“Fuck you.”
I take his hand that’s holding the dragon brooch and jam it toward his neck. I wait for his screams to end. “Get up.”
I keep the gun in his back and push him out of the room. I activate his phone. It’s fingerprint protected. We reach the elevator. “Open it.”
He presses his free hand to the scanner. The doors open.
“Where are they taping that Kissing Humans show?” I ask.
“The film studio,” he murmurs.
“What floor?”
“U86,” he says. The elevator ascends. “You gotta—”
I shoot him in the head. I lean down beside his body, grab his hand—damp with sweat— and press a finger to his phone’s bioscanner. I search through it, but it seems that he only had access to my CENSIR. I dial 911, am not surprised that it doesn’t work.
I search his body for anything useful, find an extra gun clip. I consider his body armor, decide against it. I’ll need to be quick, and it’ll slow me down. I position him in front of the doors, on his side so I can use him as barricade. I kneel behind him, propping my arm on his hip for stability.
I check in with Grackel. She hasn’t been able to reach my brother or Allie.
The digital indicator is at U93 when I remember the brooch. I need to give it back to Allie. I tug it from his neck, wipe it on my scrubs, and pocket it.
The elevator stops; the doors slide open into a giant warehouse. The soundstage is on the far end, maybe two hundred feet away. It’s outfitted with green screens and decorated to resemble a cave. James and Evelyn stand in front of sword racks on either side of the stage, proselytizing for the cameras directed at them. Their victims are shackled to adjacent slabs. It’s too far for me to make out features, but James has the one with the cowboy hat. Evelyn’s quarry is writhing against his bonds, moaning and squealing through his gag.
I count three white cloaks in the room, scattered around the stage in an arc. Their backs are to me, but shelving and lighting block my line of aim on O.J. He’s a few feet back from the middle of the stage, waving his gun around in the air, conducting to nonexistent music.
I have to get closer, get better angles. I scan for options, spot a perfect vantage point behind a row of equipment cases.
I climb over my dead-body barricade, get on my stomach, and army-crawl forward.
“Your government tells you that dragons are monsters,” Evelyn’s saying, her voice echoing from speakers on either side of the stage.
“Your government tells you that dragons cannot breed,” James says. I lift up onto my knees, test my line of sight. No good.
“Your government tells you that dragon children do not exist,” Evelyn says.
“Your government tells you that only monsters kill children,” James says.
“Your government tells you, and you believe,” Evelyn says.
I see them grab their swords from the racks.
Shit.
I rise up, quick swivel to my left, take a breath, and shoot. White Cloak One goes down.
“It’s her!” Evelyn shrieks.
I spin right. White Cloak Two’s swinging his machine toward me. I nail him in the chest—in his body armor. He staggers, sprays bullets toward me. One slices my calf. I buckle, squeeze off another round, miss.
I dash toward the wings. Gunfire chases me. I whirl around a lighting stand. It takes a couple of hits before toppling.
“Dandelion delight!” O.J. calls. A bullet whistles past my head. I zig, zag, dive behind a shelving rack laden with industrial boxes. Machine-gun fire rattles toward me from the other side of the shelving. Boxes tumble. One lands on my back; another slams onto my legs. I grimace, catch a glimpse of White Cloak Two’s shins in the gap between the floor and the first shelf.
I shoot him in the left shin, then the right. He falls to his knees. I shoot him in the thigh. He falls to his stomach. I shoot him in the face.
I’m wriggling out from the boxes when somebody steps on my hand. A foot kicks my gun away. “You have a little more Green in you than I thought, dandelion.”
I turn my head to see O.J. grinning all sorts of happy at me, his gold-plated Beretta aimed at my forehead. He crouches. The gun shakes in his grip, but even blind he wouldn’t miss me.
“Was it the left eye you got my baby Klyv with?”
“I think it was the right,” I say with a smirk.
“Yes, it was the right,” James says behind him. There’s a flash of metal.
O.J. turns his head a fraction. The sword connects with his neck, cleaves right through it. His body falls backward. His grinning face falls on top of me. I grab him by the ears and hurl him as far as I can.
“Sorry,” James says. “I had to make sure it was a killing blow.”
I wipe blood from my face. “Good job.”
He pushes the box off my leg. “What are you doing here, Melissa?”
I jump up, grimace back the inferno that ignites in my calf, and grab my gun. “Did you kill him?”
“I didn’t have a choice in this, Melissa,” he says as I fish out a Mickey Mouse key chain attached to a pair of heavy-duty keys from O.J.’s pocket.
“Did. You. Kill. Him?”
“No.”
My relief lasts until I skirt the shelving and get a view of the stage. Evelyn’s got her sword perched on Colin’s back, both hands on the pommel, ready to skewer him. A film of blood coats the blade, and for a moment I think it’s his, but then he looks up, his eyes filled with sadness, and gives a slight shake of his head.
I train my gun on her.
“Put it down, Twenty-Five.”
I stride toward her, my aim fixed in the spot between her eyes.
She raises the sword. “Don’t test me, Twenty-Five. Look what I did to Hector . . . and I liked him.”
Hector? I look toward the other slab. The Kissing Dragons director’s Botoxed face hangs slack, one eye wide open, the other half shut. Blood drools from his mouth.
I keep walking.
She lifts the sword in a threatening-to-plunge motion. “You know me, Twenty-Five.”
Too well. She’ll do it regardless.
“You know who he is?” Evelyn says. Her superior expression shifts to something I’ve never seen from her before. Fury? Her voice and arms are shaking with it. “You know who he is?”
I stop walking. “Let him go, Evelyn.”
Evelyn bristles. “He’s the one who put us in Georgetown! He’s the reason we’re like this!”
“You have three seconds to drop the sword, Evelyn, or I’m going to kill you.”
“He deserves it,” Evelyn says, but releases her grip. The sword clatters to the stage. “They all deserve it! They all—”
She spasms, then collapses.
“You were going to kill her either way,” James says, statement more than question. I glance back. He’s got O.J.’s phone in his hand.
No, I was going to interrogate her, then I was going to kill her. I head for the stage. “Where’s the hive, James? Where’s Allie?”
“Melissa . . . I’m sorry . . . I can’t . . . I just can’t.” He gets in front of me, and for a moment I think he means to obstruct me and that I might have to shoot him, but then he hands me the phone. It’s on his CENSIR control screen. “You’re going to have to incapacitate me.”
“Don’t make me do that. Oren’s going to find out you helped me.”
“Probably.”
“Come with us.”
“You and I both know that’s not possible. Get out of here, Melissa. Head to the fourth floor and escape. I’ll bring Allie back once this is all over. I promise.”
I wish I could believe him, wish I could believe things will somehow turn out all right. “I can’t do that.”
“They’re going to kill you.”
“Probably. Good-bye, James.”
He touches my cheek, pulls his hand back. “Good-bye, Melissa.”
I look at him for a second longer, then turn away and hit the inc
apacitate button on the phone.
45
I hobble onto the stage, get on my knees, and remove Colin’s gag.
“Hey, beaut—”
I kiss him.
“I don’t like you as a cowboy,” I say, tossing his hat aside. I use O.J.’s phone to remove his CENSIR.
“Your cowboy,” he says with utmost earnestness.
I’m unshackling him when I catch sight of the cameras. Still filming? I stare into the lens of the one focused on Colin’s execution slab. “Oren and the Diocletians will be attacking soon with hundreds of Greens! Get to your shelters! Get to your shelters!”
“Stay here,” Colin says the moment he’s free. Ignoring my questions, he jumps off the stage and jogs over to a row of equipment cases. He returns with a roll of duct tape and a microfiber cloth.
“Need to fix you up,” he says.
I glance at my calf. Blood streams down the back of my leg from where the bullet sliced it. “I’m fine.”
He crouches, places the cloth against the wound. As he duct tapes my calf, I search O.J.’s phone for information.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I’m looking for Allie. The hive,” I mumble. Unable to find anything useful, I navigate to Eveyln’s CENSIR controls. I shock her several times. Her body jerks and spasms, but she doesn’t wake. I up the settings.
Colin takes the phone from me before I kill her. “I think I know where Allie is. There’s a military com center for disaster protocol. Unfortunately, the only way to access it from here is via the hub.”
I hop off the stage, swallow the grimace as pain shoots through my leg. I scavenge a machine gun from one of the dead white cloaks. “What’s the hub?”
He loots the other body. “A massive underground train station, pretty much.”
The dragon zoo. “How do you know that?”
He doesn’t answer for several seconds. “There’s a lot I need to tell you.”
After I retrieve my Beretta, we head for the elevator.
“Start with where we are.”
“Area 51.”
“You shitting me? Is this where the dragons came from?”
“Oh, yeah, dragons, aliens . . . all part of the bigger government conspiracy.” He sighs. “Rumors and smokescreens. Area 51 was designed as an underground community model for end-of-the-world scenarios. . . .” He trails off, gives me a quick glance. “Hey, about what Evelyn was saying—”
“Colin, I know who you are.” I squeeze his hand. “Who you were, that doesn’t matter to me.”
“I don’t want any secrets between us,” he says. I can feel his heartbeat in his palm. He looks away, takes several deep breaths. “I helped design the original CENSIR. Evelyn was right. Everything that’s happened to you—”
“I killed your sister. Let’s focus on getting Allie back, then we can worry about who’s the more horrible person, okay?”
“Sure.”
“Look at me.” I wait until he does, smile up at him. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
For being foolish. For loving me. “For being you.”
The elevator’s closed. The indicator above says that it’s at U599. Colin searches through O.J.’s phone for an override to the bioprint scanner. Unable to find anything, he drags O.J.’s body over and places his palm to the scanner. The scanner flashes red. Rejection.
“He hasn’t been dead long enough,” Colin says. He looks over his shoulder toward the stage. “They know what’s happened. Hold tight.”
He sprints back toward the stage, returns a couple minutes later with a toolbox. He’s trying to pry the scanner open with a screwdriver when the floor indicator starts counting down. U598, U597, U596 . . .
“You do that?” I ask.
“Nope. They’re coming for us.” He tosses the screwdriver aside, winks at me, very J.R. cowboylike. “You ready for some fun?”
“You and I have different versions of fun.”
“Shock, awe, and confusion. Fish in a barrel.” He sketches out a quick plan for us to ambush their ambush. They’ve got five hundred floors to go. We’ve got four or five minutes to prep.
While I set up a fortification of equipment boxes around a shelving rack that gives me clear aim on the elevator, he retrieves a pair of speakers and sets them up in the wings of the studio. When he’s finished, he shoots out most of the lights in the room, except those in the vicinity of the elevator, which he calls the kill zone.
“When the doors open, they’ll come at you with lots of noise,” he says, clipping a mic to my scrubs. I can barely see him in the darkness. “We come at them with more.”
“Got it. Act hysterical.” My voice blares from the two speakers.
“Pissed,” he says, his voice also in surround sound. He dashes to the wall adjacent to the elevator, disappearing into the shadows beyond the kill zone.
I kneel behind the shelving rack, test my line of sight, and squeeze off a few rounds to get a feel of the machine gun’s kick.
“Don’t worry too much about accuracy,” Colin says. “Just keep firing.”
“Always go for the kill shot, right?”
“Thatagirl,” he says. “And if—”
“Go time,” I say.
The elevator arrives. My heartbeat accelerates; the doors start to open. I unload everything I’ve got, screaming and yelling at the top of my lungs. Colin’s voice echoes beside mine, coming from everywhere at once, louder than the metallic growl of my machine gun.
White cloaks pour out of the elevator. A couple get razed by my bullets; the rest toss grenades in every direction. Colin emerges from the shadows behind them, opens fire—
The grenades detonate. I duck and cover as a hailstorm of floor and shrapnel pelts my bulwark of equipment boxes. By the time it ends, the battle’s over. Colin’s working his way through a field of debris and white-cloak carnage.
He’s saying something.
It takes me a couple of second to hear over the ringing in my ears.
“Melissa?” My name echoes everywhere.
I stagger to my feet. “Here.”
After a quick check on my calf, and a quicker debate of whether or not I’m up to this, we scavenge the white-cloak bodies for ammo, then get in the elevator. We tell it where we want to go, but it doesn’t respond.
“Stand back,” Colin says. Using the butt of his machine gun, he smashes the elevator’s floor indicator. He hoists me up and has me pull out the indicator housing, a rectangular box that’s connected to the elevator’s internal framework by a braid of thick wires.
He examines them and jerks out a couple. The lights flicker. Emergency lighting turns on. He gives me a sheepish smile that’s painfully adorable. He rips out a couple more, crosses them. They spark, and a moment later the doors close and the elevator lurches to life.
We descend.
46
We spend the ride down going over hand signals so we can communicate without talking. Doesn’t do us much good once we hit bottom, though. It’s pitch black in the train tunnel and uncomfortably silent. I press the machine gun close to keep it from rattling. We tiptoe forward, feeling our way to the edge of the platform.
I reach out with my machine gun, probing for a train, but there’s nothing. Colin grabs me by the waist and lowers me onto the tracks. I hear him land next to me. The noise of him, his footsteps, his breathing, it’s all too loud, but I’m not sure I could move forward without it.
With my free hand, I find his. He’s sweating.
“Nervous?”
“Just hot,” he says. “You?”
“Just hot,” I respond, and take off before we get any hotter.
Fire shoots through my injured calf with every step, but I bite back the groans and force Colin to keep up with me.
Too many minutes later, I see the faint haze of the terminal’s lights. No Green glow. The dragon cages are empty. Colin slows us, skulks ahead, machine gun poised. He motions for me to stop or follow every few
steps. It takes all my effort to comply.
The terminal is empty. The expansive quiet reminds me of Chicago. No echo of humanity.
“You okay?” Colin asks.
“Fine.” The path of dragon cages extends out of sight. To our right, there’s another set of tracks leading into a different tunnel. “Which way?”
He checks my duct-tape bandage. It’s stained crimson. “Melissa, you’re not doing well—”
“Which way?”
He indicates the tunnel.
Before he can become too concerned, I pull him into the blackness of the other tunnel and set a brisk pace.
My lungs are burning almost as much as my calf when Grackel enters my head.
The attack has begun, she says, her voice resonating a little, which must mean she’s in broadcast mode, telling Colin the same thing.
“How do you know?” I whisper aloud for Colin’s benefit. Even that sounds like thunder in the dark quiet of the tunnel.
I can feel it. The air is alive with Green rage.
I drop into silent communication. Do you know where?
No, I do not know where. Feels like a lot.
What about my brother?
I have not been able to reach him, she says, for my ears only.
We reach the tunnel’s terminus. Columns of light funnel down a bank of deactivated escalators, dimly illuminating the station’s platform. Colin holds up his hand. Halt. He and the train he lurks behind are little more than gray shadows. He sneaks around it, climbs onto the platform, and scouts the escalators. He circles them twice before waving me forward.
I follow him up an escalator at a torpid creep. He pauses now and again, I assume to listen, though I’m not sure for what. That eerie silence from the terminal has followed us.
Can you tell Colin to hurry it up, Grackel?
Seconds later, Colin glances back at me and shakes his head.
He says that he is the trained soldier and rushing into the unknown is unwise, Grackel tells me.
Unwise, huh? I imagine he said something with a little more bite. He looks back again and holds up his hand, stiffer than normal, his eyes tight. Not just Halt, but Halt!
I push past with a glare and take the remaining steps two at a time.
The Other Side Page 28