Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel

by A. J. Scudiere

  A midnight drill was a torture device.

  She looked at her clock. It wasn't midnight—it was two a.m. She'd actually managed to get to sleep the night before their weekend break, and now these fuckers had to wake her up. She was quite certain they were going to have to attend a full day's worth of classes tomorrow on very little rest. Lovely.

  Still, she was a Marine at heart, and she was good at doing what she was told. She rolled upright, watching as GJ Janson put both feet on the floor, stood up, and slid fluidly into her khaki pants and academy-issued polo shirt.

  Though Walter was bionic during the day, at night, it was as entirely different story. Her prostheses were off. They had to be. She couldn't function if she slept in them. So she now sat on the side of the bed, one foot on the floor, the other partial leg dangling, and slung herself into the polo shirt. At least she'd had it handy. She'd been ready.

  As she pulled one pants leg up, she saw GJ tuck her shirt in and buckle everything up her pre-threaded belt. Her roommate wasn’t the strongest or the fastest or the most intimidating, but she was sharp. GJ was at the door with her hand on the knob before she seemed to fully wake up and realize what was going on.

  Though Walter was mostly dressed now, she was still missing two limbs. Reaching out, she grabbed her leg prosthesis, and began the task of settling it just so, then buckling it into place. It wasn't the long, arduous process that many veterans dealt with. Few people had her level of tech. She’d agreed to be a guinea pig at Walter Reed Hospital. While it had meant a longer stay and longer recovery, it also earned her the best non-flesh limbs money could buy. But even with all her advantages, putting on her prosthetics still wasn't a process that could be termed “fast.”

  Worried and wondering why she hadn't heard the door open—why GJ wasn't already out it, since she was dressed and ready—Walter looked up. She’d moved just in time to see GJ holding out the left arm prosthetic.

  "You should go," Walter said, "I can do this."

  "I know," said GJ, "But I'm here. We go out the door together."

  "That's not necessary." Walter shook her head. "You have to pass these things, or neither of us will graduate."

  "I know. I’ll pass. I know you may not believe me and I know that I huff and I puff when we go on the five-mile runs. And I hate every step of it while you seem to think it's just a walk in the park. I'm the one who takes excellent notes in class and understands all the scientific concepts. I'm the one who makes everybody concerned that I'm a sociopath because I'm actually really good at interrogating people. You're good at intimidating.

  “But the deal is: we have to start being a team. It isn't just about training. When we get out in the field, Westerfield's going to leave us on our own. If we don't have each other's backs, it won’t be about flunking out, it will be that we're actually not going to survive. It hadn't really hit me until earlier today, but we can't afford to keep going the way we've been going. So here’s your arm. How can I help put it on so that we can be faster? Because we're going out that door together."

  For a moment, Walter sat in stunned silence. In all her life—even before she'd even been missing a limb or two, before she'd ever needed an extra five minutes to get a prosthetic device on—everyone went out the door for themselves. That was how she’d been trained to operate. It was what she’d always done. Despite being part of a team, she was expected to go on her own.

  No one had ever waited for her.

  Walter woke up in bed naked next to Donovan. However, she was thoroughly disappointed. She was naked for no good reason, and that sucked. She had been so tired when she arrived, that she’d walked through his door and basically shed every piece of clothing before saying hello. Then fell face-first into his bed. At some point during the night, he must have climbed in with her, but she would not have been able to answer what time in a court of law.

  Luckily, when she woke up, the morning played out a good bit better than the night before had.

  Later, over breakfast, Donovan commented, "I'd expected you to arrive earlier. And I expected you to be awake. I'm just glad you made it safely."

  "Yeah." Walter fought a sigh. "It was a bitch. I think I drank fifteen sodas trying to stay awake on the drive down. I'm surprised I didn't have to get up five times in the middle of the night to pee."

  He laughed at her and she appreciated the ability to speak with frank candor about peeing in the middle of the night. She appreciated having a boyfriend. It had been a long time since that had happened. The last time Walter had a significant other, she'd also had four intact limbs. But if anyone understood her, it was Donovan.

  She explained to him about the middle-of-the-night drill, how they'd been roused from their beds and lined up in the hallway like cadets in a military academy.

  “I remember those!” He almost looked nostalgic. “I remember having these contradictory thoughts at the time. One was, I survived med school just fine, and I can survive this. And the other was, I fucking went to med school. I do not need this shit.”

  That time, she laughed. At least midnight drills and cold practices were something she knew and understood well. She told him about GJ waiting for her and then she told him how the two of them had arrived, last in line, last to stand at attention.

  While everyone waited silently ready for the drill/torture to start, the instructor yelled at GJ. Why hadn't she come out first? Why had she waited for her partner? GJ had stayed motionless—all five feet and two inches of her—and stared the man down. She said, "That's my partner. I don't leave without her."

  Walter could tell that Donovan understood how touched she was by the gesture. He also understood she was never going to say so. Though the instructors threatened GJ with failure of the exercise—which meant a repeat of it—GJ didn’t budge. They next threatened to flunk her out of the physical portion of training, giving her bad marks and putting her at the bottom of the class. GJ still stood firm. She only repeated what she'd said to Walter earlier. "She and I, we're going to be partners in the field. If we don't have each other's backs, we'll be dead. So you can yell at me all you want, but it's not going to change the fact that every time we leave the door, we'll leave it together."

  Walter's final assessment was that GJ was slow, she was relatively weak, she was quite smart, and sometimes she was a holy terror with a gun. Walter was still afraid her partner was going to accidentally hurt someone in the roll-and-shoot drills. Walter wanted to be nowhere near her when that day happened. She was simply grateful they hadn't gotten there yet.

  "That," she told Donovan, "is probably going to be the day that GJ flunks us out of Quantico."

  Walter was unprepared for when he laughed at her. "I don't know, Walter. The girl's got spunk; you've got to hand it to her. My thought is, you can pull off the academy courses and study. It’s not that you're not smart, you're just not a student like that. If you can pull off the academy classes, she can pull off the physical side of it. You just watch. The two of you will graduate just fine. After all, I did, and honestly, some days I don't think I'm in any better shape or any more coordinated than GJ is."

  They ate a little longer in silence and then Donovan changed the topic. "I'm assuming since Westerfield put the two of you together, he'd also set you guys up to spill all your secrets to each other, right?"

  Though he hadn't completely meant it, Walter knew what he was fishing for. "No," she said. "He sat us down together and offered us the position together and GJ accepted right away. When I took longer to decide, he talked to me a couple of times that week. He made it very clear that I was not to tell GJ what I knew about you and the others like you."

  "Are you serious?" Donovan asked. "That's like pitting the two of you against each other. Like making you partners and then making you keep secrets. But surely, she's figured it out. Right?"

  "No, I don't think so." Walter shook her head. "GJ still seems convinced that you have an extreme case of double-jointedness that you don't even know about yourself." />
  "What?” He blinked a few times as though reconciling the idea. "GJ did ask me about that before, and I brushed her off. She’s still stuck on that?"

  "Looks like. Her grandfather has a collection of bones like yours," she said. "But she doesn't think there's anything to it other than some plates that didn't fuse and some ligament attachments that make it look like you should be pretty flexible."

  "Holy shit," Donovan said, though Walter wasn’t sure if that comment was from finding out about the collection or from GJ’s current inability to put the pieces together. "What's going to happen when she finds out?"

  "Who says she's going to find out?" Walter asked. "If she and I are partners and we're not put on the same cases with you, how would she? If she doesn't see you or the other agent Wade or, you know, someone else like you, what would happen? If we don't run into the Lobomau, then who's to say she'll ever figure it out?"

  Donovan didn't seem as convinced about that possibility as Walter did and honestly, Walter wasn't sure. Apparently, GJ had cracked a nearly uncrackable code when they'd been working a previous case. She'd cracked it partly through sheer smarts and partly through dogged determination. Maybe Donovan was right. Walter wondered what would happen if she just told her everything, but what would Westerfield do if she defied his specific orders? She asked Donovan what he thought the repercussions might be.

  Shaking his head, he stood up from the table and carried his plate to the sink. "I don't know,” he said. “All I know is that Westerfield's being an ass. He's put you in a damn hard position, Walter."

  7

  GJ's grandfather wasn't even home. He was out on a speaking tour and she’d known it. He’d managed to leave just prior to her arrival and he’d be back Tuesday, after she’d already left. So no one was here for the weekend, except herself and the staff. The staff loved her almost as much as her grandfather did.

  She could've gone to her own home or seen her parents. However, since she hadn't even told them that she was at Quantico training to become an FBI agent, she wasn't about to try to explain where her bruises had come from. Or why she was so sleep-deprived. They would likely assume the sleep issue was from being a graduate student, but the bruises were much harder to explain away. And what could she possibly say about why on earth she kept putting her hand to her right hip?

  That's where her gun was holstered. They wore heavy plastic, brightly colored, molded fake Glocks that wouldn't do anything in a fight except bounce off someone's head if thrown. But the NATs had to wear them at all times, Quantico regulations for new academy trainees. The problem was, after just a few short days of wearing the heavy pieces at their sides, all the trainees began to act as though they were walking around with actual guns.

  The men got more macho, which was honestly a tough thing to do given the amount of testosterone that was flowing through her training class already. But GJ found even she began to reach for her hip. After so many times practicing the release of the holster, drawing the weapon, and firing on sight, it had become perfectly natural to her. Once they'd been allowed to actually pull the trigger on the real guns and loose some bullets on things, then they'd started pulling the fake guns out of the holsters. And that was the point, though she wasn’t sure she liked it.

  They practiced aiming, even though the plastic guns couldn't shoot. Despite all the fake parts of the drills, she’d still become adept at reaching for her gun. It was an odd sensation—one she'd never expected to feel as a scientist and she had expected to be a scientist. It wasn't that she wasn't one now, but she certainly had entered a whole new realm.

  She'd made the drive to her grandfather's house because she hadn't wanted to go to her own place. GJ could've gone to her apartment and seen some of her friends and she would have loved it. They would have wanted her to come out to party, to hang out, to talk, to stay up late, and she would've wanted to do it. She would've returned to Quantico more worn out than when she'd left—and those assholes kept them up all night running trainings.

  After lining up the NATs along the length of the hallway the night before, they'd taken them to the practice room. There, they’d spent hours practicing jiu-jitsu take downs. They practiced hold maneuvers, and pressure-point applications, and finally, everyone was let in on the little trick Walter had used to take Hank to the floor. That was a shame. Though GJ appreciated learning the hold, she wished it was something Walter still could lord over Hank. Hank had smirked at Walter as he'd walked by at the end of training.

  The only thought GJ had was that—while Hank had one trick—Walter surely had a hundred more. You didn't come out of MARSOC, you didn't come out of Afghanistan or Somalia—or any of the other places where Walter had apparently been stationed, but couldn't breathe a word about—without knowing all kinds of wonderful little things like that. Maybe after they graduated GJ could get Walter to teach her a few more. Maybe after they graduated, she and Walter would be closer to being friends. At least they'd improved from always sniping at each other to at least being partners. They sure as hell weren't friends, yet.

  She probably slept fourteen hours the first night at her grandfather’s. Her original plans included walking in the door, hugging the staff, and telling them a lie about where she'd been. If she could get them to ignore her bruises—though that was difficult, as they were no less nitpicky or concerned than her parents—she’d thought she would go down to her grandfather's laboratory that first night.

  No such luck. She slept so soundly that she didn’t wake until the sun crested the top of the sky. She hadn't done that since finals. Having slept so long, she certainly couldn't run right down into the basement lab. She had to check in and assure the staff there was nothing wrong with her, she'd simply been extremely busy. And that, though she'd been looking forward to her weekend, she had not been able to get a good night's sleep the night before she left. That part was true. The why was not. She was lucky she’d gotten some sleep on the plane or she wouldn’t have made it home without falling asleep at the wheel and driving off the side of the road, though she didn't tell them that part, either.

  The staff had made her a hearty breakfast at the usual time, but when she didn’t show, they’d set it aside and kept it warm. She ate it served up at noon: French toast casserole, sausage, bacon, and an egg, because what growing grad student didn't need all that? She finally managed to sneak away. It was almost two o'clock by the time she'd showered, gotten dressed, and managed to get everyone else out of her hair.

  Once again, she'd flipped the breaker to the wing that housed a full lab inside the large home. Leaving the power off kept the camera at the end of the hallway from recording her as she walked down. It also tripped the switch on the coded lock that had shown up on her grandfather's basement laboratory door, replacing the old combination lock she’d figured out opened with her own birthday. The new lock didn’t.

  Maybe he was getting suspicious. Maybe he'd always been paranoid. She wasn't certain what it was, but she knew it wasn't a good sign. She tried to ignore the feeling in the pit of her stomach. Tried to ignore the fact that the person she was spying on was her own grandfather. The man who’d taken her for walks and Planet Earth movies in IMAX. He’d told her about animals and people and ancient cultures. She just didn’t know what else he was doing.

  With a little bit of research, her specialty, she'd managed to find an online video and figure out how to flip the lock. While it was a nice, heavy, digital padlock, it had an emergency code so it couldn't lock anyone in or out if the power was off. It was a design flaw, she thought, but her grandfather—while very smart and good at many things—was no technical expert. It made perfect sense that he’d bought a lock that his own granddaughter could pick.

  In the middle of the day, enough light came in through the high windows to see around without her camera. The windows had been frosted so that no one could sneak around the outside and peek in to see what he was doing—another design issue that she hadn't fully considered the first time she'd co
me down here. Back then, she’d thought the place incredibly cool and wondered why he locked it up. Now, each time she visited, she encountered or spotted yet another feature designed to keep the world out.

  The more she walked around, the more she looked, the more she realized that this place was a fortress of its own. Despite the glow coming through the high windows, she still needed the flashlight on her phone when looking in the backs of drawers, or under papers and stacks of files, where the light wasn't quite enough to make up for the shadows that always haunted the room when she was down here.

  Scanning the space at large, she saw the kettle was once again open. Standing near it and peeking down inside, she could see it was back to its normal, clean, shiny self. Whatever had been boiling in it had been removed. Nothing was lying out on the tables. That was also a normal facet of her grandfather's lab. The more she'd learned about other people's labs, the more time she'd spent with other professors, the more she'd learned that they left their bones out. They simply left the bodies lying on the table. They considered it enough to lock the lab when they left. If that was enough precaution to cover their end of the responsibility, why did her grandfather always put everything away? She didn’t want to think he was hiding his work, but there was no other conclusion she could draw. Ironically, he was the one who’d taught her to rule out all other options to arrive at the logic of a situation.

  Now she had the task of sorting through what she knew, what she remembered, and what she had in the record on her cellphone. She had to figure out which things were new in the lab. Pulling open drawers, GJ saw some had full human skeletons laid out, bone by bone, recreating the anatomy of the figure when they were alive. Others simply held pieces. Some had a femur, a tibia, a handful of foot bones, each laid out as well as could be done with so many missing pieces. Still other drawers were smaller, holding only partial limbs, and eventually, some pieces were just kept in boxes, labeled on the ends and stacked to the top of the ceiling. So many lives were cataloged in this room, she thought. And so many of them—in fact, almost all the ones she could specifically examine—had one singular, massive, full-skeletal anomaly.