Authors: Kat Ross
It clicks down on an empty chamber.
Damn
.
I should have thought about how many bullets I used at the Helix, but I didn’t get around to that. The guy hears the click and starts to turn, and I bring the gun up with both hands and smash the butt down on his head. He falls to his knees, momentarily stunned, and that’s when Jake comes through.
Two on one side, three on the other. They do it that way sometimes.
I wonder how many more are outside.
We stare at each other for a split second. Then we both move, but as always, I’m a little faster. I step forward and twist his gun hand down and around until it’s hyperextended to the side. With my left I grab his throat in an eagle claw. I have to reach up to do it since he’s so much taller, but that doesn’t really matter. Once my thumb curls behind his windpipe, his air supply is virtually cut off. Special ops likes it because the victim can’t make a sound, other than a thin kind of wheezing.
For a moment I flash back to the last time I saw him. The smile on his face when I asked him where he was during the operation.
I squeeze a little tighter.
Then I see movement a couple feet away. The second agent through, the one I clocked, is getting up. He’s reaching for his backup weapon, which is usually a regular handgun in case an EMP has been deployed. He gains his feet and flicks off the safety.
Suddenly there’s a yell, and I hear feet crunching on broken glass behind me. It’s Will, and God love him, he’s got the poker. He sweeps it down and up, and even though the agent has body armor, it’s a brutal blow. His knee buckles and Will keeps hitting him, slashing diagonal motions that make contact in all the right places. Will’s growling like an animal, but he’s not panicking. I’m not either, though it’s a close thing. I just killed two agents, people I might even know. I tell myself I had to, and that’s true, but it’s also true that I feel sick. They were just following orders. It’s one thing to cavalierly call yourself a killer. Another entirely to be one. To shoot another human being. If there was any line left, I just crossed it, permanently and irrevocably.
But I can’t look back, not now. We have to get away from here.
We have to
.
My whole body is slick with sweat. Jake needs to black out. The last two days have taken a toll, and I don’t have much stamina for this kind of thing. Just a few more seconds. The brain can’t function long without oxygen. It’s a simple and undeniable fact. Some chokeholds actually put people down in two seconds.
Two seconds
. It sounds impossible, and I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it done.
But Jake is well-rested and well-fed and a lot stronger to begin with. He hasn’t suffered recent kidney failure, or been blown halfway down a corridor and then brained by chalkheads. And he has really long arms.
The left one grabs me under the rump and just flips me over his shoulder, straight out the broken window.
I land flat on my back in the weeds. The air in my lungs departs with a
whoosh
. I open my mouth and it fills with rain, not the clean rain of the surface but the stale, chemically treated stuff they use down here.
I close my eyes and when I open them, I see Jake leap like a cat over the windowsill. He drops on top of me, pinning my arms with his knees. Inside, Will screams in pain and something smashes to the floor.
“I’m bringing you in, Jansin,” Jake rasps. He pulls out a set of cuffs, slaps one side onto my left wrist. “You’re lucky I’m here. The others might just kill you at this point.” He glances behind the house.
I go limp. Let him think I’ve given up.
“Where are you taking me?” I whisper.
He snaps the cuffs onto my right wrist.
“Disneyland,” Jake says.
He doesn’t say it in a gloating way. The opposite, in fact. Like he’s a little sorry about it.
I’ve only heard of the place from rumors around the Academy. Officially, it doesn’t exist. It’s where the military conducts psy-ops research. Rewires people’s brains. Turns your reality into one bad Technicolor acid trip. Hence the name.
“That sucks, Jake,” I say.
He shrugs. Yeah, it sucks. But it’s the way things are. Orders are orders.
I know better than to appeal for mercy. It won’t be forthcoming.
He’s shifting his weight to yank me to my feet when a gun goes off inside the study. A single shot, followed by silence.
My heart stops. I struggle to get a glimpse through the window but Jake’s armored bulk is in the way. He puts a knee on the center of the cuffs, pinning my hands to the ground, and gets his gun up. I hear a scraping sound. Jake’s eyes narrow, and his mouth sets in a grim line. He has a look on his face that can only be interpreted as sizing up the competition.
I know then that he’s seeing Will, and he’s about to shoot him. So I do the only thing I can. I bite his thigh.
It’s an interesting thing about biting. With not much effort, the human jaw can exert pressure of up to fifteen tons per square inch. I read that once. But there’s also something uniquely disturbing about being bitten by another person. It elicits a kind of primal horror. Especially when it’s near the groin.
Jake is no exception. He howls as I sink my teeth into him, and it buys Will the time he needs to jump from the sill and wallop Jake with a two-handed overhead blow that dents his helmet and knocks him senseless. I scramble over to Jake’s weapon and pick it up. The cuffs can be dealt with later. At least they’re in front, so I can shoot.
Which I should do to Jake, but can’t. Not in cold blood.
“What happened in there?” I ask as we press our backs against the wall of the house, where the shadows are deepest.
“Samer’s bleeding bad, he may be dead, I don’t know. He’s not moving. Rafiq took a gun from one of the ones you shot and got the guy I was fighting. He sprayed me with this stuff that burns your skin.” Will shows me his arm. There’s an angry red weal running from wrist to elbow. It’s already rising in a blister. “Then Rafiq took off, and I saw you outside.”
“OK, we’re getting out of here. Let’s try the back,” I say, figuring that the direction Jake looked in is where some of the extraction team is waiting. Hopefully with transportation.
If they did it by the book, there’s no more than eight, and four are dead or unconscious. I don’t see any of the others, but I know they’re out here somewhere.
I get low and peek around the corner of the house. Three stories high, it occupies a large cavern, with about two acres of open space that ends at rock walls on all sides but the driveway. The perfect mousetrap.
I put a finger to my lips and we crouch there for a minute, listening to the soft hiss of rain pattering on stone. Time passes, and the urge to run is almost overwhelming. But that’s what they expect us to do. There’s not a chance that long driveway is unwatched. Will is stock-still next to me, gripping the poker, eyes scanning the grounds. He’s scared but holding it together, and I think that he would’ve made a decent agent if he was a little more cold-hearted. Also, I’m glad he’s not.
Then a radio crackles. It’s coming from inside a tall artificial hedge about ten yards to the left. I know it’s artificial because it’s the only thing that’s green, and they take forever to grow in real life. There’s a broken stone fountain between us and the hedge, and we use it for cover, creeping across the dim yard on our bellies until we leave the lights from the windows behind. Shadows move on the second and third floors. I hope one of them is Rafiq, that he’s still alive.
The hedge is unbroken on this side, and we have to crawl for a way before we find a gap. It leads to a narrow path with blind corners at either end. The path twists and turns like a maze, and I’m afraid if we don’t find whoever has that radio soon, they’ll find us. And there won’t be anywhere to run.
Finally we hit a gap that opens onto a larger square. In the middle are three motorcycles, the very, very fast ones with huge tires and a zero gravity windscreen that are illegal to own unless you’re police or military. There’s also an agent, but sadly for him or her, they’re looking in the other direction. I aim Jake’s gun at the vulnerable spot just below the Kevlar helmet, begin to squeeze the trigger. That’s when the lights go out.
The blackness is instantaneous and total. Above, on the surface, there’s always the tiniest bit of light, even on moonless, overcast nights. But six thousand feet down, it’s like the bottom of the sea, or the depths of space. They must have finished searching the house and cut the power.
I can hear Will breathing beside me, and shouts from the yard, near the fountain. They’re moving closer. If I shoot and miss, I’ll give away our position. And I can’t be sure the agent hasn’t moved.
So I open my eyes wide and wait for something, anything, to tell me where they are. Ten or twenty seconds go by, and I’m dying to blink but I don’t, like the insane staring contests you get into when you’re a kid. Then a tiny green light winks into existence, only for a millisecond, but I know what it is: the power indicator on a set of infrared goggles. I fire into the darkness and there’s a scream. Boots pound toward us through the hedge maze, about two rows away.
I fire again, and in the white laser flash I see the agent, motionless on the ground. We stumble forward, bumping into the bikes, and I find Will’s fingers, give him the gun.
“Shoot the cuffs off,” I say. “You have to hit the double hinge in the middle.”
“Shit,” he mutters. He’s thinking he can’t see a thing and he might just as easily shoot my hands off.
Together we get the gun positioned so it seems right. He fires. The heat singes the hair on my arms but the cuffs snap in half, leaving the carbon steel bracelets dangling from my wrists. A perfect shot.
I grab the dead agent and drag him or her, I don’t know which and don’t care, to the nearest bike. Press the still-warm thumb against a reader next to the controls. The dash hums to life, washing the clearing in a green glow.
We jump on the bike and gun it just as an agent bursts through the gap. I run them down, skid around a tight corner and blow straight through the hedge as two others come at us from either side. Their laser fire ignites the hedge, which is made out of something plastic that appears to be extremely flammable. I hope they roast in there.
We hug the side of the fountain and I get the headlight on. Jake is gone. And someone’s running at us from the side of the house. Will raises the gun to shoot, but I grab his arm. It’s Rafiq.
He’s covered in blood.
“Get on!” I yell, braking hard.
Two sets of lights pierce the darkness behind us. I’d hoped the other bikes were burning by now, but no such luck. Why the hell didn’t I just fry them with the laser gun? Another stupid mistake.
“It won’t take three, you know that,” Rafiq gasps. “Forget about me, just go.” He thrusts something at Will, as the other bikes roar out of the hedge.
I curse and accelerate down the driveway. When I glance in the rearview, I see one of the agents shoot Rafiq in passing as casually as you’d shoot a rabid dog. He topples over and lies there, still.
Hatred boils inside me, and I swear to myself that I’ll get them somehow, someday. For Nileen and Petyr and Fatima and Banerjee and all the rest. For my mother, and what they’re doing to her right now. They’re going to regret making me what I am. I think they already are.
We enter the long upward-sloping tunnel and I start to wonder why the agents behind us aren’t shooting. These bikes are equipped with a virtual armory of lethal accessories. It doesn’t take long to find out. Two sets of headlights appear ahead of us. Oncoming, and closing the distance very fast. I guess they don’t want to hit the last team by accident, the ones who were covering the exit.
“Hold on tight,” I yell at Will, unnecessarily, as he’s got me around the waist in a death grip.
I aim for the gap between the lights, knowing it’s too narrow. At the last second, I swerve to the left, directly in front of the lead rider, and hit the throttle. The bike screams and climbs up the rock wall of the tunnel in a forty-five degree arc, then thumps down on the big tires. We fishtail badly for a moment, but the bike recovers and we shoot out of the tunnel into a wider, two-lane roadway.
God bless GPS, as I have no idea where the station is.
Tires screech behind us as the agents who were following nearly collide with the ones we just passed. I get the map up on the dash and activate the onboard computer, request directions to Nu London station.
“Proceed straight on King’s Road for six point eight miles,” a deep male voice instructs. “Then south on the M4 to Interchange Seven.”
We lean forward and I open the throttle as far as I can without losing it on the turns.
“Jansin,” Will breathes in my ear. “That was. . .”
Four headlights appear in the rearview, maybe half a mile behind.
“Once we’re at the station, we can lose them in the tunnels,” I call over the thrum of the engine, but Will’s already turned away to aim the laser weapon at our pursuers. He’s smart enough to shoot at the ceiling instead of trying to hit the bikes, and the blast rains dust and rubble down on their heads. I just hope the whole tunnel doesn’t collapse.
“Bear right in point two miles,” the GPS advises, and I yank the bike nearly horizontal as we hit a fork in the road. At the rate we’re going, point two miles means
right now
.
We scrape through a tight curve and when it ends, there’s only three sets of lights behind us. But it’s a long straightaway ahead. Bad for us. Because it’s the perfect stretch for them to deploy the heavy artillery.
I jerk the bike to the fluorescent center line as a storm of bullets rips through the space we were just occupying. But now I’m in the lane of oncoming traffic, which is picking up as we get closer to the city center. I almost forgot they drive on the opposite side here, and nearly collide head-on with a bus.
Will is cursing fluently behind me, and my legs shake so hard I have to squeeze my knees around the saddle to keep from falling off. Please God, don’t let us die here. Not like this. Not after everything we’ve been through. Not when we’re so close to finding out the truth. Maybe even close to being free of them forever.