The Kip Keene Box Set: Books 1, 2 & 3

by Nicholas Erik

  They crumpled to the ground.

  She started to sprint full-out, the turret trying to spin-up again by interrupting its cool-down functionality. The hallway, lined with locked rooms, stood about a hundred feet long, with the turret in the dead center.

  It whirred.

  Her boots glided over the slick surface.

  Twenty feet away.

  She smelled gun oil, the bullets being prepped to fly out of the chamber.

  Fifteen feet.

  Spinning, spinning, spinning. About to fire.

  At the last moment she dove to her right, throwing all her weight and force into her shoulder. It connected with a door, which gave way with a creaking crash. She tumbled into a small office, riding the broken door on her side up to the edge of a desk, which stopped her forward momentum with a sudden jolt.

  Outside, the turret spit hundreds of useless rounds at where it had last seen Rabbit. Chunks of plaster, duct work and metal framing crumbled, but the weapon only had Rabbit’s last known position.

  Which was upright, sailing through the air.

  The bullets tore holes in the office a little over head high as Rabbit flattened herself against the ground, making herself as small as possible. This time, however, the machine seemed less willing to give up. The assault continued, showering her in a haze of dusty particles and errant debris.

  Then, on a frequency below the constant, thunderous chunk-a-chunk of the high caliber rounds, Rabbit heard what she’d been waiting for.

  The control room’s weakened glass caved, millions of gallons of water whooshing inside. Within seconds, it had rushed into the hallway, filling it ankle high. Rabbit held hear breath, the water coming in the side of her mouth and nose.

  The turret sputtered and died, short circuited by the liquid. A shower of white sparks shot up in the hallway.

  No time to lose.

  Rabbit leapt to her feet, dashed through the ruined doorway—which had received significant renovations at around eye level by the turret’s futile defense attempts—and began wading through the rising water towards the end of the hall.

  The elevator.

  Her life seemed to be caught on repeat, an endless hail of gunfire and near-escapes.

  The water at her thighs, she reached the elevator. Out of order. But she’d known that was going to happen. Rabbit turned right, where a short connecting hallway led to where she needed to go.

  The stairs.

  Half-swimming, half-jogging, she reached the door with the bright orange exit sign above it and pressed against the bar.

  The flow of the water carried her on to the stairwell’s landing, a cresting wave dropping her to the concrete. Water rushed in, pinning the door open. A cascade of water rushed down the steps, filling the stairwell.

  Rabbit scrambled to her feet, slipping on the slick steps. She took them two or three at a time, periodically glancing down to see the water’s progress. The control room being at the bottom of the structure didn’t leave much of a buffer before the water level began to catch up with her.

  The landing where she had just stood was already filled, and now the first step was disappearing.

  She accelerated, leaping four stairs at once before realizing she had a bigger problem.

  Two floors above, a creaking noise—a telltale indicator of turning gears—reverberated through the flooding stairwell. She didn’t need her enhanced senses to tell her what was going on.

  An emergency door was being lowered to seal off the passageway and prevent the flooding of the entire building.

  This she had not planned for.

  And the twelve tons of pressure-resistance steel was going to seal Rabbit within a watery grave.

  19 | Precinct 21B

  Wade tumbled over the divider into the front seat while Keene and Strike pounded against the bulletproof glass windows in the back of the town car.

  “It’s not moving,” Strike said. “Damn it, damn it.” She switched from her boots to her hands, battering the tinted windows with a barrage of fists.

  Keene caught her arm in mid-swing. “Relax.”

  She jerked and tried to free herself, but he held tight. In a display of defiance, she continued punching with her other arm. “We gotta do something.”

  Keene let go of her arm and she gave another series of half-hearted punches before giving up. Wade rustled in the front seat.

  Keene leaned over the divider to check on what Wade was up to. “Tell me you have something.”

  “Car’s control panel is admin access only, dude. Locked out. All controls are—they’re uh, I think they’re remote.”

  The frenzied beeping grew louder. Strike kicked at one of the town car’s speakers, and a sputtering mix of static drowned out the countdown of their impending doom.

  “She didn’t need to do that,” Wade said. The trembling in his voice had ceased, and he had a more pensive tone.

  “But it felt so damn good,” Strike said.

  “Not you. The polar bear lady who kidnapped us.” Wade pried at one of the speaker grille’s in the front seat while Keene watched. “She wired the countdown timer so it would play through the speakers.”

  “So she’s an asshole,” Strike said. “We knew that.”

  “It means I can overload the circuit with a burst of electricity,” Wade said. “Fry it.”

  “Won’t that trigger a dead man’s switch or an emergency?” Keene said, but his concerns went unanswered. The kid yanked out a bundle of wires from beneath car’s dashboard and began attaching them to the robot in the driver’s seat.

  The bursts of static and sharp beeps grew noisier and more obnoxious, so loud that Keene had to cover his ears. Wade, however, seemed nonplussed by the pandemonium swirling about him as he unhooked and tested various wires.

  In frustration—or audio-induced delirium—Keene screamed, “Let me do that,” leaning forward into the front seat, the plastic divider cutting into his rib cage as he ripped a bundle of wires out of the robot’s chest, where its battery was seated. “Give me the others.”

  Wade tore out the wires from the stereo and handed them to Keene, who took the conductive copper ends and began twisting them together.

  “Dude, I don’t know about that.”

  “Trust me, it’ll be fine.” Keene continued meshing the wires from the robot’s battery with the ones sticking out of the ruined speaker. “How much time we got left?”

  “I don’t—”

  A giant spark filled the air, and Keene was blown back into the leather seat. Smoke came from between his fingers, and he smelled burning hair. He wondered if this was the explosion, and if it was, it was way weaker than he had anticipated and wasn’t really worth the trouble.

  Then he passed out.

  Kip Keene’s phone rang, and the buzzing next to his heart startled him awake.

  He rocketed upwards, forgetting that he was still inside the town car when he tried to stand up.

  “Son of a bitch.” Keene winced, feeling the top of his head as he fished in his pocket for the phone and surveyed his surroundings. Strike and Wade, still alive. No one had grown angel’s wings or devil’s horns, or were surrounded by bizarre ethereal lights.

  By the looks if it, they were still alive.

  Wade gave him the thumbs up and said, “Shitty bomb, huh?”

  Keene gave him a weak smile and then answered the phone. “What?”

  “Kip?”

  “Lei? Yeah, look, you guys fucked us pretty good here, so—”

  “We’re in jail.”

  “How the hell did that happen?”

  “Renting your stupid car without papers and a passport. Or any identification. They’ve got the city airtight now, what with suspicious activities and all.” Rustling in the background. Lorelei whispering something in a conspiratorial tone, too quiet
to make out the words.

  “You didn’t just steal one?”

  “All the cars are tiny around here, so if you hadn’t been so damn specific about the town—”

  “We almost just died.”

  “Join the club,” Lorelei said. She sighed. “Sorry. They’re giving us a lot of shit, is all. What with Derek being shot, they figure he’s up to something. Been jerking us around for hours. First chance I had to call.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Precinct 21B.”

  “We’ll be there in…I don’t know. Soon.”

  “Hurry.” Loud shouts and angry voices in the background. “I think Derek started a little situation.”

  “Anything pressing?”

  “They aren’t gonna let us out. We’ve been here for eight hours. Hey.” A blast, and the sound of a sparking light fixture. “Yeah, that’s right, you stay.”

  More gunshots and agitated Spanish.

  “The hell did you just do?”

  “I, uh, I think we need your help.”

  “With what?”

  “Breaking out.”

  Keene paused for a long couple of seconds, listening to the noise in the background of the call. Then he said, “Half an hour.”

  “Jesus, half an hour? I’m not trying to go out like Butch and Sundance here.”

  “Fifteen minutes. I don’t know. We have situations here of our own.”

  Gunfire in the background, shattering glass. “I don’t know if we’ll last that long.”

  “Shit, all right. Just think of something.”

  He hung up the phone and glanced at Wade and Strike. “What?”

  “She was only trying to help, dude,” Wade said.

  “She’s family,” Strike said.

  “Don’t lecture me on family,” Keene said. He tried the door handle, but the lock refused to give. “Goddamn, we’re still in here?”

  “Can’t get out.” Wade shrugged and slumped into the passenger seat. “Hey, at least we’re not fried chicken.”

  “Fantastic. Party at my place.”

  The on-screen navigation console flashed, and the crackling sound of running water filled the car’s static-ridden speakers. Another video began to play on the car’s screen.

  “No, no, not again,” Wade said. His unexpected stoicism during the crisis before melted in the face of more adversity. “I’m too young for this.”

  Footsteps echoed on concrete while the video feed bounced up and down, up and down, showing a woman with a black spiked hair.

  “Holy shit, it’s you,” Keene said.

  “Piggybacked on Hawk’s signal,” Rabbit said.

  “Hawk?”

  “There is no time for explanations.” Deep breaths. The fuzzy waterfall noises coming from the car’s speakers made it sound like she was trapped in a bathtub during an electrical storm. “I am sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Keene said. “I was gonna hand you over to Owens, so we’ll call it even.”

  A snort on the other end. “Likely.”

  “Was that a joke? Goddamn, you’ve grown in the past few hours.”

  “No time. Atlantis is trying to attack, and will use Hawk to do it.”

  “The city?”

  “Yes. I have sent the schematics from the drive to you.”

  They flashed on-screen. “Whoa. Didn’t see these the first time around.”

  “And Kip Keene?”

  “Yeah, Rabbit?”

  “Goodbye. And thank you.”

  The feed devolved into static and white noise before Keene could say anything more. Then it reverted to the schematics Rabbit had sent from the drive.

  The doors also unlocked with a welcome click.

  Keene tried the handle and raised his hands in the air as he tumbled on to the asphalt. The morning sunrise never looked so damn beautiful.

  “Nano-bots,” Wade said.

  “What?” Keene walked over to the highway’s median and sat down. No cars were coming at this time of the morning, making the road almost peaceful. Then he remembered the bomb. “Everyone want to steer clear of the vehicle?”

  “Come on, Keeney, this is crazy. The Atlanteans used nano-bots to create living—okay, moving—objects out of regular stuff. So they could animate stone, wood and all sorts of crazy stuff.”

  “And it would be alive?” Keene scooted underneath the car, searching for the offending parcel of explosives.

  “Nah, more like a party trick. But the thing is, you combine those nano-bots with certain high-tech computer systems through accidental cross-contamination, and boom, you’ve created an AI system with some interesting properties.”

  “How interesting?” Keene stared at the duct-taped package of plastic explosive, then figured, screw it, and ripped the whole thing off the undercarriage of the town car.

  Nothing happened, so he figured that was the right move.

  After all, they needed to drive this car, and they had less than fifteen minutes to make it into town and save Lorelei and Derek’s asses. Hitchhiking wasn’t going to be an option.

  “If the psychotic soldiers the stuff made are any indication, dude, very interesting.”

  “Anything about this Hawk character?” He glanced at the explosives and figured they might come in handy. Keene tapped his fingers against the trunk of the car, and it came unlocked.

  He tossed the explosives in and walked towards the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah, that’s who we were talking to. She’s a damn smoke show—”

  “Don’t say anything else,” Strike said. “Please, nothing else.”

  “Jealous?” Keene tore the robot out of the driver’s seat and tossed it by the side of the road before getting inside. He took a look at the dashboard and hoped that Rabbit, in all her wisdom and foresight, had also removed the car from Hawk’s control.

  Keene slammed his hand against the underside of the steering wheel, and a mountain of wires popped out.

  “I’m jealous of that,” Strike said. “You’ve been hiding some serious skills, Captain Keene.”

  Keene sparked two of the wires together and the car roared to life. “Thank God for Rabbit.”

  “What do you think she wants us to do with all this info?”

  “Finish what she started,” Keene said, whipping the wheel in a sharp 180 before accelerating so fast that it pushed everyone against their seats. “Before it’s too late.”

  The town car tore along the C-31, toward Barcelona, on a collision course with an uncertain situation at Precinct 21B.

  20 | Watery Grave

  Rabbit rolled under the metal door, her left leg trailing behind. The monstrous safety mechanism slammed shut and she screamed. Even her heightened ability to focus couldn’t make her ignore the pain.

  She dropped the phone and reached down.

  Through squinted, tearing eyes she stared at her leg.

  Gone, shorn clean off at the calf. Blood flowed from the wound like a river of molten lead.

  The emergency stairwell was wet, but not from the water. A blood pool began to form around her, growing by the second. The drab cement landing shifted and swam as her depth perception faltered. Her head lolled backwards, and she saw what appeared to be an endless stairway leading upwards, to a place she’d never go.

  She closed her eyes. The blur of colors mish-mashed into one single, brilliant hue at the center of her vision, an unknown shade of extraordinary beauty.

  Rabbit smiled.

  She had warned Kip Keene. The fate of this world was in his hands now. And Samantha Strike. She was a good one, too. The kid, he was stupid, but maybe he would be helpful…

  Although there was still one thing she could do to help.

  As the pain grew, her mind began to wander the automatic loops imprinted upon it through train
ing.

  Visualize the target, visualize the success.

  The mantra, embedded over and over during training, played on repeat, her wounded body and mind retreating to the familiar, the drilled, the conditioned. Searing pain subsided as she imagined her leg whole again.

  It was a trick, a mental gambit that would not hold up long. But then, most extraordinary things in life were tricks of the mind, willing one’s consciousness where it dared not tread on its own.

  A deep sense of calm and concentration washed over her. The pungent smell of copper seemed to retreat with her newfound focus.

  Then she opened her eyes.

  Half a minute. Maybe forty seconds until she lost consciousness. A camera swiveled in the corner above. In a minute and a half, she would be dead.

  She fished the thumb drive from her pocket.

  So much trouble for such a little thing.

  She crushed it between her fingers, the brittle plastic crumbling to the bloodied ground.

  No one would be using that any longer. A symbolic gesture, considering what she was about to do, but it brought her immense satisfaction to hear the crack of the circuit board. The security camera swiveled, focusing in on her next move.

  She smiled.

  “Watch what comes next,” Rabbit said.

  With a shaking hand, Rabbit reached into her other pocket, extracting a grenade. She held it high above her head. A good thing she had come to this place prepared, although the modified explosive’s purpose was not planned for this particular moment.

  But it was planned for this precise purpose. A backup plan.

  She pulled the pin.

  The room went black, grenade bouncing to the ground near her head.

  Rabbit didn’t feel a thing.

  Static filled the screen as the entire facility shook. Hawk’s teeth dug into her bottom lip while the ground quaked beneath her boots.

  “Primary containment door has failed,” the technician said. His fingers banged against the keyboard with wild fury. “Entire containment system is down. It still thinks the door is holding. I can’t get the other doors to drop.”

  “Manual override,” Hawk said.

  “I—I can’t. The blast completely disabled the compartmentalization system.”