by Rachel Caine
Her own original murderer.
“Hey, Bryn,” he said. “What’s shakin’, bacon?” He flipped open a long-bladed knife, hesitated for a few seconds with his gaze on her face, and then neatly began slitting open her Velcro restraints. “Welcome to your rescue party.”
She sat up fast as he methodically finished with the last of the straps, ready to defend herself if he decided to go psycho on her…but after Jane, Freddy weirdly seemed quite normal. Her scale of crazy had definitely undergone some vast expansion.
He cast a look at Carl and said, “Guess we’ll be leaving him.” He patted Carl’s bloodless cheek. “Sorry, buddy. Sucks for you, I know.”
With that, Freddy folded his knife and jumped down from the back, and Bryn followed, feeling shaky with a toxic mix of adrenaline, relief, uncertainty, and decaying nanites. The ambulance was parked on a small side road off the main one leading down the hill; they were surrounded on three sides by swelling dark hills.
And they weren’t alone. A blue sedan idled nearby, and Freddy walked over to it and opened the back door. When she hesitated, he said, “The ambulance is stolen. If you go joyriding around for long, especially with your headless friend in the back, you’ll be having some fun with the local yokels real soon. C’mon, Bryn. Could have hurt you already if I was going to do it—oh, and if I leave you here, Jane’ll find you soon. You don’t want that. Trust me.”
She really didn’t. After another second or two, she slid into the backseat of the sedan. Freddy shut the door and got into the passenger seat.
The man in the front seat said, “Hello, Bryn,” and she realized that it was no surprise, really.
Jonathan Mercer was driving the car. Fast Freddy’s boss…
And the inventor of Returné.
“I came to save your life,” he said. “How am I doing so far?”
“Great,” Bryn said. She lunged forward over the seat, put him in a headlock, and said, “Give me your cell phone or I’ll break your fucking neck, you psycho.”
He choked, flailed, and pointed wildly at Fast Freddy…who dug a phone from his pocket and held it out. Bryn let go of Mercer’s chicken-thin throat, took the phone, and sank back against the cushions as she dialed with lightning-fast fingers.
Patrick answered on the first ring, this time.
“It’s Bryn,” she said. “I’m out. They’re coming for Joe and his family. Get everyone safe, right now. Don’t worry about me.”
“Does Mercer have you?” Patrick asked. She could hear the tension in his voice.
“Did you hear me? Kylie and the kids—”
“Are safe,” Joe said, clicking in on another line. “Liam’s okay, too. So’s your dog, in case you’re wondering, although he’s getting a little pissed at you for all the inconvenient abductions. It’s hell on his routine. Does Mercer have you?”
This was so confusing it made her head hurt. “Is he supposed to have me?”
“Yes,” said Patrick. “It was the best way we could get you out of there safely. They were looking for us. Not for someone we’d shoot on sight.”
She was feeling a little out of her depth, suddenly. Back was front. White was black. And Jonathan Mercer and Fast Freddy, apparently, were allies. “How the hell…?”
“Long story,” Fast Freddy said, and plucked the phone out of her hand. “No time. We’re coming in,” he said into it, and hung up the call. “You can chat all you want later, but right now, we need to go. When Jane gets where she’s heading and figures out it’s a trap, she’s going to come looking for us, and I really don’t want to be found.”
Mercer turned around and glared at Bryn. “It probably goes without saying, but try grabbing me again and you’ll end up headless in a ditch. Got it?”
Bryn glared back at him in the rearview mirror and didn’t make any promises.
“Seat belt,” he said. “And shut up. You too, Freddy.”
It was a silent drive.
It was a long drive, as they veered northeast from San Diego and out into the desert landscape.…Not much traffic in the predawn hours, especially as the car headed into what wasn’t much more than wilderness. Bryn watched the sky turn from cobalt blue to lapis as the sunrise drove away the night. Now that she had time to think without the masking veil of adrenaline clouding everything, she couldn’t believe she was still alive—well, still functioning.
She’d met a true, nearly soulless psycho killer and walked away. For now, some part of her whispered. And you’ll never really leave that room, in a whole lot of ways that matter. She could feel it, the damage Jane had done to her. Not physically—that would heal—but in other, subtler, more awful ways. The idea of being touched by anyone made her feel sick and light-headed. She could feel her body trying to process out the stress in random twitches and shakes, but they were like the lightest possible surface tremors, and deep inside, tectonic plates were shifting, crashing, re-forming. The damage had to go somewhere, and it turned inward.
She thought that was what Jane had been trying to tell her, there at the end. It changes you.
Bryn had a new, desperate fear that it would change her, rip her apart and cobble her back together into something that was human only on the outside, like Jane—something that had lost all sense of what it meant to love and be loved in return. Something that understood only pain. Because right now, that was all she could see, smell, hear, touch, taste, be. Psychic, raw pain.
Bryn leaned her forehead against the cool window glass and stared blindly out at the dawn. Mercer and Fast Freddy tried to talk to her, but she ignored them; eventually, Freddy settled on an oldies rock station on the radio, and that was oddly soothing. She might feel like an alien in a human suit just now, but the Rolling Stones were always relevant.
The car passed a billboard reading SALTON SEA RECREATION AREA. It was an ancient, decaying, leprously peeling artifact of a far different era: 1950s hopeful families, finned cars, and a would-be resort that now existed only in faded postcards…and ruins.
Bryn leaned forward, but not enough to put a headlock on Mercer. Yet. “Where are we going?” She’d expected to head back to the estate, or, failing that, some locked-down location in the city. Instead, they were heading out to the literal middle of nowhere.
“Bombay Beach,” Mercer said.
“Isn’t that abandoned?”
“For years now, except for addicts and thrill seekers,” he said. “You know, you haven’t asked anything yet. Not even why I’m suddenly your best friend, coming to your rescue.”
“I don’t figure you’ll tell me the truth,” she said.
“Oh, Bryn, after all I’ve done for you? That hurts.”
“I don’t think you’ve earned any trust points. You sent my own sister to try to kill me.”
“Granted, but things have changed. It’s not a fight for market share for my product; it’s survival. Jane’s employers are taking away my customers, not just targeting your Pharmadene drones on the government dole. I need my customers.” Jonathan Mercer had, she’d heard, started out as an idealistic scientist, but something about Returné had broken him, too—not in the literal sense, because he wasn’t on the drug (and was still alive), but because he’d lost that rosy glow of belief. He’d been betrayed by his own, and his response had been to betray them back, over and over.
The only thing that really mattered to him now was money, lots of it, acquired as quickly as possible. He was the one who’d started illegally running Returné in a blackmail scheme with Lincoln Fairview, Bryn’s former boss; indirectly, he was responsible for Bryn’s murder and rebirth.
And directly responsible for Annie’s.
Mercer stared at her in the rearview. Pharmadene’s brand of psychotic idealism meant using the drug to turn all the best people—in their opinion, of course—into the Revived, living forever, and owing their very existence to the great corporate god. The only good thing that Bryn could say about Mercer was that he wasn’t a kingmaker; he didn’t try to judge who shoul
d get the drug and who shouldn’t. He believed that if you could pay, you should play.
It wasn’t egalitarian, except in the very commercial sense, but at least it had been better than Pharmadene’s “new world order” plans.
Mercer had gotten tired of her silence. “The point is, I have no quarrel with you personally, Bryn. Nor with Mr. McCallister. My fight with the government’s control of my business will have to wait for a better time, because they have absolutely no clue about what they’re facing.”
“Do you?” Bryn asked.
“Oh yes,” Mercer said. “Quite a bit of one, and trust me when I tell you that however afraid you are right now, you are not afraid enough.” He glanced over at Freddy. “We’ve arrived. Make the call.”
Freddy pulled out a cell phone and dialed, and just said, “Ready,” before hanging up again.
“This seems very spy-friendly,” Bryn said. “Please tell me if I’ve joined the Impossible Missions Force.”
“I think you did that the day you died,” Mercer said—and sadly, she thought, he was probably right. “You’re looking quite gray, you know. If you want a shot, then be quiet and do as you’re told. If all works well, you should have most of your answers in under an hour. I don’t think you’ll enjoy them, but you will have them.”
They passed Salton City, which was about the only claim in the whole area to civilization; the Salton Sea Recreation Area had been a half-assed attempt to create a tourist trap by sheer force of will, on an inland saltwater lake that was in the process of ecological crash. The creators had envisioned a California version of Las Vegas, only without (presumably) as much gambling.
What was left of that utter failure was sunbaked, dry, and defeated; the boarded-up, crumbling motels looked postapocalyptic, and the few stores and restaurants struggling to stay open seemed like places to avoid, not frequent.
And that was the thriving part of the area. Bombay Beach was much, much worse.
The sedan slowed down as they entered the real devastation. Most of the eyesores around Salton City had been quietly bulldozed, but here, in Bombay Beach, they were the landscape. If anyone still lingered here, it was because there was no way out for them. Where there were actual houses, they’d been left to the elements, windows broken out and ragged, sun-rotted curtains flapping in the breeze. The departing owners must not have made much of an effort to take their furniture, because many pieces lay broken and dismembered. A disemboweled sofa with chunky sixties-style lines bled tattered foam where it lay half on, half off a sagging porch.
They kept going, past row after row of utter destruction and neglect. No sign of people, just circling, wheeling birds over the flat, harsh lake. The white spots she’d initially taken for foam on the water’s surface were, in fact, dead fish. Hence the greedy birds.
It was beyond any doubt the most blighted and depressing area Bryn could imagine that hadn’t been bombed out of existence.
Mercer slowed the sedan finally, as a chain-link fence appeared ahead. It was ancient, but still upright and doing its job—odd that it hadn’t been ripped apart by vandals, as so many others had been. Behind it lay a large, square cinder-block building that looked beaten, but not quite as broken as the others.
Mercer parked. Freddy got out of the car and slid back a section of the fence that had been cut loose from the post; Mercer scraped through with only a minor loss of paint, and Freddy restored the fence and twisted some kind of fastener back in place to hold it. That was why vandals hadn’t bothered to rip it down.…They didn’t need to do so. Easy access.
They parked in front of the building. It had a single closed door, and a faded, illegible sign that Bryn couldn’t make out. She thought it looked like the ghost of a sailboat, and water, but this place was like a real-world Rorschach test—you could impose your own meaning on anything you saw here.
“Out,” Freddy said, and opened her car door. She didn’t like it, suddenly, didn’t like this.…It was rarely good news to be driven to the middle of abandoned nowhere and marched out of a car. But in truth, if Mercer had wanted her dead, he could have let her go to the incinerator and not put forth the effort.
So she went…although she remained acutely aware of Fast Freddy’s knife and where he kept it. In a crisis, she’d go for that.
She also didn’t let anyone touch her. Not at all.
Mercer walked right up to the door and knocked. Three strong, steady bangs of his knuckles, then three more, as if it was some kind of signal. Bryn listened. There was no sound out here at all except the unearthly crying of the gulls diving on the fish and the rattle of wind. The smell of the place struck her hard—a hard-to-stomach aroma of pure, rotten death. Recreation area my ass. The only recreation still thriving out here was conducted in the dark, fueled by booze, drugs, and violence.
The door opened on shadows, and Fast Freddy tried to push her inside; that was a mistake. As he reached for her, Bryn stepped into the gesture, grabbed his arm, and twisted it behind him, then frog-marched him over the threshold as a human shield. “Touch me again,” she whispered in his ear, “and I’ll cut things off you, asshole.”
He laughed. Laughed. “I forgot,” he said. “You’ve met Jane.”
She twisted harder and got a wince out of him. “What do you mean by that? You think I’m her?”
“I think nobody is the same after they meet Jane,” Freddy said, and for once, there wasn’t any mockery in his voice. “I damn sure wasn’t.”
Mercer entered behind her, and Bryn backed to the side, taking Freddy with her; she didn’t want Mercer at her back any more than she did anyone else just now. He didn’t comment, not even to ask her to let go of his sidekick; he just shut and locked the door.
A rank of lights flickered on overhead—old fixtures, dirty bulbs. It was amazing any of it still worked. The room itself was just a rectangular box that vaulted up into a curved concrete roof spiderwebbed with cracks and peeling turquoise paint.
There were two people standing in the center of the room, and both of them were armed.
One of them was Liam. It was very odd seeing him here, dressed in his sweater vest and dress pants under Kevlar, with what looked like a .380 semiautomatic pistol in his hand—what was even odder was that he looked completely comfortable with it, especially as he aimed it two-handed with impeccable form at Mercer’s head. “Please don’t move,” he said. “This might not damage your friend, but I understand it would greatly hamper your future plans.”
Mercer, looking amused, shrugged and raised his hands. “And here I thought we were all friends.” He glanced at Bryn. “You can let him go now. You’re safe.”
She released Fast Freddy, because the other armed person was Pat McCallister. No comfortable sweater, no dress pants. He was dressed for war and death, and he looked very intimidating. His dark, very cold stare fixed on Fast Freddy as Bryn let go of him. “Hands,” he said. “Up on your head. Down on your knees.”
“Do it, Freddy,” Mercer said. “Let’s not start off our collaboration with so much drama. Please have your man stop posturing. You can’t afford to kill me, McCallister. You need what I know.”
“Not as much as I’d like to blow your brain stem out the back of your skull for all the misery you’ve caused,” Pat said. “Don’t underestimate how much I hate you, Mercer.”
Mercer made it look like the prisoner-of-war pose was his own idea, even as Pat slammed him facedown onto the concrete, zip-tied his hands and ankles, and flipped him over on his back to search him. He came up with two guns, which he added to his own arsenal, and then repeated the process with Fast Freddy. He didn’t miss the knife.
Only after the two men were down and helpless did he nod to Liam, who relaxed and stepped back.
And then he finally looked at Bryn.
She didn’t remember him moving, but suddenly he was there, within touching distance, arms open for her, and McCallister was the only safe place she could imagine left in the world. The only solace.
; But she flinched when he reached out. It was sheer gut reaction, utterly beyond her control; she saw the flicker of shock in his face, and then the understanding, which was worse. He didn’t try to embrace her.
Instead, he slowly, carefully put his hands on either side of her face. They felt sunshine-warm. So did his voice. “I’m sorry,” he said. It was little more than a whisper, and his eyes were fierce and desperate. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come for you myself. It was safer this way. We didn’t have the firepower to take that place, Bryn. The only thing we could do was trust that Mercer could pull this off. I hated leaving you there even an extra second, believe me.”
“I know,” she said, and wrapped one hand around his wrist. His pulse was tapping hard against her fingers. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay now.” She was lying—to him, to herself—but she couldn’t say anything else. Nothing else would help that anxious, tense look on his face. “Where’s Joe?”
“With his family. I wouldn’t ask him to leave them now, not after—”
“After Jeff went missing,” Bryn said, and felt a horrible surge of fear. “He’s all right, isn’t he? They let him go? He wasn’t hurt, was he?” That was the one rock to which she’d clung through all that horror with Jane—that at least she’d saved Jeff. If she hadn’t…if she hadn’t, the tide would rush her over the cliff.
“He’s fine. Scared as hell, like his mom. Kylie was going out of her mind, and Joe—” McCallister cut himself off, and shook his head. “I can’t let him put them at risk anymore. Or himself. Joe’s out of this—he has to be.”
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t want him hurt, either.” She took a deep breath and said, “I also don’t want you putting yourself at risk. Or Liam. This isn’t about you; it’s about me, and Annie. About the Revived. You’re just going to get hurt, Pat. These people…they’re not like Pharmadene, as bad as that was. They’re something else. Something far worse.”
“She’s right,” Mercer called from where he was on the floor. “You have no idea how much worse this really is. I’m nothing. Pharmadene is nothing. Widen your scope of disaster, McCallister.”
