And at the tip of the cross, his life’s work. His life’s purpose. Four towering glass tanks, sealed and under pressure, joined by fat and winding hoses. Cables snaked along the pale stone floor to the consoles in the lab, monitoring heat, particle density, every aspect of the cooking process down to the tiniest detail.
Gas, the color of mold on a rotten bone, billowed inside the chambers. The Clean Slate, almost ready to be gifted unto a corrupt and undeserving world.
“You.” Cranston snapped his fingers. “Run down the southern tunnel to the old cave-in. I don’t know what the hell they did up there, but we might need an alternate exit.”
“We decided not to blast it open. It was too fragile—”
“Then start digging, damn it. We can’t be trapped down here. You, get on the monitors, try to bring some of those dead cameras back online. I need information. And as for the rest of you…”
He stood before the gathered sentinels. Eight men, armed to the teeth with shotguns, rifles, handguns, anything they could scrounge on short notice. All true believers in the cause, ready to die at his command. He pointed to the doorway.
“I doubt our guests are going to get that door open, not with anything short of a battering ram. But if they do? No hesitation, and no mercy. Kill them.”
He turned and strode off to check the tanks.
His followers looked between one another, silent, then turned to the door.
It responded with a leaden thud. Something slammed it from the other side, hard enough to make it jolt in its reinforced frame.
Thud. The smarter ones raised their guns, taking aim. The rest followed suit.
Thud. They thumbed back hammers, gripping their weapons tight, executioners in a firing line.
Thud.
There was a moment of silence. Motes of soot settled to the ground in a gentle gossamer rain.
Then the thick slab of steel tore from its hinges and blasted down, slamming to the stone and kicking up a billowing cloud of dust.
The cultists opened fire. The dust cloud erupted with muzzle flashes, strobing as the gallery filled with the deafening hammering thrum of a firing range. They unleashed an endless fusillade of death that chopped the air into shreds, firing until their guns ran dry.
* * *
The dust cloud died, settling to the stone.
In its wake stood a curtain of bullets.
Hundreds of rounds hung, quivering, in a wall of air hardened to the consistency of gelatin. They strained, struggling to spend their energy, to pass through to the two women standing just inside the doorway. Harmony held one hand aloft, eyes squeezed shut and her brow slick with sweat, struggling to hold the magical shield intact.
At her side, Jessie’s eyes blazed. Her hands were hooked into the impression of claws, her shoulders back and neck low, and she licked her lips as she tilted her head, sizing up the men before her.
Beyond her eyes, hot enough to glow like beacons of rage, she didn’t transform. She didn’t sprout fangs or fur, and the full moon had no say in when she vented her fury. But anyone who stood in Jessie Temple’s path when she let loose knew one thing for certain: the legends of werewolves sprang from her bloodline. And the legends left out the bloody details.
“Now,” she hissed.
Harmony’s arm whipped downward. The gelatinous air collapsed and brought the bullets down with it, clattering to the stone in a thunderstorm of brass. Jessie was already airborne, leaping over the falling curtain, lunging for the closest target. Her hand shot for his face—not in a punch, her fingers jamming into his mouth, thumb clamping under his chin. She twisted and tore. His jaw ripped free in a gout of blood and dangling sinew. She didn’t even slow down, tossing the mangled curve of bone to the ground and leaving the man howling in her wake, clutching his mutilated face as his tongue dangled loose. Her free hand snatched an empty rifle and twisted it, yanking it from its owner’s grip.
She spun it around and thrust it like a spear. The muzzle shattered his teeth and punched out through the back of his neck.
Harmony was on the move, veering right, taking cover behind the thick stone support pillars that lined the gallery. She put her back to one, braced her pistol, and came out firing with her jacket flaring behind her, lending Jessie cover. One of Cranston’s men dropped his gun in the middle of reloading. His weapon and magazine fell from his hands as he dove to escape. Harmony kept moving, obeying the first rule of a gunfight, and slipped behind the second pillar before anyone could frame her in his sights.
One man tried, slapping a speed-load into his revolver and sealing the chamber with a flick of his wrist, raising it to fire. Jessie hit him from the side. She twisted his arm, shattered his wrist, and forced the barrel of the revolver up against his wide, panicked eye. Then she curled her finger over his and helped him pull the trigger.
Hard metal slammed into her back. One of the cultists, out of ammo and desperate, had turned his shotgun into a club. She snarled, wheeling around as he hit her again. The butt cracked against her shoulder and set off a starburst of pain. She caught the third swing and ripped the shotgun from his hands. Hot blood spattered Jessie’s cheeks as she brought it down in both hands and smashed it against his skull hard enough to warp the black metal. He crumpled to her feet and she swung again, and again, until he didn’t have a face anymore. She tossed the dented weapon aside and ground her heel down on what was left as she hunted for another target.
More of Cranston’s followers thundered up the hall, ready to join the fight. Harmony dropped to her knee, held her pistol in a two-hand grip, and closed one eye. Her suppressor spat, two rounds in quick succession, and one of the cultists pitched to the floor with scarlet stains spreading across his chest. His partner saw him drop, turned with his rifle high, and her last bullet hit him between the eyes.
Cranston was on the run. He and his maid, leather satchel clunking at her side, and they broke in different directions. He angled left, darting through the laboratory and through the narrow mouth of a tunnel.
She headed straight for the tanks of Clean Slate.
A cultist’s back snapped over Jessie’s knee. He was still alive and screaming, but she tossed his broken body to the floor. Eyes narrow, nose twitching as she inhaled air choked with blood and piss and fear, she honed in on the danger. Her gaze snapped to Harmony. She didn’t need words. They both knew who was faster. Her legs thrust out in a bounding leap and she broke into a dead sprint, racing for the tanks, while Harmony chased Cranston down.
39.
Harmony’s gun was empty.
Usually she had her magic as a backup weapon. The shield of air had stolen her strength, twisted her guts into cramped knots. Couldn’t do that again, not this soon. But weakness was a luxury she couldn’t afford. If Cranston found a way out of this maze and escaped, he could start all over again, anywhere in the world. The laboratory, the tanks, it was all the product of his twisted mind. He had to be stopped here and now.
Besides, she’d made a promise.
She took the winding tunnel as fast as she dared, eyes sharp, hunting for traps or an ambush. All she had right now were her wits, razor-honed and ready. And in the space of a heartbeat, catching the faintest gleam in the darkness, they saved her life.
There were trip wires in the tunnel. A nest of them at ankle level, some strung straight across the path, others at a hard diagonal, all running through eyelets in the stone. She scanned the rough stone walls and then the ceiling above. That’s where she saw the seams, rigged to drop slabs of killing weight.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Her heart was thudding against her chest, commanding her to hurry, to stop Cranston from getting away, but she moved with deliberation and care. She picked her way through the nest of wires, stepping from flagstone to flagstone, testing her weight in case of a secondary trap. Once she slipped free, she didn’t break into a run; she kept it smooth, eyes steady, hunting for more trip wires.
There were no breaks in the tunnel, no choices
about where to turn. It dead-ended in a room that might have been used for liquor storage, back in the day, or a private office for the gangster in charge of the operation.
Cranston had turned it into a dojo.
It was a pale imitation of the sleek, polished one back at his mansion in Tampa. Tatami mats lined the musty stone floor, and a few paper screens here and there added some meditative flair to the dusty, dun-colored walls. His collection of practice weapons nestled in pegs on a stand of red lacquered wood. Light shone from a battery-powered lamp, mounted on a tripod in the far corner of the room.
Cranston stood just outside its circle of light, his back to her, fumbling with a stretch of bare wall. His fingers dug at the crumbling mortar, tugging at one rough chunk of stone and then another, hunting for a hidden catch.
“Running away?” Harmony asked. “What, no faith that your ocean god is going to come and save you?”
He turned. He reared up, chin high and pressing his shoulders back, like a cobra preparing to strike.
“I will not be mocked by a woman who serves the likes of Robert Diehl. At least I chose a worthy master.”
“I don’t work for Diehl,” Harmony said. “Neither did Natalie Cooper.”
He blinked. “Oh. Well. That does put a spin on things.”
“I belong to an organization that deals with people like you.”
“People like me?” he said. “You mean people who are trying to save the world?”
“By destroying it?”
Cranston rolled his eyes. “Please. It’s a culling, as natural as any plague. That’s the beauty of the Clean Slate: at stage four of mutation, subjects only survive for a day, two at most, before they go into cardiac arrest. The infected kill the uninfected, then the infected die out. What remains is a pristine, empty land. A healing land, for the chosen few to return to and repopulate.”
His open hand clutched at the air as he slowly sidestepped, circling the mat, edging closer to the weapon rack.
“Don’t you understand? The Earth is dying. Oceanic pollution, global warming—we are murdering our own habitat. Our species is reckless, insane, suicidal. Incremental solutions won’t work. You can’t stop mass-scale toxic dumping by pledging to recycle your aluminum cans. Someone has to step up and take drastic action. Decades, a century from now, I’ll be regarded as the savior of humanity.”
Something in his words caught in Harmony’s ear. She tilted her head, studying him.
“‘Our,’” she said.
He frowned, not following. She took a step toward him, her shoes touching down on the far edge of the tatami mat.
“‘Our species.’ That’s what you just said. But that’s not what you tell your followers, is it?”
His hand fluttered in a dismissive wave. “Figure of speech, it means nothing—”
“It means everything. See, I heard your sermon, back at the church. You’ve convinced these people that they’re, what was it, exiles from the ‘Ocean Behind the Ocean’? That they’re superior beings, forced to live among the humans? And you don’t even believe it yourself. It’s a grift.” Harmony let out a small and bitter laugh. “Makes it easier, doesn’t it? Makes it easier to get these people to kill for you. After all, they’re not murdering their own kind. Just us lowly human beings.”
Cranston cracked a tiny smile.
“I learned something as a young man. I was bullied as a child. Teased, incessantly, for…this.”
He held up his left hand, spreading his fingers as far as the webbing of flesh would allow.
“Like I said when we dined together, my mother told me I was part fish. She was trying to cheer me up. It’s just syndactyly. A birth defect. But I believed it for a time, and that belief spurred my greatest passions in life. That’s when I realized the motivating power of a tiny white lie.” His hand fell to his side. “There are other worlds than this. You’ve seen the proof of it, yes?”
“I have,” Harmony said.
“I’ve heard the songs of the sea, the words of my priestesses. The Ocean Behind the Ocean is real, and I will lead my faithful there. If I had to bend the truth to make all of this glorious work possible, I think I can be forgiven for that.”
“Your crusade is over,” Harmony said. “You aren’t leading anyone anywhere.”
He scoffed at her and offered his wrists for imaginary handcuffs.
“What are you going to do, arrest me? Tell me, do I get my day in court or just a cell in a lonely black site somewhere, far off the grid?”
Harmony thought about that.
“When people join my organization,” she said, “we lay the facts on the line. It’s not a fortune and glory kind of job. There’s no declassification date for the work we do; fight monsters, save the world, the best you can hope for is a handshake and a cup of coffee. People like Natalie Cooper, they understand that nobody will ever know the good they did, the lives they saved, the sacrifices they made. They do the job anyway, because it needs to be done. All we can offer in return is a promise. One promise.”
Cranston stared at her, uncertain now.
“The promise is that when you go on your final mission, the one you don’t come home from, we’ll come hunting. We’ll find the person responsible. And we will make them pay.”
The tatami mat rustled under her foot as she took a step closer.
“I’m not here to arrest you,” Harmony said.
Cranston was silent for a moment, contemplative.
“I meant what I said, at dinner,” he replied. “You don’t really know someone until you’ve tested each other’s skills. I…don’t suppose a friendly sparring match is in order, though.”
“I don’t suppose it is,” she said.
“I’m curious. What do you know about escrima?”
“National martial art of the Philippines.” She glanced to the rack of practice gear. “Stick fighting.”
“Often, often. Understandable assumption. Escrima practitioners do use a wide array of other weapons though. The panangga, the barong, the sibat. Personally, I’m quite fond of the buntot pagi.”
He reached to the rack. A whip, four feet of stiff, oddly pale leather, slithered free from the pegs.
“Buntot pagi,” he said, “meaning ‘stingray tail.’ Properly preserved and treated, it makes for quite the fighting tool. The texture is akin to very coarse sandpaper. Remarkably, even dried, a stingray’s tail retains traces of neurotoxin.”
Harmony was back in the morgue in Tampa, studying Cooper’s glassy-eyed corpse under the stark surgical lights. The endless, thin knife cuts along her back. At least she had thought they were made with a knife. She heard the medical examiner’s voice, his confusion at finding stingray venom in Cooper’s blood.
“That’s why I’m rerunning the tests. Because looking at these results, factoring in the falloff over time…it looks to me like she was stung repeatedly, over a course of at least three hours.”
Harmony’s hand curled into a fist at her side. Her fingernails dug into her palms.
“I’ll admit to a bit of cheating,” Cranston told her. “Access to a marine biology lab has its privileges. I soak mine in venom now and then, just to keep it fresh. So. Your aikido against my escrima. Shall we?”
She stared in his eyes, but all she could see was Cooper’s face.
Then she came at him.
* * *
The maid was running for the bioweapon tanks. Jessie was running for the maid. Closing the open floor between them, blood roaring in her ears. She tasted fear, anger, a pheromone trail leading to her prey.
The maid spun, her flat fish eyes blazing as she swung a boatman’s hook. The hook whistled through the air and Jessie leaned back, its rusted tip slicing an inch from her throat. The maid waged a fighting retreat, slashing the air wildly as she darted backward, making her last stand between the four towering tanks. Green gas billowed against the glass all around them, airborne death waiting to be unleashed on a sleeping world.
Jessie took her ti
me now. Nowhere for her prey to run. No one left standing, just the two of them in a gallery littered with the mangled and the dead.
The maid knew it, too. Her gaze shifted left and right. To the thick rubber hoses, to the tank controls. Even if she planned on a suicide bid, she’d never reach the valves before Jessie grabbed her, much less get them open.
Mutually assured destruction was still an option, though.
Her pale hand plunged into the satchel at her side. She yanked out a ribbed plastic mask with an anesthesiologist’s bottle attached, the same one she’d used on Dominguez in the church. Before Jessie could stop her, she put the mask to her own face and squeezed the bottle tight.
40.
Cranston’s stingray tail whip-cracked through the air and Harmony ducked low, darting in. She was half rage, half muscle memory, moving on lethal instinct. She locked up his whip hand with her curled arm and drove her other arm at his throat, hitting him with the V of her inside elbow. Cranston went down hard. He was built like an engine block but faster than he looked. As soon as his shoulders hit the tatami mat he was already rolling, springing up, rallying for his next attack.
His whip slashed at her eyes, too fast to escape. She threw up her right forearm, shielding herself, and the stingray tail carved into her. It sliced through her jacket, her shirt, her skin, spattering her blood across the woven mat.
She brought her hand down on his whip arm, slipped around him, and drove the flat of her other hand against the back of Cranston’s neck. Then she twisted his wrist behind his back, trapping his weapon. It should have been a textbook move, but her cut was doing more than slowing her down: a lit trail of gasoline burned its way up her wounded arm, neurotoxin fires making her muscles twitch and cramp. Her fingers convulsed and he broke free, twisting away from her. He dropped low and kicked at her leg. She lost her balance and fell, rolling fast as he brought the whip down. It sliced into the tatami again and again, carving razor scars in the woven mat, pursuing her as she scrambled to escape.
Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5) Page 27
