by Rachel Caine
Claire nodded. She focused on the plans first. Anderson was right – it was a straightforward enough job, but a lot of it required her to disassemble the base model, and reassemble in the new configuration. She studied the schematics, and examined each piece that she was to add into the machine. That was an amplifier, capable of boosting the signal at least a hundred times beyond what she’d originally planned. That piece, snapping on underneath, was an inverter that changed the signal from something that enhanced to something that cancelled – which was what she had originally intended, to be able to remove a vampire’s desire to attack instead of having to fight in the first place. These were the modifications she’d have made in the course of her studies … something that would have made VLAD a mostly benign defensive weapon.
But the last piece was the most sinister. It was a complex combination of several different pieces, but from what Claire could puzzle out, it was designed to trigger a different set of emotions. Fear, obviously – overwhelming, paralysing terror. It also seemed to have some other component. From what Claire had seen of its effects, it must have sensitised nerves and created a strong pain reaction. Like a taser, only more intense, and very long lasting.
‘What are you doing?’
She jumped. Irene Anderson was staring at her, cold suspicion in her gaze.
‘I’m sorry,’ Claire said. ‘I just wanted to be sure I understood what I was doing first. I didn’t want to make any mistakes.’
‘Don’t,’ Anderson said flatly. ‘You’ve got an hour. Move it.’
Claire took a deep breath, put the nonworking VLAD in the centre of the worktable, consulted the plans one last time, and began the work.
She built the thing, piece by piece. The tools were all right there, everything precise and perfectly laid out for her. Anderson was watching her, and she made sure that she did nothing, absolutely nothing, that would draw any suspicion.
Not even Dr Anderson could keep her focus completely on her forever. Claire felt when it started to wander; it was like pressure coming off of her, and she had to work hard to not give any kind of physical signal that she knew something had changed.
Just do the work. Do the work.
By the time she was down to the last of it, Anderson’s focus had mostly moved on, though she remained close. And when Myrnin suddenly convulsed and cried out, writhing in his restraints, it drew Dr Anderson’s complete attention for a critical few seconds, just as Claire fastened the last piece of the machine on board.
She’d already identified the opportunity, when she’d been going over the plans. The last component had switches built inside. They were tiny, not meant to be manipulated without specialised tools, but she’d deliberately chosen the smallest possible screwdriver, even though it was the worst tool for the job she was apparently doing.
It fit into the tiny slots just far enough to slide the switches in opposite directions.
I have no idea if I’m modding this right, she thought. But all she could do was reverse the order of the switches, and hope that it worked.
As she finished and put down the screwdriver, Dr Anderson was right there to take control – even before she’d managed to take the weapon off its stand to hand it to her.
‘Good job, and done in time, too,’ Anderson said. She handed it to the man who’d been Claire’s shadow and guard all this time. He didn’t bother with the safety strap. ‘It’s time to see if you’re reliable, Claire. If you aren’t – if you decided to try to pull a clever one and sabotage me – then we’re going to find out right now, and it won’t go well for you. Or for your friends. This is your final exam, do you understand? Pass, and you win the lives of those you care about.’
Claire met her eyes. ‘And what if I fail?’
‘Then we have acres and acres of farmland waiting for fertiliser,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘I’m fighting for the human race. I’m not going to flinch from whatever I have to do to save innocent lives for the future.’
‘Neither am I,’ Claire said. ‘You should have trusted me. I’m really tired of people not trusting me.’
Shane would have recognised that tone. But Dr Anderson missed the warning altogether.
Anderson led the way to the other half of the room, through the clear glass door that separated the two parts. The three vampires knelt where they’d been left, all still submissive. Dr Davis had blood samples laid out on his lab tables, neatly labelled, and he was talking to a lab geek in a white coat – but one, Claire noticed, who also had the rising sun pin on his lapel. He looked up when he saw Anderson, Claire, and the guard, and nodded.
‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘We’ve been waiting.’
‘You can afford to lose one, Patrick? Just in case Claire’s tried to do something interesting with her project?’
‘I have redundancy now,’ he said. ‘So, yes. If I had to pick one, I’d say the older-looking one. He seems like the most trouble.’
‘Oliver?’ Anderson nodded. ‘Very well. He’s got quite the reputation as a killer. I think that seems appropriate.’ She turned to the guard, took the heavy weapon, and held it out to Claire. ‘Take it.’
Claire didn’t hesitate. The weight settled in her hands, throwing off her balance, but she felt better for having it. Stronger.
‘Before you try using it on me,’ Anderson said, ‘please remember that my friend here has a weapon pointed at your head.’
Claire glanced aside, and saw that the guard behind her had drawn his sidearm, and yes – it was pointed at her, steady and calm. He wouldn’t hesitate, she thought.
‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked. But she already knew.
‘I want you to shoot Oliver,’ Anderson said. ‘I want you to prove to me that I can trust you. He looks as if he is recovering faster than the others, and I want you to render him nonthreatening. Then I want you to continue shooting him. Do you understand?’
Claire swallowed hard, and looked at Oliver. He hadn’t raised his head. He looked frail, and unexpectedly old and vulnerable. ‘Why?’
‘Because I need to be certain we can kill them this way,’ Anderson said. ‘The simulations say it will work. I need to prove the theory, and document how long it takes to accomplish it. You wanted to be a scientist, Claire. This is what it takes.’
Oliver looked up. It seemed to take a vast effort, from the shaking of his body, but he raised his head and met her gaze. His eyes weren’t red. They were dark, and human, and afraid.
‘Please,’ he whispered. ‘Please.’
Claire didn’t honestly know what he was asking. She didn’t know what he wanted. But she knew what she had to do. It had to be done fast, and confidently, and above all, it had to be done without hesitation.
She took a deep breath, said, ‘I’m really sorry, but she’s right. I have to do it.’
And then she raised the weapon and held down the trigger.
It seemed to take forever. Oliver was caught in the beam, twitching, eyes wide, mouth open, and the chains rattled against the hasp like chattering teeth … and then, he collapsed. Dead weight. He fell hard, with no attempt to save himself, and hit the concrete limp and lifeless. All the colour that remained had drained from his face, leaving it eerily blue-white; his eyes were open, dark, and blank. His fangs were down, his mouth half-open.
He didn’t move.
‘How can we tell if he’s actually dead?’ Davis asked. He sounded completely unaffected by the whole thing. Claire felt hot, unsteady, numbed into stillness. She couldn’t look away from Oliver’s eyes.
Dr Anderson went to Oliver, knelt down, and used a silver knife from her belt to cut him. No reaction, though his skin still burned and sparked along the edges of the cut.
She stabbed him. Nothing.
‘It’s dead,’ she said. ‘Congratulations, Claire. It’s quite a breakthrough. With a little more experimentation, we can understand everything about vampires – how to use them, how to control them properly. And it’s all thanks to you.’
‘
I know,’ Claire said. ‘So’s this.’
She couldn’t hesitate, couldn’t stop to second-guess herself. She turned the weapon on Jesse and shot her, too. Then turned the gun on Myrnin. She didn’t have time to hold down the trigger quite as long before the guard started to rush her, clearly not sure whether this was a killing situation or not, and deciding to err on the side of caution.
It was enough time for her to smash VLAD against the concrete floor and destroy the delicate circuitry before he tackled her.
‘No!’ Anderson yelled, too late. Myrnin and Jesse were lifeless on the floor, like Oliver. ‘No, you fool, what did you do?’
‘I ended your experiment,’ Claire said, as the guards shoved her down to a kneeling position. ‘Because you’re not a scientist. You’re a monster. I’m not leaving any of them at your mercy.’
Anderson’s face turned red with fury, and she grabbed the wreckage of the weapon off the floor. ‘Shoot her!’ she shouted. ‘Shoot her, and shoot her friends, too. And bring me Michael. At least we’ve still got him!’
‘Come on,’ the guard said, and grabbed Claire by the collar of her shirt. ‘Might as well die with them. That was stupid, you know. Real stupid.’
Claire knew. But this time, doing something stupid was the only way she could outsmart her enemies.
Dr Davis was kneeling down next to the bodies. ‘Looks like they’re dead all right. In any case, they’re of no use to us now. Take them out of here and get rid of the bodies. Burn them.’
That was exactly right. Burning was the only way to truly be sure the vampires were dead. Davis wasn’t taking any chances … and Claire didn’t want him to take any, either. She needed the vampires to be unlocked.
The air outside of the barn was brisk and cold, and it tasted like snow was coming, even though the sun was still shining. A pretty morning. Probably the last sunrise she’d ever see.
She’d kind of given up on the crazy idea of surviving this, she realised, and that made it possible to take in a deep breath and enjoy the last few moments in the world. She’d done what she could. And maybe it would work out.
But most probably, it wouldn’t. The barn seemed deathly quiet behind them. She pictured Dr Davis’s lab monkeys unchaining Jesse, and Myrnin, and Oliver … and she could see it so vividly in her mind, the limp, dead way their bodies slumped to the floor.
She’d either saved them, or destroyed them. There was no middle ground.
And then she heard the yelling coming from the farmhouse where Shane and Eve and Michael were being held, and the day got just a little bit brighter, somehow. Yes. She wasn’t the only one raising hell.
Time to raise a little more.
Her guard was distracted for a moment, and when she tripped over a rock and jolted against him, she threw him off balance. His gun weaved off target.
Claire saw it in slow motion in her mind, just the way Shane had drilled her. Against an armed opponent, you had to be decisive and fast, because any hesitation would be your last.
She whirled into his grip, throwing him further off balance, and whipping him around in a strange, stumbling dance. She got her foot between his, and then they were falling, and he instinctively let go of the gun to break his fall. She threw her weight against him as they landed, and flung out her hand to grab the gun as she rolled past it.
She almost missed it. Her fingers slipped off the grip, and she fumbled it, but retrieved it with one last, desperate effort that pulled muscles in her side as his weight continued to roll her forward. She used physics in her favour this time, wrapped her legs around him, and used their momentum to whip him hard around, slamming him into the hard gravel on his back as she rolled up on top of him.
She had the gun, and she aimed it right at his head.
He dropped his hands at his sides, signalling surrender. He looked young, and very scared, all of a sudden.
Claire didn’t have it in her to shoot him, but she hit him with the gun, hard enough to leave him curled up and moaning.
Then she ran for the farmhouse, where all hell was still breaking loose. And all the way there, the fear sank in deeper and deeper.
What if I just killed us all?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SHANE
What got us loose was an old wrestling trick, but hey, there’s a reason those guys keep making money. First, pick a fight – a loud one, loud enough to attract the attention of the guards. Next, have a fight, the more real, the better. (And trust me, Eve can throw a punch when she feels like it. Girl knows how to power out from the shoulder.)
Last, score yourself a bloody head wound, self-inflicted and minor, to sell the show as you flop down defeated, beaten and – in this case – preferably looking really dead. Have your friends sell it with lots of distress and screams for help while getting their hands very bloody. Eve was maybe a little too over the top, but Pete sold the whole package – he looked grim, scared, and smeared blood around like I’d sprung an arterial leak and was pumping out the last pint.
In all probability, our new friends didn’t really care, but like all employees, they would be expected to explain inventory breakage, and nobody wanted to have to say that they’d let me bleed out on the floor without some kind of due diligence.
They opened the door, came in, and I passed Pete the rusty piece of metal I’d used to cut my head open as he bent over me, hands pressed to my neck. ‘Come on, man, hurry up, he’s losing too much blood!’ he said to the two guards who entered. One came toward me, holstering his gun. The other stood at the door and kept his weapon out and ready.
Pete stood up and backed off to make room for the guard, who touched down one knee next to me. Eve was screaming and crying, and kept saying that she couldn’t find a pulse, which was nicely distracting. Pete kept backing up, and put his bloody hands over his face as he did; his shoulders shook with what looked like genuine tears. I was impressed. The guy had a future career on the stage. It looked so much like real grief, and there was so much chaos going on around my limp body, that the guard who was at the door missed how close Pete was getting until it was too late.
Pete whirled around, grabbed the man’s gun arm and shoved it up as he jammed a knee up into a region that made me wince. That guard doubled over. Eve, at the same time, lunged across my body at the guard checking me out, and I came alive to wrestle him down as she pulled his gun free and rose to point it at him.
The other guard’s gun went off as he and Pete struggled, but Pete put him down hard with a blow from that rusty piece of metal, and scooped up the weapon. ‘Get her!’ he yelled, and pointed at Liz as he threw himself to one side of the doorway. I scrambled up, grabbed Liz, tossed her over my shoulder, and was immediately thrown off balance as she started to struggle.
Dammit, this was not the time for the girl to be waking up. ‘We need out of this room!’ I said to Eve, who nodded and joined Pete at the door. She tapped him on the shoulder to let him know she was behind him, and he moved fast, out of the room and firing. Turned out that he was firing deliberately high, because when I followed him and Eve out, the guards were down behind overturned steel tables. There was a lot of confused shouting going on.
We ran the gauntlet before they could get organised, because there wasn’t much else we could do. Eve broke off and ran to Michael’s cage, which I wouldn’t have let her do if I’d had any kind of choice in the matter, but she was thinking ahead; she’d lifted the keys from the guard we’d tackled, and as Pete kept the others’ heads down, she fumbled through the selection and found the one that turned the lock.
Michael wasn’t nearly as debilitated as he looked. He uncoiled himself from the ball he’d been in, crawled out, and lunged at Eve.
For a scary second, I was afraid she’d just signed her death warrant, but it was just a hug, not a full-on attack; his fangs stayed in, and the energy of rising to his feet seemed to be just about all he had, because he sagged against her almost immediately, and she had to drag/carry him toward the door. I caugh
t a glimpse of his face over her shoulder – my boy Mikey was back. Not well, not by half, but that was him, looking at me through those blue eyes.
You go, bro.
It all took about ten seconds, but it seemed like half an hour to make it to the far side of the room; the guards started firing back at us within half that time, and Pete stopped aiming over their heads and started punching neat holes into the steel tables they were hiding behind. That kept them down. I almost went over backward as Liz started kicking and writhing; she was taller than Claire, and strong, and panicked. I let her slide off as we reached the far doorway, and she nearly collapsed as she tried to take her weight on both feet. When she tried to break free of me, I yanked her closer. ‘I’m Claire’s boyfriend!’ I yelled at her. I guess the blood dripping all over my face didn’t make me look any more trustworthy, because she didn’t seem reassured. ‘Go!’ I shoved her ahead of me, and she stumbled on barely functioning legs to the closed steel door.
It didn’t open.
‘Eve!’ I yelled, and gestured for the gun she was firing. She tossed it to me and lunged for the door, trying keys with frantic haste. The semi-auto pistols that Pete and I were firing each carried fifteen shots, but Pete was already down at least nine, and Eve had popped off four. It wouldn’t last long if we were trying to intimidate a room full of guys with bullets and the hard-core training to use them.
None of Eve’s keys worked. She grimly started over, trying them again, and I used four more of our bullet inventory. I hoped I wasn’t hitting anybody, but at that moment, I wasn’t really opposed to it, either.
Michael came through for us. He moved Eve out of the way, grabbed hold of the handle, and yanked, hard. It broke off, and he pushed the hardware through on the other side, reached in, and pulled back the tongue on the lock. Then he half collapsed again, and Eve had to drag him out by the arms into the hallway.
We weren’t out of the fire, but at least we were off the frying pan, and I know Pete breathed a sigh of relief as we escaped out. Michael yelled something I didn’t catch, and then he got to his feet and charged forward – by vampire standards, it was more of a lumbering stumble than a charge, because he wasn’t moving any faster than the rest of us. But he took down a guy aiming at Eve, tackled him to the floor, and his vampire instincts finally kicked in. I heard the low-in-the-throat snarl, saw the flash of fangs coming down, and I felt a sudden answering burn inside. It came from my arm first; I’d almost forgotten the bite I’d gotten there before I left Morganville, but this reminded me, hard enough to make me stagger and catch myself against the wall. The pain crawled up to my shoulder, and spread like fire over the network of my bones, and I didn’t know what the hell was happening to me. I sagged, coughing, and heard Pete demanding to know if I’d been hit. I shook my head.