The Blonde (30 page)

“An hour later, I found two more bodies. It was a little shore town that didn’t even have a name. I can only imagine that Vanessa had pulled in there because it looked dark, and maybe had beach access. She probably thought she could go to the beach and be alone and try to figure this out.

“I drove into the town and got out, and there were bodies everywhere. This is probably where you found most of the victims. Must have been a party that let out…something. I don’t know. A couple of kids were gibbering in Spanish about
pelirrojo, pelirrojo
. Redhead.

“I ask them what happened. They told me about a crazy woman with wild hair who kept telling them to stay back, stay back. Shouting at them. Waving her arms. Trying to run away. But still, people approached, wanting to help help her. They would only make it a few steps before dropping to their knees.

“
‘Ella es laplagaV
the kids shouted. She is the plague.

“I kept driving but didn’t find her. It was almost morning. She could anywhere. So I went back to the hotel, hoping she’d make her way back eventually. Once she had a chance to calm down.

“And yeah, I know that was ridiculous. The last thing she’d want was to come near me.

“I hadn’t even checked into the hotel. So I waited in the lobby, drinking Diet Coke to keep myself awake.

“A couple of hours later, after the sun came up, she had me paged. I picked up the hotel’s house phone.

“She told me she was at a pay phone somewhere, not to bother looking for her. She told me she was tired of killing. Of being a monster. There was nowhere left to go, she said. I told her to calm down, that I’d help her. We’d figure it out, just like we did in Philadelphia. She told me I was sweet, but no. There was no way out. Not out of this.

“She thanked me for saving her.

“She thanked me for trying.

“She thanked me for the Beretta.

“And then I heard a gun crack. I dropped the phone. A while later, I called you guys to turn myself in.”

T
he interrogator stood up and started clapping. “Bravo,” he said. “
Bra-fucking-vo.
” He turned to a camera on the ceiling. “Did you get that on tape? I mean, cut it right now and submit it to the Academy. That is fucking Oscar-caliber material.”

The interrogator walked around to Kowalski’s side of the table, then leaned in close to his ear. “Two things, buddy boy. You said she dropped the gun in the banquet room. Hard to blow your brains out with a gun you don’t have.”

Then he grabbed Kowalski’s chin and used his thumb to pull down his bottom lip, exposing his lower teeth.

“And you’ve got all your teeth. When did you have time to see a dentist?”

Kowalski twisted his head away.

The interrogator looked practically orgasmic. “It’s pain time, Mikey boy.”

The next minute was what Kowalski expected. The guards came back into the room, handcuffed him, then dragged him back to the gleaming meat hook. They lifted him up, looped the links of the handcuffs over the hook, then let him drop. The cuffs cut into
his wrists. Meanwhile, the interrogator had retrieved his knife. The blade caught some of the fluorescent lights in the room. It glistened.

The interrogator approached. Kowalski was hanging high enough so that his nipples were at eye level with the interrogator.

“Let me ask once more for the record,” he said.

“Sure,” Kowalski said.

“Where’s Lucia Black?”

“I don’t know.”

“
Yes!
”

The interrogator moved in with the knife. Predictably, he immediately started trying to spread Kowalski’s legs. Going for the anal cavity. The interrogator gestured to the guards. “Grab a leg, each of you.”

This was going to hurt.

N
ot the anal cavity.

His mouth.

Specifically, pushing the tooth out of his gumline again.

It was going to really hurt.

The interrogator had been right. Kowalski had been spinning him a line of bullshit, ever since the stuff about the banquet room, after Lucia Black had announced she’d reprogrammed Proximity.

Sadly, that last part was true.

Vanessa had been turned into a walking, talking killing machine.

But what Kowalski hadn’t mentioned was that he’d grabbed Lucia before she could run away.

Vanessa had bolted, yes. She had driven away and inadvertently killed seventeen people. Many of them American tourists. It was not pretty. Kowalski wasn’t going to lie to himself.

He couldn’t imagine the horrors taking place in her mind.

She was still shell-shocked over the adulterers she’d slaughtered.

But instead of searching for Vanessa, Kowalski had attacked the problem at the root. He took Lucia Black and applied his signature move: arm around her neck until she was unconscious.

She woke up an hour later, strapped to a dentist’s chair.

A chair belonging to Kowalski’s Mexican dentist friend, who was just gearing up for a long tequila-fueled night.

Kowalski told him not to worry. He’d take it from here.

First he kissed Lucia. Deeply.

He wanted to get those Proximity-eating nanites into his own system.

Then he settled in for some real work.

Lucia resisted for a while. But by the time Kowalski was finished with the drill, she was not only ready to deactivate the nanites in Vanessa’s bloodstream and tell Kowalski how to repro-gram Proximity from her handheld, but perfectly willing to reveal the formula for Coke as well as the eleven herbs and spices in Kentucky Fried Chicken.

She spilled
everything
.

Even how her brother used to finger her in secret when they were kids.

Kowalski thanked her, then smothered her with a wet towel. Figured that was doing her a favor. Later, he’d cut off her head, tell them it was her. Vanessa. Their mysterious blonde, now a redhead.

The real Vanessa
did
call the hotel near dawn, crying and ready to end it all, even though she didn’t have a gun. Kowalski was glad she didn’t remember the grenade launcher in the trunk of the Taurus.

After Kowalski assured her she was safe, and unable to kill anyone else, they met up again. They talked. They made plans. They used Lucia’s handheld device to do a little reprogramming of their own. They figured out a way to end this, for good.

For good, at least for now.

Make them suffer a little in return.

They visited Kowalski’s dentist again, who by this point had mostly sobered up.

“You want me to do
what?
” he asked.

He was intoxicated enough to do it anyway.

K
owalski finally worked the tooth free, then spat it out.

The interrogator smirked. “Come on now. I haven’t even touched your face.”

Kowalski smiled. Revealing the small trigger mechanism he’d had implanted in his gum. A tiny LED in the middle of the trigger pulsed red.

Blink blink

Blink blink

The trigger would tell Proximity to reprogram the nanites in his bloodstream.

But not to kill at ten feet. Kowalski and Vanessa had discussed that, and decided it wasn’t enough. So they used Lucia’s handheld device to reprogram the distance to, oh, say, quarter of a mile. In all directions.

I’m going to let myself be captured
, Kowalski had told her.
And then, when Ym sure all of the rats are in one place, and I know what they know
…
they’re dead. Every last one of them
.

The interrogator stared at Kowalski’s mouth, dumbstruck, but at the last moment he seemed to get it. Not everything, of course. Just the idea that yes, Kowalski had indeed outthought them every step of the way. And yes, they were all about to die. Every last one of them.

Kowalski depressed the trigger with his tongue.

“Good-bye,” he said.

T
he guards dropped first, followed by the interrogator. They were all screaming. Kowalski counted to nine in his mind, and then …

Yeah.

Twin sprays of red.

Then a third.

Kowalski swung his body back and forth until he had enough momentum to hurl himself up and slip the chain from the hook.

He landed on his feet.

First thing he did was walk to a corner and take the most satisfying leak of his life.

Then he checked out the rest of the facility.

T
here was one guy still alive. He represented the freaky 1 percent who remained uninfected by Proximity.

That was okay.

Kowalski gutted him with the interrogator’s Pampered Chef knife. It really was pretty fucking sharp.

Everyone else was dead.

Fortunately, his brother-in-law wasn’t among them. They must have shipped him off to a different secret prison facility. Or maybe he was already in the field. Wouldn’t surprise him. CI-6 loved to rush things.

Kowalski kept a loose count as he walked through the facility. He was into the low fifties before he stopped. A lot of dead bodies. More than he thought he’d ever see.

And all of them redheads now.

T
he rest was routine. A burning of the last twelve hours of surveillance video. A gathering of research files. Some borrowed clothes. Weapons. Key cards. Water. Food. The interrogator’s little knife.

Kowalski left the facility. He pushed the trigger in his gum, turning off the killer nanite effect. There was no need anymore.

It was still early morning in Pennsylvania mountain country. The air was bitter cold. Not even the sun was enough to warm you
up. A rainstorm had passed through recently, so Kowalski’s borrowed boots sunk into the chilly mud a bit with every step. It felt nice to stretch his muscles like this again. Too much time in planes, in cars, on rooftops. He liked that he had a walk ahead of him.

Kowalski walked and enjoyed the cool air and thought about Vanessa. Thought about how they parted ways.

For good.

I’m not like you
, she’d told him.
I’m no monster. You can do this. I can’t. I mean, I did for a while. But not anymore
.

I want my life back
.

That’s when Kowalski kissed her, deeply, giving her what he’d stolen from Lucia. A kiss from the monster Prince Charming.

You’ve got your life back
, he said.

Don’t try to find me
, she said.

I won’t
, he said.

After a few hours of wandering he sat down by the side of a road and opened an oatmeal bar he’d taken from the snackroom.

Yes, even secret government prisons had snackrooms.

Kowalski enjoyed a brown sugar and cinnamon oatmeal bar. It was the first real food he’d eaten in a long while. But a chunk of oat got caught between a tooth and the trigger mechanism. He tried pushing it out with his tongue; nothing doing.

He thought about what he could do with the quarter-mile shield of death that surrounded him. He could find every secret CI-6 prison in the country. He could visit all of the front companies they had, scattered around the globe. He could stop into certain offices in the U.S. Capitol Building. He could kill them all with a flip of the switch. Death with a smile. They could throw everything in the world at him. The National Guard, even. Unless they had a sniper that could work with a quarter-mile accuracy, he was unstoppable.

And maybe he should. Because CI-6 wasn’t going to stop. This facility was just an interrogation room; there were others in the organization who knew. They wouldn’t give up a weapon like Proximity.

Maybe he should keep going until they were all dead.

Kowalski took another bite of the oatmeal bar. Another piece got stuck between his teeth. He pulled out the interrogator’s Pampered Chef knife then used it to dislodge the chunks.

He could still feel it, though. So he kept using the knife, digging at his jaw. There were no mirrors out here in the country. He had to go by feel. The blade against his tender gums. Scraping. Don’t mind me, he thought. I’m just a man sitting in the middle of the Pennsylvania countryside doing a little dental surgery. The brown sugar was gone; his mouth tasted of copper pennies now. But there was still oatmeal in there. So Kowalski kept working. Strangely, as the pain enlarged, his vision grew clearer. Maybe it was the film of tears in his eyes. There was no sound except the occasional chirping of a bird, and his own heavy breathing. It focused him on the task at hand.

Eventually he realized that his chin and stolen shirt were covered in blood.

But the trigger came out, and Kowalski stared at it for a few moments, feeling the cool morning air on his fevered face, before using a rock to smash it to pieces.

Yeah, I’m a monster
, he thought.

But not that big of a monster.

H
e wondered where Vanessa was now.