Fragments (11 page)

Kira stood frozen in the doorway, her knuckles white as bone as they clutched the
rifle. A second became a minute; a minute became two. The monster didn’t return. The
adrenaline rush wore off and Kira began to shake, subtly at first and then harder,
faster, shaking uncontrollably. She climbed down from the desk, nearly falling to
the floor, and collapsed in the corner, sobbing.

The dawn light didn’t reach through the maze of walls and doorways, but Kira could
hear the sounds of morning: birds singing to greet the sun, bees buzzing through the
flowers in the asphalt, and yes, even the distant trumpet of an elephant. Kira stood
up slowly, peering through the cracked doorway. Her light was still on, though the
batteries were failing; the room beyond was covered in sprays and smears of blood,
but the creature itself was gone. She pulled back the desk, carefully opening the
door; it was lighter out here, and she saw a beam of sunlight on the cluttered floor
of the mall. Red-brown footprints led out to the street and into the plaza, but Kira
didn’t bother following them. She took a drink from her canteen, sloshing the cold
water on her face. It had been stupid to go out at night, she knew, and she promised
herself she would never do it again.

She shook her head, working out the kinks in her back and arms and fingers. The men
she was chasing were probably too far away to have heard the gunfire last night, but
if she was unlucky with the echoes, who was to say what could have happened? It didn’t
change her plan—she had already been in a rush to find their building, and it was
only more urgent now. She pulled her map from her backpack, locating herself and her
quarry and planning out the best route to take. With a sigh and another sip of water,
she set off through the city.

Kira traveled cautiously, wary now not only of Partial patrols but of giant hairy
claw monsters; she saw movement in every shadow, and had to force herself to stay
calm and levelheaded. When she arrived at the right neighborhood, it took her a few
hours to positively identify the building with the antenna, though most of that was
her fear of being seen. She ended up climbing another building’s staircase to get
a bird’s-eye view, and from there spotted the antenna easily. The buildings here were
shorter, only three or four stories for most of them. Knowing what she was looking
for, it was easy to spot some of the more subtle clues that the building was inhabited—many
of the windows were boarded over, especially on the third floor, and faint tracks
in the built-up dirt showed that someone had recently used the front steps.

This was the tricky part. She didn’t dare to move in until she knew who lived there,
where they were, and whether the bombs were set to explode. The most likely scenario,
at least to her, was that this was some kind of outpost for a faction of Partials—and
not a faction friendly to Dr. Morgan, since their last meeting at the other outpost
had gone so destructively. That didn’t automatically mean that these Partials were
friendly to humans, though, and Kira didn’t want to walk into a trap. She would watch,
and wait, and see what happened.

Nothing happened.

Kira watched the building all day and night, holed up in the apartment across the
street. She ate cold cans of beans and huddled under a moth-eaten blanket to avoid
starting a fire. Nobody went in and nobody went out, and when night fell there were
no fires in the windows, no smoke rising up through a crack in the boards. Nothing
happened the second day either, and Kira was beginning to get nervous—they must have
left before she got there, or slipped out a back way. She crept down to the street
and did a quick perimeter check, searching for other entrances and exits, but nothing
looked used, either generally or recently. If they’d left at all, they’d done it through
the front door. She settled back in to watch it.

That night, someone came out.

Kira leaned forward, careful to stay out of the moonlight in the window. The man was
large, easily seven feet tall, with the heft and girth to match. He probably outweighed
Kira by two hundred pounds. His skin was dark, but probably no darker than her own;
it was hard to tell in the faint light of a cloudy moon. He opened the front door
cautiously, lifted a small cart through the door and down the stairs, and carefully
locked the door behind him. The cart was full of jugs, and Kira guessed he was off
to retrieve water. He wore a heavy pack full of something she couldn’t identify, and
she couldn’t see his weapon.
Safer to assume the worst, then,
she thought, as there could easily be a high-caliber handgun or submachine gun hidden
in the folds of his loose-fitting trench coat.

Kira grabbed her things quietly, packing in the dark, and stole down the stairs to
follow him. He was already at the corner when she reached the street, and she waited
until he rounded it before slipping out after him, stepping as lightly as she could
through the rubble in the street. She peered around the corner and saw him walking
slowly, pulling the cart behind him. He moved strangely, almost like a waddle, and
Kira wondered if it was just his bulk or some other factor. He reached the end of
the block and stepped into the street without pausing, as if completely unconcerned
that he would be seen or, worse, eaten. How had he survived this long without running
into that nocturnal monster? He disappeared around a low wall, and Kira crept after
him.

He stood at the mouth of a subway tunnel, filling his plastic jugs with a long-tubed
pump similar to her own. He huffed as he worked, as if the exertion was too much for
him, but the rest of his mannerisms spoke of long familiarity and expertise. He’d
done this often enough to be very good at it.

Was he a Partial? Kira stayed motionless in the shadows observing him, trying to . . .
not to listen, not to smell, but to
feel
him, in the way that she’d been able to feel Samm. The link. It was more emotional
than informational; if she linked with this man at all, it would be through feeling
the things he felt. She examined her emotions closely: She was curious; she was tired;
she was sure of her purpose. Did any of that come from him? What would he be feeling?
He was muttering to himself, not angrily but simply talking, the way she had started
talking to herself. She couldn’t hear the words.

The more she watched him, methodically filling the jugs, the more she realized that
his size suggested he was human. The Partials had been engineered not just as soldiers
but as specific soldiers: the infantry were all young men, the generals were all older
men, and Samm had said that their doctors were women and their pilots were petite
girls designed to fit easily into small vehicles and tight cockpits. The military
contractors had saved billions of dollars building undersized jets. Obviously there
were exceptions—Kira had no idea what role Heron was intended to fill, the tall, leggy
supermodel who’d captured her for Dr. Morgan—but did one of the templates include
this man? He was huge, especially now that she saw him from ground level. Some kind
of super-soldier among super-soldiers? A heavy-weapons specialist, maybe, or a close-combat
expert? Samm hadn’t mentioned anyone like that, but there had been a lot of things
he’d never mentioned. Kira concentrated as hard as she could, willing herself to detect
this giant through whatever version of the link she possessed, but she felt nothing.

Aside from his size was the simple fact that he was winded. He’d walked only a couple
of blocks, and yet he was huffing like he’d just run a marathon. That didn’t make
sense for a physically perfect super-soldier, but it was perfect for an overweight
human.

He was illuminated fairly well, thanks to a large moon and a cloudless sky, and Kira
quietly pulled out her binoculars to look at him more closely. She was barely thirty
yards away, crouched behind a rusting car, but she wanted to confirm his weaponry
at the very least. There was nothing on his legs or hips, no holsters or knives, and
there seemed to be nothing in the cart but plastic jugs. He finished filling a jug
and lifted it, turning toward her as he placed it in the cart, and for just a moment
his coat fell open and she saw his chest and sides: He had no weapons in there either,
no shoulder holsters or bandoliers or anything. Kira frowned. No one would travel
in the wilderness unarmed, so his weapon must be concealed, but why conceal it if
you thought you were alone—

In a flash Kira realized that she had walked into a trap: This man, big and slow and
unarmed, had been sent outside as bait, while the others circled around to cut off
her escape. She dropped to the ground, lowering her profile in case anyone tried to
shoot her right there, and looked around wildly for the attackers. The city was too
dark; there could be snipers in a hundred different windows and doorways and shadows
around her, but she couldn’t see deep enough into any of them. Her only hope was to
run, just like with the monster in the plaza. The building behind had some kind of
storefront, maybe an old pizza place; there would be a back room at the very least,
probably a basement, and if she was lucky a stairwell that accessed the rest of the
building. She could slip in, find another exit, and slip out before they had a chance
to close their trap.

The man by the subway stairs was stretching, his backpack lying gently on the ground
beside him. Was he prepping for a strike? She had to go now. Kira scrambled to her
feet and bolted toward the storefront, bracing herself for the impact of bullets in
her back. Behind her she heard a yelp, like a cry of fear, but she didn’t turn around.
At the back of the old pizza place was a thin wooden door, and beyond it an office;
Kira dove through and slammed it closed behind her, switching on her light to look
for another exit. There was none.

She was trapped.

K
ira swept her arm across the metal desk in the center of the room, clearing away decades-old
dust and thick stacks of papers. Last was a thin computer monitor, which she knocked
aside on her backswing before flipping the desk on its side, diving behind it for
an extra layer of shielding. She crouched low behind the barrier, her rifle tucked
into the side of her face, the barrel trained squarely on the door; if the knob so
much as twitched, she could put a whole clip into whoever stood beyond it. She waited,
barely daring to breathe.

She waited.

A minute went by. Five minutes. Ten minutes. She imagined another gunman on the far
side of the door, lying in wait as carefully as she was. Which one of them would break
first? There were more of them, and they had the advantage; they had more room to
maneuver, and more people to do it with. But she wasn’t going to give up that easily.
If they wanted her, they had to come in and get her.

Ten more minutes went by, and Kira shifted her weight painfully from one leg to the
other. She blinked sweat from her eyes, feeling them red and raw, but still she refused
to move. Another ten minutes. Her throat was parched and painful, her fingers cramped
around the handgrip of her gun. Nothing moved. No sound disturbed the night.

Kira’s flashlight flickered, sick and yellow as the batteries started to fail. They’d
been weak for a few days, and she hadn’t found any replacements yet. Ten minutes later
the light winked out for good, and Kira closed her eyes uselessly against the utter
blackness, listening with every ounce of her focus: for the doorknob, for the creak
of floorboards or the squeak of shoes, for the click of a gun as it readied to fire.
Ten more minutes. Twenty. An hour. Were they really this patient?

Or was there nobody there?

Kira rubbed her eyes, thinking back on the attack. She had assumed there was a trap—it
was the most logical explanation—but she hadn’t actually seen anyone. Was it really
possible that the man outside, unarmed and alone in a dead city full of monsters,
was really the only one? It was extremely unlikely, but yes, it was possible. Was
she ready to bet her life on that possibility?

She lowered her gun, whimpering silently at the ache in her stiff shoulders. She moved
as quietly as she could to the side of the room, out of the line of fire that would
come through the door, and listened again. All was quiet. She reached out with one
hand, hugging the wall tightly, and touched the doorknob. Nobody shot her. She took
a breath, gripped the knob tightly, and threw it open as fast as she could, yanking
her hand back and rolling away from the opening. No gunfire, no shouts, no noise at
all but the creak of the door. She stared at the dark black doorway, trying to work
up the courage to go through it, and decided to try one more thing; she picked up
the monitor she’d knocked off the desk, found a good stance, and heaved it out the
door, hoping to draw the fire of anyone lurking on the other side. The monitor clattered
to the ground, the screen cracked, and the silence returned.

“Nobody shoot me,” she said, just in case, and slowly came around the corner of the
door frame. The pizza place beyond was as empty as ever, and out in the street the
sagging metal cars reflected shafts of moonlight. She crept outside, rifle up and
ready, checking her corners and watching for an ambush, but she was alone. On the
far side of the street stood the subway entrance, and beside it the large man’s cart,
motionless and abandoned. A jug lay on the ground nearby, dropped on its side, the
water now long spilled out. A few feet away, where he had laid it against the wall
of the subway entrance, was the man’s bulging backpack.

Kira walked a full circuit of the intersection, running from car to car for cover,
before approaching the backpack. It was enormous, practically as big as she was, and
she couldn’t help but think of the shattered craters of the previous two houses she’d
seen. Did she really want to open a bomber’s backpack? He could have left it here
as a trap specifically to kill her . . . but honestly, he’d had so many easier opportunities
to just shoot her if he really wanted her dead. Or were explosives the only weapon
he knew? Maybe he really didn’t have a gun at all.