by Lee French
Aside — Privek
Everything was not precisely going according to plan, but it came close enough. Privek glanced over at Kanik, hoping the lunatic would stick to it. Right now, the kid paced back and forth frantically across the thick shag carpet, ignoring the monitors and muttering to himself. He did that a lot and Privek had learned to ignore it a while ago.
Those monitors, with the camera feeds provided by Sam, showed a large group of them converging on the lobby, along with those five soldiers helping them. He should have known better than to post those men anywhere near someplace Mitchell might show up if he ever got loose, but their involvement wasn’t any more of a disaster than anything else.
His eyes zeroed in on the actual problem: Moore and Pearson. He didn’t expect either of them to want to wake Mitchell up, and definitely didn’t expect Moore to find Elena. The telepath shouldn’t have been persuaded away from their goals, either. He should have seen through Mitchell just like Kanik’s implanted suggestions told him to. Kanik’s ability, apparently, wasn’t as foolproof as he thought. At least it had kept Pearson from successfully reading his own mind.
Actually, in some ways, the worst part had to be Kanik losing his control over Jayce early. After making the effort to set those first four up to flee those ridiculous experiments, and planting those lists so they’d do half the work for him, he’d lost his ace in the hole. At least everything had gone well prior to losing him. If the suggestions had only lasted a little longer, he wouldn’t have had to send Camellia to find them. Things would be much better if he had Jayce now, too.
Privek pulled his phone out and sent Sam a short text, trusting the improvements she and that Greg kid made to the structure to be enough to handle the escapees. In a minute, several would be dead, and the rest would blindly flail around, blundering into the rest of his trap. Good thing Mitchell decided to take all the ones who could actually survive this sort of thing on his side trip.
He imagined himself slapping glossy photographs down in a line on the President’s desk, each showing Mitchell’s handiwork, or that of one of his band of freaks. The fireballs wouldn’t be terribly compelling, but the corpses with their chests ripped out would make a statement. Agent Kaffer’s body, too; all those tiny bites and scorchmarks hinted at a slow, painful death of a thousand cuts.
The President and all his advisors—the Vice President, the Chief of Staff, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the National Security Advisor, and more—gaped at the pictures, sucking in breaths and riveted by the grotesque images.
“These things represent a clear and present danger to the security of the Unites States, Mister President.”
The President kept his hands to himself, as if refusing to touch the photos would make them less real. He was a weak man, a politician. A few long, stunned seconds passed before he reached for the one showing Mitchell and a few of the others. Picking it up, he stared at the faces, imagining his own teenage children in their place. “They’re just kids,” he protested.
Privek slammed a hand on the desk, making all of them jump. “Don’t let them deceive you, Mr. President. They may look like ordinary humans, but I assure you, they are not. They’re dangerous halfbreeds, too alien to handle the power they’ve developed without letting it consume and corrupt them. We need to hunt them down before they kill like this again. I have the tools to do the job, I just need resources to deploy them.”
The President nodded and sighed in resignation. “Give him whatever he needs to deal with this. I’d give you a Cabinet position, Mr. Privek, but then you’d be subject to Congressional approval. This should be kept quiet, and your vigilance and patriotism will be rewarded. Handsomely.”
Kanik’s voice broke into his fantasy, dispelling it for now. “I don’t understand what we’re doing anymore.” He seemed to have regained some measure of lucidity. When he’d first found the kid, he’d been paranoid and ranting and obsessed with revenge against the executives of that rail freight company. He saw the potential immediately. Kanik was his golden ticket. So sad he’d probably need to kill the kid to seal this deal. Someone would have to take the blame for everything. Privek would miss having such a useful tool at his disposal, though.
“We’re getting back at the men who hurt you.”
Bringing up his old hurts never failed to distract Kanik. He went off on a spittle-flecked, incoherent rant about injustice and the marginalization of the Inuit people, and all the rest. Funny how out of all these freaks, the one who could plant suggestions in others’ minds turned out to be the easiest to manipulate.
“The test subjects,” Privek said loudly enough to interrupt, “will be waking up soon. You should go and make sure all of them are under your control. We’ll need them to keep you safe.”
Kanik paused in his pacing and nodded fervently. “Yes, yes, the railroad men are coming. They won’t get me. No one will get me. We’ll stop them and their pawns.” He hurried out of the room, rubbing the old burn scars on his hand.
Privek smirked and turned his attention to the monitors just in time to watch the real show begin. With proper motivation, Sam and Greg did good work. Maybe he’d keep them around. Just because they were freaks didn’t mean they couldn’t be controlled for the long term. It depended on how this whole thing went down.
Chapter 13
Packed with people, the elevator dinged and the doors slid open. Liam stood away from the back wall, ready to pile out with everyone else, when he noticed Paul roll his shoulders uncomfortably. His eyes darted to Kaitlin. Her eyes closed and her lips parted.
Paul shrugged it off and stepped out of the elevator with the others. Owen carried Maisie in his arms and Matthew had Brian slung over his shoulder. Lisa helped Anita. Lily let Dan lean on her while Sebastian walked beside her, holding her hand. Jasmine sat in Liam’s pocket again, trying not to take up space.
“Wait,” Kaitlin said.
Fearing the worst, Liam reached out and missed Anita’s arm.
“Come back.” Kaitlin grabbed Lily’s shirt.
Outside the doors, Liam heard a mechanical whirring. It sounded very different from Bobby’s swarm. His foot moved back and he had a sinking feeling he knew what Kaitlin had seen.
The lobby erupted with gunfire.
“Get down!” The voice came from the lobby, and Liam thought it might be Riker. “We need cover!”
Liam grabbed Dan and hauled him back in, healing the fresh injury to his leg without thinking. How many bullet wounds would he heal today? At once, he hoped it would be a lot and only a few—the lobby had few places to hide and that sounded like a lot of weapons firing. Apparently, Privek had expected something like this.
The deafening roar of guns trampled over voices shouting in the lobby. Jasmine crawled out of Liam’s pocket and raced out of the elevator as the doors slid shut, cutting off the clamor.
“What are we supposed to do?” Liam looked to Kaitlin, begging her to have an answer.
Her eyes darted around wildly. “I don’t know. It’s like with the assault on the farm. I only know what to do for me, not anyone else, and only at the last minute.”
“What about Riker and his men?”
Kaitlin went pale. “I…I don’t know,” she whispered. “They were in the lobby last we knew.”
Sebastian reached a little hand up to the buttons. “Mama, don’t run away.” He pushed the number one and watched the doors open again. The fire sprinklers hissed, soaking everything and putting a metallic tang in the air. They heard a gun sputter and stop. Lily grabbed her son, pulling him away from the doors and shielding him with her own body.
“I got it,” Anita’s voice, strained with pain, called out. “One left.”
The last gun clicked, still shooting without bullets. “Clear,” Jasmine’s voice shouted from near the ceiling. “Is everybody okay?” A lot of silence answered her.
Liam pulled himself to his feet and poked his head cautiously out of the elevator. “Hold the doors open.” Dan stuck a hand i
n the way and peered out, too. A haze of dust and smoke hung in the air, the walls riddled with bullet holes. Chunks of concrete or plaster, or whatever the walls and floor were made of, littered the floor. Everything was drenched. Brackish water formed small puddles bounded by debris.
Flinching away from the rain, Liam held up a hand to shield his eyes so he could see. He caught sight of Anita, huddled on herself and shivering behind a pillar, her power holding up a broken piece of bullet-ridden plexiglass from the security station as a shield.
Jasmine clung to something on the ceiling, dangling next to the empty machine gun still chattering away. She must have disconnected the ammunition somehow. As he watched, she shrank down to her squirrel shape again and raced across the wall to get down.
The front wall remained intact with only the glass door damaged. He saw Riker standing there, doing the same thing as him: checking the situation for safety and survivors. A wide smear of blood on the floor suggested all his men didn’t get out in one piece. So long as they all lived, he could take care of them.
Thanks to the sprinklers, the air cleared quickly, and Liam made out a limp hand in the debris. “Can someone shut off the water?” He hopped and hurried over to that hand, hoping he’d find it attached to an arm.
“I can only affect people,” Dan grunted from close behind him. “Anita, did you get hurt?”
From what he’d seen of the Hill footage, he never would have guessed Dan would show concern for anyone else. Yet here he was, offering Anita a hand up and looking her over. The Hispanic girl took his help, letting out a squeak as she tried to put weight on her foot. Distracted from his other goal, Liam leaned over and took her other hand. Another bullet wound added insult to all the injury his pants had suffered already. The pain made him grit his teeth as it flashed in his leg and rapidly slipped away.
Riker, Hegi, and Platt reached the other people first and shifted the debris off them. “Liam,” Riker called out, his tone sharp enough to cut through shock, “what can you do about dead?”
“Nothing.” Liam took a deep breath and forced himself to go find out who Riker had found, knowing he only asked because he found a body. What he wouldn’t give for an umbrella right now.
“Day-umn.” Dan’s comment covered the situation. Paul was dead, his body riddled with bloody holes. Alongside him, four more: Lisa, Maisie, Brian, Owen. It looked like they’d been used a thousand times as targets in a shooting gallery. The guns broadsided them, because Brian should have been able to shield them, and Maisie should have been able to get them out of there.
“Wait, where’s Matt?” Dan looked around, then he pointed at a hole in the wall, big enough for a person to get through. “Never mind. We don’t want to find him right now. He’s got no control as a wolf.”
“Liam, quick,” Platt said, holding two fingers to Maisie’s neck, “this one is alive.” Riker gave up on Owen and crab hopped to grab Maisie’s hand to shove it at Liam. Debris drunkenly flopped off of her, probably Anita’s doing.
In a daze, Liam took it, then he collapsed to the floor, overwhelmed by all the damage done to her body. Bullet wounds and cracked ribs and internal bleeding all warred for his attention, and he let out a gurgling scream as it washed over him. Something else kept her unconscious, but she’d be fine.
“What do we do now, Sarge? Guns popping out of the ceiling wasn’t anything we expected.” Platt picked Maisie up.
Riker pushed Paul’s glassy, staring eyes shut and scowled. “Outside. Liam, take care of Hansen. He’ll live, but we could use him at one hundred percent.”
“Lisa’s pregnant.” Kaitlin shook, hugging herself. “I didn’t see this coming. Why didn’t I see this coming?”
“You’re not per—” Riker cut himself off, and he, Platt, and Hegi all cocked their heads to the side and listened to something. “Change of plan.”
Carter helped Hansen, cradling his arm and limping, hurry in through the door and looked to Riker. “There’s four of them.”
“Elevator, now!” Riker barked.
Everyone else hurried that way. Liam stood there, staring stupidly at Paul’s corpse. He risked everything because Liam asked him to. Consumed by his need to find Elena, he begged and cajoled until Paul relented and helped him wake up Bobby. His death was Liam’s fault. Elena was safe and Paul was dead.
Someone shouted his name, maybe more than once. It made him look up. Three women he’d only previously seen pictures of filed in through the door, accompanied by Raymond. He thought the thin, waifish Asian wearing blue leggings with white polka dots and a matching blue top might be Ai. The second, a blonde with curves in black pants and a red blouse and boots could either be Hannah or Violet.
As for the third, they only had two black women among them that he knew of, and Dianna’s body still lay outside. That made this one, with her hair swept up in an elegant bun that clashed with her plain shirt and jeans, Tiana. Ray looked like he usually did: a burly black man in military camouflage pants and a dingy white tank top, holding a large silvery shield.
It took him a long second to register the strange, futuristic guns they each carried. By then, the foursome had those weapons raised. Each showed him cold indifference, a willingness to cut him down where he stood and be unmoved by it.
Something took control of his body and made him run, ducking down and hopping around to be harder to target.
The guns threw pulses of sickly greenish light across the lobby to slam into the already broken surfaces. He heard sizzling where they hit, the light either cooking or eating the surfaces it struck. Liam’s mouth went dry as he considered what that would do to flesh. Where did they get guns like that? His body ducked into the elevator and the doors slid shut behind him.
“Jesus fucking Christ with a biscuit,” Dan spat. “Run next time, ya idjit.”
Riker grabbed Liam’s arm and smacked it onto Hegi’s, causing his healing gift to activate and take the soldier’s pain as the elevator trundled upwards. “They might have been there to herd us, I’m not sure. Rundown of superpowers here?”
Sebastian, the cute little boy holding Lily’s hand, pointed at each person and recited all their abilities as if he had the list memorized somehow. “Healing, precog, telekinesis, body control, weapon creation, portal-based teleportation, squirrel shapeshifter. Uncle Matty is a werewolf.”
Everyone stared at him except Jasmine, who sat in Kaitlin’s hand as a squirrel. Liam didn’t blame her for not wanting to be in his pocket anymore.
“Right.” Riker recovered from the surprise well before Liam did. “Thanks. What kind of weapons?”
Lily she sighed as she pulled her son into a bewildered hug. “So far, I haven’t tried a lot. I can make functioning bullets of any kind you show me, bricks, blades, hand tools, and inflexible sheets. None of it lasts more than an hour.”
Riker nodded and pulled the clip out of his rifle. Popping one bullet off, he handed it to her. “We may need more of these before we get out of here. Anybody get an empty spare clip, give it to her so she can fill it up. What’s wrong with the teleporting girl here?” He slammed the clip home and checked his pistol. His men followed suit, checking their weapons, too.
Dan shrugged. “Jayce shot her with that drug stuff. She was on the wrong team. She’ll be out for hours.”
“She’s not a threat to them, then, so she’s low priority if we need to bug out. What button did you push?”
Platt shrugged. “I didn’t.”
Sebastian beamed up at him. “I pushed the six!”
Chapter 14
“The elevator just went past. I heard it.”
Bobby nodded. He shouldn’t have called back all his dragons. The situation go out of control so much and so fast that he thought he needed all hands…er, claws on deck. Now he had no idea what else might be going on with Riker and Kaitlin and the rest. That needed to change. “I’m gonna scout ahead and go see who’s in the elevator and what’s up. Stick together and don’t do nothing stupid.”
“That’s your job.” Stephen finally sounded like himself again.
“Yeah.” He blew into the swarm and left a few behind. Most of the dragons poured down the hallways of the second floor, searching through the place. A handful went to find a way to wriggle into the elevator. Another handful went down to check the lobby. Since they hadn’t gone past the second floor yet, the dragons heading for the lobby reached their destination first.
They streaked out into a war zone.
Bobby threw himself into one of those dragons, stunned by what he found. Tiana, Ai, Violet, and a man he didn’t know picked their way through, holding weird looking guns. Violet stooped to check the bodies.
“These are dead. Leave them.”
Tiana peered into the giant hole in the wall. “Should we check this way?”
“Nah,” the black man said with a shake of his head, “our job was just to get them to take the elevator. Mission accomplished.”
“I’m going up the stairs to make sure they get a proper greeting.” Ai blurred as she ran to the stairs.
“Andrew!” Bobby had enough dragons near the Creole to at least form a kind of mouth. It was weird and freakish. He chose not to think about it in favor of grabbing a chance to get Ai. “Stairs! ”
Fortunately, Andrew hadn’t gone anywhere yet and decided not to be disturbed by what he saw of Bobby. He tossed the door open and flung himself through it, just in time to collide with Ai as she sped up the stairs at a hundred miles an hour. They tumbled together in a squawking heap, her gun clattering to the floor and shooting off a pulse that singed Andrew’s arm. He groaned. He also slapped a hand on Ai’s arm and squeezed so she couldn’t get away.
“Oh, my head.” Ai groaned. “What did I just hit?”
“Me. And the floor. What’re you in such a hurry for, anyway?” Andrew let her go and they each leaned against the other and the wall to get to their feet.
“I was…” She frowned and shook her head. “Why did I even care about that?” Her eyes went wide and her mouth fell open. “Oh, Andrew, Lisa is dead! And Owen. Down in the lobby, with some of the others I don’t know. I tried to shoot one of us, too! Oh my gosh, why did I do that? ”
