Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  “No.” This came from Scalli, whose voice had become a deep rumble. The big man turned in his seat, looking between the three of them. “You girls stay in the truck. Mason and I are going.”

  Bobbi felt her face catch on fire. “No way in hell,” she began, but Scalli gave her such a stern look that she fell quiet as if she’d been slapped.

  Scalli continued. “I’m not convinced that this is a settlement,” he began, “or that it ever was. Bobbi and I have been to places that looked perfectly normal already, and they turned out to be hellholes. Now I know Bobbi hasn’t told you two, but about a week before we came to Tenleytown we hit up an old office building in the Verge that until recently had been Old City territory. It was supposed to be a Genefex building, like a computer lab – turned out to be a hell of a lot more than that.”

  Scalli told them the story of the horrors that unfolded in Data Nexus 231, of the Chorus and what had happened to Freida. As he spoke, Bobbi watched Diana’s face slacken with disbelief – but in Mason’s eyes, she was surprised to see grim recognition there, and finally a certain glitter of satisfaction when Scalli told how they’d collapsed the building.

  “Fucking good riddance,” Mason said when Scalli had finished.

  “Yeah,” Scalli replied. He was looking at Mason a little strangely as well – Bobbi was sure that he had seen the same thing that she had. “In any case, whatever these sick fuckers are up to, that’s what we think is going on in these places. You ask me, a ‘Drone Nexus’ or whatever they’re calling it is going to—”

  “Drone Processor,” Bobbi corrected him.

  “Right. A ‘Drone Processor’ sounds almost like…a factory. I think it’s a place where they make more of these things out of people. And this place is a stop on the line to get there. Now if it’s hiding another Genefex facility, however bombed-out, I think Harry here will agree with me when I say that it’s not a place for anyone but hardened badasses— and I hope you two will forgive me, but I think only he and I apply.” Scalli looked at Diana and Bobbi in turn. “Would you disagree?”

  Bobbi frowned, but she really couldn’t argue with him. Well, she could, but it would be out of a position of stubbornness and not any kind of sense. She drew a deep breath. “Fine,” she said, spreading her hands, “fine. I guess I really can’t argue with that.”

  “I sure as hell could,” Diana muttered. “But I won’t if you’re sure, Harry.”

  Mason nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “A recon man and an assault specialist? I think we could do a lot worse. We’ll keep in contact on the radio.”

  Diana nodded at the bandage around Mason’s bicep. “You gonna be okay with that?”

  He gave Diana a wide grin. “Like it never even happened already,” said Mason, and he winked. “Now you two hang out here and keep an eye on things. Di, how much brass do we have left for that thirty-cal?”

  “A hundred rounds?” She nodded toward Bobbi, or rather just under her. “She’s sitting on another can.”

  Mason nodded. “All right. Well, let’s see what we can’t find out, then, shall we?”

  Not long after, the two men were creeping across the parking lot toward the breached grocery. Bobbi and Diana sat watching them from the relative safety of the armored truck; they sat in the back seat and looked out the rear driver’s side window, the armored hatch covering it lifted and propped open. The cool, stained afternoon air drifted in, its passing the only sound in their ears. Mason and Scalli, starting off by sneaking among the concrete barriers toward their destination, had quickly proceeded far enough that their footfalls could not be heard and their shapes grew distant.

  “Look at ‘em go,” Diana said. “Your man’s a mother of a mover.”

  “Mason isn’t too bad either,” she said. “I heard you two were talking last night.”

  “A little.” Diana smiled quietly. “He sure can use his tongue.”

  Bobbi felt herself color slightly.

  “Shame about the rest, though.”

  Bobbi looked at Diana then, and blinked. “Wait,” she said. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing down there.” Diana shrugged. “It’s like…smooth, like he was wearing a cup. Well, I mean apparently it’s there, it’s just…hidden under the muscle and stuff. Like it only comes out when he pees, and then only just enough to do the job.”

  Well that was a weird fucking thing to hear. “I wonder why that is,” Bobbi murmured. “I mean, I never did it with muscle-jobs, so I dunno…” She tried to remember anatomy, how muscles worked, how they laced together. Was that even possible, not having a ready dick? There had to be something to that. “Sorry you didn’t get anything more then, I guess.”

  Diana chuckled. “That’s all right,” she said with a shrug. “I figure he’s been panting after you long enough, he could get a little piece of something new, you know?” The way she said it was acidic, nasty. She was enjoying what she obviously thought was a little revenge.

  The joke was on her, of course. “We’re not together, you know,” Bobbi said sweetly. “I mean he wanted to, but we’re just friends. Glad you got a little play, though.”

  A black look cast her way was Diana’s response. Silence hung between them for a while as both men rejoined at the mouth of the breach. Bobbi watched them talk a moment, then vanish inside. “I wonder what they’re going to see in there,” she said.

  “Not sure,” Diana said. “Maybe it’ll just be deserted in there.”

  “Maybe so.” Bobbi let out a deep breath, let her brain center itself a little more. They sat there for what felt like ages, just waiting to hear something. Gunshot, radio, whatever. Diana had the strangest look on her face, as though she were on vacation, listening to the silence with a tiny smile playing on her lips. Bobbi figured she understood why, though. Girl like her had to run into all kinds of hard stuff, and all kinds of waiting to go along with it. Bobbi figured that you learned to pass the time— she knew she had, though it involved a little more talking.

  So, Bobbi decided to talk. “So,” she said, breaking the silence. “What’s up with you and Mason? You friends, or what?”

  “Or what,” Diana replied. She sounded sly. “Harry’s a good guy, but he wants to settle down. He’d do anything for me, you know?”

  Bobbi looked at her out of the corner of her eye. “Yeah,” she said, “I do at that. So what, you fuck him anyway?”

  “Anytime I want,” she said with a shrug. “He’s always willing. Nobody else goes near him, you know, I mean beneath that young body of his he’s still old. Has an old man’s mind, old man’s opinions. Bit hard for a girl when she finds out the slightly older stud she thinks she’s fucking turns out to be an absolute grandpa.”

  “Anything you want, huh.” The words didn’t sit at all well with Bobbi, though she wasn’t certain why. “So you’ve been with him a while?”

  “In as much as I am ‘with’ him, yeah,” Diana said. “After Francois died.”

  Something ticked over in the back of Bobbi’s head. Her mind was quite suddenly directed toward the weight of the nerve crusher in the pocket of her jumpsuit, laying cool against her thigh. A nameless anxiety began to bubble up within her. “Tell me something, Diana,” she finally said. “Why did you volunteer to come with us?”

  “Oh,” said Diana with a chuckle. “I’d thought that would be obvious.”

  The anxiety built and knotted in Bobbi’s gut. She slid her hand into her pocket, found the checkered plastic of the crusher’s scavenged pistol grip. “This is different. I mean it’s not just about your boy.”

  Diana smiled. “You always were sharp, January.” She shifted a little so that Bobbi could see the muzzle of a small pistol in her free hand. She must have brought it out of the glove box with the binoculars, or maybe she had it with her all the while. “But you are correct.” As she spoke her voice began to change, to flatten out. Bobbi felt the blood freeze in her veins as she heard it. It was like she spoke through a vocal processor. “I am going to kill you.”


  For the slightest moment, she thought that it might have been some attempt at humor, or a momentary daydream – but there they were, and Diana’s gun was very real as it gleamed in her hand. It was funny, really; she thought that she should have hardened up with all that she’d been through, but Bobbi’s heart bubbled with the animal fear that came with impending doom.

  “Well,” she heard herself saying to Diana, “tell me why, first.”

  “You know why.” Diana leaned against the opposite door, bracing her back and holding the pistol level, close to her stomach. “My father. Or my mother, in point of fact.”

  There was silence again as Bobbi watched her. This again, she thought, and found that behind the fear was a kernel of anger— not at Diana, which surprised her, but for her wayward mother. She had left ruin wherever she went after Bobbi’s father died, and here was more wreckage for Bobbi to clean up – assuming, of course, she didn’t die in the process. The anger burned her fear back, allowed calm to take its place. The clarity that helped her on the network helped her now. “I can’t help that,” she said. “I’m sorry about my mother. I’m sorry about yours.”

  “Not that mother,” said Diana, and she smiled. “But we can begin with the woman who birthed this body.” Her voice was ice in Bobbi’s head, causing her hands to tremble. “She could not withstand the constant trauma of her husband consorting with your mother under the guise of working late— while watching the children of his husband’s lover playing with her own child. Eventually she grew unstable.” Diana leaned forward a bit and grinned. “Or perhaps, as Diana would have said, ‘She sat there and watched us— watched you— knowing what was going on, knowing that…that woman would come back and that she’d have to face her. Dad’s cock on her breath, no doubt.’”

  Bobbi’s eyes grew wide. The circuits connected in her mind— she knew what that voice was now, why it had sounded so familiar. “You’re not Diana, are you,” she breathed. “Not anymore.”

  The other woman shrugged, ignoring her and continuing on. “And then she shot herself when Diana was sixteen,” she said. “A year after you left. After, that there was nothing for her but the militia. They took her in.”

  Bobbi closed her eyes a moment. She had spent much of her childhood with Diana— they weren’t necessarily the best of friends, but they certainly had gotten into many things together. They’d done that because Diana’s father “worked late.” Of course, what he was really doing was obvious now. Bobbi wanted nothing more right now than to go back and beat the living shit out of her mother for doing this, even though she knew that she wasn’t well at the time. But of course, that was the least of her problems. “You’re not Diana,” she said again. “Diana was proud, but she’d never turn out to be a murderer. You’re not human at all.”

  To her horror, Diana smiled. “Correct,” she said in that flat, horrible voice. “I am not. You know what I am.”

  Bobbi closed her eyes again, counted backwards from five. “You’re one of them. You got in her head.”

  “Quite.”

  Bobbi had an image of her body being torn apart by the machine gun’s heavy rounds, transformed into a pinwheel of blood and meat, and she shook her head. “I won’t run. But how did it happen? Did I make her hate me that much?”

  “It had nothing to do with you,” said the thing that was Diana, nodding slightly. “It had everything to do with her. Hatred, you see. It dissolves sanity faster than anything else – she held hate in her heart for you for almost ten years before she met her man, Francois.”

  “But shouldn’t that have helped her?”

  “It did. And where before her misdirected hatred for you and your mother sustained her, meeting him gave her new belief that things would get better. But then he was killed. She watched him die, you know.” She narrowed her eyes a bit. “You’re lucky. You haven’t had to watch the life leave the eyes of the one you love.” For a moment, it wasn’t clear if the thing that had replaced Diana that was talking, or if the words were an echo of the lady herself. “I’m doing the world a favor like this, you see. It’s a form of pest control.”

  Bobbi was silent for a long moment, just staring at the other woman. She thought of what Diana must have felt for her, how she must have burned to kill her for so long. For what had happened to her mother…or was it that she blamed Bobbi for not being there when her mother finally died? Either way, Bobbi’s heart went out to the part of her that wasn’t holding that gun in her face, the part that had been suppressed under the weight of this new creature. In another situation she might have tried to talk her down honestly, to try reason with her in good faith, but that wasn’t going to happen. She intended to kill Bobbi, and that was going to be it. This was a fixed point of action.

  It was for that reason that Bobbi had been carefully working the razor-sharp points of the crusher’s terminals through the fabric of her pocket, and she felt resistance nearly gone. So set was Diana on watching Bobbi’s face for signs of whatever she had wanted to see— fear, remorse, maybe even scornful validation, Bobbi didn’t know— that she had completely missed the gentle flexing of Bobbi’s hand as it sat shoved in her pocket. Maybe she hadn’t noticed the crusher in Bobbi’s hand before, or maybe there was something willful in her ignorance. Bobbi could not know, nor did she have time to speculate. There was only the moment between them now, the peril of it, and Bobbi took a deep breath.

  “Tell me something,” Bobbi said. “Were you waiting for me there? Does she know about me?”

  The Diana-thing quirked a brow. “Does who know about you?”

  “You know who I’m talking about. Your other mother.”

  The creature was silent for a moment. Her eyes were hard to read. Finally she spoke. “No,” she said after a moment. “I haven’t told her about you yet.”

  “But she knows about me?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes narrowed. “At least, she knows of your association with Thomas Walken. She doesn’t know that you know about us, I don’t think. I’ll have an interesting report to give her once I’ve killed you.”

  Bobbi’s mind raced. She didn’t tell her? How could she not have told Merducci, the so-called Mother of Systems, about her? Perhaps Diana’s consciousness was leaking into the thing that drove her body more than she was aware – this could be an example of an imperfect transition. Who knew how these things thought? Either way, she was going to die very quickly if she didn’t work fast. There wasn’t any more time to quiz the thing.

  “Please,” Bobbi said, still working at the fabric of her pants. “I want you to think about this.”

  “I already have,” the creature said with a thin, manic smile. She hefted the pistol. “And I wouldn’t worry about your friend. I’ve asked Mason to take care of him, and as I said, he does what I want. I’m surprised, though.” She thumbed off the safety, eyes narrowing very slightly in thought. “Why aren’t you asking me to stop?”

  Bobbi met her gaze, not flinching. “Would it do any good?”

  The Yathi lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “No,” she said. “I guess it wouldn’t. But it would sure as hell make me feel better about my work.”

  Bobbi drew a deep breath, forcing herself into a state of focused calm. An idea surfaced, something that she hoped would give her the chance to distract Diana long enough to get the fuck away. “Answer a question for me before you kill me, huh?”

  The thing that had been Diana quirked a brow, but nodded. “All right.”

  “Do you remember what your name is? Your real one?”

  It was as if Bobbi had struck the other woman in the face. She sat stunned for a moment, as if she was searching for the answer and couldn’t find it. Bobbi took advantage of the mental blow to save herself. She pushed her arm forward, felt the fabric of her pants tear, the crusher’s terminals stabbing out into the air like needles. The creature looked down at the spikes that had grown from Bobbi’s leg, and through the bluntness dawning recognition. She scrambled with the pistol, bu
t Bobbi clamped down hard on the crusher’s trigger as Diana brought the gun up to bear. The world exploded into white noise.

  When consciousness returned, it came first in the form of scent of ozone stinging Bobbi’s nostrils. Then the awareness of the body, the leg that wasn’t quite reporting in, the world around her swimming back into eyes that re-established connection to a stunned brain. The wet-cement sensation of recovering from a crusher blast was already well under way. Bobbi felt her chest heaving, became alarmed, then realized that it was only her own lungs working as intended.

  She blinked her eyes twice, trying to find focus. She was still inside the car, and the air was faintly smoky. Bobbi realized with a jolt that the fabric around where the crusher had fired was smoldering. She patted her leg until the tiny cinders blew out. By then her brain had ticked over into proper function and she remembered the alien thing.

  Bobbi sat up hard. The thing had collapsed into her corner of the back seat, boneless and unmoving. Bobbi leaned forward, smelled burnt fabric and flesh. She took a deep breath, ignoring the stink, and pushed it back by the shoulder. The blast from Bobbi’s crusher had hit her full in the chest; a hole had been burnt away in the material of her padded vest, the skin beneath scorched and blistered. Cooked her heart, most likely, but Bobbi took her pulse anyway. She felt nothing.

  Tears started in Bobbi’s eyes as she looked down at the body of the woman that had been her childhood friend. She could not know if Diana’s fate had truly been as the Yathi had revealed to her, of if she had still been there, somewhere in her mind. Bobbi only knew that she had killed at least one living thing, if not two. Though it was in self-defense, there was a core of coldness in her, something that she knew that she could never try and talk away. Everything that had been Diana Blake— her pain, her joy, all the years that had passed between when Bobbi had seen her last and this moment— was gone now. The alien thing in her head had taken it away, and now Bobbi had destroyed it as well.

  “Jesus, Di,” Bobbi muttered softly, and she wiped her eyes clear with the back of her hand. She wanted to feel more, anger, sadness…something. She’d heard people went through the most terrible emotional shock immediately after killing someone for the first time— pissed themselves, or worse. That kind of thing. Maybe that would come later, but right then there was nothing but a numbness that spread throughout her body. As her leg buzzed in fury at the proximity of the fatal shock, Bobbi remembered then what fate awaited Scalli; her brain locked her emotions away in a mental box and she was moving again.