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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Serie: Revivalist
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Already addicted to the pharmaceutical drug that keeps her body from decomposing, Bryn has to stop a secretive group of rich and powerful investors from eliminating the existing Returné addicts altogether. To ensure their plan to launch a new, military-grade strain of nanotech, the investors' undead assassin-who just happens to be the ex-wife of Bryn's lover Patrick-is on the hunt for anyone that stands in their way. And while Bryn's allies aren't about to go down without a fight, the secret she's been keeping threatens to put those closest to her in even more danger. Poised to become a monster that her own side-and her own lover-will have to trap and kill, Bryn needs to find the cure to have any hope of preserving the lives of her friends, and her own dwindling humanity.
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TERMINATED
REVIVALISTSERIES BOOK THREE
RACHEL CAINE
To my mom, Hazel Longstreet, who instilled in me an early love of books and writing.
This one’s for you, Mom, with love – because you’re a survivor.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
The real problem with becoming a monster, Bryn thought, was that you didn’t know who to trust.
Bryn Davis, monster, paced the floor in silence, surrounded by her friends and allies, and she didn’t dare trust a single one of them. Not fully, not now. Only one of them knew the truth of what she’d become … and even though Riley Block already shared the secret, and the curse, Bryn didn’t know if she could, or should, trust her.
As for the rest of them, they’d be torn between horror and fury and pity, but someone would make it a mission to see her dead, and someone else would defend her, and it would tear everything, and everyone, apart.
Some secrets just had to be kept in utter silence.
‘Bryn?’ her lover Patrick McCallister said, in the kind of voice one used when the first few tries hadn’t broken through the haze. She stopped and looked up to focus on his face. He’s tired, she thought, and despite how conflicted she was about her own situation, she wanted to comfort him. She loved him. It came from some place deep inside, a wellspring she couldn’t block up even when she tried. ‘Bryn, did you get anything from the Pharmadene lab to tell us what they were working on in there?’
She felt a wild urge to laugh, but it was the same self-destructive impulse one might feel standing on the edge of a cliff. Tell them, something mad in her whispered. Tell them, jump, just let it all go.
Because she’d certainly got something. Proof. The problem was, it was coursing through her veins, twisting her into something that was even farther from human than she’d been before. There was a far cry from being a dead woman, revived with a miracle nanotechnology drug and dependent on it for daily survival … to whatever she was now. Because her little life-mimicking machines had new programming.
Military programming.
Can’t tell him that, she thought, and shook her head instead. ‘Didn’t have time to do much exploring, since they were trying to kill us extremely hard,’ she said. ‘It looked like what I saw at the nursing home … they were using innocent people for nanotech incubators. Breeding more of the nanites. This was probably some kind of … factory farm.’ Not a lie, not quite. The nanotech was real, and they had been breeding it in the unconscious, drugged bodies. It was just the type of nanotech she was silent about.
‘Riley—’ McCallister turned toward the FBI agent, sitting silently with her back to the wall of the small room. Bryn had rescued Riley Block from a hospital bed in that terrible lab, and as different as the two of them were, as fundamentally antagonistic in many ways, they had this secret in common. Riley didn’t look up, but then, there were people in the way. Too many people. It felt terribly, oppressively crowded … this cheap motel room they’d rented as their temporary safe house was meant for a sweaty couple with no interest in anything save the bed.
Bryn felt constantly short of breath, on the verge of violence and screams. She wondered if Riley felt the same.
Riley finally raised her head, and beneath the signature black bob, she seemed far away. Thinking, just as Bryn was, about her circumstances.
Patrick wasn’t done trying to elicit information, and he pounced on the opportunity. ‘Riley, did you get anything from the lab?’
‘No,’ the woman said, which was an outright lie. ‘No idea what they were doing, but Bryn’s probably got it right. I was unconscious most of the time.’ She lied beautifully, Bryn thought, with just the right amount of flat indifference and just the right amount of eye contact. ‘How long do we have to stay here?’
McCallister shot a glance toward his old friend Joe Fideli, who was stationed at the window, looking through the quarter-inch slit between the glass and the curtain without disturbing the fabric. Those two men, Bryn reflected, had never lost their Army Ranger alertness, even though they’d cashiered out years back – but then, Joe made his living guarding people. Fideli shrugged. ‘No way to know,’ he said. ‘We’re still good for now.’
Meaning, it appeared that their enemies hadn’t traced them here. Yet. It had been a hell of an escape from Pharmadene, the government-run drug company, and the chaos had worked to their advantage, but that didn’t mean that their enemies wouldn’t be on the case tracking them down. Oddly, that probably wasn’t the government itself … only a rogue body inside of it. So they weren’t totally screwed yet.
Then again … it was impossible to know, but Bryn suspected that the nanites coursing through her body – Version 2.0, these tiny little life-supporting machines – were fully trackable if the Pharmadene team still had the tech online to do it. Riley had the same issue. They’d done plenty of damage there, but had it been to the right equipment?
Despite the risk of discovery, she wasn’t sure how much they dared tell her friends and allies … but she needn’t have worried, because Manny Glickman, their burly mad-scientist-for-hire, was on it already. How in the world Patrick had first met the man was a mystery to Bryn, but one thing was certain: Manny had skills.
He also had a big backpack of stuff, and he’d unzipped it and handed his girlfriend Pansy Taylor a syringe from its depths. ‘Better safe than sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s a frequency blocker for the nanites. Bryn, you and Riley had better take it. I’m not sure they can lock on you anymore, but I’d rather assume they were smart and we are smarter.’
Of all the people Bryn didn’t want knowing about her involuntary nanite upgrade, Manny was at the top of the list. Manny was brilliant, but he was also paranoid as hell, and although she wasn’t sure he could kill her by himself, he’d damn well try, and he’d have something hidden in that bag that would be a nasty, premeditated surprise. Manny didn’t like being at anyone’s mercy, and he didn’t trust anyone, except possibly his girlfriend Pansy, and Patrick McCallister.
Pansy herself was a bit of a puzzle, because she seemed so … damn normal. Forthright, sweet, and yet fully capable of handling herself in a fight if necessary. She eased past Patrick, Joe, and stepped around Riley’s outstretched legs to crouch next to the woman and give her an apologetic smile. ‘Large gauge needle,’ she said. ‘You’ll feel it, sorry.’
‘I wish that was the worst thing that’s happened to me today,’ Riley said, and rolled up her sleeve. Pansy administered the shot into Riley’s bicep, then safety-capped the needle and approached Bryn with the same needle – no point in worrying about infection, with the nanites on the job. Bryn took it without comment. It did sting, and then it burned, but like Riley had said, it wasn’t the worst thing in her day. Not by a long shot.
‘Excuse me, but can we discuss our resources?’ That question, diffidently offered, came from the tall older man standing near the bathroom, Liam … and Bryn realized she had no context for Liam, now. Before today, she’d known him as the urbane administrator/butler at Patrick’s family estate – an Alfred to Patrick’s uncostumed Batman, in a way. But since she’d seen him firing an automatic weapon while coming to her rescue, and looking as calm doing that as greeting guests at the front door, she wasn’t sure she had any handle on him at all.
‘Go ahead, Liam,’ Patrick said. ‘Let’s get all the bad news out now.’
‘I can get us funds from the black account, but they’ll cut us off soon enough. I initiated transfers to dump cash into various offshore accounts before I joined you today. They’ll find some of it, of course, but not all. I estimate we may be able to count on a few million, no more – at least until this is resolved.’
That sounded like a lot of money to Bryn, who’d grown up poorer than most, but she guessed that when you were expected to support this sized group of fugitives on the run, and fight along the way, what seemed a fortune might dwindle quickly. But then, Patrick’s family had been insanely wealthy, in a way that made most of the legendary one-percent look comfortably middle class. Oddly, Patrick didn’t control the cash; his parents had put it all into a foundation, administered by Liam. For being disinherited with prejudice, though, Patrick still did well for himself. Thankfully. The only thing worse than running for your life was doing it flat broke.
Bryn’s sister Annalie had been uncharacteristically silent, huddled in the corner near Liam, but now she said, ‘Where are we going to go? Where can we go? They’re going to find us, aren’t they?’ She sounded scared, but more together than Bryn would have expected of her. Annie had never been tough – she was the flighty, impractical sister, the kind-hearted one who constantly picked up good causes and dropped them in favor of even better causes. Never quite doing the right thing, but trying for the right reasons.
And also, she was terrible with money. Terrible.
But none of that mattered anymore, because Annie, like Bryn – and Riley – was effectively Dead Girl Walking. The nanites – originally developed as a pharmaceutical called Returné, ambitiously aiming to revive the recently dead on the battlefield – did their programmed job and kept them all breathing and talking and having a simulation of life, but something in their bodies was … broken. What kept them going wasn’t resuscitation, it was life support. Annie still needed daily shots of the drug to keep going.
And Bryn and Riley had needed them too … until the newly upgraded nanites had taken over, back there in the Pharmadene secret lab. Before they’d gotten away, Riley had claimed that these new, improved bugs powered, repaired, and reproduced themselves without any supporting shots at all.
She’d also said they were infectious. And Bryn supposed she had firsthand proof of that, because God only knew, someone had infected her with the stuff.
Now, she had about thirty days to find a way to stop it, or she’d pass the nanites on to some other poor bastard who was susceptible, once they’d matured within her. She’d infect someone. Spread the – the disease. Increase the army of nearly invincible soldiers for their enemies – at least, that was supposed to be the goal of the whole twisted program.
The implications of her condition were only just beginning to take hold … and the dangers. I need to tellthem, she thought, and looked at Riley.
Riley was looking at her, too. As if she knew what Bryn was thinking. She gave Bryn a small shake of her head. Don’t.
‘I need—’ Bryn said, but Riley spoke at the same time, louder.
‘We need some food,’ she said, and that was true, it woke an instant and uncomfortable surge of hunger inside of Bryn that shocked and horrified her. Because what she craved wasn’t just food. The nanites powering her now – these nanites needed protein. Meat. A lot of it. And they weren’t picky about its source. The scientists had been hideously practical in their design of the little monsters … because one thing you could always find on a battlefield was meat.
‘We’ll eat once we’re safe,’ Joe Fideli said, still staring out the window. ‘Can’t exactly call out for pizza right now.’
The prospect of having to wait to satisfy that craving was, frankly, terrifying. Bryn tried to ignore the hunger clawing at her, but she knew what it signified … the nanites needed power. And sooner or later, the nanites would take her conscious decision-making out of the equation, and simply find food, and look, there was a whole room of meat on the bone, right here. Between her and Riley, it could be a bloodbath.
‘Bathroom,’ Bryn said, and lunged for the door. She slammed and locked it, and dry-heaved into the sink, then raised her head and looked at her chalk-pale face. Her mouth felt dry, and she drank a few handfuls of water from the sink. Cold and fresh. It wasn’t much, but it might help. She sank down on the toilet seat and put her head in her hands, shaking now. Trying not to think too hard about what her life had become.
Dead Girl Walking. That had described her before. But what was she now? A supercharged, meat-craving freak capable of passing on her sickness.
Sayit.
Okay, then.
She was now a fucking zombie.
The worst thing about it was that she couldn’t even really make a choice to end her own threat; the nanites that had kept her together before had made her mostly invulnerable, but these – these were military grade. She couldn’t even count on killing herself if things got worse.
She was pretty sure the nanites wouldn’t let her.
And she was pretty sure it would definitely get worse.
There was a soft knock on the door, and Patrick’s voice. ‘Bryn? You okay?’
‘Sure,’ she said. She wiped her face, although she was sure she hadn’t shed any tears, took a deep breath, and stood up to unlock the door. He blocked the exit for a second, studying her, and she met his gaze without flinching. ‘I’m just exhausted.’
‘Do you need a shot? You look pale.’
‘I’m okay for now,’ she said. God, the shots. If she didn’t own up to her new condition, she’d have to figure out how to explain to him about the shots. ‘It’s just been – a lot to handle.’
‘I know,’ he said, and stepped in to give her a hug. ‘I’m sorry.’
He felt so good, so warm, so solid … and she felt herself relax against him, just a little. He smelled good, too, as unbelievable as that might have been, after the day’s fighting. He smelled like …
Blood.
Meat.
He smelled like food.
Bryn broke free and stepped back, suddenly cold again, and said, ‘Sorry, I need a minute.’ She slammed the door on him and locked it again, and took another look around the bathroom. I can’t do this. I can’t handle this. I can’t be around people I like, people I love …
Because it wasn’t safe.
The bathroom had a small frosted-glass window, but there were bars on the outside. The motel hadn’t heard of fire regulations, evidently, because there was no quick-release on the bars, either.
It didn’t matter.
Bryn smashed out the window, pushed the bars out from their moorings with one hard shove, and slithered out through the narrow opening. Her hips fit, though the concrete bricks scraped them raw, and the rest was easy enough. She thumped to the weedy, trash-strewn ground, took a second to get her bearings, and then headed for the eight-foot concrete wall a few strides away. A single leap took her to the top, right about the time she heard the door breaking down inside the motel room. She looked back in time to see Patrick at the broken window. He looked stunned.
Then he looked worried.
‘Bryn, don’t!’ he called. ‘What are you doing? Don’t!’
‘I have to,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t explain right now, but please. Just let me go.’
She dropped down on the other side, into a four-foot ditch below the wall’s level, and then scrambled up and across the road. Not a lot out here in the country, but the road did relatively brisk traffic for long-haul trucks. Most truckers were wise enough not to stop for hitchhikers, but that wasn’t what she was looking for.
She started jogging along the gravel edge, picking up speed to a flat-out run – and then, as the front of an eighteen-wheeler passed her, she leaped sideways.
Her timing was almost perfect. She landed on the hydraulic connectors for the trailer behind the cab and immediately slipped off, having miscalculated her momentum – then caught herself just before she slid underneath the wheels.
Bryn scrambled to a balance point and braced her back against the cold corrugated metal of the trailer, then settled herself against the bumps. It wouldn’t be necessary to stay with the truck for long – in fact, it might be counterproductive, since Patrick would be dedicated in his search. She tried not to think about what might happen if her perch shook her loose – it probably wouldn’t kill her, but it’d be unpleasant for sure.
When the truck slowed down at a crossroads twenty minutes later, she jumped, landed and rolled into the low ditch next to the pavement, then stalked another truck and did the same jump-on maneuver. This one was easier, or she’d perfected the maneuver; either way, she settled in comfortably for a fifty mile ride west. No particular destination in mind, because she had no idea what her plan was going to be, but putting space between herself and Patrick seemed like the only thing she could think about. She needed to know herself better before she took the risk of hurting him, or Annie, or any of the others.
But what about Riley? Isn’t she just as dangerous? That worryingly practical part of her brain nudged at her, but the truth was, she didn’t think Riley was as much of a threat. For one thing, Riley seemed to thoroughly understand her new condition, and she’d learned how to manage it. She’d been dealing with it longer, and had made some kind of mental accommodation with it.
But Bryn didn’t trust herself. Not yet.
Not when she was hungry.
She hopped off when the truck paused at a rest stop, one of the big complexes that catered to long-haulers; the luck of it was that it was like a shopping mall, full of clothes to replace the stained things she was wearing, and after she’d showered in the clean bathroom facilities and changed, she took the rest of her limited bankroll to the restaurant.
‘What’s your biggest steak?’ she asked the waitress – a faded American Beauty rose with gray streaks in her blond hair, and an ever-friendly smile.
‘Well, that’d be the Big Tex, seventy-two ounces, but it’s a stunt, honey; we serve it to those big-boy truckers and drunk frat boys, free if they finish it, which they hardly ever do. Otherwise, it’s a cool forty bucks. Most don’t even make it to the parking lot before they throw it all up. Maybe something like a porterhouse, how does that sound?’
‘No,’ Bryn said. ‘I’ll take the Big Tex. Rare as you can make it and not get closed down by the health department.’
The waitress waited for the punch line. When Bryn didn’t deliver one, she shook her head and wrote it down on her order pad. ‘Your ambulance ride, honey. Want any sides with it?’
‘Just water,’ Bryn said. She tried for a charming smile, but the waitress had probably seen it all, and tilted a skeptical eyebrow before heading for the kitchen window. She and the cook had a conversation, and a balding man in stained whites leaned out to give Bryn a look. He, too, shook his head, but in a couple of minutes she heard the steak sizzling, and the hunger she’d tried to leash began to snarl with real ferocity.
Bryn squeezed her eyes shut. Just wait. Wait. It’s coming.
She didn’t know how long she sat there, struggling for control, but it snapped when a plate landed with a thump on the table in front of her – and there it was, seventy-two ounces of pure meat, drenched in watery blood. Just cooked enough to be legal, as she’d ordered. The waitress put down a glass of ice water and stepped back. ‘Okay, now, when you start feeling full, you just tell me and—’
Bryn didn’t even use the knife and fork.
She grabbed the steak off the plate and held it in both hands, and bit into it. The waitress made a startled sound and took a bigger step back, but that hardly registered at all, because Bryn gnawed at the beef, tore at it, chewed and swallowed without even registering the taste except as blood and salt and flesh, and she didn’t pause until she’d teethed the last threads of gristle from the bone. Then she broke the bone open with her hands and sucked out the marrow.
Something in her brain registered, then, that refueling had been accomplished, and she dropped the fragments to the plate, sat back, wiped her mouth and chin with the napkin, and drank the entire glass of water in one long, convulsive gulp.
The silence got to her in the next few seconds, and she looked up to see the waitress standing ten feet away, back pressed to a wall, mouth open. The cook was leaning out the window with an identically shocked expression. Other diners were completely still, and every set of eyes in the place was fixed on Bryn.
One kid had his cell phone out and was recording. He stopped, put it down, and slow-clapped. ‘That was awesome.’
‘I—’ Bryn swallowed, tried again. ‘I really love a good steak.’
Someone laughed. But not the cook, and not the waitress. They’d seen a steady parade of tough guys in here trying to eat this steak, and Bryn imagined that most of them had left half on the plate.
And nobody had ever swallowed it in five minutes flat, ripping into it like a wild dog.
Bryn threw a generous tip on the table, and got out fast. She stopped again in the restroom to clean herself up. In the harsh lights, she looked – surprisingly fine. She wiped off the remaining grease and splatters of juice, but she felt good. Better than good. She felt … great.
I can do this, she told her reflection. A steak a day. Or any kind of meat, as long as it isn’t … alive. It’s strange, but I can do it. There’s a way to deal with this. I don’t have to be a monster.
But she couldn’t shake the expression she’d seen on the waitress, either. Her definition of in control might be someone else’s of insane. Either way, it was going to be hard to masquerade in normal life now, when hunger drove her to these kinds of extremes. And how often would it do that? How much would she have to eat? She’d have to ask some hard questions of Riley to find out, but she suspected that the amount of fuel she took on would have quite a lot to do with how much effort she put out.
And considering they were right now on the unprepared, unarmed side of a war … effort would probably be considerable.
You can’t run away from it, Bryn. This is what you are. Deal with it, because it isn’t going away.
She went to the pay phones outside in the hallway – ancient things, but still working, thankfully – and phoned back to the motel. She asked for the room where they’d been staying, and was put through, and there was only half a ring before the call connected and Riley Block said, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Bryn?’
‘You knew it’d be me.’
‘Of course I knew, I’m not an idiot. Where are you?’
‘At a truck stop off Route 70,’ Bryn said. ‘I ate an entire seventy-two ounce steak in five minutes. I think I set the new record.’
Riley was quiet for a moment. ‘Are you sure that was smart?’
‘Almost certainly wasn’t. But I couldn’t – I wasn’t sure I could control it, Riley. Around Patrick. Around Joe. And I can’t stand that. I needed to eat, and waiting around for a trail bar and OJ wasn’t going to cut it. You understand.’
‘You think it’s safer out there? You’re going to attract attention ordering those kinds of meals, you know that.’
‘I know,’ Bryn said. ‘But I had to have a little bit of time to myself. Just to test myself. To know – know if I can really control myself.’
‘I can see that. But you can’t be out there on your own; you’re going to get hurt.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m calling.’
‘We’re ready to leave here now,’ Riley said. ‘We’ll pick you up. Stay in plain sight in the restaurant, and we’ll find you. Have some pie. Live a little. It’s not like you have to worry about your weight. No matter what you eat, it’ll burn right off.’
‘Bright side to everything, then.’
‘Damn right,’ Riley said, and hung up.
Bryn went back to the restaurant, took her seat again, and ordered a piece of apple pie à la mode. Because Riley was right about the calories, this time her body was perfectly capable of enjoying the taste of a good pie. And it was good. Extraordinary. Or maybe that was just all her newly upgraded senses coming online.
She was tempted to order a second piece, but saw a large black van pulling into the parking lot. It flashed its lights twice, and she started to get out of her booth.
The waitress blocked her path. She was flanked by a tall, skinny man in a flannel shirt and jeans with a camera. ‘Just a sec, hon, we need to get your picture for the wall. This is Matt, he’s the manager here.’
Bryn was able to get her hand up just in time to block the flash, and shoved forward, knocking the waitress and the manager – who was still angling for a shot – out of her path as she headed for the door. ‘Wait!’ the manager yelled. ‘It’s part of the deal, we have to get a picture of anybody who eats the steak, wait—’
She didn’t. She was out the front doors, across the parking lot, and moving without pause into the black van, whose sliding door had opened for her. Bryn slammed it shut and said, ‘Drive,’ and Joe Fideli, behind the wheel, put the van in gear and accelerated smoothly away onto the access road.
There was a moment of silence, and Bryn looked around. Everyone – absolutely everyone, even Joe, in the rear-view mirror – was studying her.
‘Enjoy your meal?’ Manny asked.
Riley was watching her, too, and after a bare second, she gave an almost imperceptible nod.
Bryn sighed. ‘I have to tell you something. You’re not going to like it.’
She was certainly right about that last part.
Bryn chose her words carefully, because she knew what she said next would change everything, forever. And she also knew that Riley was using her as a stalking horse … and that whatever she said about her own condition, she couldn’t implicate Riley.
Not yet.
‘You know that the version of Returné I originally was given needed daily shots,’ she began. ‘Manny improved the formula and edited out some of the programming to get past the less fun aspects, like being a slave operated by remote control. But the best he could do was extend the amount of time needed between shots.’
Manny said, ‘You say that like someone else has done better.’
‘They have,’ she said. ‘Back there at Pharmadene. But it’s a little bit more complicated. You know they were engineering the drug originally for the military, and the military had a problem with the shot-a-day barrier, which – along with the chancy conversion rate – was why they canceled their support. What we didn’t know was that the project was still under way by a rogue department working for outside contractors, and that was what I stumbled into at that nursing home … a farm for advanced nanites, incubated in the unconscious bodies of people who didn’t have anyone to look out for them.’ She still had hideous flashbacks of that place – of the quiet horrors that went on there.
‘We know all that,’ Manny said. ‘What does this have to do with you running out for a fucking steak dinner?’
Riley turned her head toward Bryn, very slightly, but didn’t make eye contact. Didn’t give any kind of a signal.
‘When Annie and I went to Pharmadene for safety, we found out they’d made headway on the military priorities,’ Bryn said. ‘We found out … the hard way. I’m infected with the upgrades now. I don’t need shots anymore. What I do need – desperately – is high-protein meals. So you can’t just stash me in a motel with a granola bar from now on. Sorry, but it’s a – medical condition.’
There was a frozen, electric moment of silence.
‘Upgrades,’ Manny finally repeated. ‘That’s why you survived that fight at Pharmadene. But what do you mean, you don’t need shots?’
She took a deep breath, and took the plunge. ‘They’re self-replicating, the upgraded nanites. When they mature, they’ll reproduce, and that colony will need to migrate to a new host.’
Silence again, heavy this time, and finally, Pansy Taylor was the one who spoke up. ‘Okay, if nobody else wants to, I’ll say it. What you mean is that you’re infected, and you’re going to be infectious. And when you say you need protein, you mean you need meat.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Joe Fideli said. He sounded grim, and he looked it, too. ‘Fucking eggheads. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency engineered the same tech into their robot battle dog. Official press release says that it could power itself from available proteins, but nobody who looked it over was fooled. It eats corpses. Or, theoretically, live prey, if it can bring it down. That’s what you’re afraid of. You’re craving meat, because that’s how the nanites are powered. You’re afraid you’re going to … what, eat us?’
‘I—’ She couldn’t lie. ‘Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. But I needed food, and I couldn’t take the risk of staying with you. Manny, the incubation period is thirty days, so I think I’ve got until then to figure out how to stop this thing. I don’t want to spread it, I promise, I don’t. But I’m going to need your help.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you damn sure do.’
And he drew his gun and shot her in the head.
Bryn saw the flash, but she never heard the sound; it was far too late.
The world blacked out.
When it came back, it did so in a thick, red rush of pain … a cascading signal that swept through her brain and out through every part of her body. The machine, coming back online, and bringing with it twists of agony that curled through her like whip-cracks.
She was aware she was convulsing – and then it was over, and she sucked in a cold breath of air and tried to sit up. She failed, but only because someone was holding her down. There was a smell of burned hair and blood and gunpowder, and voices shouting.
Violence in the air. The van had stopped moving.
‘No,’ she said, or thought she did; she managed to fight the hands trying to hold her down. ‘No! Stop!’
It would have come as no shock to anybody in the van that she could return from a shot in the head, but still, it made them pause long enough for her to struggle up to a sitting position. ‘Don’t hurt him,’ she said. Somehow, the words came out right, which was a surprise; she hadn’t thought she’d be capable of stringing sense together, around the massive, wretched headache. The bullet must have gone straight through and not bounced, she guessed. That would have been a much bigger mess that would have taken time to heal, but even so, she’d have some explaining to do about the blood all over her brand-new clothes. ‘It’s not his fault. He’s responding to what he sees as a real threat.’
Manny had been tackled, she saw, and Liam was zip-tying his hands behind his back. Pansy had surrendered, but her face was tense and her eyes glittered with fury. Riley Block was holding a gun on her, and paying attention to everyone else in the van as well.
‘You know I’m not wrong,’ Manny said. ‘Bryn needs to be eliminated, and we need to get the hell away from her. Far away. Did you hear her? She’s infectious.’
‘Then so is her blood, Manny,’ Patrick said. He was holding her, Bryn realized; she was now propped against his shoulder, and his arm was around her, holding her up. ‘Everybody touched by blood spatter could be infected now. Including you.’
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Bryn said. She felt sick and weary now, and throbbing with pain that wasn’t entirely physical. ‘Can’t infect just anybody. Has to be one of the those already Revived, according to what I heard back at Pharmadene. Otherwise, normal human immune systems will just kill the nanites.’
It wasn’t like Manny to react quite that violently, but they were dealing now not with the rational, brilliant scientist, but the man who’d once been buried six feet under in a coffin – buried alive. The same man, but one at the mercy of all his paranoid fears and phobias … and Bryn had run headlong into that wall of razors. So had Patrick, because all his observation accomplished was to provoke panicked yelling and thrashing from Manny, until Liam put him in a compression hold and sent him unconscious.
‘That won’t last long,’ Liam said. ‘He needs a sedative.’
‘Drug him and I’ll kill you,’ Pansy said in a low, level voice. ‘Promise.’
‘Would you rather I continue to choke him out? Because I’m fairly sure that risks brain damage,’ Liam snapped, and Pansy, still smoldering, looked away. ‘Agent Block, the sedatives, please.’
Riley reached down for a backpack leaning nearby, and rummaged through it to find a small zipped case. In it was a syringe and several vials of drugs. She prepared a shot and handed it to him. Liam slid it home and injected Manny just as the other man started to come to, and Manny subsided into unconsciousness again with a soft sigh.
‘What about her?’ Liam asked Patrick. Patrick studied Pansy for a moment, then shook his head.
‘No. Pansy understands that Manny can be dangerous to himself as much as anybody else when he’s in this mood. She knows that this is for his own protection.’
‘Fuck you, McCallister. He’s your friend.’
‘He just shot my girlfriend in the head. I think I’m displaying some amazing restraint, Pansy, and you need to understand that we’re up against the wall now. No room for bullshit and personal problems, all right? Those bastards at Pharmadene bought out part of the FBI, which is generally not known for its ability to be bribed or coerced. So think, and stop blindly reacting. We need a safe haven, one where we can test what’s going on with Bryn and see what we’re really up against. And we need to get off the grid, because sure as hell’s on fire, my ex-wife Jane’s coming for us and she’s bringing an army with her.’ Patrick had never sounded so intense and certain, Bryn thought. And he was right. What they needed right now, more than anything else, was a safe place to plan.
Jane. She was their enemies’ frontline general – one who really loved getting her hands dirty. Bryn shuddered. The smiling, cheerfully pathological face of the woman – no, the monster – loomed in her mind at the best of times now; she’d endured terrible things at Jane’s hands, and the idea of ending up in that situation again was definitely not appealing.
That wasn’t helped by the fact that Jane was Patrick’s ex – something that, frankly, Bryn still couldn’t think about without a stabbing jolt of betrayal.
She pushed the issue of Jane aside. Moving as a team meant getting Manny on their side … or at least, Pansy. Pansy could manage Manny, if she had to do it.
Pansy glared back for a long, long moment, then said, ‘Manny’s never going to trust any of you again, you know that.’
Patrick shook his head. ‘Manny can stuff it for all I care, because once again, he just shot my girlfriend in the head. You see the problem? I can’t trust Manny either. So we’re even. But Manny’s safe houses are the only shot we’ve got at staying alive at this point. Even if you both walked away, they’d find you eventually. He can’t earn money if he can’t work, and he can’t work if these assholes are on his trail and the world’s falling apart. So you have to do this, Pansy, out of pure self-interest. We have to win. There’s no other option.’
She was silent for a long, long moment, and then she nodded and took a deep breath. ‘I may just have broken up with Manny, but I have to admit, you’ve got a point,’ she said. ‘Okay. Where are we, exactly? Geographically, not metaphorically.’
Joe Fideli – who Bryn realized was still in the driver’s seat, but turned to face them since he’d stopped the van – lowered a gun that he’d been keeping ready, and said, ‘Exactly? You want GPS coordinates?’
‘Highway and nearest town.’
He gave it to her, and she nodded and spewed back directions, which Bryn couldn’t follow, because her headache was literally blinding her. Hold on, she told herself, as her stomach roiled in protest. It’ll pass. It’ll pass. It didn’t feel like that. It felt like dying, not healing.
She missed the moments that agreements were reached and plans made, so the next thing she was directly aware of was the van whipping a U-turn and speeding back the way they’d come, which did not seem like so much progress to her, but she was willing to give up control to the powers that be at the moment, and just rest. Bullet in the head still takesit out of me, she thought, and was briefly, painfully amused. God, I need a shower. I reek of death. Again.
Oddly enough, though, she didn’t feel hungry. Not yet. So maybe the seventy-two ounce steak had actually done some good.
They drove for what seemed like hours – steady, fast speed, curves that must have been freeway changes. By the time Bryn’s lingering headache had vanished, Joe Fideli was pulling the van onto an off-ramp and slowing down. ‘Almost there,’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen any pursuit. I think we’re good so far.’
‘Either that, or they’re just surveilling us and waiting for us to go to ground,’ Patrick said. ‘Easier and neater to take us out once we’re in an area that can be controlled. So keep your eyes open, Joe.’
‘Don’t I always?’ For normally cheerful Joe, that was positively grumpy. ‘Keep your drawers on. Ten minutes.’
It was a long, tense ten minutes; none of them believed they were going to make it, Bryn realized, and so it was an immense relief when the van slowed and stopped. ‘Pansy, we’re at a gate,’ Joe said. ‘Looks like a pretty serious gate, actually.’
‘That’s my cue,’ she said, and climbed over them to the sliding door. She slammed it shut behind her and about fifteen seconds later, the van moved on. The daylight outside the tinted windows darkened to shadow, and then went away completely as the angle of the van’s progress changed to a downward slope. It took another two minutes for Joe to pull it to a halt, and then Pansy pulled the van’s door open from outside and gave them a tight, wary smile.
‘Welcome to the Batcave,’ she said.
She wasn’t kidding.
CHAPTER TWO
The Batcave – Bryn presumed that wasn’t the actual name of the place, but she couldn’t be too certain of it – looked impressive enough just from the parking area. It was big enough to park several eighteen-wheelers in a pinch, with high ceilings, and used an impressive amount of steel and concrete. There were major industrial buildings that couldn’t boast this fine an underground parking structure.
It had three exits she identified automatically … up the ramp, of course, but the ramp was blocked by a take-no-prisoners steel gate that wouldn’t have been out of place guarding the CIA headquarters in Langley. A red sign announced there was an exit at the back, but it was almost certainly locked, too, at least biometrically. She wouldn’t expect anything less from Manny Glickman. The man regularly elevated paranoia to an art form.
The third way out was the elevator, which Pansy had already summoned with the pressure of her hand on a palm scanner. It was a big industrial affair that they could have driven into in a pinch, and it held all of them without crowding. Patrick had the unconscious Manny over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
Bryn expected the elevator to go up, but instead, it went down. Down for at least a minute. She sent Pansy a look, and Pansy nodded to reassure her. ‘This place was a Cold War missile base. One of the few Titan bases they ever built – only about a dozen in the whole country. Manny got it in a sweetheart deal the second it went up for public auction about ten years ago, and he spent years building it out. One of the most secure spots in the country, until you want to go to war against another Titan base.’
‘I assume they took the missiles.’
‘Sadly true,’ she said. ‘But there’s a half mile of tunnels, and more than forty thousand feet of storage and living space. This is where the serious work gets done around here. And I think we’re serious now, right? Plus, if you need a secure base of operations, there isn’t a better spot. We have hardened communications, a deepwater well system, our own generators, protected airflow, and enough food, drinks, and entertainment stocked to weather a nuclear winter.’
The elevator lurched to a stop, and as the doors opened, Pansy gave them a warmer smile and led the way out. ‘Like I said … welcome to the Batcave. The guest rooms aren’t fancy, but we at least have plenty of them. Kitchen and main housing is here in the center. Communications room doubles as the entertainment room, because what’s the apocalypse without Xbox? Feel free to explore – oh, wait. Before you do, let me enter your data in the computer. Everything’s security controlled.’
They followed her to a small anteroom, which required another palm scan from Pansy to open; it had thick bullet-resistant windows and a view into hallways on two sides, with a second door at the other end. The curved console in it featured a state-of-the-art monitor and keyboard, and various equipment whose purpose wasn’t immediately obvious. Pansy slid into the operator’s seat, and fired up the computer.
It took a surprisingly small time to process each of them through the security system – a palm scan, an ocular scan, and reading a short phrase into a microphone. Pansy was efficient and calm about it, though she was obviously bone-tired; she handed them each ID cards with clips when the process was done. ‘We’ve got extra clothing, too,’ she said, no doubt because Bryn’s were messily ruined. ‘There’s a wardrobe room on Level Two. Pretty much like a store, sorted by men’s, women’s, and children’s wear, into sizes. Plain stuff, but it ought to work. Raid it as you need it.’
She took a pair of wire cutters out of a drawer and snapped the plastic zip-ties securing Manny where he’d been deposited on a plastic chair, and then walked to the other door. Another palm scan to open it. ‘This way to the mansion,’ she said. ‘Oh, and wear your ID cards at all times. You can open the doors with palm scans or eye scans, but you need the ID card on you or the facility goes into lockdown. You don’t want to be in the shower when that happens, by the way. I speak from experience. Um … Patrick, could you …?’ She gestured to Manny, and Patrick picked him up and carried him through the door. Bryn followed … and realized that Pansy had been dead-on descriptive in calling this the mansion.
Either Manny or Pansy, or both, had taken a forbidding room and turned it into a beautiful, soaring living space … the floors were treated, subtly colored concrete, covered with expensive rugs and groupings of lush sofas and chairs. It was modern but comfortable, and vast impressionist and abstract canvases – almost certainly all real, and all insanely expensive – were mounted on the walls. The plasma screen TV was a vast size, but it looked small in the space, comparatively.
And they had books. Lots of books, with shelves that stretched up two stories – a library with its own system of movable wooden ladders.
‘Wow,’ Riley said. ‘I guess being a mad scientist for hire pays pretty well. Because I guarantee you he didn’t earn this working at the FBI lab all those years.’
Pansy gave her a cool, unreadable look, and said, ‘Thanks, Patrick, you can put him down here on the couch. Maybe you should all go get yourselves some rooms, showers, whatever. Just take the hallways going either right or left. Guest rooms have signs. You can write your names on the boards on the doors.’
‘Pansy—’ Bryn wanted to hug her, but she knew it wasn’t the time, and besides, she felt sticky and filthy. ‘Thank you. Thank you for doing this for us.’
‘You’re probably worth the risk,’ Pansy said, and gave her a fleeting wink. ‘Manny’s going to be a grumpy, angry bear, and I mean grizzly angry, but he’ll come around eventually. Just – let me handle it. Oh, and guys? Weapons stay here in this room, with us. All of them. For our safety.’
They all exchanged looks, especially Joe and Patrick; they didn’t like disarming, but there was no threat here, especially nothing they could shoot their way out of. So with a shrug, Joe put down his converted AR-15, unholstered his handgun, and removed a couple of combat knives. Patrick added to the pile. Each of them did in turn. When the last person disarmed, Pansy nodded her thanks. ‘You’ll get it all back,’ she promised. ‘We have an armory on Level Two. It takes a special code, which Manny and I have. Once he’s sure you’re all okay, he’ll probably share it with you, but it’s not for me to do. I’ve done enough already. Oh, I almost forgot, one more thing. Arm, Bryn. You too, Riley.’
She produced two syringes. Riley frowned and shook her head. ‘We don’t need that. The upgrade means no daily shots.’
‘I know,’ Pansy said. ‘The shot I gave you earlier canceled out the tracking frequencies for your nanites, but these will deactivate the tracking functionality altogether. Otherwise, they’ll be colonizing bones and making you a living GPS, and we can’t keep giving you the neutralizer shots. So be quiet and take your medicine, ladies.’
Bryn couldn’t object, and neither did Riley; they knew the risks, and also knew how big a gift they’d been given.
Although Manny might end up stuffing them back in the van and out the gate just as quickly. She supposed that she ought to get a shower, new clothes, and as much rest as possible before he woke up, so after the burn of the shot that Pansy administered had subsided, she joined Patrick as he left the main living area and took the door into the hallway to the right. ‘I can’t quite believe this,’ Bryn said, and ran her fingers over the smooth, cool concrete of the walls as they walked. ‘How the hell does he afford all this?’
‘You really want to know?’ Patrick asked.
‘Sure.’
‘He holds the patent on at least three major lifestyle drugs developed in the past fifteen years, and he does independent consulting work for dozens of research labs – that’s his clean income. He gets much more from sources that aren’t quite as … aboveboard. Insanely rich people wanting a special drug developed for their own use, for instance – a safe, special, legal high. Private forensic work for corporations that don’t necessarily want to involve law enforcement. That sort of thing. He holds a lot of secrets, Manny does, and all that just feeds his native paranoid tendencies. Add to that a certain agoraphobia, and … you end up here, in a missile bunker.’
‘But one with great amenities.’
‘Exactly.’ He smiled, but it was weary and small, and she took his hand in hers. ‘Ah. I guess this is one of the guest rooms.’
It was labeled that way, with a simple black nameplate, and a write-on/wipe-off board below that. Bryn wrote her name on the board and opened the door. She was expecting the basics – a plain bed, maybe a desk, a simple shower. But the room was lushly carpeted, with a broad king-sized bed, nightstand, work desk, art … and a modern full-sized bath. Suddenly, Bryn craved every single bit of that with an intensity that made her shake.
She looked wordlessly at Patrick, and he read it in her. He leaned in and kissed her gently. ‘Go catch a shower and rest,’ he said. ‘We can talk later.’
What he wasn’t saying was that they needed to talk later, but she understood. It didn’t matter just now. She was far too sore, too exhausted, too dirty to care, and she closed and thumb-locked the door, stripped off her bloody clothes down to the skin, and was in the shower and shampooing her hair before she remembered she hadn’t thought to go to the Wardrobe Room. Damn.
That, she decided, was a problem she’d face later. Half an hour of hot water later, she toweled her hair dry and crawled naked between the sheets, and was asleep within seconds of hitting the dimmer switch by the bed.
She probably could have slept the clock round, but six hours later, a doorbell she didn’t know she had rang a soft chime, and the room’s lights automatically brightened themselves to a soft shimmer, enough to let her make her way to the door. She remembered she was naked about two seconds before opening it, and hunted in the closet to find – yes! – a fluffy white bathrobe that enveloped her in sandalwood-scented luxury.
She found Liam standing on the other side of the door when she opened it. He was holding a set of hangers, and bowed slightly as he handed them over. ‘I took the liberty,’ he said. ‘Patrick thought you might need something, considering how damaged your clothing was. He didn’t think you had the energy to go shopping.’
Liam had also freshened up; the jeans and checked shirt he wore weren’t his usual dapper style, but he still looked starched, somehow. She took the clothes and smiled back at him. ‘Thanks, Liam. Um … I didn’t have time to ask, but … are the dogs okay …?’ Because one thing the two of them shared was a love of dogs. His were the various hounds that lived at the McCallister estate; hers was a bulldog that had gotten caught up in the recent chaos. And she’d missed him, badly.
‘I made sure we recovered them outside of Pharmadene, including Mr French,’ he said. ‘I had the opportunity to board them before we came for you. I’m afraid anything we left in the estate is probably going to be seized, at best, and I was afraid to leave the dogs to their tender mercies.’
It hurt her to think of her adorable bulldog Mr French in some boarding cage, but she couldn’t do anything for him just now – and besides, knowing Liam, it would be the cushiest pet spa of all, and Mr French wouldn’t want for a thing. Right now, she needed her dog’s unquestioning love more than he needed hers.
Her world had narrowed down into the single goal of kill or be killed, and her sweet pet didn’t have any place in that. And she wasn’t cruel enough to pretend he did.
Even if she wanted to.
‘May I ask you something?’ he said, and she blinked and focused back on Liam. ‘Your … new biological status. How dangerous are you, Bryn? Really?’
‘Not dangerous to you or Patrick,’ she said. ‘Maybe a little, to my sister, because she’s already got the nanites. These upgrades can’t infect regular people, only those brought back with Returné.’
His smile didn’t waver as he said, ‘You wouldn’t be lying to me about that, would you?’
‘I wouldn’t, Liam.’
‘I’d fully understand if you felt the need,’ he said. ‘But it would be a rather massive mistake to give in to the temptation.’
She nodded, just a little, and didn’t break eye contact. ‘You’d kill to protect him,’ she said. ‘I know that.’
‘Specifically, I would kill you to protect him,’ Liam said. ‘If you posed a clear and present danger. But I will take your word for it that you don’t.’ The unspoken part of that was for now, and Bryn clearly understood it, and acknowledged it. ‘Dinner is being served. I thought you might be hungry.’
She was, she realized. Very. Which was upsetting and worrisome. Bryn clutched the clothes to her chest, closed the door and dressed very quickly; it all fit, more or less, and as she came out of the room she saw her sister waiting in the hallway.
Annie looked pale and drawn, and when she saw Bryn, her eyes filled with tears. She came over, and they hugged silently for a long, long moment. ‘I was so worried about you,’ Annie whispered. ‘God, Bryn. You okay?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ Bryn said, and patted Annie’s back. ‘Not like we haven’t been through worse, right?’
‘That is way too right to be funny anymore. Oh God, I guess we’re going to have to call the fam pretty soon and lie to them, aren’t we? Just so they don’t freak out and do something stupid like call the cops and file missing persons on us.’
That was an excellent point, and Bryn was a little startled that she hadn’t thought of it. ‘God, you’re right. We had to ditch the cell phones, after all. They might think we’ve been—’
‘Abducted,’ Annie said, and burst into strange, borderline-hysterical laughter. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’
The laughter was infectious, and Bryn felt it bubbling its way up out of her too – not humor, exactly, but a black kind of amusement liberally mixed with despair. She clung to Annie, and Annie held on to her, and they laughed it out until they finally got enough breath to separate.
Annie wiped her eyes and said, ‘I guess we really should eat something, right?’
‘I hope they have steak,’ Bryn said. ‘I really hope they have steak.’
In fact, they did. Evidently, Riley and Pansy had put their heads together, and dinner was mostly available self-serve in pots and pans … but there were steaks, big ones, and a small stack of them were left almost raw. When Bryn took a plate, Riley – who looked rested and fresh, too – pointed her toward the meat. ‘Specially made,’ she said. ‘I think you’ll find it’s what you need. It helped me a lot.’
‘You already ate?’
‘Had to,’ Riley said. That was a short answer, but it conveyed a lot, especially when she raised her eyebrows just a bit. ‘Pansy was kind enough to fix something.’
That must have been quite the culinary conversation, Bryn thought. ‘Is Manny awake?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Liam said, where he was spooning broccoli onto his plate beside a chicken breast. ‘Mr Glickman woke very loudly. He is now barricaded in his room and says he will not come out until you and Riley vacate the premises and he has a chance to decontaminate the rooms.’
