“What I’m also telling you is, people who think memorialists are harmless”—Korgan leaned forward, her elbows on her knees—“they’re way wrong.”
“You said you know who’s responsible for these attacks.” Mesa’s finger tightened on the trigger, her palms slick against the gun’s grip.
“Did I?” Korgan seemed surprised.
Mesa smiled slightly, remembering Korgan’s half-hearted shrug when pressed for details the previous evening. “You said you had heard rumors.”
“Rumors, sure. Solid intel? Nah.”
“Tell me about the rumors, then.”
“You mind if I smoke?” Mariann gestured toward the large purse she’d been clutching in her lap. “Some water, too. I’m parched.”
“Go for it.”
Mariann angled the bag toward Mesa, allowing her to see the contents. Slowly, she fished out a pack of smokes and a bottle of water. The contents inside the purse shifted and jangled as they resettled into the new crooks and crannies. Korgan tapped a cigarette and a lighter from the pack then took a long, slow pull. Tilting her head up and away from Mesa, she let out a long, smoky breath. She closed her eyes, contentment settling on her face, instantly calm and serene.
After giving her a minute to collect herself, Mesa prodded her with, “So these rumors?”
Korgan smiled, unscrewing the bottle cap, and took a swig of water. She took her time screwing the cap back on, apparently enjoying Mesa’s impatience. She held the bottle between her knees and tried to find a more comfortable spot for her ass against the wooden seat. “LA wasn’t the first hit.”
Her words drove the impatience out of Mesa and replaced it with stunned disbelief. “What?”
“Over the last two years, five memorialists were murdered in various locations across the US. At first, their deaths were thought to be totally random. Other enclaves picked up the workflow and filtered the data. Eventually, somebody got curious enough to run a convergence on the victims. One guess where they all came from.”
“LA.”
“And the girl gets a prize!”
“They’re targeting Alice Xie’s memorialists,” Mesa said. “What is it? Some kind of gangland retribution or something?”
“Well,” Korgan began, “that’s where it gets a little bit trickier. Each of the vics were recruited by Alice, but each one also had some interesting data packets that got filtered out and rerouted back home to the LA enclave.”
She let her words hang in the air, luring Mesa out.
Annoyed at being forced by the prompt, Mesa asked, “What kind of data?”
“What do you know about body-shifting?”
“What? What the hell is that?” A hollowness opened in Mesa’s belly; a cool tickle worked down her spine. She’d never heard of body-shifting before, but the term immediately raised the hair on the back of her neck. She knew it could not possibly be good.
“Huh,” Korgan said, seemingly thrown. “OK, well. It’s like this. Each of the murdered memorialists were data hounding the work of a PRC general named Jiang Yuan. Apparently, before becoming a general, he was a researcher in California. His work revolved around memory formation and replication. He never finished his PhD, because of the war I guess, but he started developing an experimental technique to transfer host memories into a surrogate. Meaning he was transferring an entire life of one thing into another thing. He was doing this on cats or rats or something, lab animals.”
“Jesus Christ,” Mesa said.
“Hey, c’mon now, we’re in church,” Korgan said.
Mesa wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or not.
“And these memorialists,” Mesa said, “they were what? Body-shifters or something?”
“No, no, nothing like that. At least I don’t think so. They just had the knowledge in their head.”
“And that’s why they were killed.” Mesa’s heart raced. Indigestion bubbled up again as acidic bubbles burst in her belly.
“I think so.”
“But then whatever they knew got filtered back into the other enclaves and directed back to LA.”
“Putting big ol’ target signs on each of our foreheads.”
“Shit,” Mesa said. “After we found out about LA, we picked up the slack. There were other enclaves, too, but we jumped in to help right away.”
“You’ve probably taken notice of a rising body count since then.”
Mesa nodded, deflated. Jonah. Sri. Ashita. Doris. “Jesus,” she said again, too beaten down for the slur to carry much invective.
“How much do you know about Jade Mori?”
The name hit her as if she’d been punched with a metal weight in the belly. This wasn’t going at all as she had expected. “Jade?”
“She came up in the convergence. When the other enclaves started mapping out the data, they found out that Alice Xie had recruited six people. Jade Mori is the one soul unaccounted for. She went north, to Washington. You know her, don’t you?”
Oh, Jade… “She’s a friend.”
“Those five who got dead? They got dead because they were stupid. They didn’t do much in the way of operational security. No fake credentials, no masks, not like you. You’ve been real good, careful. You’ve stayed well hidden.”
Mesa felt dizzy. The world around her was spinning out of control. Korgan’s voice carried a peculiar tone that reverberated in her eardrums. She felt sick, and her dinner turned leaden, like a smoldering, rising gorge.
Mariann leaned in close, pursing her lips to blow smoke up and away between them. She caught Mesa in an intense stare, her eyes searching hard, as if she could pierce Mesa’s soul. Eventually, she seemed to have found a flicker of recognition and spoke. “Hello, Alice.”
Mesa’s mouth went desert dry. “What?”
“They were lazy. And you killed them. You, Alice, you did that.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Mesa asked. A darker voice, tucked deep in her mind said, Kill her.
“You see,” Korgan said, “they were killed because they possessed proprietary information. Top-secret developmental research. Technology that some people would much rather be kept off the streets and limited to a very, very select few.
“You’ll be happy to know, Mesa, that body-shifting works. Isn’t that right, Alice?”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Why do you keep calling me Alice?”
“I’m not talking to you, stupid girl. I’m talking to Alice.”
Kill her.
“She is in there, isn’t she?” Korgan asked. The question was clearly rhetorical.
Kill her.
Mesa raised the gun, but Korgan was fast. She dived in the seat, slinking low and pushing forward. Torpedoing her body into Mesa’s, she sent them sliding off the pew, onto the dirty floor.
Korgan delivered a fast punch to Mesa’s face, smashing the back of her skull against the metal barrel, keeping her gun arm pushed off to the side.
Mesa was dazed. Flashes of silver speckled her vision. She tried to get a knee between them, but Korgan was in too close for her to get any leverage. Her skull throbbed, but maybe she had enough room to make the pain worse. She flung her head forward, sending the top of her forehead crashing into Korgan’s nose, shattering it.
The head-butt was enough to force Korgan away and put some distance between them. Blood poured freely down her face, over her mouth. In reflex, one hand went to her nose, and Mesa was able to pull her gun hand loose.
She brought the pistol forward, too slow. Korgan punched Mesa again, and Mesa’s lips cut on her teeth. In the dazed confusion of recovery, Korgan brought a knife out and slashed forward. Mesa whipped her head back, but the blade cut a shallow groove across the bridge of her nose and below her right eye.
W
hile Korgan’s bladed fist swung high, Mesa’s gun arm pulled low. She jabbed the barrel of the pistol into Korgan’s belly, flush with her kidney, and pulled the trigger twice. She jerked a leg free, kicking Korgan off as she rolled away.
Hunched over, an arm wrapped around her waist in an effort to staunch the bleeding, her face a mask of pain, Korgan was intent on fighting to the end. She held the knife between them, still threatening Mesa with it.
The scene brought back the memory of an old holovid she had watched with Jonah—an old cowboy flick that he’d been excited to rewatch, something from before his own childhood that he’d watched with his father. “Never bring a knife to a gunfight,” the cowboy had warned.
Mesa raised the gun, ready to end her. Korgan flashed a red-rimmed smile, a dare in her eyes.
The doors burst open, and booted feet crashed over the broken glass strewn across the floor. Mesa recognized Korgan’s look for what it really was—not a dare, but a promise.
The distraction was enough. As Mesa looked up at the three men storming into the room, clad head to toe in black, guns raised before them, Korgan hunched low and ran forward, using the sudden surprise to tackle Mesa.
Though distracted, Mesa caught the flash of movement and turned in time to avoid taking a stabbing blow to her belly. The knife glanced off her hipbone, but Korgan’s weight pushed her off her feet. They fell in a clumsy lump, limbs akimbo, wrestling each other for their weapons.
Mesa decided she had no time for finesse. In a snap judgment, she let go of Korgan’s arm and sent a cross-hook into her cheekbone. The blow twisted Mariann’s face away, but she recovered quickly and stabbed downward. Flaming hot pain shot through her shoulder instantly as the blade slashed through tendon and ground against bone. Mesa howled then punched Korgan again. The woman falling off her, Mesa scrambled backward, trying to get her feet under her, but her hand slid on the dirty floor.
The men fanned across the room, leveling their guns at her.
Mariann was on her knees and elbows, blood gushing from her belly and staining the ground in a spreading pool.
Quickly, Mesa fired but not at the men. She was outgunned, outmanned, and surrounded. They had the entrance covered, which left her only one viable alternative.
The stained-glass window shattered, raining glass across the ledge and onto the pew beneath it.
Reacting to the gunfire, the men took aim, but she was already moving. Bullets stitched the ground behind her as the men swung to follow her. She tucked the pistol into her waistband, screwed her mouth shut, and got ready for a world of pain as she wrenched the knife loose, nearly blacking out. Her arm went numb as a tacky wetness spread from her wound and down her chest.
She forced her arm to move, but the limb was slow to respond, and—Christ, the pain. She grabbed a fistful of Korgan’s hair and hauled her to her feet. Before Mariann could react, Mesa buried the knife in her throat, driving the blade upward. She felt it stab through the woman’s soft palette then gore sliding down the blade and across her fist.
Using the dying woman as a shield, Mesa pushed Korgan forward and shoved her into the nearest gunman. While the man grappled free, Mesa ran to the shattered window and the pew that was pressed up against the wall.
Bullets struck the pew, splintering the wood as Mesa’s foot connected. She leapt, grabbing onto the window ledge, her shoulder howling in agony. Broken glass bit into her hands, and she cursed the pain. More gunfire echoed in the rectory, and she could hear the semi-automatic rounds pocking into the wall. She pulled herself up, then glass cut across her belly, slicing her T-shirt to ribbons as she slung herself through the window. She screamed as a bullet struck her thigh, then she was falling.
She landed on packed dirt, desert scrub, and broken glass. She forced herself to move. The shards cut her hands, knees, and forearms as she worked to get her feet back under her, her thigh protesting.
In all the commotion, she hadn’t even noticed that Kaizhou’s commNet feed had gone dark.
Mesa forced herself to run. Each step made her wounded leg quiver with a pain that threatened to fell her. Her racing heart sent angry throbs and shooting lancets through her shoulder. Despite the more serious injuries, the shallow cuts across her hip and nose fought to make themselves noticed. Glass was embedded in her palms, but she did not have time to worry about that. She ran.
Her slow plodding strides must have resembled something from a horror movie—Frankenstein’s monster being chased by well-armed, well-armored village folk or a shuffling zombie fleeing its inevitable massacre. Lights splashed across her, and she could clearly see the men taking aim. The sudden illumination surprised them, and the throaty growl of the Jeep sent a resonant, booming bass through the quiet stillness of Last Chance Road.
Mesa wanted to feel joy, but she hurt too much to rejoice. The Jeep crashed forward, scattering the men, and hurtled toward her. Kaizhou mashed the brake to the floor, turning the wheel hard, and skidded into a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, facing the gunmen.
“Run,” he yelled. “Go!”
Oh, no. She tried to protest, to get the words out, but a darker voice overruled her and rallied her to move. To go forward was suicide.
Kaizhou gunned the Jeep forward. The side of the vehicle clipped one of the soldiers who was too slow to move out of the way. The maneuver was a distraction, an attempt to draw the men toward him and away from Mesa.
Go! the voice screamed at her, but beneath the pounding inside her skull, she couldn’t be sure who the voice belonged to. She followed the command, though, and ran.
Kaizhou threw the Jeep into reverse, backed up enough to get the solider in his high beams, and launched forward again. The grill caught the man’s face, and the Jeep rocked as its wheels rolled over the prone figure. Throwing the Jeep into reverse once again, Kaizhou slammed on the gas and maneuvered the rear wheels over the man’s skull. The rear of the vehicle jolted over the bump as it ground through bone.
His victory was short-lived, but it had distracted the men, giving Mesa the time she needed. The open top provided him no security whatsoever as the remaining two soldiers regrouped and took aim. They opened fire, decimating Kaizhou in a hail of bullets.
Mesa heard the gunfire—and the wailing death of her first love.
Tears clouded her vision as she ran into an abandoned, half-built stretch of a suburban subdivision. Her shuffling gait took her through the small development and into the desert beyond. Her feet moved across dry and crunchy scrub.
A small idea forming, she let the backpack fall from her shoulder. Releasing the weight was an instant gratification. She dug around in her bag, listening for the approach of the men, but heard nothing.
The stale cigarettes were buried at the bottom, beneath dirty clothes and ammo clips. She fished them out, pulling the lighter free. She took a knee, and her thumb flicked the striker. A small flash of light blossomed in the darkness—once, twice, three times. The fourth took the spark and produced a flame.
“There!” a husky voice shouted, but she didn’t care.
She held the flame to the scrub, waiting for it to light. The burn was slow, and the men were fast.
“Shit,” she whispered. “C’mon.”
The small diamond of fire danced and skirted the dry green firs, sending gray smoke wafting into the air. “C’mon,” she urged, checking on the soldier’s approach.
They rushed forward, guns at the ready and tucked close to their bodies in two-handed grips. They kept themselves turned slightly to present a smaller profile.
With a small crackle, the scrub caught fire. After that, it moved quickly and spread with a ravenous hunger, stretching to the other branches, engulfing them and seeking more fuel.
She aimed her gun just as the men were in range and ready to fire upon her. She fired twice at each man. The hot, spent sh
ell casings fell into the scrub.
Smoke curled around her, choking her. The fire grew larger.
She turned, keeping crouched low, coughing into her arm and trying not to inhale the rising wall of smoke.
Gunshots tore through the air, and she felt their passing heat, too close. She shuffled forward, flames leaping at her back. In the still air, the smoke formed a dark shroud that she hoped was thick enough to obscure her.
The soldiers were firing blindly through the rising inferno. Geysers of sand burst into the air as bullets scoured the earth around her. As the fire spread, aided by a soft wind, its heat worsened. Its appetite expanded farther and farther, unquenched.
Her body aching, Mesa forced her feet forward. One in front of the other, she urged, hoping she didn’t burn to death in the horror she had created.
The flames followed her, growing as they reached the green banks of the Humboldt River. Her eyes stung from the smoke, and she was gasping for air—she couldn’t crouch low enough, thanks to her bleeding, shaky thigh.
She fell forward, exhausted. A lick of flame lashed out, scoring her forearm. Her leg felt warm, and she noticed, with an uncomfortable degree of distance, that the ankle of her pants had caught fire. She kicked in the scrabble and rolled, trying to put the flame out while at the same time kicking herself away from the all-consuming monster. The roar of the fire and the rushing scream of the river deafened her.
She was caught in the fire, surrounded. She coughed violently, and blood from her scored hip pooled into the waist of her pants. Her eyes refused to open, and her lungs fought to expel the burning contagion she had inhaled. Her legs were working uselessly. Her ruined hands scraped through the grass, dust, and sand, aggravating the lacerations further.
Emergence (A DRMR Novel Book 2) Page 12
