They loped through the neighborhood, going up and down driveways, peeking through filthy garage windows, and trying doors. Most of the entries were locked, and the roll-up garage doors were impossible to budge without a manual override from inside the structure. The few units with windows revealed darkened interiors—some neat and organized, others messy—but each had typical garage things: paint cans, lawnmowers, and garden tools.
In the early morning air, their soft footsteps and the noisy chittering of insects and birds broke the silence. Kaizhou hung back a step. Mesa hadn’t spoken to him since they’d left the house.
As they made their way up a drive, a low rumbling cracked through the air, growing closer. Mesa’s eyes went large, and she took his hand. They ran down the side of the garage and ducked behind it. She peeked around the corner, and he did the same on the opposite side.
The large, bulky front end of an ancient, rusty Jeep slowly rolled into view. Despite the noise, it was an electric unit. The engine generated a digital idling noise so that drivers and pedestrians knew the car was running, giving it that spark of life people had grown accustomed to. Somebody had hacked the audio, though, and given it a more resonant bass and a deeper growl. It sounded loud and intimidating, and the earth vibrated under the pounding noise.
Four men, equally large and bulky, rode in the open-air cabin. Scavengers. Then she noticed their weaponry. Well-armed scavengers.
To a T, each man wore stained, dirty undershirts and frayed carpenter pants. A sidearm was holstered at each waist, along with a knife. They carried tools—axes, sledgehammers, saws, large wrenches, and blowtorches. One had a rough-hewn leather vest with a complete set of screwdrivers pocketed along both breasts. They were filthy, sweaty, and unshaved.
Don’t stop, don’t stop. That’s it, keep going. Mesa willed the Jeep on, keeping herself tucked away from view.
Keep going. Don’t stop here.
The false noise of the engine rumbled on, vibrating the pavement as it continued its slow march forward. One of the men stood and leaned over the roll bars to spit, and then they were past her field of view.
She exhaled slowly, relaxing a small fraction.
Kaizhou was on the verge of collapsing, his face pale and damp with fear.
“We should hang out here for a bit. We don’t want to run into them by accident,” she said.
“Maybe we can try cutting through the yards, put some distance between us.”
“If they’re working a grid, we might cross paths with them. If we stay behind them, it might be easier to hide.”
He shrugged, his eyes darting around. Still clearly shook up, he licked his lips and tentatively touched the doorknob then gave it a twist. It turned easily, and he broke into a sloppy grin.
Mesa smiled. Their first success.
“Let’s see what’s behind Door Number Fourteen,” she said, slapping Kaizhou’s shoulder good naturedly and pushing him through the doorway.
After her eyes adjusted to the dark, Mesa realized lots of stuff filled the garage, but none of it was of any use to them. The toppled cans, the empty light socket, the corpses of mice and bugs, useless electrical outlets, and the peeled-back fire-stop boards were all pretty good indicators that the scavengers had already been through the house.
“They’ll work until nightfall,” Kaizhou said.
“We can’t wait that long.”
“There were four of them,” he said. “Probably, they’ll split up—two men to a house—work fast, and move on.”
“Then we wait until they’re hard at work and scoot on by.”
“I can still hear their car.”
Mesa nodded, straining to listen for the cessation of the noisy idling.
“With all the noise they’re making,” Kaizhou said, nodding toward the street, “it shouldn’t be too difficult to avoid them.”
“Maybe we do it your way,” she said. “Once we know they’re occupied, we’ll cut through the yards and work our way around them.”
“It’s not going to be easy to find a car,” he said.
She shook her head. “I think we’re on foot for a while.”
He leaned against the door as if trying to get the weight off his feet. “It’s about twenty miles to Tacoma. We should be able to find something along the way.”
She nodded, taking his hand. She needed to hold him, to hold on to what they had. Her anger had swung back around toward guilt, and she felt bad for snapping at him earlier and ignoring him afterward. He gave her a weak smile, clearly conflicted by a jumble of different fears and worries.
Tacoma or the smaller towns in between were options. She doubted the security networks were tightly entwined with Seattle, but she worried that whoever was tracking her would have had the foresight to widen the search after she escaped the apartment. Just because she’d made it out of the city safely, she had no reason to think she could go unnoticed for extended times elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands of intelligent crawler bots could be trawling the digital ether, hunting for her, capturing and scanning information, and running their data troves against any permutation the bad guys could think of or their AI could concoct. She wondered how many hairstyles they would have to sift through before homing in on her old-world punk. Then she laughed. She let out the first real laugh she’d had in a while.
Finally, the trembling reverb halted, and the echoes of the Jeep’s engine died away. They gave it a few more minutes before Mesa opened the door.
“OK.” She took a deep breath, hoping for the best. “Let’s do this.”
Chapter 9
Mesa stepped out the door, turned the corner of the garage, and walked right into a gun leveled at her face.
Without thinking, she screamed, a high-pitched ear-splitting cry. As time slowed to an infinite crawl, she saw the scavenger’s eyes widen in surprise. His friend took a quick step back. With her left arm, she pushed the gunman’s extended limb away from both their bodies and, using her forward momentum, curled the fingers of her right hand. She launched the protruding knuckles into the hollow of his exposed throat. She heard and felt a rewarding crunch as his trachea collapsed.
His face went red as he struggled for air but was unable to force any through his open mouth.
Still moving forward, she brought her left knee up into his groin, driving his pelvis backward. This caused his torso to bend, and in one fluid, continuous movement, she grabbed the sides of his head and brought his face down on her still-rising knee. She felt his nose shatter then heard the gun clatter to the concrete.
Through it all, she had noticed the shocked expression of his bewildered colleague. She was operating on full automatic, instinctually knowing that neither man had been expecting the sudden, propulsive violence. Both had relied too heavily on the threat of implied danger in their bearings and their large frames—they were soft. If they had possessed intent, she would have been dead as soon as the door opened. Instead, she’d quickly stripped them of any control. Mesa was younger and faster. She had trained. They had not.
She twisted her gunman around, using his hunched form as a temporary shield, and shoved him toward his friend. While he stumbled forward, she dove for the gun and rolled to the opposite end of the driveway then scrambled for cover against the corner of the house.
The friend was more worried for the safety of the choking scavenger than he was about the girl or for his own safety. His eyes darted around wildly, hoping for help.
Mesa knew two more men were out there somewhere, and she couldn’t risk being outnumbered and out-gunned. She had to level the playing field further.
She leaned out from the corner of the house, presenting the thinnest part of her profile as she assumed a basic shooting stance, and aimed for the second gunman. He tried to bring up his own gun, but he was too slow.
She
fired once, twice. The shots clustered closely around center mass. A dark-red stain blossomed against his dirty white undershirt and sent him to the ground.
Turning quickly, she sought out more targets but saw none. She approached the fallen men and fired twice more, once into the skull of each, instantly muting their cries.
“Holy shit,” Kaizhou said. He stared at her, his mouth agape. “What the fuck?”
“Get back. Stay inside until I come for you.”
She wondered at the sudden steel in her voice, at the still bodies at her feet, and her capacity for violence. The onward march of time caught back up with her, and she realized that, even though it had felt much, much longer, no more than a handful of seconds had passed.
Kaizhou scrambled to get back into the garage, and she ducked back behind the house, heading in the opposite direction. She kept low, walking half-crouched as she passed the deck. Using the large, imitation-wood platform as cover, she crossed the yard, moving away from the driveway and toward a thin strip of grass that wound around the western side of the residence.
Mesa moved quickly but quietly. If the third and fourth gunmen popped around the corner and opened fire, they would be aiming higher, expecting a standing target on level with their own height. She crouched and kept ducked down as she reached the far end of the house and peeked around the corner.
And there was the Jeep. It had reversed back down the street, its audio silenced. They’d known she and Kaizhou had been there, hiding in the garage. Clearly, they’d expected to take them unawares, to rob them, and who knows what else.
The driver was still seated in the car, his head moving around. He was plainly concerned but not willing to risk his life in order to check out the gunshots. Probably, he thought somebody would radio in if there was trouble and was using that small consolation as a balm to soothe his cowardice.
She edged back around the corner of the house, crossed back to the deck, and glanced around the structure. The two dead men were still where she’d left them, but a shadow was moving toward them.
And there’s number three.
He was a large man, heavily muscled and clearly well fed. He went pale as he approached the fallen scavengers, quickly looking around for the source of violence. He couldn’t see her, but as he turned in her direction, she could make out the plainly cosmetic nature of his eyes. They were enhanced by an expensive upgrade package, and it wasn’t a subtle one, either. He wanted to broadcast his upgrades to the world.
Slowly, he looked back toward the garage. Mesa questioned her assessment that she’d gone unseen. He could have been sporting any number of different ocular implants, from heat sensors to night vision to sonar guides or infrared. He knew she was there, tucked away behind the deck. He also knew that one more person was hiding in the garage. The split was fifty-fifty on which one of them he would choose to target.
The man looked at the prone forms on the ground. He quickly assessed their firearms, swearing softly to himself. He no doubt realized that at least one of his quarries was now armed. Finding none, he stood again and moved slowly and quietly, his gun forward in a two-handed grip. He took a long time working his way along the side of the garage, pausing at the filth-covered window for a look inside. Then he checked back toward the deck and the far end of the house.
Mesa had kept the gun tucked close, hoping that her body heat would prevent his upgrades from sussing out the weapon. She kept herself hidden by the deck skirting, watching him through the square picture-framed lattice. She cursed silently when he crossed the garage window and edged closer to the entry.
What are the options here? Would he shoot first or use Kaizhou to bait her out? She questioned whether she could cross the yard quickly enough to take him out before he did any damage to her or Kaizhou.
She crab-walked back to the corner, took a quick glance, then fell back behind the deck skirting. The fourth man was still in the Jeep, apparently useless. Staring through the lattice, she could make out the blur of his companion as he moved past, out of sight. Around the edge of the skirting, she watched as he rounded the corner of the garage and stopped at the door.
Taking a deep breath to steady herself, keeping the gun tucked close to her center of gravity, she squared the sights on her target.
He kept his gun waist-high as he reached across the door to turn the knob. He eased it open, peeking through. Very slowly, he opened the door farther then glanced at his rear, and—
She fired just as he was turning, as if to meet the bullet. The slug pounded through his cheekbone, and he stumbled back into a clumsy fall.
Hoping the element of surprise was on her side, Mesa launched out of her hiding place, pushing herself off and away from the corner of the house and into a quick run toward the Jeep.
The man started and fumbled for his gun, too slowly. Two rounds to the skull rocked him in his seat, sending a smattering of red pulp and shards of bone across the roll bars and onto the street beside him. The Jeep, fortunately, was in park.
Mesa slowed to a walk, watching as the corpse slumped against the doorframe. She reached the driver’s-side door and opened it, letting gravity pull the collapsed figure onto the street. He landed in the puddle of his own mess.
Her new ride wasn’t as sloppy as she had feared. She grabbed at the collar of the man’s work shirt and pulled hard, tearing away a long, wide strip of fabric. Using the cloth, she wiped the gore away from the roll bar and window ledge then folded it over and cleaned the headrest where a small amount of blowback dirtied the dark, fake-leather interior. She cleaned a few drops from the door trim, too. When she was finished, she gave the ride a quick once-over and was satisfied.
Once the threats had been eliminated, the veil slowly lifted from her mind. Her heart was racing, and a slight tremor had sprung to life in her hand. She had never killed before. In fact, she was fairly certain she’d never done anything with such cold deliberation before. She closed her eyes and fought to focus her thoughts and still her hand. When she reopened them, it was to take things one step at a time. Get in the vehicle. Get Kaizhou. Get out.
The ignition was a hacked start button, and she was grateful she didn’t have to worry about thumbprint encoding. The scavengers had already silenced the false-ignition noise, giving her one less thing to worry about.
She climbed in, pulled the shifter into drive, and rolled slowly toward the mouth of the driveway. She looked around, feeling oddly good about herself, and gave the horn a quick tap. Its weak, ill-sounding gasp was disappointing, but Kaizhou got the message.
He poked his head around the corner of the garage, surveyed the damage around him, and ran toward the Jeep. He was pale and sweaty. The stink of fear boiled off his skin, and he took a moment to figure out the door latch. Clumsily, he climbed into the seat, where he then fumbled with the seatbelt. She really hoped he wouldn’t throw up inside the vehicle.
Mesa drove for more than an hour before Kaizhou broke the silence. “Did you want to talk about what happened back there?” he asked.
Without taking her eyes off the road, Mesa said, “No.”
The truth was, she did want to talk about it, but she had no idea how to. She had killed four men. Executed them. Despite the three years of training Jonah had insisted on, that automatic level of precision was beyond her. Those three years of training had brought her peace, built up her confidence, and helped instill a sense of self that was still largely absent. For three years, she’d been to gun ranges, learning to shoot with skill and capability, but she’d been up against paper targets. Back there, she had murdered with thoughtful deliberation, with ease, and for the last hour, she had been wondering if that was who she was.
This is who I am, a cold voice assured her. The slithery voice carried the texture of rough-hewn concrete. It spoke with a melodic softness, undercut with a knife-sharp edge.
The doctors had told her that even though her memories had been destroyed beyond recovery, her natural personality could possibly begin to resurface over time. She had reflexes that were ingrained in her body with muscle memory, natural capabilities that her body had become accustomed to over time and could carry out without any conscious need for learned ability. This included things like walking or handling kitchen utensils.
Something was buried deeply inside her. That being was slowly beginning to awaken and resurface—a being that she was and that she wasn’t.
And how in the fuck am I supposed to talk about that?
“We should talk about it,” Kaizhou said, his voice insistent enough to draw her eyes toward him. She was glad to see the color had returned to his face.
“You killed them,” he said.
“We needed a ride.” Her voice carried an exaggerated cool that she didn’t feel, as if she were pretending to spout a line from an old cheesy holovid.
“Christ, don’t you feel anything?”
She wanted to scream. She wanted to stomp on the brakes and swerve the vehicle off the road, kicking up a violent plume of dust behind them. She could scream at him until he shut up and understood, until he stopped being so goddamned self-centered with his bullshit morality, as if he knew anything at all about what she was going through. She felt her face burning, but she bit back the invectives.
Instead, with an incredible detachedness, and remembering the years of frustration and helpful pointers her REMIND therapy had instilled in her, she calmly said, “Of course I do. And I’m working on trying to figure it out. I need time to process all this. We can talk about it but not right this second. Okay?”
Emergence (A DRMR Novel Book 2) Page 9
