She saw Ravi curled asleep in their bed with his knees too high, blissfully unaware. She saw the look on Amo's face as he lied about what Salle had done, in the moment he decided that he would kill the bunker himself. She saw her own father's white eyes, flickering briefly back to brown as he died to save her from the red demon, and she saw Cerulean's lonely head, lying in a drift of snow in Julio's torture pit.
The rage came easily after that, flowing through channels well carved and only delayed by three months of waiting. This was easy. This bastard in her lab, this idiot using her samples, was not going to hurt any of her people again.
She raised her arm in an underhand lob and hurled the crowbar. It went spinning wildly over the worktop, crashing through the fragile titration apparatus and shattering glass into the man's face before plowing on to strike him solidly in the shoulder.
The gun may have fired, she wasn't sure, but nothing hit her and she was already moving anyway, rounding the workbench. She snatched up two flasks and flung them at him as she ran; one struck him a hollow THUNK on the breastbone and drew a gasp, while the other sailed harmlessly over his head to smash loudly against an air-filtration pipe.
She sprinted the last few steps barefoot over the smashed titration glass just as he leveled the gun again, then she was on him and her shoulder thumped into his gut. He was heavier but not by much, and her 100 pounds of speeding muscle carried him off his feet and into the air. For a split second they flew, then the ground rose up and walloped him in the back.
Anna landed neatly on his chest and rolled up easily to straddle him. Up close his thin face was worn, pale as a zombie and haunted by the defeat he had to know was on him. She thrust two palm-first blows at his nose; one glanced off his cheek but the other caught him full on and shattered the cartilage flat with a red burst, like she'd just splatted a ripe tomato.
He bucked and struggled to throw her off but he wasn't strong and Anna didn't give him the chance to gain leverage. With one hand she leaned over to secure the gun, holding it flat to the ground in his hand, while with the other she stabbed at his neck three times, driving the edge of her palm into his throat like she was karate-chopping a block of wood.
On the second he gargled and began to choke as his airway crumpled inward, then the third blow fell in a frenzy and only made it worse.
His grip on the gun faltered and his body began to spasm. Anna grabbed the weapon and rocked back off his chest to point the gun at his head. His face was already turning purple, and she squeezed her finger to the trigger. It wasn't enough that he'd choke now, not after so many people had died, not after Cerulean died, and Abigail and Lucy and Chantelle and so many others all had died.
Red cloaked her like a bloody fall of snow, and flashes of the day Cerulean beat Julio rose into her mind, back when she was only five years old. Her memory of it was foggy, but she had no doubt that this was how he must have felt, in the seconds before Amo and Jake pulled him away. It was the right thing. If only they'd let him finish it and kill Julio, then so many good people would still be alive.
He foamed and pawed feebly at his throat, but there was no choice here. She'd already killed three thousand, what was one more? Better safe than sorry, that's the lesson she'd learned by now.
She squeezed the trigger.
3. QUARANTINE
Click.
The hammer fell but no bullet discharged. His brains didn't blow out across the floor as she'd expected.
Click, the hammer fell again. She checked the safety- off. She palmed the release to eject the clip, saw no bullets, and laughed.
No bullets. He hadn't fired at all, then. The muzzle was cold and there was no tangy cordite smell in the air, which only confirmed it. Did that change things?
Anna looked down at this strange, pale man as he died. His face was purple, he was gasping and reaching, sweaty and desperate, and was that the kind of thing that might haunt her in days and months to come? It wasn't satisfying, not like killing the mad woman or watching Salle Coram's head blow out. It wasn't even a grim kind of justice, as roaming the halls of the bunker had been, turning three thousand mostly innocent colonists to zombies.
This just seemed sad. Like a mistake.
She stood up. Choking was an ugly death, with the bulging eyes and obvious, grasping torment. Really ugly, not one she'd wish on anyone, not even someone who'd, what? Used her lab? Pulled an unloaded gun on her?
"Shit," she whispered, as the red rage ebbed. Certain people certainly deserved to die; certain whole populations had to die just to keep her people safe, but this man?
"Shit," she said again, as the weight started to hit. She would regret this, she could feel it, but then what could she do now; how did you fix a broken windpipe? Her training at Macy's hands, training she'd scheduled to go deeper than basic first aid and full on into battlefield medicine, covered some of this, but not this exact scenario.
She closed her eyes for a second and focused. They'd practiced something like this on zombies, who hadn't cared. In the event of a throat injury, an extreme allergy, even poison gas that the enemy could theoretically deploy, you did, what, a tracheotomy? Maybe that wasn't possible with the injury she'd done him; the upper part of his neck didn't look right, punched in and crooked, but lower down?
There wasn't any choice.
On the worktop she found one of her glass knives easily. Those things cut through skin like butter. And a tube? She snatched up one of the glass stalks from the titration kit then dropped back onto the man's chest. He'd gone gray now and his legs were only feebly kicking. Death throes. Anna knew the brain could survive for four minutes without oxygen, and he was already about a minute into that.
The glass knife made short work of his black hoodie and she tore it away. Underneath his chest was frail, pale and bird-like, with an array of striped scars, like lash marks. She laid three fingers at the top of his breastbone, steadied the knife on her index finger, then pushed it a cautious inch in.
He convulsed a little bit harder. She ignored it, drew the knife out, and pushed the titration tube in to the slit. It slid through easily, filled up with blood, then the blood blew out like a whale spouting water from its blowhole.
Anna was splattered. She laughed, as his throat sucked roughly at the air.
"You're welcome," she said.
He was breathing. His eyes glared at her, wide and mad with having just almost died, before unconsciousness sucked him down. A single tube wasn't perfect, it was probably barely enough oxygen to keep him going, but he was alive, and for now, out for the count.
She pushed herself to her knees, starting to feel a little drowsy. Looking down, she saw two puddles of blood pooling out of her torn feet. The amount of shattered glass stuck in them was appalling.
"Ugh," she mumbled. That was a lot of blood. She needed to pluck it out and get a bandage on them soon. Lucky she was in a medical facility.
* * *
In an hour she had everyone there, all seven of them: Feargal, Macy, Wanda, Ollie, Ravi, Peters, and Jake. The assault squad, gathered round a man on the floor with a tube in his throat, breathing through it with an even wet whistle.
"You did this?" Peters commented, first amongst them to speak.
The white floor of the lab was painted with bloody pools. The walls were spattered with blood; there was even spray on the ceiling, presumably from his first gasp through the tube. Glass lay in the dark red, sparkling like little diamond islands. Her bloody footmarks marked a trail leading out of the room, before she'd bandaged herself and slipped on her rain boots.
The man lay in the middle, wheezing through his tube. There was some color in his face now, though his neck was a deep purple and his throat was horribly crooked inwards.
Peters had asked her a question. She turned to him, feeling light-headed.
"It wasn't the first thing I did," she said. "I didn't just run up and stab him with a tube."
"But you did stab him with a tube?" Ravi confirmed. His express
ion was queasy. He wasn't good with blood.
"To save him," Macy stepped in sternly. "It's clear what happened here. Now we need to deal with it."
"He's lucky he's alive," Peters said, and that seemed to settle it. "Macy, what do you need from us?"
The rest happened while Anna spaced out. Loss of blood was making her faint. She slumped when Ravi pulled up a wheelchair for her to sit in. She tried to stand up again moments later, but her hands were too weak to get any traction on the handles. Through a fog she watched the others clear the workbench and lift the man up onto it.
A little later Macy was there before her, taking her pulse and peering into her eyes one after the other.
"She's lost a lot of blood," she said, not even talking to Anna. "Responses are sluggish. Ravi, get her on a drip; we've got saline packs back at the RV. You can lay her here."
Anna tried to say- "Don't worry about me, I'll be fine," but it came out instead as- "Ungghh", which was close but not quite there. For a time after that, while they laid her on a bench across from the man she'd almost killed, and rigged her drip, and Ravi squeezed her hand and Macy did exploratory surgery on the intruder's broken throat, she felt like she'd mostly gotten her message across.
So she relaxed and drifted. Everything was going to be all right.
But there was one thought that kept resurging, spiraling insistently round and round her head like a bug that wouldn't flush down the drain.
What discoloration?
What discoloration had this man found, when she'd found none? Who was he, and why was he so familiar with her lab, and what had he found?
"Amo," she mumbled.
"I love you too, honey," Ravi whispered. "I'm not going anywhere."
She tried to give him a disapproving look. He just smiled more convincingly.
* * *
A time later she roused.
Ravi was sitting nearby, slumped and dozing in a chair. The ward's white lights had been dimmed and she could hear the generator chugging away, but the man was there still, strapped to the workbench with what looked like airplane seatbelts. There was a small airplane cushion under his head and a red blanket over his legs. The glass tube was gone from his throat, replaced by a large bandage, though she could still see the dark bruise spreading up his jawline and down his chest.
This was the cost. Everybody paid the cost in blood and pain and loss, and ultimately they paid with their lives, because that was the way of the world now. There was no use crying over it, any more than there was any use crying over three thousand dead. They were dead and more would follow.
Ravi shifted in his sleep. Ravi and the others, none of them knew what she and Amo had done. Perhaps they were weak. They still believed it was Salle Coram's doing, because what person could be so barbaric as to kill thousands of unarmed people?
The intruder's head turned.
Anna blinked and focused in. Was he awake?
His eyes opened. He looked right at her. He was.
A long moment passed. He opened his mouth but winced. He wouldn't be speaking any time soon, that was clear, so instead they stared at each other. There was so much to say, but Anna didn't know what ought to come first. Who he was, what he wanted, what he'd found, why he hadn't just asked to use her lab? None of them seemed to strike the right tone, so they just stared, and perhaps some kind of meaning transferred in that long gaze.
Anna carefully eased her hand out of Ravi's grip. She was still sore and headachy, but the strength was there. Now was the time to project it.
"What do you want?" she asked.
He just looked back at her. That was fine, he couldn't answer by speaking anyway. She eased her feet around, bundled now like Christmas presents in white gauze and surgical tape, until she was sitting upright and steady on the bench. The wheelchair wasn't nearby, but that was all right.
"Ravi," she said sharply. "Wake up."
Ravi jerked, his eyes opened, then he saw Anna sitting up. Worry darkened his handsome, tanned features, and possibly something else. Fear.
"Anna, you're not supposed to be up. Macy said. Lie down."
His worry she could handle. He loved her, he was concerned about her, that was fine. But his fear? That stung, and she stopped looking at him. These were two different modes, loving Anna or Anna the fighter, and she couldn't do them both at once.
"He's awake, Ravi," she said flatly, choosing the latter. "I need you to do something for me."
"Of course, what is it?" he asked. He was confused, that much was obvious. He hadn't expected this. He'd been sitting there all day probably, waiting for her to wake up so he could help her through this, but she didn't need that kind of help. What she needed was a soldier to do her bidding.
"Get a piece of paper and a pen."
She spoke without breaking eye contact with the man on the bench. It seemed that he read meaning in that. He saw Ravi move and he saw her give the order and he understood. He made his judgments. She wasn't going to show any weakness at all. She'd won here. She'd saved his life. She would end it in a second if he gave any sign of trouble, and in his eyes she saw that he knew that. But there was something else there too, something deeper, like the fear Ravi felt but stronger, perhaps even hate.
"Here," said Ravi, holding out a piece of bloodstained paper.
"Give it to him," she said, keeping the cold edge in her voice, as if she was talking to the man directly. It would hurt Ravi to use him this way, she knew that, but this was the way it had to be done. This was her squad and she was the leader. For too long they'd been complacent. They'd gotten soft waiting for the massacre to begin; three months of preparation and now this was real. "Put the pen in his hand, where he can use it."
Ravi did it. The man didn't break eye contact. Yes, she thought. Give it to me. You hate me? You fear me? You should.
"Now tell me," she said. "What do you want?"
The pen moved. His hand shifted at the wrist, too drained to do more than that. Air whistled in and out of his bandaged throat. He wrote something, with Ravi's help. Ravi was a nurse, that was true. He was a nurturer.
"He's finished," Ravi said, lifting the paper to the light.
"What does it say?" Anna asked, still not breaking eye contact with the man.
"I can't," Ravi began, then paused and rotated the paper sideways. "I can't make it out. A lot of loops?"
"Here." She held out her hand. He dutifully put the paper in it, and she broke her gaze with the man to study it. It was all loops and squiggles, hard to make out, but the shape of it was there.
ONLY TO AMO
4. QUESTIONS
Anna stared. He stared back defiantly.
She'd broken his throat then saved him, and that was the mistake. Mercy was always the mistake, but it was done now, and he'd stuck a wedge into the crack that he would only pry further open.
He knew something. He wanted something. The ground had been well laid, and asking him questions would be weakness now, she knew that. To rage and flail would be just more displays of his power. She could threaten to kill him, but if she killed him she'd never find out what he really wanted.
What did he want?
It didn't make sense. She tracked the night backwards, trying to grasp her arms around it. She'd picked him up outside the hangar near the RVs, but why would he ever go there if what he wanted was here? They didn't keep cell samples out by the Cessna. He'd climbed the ladder up to peer into the cockpit, for what? There was certainly nothing for him in there.
A hollow feeling opened up beneath her. He'd played her for some agenda she didn't know, and that made her angry.
"Ravi, can you fetch my wheelchair?"
Ravi was watching her with wide eyes. He didn't get it, but that was fine.
"The wheelchair," she repeated.
He nodded and started moving. Anna waited for his back to be turned, and made her next move. Sliding off the edge of the bench, she let her feet take her weight.
Oh dear God, that hurt. It felt
like icicles pushing deep into her heels and forcing the skin apart. She almost buckled and collapsed, but held on to the edge of the bench to support herself. How many stitches had they used to sew her up, and how many now would need to be replaced?
It was worth it for the look on the man's face. She released the workbench edge, as a hot rush of blood started to stain right through her puffy white sock bandages. Sweat broke out on her forehead, but still she advanced on the intruder.
He watched her come.
"You'll tell it to me," she said, low enough for only him to hear. She leaned in and rested her fingers on his cheek. "What you're doing here, what you want, and do you know why?"
He stared at her, while Ravi was off somewhere struggling with the chair's parking brake.
"Because you're nothing. You're a comma in history, a footnote. Nobody would have cared if you'd died here. You're living on my mercy now, and if you want that mercy to go on, you'll tell me everything you know."
His lip lifted in a faint snarl. Anna wanted to laugh. How things changed.
Then her legs buckled and she barely caught herself on the edge of the desk.
"Anna, what are you doing?" Ravi called.
He rushed over with the wheelchair, took her arm and tried to guide her in, but she resisted. Just for another second, just a few more seconds of eye contact to fully sign, seal and deliver her message. Pain didn't matter. Loss and damage wouldn't stop her. At last the man on the bench looked away.
Anna wilted. She let Ravi fuss and guide her into the chair, then rush her out. They banged through the airlock door and out into the corridor with Ravi talking rapidly into his walkie.
She managed to hold it in until they were out of the quarantine zone and out onto the concourse. Then she leaned to the side and puked all over the marble-effect floor.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 87