by Rachel Caine
He said, in a low, rough voice, “Hungry. I’m hungry.”
Of course he was. Bryn realized with a jolt that he’d used up whatever energy the nanites had brought with them in this massive healing effort, and he’d need food. Fast.
Or he’d turn on Patrick, as the next available food source.
Riley had already realized that, and she came back . . . dragging a body. One of the men Bryn had killed in the hallway. Jane’s men.
“Oh God,” Bryn murmured, but she knew there was no choice.
Riley, expressionless, ripped the sleeve from the dead man’s arm, and said, “Patrick, you’d better wait outside. Bryn—”
Bryn was only too happy to join him.
Patrick didn’t say anything, but the tight expression on his face was more than enough to communicate how repulsed he was.
I did this, Bryn thought, with a wave of sick horror. I did this to Joe.
She tried not to listen to the sounds inside the room.
A few minutes later, Joe came to the door. He was visibly stronger. Shaken, confused, but solid on his legs. His face and hands were clean of any evidence of what he’d just consumed—that would have been Riley, and kindness. The trauma would come later for Joe, she thought—it always came, sooner or later. But for now . . . for now it was just survival.
“Good to go,” he said hoarsely.
They took him at his word.
Riley took point on the hallway, all the way to the end. There was another keypad, and she eased out of the way for Patrick to work his code magic, which Bryn assumed he’d learned from watching Jane . . . and the door opened.
It also set off a shrieking alarm, and flashing strobes.
“Go!” Patrick yelled, and Bryn charged after Riley. The next hall was another cinder-block nightmare, door after door, with another code-keyed exit. He opened that, and set off more alarms.
This time, when the door opened, there was a hail of gunfire. Riley took hits, but she fired back, and Bryn stood next to her, calmly taking down three more in addition to Riley’s two. These were also wearing fatigues—not official current army camo, but Desert Storm–era. No identifying marks.
Joe was trying to be himself, and he almost managed it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said as he stripped a machine pistol from one of the fallen men, “we are officially, truly screwed if this is a military op.” He spoiled it only by the trembling of his hands and the haunted shadows in his eyes.
He was right. There was a window on this hallway, neatly painted and clean, and Bryn looked out to see clear white gravel, carefully raked. Trimmed hedges. Camouflaged vehicles, and the American flag flying high.
Truly screwed just about covered it.
She looked at the four of them, in bloody jumpsuits. . . . None of them looked passably military, at the moment. “Joe, Pat, they’re close to your sizes—” she pointed to two of the downed soldiers, and went to strip the clothing from the smallest man. It felt horrifying; it felt dishonorable. But there wasn’t any other choice. I’m sorry, she told his lifeless, empty corpse. I hope you weren’t innocent, just posted here on orders.
And my God, I hope you’re not actually military.
Bryn—hair just starting to emerge in a blurred fringe of pale gold around her scalp—looked like a particularly gung-ho recruit. Riley’s shorter hair could at least pass muster. Nothing could be done about Patrick’s messy, unshaven state, or Joe’s bruising, but if they walked quickly and quietly out of the building to the vehicles, they might just manage it.
Of course, the alarms going off would be a problem—or at least, would have been, except for Joe. As doors banged open at the other end of the hallway, admitting a flood of soldiers, he bent down, grabbed one of the fallen still wearing a uniform in a collar-pull, and began towing him toward the oncoming men. “Medic!” he yelled. “We need goddamn medics in here—we’ve got men down!”
It was confusing enough, with the sirens and strobes, that he seemed to be on their side, and with Bryn, Riley, and Patrick all uniformed and pulling their own bodies, the crowd simply flowed around them.
Joe left his man as soon as it was clear and ran for the door. They all followed. Bryn was acutely aware that anyone could twig at any second to the thin deception, but the general chaos—and the fact that all this was undoubtedly top secret, and nobody knew what was going on, or who was supposed to be there—contributed to just enough confusion for it all to work.
They made it to the parked vehicles lining the side of the gravel, and Patrick elbowed Joe aside to take the wheel. The keys were in it, and they’d managed to get halfway to the gate—manned, of course—before the first alarm was shouted behind them.
Patrick hit the gas. Bullets started flying as they accelerated, and Bryn felt two hit her in the arm and shoulder, but then they were smashing through the barriers just before the tire-shredders raised up, and taking the turn on two screaming tires to reach a main road.
When she looked back, she realized that it wasn’t a genuine army base—couldn’t have been. There were no signs, beyond PRIVATE PROPERTY and TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. It was far, far out into what looked like . . . scrub desert.
“Where are we?” Riley asked. It damn sure wasn’t Alaska; not a flake of snow in sight. The mountains in the distance were blue and more like foothills. It looked and felt like the far Southwest, but Bryn wasn’t entirely sure until they took a sharp left at the next main road, heading west.
All of a sudden, the nagging familiarity fell into place.
“I know this,” she said. “My God. It’s El Paso. Somewhere near it, anyway.”
“El Paso where?” Riley asked. “California?”
“Texas,” she said. “Right at the corner of New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico.”
“That wasn’t Fort Bliss,” Joe said. “I’ve been to Bliss.”
“I was stationed there,” Bryn nodded. “That back there is some bullshit paramilitary compound, probably one Jane bought out or took over. If we’d been at Bliss, they’d have killed us in the hallway.”
“We’d have never gotten out,” Joe agreed, and then, after a pause, said, “What just happened to me?”
“You know already,” Riley said, quietly. “You were dying, Joe. In fact, you did die. Don’t blame Bryn. She did it to save you.”
He narrowed in on her then, and she felt a sick surge of guilt and horror. She hadn’t intended any of this.
“No, you should blame me,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Joe. The nanites were driving me, but I still—I wanted to help you. Jane left you there to die, and I couldn’t bear that. I really couldn’t, for Kylie and the kids. And because you’re just—better than that.” She was on the verge of tears, and the guilt felt overwhelming. She knew how much she’d hated waking up to . . . that. How traumatic it was.
Joe gave her a smile. It was almost real; she had to give him credit for the effort. It was possible to see past it, to see the uncertainty and the horror and the shock, but he was holding together. Fake it ’til you make it. It was probably his family motto. “I’m not angry about it. Look, I want to live for them, too, even if this is not the way I expected it to come out. And let’s face it: being nearly invulnerable in my line of work . . . isn’t a terrible thing. I got the upgrade, right?”
“Yes,” she said, and just stared at him for a while. “You’re okay with that?”
“Oh hell no,” he said, and that at least was heartfelt and honest. “I’m not okay with a lot of things. But if I was lying on the battlefield and you had to cut my leg off to save my life, I’d be okay with it because the alternative sucked worse. I’d be not so okay with all the pain and coping, but everything’s a tradeoff. I’m trying to believe this is—no different.”
“It—” She eye-polled the others. Riley shrugged. Regardless of what she believed, she couldn’t add to Joe’s general distress. He was too pale, too controlled. Let him keep his illusions, if they got him through the day. “I guess maybe it isn�
��t.”
“Then I’ll whine about my awful life later,” he said. “But even then, I’ll be alive to whine about it. Relax, Bryn. I’m cool.”
“That’s why we love you,” Pat said.
That was too close to real emotion for Joe to handle. Bryn saw it, and he put up the armor again. Fast. “Moving on . . . What about Jane?”
“She’s dead,” Bryn said. “I slashed her throat and poured Thorpe’s cure right down the hole.”
“Jesus!”
“She deserved it.”
“Yeah, I know, but Jesus, Bryn. You sounded just like her for a minute; you know that?”
She did, and it made her fall utterly silent. Patrick kept them moving, speed high, until they reached another turnoff—actually he passed it, then studied that side of the road, looped around and came back.
This side road, after half a mile of badly paved road, led to something that had sometime in the seventies been a happy family mobile home community, complete with convenience store and pool and campgrounds. Today, it was polluted by crumbling ancient trailers with blacked-out windows, trash, and prowling stray dogs. The pool was empty and full of rusting junk. The convenience store had long ago been left to rot in the sun, and taggers had left their discontent all over it in primary-colored swirls of graffiti.
“What are you doing?” Riley asked. “This place looks like they might as well call it Meth Manor.”
“You know what I love about meth cookers? They usually have a lot of money and drive good cars,” Patrick said. “They also love weapons, and tend to not call the police when you steal from them.”
“Ah,” Joe said. “Supply run.”
“That, and I’m pretty damn sure this truck is LoJacked. So they’ll be tracking us in it. On the other hand, if they come rolling hard into this place and start shooting—”
“Lots of bullets come right back,” Riley said, and smiled broadly.
“It’s a side bonus, along with the heavy potential for explosions. Meth cooking is not exactly a low-risk business, especially when you combine it with firearms. I think it has the potential to make our friends’ lives very interesting for a while.”
“There,” Bryn said, and pointed. In front of a particularly decaying trailer that had once been disco-era antique gold sat a new Dodge Challenger, matte black. If Batman had a casual car for running errands, that was what it would look like, she thought—and the Challengers had a lot of power under that hood. Enough to get them out of a lot of trouble.
“Outstanding,” Patrick said. “Riley—”
She gave him a cartoon salute, and was out of the truck the second it stopped. The Dodge was locked—not an unreasonable precaution in this neighborhood—but she took a second to search around the rocky ground near a Dumpster, and came up with a flat, thin piece of metal that she rapidly fastened into a slim jim.
“Somebody ought to tell the FBI they need to check their criminal records,” Joe said. “Because she’s done this before.”
Fifteen seconds after Riley found the metal, she was in the car, and fifteen seconds after, she had it running, a low throb of engine that Bryn felt even through the battle-tested metal of what they were in. “Go,” Patrick said, and bailed out to join Riley; Joe and Bryn were right behind him.
Bryn was still outside the car when a skinny, pale dude in smudged underwear opened the trailer’s door and stepped out on the rickety front porch, mouth open in an outraged yell. His front teeth were gone.
She waved, jumped in, and Riley jammed the car into gear and smoked tires on the way out.
Joe started laughing, and the rest of them joined in, not out of any real amusement but simply because ripping off a meth cooker was probably the funniest thing that had happened to them in a long time, and it felt good to laugh.
Bryn finished with a last hiccup that was almost giggles, and sagged against Joe. She put her head on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Really.”
He shrugged a little, but he was careful not to dislodge her from that position. “I’ll adjust,” he said. “So will Kylie. Really.”
In the front seat, Patrick was quizzing Riley about her car-boosting skills; she was electing to reply with a frosty, regal silence that was funny in itself.
Jane was dead. They’d roused at least some part of the government to act directly against the Fountain Group, if Riley was to be believed. And against all odds, they were still together, still moving.
But despite all those impossible strides, she felt one thing very clearly: fear. Because while they’d been suffering in Jane’s personal killing jars out here in the desert, the meeting of the Fountain Group—their opportunity to take the brains of the beast—that had happened and passed without incident.
And they didn’t even have names to track.
“We’re boned,” she whispered, echoing Joe from before, and closed her eyes as Riley turned the Challenger on the main highway, heading east. The only thing west was Mexico, but Bryn knew that if she asked, Riley wouldn’t have any sort of destination in mind except not here. No point in even asking about directions until they reached some point where a decision could be made . . . which, from El Paso, would be two hundred miles at least.
They searched the car, and came up with an interesting assortment of goodies—concealed panels in the doors yielded up a couple of poorly maintained handguns and a stack of stained bills, mostly twenties and fifties. When they stopped for gas, they found the trunk was filled with stained empty cups and fast-food bags . . . but underneath, at least ten prepaid cell phones, still in the packaging.
Bryn took one out and typed in the number that they’d used to reach Manny, before—before everything had gone to hell. “Think he’s still answering?” she asked.
“I think that when we didn’t come back in Barrow, he folded up the tents and vanished, along with everybody else on that plane,” Patrick said. “He’d have considered us dead. He’d have been perfectly right to do it.”
She couldn’t argue with that, but something was bothering her—something much bigger. “Patrick . . . he knows how big this is, better than any of us. He knows the risks, if the Fountain Group goes unchecked. They’ll take over strategic assets, like the military, or the government itself. Once they do that, it’s over for the rest of us. They want to live forever—them, and their handpicked best people. Sooner or later, they’ll own us. All of us. What do you think Manny would do about that?”
“He’s got the cure,” Patrick said, watching the numbers roll by on the pump as the Challenger drank down the fuel. “He’ll concentrate on taking it apart down to the molecules, until he understands everything about how it works. And then he’ll put it back together again, synthesize it, and use it.”
“He’ll act.”
“Yes,” Patrick said. “He’ll do it because it needs to be done.” He frowned, shook his head, and said, “I don’t know how long we were—in there. Do you?”
“Long enough,” she said. “Long enough for my nanites to mature and migrate.” Which made her think, suddenly, about Riley . . . who hadn’t shown any signs of the same impulse, though they were on the same schedule—had to be, since Riley’s bite had infected her. “You’re not—?”
The other woman didn’t look up from where she was loading trash from the Challenger’s trunk into the pump-side bin. “Jane used them,” she said. “Yesterday. She brought me one of her people.”
“And you upgraded him?” Patrick said. It sounded like an accusation, though he probably didn’t mean it that way.
“I didn’t have a choice,” she snapped back. “Ask your girlfriend. Doesn’t matter. He was—she doesn’t like to share. She had him put down.”
“Put down?” Bryn said, and went very still. “What do you mean, put down?”
“We can still die, Bryn. Figure it out. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t easy to do, but with enough ingenuity and cruelty you can do anything.” When Bryn continued to stare at her, Riley looked away. “Acid. Sh
e dissolved him. Trust me, you don’t want to know the details.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Because she could,” Patrick said. “And because she wanted to be sure she could destroy an upgrade if she needed to do so. Research and fun: her favorite combination. I’m sorry, Riley. She found ways to hurt all of us, one way or another. That was her specialty.”
Riley nodded. “At least I’m not contagious now for another thirty days. Neither is Bryn.”
“I don’t think we’re going to make it another thirty days,” Patrick said. He sounded calm, and sure, and nodded to Bryn. “Call Manny. Maybe he’ll pick up. We can hope he will.”
But Manny didn’t pick up. The phone rang, and rang, and rang, and then a distorted recorded message reported the number had been disconnected.
Manny was gone, along with Pansy, and Liam, and Annie. They’d even taken her dog.
It was ridiculous, after all she’d been through, to want to burst into tears, but . . . suddenly, that last little piece of normality being chipped away seemed to take the last solid ground from under her feet, and Bryn had to brace herself against the Challenger’s sleek fender, just to stay upright. She gently folded the phone and put it in the pocket of her fatigues.
Patrick was watching her. She couldn’t afford to break down now; she couldn’t let him down. The four of them—they might be all they had, now. She would not be the weak link.
So she simply shook her head. He didn’t seem surprised. Just grim.
Fueling finished, he took a trip to the station’s probably horrible restroom; Bryn used one of the smaller bills in their drug dealer’s bankroll to supply them all with water and high-protein snacks, mainly for her, Riley, and Joe. She didn’t know how the other two felt, but her stomach was aching with need, and Riley was probably just as starved.
After that, it was more than a hundred miles across open desert before any significant towns, broken by occasional twisted eruptions of ancient rocks and the twisted, spiked growths of Joshua trees and mesquite. Green balls of desert sage growing out of mounds of pale sand. Rotting shacks. A cloudless, bone-dry, unforgiving sky.
