The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy)

by Chris Strange

  I grunted. I wasn’t really that transparent, was I? “You went to a lot of effort for little ol’ me and your crystals. Your friend Bohr did too. Did I tell you he kidnapped me with a giant bat-creature? I mean, who does that? But what’s so special about the crystals, Doc? Just tell me what they do.”

  “No,” she said simply. She smiled at me and waved to her goon. “Take him. We’ll escort him downstairs. It won’t be long now.”

  The suit-wearing goon nodded and took a step toward me, machine pistol in his hands.

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling the bottle of Kemia from my pocket and uncorking it. “I don’t think that’s gonna work out.”

  The goon paused and glanced back at the doc. She just smiled in her kind, motherly way. “Oh, Miles. We both know you’re not strong enough to open a Pin Hole right now. Those crystals are tearing you up inside. Just come along. I can make your last few hours peaceful.”

  I shook my head and held up a coin between my index and middle fingers. “That’d be like lying to myself. I intend to die the way I lived my life. Stupidly and without purpose.” I grinned. “And you’re half right. I can’t open a working Pin Hole right now. Hell, I don’t even think I can stand up. But this here…” I wiggled the coin in my fingers. “…is not a working Pin Hole. It’s about as far from one as you can get. You know all those warnings about the dangers of Tunneling without proper training? How if you screw up the Pin Hole, you could turn yourself inside out or liquefy your own brain?”

  Her smile stayed, but her eyes betrayed her. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Yes, I would,” I said. “I don’t have enough energy to open a Pin Hole. But I think I’ve got just enough strength to screw one up. I wonder if your precious crystals will survive if I splatter myself across these nice, pretty walls.”

  The goon looked from me to his boss and raised his gun a little, but he didn’t fire. Doc McCaffrey was silent. Interesting. I’d been half-expecting them to put a few rounds in my head and get the crystals afterwards. But maybe it didn’t work like that. Maybe they actually needed to extract the crystals when I was still alive or freshly dead, like the Collective wanted to with their grinder. That bought me a few more seconds of bargaining time.

  “If this was anyone else, I’d ask if you were bluffing,” Doc McCaffrey said. “But maybe you’re stupid enough to actually do this.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere, Doc. So if you want the crystals, you better start talking. What do they do?”

  She adjusted her glasses on her nose and frowned at me. “What does it matter? Either way, you’ll be dead.”

  “People keep asking me that. Why does it matter? Because all my goddamn life I’ve been a screw-up. The only thing that makes me worthwhile in the eyes of anyone anymore is the way I burned a gang to the ground, and now I can’t escape the dreams and the waking nightmares. I was a loser. I never wanted to be a mass murderer as well. And now all I’ve got is this.” I shook the Pin Hole coin and the bottle of Kemia. “I’ve let too many people down. And before I end up as a pile of goo on the floor, I wanna know why the hell so many people had to die.”

  There was silence for a moment. I tried to focus on McCaffrey, but my vision was starting to get dark, narrow. I couldn’t keep this up forever. I wasn’t bluffing. The Pin Hole was a modified version of the one I used to turn myself into the Incredible Hulk, which had been based on my Chroma-enhanced bug-out last winter. If I’d worked it out right, the Pin Hole was screwed up enough to change the position and orientation of every organ in my body. Skin, guts, bones, everything. And maybe, if I was lucky, there’d be some nice splatter as well, like someone had implanted a grenade in my stomach.

  “Answers,” I said. “Three seconds, or I’m gonna blow this popsicle stand.”

  She smiled again. “Such a flair for the dramatic. Very well. Leslie, it’s all right.” She gestured to the goon. He scowled and lowered his gun, moving aside.

  “Leslie?” I said. “Your thug’s name is Leslie? No wonder he looks so angry.”

  Leslie scowled, but McCaffrey ignored the comment. “Have you ever really considered the power you wield, Miles? You play with it like it’s a toy, but inside you you have the ability to reshape reality as you see fit. And you’re good at it too. I’ve studied dozens of Tunnelers. Most use the same few Pin Holes to help with menial tasks, but they depend mostly on the reliability of full Tunnels as a way to ply their trade. You aren’t content to stick with the basics. You improvise. You do things that would kill other Tunnelers, and you make it work. You have a brilliant, instinctual command of your craft. And that’s only increased since the incident with the Chroma.”

  “What did I say about flattery?”

  I struggled to put it together in my brain. She’d used me because I’d taken Chroma. But why? I didn’t know. I wasn’t smart enough to work this thing out. My gaze went to the phone. I had to tell Vivian that McCaffrey was behind this. Could I use my life as a bargaining chip long enough to make the call?

  I met McCaffrey’s eyes. Even now, she looked kinder than most of the foster mothers I’d had. She wasn’t power-mad like Caterina or tweaked out like Bohr. She looked almost sad. What had driven her to do all this? Somewhere deep inside, the fire that had been driving me, the burn of guilt and revenge, dimmed a little.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Doc McCaffrey said. “He doesn’t need to know. I think he’s bluffing after all. Take him.”

  So much for the sympathy.

  Leslie came for me. I lurched up, every inch of me on fire, and kicked the chair toward him. He deflected the pathetic attack easily and kept coming. I stumbled backward, put my back against the window, and held the Kemia up to the moonlight.

  Nowhere to run now. No clever escapes. I was ready. Hell, I was way past ready. I glanced at the doc and saw Claudia standing behind her. She smiled at me. I’d found the person who’d killed her. Not that she would be caught, but that was all right. It was someone else’s problem now. I couldn’t wait to finally rest, free of hallucinations and fear and pain and those goddamn dreams. It was time.

  Leslie lunged at me. I could barely feel my limbs. Somehow I lifted the bottle of Kemia and tilted it. The silvery liquid shimmered, just waiting to hit the broken Pin Hole and turn me into a living bomb. Time seemed to stand there forever.

  And then the bottle slipped from my fingers. I watched it fall, my heart giving one last, pathetic throb. No. I grabbed for the bottle, but my knees went next. They couldn’t take my weight anymore. I fell at the same speed as the bottle, liquid sloshing inside both of us.

  The bottle hit the ground. It shattered.

  The silvery liquid hissed and dissolved as it came into contact with the carpet. I watched, unable to even utter a groan, as my last act of defiance petered out in the most humiliating way possible.

  I couldn’t see Claudia anymore. I knew she was disappointed.

  I lay on the ground, slumped and broken. The goon’s shoes came into view and kicked my hand. I didn’t even feel it. The sabotaged Pin Hole fell out of my grasp and rolled away under the desk. My mouth hung open, blood and spit drooling into the carpet. I could barely even blink.

  “You made this harder than it needed to be,” McCaffrey said. “But I always knew you would.” She moved to my side and slowly crouched, her joints cracking with age. I could make out the darkened, spotted skin of her ankles, and a varicose vein that disappeared under the hem of her trousers. Her fingers touched the artery in my neck. Her skin was clammy. Or maybe it was me that was clammy. I tried to pull back from her touch, but her other hand wrapped around the back of my head and easily held me in place. I wheezed, trying to keep from slipping into unconsciousness.

  Her touch left me. “He’s nearly at the end,” she said. “I need to sample his blood before he dies. Get him downstairs—”

  A boom ripped through the night. The floor vibrated beneath me. I thought I heard shouts somewhere far away, but I couldn’t be sure. My broken mind was having tr
ouble piecing everything together. Was that a bomb?

  I rolled to the side, my muscles groaning, and realized McCaffrey and Leslie weren’t next to me anymore. They were at the window, staring down toward the street. Their faces were lit from below by flickering orange light.

  Footsteps crashed into the room. I forced my neck back the other way to look at the door. Another goon rushed into the room, his eyes the size of pizza dishes, his gun trembling in his hands like he was going to start loosing shots at any second.

  “It’s the Collective,” the goon said, his voice rapid. “They’re coming in the main entrance. Dozens of them.”

  My head rolled a little more to the side, and my gaze fell on the gun that I’d dropped. Zhi’s revolver. Within my reach. I saw McCaffrey’s face, and for the millionth time I pictured Claudia lying on that slab. With my muscles trembling, I reached for the gun.

  “Get him up,” McCaffrey ordered. “Take him to the basement via the service elevator and get him prepped. I need to clear out Jozef’s office. Go.”

  My fingers brushed the butt of the revolver. It was almost as cold as I was. Then two pairs of arms grabbed me under the armpits and hauled me up. The revolver was a million miles away now.

  “Fuck this,” Leslie said. “I’m not carrying him. Stick him in the chair. We’ll push him.”

  They threw my limp body into Kowalski’s office chair. I slumped to the side. There were pops and cracks coming from downstairs. Gunfire. Leslie grabbed me by the shirt, shoved me upright in the seat, and took hold of the back of the chair to haul me away. My heels scraped on the floor as he rolled me backward away from Doc McCaffrey.

  “See you soon, Miles,” she said.

  I tried to spit, but all I got was blood dribbling down my chin. I don’t think it had quite the effect I was going for.

  The goons dragged me down the hallway in the opposite direction I’d come from. We passed a stairwell, and I heard the echo of boots stomping up the stairs. The goons quickened their pace.

  We went through a door and down a wide corridor that lacked the fancy styling of the rest of the floor. Finally, we stopped outside a bare metal elevator with oversized doors. Leslie jabbed the call button. Something deep in the bowels of the building rumbled to life.

  “Hey,” I rasped. “Leslie. Why’d your mother give you such a girly name, huh?”

  “Shut up.” He pressed the call button a couple more times, just to make sure the elevator knew he was in a hurry.

  “You want me to ask your mom next time I see her?” I asked. My head drooped to the side, and I didn’t have the strength to pull it back up. “I was gonna go visit her in the morning. You know how horny she gets in the mornings.”

  “The doc doesn’t need your tongue. Don’t make me cut it out.”

  The elevator doors slid open silently, and the goons dragged me inside. Leslie punched the button for the basement.

  “You know, your mom always said my tongue was my best feature,” I said. “You should hear the way she screams when I—”

  He clocked me in the mouth with the butt of his machine pistol. Compared to the fires raging inside me, it felt like getting a massage while sipping cocktails on a beach in Thailand. One of my incisors was loose when I probed it with my tongue, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

  When I could see again, I let my eyes fall on the digital display above the door, reading off the floor numbers as we descended. 6. 5. 4. Every one brought me closer to the basement, and my inevitable mulching.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’ve worked it out. You don’t even want the crystals, do you? You’re just going to turn me into Soylent Green. You sick bastards.”

  “You don’t ever shut up, do you?”

  “I’m not known for it,” I said.

  “Well, you’ll be silent soon enou…” The elevator slowed and stopped. I glanced at the floor display. G.

  “What the fuck?” Leslie said.

  The doors slid open. The three scruffily-dressed guys with submachine guns looked as surprised to see us as we were to see them. They were no more than five feet away. For a moment, my goons stared at the Collectivists, and the Collectivists stared back. Then everyone started shouting at once.

  “Drop the guns!” Leslie screamed, waving his machine pistol at them.

  The single Vei gangster went bug-eyed and snarled, his shark teeth bared in a classic Vei threat response. I wasn’t liking how close the barrel of his gun was coming to being pointed at my chest. My heart feebly tried to pound. I flopped down a little lower in the chair.

  The doors started to close again, but one of the human Collectivists shoved his foot in the door and stopped it. I could tell from the way he was looking at me he knew who I was. Leslie must’ve seen it too. The goon’s hand closed around my neck. Cold metal pressed against the side of my head.

  “Drop the guns,” Leslie said. His voice was cracking. “Drop them or I drop Franco. I’ll splatter him right here. Then no one gets him. Drop the guns. Drop ’em!”

  No one looked inclined to do any such thing. I was most worried about the Vei gangster. Vei are unpredictable at the best of times, and this one looked about ready to blow his top and smoke the lot of us. With the grip Leslie had on me, I had no chance of dropping to the ground to avoid the shootout. It was funny in a way, how much it scared me to be looking down the barrels of those guns. I was going to be dead in an hour anyway, and just ten minutes ago I’d tried to kill myself. But now here I was, every instinct urging me to stay alive.

  Gunfire burst out, echoing in the elevator. My spine—or what was left of it—turned to ice. But I didn’t fall. Neither did Leslie or the other suit-and-tie goon.

  The three Collectivists weren’t so lucky. They all stood there for a second as the blood leaked from the holes in their chests. All the fire had gone out of the Vei’s eyes. He said something to himself in Vei, but I was too far gone to translate it. Then all three dropped to the ground. Their blood mixed and trickled into the crack at the door of the elevators. The guy who was blocking the elevator door with his foot was still in the way.

  Leslie’s grip left my neck, and he sighed deeply. The other goon had gone whiter than his shirt. Neither of them had touched their triggers.

  “Was that Sean who shot them?” Leslie said. He stuck his head out the doors. “Sean—” He jerked upright. “Who the hell are you?”

  Gunfire ripped through him, and I watched the back of his skull turn into pulp. His body slumped across me for a moment, before sliding to the floor. The stink of death and piss and shit and gunsmoke burned in my nostrils. I dry retched, but my guts had nothing left to give.

  The white-faced goon dropped his gun. It landed on the elevator floor, engulfed by an ever-growing pool of blood. The goon pulled himself into a ball in the corner, trembling.

  A figure appeared in the doorway. He was tall for a Vei, dressed in a button down suit. Aran. The Vei that’d sliced my ear, the one I’d rescued from the Collective at their base. He just couldn’t stay away from me, could he? He raised his assault rifle. But it wasn’t pointed at me.

  “No,” the trembling goon said, holding his hands out in front of him.

  It did nothing to stop the bullets ripping through his face. Aran stopped firing. The goon slumped. They were all dead. All but me and Aran.

  “Wha…?” My brain couldn’t keep up with what was happening.

  Aran shook his head, tossed his assault rifle aside, and pried the machine pistol out of Leslie’s hands. “Talk later. My brother’s outside in the car. We need to get you out of here.”

  I tried to make sense of the words coming out of his mouth. I gave up. “Wha…?”

  He sighed and kicked the dead Collectivists out of the way, then grabbed the back of my chair and scooted me out of the elevator. “They want you, Franco, all of them. I don’t want them to have what they want. They want to process you and your precious crystals while you’re alive, before they have time to degrade. But they’ll take you dead
and fresh if they have to.”

  He pushed me along a wide corridor. Gunfire was still cracking throughout the building. In the distance, I could hear sirens.

  We were approaching a fire escape door. Aran smashed in the glass of a fire alarm on the wall and pulled the lever down. The alarm started screaming, and the door opened automatically. He dragged me out into the night. The smell of the city nearly drowned out the taste of smoke and blood in my mouth.

  “So, you’re here to save me?” I asked.

  “No,” Aran said. “I’m here to keep you alive long enough so you can die where they can’t get to you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Close enough. Lead on.”

  He dragged me across the empty parking lot to the waiting car, his brother behind the steering wheel. I looked up and tried to see stars, but to me, everything was just the color of blood.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I lay curled up in the back of the rusted old Impala, feeling every bump as we tore down the road away from the AISOR building. My vision was fading in and out, or maybe that was just the strobing of the streetlights outside. I wasn’t going to be hanging around much longer, but at least I’d have the chance to tell Vivian that McCaffrey was running this messed up game. Or I would, if I could get my numb fingers to operate the buttons on my cell phone.

  “Aran,” I rasped, pushing the phone toward him where he sat in the front passenger seat. “Find the number for Vivian in my contacts and dial it for me.”

  The Vei reached back and took the phone, but he hesitated. “Who’s Vivian?”

  “A cop.”

  “No cops.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “I need to tell her so she can end this.”

  Aran stared out the windshield and gestured to his brother in the driver’s seat. “We’ll end this.”

  “You already got one brother in hospital—”