by Dunne, Lexie
Gunshots outside made me drop to the floor. The sliding door was locked when I tested it. When I tried to yank on the handle as hard as I could, it broke off in my hand.
“This is really not my day,” I said, throwing the handle at the wall. A new spate of gunfire made me drop to a crouch again.
From outside the van, I heard Cooper’s voice, but it was muffled. I couldn’t make out anything he was saying, but if he was like any of the other villains who had kidnapped me and stuffed me in the back of a van, it was probably something mocking.
“Release the hostage and surrender.” Raptor’s altered voice boomed through the walls of the van; she must have had speakers on the Raptor Tank. “Put the weapon down.”
Fat chance of that. I tried kicking the door; it didn’t budge. And then my gaze fell on the HAZMAT gear, and I had a horrible idea.
A brilliant, horrible idea.
The gear was meant for somebody Cooper’s size, but at least the pants came with suspenders. I shimmied into the pants and scrambled into the jacket, fingers fumbling in my haste. I yanked the hood up so that it covered my skin around the gas mask. It was difficult to get the cap off the first container of acid with the stiff gloves. I prayed to the patron saint of hostages, cursing when that didn’t immediately solve my problems.
The cap came off with a snap.
“Here goes nothing,” I said under my breath as Raptor demanded Cooper drop the gun once more. Standing as far back as I could, I splashed the acid right at the back doors. A stream of highly corrosive acid hit the doors dead center. The air filled with the acrid stench of burning. The doors began to sizzle and pop.
The shooting stopped as the acid, smoking hard enough to make me glad for the gas mask, ate a fist-sized hole in the door. Sunlight filtered in through the smoke. I stepped closer, until I could kind of make out the Raptor Tank in the distance. The hole grew bigger and bigger. Cooper stepped into view, gawking at the rapidly melting doors.
I threw the rest of the acid in the bottle. It hit him in the chest, splashing everywhere. If he’d been any less indestructible, it would have killed him instantly. Since it was Cooper, he merely dropped to his knees and clutched at his face, letting out an unearthly scream.
Two seconds later, the doors lost their structural integrity and fell right off the van. I took a deep breath, stepped back, and ran as hard as I could. Even in my weakened state, I was able to launch myself. I flew over the screaming Cooper and tumbled to a stop on a clean patch of asphalt. I started for the Tank even as I ripped the HAZMAT suit off.
Raptor appeared around the side, stocky and formidable in her armor. I opened my mouth to scream when I saw the gun in her hands, but she immediately pointed it beyond me, at Cooper.
Gunshots erupted again. Something clipped the pavement a foot to my left and ricocheted. I cut right, automatically falling into a zigzag pattern. Safety. That was my only goal. If I could get to the dark bronze tank, I would be safe. I just had to get there.
Raptor covered me, gun muzzle flashing every time she fired it toward Cooper. Bullets ricocheted off the ground and the tank in front of me, but I ran on. By some miracle, I was suddenly there, throwing myself around the back and to safety. When the hatch opened, I scurried inside. It slammed shut behind me as I ran my hands over any part of my body I could reach in a panic. Had I gotten any acid on me? I knew what it could do, I didn’t want to die like that—
Raptor dropped in through the top hatch. “You didn’t get any on you. You’re safe.”
Even an hour ago, those words would have caused terror. Now I just wanted to break down and sob. I fell forward, mouth open as I tried to pull air into my lungs and breathe again. Safe. Raptor had come to my rescue. Cooper wasn’t going to shoot me in the head and dissolve my body in acid. I was safe.
And then I heard the Raptor swear, and looked up. The interior of the Raptor Tank wasn’t actually that large: it held a bay area, where I was currently staving off a panic attack, and two padded seats in front of a console loaded with switches and gauges. Raptor had immediately taken the seat on the left. Ahead of her, through the window, I could see Cooper’s van peeling out. The second door crumpled and fell off. It lay in a smoking heap on the pavement.
“Aren’t you going after him?” I asked between gasps. I didn’t know what I wanted the answer to be.
Cooper was dangerous, and I needed to stay as far away from him as I could get.
To my shame and relief, Raptor shook her head tightly. She pushed back her cowl so that she was Jessica Davenport again. “Can’t. I’ve got more pressing problems to deal with. You’re not the only one who’s bleeding.”
“What the—oh, hell.” There was something wet on her glove when she lifted it, and now that I wasn’t so focused, I could smell the coppery tang of blood in the air. A lot of blood. He’d clipped her in the thigh, it looked like. “It didn’t hit the femoral artery, did it? Crap, that’s a lot of blood. Um, okay, I know how to handle this, this happened to me once. I can—”
“Get in the seat.” She reached overhead, and pulled down a kit.
“O-okay.” Apparently we were working together now. I climbed into the passenger seat, though every move jarred my stomach and back. “Should you be driving with that?”
“No, which is why you’re going to.” She flipped a switch. A panel opened in front of me and what looked like controls for a 747 silently slid out. I gawked at them. “What are you waiting for? Drive.”
“I’ve never—okay.” I could roll with this, if it put me far away from Cooper. I pressed on what I hoped was the gas pedal, and the Raptor Tank shot forward, making me feel like a teenager with her first stick-shift car all over again.
“Who the hell taught you how to drive?” Jessica asked as she calmly sorted through the first-aid kit. Blood continued to leak onto the floor, but she was probably used to that.
“You know,” I said, pushing more slowly on the gas (the Tank jumped again, but not as badly), “you really remind me of your mother. Where are we going?”
Jessica flipped another switch, and the windshield seemed to light up. A blue line appeared in the middle. “Follow the blue line.” She grunted and peeled back a panel on her pants to expose a patch of skin marred by blood. “Missed the artery. Looks like you’re not driving me to the morgue after all.”
“Uh, yay?” I was still weak and dizzy, and the fact that the vehicle I was driving had a console full of more controls than a plane cockpit really wasn’t helping either matter. I just had to hope that I wasn’t going to accidentally flip a switch with my elbow and level a city block with a missile or something. I’d heard a lot of rumors about the Raptor Tank, and right now I really had no desire to discover if any of them were true. “But seriously, where are we going?”
“Unfinished business. You’ll see in a minute.” Jessica ripped open the packaging of a small, flat item. I shook my head, took a deep breath, and decided that for now I would just follow the blue line superimposed over the windshield. It made me take a U-turn. I only put the Tank up on two wheels for a second. Jessica sighed at me as she placed some kind of bandage over the gunshot wound on her leg. “How bad are you hurt? And where?”
“He cut me up some,” I said. I still didn’t have a shirt, so the trail of blood from the incisions on my midsection and along my spine were pretty easy to see, even in the dark. And my arm had already started to scab over. “I’m safe to drive, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Whether you’re actually a good driver remains to be seen.”
“You could give me just a little leeway, considering this is my first time driving a tank.”
“There,” Jessica said, pointing up ahead. I leaned forward to squint through the windshield, and cold washed over me.
“You can’t take me back there,” I said, sick fear coating the back of my throat. The facility Cooper and I ha
d just left behind was just ahead. I could see people in the parking lot now, but they were clustered far away from the building. “They do things there—they did this to me—”
When I tried to stomp the brakes, Jessica grabbed my elbow, her gloved fingers digging in. “Don’t do that. Flip that switch by your left hand.”
“Why?” I tried to pull my arm free; her grip only tightened.
“Are you going to question everything I do, or are you going to do what I say?”
“Ask your mother,” I said, but when Jessica gave me a hard look, I reached over and flipped the switch.
The building exploded into a spectacularly large orange fireball. The percussive wave threw the people closest back. It barely even nudged the Raptor Tank.
“Holy shit!” I gawked at the plumes of black, oily smoke. “What the hell did I just do?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Jess gave me a cranky look.
I turned on her, which hurt my stomach and back. “How many people did I just kill?”
“I pulled the fire alarm. It should have been empty. Drive.” Not at all bothered by the massive destruction of property we’d inflicted on the mysterious building, Jessica leaned forward and began turning dials. Belatedly, I put my foot on the gas, hard enough to leave rubber marks on the street behind us. People were too busy gawking at the burning building to really pay much attention to the armored utility vehicle that had just leapfrogged into action. “I’m putting us in stealth mode so nobody should notice us unless you keep driving like you are.”
“Are you this mean to everybody you save?” I asked. Outside the tank, the air seemed to shimmer like massive amounts of heat radiating off its surface. But when I passed the mirrored windows of a storefront, I saw nothing but an overlarge SUV going by. So that was how the Raptor sneaked her overly conspicuous transportation around town. I’d always wondered. “Uh, thanks for that, by the way. I didn’t really want to end up in a shallow grave today.”
Instead of answering, Jessica sorted through the first-aid kit again. The bandage on her leg had actively begun to sizzle, which was a little worrisome, but she wasn’t dripping blood on the floor anymore. “You know who told me where you were hiding out?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“My mother called me from prison in the middle of the night and gave me the address of where you were staying.”
“Rita gave me up?” I asked. “That . . . that bitch.”
“Don’t take it personally. One thing I have learned over a lifetime with my mother is that she doesn’t do things without a purpose. So when Cooper put his request in, I figured something was up.” She pushed on my shoulder, luckily one of the few nonsore parts on my back, until I leaned forward. It wasn’t easy to drive like that, and it put my nose perilously close to some of the switches. At least she didn’t have to rustle around under my shirt since I wasn’t wearing one. “Turns out I was right. Sorry to make you the bait. I needed to know how deep the corruption went. How bad did he hurt you?”
“These are probably the worst of it.” I hissed through my teeth when she poured something on my back, over the place Cooper had operated on. It stung, but in the grand scheme of things, it was a tolerable pain. “So wait, were you in the building with me the whole time?”
“Explosives don’t plant themselves.” With a briskness that told me she was well practiced at this, she smoothed a bandage over my wound.
“You were never going to let him kill me, were you?”
“I don’t believe in killing. On either side.” She sealed the bandage down with her thumb and sagged back against her chair, one hand creeping toward her leg. Her breathing was beginning to grow labored, I realized. The gunshot wound hurt more than she was willing to let on.
“Are you okay?” I asked, glancing at her quickly before I focused on the road again. In the past three days, I’d driven more than I had since moving to Chicago five years before. “You don’t look so hot.”
“The injuries hurt worse the older you get.” She finger-combed her hair back impatiently and sagged against her seat. “There’s a strong chance I am about to pass out.”
“What the—no, don’t do that! I have no idea what the hell I’m doing.”
“Something tells me you’ll be all right. The GPS will take you to a local base, and Audra will know what to do.”
“Who is Audra?”
Jessica’s head lolled forward suddenly.
“Raptor? Raptor! Jess!” Reaching over and jiggling her shoulder did absolutely nothing. “Damn it, don’t do this, I don’t know who Audra is, and I’ve heard things about your bases. I don’t particularly want to get blown up today.”
But it looked like I didn’t have a choice. Nothing I could do would rouse Jessica Davenport. Given that she’d passed out from the bullet wound in her leg—shock, I had to figure—she needed a hospital. But I also couldn’t take the Raptor to a hospital in her full gear, as nobody even knew she was a woman, let alone who the Raptor really was. And Jessica was a Davenport, which meant people would notice if she randomly showed up at the hospital with a gunshot wound. Surely, the Raptor had been shot and injured before. She didn’t look like she was healing rapidly, so this couldn’t the first time she needed medical assistance.
And she hadn’t said go to the hospital. She’d said Audra would know what to do.
I really hoped she was right about that. Shaky, still weak from surviving whatever the hell Cooper had done to me, and terrified even though I was in what was probably the safest vehicle on the planet, I followed the blue line of the Raptor Tank’s GPS system. It took me to a neighborhood I only knew because my old boss had lived close by and had hosted the holiday party for work a few times. When it bade me to turn into a parking garage, I took a deep breath and obeyed though I had no idea why Jessica would pick some place so public as a parking garage to house the Raptor Tank.
The attendant didn’t even look up from his phone as he let us in, which was a good thing. I didn’t really know how this hologram system of hers worked. Sweating and glancing nervously at the unconscious Jessica every couple of seconds, I drove in and parked in the spot it directed me to. What was I supposed to do now? There wasn’t exactly a key in the ignition I could twist and remove. I had no idea what any of the switches did, and Jessica didn’t look like she was going to be contributing anything to society anytime within the next ten seconds.
The Raptor Tank began to sink. I gasped in surprise before I realized this was supposed to be happening and we weren’t, irrationally, melting. I stayed stiff as a board as the tank was lowered, the pavement around us rising and rising until it was level with my chin, over my head, and finally I could see some sort of underground room. It was spacious and lit moodily by the same dim yellow light that was inside the Raptor Tank. To the left, I could see an array of other vehicles: the Raptorcycle, a few fancy sports cars, what looked like some ATVs, and a—was that a jet? All of them bore the raised-falcon emblem associated with the Raptor. To the right, monitors covered an entire wall, with several computers spread out below. I could see a boxing ring shoved into the corner, as well as weight-training equipment and a treadmill. A little kitchenette area stood in another corner.
Standing in the middle of it all was a woman. She wore a crisp blouse and a skirt, with her hair twisted into an elegant chignon, and she honestly should have clashed with the moody cave all around her. But she watched our platform lower itself all the way to the ground, her expression politely disinterested. When we touched down with a tiny gust of air, she stepped forward and clicked a button on a little pad in her hand.
The top and back hatches of the tank opened as one.
Time to face the firing squad, I thought. I climbed out of the seat and crawled through the back hatch. Immediately, I put my hands in the air. “I can explain, I swear—”
“No need for that.” The woman sized me up quic
kly and coolly. “Gail Godwin,” she said. “She mentioned she might have you with her. I am Audra Yi, Miss Davenport’s personal assistant. How much medical assistance do you require?”
“At this point, probably just some Neosporin, but Raptor—Jessica—she’s hurt bad.”
“They are already taking care of it.”
“Who . . .” I turned and stopped midsentence. Somehow, so silently that even my enhanced hearing hadn’t picked up on it, two wheeled robots had appeared with a stretcher. A robot arm had descended from the ceiling and was lifting the still-unconscious Jessica onto the stretcher. It was the most futuristic technology I’d ever seen, so it wasn’t surprising that I gawked like a schoolgirl. They wheeled the unconscious superhero off to another part of the room that I couldn’t see. “Oh.”
“Davenport money,” Audra said, her voice dry. “It buys the best. If you’ll follow me? I’m sure you would like a change of clothes.”
“Please.” It was cold in the cave, and my shirt was little but a memory now. The concrete flooring was also freezing against my bare feet. I shivered hard as I followed the personal assistant. “What is this place?”
“The Raptor keeps several bases around the planet, as I’m sure you’ve no doubt figured out by now. This is her secondary Chicago residence.” Audra’s heels clicked on the floor as she led me through the base. “I’ve been pushing for her to make things a bit homier, but, unfortunately, she prefers the spartan approach in most everything she does. Would you like anything to eat or drink? It might be some time before Miss Davenport wakes up.”
“Is there a way I can get a message to somebody?” I asked, ignoring the edge of hunger gnawing at my middle. If Cooper knew his cover was blown, Kiki and the others needed to be warned.
“If your message involves Dr. Cooper,” Audra said, “there is no need to worry. Miss Davenport uploaded the data she gathered at the Lodi Corporation base straight to the heads of Davenport Industries. Dr. Cooper is now at large, but all of your friends have been warned.”
