized it was true. They were out of time. There was no way they could get to the lab in the next half hour, no matter how fast Baxter drove; their only hope was Sheila. Any noble fantasies Carina had had of destroying the ring and the password generator and then taking their own lives were forgotten. She couldn’t sacrifice Tanner, even if it meant the possibility of saving others.
And she knew he felt the same way.
She dialed Sheila’s number. The day she’d memorized it—standing in Sheila’s kitchen, trying to come to terms with the fact that this was going to be her new home, now that she was completely alone—seemed like it had been a century ago.
There was a click as the phone was picked up.
“Took you long enough,” Sheila said, not bothering with hello. “You’re flirting with your own death, you know that, right? But then, I guess I shouldn’t expect anything less. After all, you are your mother’s daughter.”
“She knows about my mom,” Carina said after she hung up, her throat dry.
“That she’s dead?”
“No. That she faked her own death. She’s known all along, Tanner. She said I’m my mother’s daughter.”
“That doesn’t mean anything, necessarily,” Tanner said as he took the phone back from Carina, who was gripping it so tightly he had to gently pry her fingers off. “Maybe she just found out. If her people somehow tracked us to your mom—”
“But how? We lost the security guys in the BART station. If one of us does have a tracker somehow, it’s the Albanians who are following the signal, not Sheila.”
“Sheila could have more guys after us. The entire security team, for all we know. But I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
Sheila had told Carina to sit tight, that she’d be there as fast as she could, fifteen minutes tops.
“And she’s bringing the antidote?”
“Yes, she promised.”
“Okay, well, we still need to worry about the tracker. We could be sending out a signal. And even if they’ve run out of drones, or drone cannons or whatever those things were, they could already be on their way to kill us the old-fashioned way.”
The fact that she and Tanner had put down two of their guys wasn’t going to deter them for long, Carina guessed. She shuddered to think that more armed, ruthless operatives could be on their way to the mall right now.
“It has to be me,” Tanner said. “The drone came after me.”
“So it had to be the guy with the beard who put it on you, right? Tanner, think about what happened back at the Dumpster—did he get close enough to you to attach something?”
“I—after he went down. I went over to … to make sure.” Tanner swallowed. “He wasn’t quite dead. He lunged at me. I mean, kind of threw himself at me—I got out of the way fast. I banged into the wall, hit my knee on the ground, just trying to get away from him. It felt like he just wanted to pound me, and I’m not sure I would have noticed him putting something on me.”
“But he could have—”
“Yeah.” Tanner pulled his shirt up and over his head, then began stripping off his shorts.
Carina checked every inch of the blood- and dirt-crusted cotton, finding nothing other than a few bits of twigs that had snagged on the fabric. She checked the shorts Tanner handed her too; it took longer because she had to go through every pocket, along every seam. When she was finished, Tanner got dressed again in the filthy clothes.
“Damn!” he exclaimed as he pulled the shirt back on. He was feeling along his back, a few inches behind his left armpit. “I can’t see, Car, but there’s something here.”
Carina bent close, her face only inches from his skin. There was something.… At first she thought it was a mole, but soon saw it was a metal bead, buried in his flesh.
“When he attacked me,” Tanner said. “I can’t believe I forgot that. It must have been a backup—like, if they lost their weapon they were still instructed to get the tracker on us. Wow, can you imagine the discipline it would take? If you knew you were finished, you were basically dead, but you still kept your wits about you enough to help the next guy finish the job?”
Carina didn’t want to think about it. “The tracker was supposed to be for me,” she said. “You were just in the way.”
“You were over in the van with the other guy. I guess he figured it was better than nothing. Can you get it out?”
“Yeah, I’ll just pull …”
She closed her thumbnail and fingernail around the small bead and tugged. To her surprise, it didn’t move.
“Ow!” Tanner exclaimed. “I mean, sorry, don’t mind me, just keep pulling. But shit, that hurt.”
Carina squinted and looked closer. She’d thought the device was attached with a simple needle, like the dart containing the poison, but when she tugged at it, the skin didn’t give way. It must have exploded on impact, embedding itself with multiple barbs, much like a fishhook.
“You sure you want me to do this?” Carina asked doubtfully. Given the technology that the Albanians had proved capable of, she was afraid to find out what would happen.
“You have to,” Tanner said, gritting his teeth.
So Carina anchored her fingers around the bit of metal, took a deep breath, and pulled with all her might.
The sound Tanner made was like that of a wounded bear, half growl and half cry. What came out in Carina’s hand was unbelievable: the bead was connected to half a dozen long, narrow blades jutting outward from the center; these had lanced under the skin and through Tanner’s tissues on impact, anchoring the device firmly; but when they were torn free they left behind pulped, bloody flesh.
Carina sat frozen, staring at the spiderlike assemblage of metal and plastic with an electronic chip at its core. It was easily four inches across, and it had left a wound at least that large on Tanner’s back.
“God, I hope I don’t faint,” Tanner said weakly, clamping his hand over the mess, blood streaming through his fingers. “Get that thing out of here, please, or I will have given up the left side of my body for no good reason.”
Carina snapped out of her shock. “Be right back,” she promised. Then she was out of the truck and running, fast, around the side of the mall. She passed a few employees heading toward the entrance, deliverymen and maintenance workers.
She didn’t know how much time she had. How long had it been since she’d called Sheila—five minutes? Ten? She ran through the parking lot, threading her way between cars, the thing in her hand still warm from Tanner’s body.
Up ahead, an area of the parking lot w
as roped off where they were repairing the median. The earthmoving equipment sat idle and unoccupied; the crew probably wouldn’t return until Monday. Perfect. When she got within several car lengths from the edge, she threw the tracker as hard as she could, watching it bounce off the edge of the bulldozer’s giant tire before coming to rest in a mound of dirt.
Thoughts of Tanner alone and bleeding made Carina turn and run back. She rounded the corner of the mall again, mindful of people staring at her, hoping they wouldn’t report her to mall security.
There—the truck was where she had left it. She ran for the door and jerked it open, pulling herself up into the driver’s seat and slamming the door behind her.
Tanner was gone.
The backpack was abandoned on the floor. The empty passenger seat was smeared with blood. On the door handle, a bloody handprint.
“Oh God, Tanner, oh no!” Carina wailed.
Behind her, the driver’s-side door was flung open. Carina twisted around in her seat, staring down at Sheila.
The woman gave her a smile that made up in irritation and impatience what it lacked in warmth.
“Looking for your boyfriend?”
“What have you done with him?”
Sheila stepped nimbly out of the way as Carina lunged. Behind her, Baxter waited, leaning back against his long, sleek sedan. It was idling in the shadow of the building, which was how Carina had missed it as she’d run from the truck.
“Baxter …,” she breathed in disbelief. Had he turned them in? Or was he only here because Sheila had summoned him? His face was unreadable behind the mirrored sunglasses.
“Your boyfriend’s fine, other than that hole in his back that he refuses to explain,” Sheila said wearily. “Also, he insists that you went out to get a bagel, but you don’t seem to have one.… Did they run out?”
Carina took a deep breath to keep herself from punching Sheila in the face. “I have to warn you, Sheila, I do not have a lot of impulse control at the moment,” she snarled. “See, there’s this virus that is doing all kinds of crap to me, and I don’t think I can be held responsible for what I do to you.”
Infected Page 15
