Bloodshot (40 page)

I was back at Adrian’s side in a flash. He was busy acting like a tiger around the edges of the desk. I hissed into Adrian’s ear, “Can you hold it?”

“Alone? Not for long.”

“I don’t need long,” I said and I gave the desk’s underside a shove that concussed at least two skulls on the other side. We didn’t have the advantage of numbers, but the defensive position was ours and two were far more maneuverable than however many were on the other side.

I was bleeding. Not bad. It was slowing to a trickle even as I trickled it all over Berber carpeting. Had to ignore it. Had to keep pushing. We were in deep shit. Ian and Cal might be in deep shit. First things first.

Out.

And that meant using whatever was at hand, up to and including whatever the dead guys behind us were toting. I rummaged through their clothes, pulled off two guns, stepped back, and began firing two-fisted badass-style—which chased a few of the more adventuresome bastards away from the corners.

One corpse left, the farthest one. By the stairwell.

He was carrying bulky loot; I could see it under his zipped-up sweater. And when I unzipped it with a one-handed rip, I saw that he was wearing a bandolier loaded with grenades.

I have no doubt that a wide, manic smile spread across my pretty little face.

I unbuckled the bandolier because the canvas was hard to tear and anyway, I wanted to bring the whole bunch, not just one or two goodies for chucking. I returned to Adrian’s side.

His eyes bugged out when he saw the grenades. Then he made a smile just like the one I’d made when I first saw them. “On the count of three, okay?” I said, and I jutted my head toward the stairs.

He got it. He nodded.

And on the count of three we each grabbed a leg of the rocking, battered desk which was increasingly full of holes … and we withdrew with it. It scrabbled across the carpet with a nasty wail and whine, bumping unevenly behind us as we retreated to the stairwell.

When we were as close to the stairwell as we could reasonably get without dropping the desk and running, we held them off a few seconds longer while he and I each took a fistful of boom and bit the pins, pulling them out with our teeth.

Simultaneously we pitched them around the desk. I gave it a final shove, causing a tangle and a stumble on the other side—and then a whole lot of panic followed it once our small, bumpy offerings had been discovered.

Together we turned and ran.

The whole hallway went up behind us like a lode-bearing boss in a video game. Fire curled around the desk, which I saw out of the corner of my eye as I ran. The desk split into gold-veined fragments that went in every direction; the last I saw of it, huge slivers were wedged into the walls and up in the ceiling.

But I didn’t dwell on it. I had Adrian in front of me and I pushed him—because I could run faster than he could, even with a couple of holes in me, though the stress and effort were starting to drag me down. I’d lost blood. That’s never helpful.

Up we went anyway. We didn’t have a choice. People were coming up the stairwell below us, shouting and dodging and brandishing weapons. They were still a couple of floors down, but I didn’t like it and neither did Adrian.

He reached around my arm and swiped another grenade out of
the bandolier, then pulled the pin and aimed down. A fortuitous bounce and a good throw sent the thing down a full floor and some change. When it went off I heard small bits of metal whistling in every direction.

Somewhere beneath us a fire had started. I suspected the fourth floor. I don’t know what they’d been stashing up there or what the Men in Black had been toting, but something smelled like chemicals and flame when the first grenades went off—and I didn’t think it was just the expected shrapnel.

We reached the hole we’d cut above the stairs and boosted each other up, over, and inside it without even checking to make sure it was free and clear. If it wasn’t, we were screwed anyway—so we went for it and hoped for the best.

The shaft was filling with smoke. I didn’t want to say anything or point it out as we fled on hands and knees in the dark, but I was pretty sure that the building was actually aflame. I wondered why I hadn’t heard any sprinkler systems right around the time I heard the fire alarm finally go off. Useless device. If their building was so hideously unprepared for invasion, firefights, and subsequent collateral damage, then it damn well deserved to burn to the ground.

Adrian coughed and my eyes were watering, but the roof was blessedly close and the fresh air tasted great. No one was up there waiting for us, which was a relief, but the guys who’d broken into 443 through the window had left their rappelling gear and a pair of very convenient ropes still hanging over the side.

We pulled them up slowly, because we didn’t need the attention from the guys who were milling about on the ground, speaking into cell phones and waving new support troops into position. They were still concentrating on that window. As if we were still hanging out in that room or something.

Eventually we were able to let ourselves down quietly on the far side of the building, where it almost smashed right up against
another building in a very narrow alley. We dropped down into something wet and disgusting, but we had hit street level in almost perfect darkness and it was only a short, side-cramping run back to the car.

I looked over my shoulder to see the fire spread and gnaw hungrily, and I would’ve smiled if I hadn’t suddenly been so afraid.

We’d made it out, yes. But I was afraid for myself and Adrian; I was afraid for Ian and even Cal, a little bit, insomuch as Cal looked after Ian and that made him important whether I liked it or not. And I was afraid for a basement full of monsters like me, imprisoned and tortured, cut and sliced and prodded—wherever they were, if they were still alive or if they hadn’t been alive in years. I watched the fire and I wanted it to take everything—not just the paper goods and the horrible records, but everything. The project, the building. The crimes—mine and theirs. I wanted it all to go up in smoke.

I let Adrian drive back to the hotel.

I was shaking too badly to do it myself; I was too wound up and frenetic, and too flustered and wounded to be any use—not right then. He was driving fast and hard, but not running into anybody and not causing any wrecks in his wake, which was better than I would’ve done. For a flash I had a small worry about running the red lights, and about getting caught on one of those stupid traffic cameras, but I forgot it almost as soon as I thought of it.

We had bigger problems. Worse problems. Real problems.

Behind us, the Office of Experimental Bioengineering Research burned itself to ashes, and as we fled the scene fire trucks and cop cars barreled toward it.

N
ot for a minute did I believe we’d burned the whole building down. They’d catch it before it got that far, in a big old stone place like that. Best I could hope for, it’d take the whole office and maybe the whole hall, leaving it a graveyard of charcoal and bones.

I said out loud, “There must be backups.”

“Of what?” Adrian asked through tight lips. Never taking his eyes off the road. Considering his path, and snapping the Malibu’s wheel around to take us a new way, closer and closer to the hotel. Christ Almighty, I probably could’ve run faster.

“Backups of the paper trail. Nobody …” My mind wandered briefly. I led it back. “Nobody just
files
things anymore. It’s all scanned and stored on disks. Or on someone’s computer, somewhere. Or a thumb drive,” I rambled on.

“Bruner probably has it.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But I bet he doesn’t have
all
of it.” Then I said, right as we pulled around to the hotel’s valet parking, “I’m going to kill that motherfucker, and I’m going to enjoy it.”

We leaped out of the car, and Adrian tossed the keys to the nearest uniformed dude. As we started to run he said, “I thought I had dibs.”

“Fuck your dibs,” I said, and I bypassed the elevator altogether, heading instead for the stairs. If Adrian wanted to wait he was welcome to, but I was going to fly like an eagle without him.

The emergency exit door banged shut behind me and I didn’t hear Adrian follow; but then again, I wasn’t listening for him. I was concentrating on the stairs, two or three at a time, pumping for all I was worth and simultaneously wishing I had a beverage to refresh my strength … and forgetting I had one. It was just as well. There wasn’t time. There was only the unending staircase, crooking ever-upward.

I burst onto the floor where our suites were conjoined, and before I rounded the corner I knew something was wrong. Before I’d staggered, panting, upon the scene I could smell it—a wet mess of metal and plasma. Before I’d opened the door—and before I’d even seen that it’d been forced—I knew that something was horribly, horribly incorrect, and that nothing was going to be the same, ever again.

Sometimes I overreact.

This was not one of those times.

Without even thinking to draw my gun (just as well, since it was empty and back at the office), I shoved myself against the door and forced it inward, flapping with a crash against the closet door and shattering the mirror there.

My entrance startled two men who were busying themselves by going through Ian and Cal’s things. They jerked to attention at
the sight of me, but they didn’t stay that way long. I flung myself at them, faster than they could’ve processed—and I broke one’s neck before he had time to lift the Taser he’d been holding in his free hand. I tasted the crackle of electricity and smelled the sizzling ozone as the thing deployed, even as he died. It fired straight into the wall and the two little prongs stuck, vibrating and shining, humming and harming nothing.

The second guy—Christ, both of them dressed like Trevor, only with a little more precision—had the presence of mind to duck out of my way and break for the door, but I caught him by the feet and brought him down like an antelope. I was so outraged by his mere existence that it was all I could do not to tear off his arms and beat him with them. I settled for stomping on his throat and taking his gun—a very nice Glock that reminded me of mine back home in Seattle.

This reminded me in turn of Domino and Pepper and the storehouse, and how I didn’t know if any of that was okay, due entirely to asswipes like the ones in that room, dead now, both of them, and me running from the room without knowing where to go next.

Cal hadn’t been there. Ian hadn’t been there.

But there’d been blood before I arrived. Plenty of blood. I didn’t know whose; I hadn’t even had the clarity of thought to notice if it was vampire or mortal blood, and I sure as hell didn’t have the cognitive felicity to consider it as I fled next door. Where else could I check but my own room? Where else might either of them have escaped to?

It didn’t make perfect sense and I knew it, but it was all I could think of so I burst inside, where the lock had also been forced. Brutally, I had to gather, since it fell away under my shoulder as easily as a doggy door.

The room had been trashed with prejudice. All available
drawers had been ripped off their rails and emptied onto the floor; the bed had been unmade and the space beneath it violated. Slash marks defaced the cushions of the settee and the love seat, on the off chance I’d been hiding anything good inside them, I supposed.

I knew Adrian’s footsteps, even running. I’d learned the weight of him and the rhythm of his pace. He was coming up fast.

“Raylene!” he gasped, stopping when he saw me standing in the middle of the destroyed room.

I don’t know what kind of look I gave him, but it was enough to send him back out and around the corner. I heard him checking in at Ian and Cal’s room, seeing the carnage, making some assumptions, and exiting—shutting the door behind him, which was something I hadn’t thought to do.

By the time he’d rejoined me, I’d found Cal.

Cal was sprawled out on his face between my bed and the window, half covered by a curtain that had been brought down in what must have been a struggle. I could tell by the way his head was bent, and by the way his arms and legs were all uncomfortably akimbo, never mind the pool of blood that spread beneath him.

I could tell he was dead.

I crouched down beside him and moved his face so I could see it, but it told me nothing. There was no revelation waiting in his eyes, or a clue to what had happened clutched in his fist. He was just … gone. That was all.

“Cal?” Adrian asked. It sounded like a guess, and I thought it was a stupid thing to say except that he was still in the doorway, and could only see Cal’s feet.

So I said, “Yeah. It’s him.”

“Shit,” he said, but I hardly heard it for the sound of men tramping up the stairs, clicking their walkie-talkie buttons and organizing a response to whatever danger the building’s security had
diagnosed. Or maybe they were more Trevors, party to whoever had done this.

Either way, Adrian was right when he took my arm and said, “We have to get out of here.”

“No,” I said reflexively. “We have to find Ian.”

“Ian isn’t here,” Adrian pointed out, so infuriatingly reasonable. “So we have to go somewhere
else
. This is about to get sticky. Come on,” he urged me again, being gentle, almost. But firm.

“Where would he go?” I asked, and I hated myself for how much it sounded like crying.

“We’ll figure it out on the way.”

“Do you think they took him?”

“No,” he said, I assume in order to humor me.

I settled for it. Hell, I clung to it. And I clung to Adrian’s hand as he shoved open the sliding balcony door and pushed me outside, shutting the thing behind us both and beginning the long, cold crawl down over the edge.

W
e were halfway down when I caught a whiff … but that’s the wrong word. Not a “whiff” exactly—it was more like a sweeping impression, some sense that I was going the wrong way and that I was required elsewhere. It was the impression of tugging, not as subtle as a psychic whisper, and not quite as hard as a punch in the gut.