Relentless

by Jonathan Maberry

  Their post-work ritual was to go down to the big rocks by the water, smoke some good Turkish weed if there were no polizia around, or smoke their way through three or four Benson & Hedges Reds while talking about politics and watching the stars. Tonight was a canapa night, and the joints were fresh and potent, spiked with something special that brought them quickly to a nice level and softened the edges of reality.

  They sat on their favorite rocks and felt the day slough off. They were aware of the many dark birds—ravens and crows and cormorants—clustered on the surrounding rocks, in the trees, or on the hoods of cars—but neither much cared. There were always birds by the water’s edge, and so what if these were black instead of white? The only thought either gave was Spike briefly wishing he’d brought a bag of table scraps with him, and he filed it away to do some other night.

  Enea talked about owning his own restaurant one day. Spike talked about how he’d like to ask out Gioia, the hostess, if her damned divorce ever went through. A lot of their conversations were retreads, but they didn’t care. They were doing okay in their lives, still young enough to enjoy the world, and content to be in each other’s company after another long, good day.

  The structure of the night changed dramatically, though, when they saw the boat.

  It came out of the night, pushing a bow wave, showing no lights at all. Like something emerging from a dream. Mysterious and a bit spooky. Only the muted growl of its engines—idling low as the boat moved toward the rocks—gave it any sense of reality.

  Spike tapped Enea and pointed. They’d lived on the coast all their lives and knew boats, but this …

  This was something special. A German-built Cigarette 59 Tirranna. A sleek black hull with red interior and seats—the color visible in the starlight. A monster racing boat that had to run two or three million euros. It looked brand-new.

  “Accidenti!” breathed Enea.

  “Dio santo,” agreed Spike.

  Then for a moment, they froze because the unreality of such a boat appearing out of the night was suddenly made nightmarish as they caught a glimpse of the pilot.

  It was not a man at all. The creature they saw had a huge, shaggy head covered entirely in white fur flecked with a red deeper than the boat’s interior. That red was smeared all over the thing’s elongated muzzle.

  “Licantropo!” cried Enea.

  They were practical young men who did not believe in werewolves, but here was a gigantic wolf piloting a ghostly boat. They were also very seriously stoned. Their mellow high turned to terror in a heartbeat, and as the boat slowed and ground onto the rocky sand below where they were sitting, they leaped to their feet and fled, shrieking about werewolves.

  The boat came to a softly rocking stop. The monstrous white dog stood up, then climbed over the windscreen and onto the bow. His pale fur glowed like silver in the cold starlight.

  The man, who had been in the other pilot’s chair, killed the engine, plunging the small stretch of coast into silence except for the fading footfalls of the two restaurant employees. Their continual yelps, prayers, and curses lingered long after they vanished down a side street. Then the man clambered out of the boat and onto the rocks. His clothes were dark, and the angle of approach had hidden him behind the dog. He clicked his tongue for the dog, who leaped from the bow to the rocks and then followed the man up to the street.

  They lingered for only a moment as the man oriented himself.

  Then they faded into darkness and were gone long before anyone came to investigate. The night birds watched them go and then one by one lifted off the sea-soaked rocks and followed.

  CHAPTER 17

  INTEGRATED SCIENCES DIVISION

  PHOENIX HOUSE

  OMFORI ISLAND, GREECE

  Dr. Jane Holliday sat perched on a stool sipping tea from a delicate china cup, the saucer held between thumb and index finger of her other hand. She was the calm center of a storm of activity as handlers brought in dozens of boxes of paper printouts, crates of laptops, cell phones, and hard drives. Another team, dressed in lemon-yellow biohazard suits, carried special metal boxes boldly stenciled with the distinctive symbol, the four stylized circles of which representing the infection chain of agent, host, source, and transmission. These boxes went into a cold room guarded by two stone-faced guards with automatic rifles at port arms.

  “Wow,” said Isaac Breslau, Doc Holliday’s senior research assistant, “that’s a lot of stuff.”

  “Yeppers,” said Doc happily. “They got it all, soup to nuts. No one at that site had the presence of mind to delete the data or toss a lit cigarette butt into the file cabinets. Might as well be Christmas morning.”

  “Sure, but only if there’s something of use in there,” said Isaac. He was a very short man, barely above five feet tall, which made him quite a comical companion to Doc, who was over a foot taller. And while Isaac was slim as a sword blade, Doc was what her Jewish aunt used to call zaftig—curves upon curves. The running joke was that Doc looked like a younger Dolly Parton on growth hormones, which was not entirely inaccurate, even down to the embroidered cowboy shirts and hand-tooled boots. Doc, who had endured being a figure of fun as a girl—having grown to double-D cups by tenth grade—decided to stop trying to hide and instead use her body as both a distraction and a challenge. People too dim to look past the bustline, wildly coiffed blond curls, and oversized hourglass figure did so at their peril. It meant they didn’t bother to look into Doc’s eyes and see the scathing humor and bottomless intellect. While most of the kids in high school were trying to get laid, she was filing her first dozen patents. She was born poor, graduated high school three years early, and with $4 million in a new trust account. She blew through the corporate world, racking up more patents and more millions, then fell in with the Defense Department eggheads at DARPA until they started to bore her. When Mr. Church offered her carte blanche to do any side research she wanted while also overseeing the Integrated Sciences Division—first with the DMS and then in an even more expanded capacity with RTI—she jumped at it. It was refreshing to work for someone who was not her intellectual inferior.

  Isaac Breslau was not on the same level as Doc, though he wasn’t that many floors below. A professor of biological engineering from MIT, with a handful of master’s degrees in chemistry, materials science, and health sciences. They’d met at a conference in Zurich and fell in together thick as thieves, because they were in a room of brilliant minds but were clearly—in terms of intellect—the big dogs in that room.

  Doc had hired Isaac, and when he saw the sophistication of the RTI science labs, he nearly wept.

  “There’ll be something we can use, lamb chop,” she said. Doc was fond of diminutives with everyone except Church—at least not to the boss’s face. Not often, anyway. “We’ll pick all the meat off it and suck out the marrow.”

  “First … ewww,” said Isaac. “And second … I agree.”

  They watched the workers move in a constant line like ants going out to forage, bringing back goodies, and heading out for another load.

  “How much of this is there?”

  Doc looked at a clipboard, flipped over a few pages. “Three tons of paper, two tons of computers, including several Fujitsu Fugaku supercomputers.”

  Isaac sniffed. “Last year’s models.”

  Doc grinned. “Yeah, once we strip ’em out, we can sell ’em for a nickel at a yard sale.”

  “They’re mine,” said a voice. “Calling dibs.”

  They turned to see a slim young Black man come hustling into the room. He wore an open bathrobe over pajama bottoms and a T-shirt with the big red Superman symbol on the chest.

  “Well, hell,” said Doc, “we’ve gone and woke li’l Bug from his beauty sleep. And aren’t you cute in your little blue PJs.”

  “They told me they were bringing back hardware,” said Bug, stopping by the two scientists, “but this is kind of a jackpot.”

  “Again,” said Isaac, “only if there’s something wor
th finding.”

  Bug cocked an eyebrow at Doc. “He’s cheerful tonight.”

  “He needs a foot rub and some hot cocoa,” said Doc.

  “Stop it,” said Isaac, but she ignored him.

  A lab tech came over with paper cups of coffee for the three of them, and they sipped and watched. After several minutes, during which the incoming crates and boxes grew to resemble the Grand Tetons around them, Isaac sighed and said, “Are we going to drink bad coffee, make jokes, and not talk about the elephant in the room?”

  Doc sipped and shook her head.

  Bug set his cup down and rubbed his eyes. “I keep telling myself Joe’s going to be okay.”

  “Joe,” said Doc slowly, “has never been okay since I met him. He is, by any clinical interpretation of psychology, a bag of rabid hamsters. What he went through at Christmas messed that boy up so bad that he should never—and I mean never, ever—have been allowed anywhere near a field op.”

  “Rudy Sanchez might disagree,” said Isaac.

  “Rudy Sanchez is at home with his son and very pregnant wife in Corfu,” said Doc. “Besides, ever since our boy got out of the hospital, Rudy has been lobbying for Joe to step down from fieldwork. He’s badgered Mr. Church just about every damned day.”

  “And yet Church sent Ledger out on this mission,” said Isaac. “Granted, I haven’t been around Church as long as you two have, but this feels like it’s out of character for the big man, too.”

  Bug picked up his coffee cup, stared into it, and set it down again. “No comment,” he said.

  Isaac shook his head. “We don’t even know where Ledger’s gone. It’s been hours now. God only knows what intel he got from those people he … he…”

  “Butchered is the word you’re looking for,” said Doc. “Let’s not be imprecise.”

  “Fine,” said Isaac, though he didn’t actually repeat the word. “We don’t know where Ledger’s off to. He has no resources, no backup. I heard that Top Sims wasn’t even sure if Ledger took any weapons or equipment with him.”

  “Oh, honey bear,” said Doc, “that’s one thing you don’t ever have to worry about. Joltin’ Joe’s trained for this kind of thing. He knows how to acquire money, equipment, and other resources. He might even ask nicely for some of it, but—let’s face it—for a man as skilled and resourceful as he is, do you really think for one blessed moment that he’s going to let anything get in his way?”

  Bug sighed. “What I’m really afraid of is Joe finding a quiet place to stick one of those gun barrels up under his chin and see if that stops the pain.”

  It was such a cold, frank, and plausible statement that it sucked all the warmth out of the room.

  CHAPTER 18

  BARI KAROL WOJTYŁA AIRPORT

  VIALE ENZO FERRARI

  BARI, ITALY

  The fat old man with the emotional support dog waited nearly forty minutes for the pay phone to be free. Coin phones were harder to come by lately, and this one seemed very popular. He watched a nun use it, then a teenage boy wearing a Pro Italia Galatina football jersey, and then a woman with a baby. Why none of them had cell phones this far into the twenty-first century was a mystery.

  The old man waited until there was no one around to observe him, and then he waddled over to the wall-mounted phone and thumbed in some coins. The fact that he wore gloves to do this also went unobserved. He let the phone ring while he stood there, eyes closed, one hand clutched tightly around the handset, the other balled into a fist at his side.

  When the woman answered, the man sagged against the wall as if he’d been punched. There were tears in his eyes, and his breath was a ragged wheeze.

  “Hello?”

  The woman’s voice was soft, tentative, and uncertain. Almost as if she suspected but did not believe who was calling.

  The fat old man said nothing.

  “Hello, who’s calling?” asked the woman.

  He did not reply.

  Then she said, “Joe?”

  That one word. Soft, scared, hopeful.

  It took so much of what he had left inside to speak. “I … I love you, Junie.”

  And then he hung up, whirled, and fled. The dog followed as the man hurried toward the closest trash can, and it stood guard while the man vomited.

  CHAPTER 19

  PHOENIX HOUSE

  OMFORI ISLAND, GREECE

  Church woke in the lightless depths of the night with a name on his lips. It tasted like blood and bile.

  He reached for Lilith, but her side of the bed was empty. Then he saw her by the window. Standing so still, her naked silhouette a study in tension. He could read that in every line, from the rigidity of her back muscles to the fist clenched tightly beneath her chin. Without turning, she said, “He is alive in the world again.”

  He.

  She didn’t need to say the name. They both knew.

  And they were both afraid.

  INTERLUDE 8

  THE PAVILION

  BLUE DIAMOND ELITE TRAINING CENTER

  STEVENS COUNTY, WASHINGTON

  FOUR MONTHS AGO

  Eve was alone even though she had company.

  That was how things were since Adam died. Men came and went, through her life, in and out of her bed, coasting on the far edge of her awareness. She kissed them, had sex with them, sometimes made them have sex with one another. She used them hard. She even killed one of them once just to see if that would make her feel anything.

  It didn’t. And it was messy and a bit disgusting. Two of her other men had to clean things up. HK tried to scold her, but Eve walked away and locked herself in her bedroom. That had been … when? Two weeks before? A bit longer? She couldn’t tell. Time, like so many other things, had lost its meaning.

  The only highlights of her day—the only thing that gave her any joy and brought her to a sharp focus—were the visits. Daddy came and sat with her, telling her things he wanted her to learn, filling her mind with plans about how they were going to find Joe Ledger. Find him, capture him, and spend days—weeks—ruining him. Breaking his will and his heart. Turning his body into a cage of broken pieces. Feeding him on pain and making sure the doctors did not let him die. Eve wasn’t even sure she wanted him to die. No. It would be so much better if Ledger were turned into a cripple. Maybe with no feet and just a few fingers on each hand. He’d only really need one eye. He wouldn’t need his cock or balls. Daddy said that a man could be reduced to something barely recognizable as having been human and still survive. A person like that could live for years. Kept in a cage or given a little dolly to push himself around on. No teeth, no nose. No hope.

  And together they would drive him to the very edge of madness, but not push him over. No. She wouldn’t want that. She—and Daddy—wanted him alive so he could be aware, every single day, of what he’d become and to live with the knowledge that everyone he loved was either dead or being similarly destroyed.

  Whom, then, should they remove from Ledger’s life first? Always a delicious speculation. Church, of course. Both Daddy and Kuga wanted that spooky prick dead and run through a wood chipper.

  Junie Flynn. Yeah, she had to go. Eve wanted to hand her over to a dozen—no, two dozen of the biggest, ugliest, meanest Fixers—and then tape every moment of their fun and games with her.

  The others, too. The big stupid white guy with all the muscles? Dead. The Black man who looked too old to be a soldier? Dead. The bitch with the sniper rifle and the gay Italian guy? Dead, dead.

  All of them dead. Not quickly, and not all at once, but dead in the end. And their deaths shown on movie screens ten times bigger than life, so Joe Ledger could watch. Every. Single. Day.

  The very thought of that made her feel.

  It made her weep.

  It made her scream.

  It kept her completely alive.

  CHAPTER 20

  INTEGRATED SCIENCES DIVISION

  PHOENIX HOUSE

  OMFORI ISLAND, GREECE

  Doc and Isaa
c stood side by side, looking at the material brought from the island.

  Folding tables had been brought in and arranged like spokes on a wheel radiating outward from where they stood. Each table represented a specific branch of science. Scott Wilson found them and threaded his way through boxes of additional materials that littered the floor, creating a labyrinth.

  “Good lord,” Wilson said when he reached the center and stood by the two scientists. “What is all this?”

  “It’s the haul from Mislav Mitrović’s lab,” said Doc.

  Wilson glanced from one table to the next. “Is there a method to this madness?”

  “Well,” Doc said, “a couple of hours ago, I’d have said that it was just a mishmash of records from a bunch of unrelated lines of research.” She tapped one table with a bright blue fingernail. “For example, here we have some pretty advanced work on neural memory chips, including some off-market studies on closed-loop neural prosthetics clearly purposed for military use.”

  Tap.

  “Here we have what are clearly stolen documents from DARPA focusing on human-machine fusion—that’s cyborgs to you, Scottie sweetie. A well-funded and long-range program to determine how best to integrate machine parts to human combat soldiers, with an eye to having a cybernetic ground force by 2050. But there’s also a lot of material here, including very sophisticated schematics, that leads me to believe that actual development is much further along. Some that seems like it’s in-house development by Kuga’s group of Frankensteins because those newer reports aren’t written in the DoD-friendly military doublespeak.”