Terminated (19 page)

“Where’s Reynolds?”

“Oh, that’s really him upstairs,” Jane said. “He volunteered—of course, we told him it really was all about internal matters, hence his audit spiel. Didn’t see any reason to alarm him with the full details. He set up this place a long time ago, on the off chance Calvin Thorpe decided to turn on us . . . and it’s his only known address, these days, though of course he doesn’t live here. We caught you on facial recognition in California, and an alarm tripped when someone started looking for an address—not either of you. Nice subcontracting, by the way. But still, two and two equals four in this world.”

“Is Reynolds one of the Revived?” Bryn asked. Jane cocked her head a little and raised her eyebrows. “Just wondering.”

“Most of the Fountain Group have taken the treatment.”

“That what they’re calling having a plastic bag over your head and suffocating to death, then crawling out of hell?”

“Well, you know the medical profession. They never tell you the nasty stuff about the procedures ahead of time.” Jane leaned against the wall and gave the room a quick, unimpressed look. “Looks like catalogs had an orgy in here, don’t you think?”

She did. That was actually almost funny, and Bryn had to suppress the smile, but she knew Jane would see the impulse, the micro-twitch at the corners of her mouth. And that made her angry. She did not want Jane to make her laugh. That was more of a violation than Jane making her bleed. “So,” Bryn said. “What now?”

“Now, kiddo, I kill you—temporarily, of course—and go upstairs to get Patrick. If I can take him alive, I will. If not . . . hope you had Paris. Ah, ah, don’t do that. Just don’t.” Jane’s eyes sharpened focus, and the tremor of Bryn’s hand toward her pistol was the focus. “Go for that gun and all this goes south very fast.”

“You just said you were going to kill Patrick.”

“Of course I will, but I’m not cruel. I’d put him into the Revival program. And unlike you, he’d get the right dose of nanite programming, so he’d stay . . . compliant.”

“And me?” Bryn asked. “Because you damn sure know I won’t be
compliant
.”

“Yeah, I damn sure do,” Jane agreed. “Tell me, have you felt the hunger yet? Gotten your teeth into living skin? Felt the rush of the hunt?” Bryn was silent, and Jane gave her a slow, intimate, greasy smile. “I see you have. Impressive, isn’t it? That human beings could engineer that kind of savagery in, and call it
progress
. But then, we’ve always been capable of that kind of cognitive dissonance. Killing for God, for the master race, always some kind of bullshit to ease our consciences. Sit down, Bryn. Right there on that model-home bed. Then take your weapons out, two-finger touch—you know the drill. Kick them over to me.”

Jane could ramble, but she was never distracted, and Bryn knew it was a fool’s errand to assume differently. She walked to the bed, sat down, and took off her jacket. Then she pulled the sidearm from its concealment, using two fingers, and dropped it to the primary-colored throw rug. After a second’s hesitation, she added the knife from the small of her back, too. Then she kicked them both across the room toward Jane’s booted feet. She was hoping Jane would take a split-second’s attention from her to pick them up, but Pat’s ex was wiser than that; she just kicked them onward, toward the far wall. “Facedown on the bed,” Jane said. “Hands laced on your head, ankles crossed. Any struggle, and you get a bullet in the skull.”

There wasn’t much choice. Jane was too good to make a careless mistake. She’d chosen the bed instead of the floor to avoid having to alter her center of gravity so much, and to make it that much harder for Bryn to react fast; mattresses and springs were designed for comfort, not for precise motion. Any attack she’d try to mount would flounder, and she would die.

So Bryn, seething with fury, silently got on the bed, turned facedown, laced her fingers together on the back of her head, and crossed her ankles. Only when she was still did Jane approach and dig a knee painfully into her back, then drag her wrists down and zip-tie them firmly.

The bony knee went away, thankfully. “Up,” Jane said. “Slow.”

It wasn’t as easy with her hands pinned, but Bryn rolled over and put her legs out, and leveraged her way to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. “What now?” Bryn asked, without getting up. “You march me into an oven somewhere? Problem solved?”

“You’re the kind of problem that doesn’t get solved any other way,” Jane said. “Take that as a compliment. Up.”

Bryn shook her head. “Why should I?”

“Bitch—” Jane checked herself as she started to take a step closer, and a slow, demented smile spread across her lips. “You’re buying time for Patrick. You think he’s going to figure it out.”

“Why not? I did.”

That wiped the smile from Jane’s lips, and she activated a hands-free radio with a tap on the choke-band around her neck. “Who’s got eyes on McCallister and Reynolds?” She continued to stare straight at Bryn as she listened to the reply. “How do you know they’re still there? . . . Shit. Get somebody in here to watch this bitch.”

That sounded promising. Bryn kept her attention close on Jane, but there wasn’t any kind of a slip she could take advantage of. . . . Jane stayed very still until another soldier—dressed in the same nonuniform rugged clothing that Jane favored—came in the door and took up a position with his MP4 at the ready and trained on Bryn.

“Watch her,” Jane said. “She makes a move, even a wiggle, you shoot her in the fucking head a whole lot, understand? Bryn, you play nice, now. I’m going to see what my beloved hubby’s up to.”

“News flash, you’re still divorced!” Bryn called after her. “And he still hates you!” She gave the soldier guarding her a full-on eye roll, bringing him into it with the motion. “Bet he’s not the only one in this house. So do you hate her guts or are you just terrified of her? You can pick both.”

“We’re not chatting,” the guard said. He was handsome, in a vacant kind of way—close-cropped brown hair, steady dark eyes, a square, strong chin, and some impressive cheekbones.

We already are chatting,
Bryn thought. “Suit yourself,” she said aloud. “But she is
such
a bitch. You really can’t deny that.”

He didn’t, and she saw a little bit of a relaxing of his shoulders.

“Are you, you know . . .” She lifted her eyebrows. He frowned at her. “Revived?”

“Shut up,” he said. “I told you, we’re not chatting.”

“I only ask because she’s got a bad habit of killing people and bringing them back, for fun. I know. She did it to me about”—Bryn thought for a second—“ten times, more or less, in the space of about a day. That’s not counting the torture. There was a lot of that. Have you noticed? She’s got a taste for it.”

“Shut
up
.” She’d rattled him; she saw it in the muscle jumping in his jaw. Jane spooked him. Not surprising; she spooked everybody, sooner or later, or at least Bryn would assume she did.

There was a thump, a loud one, on the wood above their heads. Her guard glanced up, a single involuntary movement, and Bryn didn’t, because she’d been pretty sure that would happen.

She launched herself at him in a blur of speed, crashed into him in a crush of flesh, bone, and spraying blood from where her skull met his nose, and the two of them rolled to the floor, tangled up in a messy knot. His gun went off in a roaring burst, and the bullets tore by close enough to leave heat trails and powder burns on her skin, but somehow, she was able to keep the barrel off target just enough to matter.

Just enough to roll them over to where Jane had kicked her knife. No easy job of it, but she nicked the plastic zip tie enough to make it possible to pull her hands apart with one violent tug. She picked up the knife on the next roll over it and jammed it straight into the guard’s chest.

His eyes went wide and blank, as if he were struggling to understand, and she twisted, ripping his heart wide-open.

Game over, at least for a while. She was hurt too—strains, a broken rib or two, and her head hurt like mad from the impact with the guard’s skull—but she’d live. She controlled her impulse to groan and roll away, and instead tugged the knife free and gave him a few more fatal wounds to worry about, including leaving the knife buried in his eye socket. Sawing through bone with this particular knife would be time-consuming, and she couldn’t afford the effort—but the knife in the brain would keep his nanites plenty busy, particularly if the knife was still in place.

More thumping from upstairs.

Bryn rolled to her feet, staggered, pushed away the damage, and ran for the stairs.

S
he was halfway up the steps when Jane’s limp body came crashing through the door, sending it spinning off its hinges. Jane hit the railing and spun like a rag doll, folding over the barrier and sliding off and down to plummet to the floor. She landed on her neck with a crack that sounded like a stiff branch being broken.

Good.

“Patrick?” Bryn raced the rest of the way, hardly feeling the steps, and stopped fast when she ran into the still-hot muzzle of a gun. Jane’s. It was in Patrick’s hands, and his eyes were wide and a little wild, but he took a deep breath, lowered the weapon, and nodded to her.

“Are you hurt?” she asked breathlessly. There was blood on his face, and after a second she spotted the cut on his head. It looked gruesome, but it probably wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He wiped at the mess impatiently to get his vision clear.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Is she down?”

“For now. I need to go put her down for longer. Are you sure—”

“Fine,” he said again, so flatly she wasn’t at all sure that he meant it in the least. “Check Reynolds.”

Reynolds—and there was no reason for Jane to have lied about it being the real man, not a double—was cowering in the corner. Broken arm, she noted without any sympathy; as a Revived, he’d heal. He just wasn’t enjoying himself. He curled in on himself defensively when she approached him, but she struck aside his flailing keep-away hand and checked the pulse on his neck. “He’s fine,” she said, and grabbed the man by his collar. “Get up.” She put the MP4 at his back to encourage it, and he practically sprang to his feet in a convulsive leap.

“You’re crazy,” he blurted. He looked scared, all right, scared and sweating and thoroughly convinced she’d shoot. “You’re all
crazy
. They’ll kill you. Don’t you get it? You’re surrounded. There’s no way out!”

He may have been right, but Bryn wasn’t convinced, not without some first-person recon. She pushed Reynolds back to Patrick, who took him in a hold that must have really hurt that broken arm more than a little.
Good.
Without any words exchanged, Bryn took the lead on the way down. One good thing about an open-plan modern house—there were very few blind corners or places to hide.

Jane was still down and motionless on the floor, but they’d have very little time before the rest of her team descended. . . . Bryn could hear them outside, running feet on stone and grass. “Knife!” she said to Patrick and he tossed her his; she plucked it out of the air and, in the same motion, slammed it down and into Jane’s left eye. The corpse jerked just a little bit in reaction. Maybe she’d only been playing dead. That would have been typical.

This time, she pulled the knife out and started grimly sawing through the skin, muscle, gristle, and bone to separate Jane’s head from her body.

“No time,” Patrick snapped. “Leave it.”

“I can’t. We have to finish her!”

“They’ll finish us first.”

He took the knife away and slammed it back into Jane’s already-healing eye, and hauled Bryn up by the elbow. She regretted losing not one but two knives in rapid succession, but he was right—they couldn’t wait, not even another breath. Speed and ruthlessness were their only allies right now. Reynolds didn’t look as if he was inclined to give them trouble, but he wasn’t helping, either. Her brain clicked through plans, rejecting each one. . . . The front was obviously out, the side where Jane had come in would be covered, and the back of the house . . .

Bryn took a single breath to consider it—those giant plate glass windows showed off the house’s best feature: its view of a sharp drop to the valley, and the glittering ribbon of the river. She didn’t ask Patrick. There wasn’t time for debate.

Instead, she grabbed one of the end tables—a blocky, heavy, square affair, very new modern—and whirled, lifting as she put her momentum into it. Then she let go.

The table sailed through the air as if on wings, hit the glass with one of those sharp edges forward, and thick as it was, the glass frosted with cracks and then shattered in a mighty crash. The end table sailed out into the void and took a comet-trail of glass shards with it. But that didn’t clear the window fully; there were still jagged blades sticking out. Bryn grabbed the fireplace poker on the fly and held it like a sword as she leaped closer; she broke the worst of it out and turned as Patrick joined her.

“This is crazy,” he told her. “That’s a hell of a drop. One of us isn’t really up to it. By that I mean me.”

Shit. In her rush, she’d somehow forgotten—forgotten!—that Patrick wasn’t capable of the same feats she was. Reynolds was Revived; he hardly mattered. But Patrick . . .

Bryn took hold of Reynolds and pulled him from Patrick’s grip. “How’s the arm?” she asked him. There would be flash-bangs deployed behind them in seconds, and then Jane’s shock troops would be inside, spraying the house with bullets and taking down anything that moved.

“Hurts,” he said.

“Good.” She threw him out the window, just like the table.

Then she wrapped her arms around Patrick and pulled him out held tight to her body.

S
he landed awkwardly and very painfully on her back. That was what she’d meant to do, and it served to take the brunt of the bare-rock impact away from Patrick, whom she held in a rock-hard grip against her chest all the way down. His body weight was solid and muscular, and it did the rest of the job that her own momentum hadn’t. She felt a lot of bones cracking, a few more shattering, and if she’d been normal and human, she’d have been concussed and probably dying from skull fractures. The concussion still occurred, but though she felt woozy and unfocused, her little nanite helpers kept her moving. That was the military upgrade. Damage was registered, but it mostly wouldn’t keep her down, or not for long.

God, she hated the busy little bastards. But she also had to admit that at moments like these, they were all that kept her alive. Her, and Patrick, too.

Patrick grunted in pain and rolled off of her. He shook his head to clear it, and then took a good look at her. “Bryn?” His expression went grim and furious. “What the hell was that?”

“Got you out, didn’t it?” she shot back breathlessly. It was hard to talk. Shattered ribs stabbed at her with every move. If she’d been standard human normal, she’d have been terrified that she’d have shredded her lungs and drowned in her own blood. Amazing how free you could feel when you just no longer worried about those kinds of considerations. “Come on, we’re clear targets.” She got up—with his help—and tried a step. At least she hadn’t landed feetfirst; that would have resulted in disabling damage that would have taken time to heal. This was all heal-on-the-move stuff.

But . . . Reynolds hadn’t been so lucky. They found him off to the right, crawling for the trees. His right leg was folded the wrong way, and if his arm had been broken before, it was worse now. He was sobbing and babbling under his breath, and under most circumstances Bryn would have been stricken with guilt for what she’d done to him. But then, Reynolds would heal up, and a little pain, for what he’d done, for what he thought was right to do . . . that didn’t bother her much at all.

“Let me go,” he panted as she grabbed him by the unbroken arm and hauled him up. He hopped on his one good leg, and groaned and almost dropped from the pain. “Oh God, oh God . . .”

“Suck it up, Doctor,” Bryn said. “Pat, can you—?” He took the doctor’s other side, and together they half pulled, half led Reynolds into the woods.

Just in time, too, because she heard shouting behind them, and peering back, she saw Jane’s men at the window, looking for them. One of them decided to try a random spray of bullets, which ended up hitting well away from them, but it was proof that they didn’t much care about hitting Dr. Reynolds if it meant stopping the two of them.

“We have to make it to the river,” Bryn said. “It’s too deserted up here, and we’re at a disadvantage.”

“Agreed,” Patrick said. He checked his clip and extra ammo, and shared some with her. “He’s going to take some time to heal. About, what, a couple of hours to get that leg straight again?”

The one time it might have been useful to be contagious, Bryn thought . . . But her upgraded nanites had a cooking time, and they weren’t done yet. Even if she bit Reynolds, all she’d leave was bite marks.

Which reminded her, forcefully, that she was hungry. Seriously, awfully hungry, a sudden emptiness in the pit of her stomach that made her wince and stagger a little—enough that Patrick put a hand on her shoulder.

She heard him ask if she was okay, but all she could see, all she could focus on was his hand. On the thin skin of his wrist. On the blood and veins and muscle and protein that represented.

She closed her eyes in a sudden, sane fit of nausea, and said, “I’m fine. Gotta move, now.”

They did, in grim silence, except for Reynolds; she’d have loved to have silenced him, but a dead (if healing) body would have been even less use than a half-cooperative one. They just kept moving. The hill was granite, with pines stubbornly clinging to the rock and shedding dry needles as they moved beneath them. It smelled lush, but the drought had hit hard up here, and these pines were far from healthy.

If Jane was awake and in charge, Bryn had a terrible premonition of how she’d handle this situation. And she would be awake and back in charge, soon. They’d de-knife her first thing, and while the brain would be a few minutes healing, it wouldn’t keep her unconscious for long.

Jane was a practical sort of ruthless, and she’d want to drive Bryn and Patrick out in the open, out of the trees. She could do that by a huge, expensive deployment of her troops, and risk them being picked off in the dimness, or . . .

. . . Or, she could just use nature to do it for her.

“Faster,” Bryn said breathlessly. Patrick nodded. He didn’t even have the wind to reply, at this point. His head wound was still steadily bleeding, but he wasn’t making a big deal out of it at all. His footing was sure, and he was holding up Reynolds just as solidly as ever—but she didn’t like the tense set of his jaw, or the blank look in his eyes. He was tapping reserves that no one should go for unless they’re down to empty.

They were halfway down the slope, with the glitter of the river distantly in sight, when a five-point buck burst from the trees, running fast. It almost crashed into them, but it veered hard and just brushed Bryn on the way by—graceful and fast and undeniably panicked.

Because behind it, the trees were burning.

A whole row of pines behind the house was on fire—tall, surreal matchsticks burning with an unholy glow even in the afternoon sun. As Bryn watched, the flames jumped from one dry branch to another, creating a solid line of fury.

And it was moving with the wind.

Toward them.

The smell was, incongruously, like warm memories of home, logs on the fire, warm cocoa, safety.

“Jesus,” Patrick said, and dragged Reynolds faster. “Move it!”

The smoke flooded them maybe two minutes later. It wasn’t a gradual thing, though the smell of the fire was already strong. The smoke came in a thick, choking blanket, rolling like fog down the slope, and in seconds their visibility was reduced to hazy, indistinct outlines. Patrick coughed as the ash began to swirl around them. It was hot already, but Bryn felt pinpricks of hellfire where the cinders began to settle on her.

Still at least half a mile to the river. It was impossible to make good time on the rocky, jagged ground, especially with the decreased field of vision, and she began to realize, horribly, that Jane had outmaneuvered her, again. They weren’t going to make it.

She’d died a lot of ways in the past few months—enough to earn herself permanent psych ward status, anyway—but burning . . . burning had a special horror to it. That was how they disposed of the Revived in the end—burning long enough, hot enough would disable the nanites and ultimately end all their lives, even the upgraded ones.

Patrick didn’t even have that to look forward to. He would suffocate in the smoke.

“Go!” Bryn yelled at him. She took all of Reynolds’ weight. “Just run, Patrick—go! You can make it! I’ll follow!”

He was coughing too hard to argue, and she shoved him, hard, in the direction of the downslope. At least they wouldn’t get too far lost. . . . It was obvious which way was down, if nothing else.

Patrick disappeared ahead of them, gone in three steps.

She could hear the roar of the trees behind them now, like rabid animals on their heels. The world shrank to steps, fast and deliberate. Her muscles screamed in pain, her still-healing bones shifted and ripped and pierced, but she didn’t care, didn’t care at all.

Reynolds screamed, snapping her from her trance, and she realized that his shirt was smoking. So was hers.

But they were close. She could see the water. A hundred yards, maybe a hundred and fifty.

All they had to do was make it just a little farther.

She saw Patrick at the edge of the tree line, and he spotted them; he started to run toward them, but she shouted at him to get back, get back, and as Reynolds stumbled and dragged her down, his shirt bursting into open flame, she let him go. She kicked him into a rolling, messy tumble down the slope toward where Patrick anxiously waited. Stop, drop and roll, she thought, and an insane giggle tickled the back of her throat. She swallowed it, because there were things to do. Serious things.

She risked a look at the fire, and froze.

It was . . . terrifying. And beautiful. A monster the size of a building, moving with easy grace and fluid speed. Trees were combusting so fast that their trunks exploded as sap boiled. Animals raced around her—mice, rabbits, what looked like a fox but it was hard to spot in the thick, curling smoke.

Her shirt was on fire now. So was her hair.

No.
God.
The nanites would keep her hideously alive, of course—hideously alive as the flames burned through skin and muscle and fat. At some point, there wouldn’t be enough of them left, and they’d shut down, but the last of them, the very last, would keep her brain sending and receiving signals while the rest of her burned away. She’d know. She’d know every single second of the agony.

There was no way out, because the flames had caught her now.

The pain was enormous. Mind-melting. She knew she was screaming, and she couldn’t stop, couldn’t begin to think how to stop, and the flames were alive, alive and eating her alive, eating her like a lion with a wounded gazelle. She could feel its eagerness, its hot-breath hunger, and she snarled out a challenge as she felt her skin sizzle and pop, and she turned and ran blindly through smoke, flames, past blazing torches of pines. A bear was running with her, its fur on fire, making grunting howls of pain. They trailed smoke and tongues of yellow and red like streamers, and suddenly someone was there, a shadow, and she felt a crack that hardly registered over the fury consuming her body and soul, and then . . .

Then she ran headlong into one of Jane’s soldiers, who had just shot her. More than once, she supposed; she couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel much of anything, as her nerves shorted and fried from the overwhelming assault.

She hit him as a fireball and took him to the ground, and as they rolled over and over down the rocky slope, they hit damp, sandy ground, and the motion smothered most of the flames, and then they rolled into the river itself, and steam exploded up in a cloud as the last of the fire went out on her body and clothing.

She dragged him underwater. He was struggling, panicked, and she saw the wide, white-rimmed flare of his eyes as she dragged him deeper. It didn’t take long before the last silvery bubbles burst out of his mouth, and his eyes took on the dull, flat look of death.

His blood was a rusty cloud in the water, and she needed it. Needed it so badly.

She was on him like a shark in the next, breathless second. She needed to breathe, but she didn’t care except to note it as additional things to heal.

For healing, she needed . . .

. . . She only needed.

No thought.

Just flesh.