The Recoil Trilogy 3 Book Boxed Set: Including Recoil, Refuse and Rebel

by Joanne Macgregor

  “Mr. Hawke,” Quinn says, “you should know that the true purpose of our visit to PlayState today was to upload some additional software into the Go!Game.”

  “Extra special effects? Excellent, excellent!” Hawke says, smoothing his hair. The man truly is a moron.

  Roth is nobody’s fool, however. She narrows her eyes at Quinn.

  “What additional software?” she demands.

  “The sort that will tell the nation about the true purpose of the Game.”

  Hawke’s smile snaps off with the suddenness of a light being switched off. Sarge’s smile used to do the same.

  “We know everything,” Quinn says. “We know about the subliminal messages in support of —”

  “Stop!” Hawke says, holding up a hand. He turns to his three secret service agents and says firmly, “Go secure the exit, all of you — now!”

  When they hesitate, looking confused, Hawke says, “I have reason to believe that the perimeter has been compromised. Go and wait at the exit. On the other side of the decon unit. And tell the camera crew they can depart.”

  Clearly, he does not want them to hear, or record, any secrets about The Game. Maybe the personal bodyguard is privy to everything though, because the big guy stays put, as immobile as a small mountain.

  “We know,” Quinn begins again, “about the subliminal messages — the ones to boost fear of the plague to irrational heights, the ones to bolster support for you and your party, the ones to get kids addicted to playing The Game.”

  Hawke shoots a panicked glance at Roth, but before she can formulate a response, Quinn continues, “And we know all about the neuro-molding of children’s brains, the creation of super-soldiers and the kickbacks ASTA receives for sending the talent your way. In fact, I think we may know more about The Game than you do. Did you know that there is a whole other set of subliminal messages? Advertising for —”

  “Stop right there!” Roth cries furiously.

  “Let him speak,” Hawke says. “I’m very curious to hear what he has to say.”

  Roth glowers at us. Leya takes a few steps backward.

  “Fact is, the Game is riddled with subliminal ads for ASTA, A Play Test and all their subsidiaries. Anyone who plays is going to be spending their money on those products. Did you know? Or has Ms. Roth here been fooling you into believing you were the only beneficiary of her super-secret technology? You both benefit from your deal, but one of you is making wayyy more money.”

  “Who are the wolves now, Leya?” I can’t resist asking my former friend. “Who are the monsters who prey on this nation, brainwashing children, terrorizing citizens with lies, propaganda, detentions, torture and deceit? Will you stop them, too? Where’s your fight now?”

  Leya doesn’t answer. What could she say?

  Hawke looks outraged. His face is purple, and his eyes are bulging. “That fact that you have not identified, isolated and eliminated this threat is staggering and deplorable, Roberta,” he says. “You may correct your failings now.”

  Bruce’s hand slips behind his waist, as does mine.

  “Wait,” Leya begins. “Let’s just —”

  “Shut up,” Roth snaps.

  “The problem is, it’s not just us who know,” Quinn says quickly. “At this very moment, across the country, the Go!Game will be broadcasting an animated depiction of President Hawke, telling the nation the truth.”

  As if on a prearranged cue, both Roth and Hawke’s phones start ringing.

  “There you go,” Quinn says. “It’s begun. And once that public service announcement concludes, the Game will self-destruct.”

  Hawke answers his cell with a curt, “Yes?”

  Roth ignores the strident ringing of her phone. She knows what we’re capable of — she’s supervised our training since we were kids. She knows we’re not bluffing.

  Hawke cuts the call and, when it starts ringing again immediately, hands the phone to his bodyguard.

  “Give up now, both of you,” Quinn urges.

  “Roberta, explain yourself!” Hawke spits.

  “We had to make a profit somehow. What the government pays us is merely enough to keep us afloat, let alone fund our new research and development. We’re a business, Alex, not a charity. We have to satisfy our shareholders and investors.”

  “You were double-dealing all this time, screwing me? Swindling and conning the nation. The nation’s children?” he yells above the ringing phones.

  “Oh, please don’t pretend you care about them,” Roth says, setting her jaw and spinning to face Hawke. The underside of her hair flashes purple as it swings. “Besides, I think you’ll find we were operating within the parameters of the law. Don’t think you can pin this on me. I have those contracts, Alex, those presidential exceptions and pardons — all the evidence. And I’ll use it. You’ll be the one in disgrace, not me. I’ll tell the world you ordered it and I was just loyally following orders.”

  “No, Roberta,” Hawke says. His lips are thin, his eyes hooded. “You won’t tell the world anything.”

  He gives his personal bodyguard a nod and then turns his back on Roth. In one smooth movement, the big guy lifts his weapon and shoots her square in the chest.

  She falls to the ground — a crumpled heap of black and white and spreading red. Her hair fans out in a halo of poisonous pokeberry purple. And in a pocket of her jacket, her phone rings and rings.

  Chapter 42

  Out of the blue

  Leya bolts, spinning on her heel and dashing back down the street in a zigzag pattern. Hawke nods again, and his bodyguard takes off after her, but I doubt he’ll find her. Leya probably knows every nook and cranny of this arena, and there are just too many bolt-holes where she could hide.

  Bruce, Quinn and I scramble backward a good twenty yards. Bruce ducks behind a dumpster on one side of the road, and I drag Quinn behind the cover of a rusty, old-model Ford on the other.

  “Young fellow, you with the accent? I’d like to talk to you. You’re an intelligent young man, I can tell. You know your computers — your bits and your bytes, your programs,” Hawke says pleasantly. He still thinks we’re geeks and hackers. “But do you know the state of your nation?”

  “I know you’re corrupt to your core!” Quinn yells back, ignoring my efforts to shush him. “I know you and your allies are profiting off the fear of a nation!”

  “If that’s what you think, then you know nothing,” Hawke says flatly. “War is coming. True war — a hot war. This plague is just a taster — a first blow to soften us up before they launch the real attack on our decimated nation. A nation that was weak — weak! — even before they attacked. Divided, partisan, with personal rights at an all-time high. The individual was being prioritized over the collective. You couldn’t shoot an armed criminal without being crucified in the media and charged in court. We were easy prey for our enemies.”

  “So you just started growing a future army from underage civilians?” Quinn yells. “Changing the brains of children?”

  “We needed soldiers.”

  “You should have asked!”

  “We did ask!” Hawke yells back. “But serving your country was no longer the fashionable thing to do! Voluntary enlistment in the armed services was at an all-time low after those botched desert conflicts. Those wars weren’t winnable, or maybe even worth fighting. If we’d tried to bring back the draft — we would have had a fight on our hands. Even the plague attacks didn’t change that, because you can’t fight a plague with soldiers and tanks.”

  “Please can I just take him out? I can’t stand this prattling anymore,” Bruce says from across the street, just loud enough for Quinn and me to hear.

  “Was fighting the plague ever even your priority?” Quinn demands.

  Hawke ignores the question. “We’ve had the intelligence for years that our enemies are planning a full-scale war. And how do you fight a war for the very survival of the nation when you don’t have enough soldiers to withstand serious losses? When bot
h sides have the same weapons, the same lethality, and are prepared to use them?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Careful, Quinn,” I whisper, pushing him down so his head doesn’t protrude above the car’s protection.

  “We needed an edge, don’t you see? If either of us went nuclear, the war would be over. But so would the world,” Hawke continues. He sounds closer. “That left us with the usual weapons, including biological attacks, which, as you’ve seen, can be difficult to control. Our only advantage would be in our fighters, quality over quantity. Perfect soldiers bred from childhood to succeed better than anyone on the planet in what they were best suited to do. Super-soldiers who’ll hit the ground running, trained up, neuro-adapted, and motivated in the extreme. That’s our edge. That’s how we’ll win.”

  “You can’t win a righteous war by sacrificing your own people,” I yell.

  “Don’t be so naïve,” Hawke says. He sounds even closer. “That’s what war is. One side pitting its finest, its strongest and best-trained youth, against the other. When we deploy our super-enhanced soldiers on foreign soil, the enemy won’t know what hit them. It’s going to change the global game.”

  “It’s not a game!” I yell, incensed.

  “You’re talking like this crazy scheme is still going to happen. But it’s over, don’t you understand?” Quinn says. “All across the USA, The Game is self-destructing. And when players know what you’ve been up to, when they aren’t being influenced by your subliminal programming any more, they’ll be able to hear the truth, to figure things out for themselves, to demand change. It’s all over for you, Hawke. Everyone in this country knows about you, or soon will. Give yourself up now.”

  “Not likely,” Hawke says contemptuously. “For the man with a little foresight and a lot of money, this isn’t the only country there is, boy. It’s not even the best. There are a dozen places who would offer me sanctuary.”

  We hear the sound of running feet and a mumbled conversation. I sneak a peek under the chassis of the Ford. The bodyguard is back. Either he found Leya and eliminated her, or he didn’t. Either way, he’s our problem again.

  Moving as quietly and carefully as I can, I extract my rifle from the duffel bag, then I take up position behind a tire, lying on my belly, aiming my weapon at Hawke’s bodyguard. The big guy has his pistol out in a double-handed grip and is moving it in an arc from side to side as he moves slowly down the street. He’s completely exposed. As far as they know, we’re three unarmed computer geeks.

  “Don’t move,” I say softly to Quinn, remembering Cameron’s warning. Hawke is a snake. He’ll want to leave no witnesses.

  The bodyguard comes another two steps closer to where we’re hiding. I try to adjust my line of fire, but the position is awkward. The rifle is better for long-distance shots, less easily maneuverable at close quarters, so I lay it down beside me, pull the Ruger from my waistband, and keep it trained on the guard.

  “My compatriot, Mr. Smith here, would like you three to surrender yourselves so we can all get together and have a nice cup of coffee and a chat to straighten out these misunderstandings,” Hawke calls to us.

  “Surrender this, asshole!” Bruce yells, flipping him the bird from where he hides, safely protected in amongst piles of rubble behind the dumpster.

  The bodyguard swivels his gaze to the spot on his right where Bruce’s voice came from, then glances up and to the left — into a traffic mirror mounted on a pole, reflecting Bruce’s position. The bodyguard hurls himself into a forward roll and fires.

  So do I.

  Bruce grunts.

  And my rounds hit the bodyguard in the chest even as Bruce slumps sideways and topples to the ground.

  Chapter 43

  Out of reach

  “Bruce! Bruce!” I scream, leaping up and dashing across the street to him.

  Blood spreads in a vicious red blossom across Bruce’s abdomen. His eyes are rolling, unfocused behind drooping eyelids.

  My heart is hammering, my head buzzing.

  I yank off my jacket with trembling hands, sending bullets scattering across the ground, and bundle it up tightly to press it hard against the wound. Bruce groans and goes limp. Please let him not be dead. Please.

  “Is he …? How is he?” Quinn asks, standing up from behind the car and taking a step toward us.

  His head snaps to the right. He lunges sideways, out of my sight, and I hear a thud, a “No!” and then Hawke calls, “I’ve got a gun up against your friend’s head, young lady.”

  Shit. Hawke must have gone for the bodyguard’s weapon, gotten there before Quinn.

  “If you try anything, I’ll shoot your friend.”

  I can’t try anything. Both my weapons are lying uselessly behind the Ford across the street — my rifle where I placed it on the ground, and my handgun where I dropped it when I leapt up to come to Bruce.

  My heart is galloping, and I can’t catch my breath. My chest feels tight, and a cold sweat breaks out under my arms. I look up into the traffic mirror across the way in time to see a flash of movement, then nothing. I risk peeking out around the edge of the dumpster. Hawke has Quinn in front of him like a shield and is backing up the street in the direction of the exit with the weapon pressed against Quinn’s temple. I pull back quickly, but I’ve been seen.

  “I’ll kill him! I will,” Hawke warns.

  “Stay where you are, Jinxy!” Quinn yells.

  “You listen to your friend here,” Hawke calls, sounding farther away, “and I’ll let him go, let you both go safely.”

  It’s when he says that, that I know he intends to kill Quinn. Me too, if he can. He doesn’t know there’s a gallery of witnesses watching everything from Roth’s eyrie. He thinks that Quinn and I — and Leya if she’s still alive — are the only ones who know Roth and Bruce were shot on his orders. He plans to use Quinn as a hostage all the way to the exit, then bait me out somehow and kill us both.

  I don’t know what to do.

  The trembling in my hands is starting to spread through my body. Full-blown buck-fever threatens. I close my eyes in panic for an instant. The image of Quinn, with death poised at his temple, is seared into my vision.

  At that moment, something inside me shuts down. The trembling stops instantly, as though I’ve pulled a kill-switch. I hold a hand out in front of me, and it’s steady as a rock. My chest expands easily as I take a deep breath. I blow it out slowly, feeling my heart rate ease. My mind is suddenly clear. Ice flows in my veins.

  For the first time, I see clearly, as though in a photograph, that I stand at the border of life, like the angel of death. My weapon may be a rifle, not a flaming sword, but it has two sides — save and kill, defend and destroy, good and bad. This is true freedom — the free will of choice, with the weight of responsibility. I cannot have one without the other. Every action has its price.

  And there’s no running away or hiding any more. This has to stop. I can stop it. And I will.

  I close my eyes again, but this time to picture the layout of the arena in my mind’s eye. If Hawke continues backing up the street, he’ll only have another block before he needs to turn to his right to take the street that leads toward the exit. That’s when I’ll make my move.

  I scan around the immediate area where Bruce is lying, unmoving. With steady hands, I lift a small chunk of concrete cinder block and gently lay it on top of my wadded jacket over his wound, hoping that the pressure will help slow the bleeding. I wipe my bloody hands on my skirt. Crouching behind the very edge of the dumpster, I allow myself another quick glance. Hawke and Quinn are almost at the end of the street.

  I count to five. And then in one fluid movement, I dive across the pavement, snatch up my rifle and race down the street after them.

  When I get to the corner of the road they must have taken, I stop and chamber a round in my rifle. One up, safety off. I lift it to my shoulder and step out into the center of the street, facing them.

  “Jinxy, no! Get
back!” Quinn calls as Hawke, bug-eyed from surprise, ducks directly behind him and pulls him close.

  “I’ll kill him. I can’t miss!” Hawke yells.

  “If you do that, I’ll kill you. And I won’t miss either.”

  “But he’ll be dead!”

  “So will you. I think this is what they call a zero-sum game.” My voice is steady, low, calm.

  It unnerves him.

  “Don’t come any closer!” he yells, his voice high and tight.

  “I don’t need to. All those games you had me play? They shaped my brain. All that training you made sure I had, it honed my skills. And when the crosshairs are locked on you, Hawke, your dream super-sniper becomes your nightmare executioner. From this range, I could put a round in the center of your eyeball, easy as breathing.”

  I could, if I could see his eyeball. But Quinn is taller, his shoulders broader, and Hawke is tucked in neatly behind him. He must have a hold of Quinn’s jacket and be tugging him backward as they take one step after another to the exit.

  Quinn is watching me steadily now. He knows what I’m capable of, but he must also know that there’s no easy shot here.

  The irony is almost amusing. Finally, I’m ready and willing to kill. I know it’s wrong. But I also know it’s not the worst of evils in this situation either. If it comes to a choice between sparing Hawke or Quinn, there’s no contest.

  Finally, my head and heart are aligned, but now there’s no shot to take. Quinn, my beloved Quinn, stands between me and my target. All of Hawke is hidden behind him. All but the hand holding that pistol, its wrist and the bent arm that sticks out to the side.

  I study that arm, that hand, that weapon. If I shot the pistol, it might accidentally discharge its lethal contents into Quinn’s brain. If I shot the hand or, say, the arm — I move my scope fractionally so that the crosshairs are centered on the bend of the elbow — would it knock the arm backward, away from Quinn? Or might the finger on the trigger reflexively convulse, and …?