“Well, lookie here!” Gilroy proclaimed. “The animal! Guess the others split and ran, eh?”
Flynn glanced back at the bounty hunters. His eyes tightened to narrow slits at the brightness of their headlamps. He couldn’t see any of them through the glare, and quickly looked away. “It was stupid to run. They tried anyways. It’s amazing we got this far.”
“So you’ll be giving up peacefully then?” demanded Colin, a hint of disappointment in his voice. He liked things messy. “I think we should just shoot him.”
A bad feeling came over Flynn. There was too much he didn’t know about how these bounty hunters ran things; it varied from team to team. He’d met these men before—they had been two hands short then, over a year back. Flynn hadn’t shared any of this with Jean when they approached the ambush point.
Okay, we’re clear. What the fuck’s a specialist?
Someone like us, he had explained. A half-human. A voice of reason to talk us toward easy surrender.
Yer shittin’ me.
They’re not inherently dangerous; hunters won’t take anyone like that. They want someone with soft abilities, someone they can put down if they get out of hand.
Flynn’s fingers tingled. He flexed and then stretched them.
“Let me talk to him,” a girl’s voice hissed. She sounded familiar and without the chaos of their recent encounters, he recognized her now. Rebecca Saul.
“Becca, just—”
She ignored her comrade and hopped out of the jeep, footsteps crunching in the dirt and soot. Flynn kept his back to her.
“You’re here to make an offer?”
“I’m here to talk you down.” She kept her ground, trying to get a look at him. He felt her eyes reaching around, hoping to grab at his face. Any sudden movement could land a bullet in his back, so he kept still, stoic.
“I don’t want back in that cell,” Flynn replied with a growl.
“I can’t promise that.” She was gentle, sympathetic. “People like us, we’re—we’re dangerous. We need to be locked up.” She glanced at her teammates, then back to Flynn. “For people like them.”
The bait. He knew the method. Rebecca Saul had to be taken out. She could ruin him, then and there. “People like us?”
She would show him, gently. Rebecca held a hand, glowing with a soft white light, up to Flynn’s side. She could do brighter, but she wasn’t trying to show off.
“Like us,” she told him, reassuringly.
This was the part where she would convince him that they were alike and he, cornered as he was, would open up. Give up. Flynn stood his ground, trying to find an opening. Jean wouldn’t move until he did. Mack wouldn’t move until Jean did. He couldn’t move until Rebecca was out of the picture.
“Becca,” another voice, one Flynn had not heard before, pleaded. That one could be dangerous. It was plain to hear that he loved her, even though it was taboo.
Caught up in his assessment, Flynn’s guard slipped as Rebecca moved around to his front. She looked at him, eye to eye, trying to find something. How she knew him, changed as he was, Flynn could not say. But as her mouth moved into the shape of his name, her eyes went wide with disbelief, and it all fell apart. Vicious claws erupted from Flynn’s left hand and he fell back a step, slashing her neck, opening her throat in an instant. And he saw all of her: the armor, which she’d grown into over the last year; the rifle, with a few new nicks and scratches but little worse for the wear; her black hair, short when he’d met her but now grown out.
“Son of a bitch!”
“Kill him! Kill him, now!”
“Becca! You bastard!”
As Rebecca fell, Flynn caught her, a bullet grazing him as he dropped beneath the spray of shells and slugs. Above him, Jean came down on her target with force, swinging her mace at Colin before striking Gilroy perfectly in the jaw. Without seeing, Flynn knew the third strike team member would fall out of the jeep, training his weapon on Jean, just in time for Mack to take him out.
Rebecca looked up at him with wet, pleading eyes. She could barely gasp, yet that was all it took to convey the horror of his act. What have you done? Her head hit the dirt as he stumbled back. Somewhere along the way, the strap from her rifle got tangled on his arm.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “Rebecca, I—”
“Flynn, get in!” Jean yelled. Mack was behind the wheel, Jean riding shotgun.
He buried his guilt, however poorly—there was something to do, answers to find. She had meant nothing to him two years ago; he needed her to mean as much to him now. He needed that distance. Grievously.
*
As the taillights faded into the dark of the wasteland, Rebecca Saul lay bleeding out. She could not look, but she knew her allies were either unconscious or dead. Her wounds were certain. No one could save her. Red pooled around the base of her neck, and she was left with an unslakable wonder.
A curdled gasp escaped her throat. “Flynn.”
It hurt to weep, to spill even more than she was already losing, but it had all come to an end so abruptly and with so little sense. How does someone you loved and lost return so suddenly and forsake you as quickly? A single disbelief cried resoundingly in her mind: He could never betray me.
Chapter Three: Fresh Wounds
Rebecca Saul’s blood stained Flynn’s hands. He’d watched her light fade, if only for a moment, before leaving her. Her rifle jostled on the seat to his right, a memento flecked in spots of her blood. His nerves were strained and he tried to bury them, looking around from time to time in search of a canteen or cloth. Something to clean it all away.
The jeep rampaged onward. There was no one else around for miles, the wastelands shifting and rioting against the vehicle as it tore through the expanse. Though hardly a steady ride, it never flipped in Mack’s hands either.
There was no time, Flynn reiterated to himself.
“You good back there?” Jean asked, twisting in her seat to look back at him.
“No, I—” Wanting to avoid the subject, Flynn searched for the silhouette resting vaguely atop the distant mountain. Leaning in toward Mack, he pointed. “That way. That’s where we’re going.”
“Okee dokee!” Mack shifted gears in a dramatic fashion before twisting the vehicle in the new direction, jostling them over a small crater.
“Shoulda let me drive,” Jean muttered. Turning back to Flynn, she rested an arm across the headrest. “Really, man, what happened back there? You said you were just gonna grab her hostage or somethin’. I mean, we made it work, but still …”
Flynn looked down. The blood was drying into the crevices of his skin. He’d gotten his hands dirty. Had it really been necessary? “Something about her caught me off guard. I … I panicked. A bit.”
“A bit? Ya tore her throat out. Don’t let me catch ya panickin’ a lot.”
A blue star waited in the distance. There had been blood then, too, and smoke. At least when he’d woken up in Civilis, he’d been able to wash it away.
*
A slope of burnt trees and ash climbed before them. The charred edges of Crescent had been old, worn in; this was fresh, a few sprouts breaking through the burnt soil. The patches of color did little to counter the eerie gray landscape or the howls as the wind sang through the holes burnt in decrepit wood.
The jeep lost traction a short distance in, as the way became too steep and the terrain too cluttered to find a navigable path. They abandoned it, and made the climb on foot. There were no signs of being followed, but the trio kept a paranoid watch on their surroundings. If they were caught, they had little for cover in this dead place; the rising earth would only work against them. Flynn looked around anxiously, hoping for a stream or pool that he could wash his hands in. They itched from the flaking blood.
“I didn’t want things to go like that,” he announced. “Back in Crescent. With Rebecca.”
“Rebecca?” Jean asked between pants.
“The girl, with the strike team.” He knew
it would be better not to share, but it hurt to keep it in when he couldn’t wash it off. “I knew her, before she was with them.”
“So how’s a pretty girl like that end up with a bunch of boorish fellows like them?” Mack asked. Unsure of the last word, he tried again. “Those. That’s. Thems … es?” Then, finally, “The guys.”
“They were looking for people like her. And she came to believe she wanted in.”
“Sooo … why?”
“Cause she’s a fuck-head,” Jean clarified.
“Some, like Rebecca,” Flynn said between breaths, “think that’s the way things have to be. That people like us shouldn’t exist, that that’s why others only see us as half—”
“Don’t say it,” Jean cut in. “I don’t like that word.” She marched on in silence for a moment. “My mom was all human, and I don’t like people suggestin’ she fucked somethin’ that wasn’t to have me.”
“Others,” Flynn continued, “figure they’re making it easier for the rest of us. The ones in the cells, especially, when they show we can play nice with the normal people.”
They trudged on without speaking for a long time.
“So what about you?” Jean asked, finally.
“What about me?”
“You were with her, and she went with them. So what about you? That why you and her split?”
“No,” Flynn shook his head, though she couldn’t see him in the dark of night. “I don’t really have any beliefs. About what anyone deserves, or where anyone belongs.”
They had reached a broad gulch near the mountain’s peak. The divide had kept the fire that had taken the hill they’d come up from spreading to the other side, and the foliage on the far side rustled in the midnight wind. Walking along the crevice, the group soon reached an old stone bridge. Chunks had fallen away and cracks had blossomed, but it was not so far gone it couldn’t be crossed.
The road behind was clogged with soil and growth and the way ahead was little clearer, but their destination waited just beyond. After tracking through mud and crushed leaves, they reached the old medical facility on the mountaintop. Its outsides were wrapped in glass and it stood only a story high; even from the entrance, they could see that it had been cut directly into the mountain. The sign that identified the building was so weatherworn that there was no way to tell what the place had once been called. The glass doors had been shattered from the outside.
“It was already like this,” Flynn clarified, before any questions could come up.
The outer corridors were lit by moonlight, but the interior was little better than Civilis. Even if the place still had power, the lighting units had been stripped out of the ceiling along with every piece of equipment that could be reasonably salvaged. Leaving the others to guard the entrance, Flynn ran ahead to the front desk, glass crunching underfoot, and grabbed a lantern. A matchbox sat beside it, and Flynn lit the lamp, brightening up the otherwise dismal lobby.
“They keep them here for salvage runs.”
The feeble light of the lantern only helped them see just how dirty the floor was and where the bits of broken glass were. Flynn gave Jean the light, but led the way himself.
*
Much of the equipment—medical tools and office supplies—had been salvaged for use in cities so crowded they made Crescent seem like a ghost town. Others pieces, from filing cabinets to complex machinery, had been stripped for parts, mostly to be melted down to scrap. If no one could find a use for it, it was better to break it down into something they could. What remained in the building leaned toward the macabre—vials of half-grown things left to rot in cloudy solutions, skeletal limbs on display in the halls. Some had been stored in large glass jars that had broken long ago, leaving behind a noxious stain of dried waste, long since evaporated and reeking.
“It started here.”
Flynn led them into a surgical theatre and down an aisle of seats still largely intact. Roaches the size of a man’s foot scattered at their approach, save for the few that knew who owned the place. A fresher stench permeated the room, and the three covered their faces as they neared the body lying on the ground in the center of the theatre. Flynn knelt down to examine it. Half the man’s body armor and been stripped from his corpse and what remained was torn apart and not worth taking. The dead man had a crew cut, but so much of his face had been shredded or rotted away that there was little more to know him by.
Flynn shook his head with pity. “They even took his smokes.”
“So, who’s he?” Mack asked, both hands cupped over his mouth and nose.
“Anthem.” Flynn stood back up. He kicked the body over, revealing a host of maggots and scuttling insects, as well what parts of his body hadn’t yet been reached. He’d been muscular once, and there were signs of two enlarged tubes under his skin, running up the sides of his neck and into his head. “Had this talent with smoke,” Flynn explained vaguely.
“So what did ‘im in?” Jean asked. Flynn looked down at the curdled slashes scarring Anthem’s chest, then back at her. “Ah.”
“Taking Anthem out must’ve been the last thing I did, before …” Flynn talked more to himself than to the others. “But why …?” Unable to draw the memory up, he shrugged it off, concluding, “Well, he was a bit of a prick.”
“That’s not why they threw you in the clink though, is it?” Mack asked. “Cause I’m gettin’ the impression they didn’t care much that he died.” He nudged the body with his foot. Something fell out and inched away. “Since, you know, they took all his stuff. And left him to rot.”
“Ya don’t exactly pass for normal,” Jean threw in.
“We had an arrangement.” Flynn looked around, getting a feel for the room. There was another entry upstairs. Flynn held up the lantern, and a bloody trail confirmed it. “This way.”
They came out into another hallway, where the real damage had been done: Bullet holes pegged the walls and loose shreds of equipment comingled with patches of blood. Unlike the theatre, there were no bodies; the rest had been tended and buried. A bilious dread seized Flynn as the memories crept back. He looked at the blood on his hands and wondered why it felt like there was more now from one death than when he’d torn five people apart.
“We’re going the right way.” He felt sick at the words. It was more than just memory now; he felt drawn to something. A familiar sensation he’d first experienced nine days past. It had tugged at him then, too, and he had become unraveled. A door slammed open somewhere nearby. The others were spooked at the noise, but he hadn’t come this close to turn back now.
“It’s the wind. It happens often enough in here. You get used to it,” he said, although his sensitive ears picked up a vindictive rhythm. He turned from it, and led the others quickly. “We’re close,” he assured them. “Then we’ll get out of here.”
Buried in memories of slaughter, of shots fired and flesh rent within the hall, he nearly passed a door. Metal, shut tight. Locked.
“Outta the way.” Jean shoved Flynn aside, slapping her hand on the door. It rattled until it buckled inward, tumbling down the stairs that lay beyond and emitting a loud clang at every bounce. This alarmed Flynn, but he didn’t show it, hoping an exit waited below. Someone was after them, someone close.
*
Doc hadn’t waited for Rebecca’s body to cool. He didn’t bother with Gilroy and Colin either, useless as they now were. Grabbing their gear, he’d run back into town. Blind fury drove him as he made demands, waving his guns around all the while. Any other night would have seen him arrested or shot, but his tale about a beastlike man whose claws could cleave flesh in twain caught the ear of an off-duty guard.
“You’ve seen him?!”
“I was there when they brought him in,” she admitted, though not before coaxing a drink from him. “Boy’s name was Flynn. Never seen a half like him.”
“Neither have I. But I will again, soon. I’m putting him in the ground, this very night.”
“Can’t help you t
here.” She drank deep and smiled. “If he’s really the one that got out of the tower, can’t see him getting caught again.”
“How did he get caught the first time?” Doc fronted her for another drink before she could ask.
“Some facility, in the mountains. So I heard. Not sure how things went down, but I guess he was making deals with another team of bounty hunters?” She shook her head, amused. “Stupid, when they think they’re better than the others.”
“Facility in the mountains,” Doc repeated, standing up.
“Come on, you don’t think he’d be dumb enough to go back where they caught him?”
“I hope he is,” he growled, storming out.
Within minutes, Doc had stolen a motorcycle. Furiously determined, he sped through the wastes and pushed the machine as far up the ashen slopes as he could before marching the rest of the way. He vowed to lay two shells to rest in that monster’s eyes.
*
Flynn saw it all before him, like a returning dream: the deep balcony and long room, the shattered remnants of a great window opening to the northern expanse. A few benches, collapsed from rot. Scattered debris. The piercing night wind.
“It’s here. I remember it.”
“What is?” Jean asked. “What the fuck’re we lookin’ for?”
As he stepped into the room, cautiously searching, feeling, a scream raged from above.
“Some asshole’s followed us.” Jean reached for her mace.
Flynn was too enraptured, drowning in memory, clawing for clarity. A grenade tumbled down the stairs, detonating prematurely in the middle of the stairwell. Feeling the heat on his back, Flynn glanced behind to see Jean and Mack recovering; they had dived away in time. He took another step forward, and—
A surge, just for a moment, of blue. A memory of the light: nearing it, touching it. Nearly drawn in by it, he had recoiled, then agonized at the way it had reached into him.
Rapid footsteps sounded on the stairs above, descending toward them. Only one. Jean and Mack should have him.
Outcasts of the Worlds Page 5
