After the Red Rain (27 page)

M
arkard took a step toward SecFac, then stopped. He turned, looked at Deedra. Stepped toward her. Stopped again. Toward the building again. Couldn’t decide what to do.

Finally, he turned to her and leveled his gun, sighting down the barrel at the center of her forehead.

“Tell me. What the hell. Is going on. Here.” Biting out the words like chewing on steel.

“I don’t know,” Deedra said. She propped herself up on the ground on her elbows. “I swear, I have no—”

“If you’re lying to me—”

“I’m not.”

Markard lowered his gun. “Stay right there. Don’t move. Don’t even
look
in the wrong direction. I’ll be back.”

Gun still drawn, he ran toward SecFac.

The explosion threw Rose into the air. In the seconds before the grenade had gone off, he’d thrown out more tendrils, shoving away more soldiers.
No one has to die. No one has to die!

The world went white, then black. His hearing vanished, swallowed in the detonation, and when it returned, he was in the air, flying under the closing blast door. Screams assailed him.

When he landed, he went skidding down the hall a good ten or twelve yards before crashing against a wall. Down at the other end of the hall, the blast door had finished closing… almost. A guard was trapped underneath, screaming as the door pressed down on his leg, crushing it. Rose shook his head to clear it. Had he managed to save any of them?

Could he help the man being crushed?

He stood unsteadily; the walls around him dipped and spun. He was out of the cell area, in a wide corridor. He leaned against the wall to keep from collapsing. He was stronger than he had been but still nowhere near full strength. And all around him was steel, concrete, tile. Processed air and artificial light. There was nothing to draw strength from, nothing to use.

The man under the door wailed like a lost baby.

Rose staggered forward. His vision was blurry, his hearing speared with ringing noises that came from nowhere and everywhere.

“Help!” the man cried, and wailed wordlessly before screaming it again: “Help!”

Rose took another step toward him.
No one dies. I will not let
anyone
die. Not if I can stop it.

He stumbled forward, collapsed to his knees.

The man stopped screaming. Dead? Unconscious from the pain?

With a slowness that pained him, Rose stretched out to touch the man’s neck, feeling for a pulse.

None.

Rose hitched in a breath. This wasn’t what he’d wanted. Not what he’d planned. No one was supposed to die.

Lockdown alarms kept up their cry. Lights flashed and whirled in emergency panic. He dragged himself away from the dead man, forced
himself to his feet. Off to his right, another hallway splintered off, this one carpeted with threadbare fabric.

And in the distance…

Sunlight.

A window. He was sure of it.

The blast door began to crank upward, slowly. Someone must have found the override controls. Smoke purled from the crevice between the bottom of the door and the floor.

Rose pushed himself to his feet. Sunlight. Outside. If he could make it that far…

He ran.

A cluster of soldiers had joined Markard, and they converged cautiously on the prison building. Deedra watched them, not moving, just as Markard had ordered. She had no idea what was going on and was pleased to discover that
they
didn’t, either. The explosion had sped everyone up, then slowed them down as they approached the prison.

It had to be Rose. It couldn’t be anything else. No one else in that building could cause such anarchy. She thought of how Rose had infuriated the Bang Boys, then multiplied that by the DeeCees.

Yeah. It was Rose.

And he would need help.

She got up and ran toward the building.

He was running through some sort of office area; there were chairs and desks on all sides of him, all abandoned, the workers having fled or sheltered at the sound of the lockdown alarm. The window ahead of him blazed with sunlight.

He nearly tripped. Behind him, he could hear shouts and orders and footsteps.

So weak. But he could get outside…

With his waning strength, he launched a tendril and snagged a chair, then sent it hurtling toward the window. At the same time, he put on a final burst of speed, knees nearly buckling.

The chair shattered the window; fragments of glass exploded outward, and Rose leapt out the window.

Deedra paused as a second-story window on the face of the prison erupted outward. A chair tumbled out, falling with broken glass. Below, DeeCees mounting the steps to the prison fell back and scattered. Markard jumped back; the chair crashed right where he’d been.

A moment later a slim figure rocketed through the window. It had flared winglike appendages and for a single instant, it blotted out the sun.

Rose. It was Rose. It could only be Rose.

Deedra realized she was grinning like an idiot.

What are you so happy about? There are still a million DeeCees here.…

As if they’d heard her thoughts, the DeeCees opened fire.

At the first sound of gunfire, Rose tucked his arms in, withdrew his “wings,” and aimed downward. Bullets sailed past him. He rolled when he hit the ground. The concrete around him splintered with the impact of bullets.

“Rose!”

He popped up to his feet. He knew that voice. Deedra. What was
she
doing here?

More bullets. He threw himself to the ground, flattening himself as much as possible, hoping Deedra wasn’t in the line of fire.

Deedra had edged off to one side as soon as she saw Rose fly out of the window. For a moment she’d been paralyzed with sheer glee.

He was
flying
.

An instant later she realized as he landed that he was actually
gliding
. She couldn’t help it; she shouted his name in sheer relief and exultation. She wanted nothing but to run to him.

But she jumped back as more bullets flew.

She had to do something. There had to be
something
to do. She couldn’t come this far, and
he
couldn’t come this far, only for it to end like this, with her standing on the sidelines, doing nothing more productive than watching.

Time to get your hands dirty, Deedra.

SI Markard was directing the DeeCees. As they fired, Rose flipped and wriggled along the ground. He couldn’t dodge forever.

Deedra ran to Markard.

Rose was exhausted, his timing impeccable but wavering. As long as he kept moving, they couldn’t hit him.

The problem was, he couldn’t keep moving. He couldn’t keep this up forever. And as long as he was focused on being a moving target, he couldn’t figure out where to go next.

He scrambled forward, then to the left, then juked diagonally to the right. More bullets pinged and spat around him.

And he caught a glimpse of Deedra. She was running toward the DeeCees.