Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven (17 page)

I found I didn’t much care as I fell to my knees and heaved, my stomach draining its contents and making me wonder what I had done to so wrong it for the second morning in a row. I lay there stretched out next to the bowl once I was done, and I heard the door to the bedroom open. A moment later there was a knock at the doorframe.

“Everything all right in here?” Breandan’s voice came around the frame from the bedroom.

“No,” I croaked. “I just had a digestive hemorrhage that cost me everything I was going to eat for the next month.”

“That’s a lovely image,” Breandan said, poking his head around the doorframe to see me lying on the tile. “Can I get you some tea?”

“God, no.” I cradled my head. “Two days in a row of this, and I haven’t even been drinking.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s wrong, are you in the family way?” He looked down at me sympathetically.

“In the family way?” I looked at him in pity. “What is this, the eighteenth century? No, I’m not preg …” My voice trailed off as a tingle crept over my scalp. “No. It’s not possible.”

He raised an eyebrow at me and leaned against the wall. “I assure you, that from a purely physiological standpoint, it is entirely possible for women to become pregnant. I’m told it’s how we propagate the species, in fact.”

I rubbed the back of my hand against my forehead and found it drenched with sweat. “Why am I not surprised you wouldn’t know firsthand?”

“Well, that was a pointed little dig, now wasn’t it?” Breandan said with a little smirk, but his voice was hollow, his face ashen. “You sure I can’t fetch you some tea while you try and decide whether you’ve been fertilized or not?”

“I can’t see how I could—” I stopped and rolled back to my knees to heave again. When I finished, I spit the last foul taste out of my mouth. “How can this be?”

“I’m not describing it for you if you don’t already know. Seems like that’d cross a line, since I just met you and all—notwithstanding the fact that you did sleep in my bed last night.”

“Thanks,” I said, and used a bit of paper to wipe my mouth. “Okay, so, yes, it’s possible. I just don’t think it’s probable, let’s put it that way. We were …” I looked at him with slight embarrassment, “ … safe.”

“Oh, I’m certain you were,” he said with a formal nod, “because it never, ever happens that being safe could go wrong. In fact, they don’t even have a word for that circumstance because it never, ever happens.” He pretended to have a thought dawn on him. “Oh, wait, yes they do—it’s called an accident. But surely it doesn’t happen often … oh, wait, yes it does. All the bloody time, in case you missed the courses where they put you in a room with a teacher who looks like they haven’t ever done the business they’re telling you about. It happens all the bloody time.”

“Oddly enough, I did miss those classes,” I said, staring up at him from the bathroom floor.

“Well, that would explain how this might happen, then.”

“What, you’re going to sit here and berate a pregnant lady?” I asked, leaning my head against the wall.

“It’s hardly a foregone conclusion,” he said with a shrug. “Perhaps you’re just acclimating after travel. Maybe you caught a bug on your flight. Or your body is reacting poorly to stress. Whatever the case, I wouldn’t get all in an uproar about it quite yet.” He smiled brightly. “You sure you don’t want that tea? I’m having some.”

“What is it with you Brits and your obsession with tea?” I asked, waving him off. “No thanks. And I never get sick. Never. Not since I manifested. Whatever this is, it’s something else entirely.”

“If you say so.” He pushed off the wall and I could hear his footsteps heading out the bedroom door and into the small kitchen as I stared at the white porcelain of the bathtub’s side. “I can recall being sicker than shite a few times since manifesting,” his voice carried as I heard him clanging in the kitchen. “Of course, those might have more to do with the number of pints I had the night before than they did with any sort of sickness I might have picked up. Except this one time—”

There was a sudden bang and the sound of a door being kicked off its hinges in the main room. I sat bolt upright, almost hitting my head on the edge of the tub.

“What the—” I heard Breandan say, and then his words were cut off by the sound of suppressed gunfire. It doesn’t sound like it does in the movies; it’s still incredibly loud. Behind it I could hear thumping of bullets hitting wood, impacting on what I suspected were the cabinets in the kitchen.

I was moving on muscle memory alone, on my feet and out the door, my nausea put aside as easily as a thought. I could feel the adrenaline flowing, any memory of what I’d been talking about with Breandan only a moment earlier completely thrust out of my mind. As I cleared the door to the bathroom I saw a man in full tactical gear—vest, hood, all black—linger with his back to the door of the bedroom. He gave me such a choice view of his back, I couldn’t help but abuse it.

I hit him in the kidney with a hard punch and he screamed. I hung my left arm around his neck and dragged him behind the doorframe for cover as bullets hissed past me. On television, suppressed gunfire sounds whisper quiet. It’s not. The sound of the bullets whipping out of the barrel and shattering the thin walls was still quieter than the bark of the shots ringing out, but they were only quieted a bit, not silent.

The man I had in my grasp decided to fight, and with more of his comrades in the next room, I had no time to deal with the possibility he could rise up and catch me from behind while I went to stop his friends. I broke his neck cleanly the way Glen Parks had taught me to, killing my second human being in less than twenty-four hours. I felt the rough assurance from inside that I was doing the right thing, the smart thing, but a small voice within cried at the thought that I was even in this position.

I pulled his submachine gun off the strap, gripping it in my hands as the first of his fellows burst through the bedroom door. I was ready and ripped off a clean three-shot burst that caught him in the chest. It staggered him and I followed it with another that caught him in the black-hooded face, splattering the wall with blood and grey matter. He slumped and fell as another submachine gun peeked around the doorframe and fired blind above me, showering me with plaster dust where I was hiding, covered over by the body of the man whose neck I had broken. I tried to keep my eyes open, the gun trained on the door’s aperture, waiting for the next one to appear.

He did, barely showing his head around the frame, and I peppered him with a three-shot burst that would have made Parks proud. It was flawless, impossible save for the fact that I was in close proximity and possessed of a steely calm brought about by hundreds of hours of training. A puffed cloud of red turned the air a subtly different color for a brief second before the body pitched forward. I would have let out a sigh but I had no idea how many more of them there would be.

I heard movement behind the doorframe and I saw a flash of black shadow against the bright of the kitchen lights. There was a burst of gunfire and I felt heavy impacts to the body that was lying atop me. Six bullets hit his tactical vest, thumping his corpse into me, hard, like miniature earthquakes jerking his body and bruising me with each hit. I lost my breath from the impacts, but I could tell from the force of them that none of them had penetrated through to me.

I flung the corpse toward the door, not really aiming so much as trying to buy a moment’s time; if the shooter had any more uninterrupted seconds to take aim, he’d surely be able to hit me in the head, and I was beginning to think I might have more than just myself to be worrying about. The corpse flew forward, reminding me of a time when I’d done something similar to a table in my living room on the day I first left my house. I heard the wet smack of it hitting the doorframe and collapsing as I ripped off two quick three-shot bursts. I rocked my body sideways and rolled to a crouch, waiting just inside the door to see what came my way. I edged closer to the frame on the chance he’d reach a barrel inside. It would only take another moment and I’d be close enough to grab a gun if it came through the door.

Unfortunately, I was still a step away when it happened. I saw the barrel poke in, and I looked up it as it pointed down on a perfect arc toward my head. My meta-enhanced eyes allowed me to see the subtle rifling at the closest end of the barrel, and even though I jerked my weapon up, I knew I wouldn’t make it before a burst of gunfire put my lights out for good. The smell of blood, of bile, of my own recently re-experienced vomit hung in my nose along with the heavy odor of the gunpowder discharge. That sharp, familiar aroma of a hundred days on the range was unmistakable, and more pungent than my recent digestive explosions. I looked down the dark barrel and waited for the flash that would end it, everything—and I felt a moment’s pity for the fact that I had left so damned much undone.

There was a sound of a soft click, then another, as the hand that held the gun pulled the trigger again and again to no effect.

“Well, now,” came an Irish voice from outside the door, “looks like you’re having a spot of bad luck.” The sound of something hard hitting flesh, and then a body hitting the wall was followed by the submachine gun that had been pointed at my face falling to the ground in front of me with a clatter. “You in there?” Breandan’s voice came around the corner.

“Yeah,” I said, my every muscle tense as I leaned against the wall, still clutching the gun to my chest, the stock hard against my shoulder. “You all right?”

“Me?” Breandan’s voice came back. “I’m quite fine. Made it to the floor before they destroyed my kitchen with a flurry of bullets. I’m not really sure I need that tea anymore, though, as I’m now quite awake.” He peeked his head through the door and looked at me. “You know, if you hadn’t distracted them and started tearing them up one by one, I’m quite sure they were planning to murder me.”

I sighed, ragged breaths coming more quickly than I would have liked. “Same here. That last one, the weapon jamming—”

“Bad luck,” Breandan said with a smile. “Doubt I could have pulled that off with all of them, but when it was down to one, it seemed easy enough to change his odds.” He extended a hand toward me. “Do you think there are more outside?”

I looked at the bloody mess on the floor of his bedroom, extending out into the main room as I took his hand and let him help me up. I tore it away from him after a moment and saw the surprised look in his eyes. “Sorry,” I said, “bad touch, remember?” I looked at the bodies piled around me. “You think these are Omega thugs?”

He looked them over. “Omega? Maybe. I’ve heard they have something called ‘sweep teams’ for their dirty work. Why?” He eyed me. “You piss ’em off?”

“Yeah, I took the mickey out of them,” I said, leaning over the nearest dead body, one of the ones who had caught a few bullets to the head. I pulled the mask off of him and looked into a destroyed face. “I ran into an Omega sweep team once; they had tattoos on their chests.”

He shrugged as he nudged at the open collar of one of the bodies. “Don’t see an obvious one on this bloke. You could ask the last one who he’s with.” He pointed to the fellow whose gun had jammed on him when he tried to shoot me. I could see him, lying against the wall just outside the bedroom door, his black tactical gear a stark contrast against the dirty white walls of the flat. “I think I left him in a hurting way, but still lively.”

I walked through the door into the main room to find the door to the outside hall broken open, hanging off the hinges. I glanced back at Breandan, who shrugged. “Common sight in this building, I’m afraid. Neighbors won’t give it a second look.”

I turned back to the man lying unmoving against the wall, his head slumped over. I pulled his mask off and found his eyes closed, face slack. He’d had a pistol on his belt, but I could see Breandan had removed it when he’d knocked the man unconscious, and I pulled the tactical vest from him and slipped it over my own chest. Couldn’t be too careful when people were shooting at you, after all. I slapped him lightly in the face (lightly for me—it still rocked his head back) and his eyes flew open with a shock. “Hi,” I said in a sweet voice tempered by irritation. I was still holding the submachine gun that I’d pulled from the first man I’d killed, and with the tactical vest I’d taken from this one I had several fresh magazines. I kept the weapon handy, unafraid that he’d be able to wrest it away from me before I pulled the trigger on him. “Who are you with?”

His hair was dark and his face was pale, with a set of scars that looked as though someone had taken shards of glass and mashed them into his forehead above his right eye. “Who are you?” he asked me, staring back, awfully unconcerned for a man with a gun in his face.

I smiled and used the barrel of the gun to whip him hard in the scars. I broke the skin and a thin trickle of red made its way down his face as he looked back at me more in anger than shock or fear. “Let’s try this again,” I said calmly. “I ask the questions, you answer the questions. Very simple ground rules for our time together, and if you follow them, I won’t shoot you in the leg and then play around by sticking my finger in the bullet hole.”

There was a subtle hint of fear at that across those inscrutable features. “I can see you’ve been shot before,” I said. “Hurts, doesn’t it? Try to imagine me twisting your nerves, ripping at your wound, causing you so much pain …” I let my voice drip with sincerity. “Now … are you ready to talk?”

He sneered at me, chin jutting defiantly out, face like flint. “I’m not saying a word.”

I looked back to Breandan, who shrugged as though indifferent, and then I sighed. “Okay.” I tossed my gun backward at Breandan, who caught it, then I thrust my palms flat against the man’s cheeks. “Hold still. I wouldn’t want to have to hurt you as I’m ripping the memories out of your head.”

His eyes went wide and he started to struggle, but I ended that with a solid punch to the nose that broke it. He tried to slap at me with a hand, but I broke that too, at the wrist, and he cried out, but I ignored him. There was a building sense of pressure in my body as he began to jerk in my grasp. There was a sweet burning feeling at the tips of my fingers, like I’d stuck them in something that was making them tingle in all the right ways. I felt the man try to stand, but I leaned in and put my weight on him, straddling him, to keep him down. He screamed and I hammered him with an elbow to the midsection that knocked the wind out of him and left him gasping for air. All the while I kept my fingers on his face, locked on, my short nails digging into his skin as he tried to get a ragged breath in.