The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1

by S. Andrew Swann

  He was already pushing the van at one-twenty klicks an hour when he hit the I-90 ramp. He was dodging slower-moving cars when he remembered this van had a siren. He found the switch and turned it on. He stopped dodging. The other cars were pulling to the side.

  He maxed it out at one-fifty as he shot through the exit on to the Midtown Corridor.

  Even blowing down the Corridor, going twice the speed limit, gave him time to think, time he didn’t want. He didn’t want to know Manny was dead. He wanted The Beast to handle it. That’s what it was for, damnit.

  However, invoking his bioengineered combat-mode didn’t help him a bit when it came to dealing with the death of the closest thing to a father he had ever had.

  He needed to hit Mayfield, and fuck the barriers. He put on the seat belt.

  He shot past the city end of Mayfield and took a right toward the Triangle parking garage. Between the bridge over Mayfield and the one over the driveway, there was a small hill that sloped toward the tracks. Nohar left the driveway and shot the van over the mostly dead lawn, up the hill, and over the dead tracks. A Dodge Electroline wasn’t intended to take that kind of grade, but the velocity carried it over. The van started spilling over the other side of the hill, only going seventy now, headed for the side of an apartment building.

  Siren still going, Nohar skidded the van to the right. The rear left corner clipped the building as he bumped on to the crumbling Moreytown section of Mayfield. The van rolled to a near stop, scattering the nocturnal population off of the street.

  Nohar floored it again, feeling the uneven road in his kidneys.

  After the first block, he was going eighty.

  He passed the abandoned bus going a hundred.

  Third block, he was going one-twenty—

  Three concrete pylons blocked the road ahead of him, each three meters tall. The hulk of the dead Subaru was still wrapped around the center pillar.

  He pulled the van all the way to the left, on to the sidewalk. On one side was now a concrete wall to Lakeview, and coming up on the right, one of the pylons. Nohar hoped the gap was big enough.

  The front end screeched and the van bucked forward with a crunch—

  He was through.

  He’d made it. There was now a wobble on the front left tire, and he’d left both front fenders behind him. But now he was shooting east down Mayfield.

  He was back to going one-fifty when he passed by Coventry. The cop on the riot watch only took three seconds to decide to give chase. Good for him. Nohar saw the first 322 marker when he passed the minimum-security prison. So far, the cop was the only shadow.

  As long as the cop didn’t try to stop him.

  The vibration from the front wheel was getting worse, but he didn’t slow. Malls and suburbia shot by him, a ghostly gray blur under the streetlights. His headlights had been taken out by his squeeze through the barrier. He drove by his night-vision and the infrequent streetlights.

  Some shithead going through an intersection didn’t get out of the way. Nohar wove a tight arc around the vehicle without hitting the brakes, and raked the side of the van across the rear end of the new BMW. It spun out and hit a light pole.

  Suburbia vanished in a wave of trees. The Cleveland cop was still the only shadow, and they were now three suburbs out of his jurisdiction. The streetlights vanished with the malls and the split-levels. The only light now was the van’s red flashers, turning the world ahead into a surrealistic image in pulsing-red monochrome.

  He hit the county line and could see the blurred lights of the motel coming up on his right. Bobby had chosen a fifty-year-old relic to stash the girls—all tarnished chrome and flickering neon. Nohar saw the lights when he was about a klick away from the hotel and cut the siren as he slowed the van.

  When he passed the entrance, he spun the van into the parking lot. The van was going seventy. The first thing he saw in the parking lot was a Ziphead with a submachine gun. The rat was standing guard outside a familiar-looking remote van. Nohar aimed his vehicle at him.

  The ratboy’s reaction time was just too slow. He jumped to the side too late to avoid being hit. Nohar heard a burst of ineffective gunfire as the wobbly front tire bumped up over the rat.

  The front end of Manny’s van plowed into the side of the remote. The remote tumbled forward like it had been jerked on a cable, the sudden deceleration throwing Nohar against the seat belt.

  There was the sound of shattering glass. Then more gunfire. He felt a wave of shots strafe the rear of the van. He heard more gunfire, not aimed at the van.

  Where the hell was his Vind?

  Nohar felt the bottom fall out of his world when he realized he had lost it somewhere in the fight with Hassan.

  Something inside him smelled the rat-blood under the van and told him it didn’t matter. He was the hunter, they were prey—

  And Stephie was in there.

  He loosed a subliminal growl as he popped the seat belt and tumbled out the driver’s side door, away from the motel. When he hit the ground he shuddered in pain. He was beginning to feel his knee again. He let the pain jack up the adrenaline.

  He took cover behind the van—most of the shots were coming from the hotel. He looked at where the shots seemed to be going and saw the Cleveland cop car. The cop was huddling down behind the front fender. The flashers were going, but a bullet had taken out the plastic covering them—the flashers were now giving off a stark white searchlight glare. The cop looked like he had taken a hit or two. Nohar recognized him. He was the pink cop who had looked so scared when he and Manny had passed him—the night all this shit started.

  The whelp had better’ve called backup.

  The ratboy who’d guarded the remote was a smear on the pavement. When he looked at the corpse, he could feel his time sense telescoping. The rest of the Zips were holed up in the motel. The Zips weren’t paying attention to him yet. The cop must’ve rounded into the parking lot just after he had plowed in.

  The wreck of the remote offered him some more cover. Nohar hunkered down and ran along the side of the wreck on all fours, right leg barely touching the ground.

  The motel was simply a line of rooms facing the parking lot. The nose of the remote was only a meter in front of a door—the room next to the Zips. Nohar tackled the door, and the cheap molding splintered. He kept going, tumbling onto a twin bed. The legs on the bed snapped off and spilled Nohar onto a synthetic rug that smelled of mothballs, rug shampoo, and old cigarette smoke. The room was empty.

  Nohar could hear the gunfire and the Zip’s chittering Spanish through the thin drywall. He stood up and looked for a weapon.

  The room’s comm was bolted to its own table. His shoulder protested as he lifted it. The cable connection ripped out of the wall, taking a wall plate and ripping a hole up the drywall for nearly a meter before it snapped free. Knee shaking, he lifted the comm over his head—it had to weigh thirty kilos—and listened to the Zips.

  One was near the wall. It sounded like he had a nine-millimeter. Nohar aimed the comm at that one—

  The comm and attached table flew in an arc that intersected the wall. It hit dead center at a fake painting—some anonymous landscape—and crashed through the drywall separating the two rooms. The mylar wallpaper tore away in sheets, following the comm through the hole.

  Perfect hit on the rat—bandage on the face marked this guy as Bigboy—the side of the comm hit the rat in the face and the picture tube imploded, adding a small cloud of phosphor powder to the plaster dust.

  The comm kept going, knocking away a table another rat was using for cover. The rat—dressing on his arm marked him as the one with the chain—turned to face Nohar. That was a stupid mistake. The cop was still covering the picture window from behind the cop car.

  The cop put a .38 slug through the rat’s neck before the ratboy realized he had lost his cover.


  The hole in the wall was a meter square.

  Nohar jumped through without any hesitation. He aimed at the third rat, who was hiding behind a set of dresser drawers.

  For a moment Nohar bared his entire flank to the cop, the kid had a perfect shot through the long-ago-vaporized picture window. Nohar didn’t care.

  Nohar landed on the third rodent, Fearless Leader. Leader had a revolver, a forty-four. An old gun but powerful. He tried to turn it on Nohar, but Nohar grabbed the ratboy’s wrist—it was in a cast—and slammed it into one of the open drawers of the dresser. Then he crunched the drawer shut with his entire weight. The gun went off inside the dresser, blasting chunks of particleboard over the rat the cop had shot.

  Fearless was looking at Nohar with wide eyes, going into shock. Somewhere, under the growling, Nohar found his voice. “So, ‘pretty kitty’s’ next?” The rat tried to shake his head.

  Nohar slashed Fearless Leader’s throat open with his claws, opened the drawer, and removed the gun from the sputtering rodent.

  The gunfire had ceased.

  He could smell perfume coming from the bathroom, over the cordite. Nohar could also smell blood that didn’t come from a rat. He gave the cop a great shot at his back as he bolted for the bathroom door at the rear of the motel room.

  Somewhere, where his rational mind was hiding, he prayed to Maria’s God he wasn’t too late.

  He kicked the door open, sending a piercing dagger of pain through his right leg. Terin turned toward him. She was picking up a nasty looking assault rifle. It looked too big for her. It was certainly too big for the small bathroom. Terin couldn’t sweep it to cover the door.

  There was a bloody knife sitting on the sink. Something small and blood-covered was hanging in the shower—

  “I’ll give you the fucking Finger of God.”

  The first shot hit her in the chest, slamming the rat into the white tile wall.

  The second got her in the face.

  The third clicked on an empty chamber.

  There was a weak sound from the shower “. . . way to go, Kit . . .”

  Chapter 25

  Angel’s voice brought him back. The Beast didn’t go back to its mental closet—the closet didn’t seem to be there anymore—but it did let his rational mind take over. For the first time Nohar felt the full impact of what he had put his body through. Glass had been ground into his left foot. The falls and the leaping had strained his back. His knee couldn’t hold his weight anymore. Any pressure on it was agonizing—

  He grabbed the sink and pulled himself into the bathroom. He looked into the shower. Angel’s hands were tied to the showerhead. Her feet didn’t touch the floor. She was still conscious, and her face was recognizable. Terin had been working from the bottom up. Terin was experienced at shaving moreys—the process was supposed to be long, painful, and the victim was supposed to live up to and, hopefully, a little past the end.

  Angel’s legs had become strips of bleeding meat.

  “Kit, you look like hell . . .”

  Nohar gritted his teeth and knelt slowly to examine the damage. It was bad, Angel was probably in shock. He dropped the forty-four in the toilet and grabbed Terin’s knife. He stood on his left leg and circled his right arm around, under Angel’s armpits, as he cut the bonds on her hands. Her weight nearly toppled him over. He pulled himself along, out of the bathroom, with his left hand. The three rodents that had been covering the picture window didn’t move. Every half-second the room was bathed in the searchlight glare of the cop’s flashers. Nohar wondered where the cop was.

  He laid Angel out on one of the twin beds. Her legs began to stain the white sheet. “I’m calling an ambulance—”

  Her head was cocked toward the front of the room. “Only one?”

  Nohar went to this room’s comm, it was intact. He called emergency. “I need a half-dozen ambulances, Woodstar Motel off route 322 in Chesterland, humans and moreys—cops, too, some of these people are dead—”

  The dispatch cop nodded. “What’s the problem there?”

  He didn’t bother to hang up. He turned to Angel. Somewhere along the way he had screwed up, badly. “Where’s Stephie?” He almost didn’t get the words out. He was too afraid of the answer.

  “Back in our room, last in line. Talked about having a hostage. Left a Zip with her . . .”

  Oh, shit. If a ratboy was left with her, the bastard would probably kill her once he saw how the fight went. Nohar hobbled over to the picture window; still no sign of the cop. He reached and turned Bigboy over. The rat had been using an Uzi. Nohar grabbed the gun and crawled out the window. Once outside, he saw the cop. Fearless had got off one well placed shot. The cop was unconscious or dead.

  Because of his knee, he had to advance on Stephie’s room while leaning against the wall. His progress was agonizingly slow. He passed the wreck of the remote and the door he had busted in. He passed an unoccupied room. Slowly, he came upon the last in the line, the black GM Maduro parked in front.

  He checked the clip on the Uzi. Good thing Bigboy wasn’t spraying the cop. There were a few shots left. He hit the ground and scrambled under the picture window—the right knee was beginning to make popping sounds every time he moved—and rolled in front of the door.

  With the feeling this was going to be it for him, he shouldered the door open and covered the room with the Uzi.

  And there was Mister Mad bomber, looking like he was about to wet his pants. The rat’s twenty-two thumped on the carpet.

  Stephie was alive, and apparently unhurt. She had been stripped naked and tied to the bed. She turned her head toward the door when it burst open. She had never smelled so good to him.

  The Beast wanted Nohar to shoot the rat. To Nohar’s surprise, he still had control. Even though the mental door was no longer there.

  “Kid, second chances are rare, use yours. Get out of here.”

  The rat carefully approached the door, where Nohar was still half-sitting, stepped over him, and ran into the night. Stephie’s eyes were wide as she watched Nohar pull himself into the room and on to the bed. Nohar didn’t waste time. He bit through the rope.

  As soon as Stephie was free, Nohar found himself on the receiving end of an embrace that smeared her with blood. “God, what’s happened to you—where’s Angel?”

  “Angel, I called an ambulance for her—and everyone else. They killed Manny—”

  Stephie broke off the hug. “Oh, Christ, I’m sorry—”

  “Can you find me something to use as a cane?”

  The curtain rod was stainless steel, and not as cheap as everything else in the motel. It made a halfway decent cane. Stephie found a robe and followed him out to the parking lot. He asked aloud the question that had gnawed at him ever since he had smelled Shaunassy’s blood—

  “Damn it, why?”

  He hobbled to the wreck of the remote. The power plant was still alive. The wheels were trying to drive it away despite the broken axle. He walked up to the vehicle. Green, just like Smith’s van. Hell, it could be Smith’s van. “The whole thing was blown. The Fed has everything.”

  He slammed his left fist at one of the dangling pneumatic doors. There was a slow hiss, and the door slid aside with the smell of leaking hydraulic fluid. There were guns and a dozen white plastic crates in back. Most of the crates had burst open. Little vials of red liquid rolled out the rear of the van. Hypo cartridges—flush, a few million dollars’ worth.

  The DEA would be happy.

  Nohar leaned in and looked at the crates more closely. They were labeled. “NuFood Inc. dietary supplements— MirrorProtein(tm)”

  MLI was using NuFood as a drug lab.

  There had to be another reason for NuFood. The Zips had only come on the scene recently. MLI had been dealing with NuFood ever since MLI’s inception.

  MirrorProtein?

 
What was it Manny said about the chemical analyzer? They had been cataloging amino acids and the display was reversed. Nohar had thought the picture had been coming up backward.

  What if it was the amino acids themselves that were coming up reversed?

  “Stephie, do you know any biochemistry?”

  Stephie was already at the Zips’ room checking on Angel. “What?”

  Nohar hobbled after her. His thoughts were flying, trying to remember things, put them into place. “This is important. Really important. Biochemistry, proteins, amino acids, what do you know?”

  “Next to nothing.” She had her hand on Angel’s neck. “She’s still alive—What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I need to remember if we’re based on levo or dextro amino acids . . .”

  “Derry was the chemistry major. Where the hell are you getting this from?” Stephie was looking worried, as if she thought he had gone over the edge.

  Far from it. Things were making sense. “I don’t know if you’ll understand this.” He was racing to get it all out. “I lived most of my childhood with Manny—a doctor and an expert on moreaus. I got a biology lesson every time I asked a question like, ‘Why am I different from the other kids?’”

  Even to him he sounded like he was rambling. He slowed down. “You can’t live like that and not pick up on biological trivia. Like the fact our amino acids all have their mirror image versions.” He finally remembered. “Almost all the life in this world is based on levo amino acids—”

  “So?”

  Nohar shook his head. “Just tell the cops when they get here. You have to talk to an FBI agent—Isham. Tell her the franks aren’t at MLI’s office building. It’s just a front, like everything else. If they’re anywhere, they’re at NuFood’s R&D facility. Tell her the MLI franks are based on a dextro amino acid biology. Got that?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Nohar was hobbling back to the Maduro. He stopped at the remote. An Uzi wouldn’t do much to one of the things Manny described. He looked in among the crates of flush and saw a pump shotgun. He’d take that, and hope.