The guards broke.
First one man, and then the others, turned and bolted back through the doors. There was no thought to their flight—this was a primal terror and I shared it as I watched on in horror. She was broken. She was what I would become, unless there was a way back. Unless there was something to cling to.
Johnson and Turner stood with Pearson as they watched me, eyes soft as I finally understood it all. We are each of us insane. Maybe there is no true sanity. All any of us have is the control we cling to, and any one of us can be swept away.
She took two steps before Afridi fled, running as if the hounds of hell themselves were chasing him. Perhaps one hound was, but all it would take was one lucky shot and she would be finished.
I don’t know what I was thinking. She was on a precipice. If she wasn’t brought back, even just half a step, she was lost. And right then, right there in the middle of this nightmare, I realised I couldn’t let her fall. I couldn’t face this alone.
I grabbed at her arm as she made to follow. She snapped around, her face terrible as she glared back at me, twin flames rising up from her eyes and cheeks. I reached out and pulled her close, ignoring the heat as I sought her lips. Her fire burned, but I didn’t care. For the length of three frantic heartbeats I kissed her. Until she staggered back and looked at me with wild, darting eyes.
“What the fuck was that?” she demanded.
“I had to do something. You were losing it. Besides,” I shrugged, “it seemed to work.”
She glared at me, anger showing all the more clearly in her eyes now that her flames had gone.
“I can’t just let him go, Carver,” she admitted, glancing back along the hallway. “Not after all of this. Not after Armond, and everyone else he’s done this to.”
I reached for her shoulders, ignoring her as she flinched. “We can’t go after him, Mackenzie. Not now. He’s probably got more guards around him already. Then there’s the others we let free. Who knows where they are by now? There are just too many unknowns, and neither of us is in any condition for a fight.”
She glanced down at my leg, at the fabric of the uniform clinging to the wound it covered, and sank down into herself.
“Fine,” she sighed. “So how the hell do we get out of here?”
I grinned. “That, at least, I think I can do.” I pointed down at the floor.
She frowned me, and then peered down at the dark lines of dirt on the tiles.
“Rubber?” she guessed, after a moment. “From a trolley or something, bringing in supplies?”
I grinned as her smile grew. “And so?”
“So, they’ll lead to a loading dock, and a way out!” She grabbed for my hand, almost dragging me along.
The hallways were silent, a stillness made somehow more pronounced by the noise we made as we crashed through doors and hurtled along the passageways. Our pace wasn’t just fuelled by a desire to be out of here. Afridi would be back, and he wouldn’t come alone. Twice I paused at some half-heard sound, both times Mackenzie tugged at me until we were running again.
It hadn’t escaped me that the dark marks and scuffs could just as easily lead to where the supplies were going as they could to the loading dock. Even odds weren’t the best, but I’ve leapt at a lot worse before now.
A burst of gunfire in the distance pulled us both to a stop and we froze, ears straining against the silence that followed. I fought against Mackenzie’s tug as she urged me on, and turned towards the faint glow of a computer screen shining through a window into the hallway.
The glass was smoked, almost tinted, and the glow was slight. I’d never have seen it if we hadn’t stopped to listen to the gunfire. I pressed an ear against the door for a minute and then tapped the card to the reader.
The security room was empty. A bank of monitors sat against one wall, with a half-eaten meal abandoned on the desk. I stepped around an open cabinet door and the Kevlar vests that had spilled out onto the floor, and touched one finger to the food. It was still warm, but only barely.
“Someone left in a hurry,” Mackenzie muttered.
I grunted and examined the monitors. The CCTV footage ran throughout the complex, and scenes of carnage filled two of the screens before I even began fiddling with the controls. The captives had made it further up than I could have hoped. The mag-locked doors simply weren’t designed to hold back that kind of force. By cycling through the cameras, I could trace their progress upwards through the facility.
“Found them,” I muttered. I watched three guards working their way backwards along a corridor. For all my mockery of their skills, they looked to have had some military training, effecting a fighting retreat as they leapfrogged each other’s positions.
Their bullets were having little effect, and the frantic waving of the guards combined with their soundless shouts as they scrambled back towards the camera. The figure was a blur at the farthest limits of the screen, charging against the retreating men. The image blurred as he moved, distorting as his form seemed to shudder and fracture, multiple images occupying the same place at once as he ran through a storm of bullets that didn’t touch him.
He shifted again, his image shuddering as he covered thirty feet in an instant. The guards stumbled back, falling over themselves as he laid about him with arms and fists that passed through flesh, sending gore spattering over the walls.
The footage was silent, but the panicked cries of the guards were written on their features. I couldn’t make out what was being said, not by the guards anyway.
The words were clear on the lips of the man who tore them to pieces. Two words, screamed and sobbed over and over from a face I’d looked into as I undid his restraints.
“Kill me!”
“Kill me!”
“Kill me!”
“Jesus Christ!” Mackenzie breathed over my shoulder. “Where is that? Where is he?”
I glanced at the numbers in the corner of the screen. “Close enough for us to worry about it. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Distant machine gun fire began again as soon as we left the security room. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded closer than before. I didn’t really need more of an incentive to get out of this place, but it was good to know Afridi’s guards were occupied.
I’ve never been one to pass up an opportunity, and we raided the security room as thoroughly as we could. The Kevlar vests weren’t built to fit anyone as small as Mackenzie, but even an ill-fitting vest would give her more protection than the stolen uniform on its own.
There was no time to look for a map. All the folders that looked to hold procedures and manuals were locked into a metal cage on the wall.
As it turned out, the marks on the floor proved more useful that I’d expected. There was still a 50/50 chance we were going the wrong way but as the marks became darker and more pronounced, I took it as a good sign.
Gunfire echoed loudly behind us again as we ran, and when I say ran, I mean a pained, lurching, jog.
Mackenzie glanced behind often but the looks she gave me were as confused as they were worried.
“This isn’t right,” she muttered as we slowed.
“How do you mean?”
“Look around, Carver,” she said, waving an arm. “Where is everyone?”
Empty hallways weren’t at the top of my list of worries at the moment, but she had a point.
“Probably caught up in that mess,” I jerked a thumb back over my shoulder.
“What, all of them? Even if every single person they have in security is busy, what about the science staff?”
I grimaced. She was right. Most people will run once the bullets start flying. The fight or flight reflex isn’t an equal split. People run, it’s built into the very fabric of what we are. That’s why the human race is still around.
“How many? A hundred or so? Is that what you said?”
She nodded. “Something like that. Janan said close to a hundred, and that was only the scientific st
aff.”
Shit, there could be upwards of two, or three, hundred people down here. Even if half of them were stuck in the lower levels, that still left more than enough to cause us problems. Being faced with a panicking mob was not going to help our situation.
I suppose that makes me sound callous? Maybe I am, but you reach a point when you have to just look out for you and the squad. In this case, Mackenzie was my squad. I couldn’t save everyone in this place. Half of them had been complicit in keeping us here, and I wouldn’t save them, even if I could. They could fucking rot.
Mackenzie saw the blood before I did and jerked to a halt. Drips and spatters that painted a trail along the floor and grew until it was a lurid streak leading to a body slumped in the hall. I wasn’t bothered by the body, or the blood. It was the footprints I was worried about. Someone had chased this man down. Someone wearing heavy combat boots.
The lab-coat only made the blood more pronounced. He’d crawled the last hundred feet or so, dragging himself along before whoever it was hunting him had finally cut him down. Like I said, the body didn’t bother me, neither did the way he’d dragged himself. Maybe it’s part of the life I’ve led that I’m desensitised to these things. Maybe I’m just an arsehole. In any event, it was the fact that he had died from gunshot wounds that was more important to me than anything else.
I pulled Mackenzie on. There wasn’t anything to be gained from examining the body and time was something we couldn’t afford to waste.
The hall widened as we rounded the corner and faced the cargo lift and a set of large double doors leading into the loading dock. I would have sworn at how much time we could have saved by just taking that route, but the scene in front of us took the words from my mouth.
I didn’t count the bodies. More than twenty lay in the hall in front of the lift, but I stopped taking it in after that. Most of them had been shot in the back as they ran. A few must have turned and tried to fight, but fists have never been much good against bullets. They’d been massacred; gunned down as they tried to flee the chaos that was rushing up from the lower levels. I suppose some might find a sick kind of justice in all of it, but that wasn’t a sentiment I wanted anything to do with.
I almost missed her. If it hadn’t been for the business suit she wore, I probably would have. The majority of the bodies were dressed in lab coats and her dark suit stuck out, the blonde hair lending a contrast. I moved closer, crouching to roll her over, ignoring Mackenzie’s whispered calls.
Artemis looked up at me in shock as she sucked in a pained breath through pale lips.
“Hello, Jo,” I said softly.
“Carver?” she gasped, her eyes showing how much it hurt her to speak.
I swore to myself under my breath as I looked at her. She had no business being here. Unless, of course, Johnson had been right, and she’d never had anything to do with the CIA or the US Government. I shook my head as the pieces fell into place. The phone in my kit, the moved passport. She’d been involved in my abduction from the very beginning, and I wandered into the trap as trusting as a lamb.
“Son of a bitch!” muttered Turner from somewhere behind me.
I managed to keep my voice level as I spoke, but my fists were clenched hard enough to make my hands ache. “I suppose I should ask what the fuck you’re doing here, but it all seems pretty obvious now. One question though?”
“Why should I tell you anything?” she managed. “Get me out of here and maybe we can talk.”
I sucked on my lip for a moment, glancing at Mackenzie. She gave me a shrug and looked back down the way we’d come, eyes darting.
Jo had lost a lot of blood, that much was obvious from the state of her suit. It had soaked through the jacket, spreading out from where her hands pressed to the wound. Laying on her hands was probably the only reason she was still alive.
“You’ll never make it, Jo. If I move you, you’ll bleed out in minutes.”
She smiled; a sad, cruel, smile that might have just been the truest reflection of who she actually was. “Then why should I tell you a goddamned thing?”
She had a point, and I didn’t have an awful lot to bargain with. Still, I needed answers, and she was the only person who could give them to me. I raised the gun, letting her get a good look.
“You’re dying, Jo. Nothing is going to change that. I can end it for you now, or I can leave you with the pain before you eventually slip away.”
“Bastard!” The word came out as a whisper but the venom it carried with it more than made up for the lack of volume.
“Carver,” Mackenzie hissed. “It’s nice that you’ve made a friend, but do we really have time for this?”
Artemis gave her a cool look, dismissing her with a glance. “What do you want to know, Carver?”
“How far?” I asked. “How far back along the trail does this go? You’ve been in on this since the beginning. How many others were involved in getting me here?”
She laughed, a pained chuckle that brought blood with it. “Who’s the rat? Who set you up? Everyone, Carver. I’ve been tracking you for months. I had your casino habits, your debts, your friends, and all the people you might go to for a job if things got desperate.”
“McCourt?” I spat.
The word brought another pained smile to her lips. “Oh yes, Mr McCourt. His empire isn’t nearly as stable as he makes out. It really didn’t take much to get him on side. You’ve been my marionette, Carver. I just had to pull the right strings to get you to dance.”
I closed my eyes for a minute, sitting back on my heels.
McCourt? Fuck!
I very nearly threw the whole idea out as bullshit. I’ve never claimed to be a paragon of virtue. I’ve done shitty things the same as anyone, and probably worse than most. There’s one thing that’s always been drilled into me though: you don’t shit on your mates, and you never shit on the squad. It’s a bond that’s hard to describe outside of the forces. It’s more than simply being friends, most of the time it’s closer than family. These are the people that you literally trust with your life, while they trust you with theirs. Shitting on that just didn’t even make sense to me. Except it did. In an awful way it made perfect sense.
“Why?” I asked the question before I thought.
Her laugh was harder this time, bringing more pain and more blood. I can’t say I was feeling much sympathy at this point. “How innocent are you? For the money, Carver. Afridi offered a small fortune for you.”
“So why the fuck are you still here?” Mackenzie hissed, spitting the words out as she drew closer. I hadn’t seen her hovering; hadn’t thought she was paying attention.
“Why do you care?” Jo replied, unruffled in the face of Mackenzie’s fury.
“I care, because it makes no sense,” I told her.
Mackenzie was right. This was a contract job; locate me and orchestrate my delivery like a sack of meat. Why was she still here? Why had she ever been here in the first place?
“Why are you here, Jo?”
“Because he was working with miracles, Carver.” Jo’s eyes were wide, her pain forgotten for a moment as the wonder filled her voice. “The things he told me about you and the others… I had to find out more. I had to come here and be part of this. And then the things I’ve seen here since, Carver… You just wouldn’t believe. Or maybe you would.”
“And that’s what killed you,” Mackenzie told her. “That’s why you deserve to die. How many others did you set up? How many abductions have you arranged, you bitch? You don’t deserve any mercy. I can’t think up anything bad enough for you to deserve. At least you can die slow and hard.”
I looked at her then, and the thing that looked back at me could never have been a nurse. She was all fury, and spite, and jagged edges.
“She’s got a point you know, Roasties,” Turner put in, chewing on a thumbnail. “Leave the bitch. She had you delivered here like some kind of big, ugly pizza. You don’t owe her shit.”
I levelled the gun
before I could give myself more time to think. I’d argued with myself enough already, without Turner and the others wading in.
The shot was loud, echoing along the hallway until the silence came back to claim it. Mackenzie gave me a frosty look that I more or less ignored. I’ve never been great with women. This ability to ignore the danger signs sent my way probably has a lot to do with that.
I should have known Jo was in on this. I should have seen it but I hadn’t, and I hated myself for it almost as much as I now hated McCourt. In hindsight, putting a bullet into Jo might not have been the greatest idea in the world. She certainly didn’t deserve a quick ending.
We left the pile of bodies to bleed, and followed a passage that sloped down through a set of large double doors and into a loading dock. I slipped through them slowly, almost gasping at the blast of stifling air that washed over me as I ran my eyes over the area, not letting them settle on anything. The human eye is attracted to motion, and I had far more chance of catching somebody moving than simply spotting them. Whoever had killed the people by the lift hadn’t left any tracks and they could as easily be in here as anywhere else
I motioned to Mackenzie, and ran for the closest row of pallets. The room was cavernous, lit by fluorescent strips that hung, suspended, from the ceiling. Giant ceiling fans did their best to circulate the air, but it didn’t seem to do anything other than add a low rumble that, somehow, didn’t truly dispel the silence.
I moved through the heat, making my way to the end of a row of pallets, and resisted the urge to cough as the dust found me. A pair of forklifts were visible as I peered past, parked against one wall with long racks of metal shelves beside them, stacked high with supplies.
The place was well-lit, but it was an ambusher’s paradise. I glanced at Mackenzie and pressed my finger to my lips. She nodded, gripping her gun, and we set off towards the next row of pallets, heading for the farthest wall and the rolling door that I hoped would be there.
Mackenzie moved quickly, keeping close enough that I always knew where she was, but not so close as to be in the way. I crouched low against a pallet stacked high with boxes, and bound in plastic sheeting, and listened.
The Lore of Prometheus Page 27