10 Fatal Strike

by Shannon McKenna

NOW

  dont text and drive u meathead its dangerous

  hah There was a pause, and she could practically hear him snickering in her mind’s ear. He went on. L8r then love u

  b careful she replied. I love u 2

  always ttyl

  She stayed that way, staring blindly up at the monitor for a minute or two, just reading and re-reading that virtual transcript in her head. Milking it for every little shining drop of comfort it could give her.

  But it was time to move. Her second bus had been late, delayed by heavy rain, and it had been a tight connection to begin with. A trip to the bathroom, a bottle of apple juice, a bag of roasted cashews, not because she was hungry, but just because fulfilling her promise to him made her feel closer to him. And then it was time to hustle to her gate.

  It was just a couple of minutes before boarding time, but evidently the bus wasn’t going to be very full. There was hardly anyone waiting, just an elderly couple dozing on the bench, and a pair of teenagers wrapped around each other. The driver had not arrived yet. Maybe this bus was delayed, too. Maybe she’d get another seat to herself. She was not up for friendly chatting.

  “Lara? Holy shit, babe! Is that you?”

  She spun around with a squeak of alarm, and found herself face to face with a big, burly, blond guy in a long, cable knit sweater and a huge, draped, knit scarf. Bearded, with dreads and a big, toothy smile. His eyebrows and lashes were so white, they were invisible, and his face was very pink. She’d never seen him before in her life.

  She backed away. “Excuse me? Who are you?”

  “Oh, come on! Don’t you remember the rave on the beach at Phuket? I’m not surprised if you don’t remember. You were pretty fucked up that night. But I guarantee . . . you had a real good time.” He leered, leaning closer. “Man, girl, you really know how to party.”

  She backed away further, and glanced around, her inner alarm bells shrilling. The kids were still kissing, the old couple still dozing. “No. You’re mistaking me for someone else,” she said very loudly. “I’ve never been to Phuket, and I—”

  “Aw, c’mon. Gimme one for old time’s sake!”

  He yanked her into a tight, smothering kiss, his moist, fleshy lips smashing hers painfully against her teeth. Too tight to scream. His arms were like huge steel cables, tightening around her. She managed to twist her mouth away, opened it to yell—

  He stuck his tongue in it. His tongue was big and muscular and slimy, prodding deep. She wiggled, mewled, as he picked her up and swung her playfully around and around, never letting her feet touch the floor, farther and farther from anyone who might be watching.

  “Scream and you die,” he whispered, and seized her wrist in a huge, damply hot hand, torquing it into a twist that zinged electric agony all the way up her arm. “Feel this? Inside your coat?” He prodded her with something cold and hard under her shirt. She’d dragged in air to scream, but it broke off into a cry of pain as he stabbed the gun barrel up under her rib. “It’s aimed at your liver. Got me, bitch?”

  She gasped for air, caught between the stab of the gun barrel, the white-hot pain still flashing up her arm. Her heart pounded heavily in her ears and his voice came from far away. “Kiss me back, cunt,” he growled into her ear, “or I will shoot you.”

  She looked into those bright, round, white-lashed eyes, glittering with excitement. His breath was sour. He was pressing an erection against her belly. Grinding it against her. His lips were shiny and wet.

  “So shoot me,” she said coldly. “Prick.”

  He laughed, raucously, as he swung her around and around again. He set her on her feet. She gasped, stiffening, at the needle sting in her neck.

  Not psi-max. She knew psi-max inside out and this was not it. Just a sedative or a muscle relaxant, but the association with the needle sting was so strong, the vortex started to whirl anyway . . .

  She walked through a wintery forest. Dead, sere grass was waist high, trees set sparsely. A park bench, almost hidden in the long grass. Rusted wrought iron. Weather-beaten. She looked at her feet and saw the pattern of paving stones beneath her feet. Ancient playground equipment, rusted and abandoned. Monkey bars. A broken swing set.

  The boy darted ahead of her. It was her little friend, but he was younger today, maybe eight, his head as pale as a little bobbing candle flame. He was barefoot in the chill, wearing his usual ragged pajamas. He looked back to see if she was following, beckoning her urgently onward.

  “What?” she called. “What do you want?”

  More silent beckoning, more pleading looks. Desperate entreaty. Hurry, hurry. But to what, goddamnit? To what?

  The image pixelated in her head and broke up, shocking her back to reality. Carried in the blond dreadlocked guy’s arms. He cradled her against his chest, nuzzling her as if it were a lover’s game. They were outside already, moving down the sidewalk. Rain hit her forehead. She tried to move, but the drug had paralyzed her body.

  She heard the sucking “pop” of a big car door opening and was dumped into a big SUV that stank of leather, newness.

  “Ah. There we go,” a woman muttered, smugly. “Excellent.”

  The front door slammed shut and the car surged forward, out into traffic. A rough hand seized her chin, jerked her limp head around.

  It was Anabel. “Bad girl,” she crooned. “Daddy gonna be so mad.”

  Anabel looked terrible. Eyes white rimmed and staring, sunken shadows around them, twitching muscles in the tense mask of her face.

  “It was like you said,” Blond Dreadlocks remarked from the front seat. “The coercion didn’t work on her. I had to come up with something else, right off the cuff.” He hesitated, then prompted, “No time to plan.”

  “Why don’t you just pull over and get out? Get yourself a cab.” Anabel sounded supremely bored. “We’re done here, so get lost. As soon as I tape her up, I can drive. I’ll take it from here.”

  “Hey, why the attitude?” Dreadlocks’s voice was aggrieved. “I extracted her for you, twenty-four minutes from the second the facial recog bot identified her, with no pursuit or alarm! It’s fucking unbelievable!”

  “Poor baby,” Anabel mocked. “Had to use your atrophied little brain the old-fashioned way when your psi didn’t work? That must have really hurt, Rockwell. Get out, now. Your B.O. is bugging me.”

  “Screw this shit,” Rockwell muttered. He jerked the car to a stop.

  He got out into the rain and walked away, leaving the car in a lane of traffic, door hanging wide open.

  Anabel wound duct tape around Lara’s arms, making agony flare in her injured wrist, taking her time even as the horns of the cars backed up behind began honking angrily. Lara had sagged down onto the seat onto the other woman’s lap, unable to stay upright.

  When she was immobilized, Anabel leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. “I missed you, honey. So did the big boss. You’ve been a bad little girl, but he’ll deal with you. And I hope he lets me watch.”

  Lara tried to visualize the computer so she could say something to Miles, but then the needle stung her again.

  The impulse vanished, drowned in darkness.

  27

  yo! wtf? why r u not answering?

  Miles forced the panic down. Panic would not help. He crouched in the trees, peering through the scope of the H&K G36 at Greaves’ house.

  Calm. Focus. He had to be ready, when his chance presented itself.

  But it had been several hours since Lara’s last response, and he was fucking tense.

  If they’d left each other on a harsh note, he could have hypothesized that she was giving him the silent treatment, but Christ, they’d parted ways after exchanging what amounted to holy vows of goddamn undying love and devotion. So what the fuck . . . ?

  She could be sleeping. Right. On a bus, as nervous and scared as she was, surrounded by strangers? Maybe all that accumulated adrenaline had crashed her, and she was snoring on the bus, mouth open. At least, the Lara light in his head wa
s still on. But it was strange, indistinct. Different from before.

  Fine, then. Asleep. It was the only possible explanation that didn’t scare him shitless, so he was clinging to it.

  It felt like a trap, the lack of security around the Blaine house. The place had been gated, of course, but there was no sign of an alarm system. This was a house Greaves had bought for his family twenty-five years ago. A convenient place for the guy and his entourage to park themselves before the ceremony set for the following afternoon. No massive security like Kolita Springs, or the Spruce Ridge complex, or the chateau in Bordeaux, or the country manor in England, or the South Sea island, or the sixteenth-century Tuscan villa, or the luxury high-rise penthouses in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai.

  Miles crept through the drenched trees, peering through the scope again. They were up and about, even at this hour. Almost five A.M., though the sky hadn’t started to lighten yet. He’d identified Greaves through the window, plus four others, two men and two women. The guy’s staff seemed somewhat reduced these days.

  But then, Miles had killed quite a few of them himself.

  He wished he had the materials to blow the place up. If he’d been able to access Aaro’s cache, or the McClouds, or Tam and Val’s, he could have flattened the guy, ka-boom. If wishes were horses. He was lucky he had the stolen H&K and a full magazine.

  Looked like the big guy was being served breakfast. There was a breakfast nook off the back porch that overlooked the lake, but as luck would have it, Greaves was seated in a chair that was out of Miles’ line of sight, behind a pillar. He saw a hand occasionally, reaching out to have coffee poured, to take a pat of butter. Minions scurried to do the guy’s bidding. But to get a straight shot at Greaves, he would need a boat to row several meters out into the lake.

  It was almost as if the guy knew that Miles was out there, and had positioned himself deliberately. But that was paranoid.

  pls pls pls lara talk2me

  Okay, stop. Last one. The transcript of unanswered messages was way too long. It would scroll for pages.

  He crept up to the position that gave him a clear view through the French doors that led out onto the side porch. That room was dark, but he saw lights filtering from an open doorway, and mapped the house with his augmented senses, as he had done in the forest fight. Greaves glowed hot in the front room, a nasty throb of powerful energy. There were the two who had been with Greaves in the forest fight. A car was coming, and he crouched lower in the foliage and followed the headlights. They slowed and stopped at the gate.

  He settled down, positioned his scope, crosshairs over the front door, careful not to let himself get blinded by the oncoming headlights.

  It was a large SUV. It parked near the RV. It took a couple of seconds to recognize the haggard woman who got out of the driver’s seat. Anabel had aged thirty years since Spruce Ridge. Dull skin, stringy hair, caved-in cheeks, shadowed, sunken eyes.

  She jerked open the back seat, leaned in, and grabbed something, heaving it out with some effort, letting it flop heavily onto the ground.

  That thing proved to be a person swathed in duct tape, in a long, olive drab wool army coat, a multicolored knitted cap, a tangled mop of long, wavy dark hair. Levis. Purple lace-up kicks. Oh, Jesus. Lara.

  His artificial calm exploded from within, like it had been mined.

  She swam up through the dark, lungs screaming. Wondering if she’d be better off falling back down into the thick, viscous darkness. Just ending the fight, and falling back into sleep. Endless sleep.

  She would have, if it weren’t for the lantern glowing in her head. She had no words in this dark place in her mind, but the closer she came to the surface, the more words, thoughts, images came back. Fear and pain, too. Throbbing in her head, her arm. Twisting in her middle.

  Miles. He was her lantern, her beacon. Her star in the darkness. She wanted to call out to him, but she couldn’t visualize images in this condition. She couldn’t see the control room, the computer screen.

  She felt numb, frozen. Mute and helpless.

  She forced her eyes open. Her head hurt, like it had been whacked with a splitting maul. Arms still bound. She moved slightly, and almost screamed, though her throat was too swollen to make much sound. Oh dear God, that hurt.

  She rolled onto her side, and raised her head.

  She was in a small, blind room. It had shiny, reflective metal walls. She became gradually aware of a whirring sound. Movement, currents. A fan, pumping air. The room was filled with large, irregular shapes, wrapped in white drop cloths. Like stiff, unmoving ghosts.

  The one closest to her was an elongated, irregular box, about three feet high. She fussed at it with her feet until the dropcloth was loose, and then turned, grabbing the edge with her uninjured hand. The cloth unwound, and the thing wrapped in it spun, wobbled, and fell.

  She gaped, astonished. It was one of her own sculptures. Pandora’s Box. It had been bought for a tidy sum, the very day before they came for her. She vaguely remembered celebrating in a bar with some friends that same evening. The Pandora figure stared at her sidewise, as if Lara herself had put that horrified, oh-what-the-fuck-have-I-done? look on her glazed ceramic face.

  It gave her a bad moment of stomach free-fall, as if the place was a surreal antechamber to her own private, personal hell.

  But that human-shaped thing in the corner. That was not hers. She’d never made anything of that size and shape.

  She forced herself up, gasping at the needle jabs of agony in her head, her wrist. Oh, ouch. Hung over from their junk, as usual.

  She stumbled over to the statue, worrying it with her teeth, then with her good hand behind her back. She yanked at the bungee cords wrapped around it. The hooks came loose, the dropcloth fell.

  Greaves. It was a bronze statue of the guy himself, snapping a photo and smiling. Yes, this was definitely hell.

  It was the statue from her visions. She’d never seen its face, since it had always been covered by rivulets of birdshit, but she recognized the pose, the camera.

  The vortex took her so fast, she didn’t even try to fight.

  She stood in that strange, empty town square, staring at the stained statue. A huge, forbidding black crow was perched on the hand that held the camera. It shook its wings, and regarded her sideways, with one beady, unfriendly eye. Gray skies, wind sweeping pine needles across the paving stones, but the grass was higher than the last time. An elk strode through the trees of the park as she watched. A fountain stood, bare and dry, encrusted with lichen. Behind her, on a park bench, was a man she had seen in an earlier vision. She’d seen him lying down, his head on a newspaper, as if he were sleeping.

  He wasn’t sleeping now. A weather-beaten skull now lay on the grayish lump of paper. Shreds of rotten clothing fluttered on his bones, his shriveled flesh. One of his legs had been detached, and various pieces were scattered around. A shoe lay not far from her foot. Bones protruded from it. Some carrion eater had gnawed upon him.

  She turned away, sickened. There were other scattered lumps, chunks of bone, probably cadavers, too. She tried not to focus on them.

  She looked around, shivering. She’d never seen the entire phantom town square before, only pieces of it, like a disjointed dream. But today, she did a full three-sixty, and saw a big marble building that faced one side of the square. It was weather-beaten and discolored. The doors gaped wide and hung askew on its hinges. Drifts of leaves and garbage had collected against the façade. As she watched, a rat came out of the open door and scurried into a crack in the wall.

  Above the door, carved in stone, was “Greaves Museum of Modern Art.”

  Her neck tingled, and she whirled around, heart pounding. It was the boy, but this time he was even younger than before. Maybe five. He held a ragged teddy bear by the foot. He was terribly thin, hollow-eyed, dressed in the same ragged, filthy pajamas.

  He looked so lonely and desolate in that dead place, her heart felt squeezed and crushed. “What a
re you doing here, all alone?”

  The boy shook his head and stuck his thumb in his mouth.

  “Do you have something to tell me?”

  His eyes widened. He held out his hand, waving with the limp teddy bear toward the nearest bundle of what looked like dry white twigs and rotten fabric, as if to say, This isn’t enough for you?

  “But what am I supposed to do about it?” she wailed.

  As she watched, he seemed to get smaller, going from five to maybe four. Eyes so wide and sad, sucking his thumb, hugging his bear. Like he had done his part, and she was supposed to be the grown-up now and make this all better. It was breaking her heart, it was driving her crazy. She wanted to hug him, scream at him. Save him.

  Beyond the boy was an area that, some long time past, had been an upscale pedestrian mall. Beautiful wrought-iron benches, fancy art deco lampposts. An old-time shopping district. One of the faded signs, carved from wood, read BLAINE GENERAL STORE.

  A loud squawk made her jump, spinning. It was the crow, still perched on the camera, but as she watched, it shook its black, ragged wings and dove right at her face. She cried out, ducked—

  And fell right onto her back. Jolted back into her body again, heart racing, dragging in air. Oh, God, she’d fallen right onto her injured wrist. It hurt so badly, she almost vomited.

  She rolled onto her side, keening with pain, and tried once again to type onto the interface. This time, she could visualize. miles?

  WTF? WHERE HAVE U BEEN WHAT HAPPENED?

  nabbed at portland bus depot dont know where I am now

  ur in blaine, greaves’ house. me 2. i saw anabel haul u in thru my scope oh baby

  god im sorry I ruined everything she typed in, appalled.

  not ur fault. im the 1 who should b sorry. where r u in the house?

  blind room 15 ft squ metal, like a bank vault. he keeps the sculpture collection here. Miles. my vision! it was of blaine!

  He didn’t reply for a moment, baffled. huh?

  i saw the statue, remember the statue, covered with birdshit? it’s greaves! they’re dedicating it tomorrow! it’s here! the vision, something horrible is going to happen here!