Two Weeks' Notice: A Revivalist Novel

by Rachel Caine

  She couldn’t trust Riley, or Zaragosa, or anyone with government ties. They had to know these three had disappeared, and if there had been an investigation, surely they would have involved Patrick, at least.

  Would Patrick have told you?

  Yes. Yes, he would have. Bryn had no doubts about that.

  Unless he is protecting you, or thinks he is.

  God, this was a circular cycle of paranoia.…She could implicate everyone, and no one, but the only real proof she had was seven dead people at Graydon and video of three Revived—like her—burned alive.

  Bryn took the thumb drive out of her purse and stared at it for a moment, then slotted it into a USB port. Maybe watching it again, blocking out the horror, she’d gather some little detail, some hint to follow. Tonight, she’d find out if Patrick knew anything.

  Tomorrow, she’d go after Riley Block and find out what she knew about it. If it was the government cutting their very substantial losses, then they’d have a fight on their hands. A public and bloody one—the very last thing they wanted. If word of Returné hit the streets, things would go insane. Everyone would want Revival—for themselves, for a loved one. And that was a cycle that never stopped, and would destroy governments, crush economies, and lead to chaos like nothing she could imagine. People were genetically selfish, and they were panicky. A bad combination when something like this was dangled in front of them, a life preserver to the sinking ship of their mortality.

  Bryn didn’t want to see that happen, and in truth she’d try her best to keep Pharmadene’s dirty secrets, but the threat was significant enough to force the government’s budget-cutting madmen off their backs.

  Hopefully.

  She lost track of time staring at the video files; even with the sound muted, the images made her feel trapped, mired in a nightmare. The calm efficiency of the killers was chilling; it said they’d done this, or things like it, so much that it was just another day on the job. That utter lack of empathy reminded her of soldiers at concentration camps and Rwandan butchers chopping up innocents. The human race, alive or Revived, was a terrifying thing.

  Bryn flinched when she heard a knock at the door, and slammed the laptop shut on the video. She hastily put it away, pressed her sweating hands on the desk for a moment, and tried to still her racing heart. Wasn’t entirely successful. “Come in,” she said.

  It was Gertrude Kleiman. She was a tall woman, with pale hair going imperceptibly gray; she wore it in a teased style that reminded Bryn strongly of her mother’s prom picture from high school. Not a warm person, but a competent one, and she dressed better than Bryn did—old money, the break room gossip said. Not that Bryn listened—much. “You wanted to see me, Miss Davis?”

  “Please have a seat,” Bryn said. She’d never had to give anybody a dressing-down outside of her time in the military, and she figured it probably wouldn’t be wise to approach it the same way. “Would you like a glass of water?”

  “No, thank you.” Kleiman—even Bryn couldn’t really call her Gertie—sat down primly on the edge of the chair, knees together and at just the correct angle. Not a wrinkle in her expertly tailored suit. She had dark blue eyes, and a very direct gaze. “Ms. Kleiman, I had a report that you’ve been referring to our office administrator in a less-than-appropriate way.”

  “Meaning?” Kleiman said without even a blink.

  “I believe the phrase was ‘that colored girl up front.’”

  Now Kleiman blinked, as if that wasn’t at all what she was expecting. “Excuse me? I don’t understand the problem.”

  “The problem is that she’d like you to refer to her by name, not by her skin color. She’s also not a girl; she’s older than I am. I realize that the phrase used to be appropriate years ago, but—”

  “I was trying to be polite!” Kleiman said, and, if anything, looked more rigid and cold. “If you’d like me to say what I really think, I think that…that woman is taking great advantage of you. She’s hardly qualified to run something as complex as a business like this.…”

  “Actually,” Bryn said, “I’m fairly certain I don’t want to know what you really think, and neither does Lucy. Lucy works for me, not you, and I’m the final judge of her performance in the job, as I am of yours, and it’s your job performance we’re discussing, not Lucy’s. So consider this a warning. If you use inappropriate terms toward any of my staff again, the next time we talk about this will be the last.”

  “This is ridiculous! What I said was not in any way offensive!”

  “In your opinion,” Bryn said. “And the point of something being offensive is that it was offensive to someone else. We’re done now. Thank you.”

  It was a clear dismissal, and Kleiman took it that way. She also slammed the door on the way out, which was damned difficult, since the doors were on hydraulics to make sure they didn’t make a lot of noise. Impressive. Bryn sighed and called Lucy’s desk phone. “Incoming,” she told her. “Kleiman’s on fire. Let me know if she comes after you.”

  “She comes for me, she’d better be wearing asbestos,” Lucy said. “Nope, she just passed me by and went to her office.”

  “If you have any problems…”

  “Come to you, yes, boss. Your four o’clock’s not here yet. I’ll ring you when he comes in.”

  “Thanks.”

  Bryn looked at the clock, stretched, and decided she was too restless to sit still for twenty minutes. She stood, put on her white lab coat from the closet, and took the back stairs down to the preparation area.

  William Nguyen looked up as she came through the frosted glass door and gave her a big, warm smile. “Hey,” he said. “Busy day, eh?” He nodded down at the body lying on the table in front of him.

  It was gruesomely damaged, but from the part of the face that hadn’t been mangled, the man was in his fifties, with short-cropped graying hair. There was another body on the second table, covered with a clean white sheet.

  “Are these the accident victims?”

  “Yeah, it was a nasty one—rear-ended by a drunk driver at a stoplight, pushed their car into a dump truck. The drunk must have been going about a hundred; the car looked like it already went through the cube crusher. This is Mr. Lindell. I’m just doing gross examination right now. I’ll e-mail you the general outline of what it’ll take, but if the son wants open casket, this is going to be a pretty intricate job.”

  “Thanks,” Bryn said. “Just let me know as soon as you can. Hey, William…”

  “Yeah?” He didn’t look up from his close analysis of Mr. Lindell’s cheekbone. “Damn, this is all splintered in here. Gonna be tough to find good anchor material for the reconstruction.”

  “Have you had any problems with Gertrude Kleiman?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Except she won’t talk to me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Never says a word. Even when she comes down here, she hands me paperwork, or picks it up, and leaves. If I say hello, she just ignores me. I don’t know. I just figured she was shy.”

  “Huh,” Bryn said, which was about as neutral as she could make it. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “For what?” He still didn’t take his attention from the dead man in front of him, gently palpating torn tissues.

  “Just thanks.” For being cheerfully oblivious, she thought. But the idea that Kleiman was rude to him, too, made her burn. “See you later.”

  “Yeah, see ya.” He finger-waved her off, and she went back upstairs, wondering exactly what to do about Gertrude now.

  She didn’t have much time to think it over, because as soon as she’d hung her coat back on the rack in the closet, Lucy paged her to let her know her four o’clock had arrived. Bryn checked herself in the mirror—habit—and went out to greet him.

  He was a tall young man, and he looked athletic, but when she spotted him sitting in the chair, he looked…unstrung, like a discarded puppet. He looked up vaguely when she stopped in front of him and said, “Mr. Lindell?” in her gentlest voi
ce. “I’m Bryn Davis. Why don’t we go into my office.”

  “Are my mom and dad here?” he asked, still seated. “Can I see them?”

  “Please, come with me,” she said, and the persuasive, understanding tone worked; it got him up and moving with her. As she shut the door, he looked around her office with blank incomprehension, and she guided him to one of the two small sofas, with the table in the middle. She’d learned her lessons from the old owner, Lincoln Fairview, well; there were tissues in a wooden box on the table, and a trash can tucked discreetly just where a visitor would expect. All her materials were ready—pens, forms, iPad with photographs of options. She sat young Mr. Lindell down, fetched him hot coffee when he indicated he might drink some, and otherwise just listened as he talked for a while. He didn’t, thankfully, return to his request to see his parents; that was something she wanted to avoid at all costs.

  “They said at the hospital it was instantaneous,” Mr. Lindell said. “That they never even knew.”

  It most likely wasn’t true, but Bryn wouldn’t have said so. Not to him, not at a time like this. “I know it was very quick,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Lindell.”

  “Eric,” he corrected softly. “I’m Eric. I want—I want to be sure I do this right, but I don’t know how. I’ve never—I’ve never even been to a funeral before. When my grandfather died, I was a freshman in college, and I couldn’t get back in time for the services.…” He seemed very pale, and much younger than Bryn had initially thought. “What happens now? What do I do?”

  “Do you have any other family members who want to be involved?” Bryn asked. She felt sorry for him, for the vacant suffering in his face. He was maybe twenty, she realized—much younger than her, in every way. She’d gone into the army and seen death and brutality; the worst this man had seen might have been a drunken fistfight at a frat party.

  Eric shook his head. “My sister’s off in Thailand on some kind of hiking trip. I can’t even reach her. It’s just me.” He suddenly took in a gasp of air and said, “I need help. I can’t do this. I can’t.”

  It was like a cry, and Bryn reached out and took his hand in hers. Instinct. It stilled some of her own pain that still boiled inside. “I know,” she said. “And I’ll help you through this.”

  It was the best part, she thought, of doing this job—seeing the relief in the eyes of those who sat on this couch, knowing they weren’t going through it alone.

  In the end, she undercharged him for the funeral, because it just…hurt to do anything else.

  The work did help, Bryn discovered when Eric Lindell finally left, paperwork in a folder for him to keep. It had been a long session, almost two hours, and the funeral home was quiet when she walked him out to his car. He seemed calmer now, and steadier, and as he was opening the car door, his cell phone rang.

  His sister, calling from Thailand. Bryn watched him from the indoor window as he talked, and cried, and finally drove away.

  Suddenly, she wanted to be back at the McCallister estate, with Patrick. Life is short. She was reminded of that every single day, here. I need to decide what to do about Kleiman, she thought. It was a thorny sort of administrative case—William hadn’t made a complaint, and Kleiman had taken the reprimand for Lucy’s complaint without too much grandstanding. Hard to dismiss her without incurring some kind of lawsuit, given the facts in hand.

  Maybe she’ll quit, Bryn thought. That would be a nice solution for everyone—voluntary departure. And maybe pigs will fly. You don’t ever get off that easily, do you?

  No. No, she didn’t.

  It was the work of a moment to pack up the laptop and thumb drive, then another five to check the doors and windows of the building and set the alarm before exiting. She was locking up when her cell phone sounded, and she juggled it along with the keys. “Hello?”

  “Bryn? Hi, this is Carl. I was—I was checking in to see when you were planning on having that support group meeting. I’d really like to be there, if possible.”

  Crap. She hadn’t thought about the support group at all for days. “I don’t know, Carl. Let me make some calls and see if I can set something up. Have you spoken with your wife yet?”

  “I—No. Not yet. Maybe if you would go with me to talk to her—I mean, having someone else there would be good, wouldn’t it?”

  Only for Carl. His wife would probably find it intimidating and terrifying, given the situation. But that depended on her, and him. “I’ll call you back,” she promised. “Are you having any other issues right now?”

  “I can’t sleep,” he said. “At all. I try, but I just lay there and think. I can’t shut my brain off. It’s like the nanites are making me do it. Did you ever feel like that? That they’re making you do things you don’t want to do?”

  That was alarming, she thought, and leaned against the pillar. “Like what specifically?”

  “I don’t know. Turn the car one direction instead of another. Think about—doing bad things.” He sounded positively strange now. “Nobody tested this stuff. They tested it on us. How do we know it’s not changing us, not making us dangerous? Do you know? Does anybody?”

  All of a sudden, Carl sounded like the darkest voices of her id coming out of the depths, and it was spooky. She’d wondered these things herself from time to time; it was easy to fall into despair in this situation and imagine every random thing that happened as a symptom of a nonexistent disease. The deadly thing was that if Carl convinced himself he wasn’t in control, what would he do? What couldn’t he do?

  “Are you thinking about hurting yourself? Hurting someone else?” She was not qualified for this, she thought in a sudden, angry fit of despair; no one had trained her, given her a diploma in how to manage dead people’s fears. Not even her own.

  His hesitation made her nervous, but then he said, “No, not really. I’m just—I think a lot, and that must be the nanites, right? That they’re working too hard or something?”

  “Carl, that’s why we have the group—because by talking out these things, we find out that what we’re feeling isn’t so strange or uncommon, okay? I’ve had the same sensations, the same thoughts. You can’t get better if you don’t reach out to people, and I’m glad you called me about it. If you feel that there’s something wrong, I want you to call the Pharmadene hotline and report it. They can check you out immediately. Understand?”

  “Yeah.” He sounded better, a little. Calmer. “Yeah, I forgot about the hotline. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. You’re anxious, and that’s really pretty normal.” She laughed, a little sadly. “As far as normal exists for us, anymore.”

  “Okay. Thanks for saying that you’ve had these thoughts, too. I thought—I thought I was out there in the dark, you know? On my own?”

  “I know,” she said. “If you need me, call back. I’ll be here.”

  He hung up after a polite decompression moment of good-night wishes, and Bryn closed the call and took a deep breath. It wasn’t the first time she’d had the same conversation. All of them fell down the rabbit hole sooner or later; not everybody was able to climb out.

  When I get home, I’ll get the group schedule, she promised herself. She knew how important it was for people to stick together, talk, connect.

  Exactly what Pharmadene and the government didn’t want them to do, of course. But screw that.

  Bryn walked through the gardens, breathing in the roses and the rich, damp smell of earth, and was almost sorry when she reached the parking lot. Her car was parked next to two of the limousines, and she headed in that direction, half her mind on what she needed to do when she reached the estate. Show Patrick the vids. That was the first thing. He’d have some perspective on it, some insight she didn’t. And she needed him to share this with her, help her process that helpless feeling of fear.

  That was just about the time that she became aware that something was wrong out here in the darkness beyond the glow of the garden’s lights.

  Bryn felt that indefi
nable prickle at the back of her neck. Ambush. That was an instinct that never really went away, even after taking off the uniform…the feeling that a predator was watching you, waiting for a chance to strike.

  She wished for a gun, but the fact was, she hadn’t come entirely unarmed. As she walked on, Bryn fumbled in her purse as if searching for her keys and closed fingers around the solid weight of a collapsible riot baton that accounted for about half the weight of the bag. She thought about her cell phone, but she’d already dropped it back in its pocket, and even if she managed to dial 911, it wouldn’t help; any possible fight would be over—in her favor or against it—before help could arrive.

  She felt a breath of air, something moving behind her, and lunged forward into a roll, yanking the baton out of her purse and flicking it out to full extension as she came back to her feet. The purse smacked to the pavement, and in the orange glow of sunset over the ocean, she saw two men dressed in plain clothes—jeans, work shirts, no identifying marks—who were wearing ski masks. They fanned out immediately, trying to work angles; she kicked the purse under the car to prevent it from fouling her footing and backed up between the car and the limousine on the other side.

  She didn’t speak.

  Neither of them moved toward her yet. They were assessing her position, and finding it tactically sound. After a few seconds they exchanged a glance, and one of them reached down to his belt and tugged free a stun gun, the kind that shot out darts. She gasped and dropped flat, rolled under the limo, and slapped her hands down to halt her momentum, then squirmed and rolled toward the tail of the long vehicle. She slithered out just as the man with the stun gun knelt down to peer underneath. He was temporarily distant from his friend, and she scrambled to her feet, lunged around between the cars, and hit him hard enough on the back of the head to knock him forehead-first into the metal of the limo door. He left a sizable dent.

  He dropped, and she kicked the stun gun under the vehicle.