7 Sykos

by Marsheila Rockwell

  Another set of double doors, this one windowless, probably led into the restaurant itself. That was their next goal, Fallon decided. She would stay close to Lilith when they went in.

  With the kitchen cleared, she motioned to Light, who nodded once, then crossed to the second set of doors. Gun ready, he pushed one of them out just enough to see through the gap.

  Rounds from an automatic weapon perforated the door. Light threw himself back against the wall, but not before one of the bullets creased his side. He paled and put his hand there, and it came away bloody. He took a few seconds to catch his breath, then readied his M249 again and pointed toward the doors. The other Sykos took positions in the kitchen where they were at least partially protected by the stainless steel fixtures and aimed their guns at the doorway. Except for Lilith. She just stood there until Fallon pulled the girl down beside her.

  When everyone was ready, Light kicked the nearest door wide open, then drew back again, lowering his gun and opening fire. Everybody else followed suit, firing through the doorway as the door swung back and forth in ever-­smaller arcs, and through the other door. They returned the shots coming their way by about ten to one, Fallon figured.

  When she raised her fist, everybody stopped shooting. The place was quiet, except for the echoes of gunfire, which might just have been a ringing in her ears. There was no answering fire coming from the far side of the doors. Leaning against the wall, clearly in pain, Light used the barrel of his machine gun to nudge the near door open again.

  Nothing.

  Fallon caught his eye and mouthed, “Are you okay?”

  Light nodded. “Flesh wound,” he mouthed back. Again using his gun, he pushed the door open wider. Still no response. He dared to step in front of it, a little unsteady on his feet. This time, when he opened the door, he looked at what was on the other side. Satisfied, he caught the door before it closed, held it open, and stepped through.

  A gunman was dead on the other side. He’d been sitting at a table, facing the door. When the volley of bullets hit, he’d been knocked backward, still in the chair—­the crash no doubt drowned out by the roar of the guns—­and riddled with bullets. Blood had pooled around him, and more was spattered on the wall behind him, along with a ­couple dozen bullet holes.

  The restaurant angled toward the clubhouse’s main lobby, and from here they couldn’t see what might wait past the corner. Fallon took a last look at Lilith, who seemed to be coming out of her waking trance, and at Light, whose color was returning slowly, then went to the corner, peeked, then stepped into the open. She heard the others follow, but her gaze was fixed dead ahead.

  On Elliott Jameson.

  And the man holding a gun to Elliott’s head.

  “I would lower your guns,” the man said. He had a slight lisp, so “guns” became “gunthh.” He was Hispanic, and his English was spoken with an accent, but not much of one. Fallon thought he had probably grown up in the U.S. He wore an off-­white Western-­cut blazer, a black Western shirt with pearl snaps, black jeans, and white ostrich boots with toes that came to an extreme point. He had short, neatly trimmed black hair. There was a thatch of beard beneath his lower lip, less than an inch across but trailing all the way down his chin. He had to point the gun up to aim at Elliott’s head because Elliott was hanging from a ceiling beam by his wrists.

  He was naked, and covered with bruises, welts, and gashes. So much blood was smeared on his flesh that in some places Fallon couldn’t tell whether he was bruised or not. One shoulder appeared to have been dislocated. His face was pulpy, his right eye closed almost completely and his left just a slit, his lips swollen to two or three times their normal size. Both cheeks were cut, and blood had caked at the corners of his mouth. He saw Fallon. She could tell that by the way his left eye fixed on her. But he didn’t acknowledge her presence. She wondered how much of a beating his brain had taken.

  Having absorbed both Elliott’s condition and the man holding the gun on him, she took the rest of the scene in with a glance. Standing behind them was a huge man, slope-­shouldered and barrel-­chested, with a big, tight gut and powerful arms. He was shirtless, but his arms, torso, and neck were covered with so many tattoos, it was hard to tell at first. His fists were encased in tight leather gloves, and he was bloody up to his elbows. That blood, Fallon was certain, was Elliott’s, not his own. Two other men, both younger, longer-­haired, in skintight Western wear, stood behind the others, pointing their machine pistols at the Sykos.

  “Please,” the man with the gun on Elliott said. “Lower them.”

  Fallon lowered her M4. As she did, her gaze dropped to a table, slightly behind where Elliott hung. On the table, along with what she supposed were various implements of torture, was her prototype.

  “Thank you,” the man said. “Now the rest of you.”

  “I don’t think so, pal,” Warga said. “There are more of us, and we have bigger guns. Tell your boys to put theirs down. I don’t know who that side of beef is, and I don’t care. I’ll shoot him, too, if it means I get to shoot you and the big ugly there.”

  The man glanced at his companions. They held their guns steady. He looked back at the Sykos. Ditto. He smiled, showing two gold teeth along with the rest.

  “It appears we have—­although I am loath to use the term—­a Mexican standoff. Some irony there, yes?”

  “What have you done, Elliott?” Fallon asked, ignoring the man’s lame joke. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  His left eye rolled back in his head, and for a she was afraid he was losing consciousness. But then it came back and his mouth opened. Blood beaded on his split, ruined lips. When he spoke, it was so softly that he was hard to hear, and the words were slurred, almost unintelligible.

  “Gamez,” she thought he said.

  “Carmen Gamez?”

  “Unh . . .’rique.”

  “Enrique Gamez.” Carmen’s late husband. Head of the Gamez Cartel. Most drug kingpins were narcissists, but not many had the stones to name their cartels after themselves rather than adopting the name of the region they called home.

  “Yuh.”

  “What about him?” She thought she had already figured it out, though, and she was too impatient to wait for him to stutter through it. “You were going to sell it to him, weren’t you? Our prototype. The MEIADD.”

  “Yuh.”

  “Why? We were making decent money. And it would have been much, much more when we were able to develop it for commercial use.”

  “Not . . . enough. Not fast enough . . .”

  Part of her wasn’t at all surprised. Elliott was a genius, but the fact that he could walk down a city street without being recognized as one always grated on him. He wanted fame, but he would settle for money. “But . . . a criminal like that? A drug cartel? Why?”

  “Had . . . plenty of . . . cash. Willing to spend.”

  “What would he want with MEIADD? Doesn’t he know a psychopath when he hires one?”

  “Does . . . more than you think.”

  “Like what?”

  “Scans brains for . . . psychopathic structure.”

  “Well, yeah. That’s its intended use.”

  “Tweak the programming . . . it can dial them down.”

  “Right. That was always the goal. Diagnosis and treatment in the same device.”

  “Yuh.”

  “Still, why would Gamez want that? Doesn’t he want psychos on his payroll?”

  “Tweak . . . another way . . . ramps them up. Way up.”

  It was almost as if he’d been talking to SAC Ramirez. “We never intended for that capability to be built into it.”

  “You didn’t. I did. Told . . . Gamez I could.”

  “This is all so interesting,” the man with the gun on Elliott said. “Truly. But we’re in the middle of something, here, and—­”

  �
��One more word from you, and I’ll shoot you where you stand,” Warga warned.

  “Before he does, I’ll shoot you where you fuck,” Lilith added. “Guess which one will hurt more?”

  The man lowered the gun and stepped away from Elliott. The torturer had become a statue, unmoving, barely breathing. The two guys in back looked at each other, confused, then lowered their guns. Fallon continued her questions.

  “So Gamez agreed to buy it, and in return you bastardized our scientific work to create something that could provide him with an army of bloodthirsty psychopaths. Soldiers who would kill anyone or anything one minute, but whose murderous impulses could be tamped down the next. That about sum it up, Elliott?”

  “Yuh.”

  “And after Enrique died, Carmen decided she still wanted it. So you made plans to meet her in the city with it, and you stole it from the lab.”

  “Fallon . . . I—­”

  “If you’re thinking about apologizing, save it,” she said. “If these guys hadn’t already beat the crap out of you, I’d pay them to do it.”

  Elliott closed both eyes. When he opened the left one again, there might have been a tear in it. Then again, it could have been a trick of the light.

  “One thing I don’t get,” Fallon said. “They have it, now. Why are you still hanging there? Why haven’t they killed you?”

  “I . . . had a plane ticket. Argentina. But the . . . airport was closed. I needed . . . their help to get out of Phoenix . . . alive. Told Carmen . . . if they got me out . . . they could have the key. They already . . . had the MEIADD . . . so the key was my only . . . bargaining chip.” He twitched his head in the direction of the guy in the white boots. “In . . . stead of helping me get out . . . Luis brought me here.”

  “Nobody’s getting out, Elliott. There was nothing they could have done for you.”

  “They are professional smugglers,” Pybus pointed out. “If anybody could do it, they could. There’s probably a tunnel half-­dug under the fence already.”

  Fallon shot him a warning glance, and he clammed up. She turned her gaze to Luis. “So you decided it would be easier to torture it out of him? Or was it just more fun?”

  “Efficient,” Luis said. “And right. He agreed to certain terms, then refused to follow through. When Carmen gets here, she will—­”

  Fallon cut him off. “Carmen won’t do anything, and you won’t be seeing her again. Not this side of hell.”

  She stepped forward. The two gunmen started to raise their weapons, but a rustling behind her let her know that all the Sykos had just trained their guns on the young thugs. They lowered their guns again.

  Fallon kept going. Close enough to Elliott to smell blood and piss and despair, then between him and the torturer. On him, she smelled blood and rank sweat. On Luis, too much cologne, and maybe some tequila. She went to the table behind him, picked up the MEIADD prototype and the small, stylized gold cross and chain lying beside it. The MEIADD was a white plastic cylinder, slightly larger than a standard temporal scanning thermometer. Instead of a single point of focus, at the business end it branched out into three sections, each with a different type of scanner. By combining electroencephalography, voxel-­based morphometry, and near-­infrared spectroscopy, the MEIADD could produce a brain image almost as accurate and detailed as an fMRI. The idea was that it would be paired with a smartphone app, so it could be a basic part of medical kits for combat medics and EMTs, and might one day be included in every home or business first-­aid kit. Fallon and Elliott had decided to take it a step further and had arrived at a method of using the technology to boost the electrical activity of those brain cells within the paralimbic region, resulting in increased performance, which would at least temporarily dampen psychopathic tendencies.

  Obviously, Elliott had other ideas.

  “These belong to me,” she said. “And I’ll be leaving with them. Anybody have a problem with that?”

  “He’s going to need that crucifix,” Luis said. “I’ll shoot your friend as soon as you’re out the door.”

  Fallon spent a moment searching for feelings of pity or empathy, even remorse, but she couldn’t find any. Maybe it was her inner psychopath emerging in the face of all the horror she had seen in the zone. Maybe proximity to the Sykos brought it out. It was possible that she was succumbing to Crazy 8s. She didn’t care.

  “Elliott,” she said, “I used to like you. Now?” She stopped in front of him, gave him a little bit of a spin. He hung there, swaying back and forth. “Now I just hope it hurts.” To Luis, she added, “He’s never prayed a day in his life. And this isn’t a crucifix.”

  His jaw dropped open as he realized what she meant. The key had been in his hands the whole time. His gun came up, as did those of his thugs, but they never had a chance. The Sykos opened fire and ripped them apart.

  Fallon didn’t flinch when the gunfire started, just watched dispassionately as three more humans fell to her team. When it finished, she gave a finger wave to Elliott and headed for the restaurant’s main door. “You guys coming?” she asked as she went.

  “What about him?” Light asked.

  Fallon stopped, glanced back at Elliott. Holding her prototype in her right hand, she felt a surge of triumph. Swollen with it, she smiled and shrugged.

  “Fuck him. Leave him to the Infecteds. He doesn’t deserve any better.”

  She turned and went through the door, then held it for the others before she let it swing closed.

  From inside, she thought she heard Elliott calling her name, maybe trying to beg for his life. She shook her head. He really should know better than to expect mercy from a psychopath.

  PART III

  THE HIVE

  CHAPTER 43

  12 hours

  There were still sentries on the roof picking off Infecteds, but fewer than before. Fallon imagined some had fled, others fallen. But the remaining cartel thugs were still a threat, so when the Sykos left the clubhouse, they retraced their route through the loading dock, around the parking lot, using the cars for cover, and back to the pool house.

  There, the Sykos insisted on raiding the bar for whatever food hadn’t rotted, and Fallon let them. Even as they’d been sneaking back around the cars, it had been easy to see the carpet of Infected bodies covering the putting green. She imagined some of the corpses were actually cartel members but hadn’t been able to tell from that distance and hadn’t really cared. As long as they weren’t around to bother her Sykos, she was happy.

  “I’m gonna take a leak,” Warga said.

  “Not in the pool!” Lilith exclaimed, her nose wrinkling in disgust at the thought. “That’s gross!”

  “They got bathrooms in the pool house, genius,” Warga replied, turning on his heel before he could see Lilith giving him the finger.

  Pybus found a big plastic jar of pretzels that weren’t too stale and a similar one of cheese puffs. Someone had left the lid partially off the cheese puffs, though, and they were crawling with ants. Sansome found some small bags of salt and vinegar chips, and Lilith found a single unopened Coke in the back of the fridge and couldn’t keep from crowing in delight.

  The Sykos sat in a circle sharing the feast of carbs, each with a glass of flat club soda from the tap. Except for Lilith, who was lovingly savoring her caffeine fix.

  And Light, who had treated his wound with bar rags and water, then spent the rest of his time going from the bar counter to the back door, keeping watch.

  The chips were as advertised and the pretzels almost as salty, and Fallon found herself sharing Warga’s urge to use the bathroom. She excused herself and went over the counter after Light declared it clear.

  The pool house hadn’t been used in days, but was still damp and smelled of chlorine and, faintly, of mildew. She went in the side marked with the figure in a dress, was pleasantly surprised to find the locker room and changing a
reas free of corpses. She ignored the open showers and went over to the stalls, which thankfully had doors. One thing it had been hard to maintain while traveling with the Sykos was any sense of personal privacy. She was glad to be able to use the bathroom without having at least Lilith tagging along.

  She rose, pulled up her pants, and went to flush, then thought better of it—­the noise might attract unwanted attention. After rebuttoning and zipping everything that needed it, she opened the door.

  Warga grabbed her by the throat, yanked her out of the stall, and slammed her up against the wall, all while jamming a huge wad of toilet paper in her mouth, effectively gagging her.

  “Should have left them down, bitch.”

  He spun her around and shoved her up against the wall again, only this time, something cold and sharp pricked at her neck. A knife.

  Shit.

  She’d been struggling, trying to get her hand on a Glock, but she was a scientist who spent all her time in the lab, whereas he’d had little to do in prison except work out and dream of a moment like this. And she knew he would cut her in an instant—­he was probably so jacked up from all the blood and violence, he’d have no problem desecrating her corpse while it was still warm, or even raping her while she died.

  Because that’s what he intended to do, she knew. In the back of her mind, she’d been expecting this though she hadn’t been entirely sure it would be her and not Lilith. Choosing Fallon made sense, though—­she was the one who’d been riding herd on him since they entered the zone, and now he wanted his turn.