Edge of Darkness

by Vikki Romano

  Sure, he killed people on a daily basis now. Drug dealers and militant convicts had met the end of his pulse gun more times than he could count, but they were the bad guys. In his mind, their demise was justified. The men in his unit didn’t deserve to die because of a foolhardy decision he made. And Jimmy didn’t deserve to lose a leg.

  “They aren’t going to leave if you keep them around,” Jimmy said, heading back toward the ladder.

  Calder knew he was right, but how do you live down something like that?

  “I should have been killed, or mutilated… punished somehow.” Calder could feel the pain and anger stirring in his gut. Burning like a fireball, giving him the pain he deserved, but it wasn’t enough.

  “Ah, so you’re upset because they didn’t punish you for being a jackass?”

  Calder glared at him.

  “That’s not what this is about,” he said, and though some of what Jimmy said was true, it wasn’t the complete truth. “Do you know how hard it was for me--is for me, knowing that we lost six men and you, of all people, lost a leg?”

  Jimmy crossed his arms and leaned back against the ladder, hooking the heel of said leg into the bottom rung.

  “Yeah, terrible what happened to the guys, and I have been doing so poorly without a leg.” He looked down at his leg sorrowfully, then back to Calder with a sarcastic smirk. “When we joined up, we knew what we were getting into, especially your guys in special ops. Not like you thought you’d be spending your days baking cookies. Death, mutilation, loss of limbs… insanity. They’re all part of the package. It was an accident. Not like you were known to do shitty things like that on a regular basis. You made a snap decision and it didn’t pay off. Well, shit happens. Get. Over. It.”

  “I can’t!” Calder shouted, his voice cold. Turning away from Jimmy, he fisted his hands against the wood shelf. “I close my eyes and it’s there. I try to sleep and I hear screams. Screams that I caused. And when I go back and try to remember why I did it, I can’t. That whole day is just gone.”

  “Because it’s not something you should go back and try to remember!” Jimmy said, coming up behind and turning him. “For fuck’s sake, Calder, would you feel better if I beat the shit out of you and shot you a few times? Stop being such a fucking martyr and forget about it already. It’s done. Nothing you can do or say will change any of it, so why torture yourself about it? I’m fine. The new leg is tons better than the old one. It’s so good I’m considering getting the other replaced. I have no pain, no memory of pain, and the men you killed don’t either. So stop!”

  Calder couldn’t control his emotions. Pulling Jimmy into a hard hug, he sobbed onto his shoulder.

  “I am so sorry, Jimmy. I am so, so sorry…”

  “I know, man,” Jimmy said, squeezing him back. “I know.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After the fifteenth call, Sierra realized that there was no getting through to Calder. His system was shot and she wasn’t sure he even had the ability to take the call if it wasn’t. Or even if he was still in his right mind. Well, that was a whole new concept for her.

  She called his sister, but she hadn’t seen him for a few weeks, and Sierra was warned not to call his parents. Not that he’d go there.

  “They haven’t spoken for years.”

  “It’s a shame he’s lost touch with them,” Sierra said, motioning for Steven to wait as he came into the alley from the shop.

  “I’ve tried to intervene there, but it’s no use. That ship has sailed.”

  “Well, if you see him or hear from him, please let me know. It’s very important.”

  “Will do, and Sierra?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for looking out for my brother. I know he thinks he’s invincible, but we all know he’s not.”

  “Yeah…” she said, and disconnected the call. Though at this point, she thought, he was probably more invincible than any of them realized, and that scared the shit out of her.

  Steven continued to peck at the screen of his tablet as he made his way toward her.

  “Did you find anything more?” she asked.

  “Nothing that will help you find him, but Cooper has some ideas about that. Not where to find him, but how to track him.”

  “Track him? Does his augment give off a signal to do that?”

  “It does, but no. We’d have to know his frequency codes to be able to track him, and we don’t have those. I’ve been trying to find it in the info I downloaded from him, but haven’t been having any luck.”

  “So what was Cooper’s idea?”

  “To get his agency code and see if that still comes up. He may have fried that as well, though, we don’t know.”

  “You’d have to go through the precinct to get it. They’re classified.”

  “Classified, but not invisible,” he said with a smirk. “I’ve been going through his code for the last hour, and I think I may have found it.”

  “How will we know if it’s the right one?”

  “If we ping it and get a ping back. Then we can track it, see if it’s him.”

  “OK, so let’s do that.”

  “Working on it,” he said as he continued to tap on his tablet, barely looking up at her. “Just running a filter on the info now, and I should have a clean code in a few minutes.”

  Sierra looked down at the tablet in his hand and watched as the scramble of numbers and symbols on the screen shuffled and flickered. One by one they disappeared until there were only seven left.

  They looked up at each other at the same time.

  “That’s it,” he said, and then scrolled through a few screens and keyed in the number that was left.

  A map popped up on the screen then and a rippled circle began pinging, bouncing around the map, shifting from area to area.

  “Damn it,” he said, scrubbing his mouth with his hand.

  “What?”

  “The signal is weak, which means he’s not nearby.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think he would be.”

  “I need to go inside and see if I can run another tracker, boost the signal a bit.”

  Sierra gestured to the door and followed him inside. Cooper was still seated at the counter, sorting through information that spewed across his monitor. He looked troubled by what he read. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to know. No, she was sure she didn’t. Things seemed to be going from bad to worse in the last hour, and she didn’t want any more bad news.

  “Sierra, do you know what unit Calder was in when he was in service?”

  “No,” she said, taking a seat on the stool next to him. “He doesn’t talk about it at all, and I never thought to ask. Though wait…” She squinted and looked away, chewing her lip.

  “What?”

  “His jacket--it’s the only thing of the military of his that I’ve seen. It has patches on it, on the sleeve.”

  “Yeah, that would help narrow it down a bit,” Cooper said.

  Sierra looked away again, trying to remember what was on his jacket. She closed her eyes and thought about it, tried to conjure it in her head.

  “He had ribbons on the front, different colors. Mostly red and yellow.”

  “Yeah, those are service ribbons. That won’t help. Is there anything on the shoulder or on the back?”

  “Nothing on the back, but yeah, on the shoulder. There are two. A round one, black background with a red dragon or something on it, and a blue triangle with a rocket on it.”

  “Red dragon?” Cooper asked. “I don’t know any red dragon insignias.” He turned back to his monitor and keyed in a few things before a page of patches popped up. “OK, here are the active badges for the years that he was in.”

  Sierra leaned toward the screen and looked at them one by one as they scrolled by.

  “There! That’s it!” She pointed at the screen. Cooper swallowed and turned to her.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, why?”<
br />
  “Delta Phoenix,” he said with an ominous tone. “Wow, if he was a Delta Phoenix, we’re fucked.”

  “What’s Delta Phoenix?” she asked, and turned toward Steven as he overheard their conversation and joined them, a look of dread on his face.

  “Delta Phoenix were renowned,” Steven said. “Special ops, high-level clearance, real badass motherfuckers. They did all the nasty secret stuff that no one knew about.”

  Calder never came off as one of those patriotic jarhead types, so she’d never suspected anything like this. He was in great shape and could handle weapons like no one’s business, but she never put two and two together.

  “So, wait, he was special ops?”

  “Not just any special ops, the special ops,” Steven said, taking a seat next to her. “They were the elite unit, handpicked and heavily trained. You have to pass some seriously nasty tests to even get in, both mental and physical.”

  “Yeah, knowing Calder was a Phoenix, I have a brand-new respect for the guy. I’m surprised he’s still alive,” Cooper said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. The short hairs stood up on the back of her neck.

  Cooper tried to explain as best he could.

  “Phoenix was a twelve-person team, mostly men, but basically when one dies, they train someone to fill in so there is always twelve.”

  “OK?”

  “Well, over the years, due to the dangerous aspect of their missions, turnover had been pretty high. It got to the point where they were running out of fill-in candidates,” he said, and then Steven jumped in.

  “During the last half of the wars, when things got really hairy, they pretty much lost everyone. Only a couple made it out, and from what I remember hearing, there wasn’t much left of them or their minds. That’s why I’m shocked to hear Calder was one of them. I mean, aside from the augment, he’s got no prosthetics that we know of, and his brain seems to be all there.”

  “Up until this morning, sure,” Sierra said.

  Steven smirked.

  “Well, prior to the upload. He was pretty normal, wasn’t he?”

  “As far as I could see, sure,” she said, scratching her head. “I mean, he’s pretty quiet normally, but he’s not an introvert and he’s not standoffish. He certainly doesn’t come across as shell-shocked or traumatized. At least not until this morning.”

  “And now we’ve got a rogue Phoenix on our hands. Wonderful,” Cooper said, letting out a breath as he turned back to his monitor.

  “And I think I’ve found him,” Steven said as he set his tablet on the counter between them. “Looks like he’s way up north by the border.”

  Sierra looked to both of them.

  “So what do we do? I mean, I can’t tell the precinct what’s going on, not yet, and I doubt we have the wherewithal to compete with him in any way.”

  Cooper grabbed his face in one hand and rubbed his temples. Steven puffed out his cheeks as he let out a breath of his own.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” he said as he stepped down from the stool. “We could go find him, but then what? Like you said, we don’t know where his head is, and there is no way we can control him. Right now I think our best option is to find out who sent that upgrade.”

  “That could take days, if we find anything at all,” Cooper said.

  “I don’t think we have any other options.” Steven took his tablet and headed back to his office in the back of the shop.

  Sierra was at a loss for words. She wanted to get in her rig and head out to where he was, make sure he was OK, or at least still alive. She assumed since he was still giving off a signal that he was, but for how much longer? Thoughts of him getting into trouble, stirring up the police wherever he was, and getting shot scared her. She had to swallow back the panic that rose in her throat.

  “Maybe I should go out to find him while you try to find this guy you’re looking for, the guy who gave him the upload.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, I really don’t,” Cooper said, turning to hold out a cautious hand. “Especially not alone. I mean, he’s a killer now, and there wouldn’t be anything you could do to stop him. You said yourself that he already attacked you this morning.”

  “But he didn’t hurt me,” she said, still clinging to hope. “Something stopped him. I think maybe because he knows me, something in that fried brain of his told him I was on his side.”

  “Sure, but we have no idea what lingering effects this upload has on him. He could be completely void right now, unable to tell one person from another.”

  “Coop’s right,” Steven said, setting his tablet aside. “We have no idea what we’re dealing with anymore. Unless we find the author of this code, we will never truly know what we’re up against. It’s too much of a risk.”

  “OK, then let’s find the author.”

  “I’m working on it,” Steven said matter-of-factly.

  “Is there anyone else we can contact? Anyone on the inside who may know something or someone who can help?” she asked.

  Cooper leaned his chin into the palm of his hand and looked at the ceiling for a moment.

  “We could try Reggie--maybe he knows someone who knows someone.”

  Steven nodded and looked back to Sierra. “Do you have any contacts at GenMed?” he asked.

  “Not anymore, no. They killed the last one we had when they found out he was talking to us.”

  “Nice.”

  “Yeah, we have a dead end there. How about the other place?” she asked.

  “What other place?” Steven asked.

  “Tsendai,” she said. She was grasping at straws now, but that was all she had left.

  “I don’t know anyone left from there, do you?” Steven asked Cooper, and Cooper stopped typing for a moment. He chewed on his lip, thinking, then started searching through his files for something, his fingers scrolling through several different pages until he stopped again and smiled.

  “Tom Malcolm--didn’t he used to work for Tsendai?”

  “I thought he worked for Dynatech?” Steven said.

  “No, after that he worked for Tsendai. Is he still around?”

  “I have no idea.” Steven said, pecking at his tablet.

  Cooper tapped the bud at his ear, called out a string of numbers, and sat forward for moment.

  “Hey, do we have contact info on Tom Malcolm?” he asked, and then nodded a few times. “Yeah, connect me, thanks.”

  He turned and looked at Sierra with a smile.

  “Tom? It’s Cooper Nelson. Do you have a minute to talk?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Is this my life now, hiding in a bunker?

  Calder leaned against a shelf, hanging his head. This was what desperation felt like. This was what it looked like, standing in a dark hole surrounded by stolen weapons. Or supposedly stolen weapons. He wasn’t asking any questions.

  He pushed away from the shelf with balled fists, grinding his teeth as he looked at the guns in front of him. Running his hand over the smooth steel, he exhaled, felt the power that was there beneath the metal and the nubbed rubber grip. Each weapon had a purpose and each weapon had a meaning, especially to him. Weapons were a part of him, instilled in him. The military made sure of that.

  All the hours of training, of brutal, torturous drills. Firing, targeting, disassembling, cleaning… until they had become an appendage. Attached to him, a part of him so using them became second nature. So you didn’t have to stop and think in moments of pure chaos.

  But now, he found himself despondent. He had been trained, tirelessly, by men like Jimmy, to use these weapons. All of them. But now he had a weapon more dangerous than any of them and there were no instructions, no drills. He was a time bomb whose trigger was unknown and whose detonation would be disastrous.

  How did you control the unknown? Calder looked up at the ceiling, into the darkness, into the void that was now his life. He was an alien in his own
skin. How did you get away from yourself? Like a dog trying to avoid his own tail.

  Closing his eyes, he fought back the anger and the tears. He’d done this to himself, he thought. His father was right all along. Had he listened all those years ago, he would be retired by now with a house in Renton or some other cookie-cutter suburb, with a trophy wife who spent all his money at the spa and kids who didn’t want to have anything to do with him. He’d be happy in a miserable sort of way, like his parents. Bored out of their minds, not talking to their kids.

  No, he was happy with the choices he’d made, bad or otherwise. He was strong, physically and mentally. He had friends who cared about him, friends that fulfilled his life in ways that some token family never could. And then his mind crept back to the situation at hand, and in a split second, all that happiness vanished. The best things in his life eradicated by one wrong decision. He could never change it. Could never remove the things that were done to him, not without some permanent fucking damage to himself and everyone around him. That wasn’t conceited, that was the truth, because he was as important to them as they were to him. He changed them just as they changed him. Sierra was a totally different person when he was around. Sure, she had that thick, rough, I’m as ballsy as a guy attitude, but he knew it was a facade.

  Yeah, she was tough. Tougher than some men he knew, but she dropped that facade when they were alone. She knew he was aware of who she was, and what she could do, to not have to use bravado around him, and that meant something to him. It was why he liked her. Really liked her, in ways he didn’t think he’d ever like anyone, especially a woman.

  Women were a distraction. Another gem the military taught him. There was no point to having one around on a regular basis, because he had no plans to marry or have a family. That was the last thing he needed.

  Aside from the occasional stress-relieving fuck, he saw no reason to have an intimate relationship with anyone. Sure, he had his ass on the side. Who didn’t? He was no Adonis by any stretch, but he knew he wasn’t bad to look at, and he was always in great shape. If a woman wanted to get her hands on his body, he was happy to oblige.