by Blaze Ward
“Not telling anyone, kid,” he said fiercely as he turned off the street and into a long-term parking lot.
In a day or two, he might call the car on his comm and tell it to return to the Bureau lot. Or he might leave it here to get him home when he got back.
“There’s paperwork we’re supposed to fill out first,” Rachel reminded him as he found a spot and pulled in.
“We’re in hot pursuit,” he grinned. “Besides, if I ask for permission, someone will leak it and our target will disappear. Cuba’s not that far away, and, in spite of everyone being friendly neighbors these days, they still don’t really like Los Anglos del Norte, or even Puerto Ricans. They can make my life hell until I bring enough firepower to the table.”
“And that would rob you of the chance to do this personally, wouldn’t it?” she fired back as she opened the door.
“You got it.”
He joined her and they started walking to the light rail station that would haul them a couple of miles to the bullet terminal. Again, if you were looking at his geocodes on a screen, nothing that would stand out and suggest you call your buddy in Florida and let him know that trouble was coming.
Just a quick jaunt. Hop a bullet and be there in time for dinner.
And not leave a trail at the airport, which was where everyone would probably look for him, if they realized he was about to pull this sort of stunt.
They got up onto the platform and the next car was about five minutes away. The rest of the people waiting around them were either the last dregs of the party hounds headed home, the immigrant women and men who cleaned offices at night, or the folks headed somewhere early before going into the office. A gym, maybe, or a non-neighborhood coffee shop where they met up with friends to shoot the shit before the day started.
He and Rachel didn’t really stand out that much. She’d had a shower a few hours ago and he was good enough.
Plus, Greyson was planning to get a cabin on the train, with a private bathroom and beds, so he could shower, sleep, and eat out of the dining car as they traveled, more or less anonymously.
You’ll never see me coming.
19
Southbound
Rachel surveyed the accommodations with jaundiced eye, following the conductor who took them up to the second floor of the car and showed them the room Greyson had apparently reserved when she wasn’t looking.
Private, but she didn’t think he was up to no good. Even if she’d been interested in a romp with a dry, sarcastic punk like Leigh. Which she generally wasn’t.
“And you have two sofas facing each other,” the man was explaining. “They can be pulled out for sleeping on long trips, forming a queen-sized bed. This is your private bathroom, with a shower and toilet. The dining car is the next car rear of you. Upstairs is a full kitchen and usually a waiting list. Downstairs looks more like a coffee shop, but they have a hotplate. Think hotdog stand with a few more options, but personally I find Xi to be a better cook than the fancy people. Is there anything else I can get you?”
“We’re good,” Greyson spoke up. “Been up all night, so I might just crash on the couch for now and then grab some breakfast when we hit Manhattan.”
Rachel watching him slide the guy a meafle, the ten loonie note with the maple leaf on the front, and got a tip of an invisible cap in return.
“Please let me know,” he said. “My cabin is across and forward, just next to the stairs.”
And then he was gone, leaving the two lovebirds alone. Or the old fart running off with his chica?
Rachel wondered how the conductor might have rated them, without knowing anything except that they were dressed pretty nice, had been up all night, and didn’t have any luggage.
How many people suddenly eloped on a train like this? Not like old Las Vegas was involved. It didn’t have the panache it used to, but was still a place for middle-class office drones to vacation, with just enough carefully-curated seediness to give you a thrill.
If you had real money, you probably jet-setted to some private island. If you were poor, there were still tribal casinos scattered around that would take your money for an evening’s entertainment.
Rachel hadn’t even packed her bikini.
But then, she doubted that she’d have need for it, unless Greyson wanted to distract someone with her ass while he was breaking in somewhere. Except that maybe she’d put him in a speedo and let the old ladies hit on poor Greyson while she got out the lockpicks.
Turnabout, my friend.
But she just smiled and studied the exhaustion etched into his face with a chisel.
“Food or sleep first?” she asked as he stood there, a little blank.
“Sleep,” he finally said. “Wake me when they announce New York City and we’ll grab some food before all those folks board. Most of them are headed to DC for work, so they’ll be after coffee and bagels.”
“Commuting?” Rachel asked, a little staggered.
“Not that much longer of a trip on the bullet than it used to be driving in from the suburbs when I was a kid, Rachel,” he countered in a serious voice. “Probably spend longer driving to the station and parking than you do in flight.”
“Weird,” she decided.
“Agreed,” he said. “But remember that everyone has their own calculations to make about how they want to do things. The world—hell the whole galaxy—is much smaller than it was thirty years ago, let alone a hundred or a thousand. We’re making a run to Florida today, and not even flying or taking the sub-orbital.”
She shrugged. Sneaking up on that bastard is what they were doing, but she wasn’t about to say that out loud. They were in public and someone might draw the wrong conclusion.
She closed the door and watched Greyson kick off his shoes and put his jacket and holsters on the floor where he could get at them quickly if he needed to.
“I need some coffee,” she told him.
He nodded and stretched out on the right-hand sofa, then got up and located a blanket in a pantry she hadn’t seen before. Like this wasn’t his first rodeo, or something.
But the man was going to be fifty this year. Twenty-seven years older than her. What other crazy shit had he done in his time? How much of it would ever come out?
And if he really was an alien wearing Greyson Leigh’s skin, how much of that knowledge could she tap?
Rachel knew that she was supposed to turn him in on suspicion, wherein they would probably have to nerve scramble him to take him down if he really was a Phrenic, with that second nervous system they had. Then he’d be dead.
Depending on how paranoid they were, she’d be put to the question pretty hard after that. At best, she’d turn into a laughingstock, to have not noticed that her partner had been taken over.
Except that she’d never met the real Greyson Leigh. It had happened before he came back.
If that same one that got Dominguez got Leigh a few days later, she’d always been partnered with an infiltrator. And a damned good cop and Hunter, from everything he had been at pains to teach her over the last six months.
Like maybe he was doing penance.
Rachel let herself out and headed rear and down, nodding mutely at other passengers as they boarded and got settled.
She needed time to plan. She’d only had Zielinski as a boss for eight months before he was out. Might and might not remember her, except that he’d set Greyson up, so he probably had her picture somewhere handy. Maybe as a target in whatever shooting range he belonged to.
Hopefully not for less prurient reasons.
Ick.
At least Greyson was always a gentleman. And had Emmy to handle his needs.
She got in line for coffee, eventually ordering a mocha instead of an Americano. Rachel figured she needed the sugar and fat today. She was going to be burning energy at a high rate.
Her comm chirped with a message as she got her cup and looked for a spot to quietly sit and sip.
Most of the folks in there ha
d that look of commuters, now that Greyson had pointed it out to her.
Live in Boston, work in Manhattan? I suppose if you’re in finance or the like and don’t want to deal with a helicopter or flitter from the Hamptons or Montauk.
Rachel shrugged and pulled her comm out.
Train? - Redhawk.
She wondered what system had been monitoring for signs of her and Greyson doing things like leaving town. The six North American Metropolitans were, in some ways, even more powerful as politicians than the President of the United States, since that one was mostly a ceremonial role these days.
The Eastern Metroplex itself combined Boston, New York, and DC, but the region Upkins controlled was huge. Panama City, Florida was just inside the Eastern Region, rather than the Southern, based out of Houston and including much of the middle of the country.
“Yup,” she typed back, sipping at the mocha and sending negative waves at any of the suits around her that might think she looked cute and single.
She was, but not the least bit interested in these schmos.
Destination?
Rachel laughed. If their system had noticed her and Greyson buying tickets, or him buying a double with a cabin, then Redhawk already knew where they were going. Given the three primary suspects right now, it narrowed things remarkably well.
“Fishing,” Rachel sent back, harking back to that picture of Fred and Zielinski in front of some critter they had apparently pulled from the depths.
Backup?
“That would be me,” she typed, scowling at a stock broker type in a fancy suit eyeing her from across the way.
She wondered if she should just flash her badge at the guy, or if that sort of thing might act like an aphrodisiac on men like him.
They all seemed to want bimbos or the forbidden.
And pumpkin over there seemed to spend more time on his mascara game every morning than Rachel’s mom did. Granted, he got better results, but that wasn’t saying much.
She decided that maybe what she needed was one of those lumberjack types that women always ran into when they went home for the holidays, at least in the books and vids she consumed.
The kind of guy whose idea of ‘scaping anything involved a machete and an ax.
Keep me posted. Leigh never will.
She laughed out loud at that, wondering just how well Edgar Redhawk knew her partner to be able to confidently assume that up front.
It wasn’t that he was wrong, mind you. But that he already knew what was coming.
That spoke of some enormous battles for information in the past.
Not that Greyson Leigh was the only person Rachel knew who might possibly be more stubborn than she was. Perish the thought.
“Will try,” Rachel sent and then stuffed the comm back into her pocket.
Pretty boy over there apparently took that as a sign, as he rose to walk over and shower her with his awesome masculinity.
Or something equally lame.
Rachel rose and stepped right up to him, fishing in her inner jacket pocket for her badge.
She flipped it open in his face and sniffed really loudly.
He staggered back a half step in surprise.
“No, you appear human,” she announced loud enough that everyone in the car without headphones in could hear her. “Rumors of an alien infiltration. Have a good day, citizen.”
Rachel slipped around the paralyzed man, trying not to giggle out loud as she went up the stairs and then crossed forward to her car.
Technically, she might even be right about aliens being aboard, but she might have pulled something like that on the pretty punk in the expensive suit anyway.
She had more important game to pursue.
20
Dreamer
Greyson slept.
At least he thought so. Some nights it was hard to tell where dreaming ended and waking nightmares became truth. He’d been up for twenty-something hours at this point.
A door opened in his mind and a creature stepped out of the closet into the hallway, scowling angrily at him.
Biped. Monster covered over with scales and such like a leatherback turtle. As Greyson watched, the face began to shift. Morph. Transform into someone familiar.
Greyson Leigh stared back at him a moment later. In dream logic, the man was even wearing the same gray slacks and white shirt.
Ethen.
The Phrenic who had killed him originally. Who had used a projection of Greyson Leigh, based on personality and memories, to fool everyone into believing that Greyson Leigh still existed.
Right up to the point that Zaborra had shot him—them—with a nerve scrambler. It should have killed them.
Except that Greyson Leigh was too stubborn to die, even when he was only a ghost in another man’s mind.
“I can save us,” Greyson, the ghost Greyson, had said in that moment. “But you have to let me. You have to let go, Ethen.”
Ethen had dreamed of Deathwalkers. Phrenic that had lost control of that mind and let the ghost take over, until they failed and died.
“No,” Greyson had reminded the creature. “I can’t survive without you. But you won’t live without me. Let go, and I can save us from Zaborra. I can save Rachel, and you’ll get all the credit.”
“You will,” Ethen had tried to say even as his mind—their mind—was shutting down. “I’m pretending to be you, because you’re a better man than I am.”
“Today, perhaps,” Greyson had said. “Tomorrow is your chance to change that. Just let go, Ethen.”
And Ethen had let go that night. Greyson had been in charge of their body since. But even frightened Ethen would surface occasionally to haunt his dreams.
Usually when the stress was reaching dangerous levels.
“Rachel suspects,” Ethen said, wearing his face like a funhouse mirror.
“Rachel knows,” Greyson replied unequivocally.
“Why hasn’t she killed us?” Ethen asked.
Greyson shrugged in response. Ethen existed inside his mind. Or he inside Ethen’s.
The Phrenic infiltrator could see all the reasons Greyson had chalked up on a board as notes.
“She believes me,” Greyson told his ghost. “She understands that we’re going to make her a better cop than I ever was.”
“And when she is?” Ethen asked. “When she no longer needs us?”
“Maybe she kills us, Ethen,” Greyson replied. “Maybe she sends us off to kill ourselves in such a way that nobody ever knows what happened. Maybe she tells you to kill someone else and take their life, hoping that maybe you’ll be happier.”
“I’d rather die than take another life, Greyson,” the man moaned. “You were the last. When she’s done then I’m done.”
“There you go,” Greyson said simply. “We live until we can’t do any more good in the world. But we’ll have done good. We will leave this world a better place than we found it.”
Greyson watched the other man morph through a dozen faces in as many seconds, standing in what appeared to be Greyson’s kitchenette now, back in that one place both of them felt safe. Man, woman. Human, alien.
Then he turned back into a base form Phrenic again, the hairless thing with scutes and scales. A blank face with big eyes and almost no nose.
“I just want to sleep,” Ethen said in a sad voice.
“You rest,” Greyson assured him. “I’ll watch over us like I always do. You’ll be safe.”
Ethen turned and walked to a door that didn’t exist in the real world, opening it and stepping into a dark closet where he could pull the door shut and hide from all the things he had done in a life of junior varsity crime.
Greyson would have liked to have found a way to raise Zaborra from the dead, just so he could kill that son of a bitch a few more times for what he’d done to Ethen when they were partners.
Ethen was a follower. Always had been. Zaborra had been the bully who did all the gaslighting. Who had twisted a weak person like Ethen into
a follower. A victim.
Made him kill people and take all the risk, so that Zaborra didn’t have to, but could still live a life of crime and debauchery.
Who knew how long they would have gone on, had Zaborra not decided to try his luck with the primitive monkeys on Earth? How much damage might they have done if they hadn’t gone after the Hunter Bureau directly, with some stupid scheme to hide behind the face of the Hunters sent to catch them.
But Zaborra was dead. Never coming back. Greyson had killed him using Ethen’s hand and Greyson’s gun.
Ethen could rest now.
Greyson would protect him, just like he did all the other innocents.
In the end, that’s what Hunters did.
21
Stalking the Elusive Prey
Greyson opened his eyes and checked the time on his comm before he realized that Rachel was seated across from him, quietly reading and drinking coffee from a paper cup.
He’d been down for an hour. Felt like ten seconds. Or ten days.
“I was about three minutes from waking you up for Manhattan,” she announced in a quiet voice. “You were having a pretty bad nightmare when I got back, but then you settled, so I started reading and let you just breathe.”
Greyson sat up and rubbed his eyes. The conductor had left the curtains closed originally, so it was dim in here. That was good. He grabbed his holsters and started reassembling his mind and body, thinking about the coffee Rachel had.
His stomach woke up and complained.
“Thank you for letting me sleep,” he said as he reached for his shoes. “I needed that. You’ll need downtime before we arrive.”
“Caffeine burns out of my system pretty quick,” she grinned at him and put her reader away. “Should we head aft and get some food?”
“Yeah,” he muttered, standing and stretching.
It felt like he’d been beaten with canes while he slept, but that was just the nightmare thing.
Other people might drink to drown those sorrows, but Greyson was made of sterner stuff. He’d abide.
