Edge of Darkness

by Vikki Romano

  “He was a friend of my brother. Do you remember Emory Radcliffe?” Jordan asked, turning to Calder, who stopped breathing a second time and turned toward him slowly.

  “Yes, I remember Em.”

  “And do you remember what happened to him?” Jordan asked as he sat back on a chunk of couch.

  Calder exhaled roughly. It wasn’t a moment he recalled willingly or with fondness.

  “On one of our skirmishes he rushed the enemy line. We had been pinned down pretty tight and he just took it upon himself to charge them, to give us the opportunity to break free.”

  “Yes, except it wasn’t him,” Jordan said blandly, and Calder shook his head.

  “I was there. I watched him do it with my own eyes.”

  “He didn’t do it. His augment made him do it. You knew him well enough to know it was very unlike him to just rush the enemy like that. He may have been selfless, but he wasn’t an idiot.”

  Calder nodded hesitantly. Jordan was right. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized many of the guys in his unit started to do spontaneous, crazy shit like that. Things that they would otherwise not do to risk themselves or their unit.

  A burning tingle ran up his spine as he also realized, at that very moment, the reason he had done what he had on the day Jimmy lost his leg wasn’t his augment.

  Jordan already mentioned it had been nonfunctional. No, he did it because everyone around him was doing spontaneous shit. He’d performed like a monster out of peer pressure. He’d killed all of those people by his own free will. That thought made him sick to his core.

  “So, what the fuck did you upload into my head, and why?” he asked, towering over Jordan.

  “I did it because you’re the last one left.”

  “So everyone from my old unit?”

  “Dead or nonfunctional. There are two others I tried, but the code had no effect on them.”

  “Lucky me,” Calder scoffed.

  “Definitely lucky. You were my last chance.”

  Calder had already passed his breaking point. Feeling the adrenaline start its familiar trickle, he didn’t hold back. If this guy wanted to turn him into a monster, he’d see a monster.

  Picking Jordan up off his feet by his collar, Calder growled into his face.

  “What did you upload?”

  Jordan’s face blanched, but after a moment of initial fright, he pushed against Calder’s muscled chest until he was set back on his feet.

  “It’s a modified version of the Omega program. And if you kill me, you won’t live long enough to see it removed.”

  The words burned in Calder’s ears, made his skull ache more than it already did. Grinding his teeth, he pushed Jordan away, then roared again. It didn’t make him feel any better.

  “Just because we can’t kill you doesn’t mean we can’t maim you in the meantime,” Jimmy said, pointing the gun at him again, and Jordan nodded and straightened.

  “If you do anything to me, I won’t help you. In fact, I have several fail-safes in place if it should come to that, so…” He shrugged. “The choice is yours. I really have nothing left to lose.”

  Calder blew out a breath. His blood was pulsing in his ears and his mind was scrambling. He fought to hold on to his thoughts, to repress the monster, but he could feel it surfacing, pushing him aside. The pain shot through his skull, hot and sharp, and he reeled, nearly falling to his knees. Grasping the wall to support his weight, he groaned and turned to Jordan.

  “It’s happening again. Do something…” He could hear his own voice, deep and trembling, disembodied. His vision was starting to cave in around him, go black. He didn’t have much time. They didn’t have much time.

  Noises echoed around him as if he were standing in a tunnel, and then there was a bright, painful flash of light.

  When Calder came to, he was slumped against the wall in the corner of the room. Jimmy and Jordan stood nearby, their faces unreadable.

  “Jesus H,” Jimmy mumbled, and Jordan held out a hand to stop him as he made to approach Calder.

  “Calder, can you hear me?” Jordan asked cautiously.

  Calder squinted up at him. Jordan’s voice was so loud it gave him an instant headache. He held up a hand, gesturing for him to stop talking.

  “Why is it so painful, so loud?”

  “You’ve never been calibrated, and I apologize for that.”

  “I should rip your fucking throat out,” he growled, clutching his head. “Do you know how excruciating this is? Like someone is splitting my skull open.”

  Jordan gave him an apologetic look--not that it helped at all, but he knelt down and put a hand to Calder’s knee.

  “Once you calm down, I can adjust everything.”

  “Once I calm down, you can shut it off.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. Not until the project is done.”

  “Project? What project?”

  “Omega Recall.”

  “Seriously? You expect me to work for GenMed now?”

  “No, I expect you to take them down.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Looking down at the primitive tracker that Cooper had given her, Sierra eyed the faint blip that she had been following the whole way from the city and into NE2. That blip suddenly jumped, moved, and got brighter. She didn’t know what that meant, but she hoped it was an indication that Calder was nearby.

  After pulling over and shutting off her engine, she checked her weapons, made sure her cartridges were on full charge, and left the vehicle with the tracker as her only guide.

  The night was an inky black and dead silent. Her senses now on overload, every noise made her flinch. Having spent most of her life within the city limits, Sierra’s experience in the “wilds” of the NE sector were limited to outings at the firing range and other tactical practice that was held in and around Renton. But Renton was far from wild, and most of the greenery had been man-made and strategically placed, leaving the scenery a bit sanitary. In contrast, this was harrowing to her. Dark, dirty, and dangerous, the headiness of damp earth surrounding her made her nose flare against the acrid scent. This was nothing like the city.

  Blowing out a slow breath, she checked again to make sure the pistol at her hip was fully charged. The grip gave her a reassuring blue glow as she tapped it, and she set off into the brush, blindly following the blip on the small screen in her hand.

  The ground beyond the road was soft, making her footsteps more unsure than they already were. The muck pulled at her boots, setting off her balance several times. Luckily, she’d remembered to wear gloves, and was thankful for that small fact after finding herself in the brambles as she got deeper into the wooded area. Her Kevlar tactical pants helped as well, but she felt several of the thorns prick her legs as she pushed through them. Mother Nature, she now saw, was an unrelenting and protective bitch.

  Her forward movement halted as she paused to gain some bearing, but she didn’t know what good it would do. She had absolutely no idea where she was. Her eyes strained to see something, anything in the darkness, but there was nothing. Just inky blackness. The clouds only offered brief glimpses of muted moonlight that did nothing to guide her.

  She sniffed against the cold and damp, her eyes trying to focus.

  That was when she heard the odd hum in the air.

  She went into a crouch and slowed her breathing as the humming seemed to near and still she saw nothing. Looking down at the screen in her hand, she realized the blip had disappeared. Fuck. Swallowing, she opened her eyes wider and realized that the humming was coming from a small, nearly invisible tracking drone. It was hovering not ten feet from her, its small IR eye searching the ground in arcs as it moved methodically through the dense woods.

  Sierra wasn’t sure if it was friend or foe, but she wasn’t about to find out. Waiting until it began making its sweep in the other direction, she inched away, back toward the road.

  Still no blip on
the tracker.

  Come on, Calder, where the fuck are you? she thought as she backtracked. But did she? She should have reached the road by now, or at least have been able to see it. There was nothing, just a vast, open void dense with trees and low brush and increasingly murky ground that sucked at her boots and made it nearly impossible to move.

  Get it together, girl… she tried to reassure herself, but this was no mission in the back alleys of the city, no car chase through the downtown grid. No, this was the stuff of horror movies.

  No one knew where she was. She was alone and there was nothing but open space surrounding her. She was a walking target.

  Her heart skipped a few beats and then she growled. She was psyching herself out and it was distracting her from her goal. Bad move. She didn’t need to be in a panic, especially now that she had gotten stuck, her feet sinking up to her shins in muck, and her balance veered. Flailing to remain upright, she watched helplessly as the tracker flew out of her hands and disappeared into the murky black swamp that she had inadvertently waded into.

  Now she was fucked, and the panic was more than palpable as it hammered in her throat.

  Trying to calm herself, she tapped the bud at her ear.

  Three short beeps made her close her eyes.

  She had no signal.

  She looked up and around her, taking in her surroundings. There were branches above her, and she reached out as best she could to grasp them. The first one she caught broke and fell on her, nearly making her tumble into the muck, but the second grab was a good one, and she reached up with her other hand and, with all her might, pulled until her feet were free. She used the aid of that branch to get to a more stable piece of ground and, once there, let out all her breath and nearly broke down and cried.

  This was stupid. Really stupid. Coming out here alone, not knowing where she was going or if she’d even been on the right track to find Calder. Monumentally dumb.

  But she couldn’t just sit in the lab and hope he turned up unscathed. The thought of him coming to any harm at all made a lump lodge in her throat, and she swallowed, hard. She couldn’t do this job without him. Hell, she couldn’t get through life without him.

  Whoa.

  The revelation shook her to the core. The idea churned for months, but now, it sat there, mocking her. Her boyfriend had accused her of having an affair with Calder for over a year. It was getting to the point where she was considering doing it just to spite him. Hell, if she was going to be punished repeatedly for a crime she didn’t commit, she may as well just reap whatever benefit she could.

  Punishment. That was what Eric had called it that first time he slapped her. It hadn’t been intentional on his part; she had goaded him, as she was known to do. And the bloodied lip she got had done the trick for a while. She had stopped instigating fights whenever he brought it up to her. She deserved it. She knew Eric was a jealous man when she started dating him.

  Having someone so possessive, someone who wanted her all to himself, was thrilling at first. Kind of hot, actually. But the constraints were getting old, and the last shiner he gave her was hard to explain when Calder asked about it.

  “It’s not like we have dainty jobs,” she had said with a laugh as she punched his arm. And Calder had bought it. They were used to seeing each other banged up on a regular basis. It was the manner of the business. Bloodied lips, loose teeth, stabbing and gunshot wounds. Yeah, they both had scars in more places than they cared to admit.

  He had soul-deep scars from the war that she never would ask about, just like she was certain he would never ask about her own scars. It was an unspoken rule.

  A crack of a twig made the awful thoughts of her life dissipate in an instant, and her hand went to the grip of her gun before she could turn to see what was coming toward her. A bear? A wolf? Dear God, were there alligators out in this swamp?

  She crouched again, her eyes adjusting to the darkness once more as she saw movement in front of her. To her right. To her left. Good God, there was movement all around her.

  Her pulse throbbed in her ears as she pulled her pistol and held it in a readied position, her left hand gripping her right as the barrel hummed against her right ear. Slowly, she cranked the mech on the grip to kill. She had no choice but to take down whatever came at her. She wasn’t taking any chances.

  She focused on a movement in front of her and saw it, the telltale flash of red LED. Their guns were definitely not on stun, and these were definitely foe.

  They hadn’t seen her yet, so she backed up slowly until her foot hit a large tree behind her. She pressed her back against the thick bark, its stability a small reassurance. Breathing shallowly, she girded herself, knowing she only had one chance. Once she started to fire, they’d know her position and she’d be an open target with absolutely no backup. She’d need to get clear of the trees, back to the road. Back to her car. Away from the murky ground to a place where her feet would be surer.

  Then she would run.

  She heard one of them talk softly into a comm. They kept saying he, him. Were they talking about Calder?

  “We have a lock on him. Yes, about forty yards. Affirmative. Yes, sir,” one of them stated, and she saw his hand gesture. A forward motion, calling his squad toward a single point somewhere ahead. If Calder was there, she had to warn him. She had to get to him first.

  She waited until they were farther ahead before she backed away. She’d circle around them, follow on the outskirts until she saw Calder, then she’d start a firefight so he’d be warned. He’d know what to do then, if, in fact, he was still in his right mind. It was a risk she’d have to take.

  She moved as quickly and as silently as her feet allowed in the unforgiving hell of a landscape. She could see movement ahead, and there, in a clearing, was a small structure. A cabin. The windows had been blacked out, but it was visible, the random peeks of moonlight hitting the metal roof with a dull shine.

  This was it. Her only chance.

  She powered down the mech on her gun to mid-range, extended her arms, and aimed for the front corner of the roof. It would send up enough static to get everyone’s attention and give Calder a fair warning.

  Gritting her teeth, she held her breath and pulled the trigger, but the arc from her pistol went wide as something hit her leg hard and she went sprawling onto the soft ground.

  In an instant the scene was pure chaos as shots were fired from every angle--at her, at the cabin, great, sparking static arcs and blowback from weapons lighting up the darkness.

  She came to a crouch and aimed into the movement, but there was no clear target. Whatever had hit her was making her leg throb, and she reached down to find a steel bolt protruding from her thigh. The sight made her waver for a moment before she got to her feet, painfully, and held her pistol out in front of her. The firefight was now centered on the cabin, and she could see pinpoints of light where bullets had managed to penetrate its defenses.

  Without thought, she switched her mech to bullets and started targeting the men rushing past her. They were fast, and dressed entirely in black, nearly impossible to see as they dodged through the trees. Out of pure luck, she managed to hit one of them in the shoulder, and he reeled to return fire. She tucked and rolled, crying out when the bolt in her leg jerked against the ground, but she came up and placed another shot cleanly into his neck and he sprawled backward. Crawling toward him, she grabbed his pulse rifle and yanked it from his hands just in time to burn a hole through another man bearing down on her. He fell in a slump away from her, and she pushed away, using the rifle as a bolster to get to her feet once more.

  The bolt in her leg was sending a nauseating ache through her, causing her knee to buckle. She gripped it and tried to yank it, but she found that it was unmoving, buried deep in the bone of her thigh. The mere attempt made her scream as white-hot pain shot through her to the core, and she fell against a tree, the rough bark scraping her face as she clutched at it, fighting to rem
ain standing.

  Movement behind her had her whirling on one leg. She fought against the spasms coursing through her, and brought her rifle up quickly, but not quickly enough.

  Looking down, she was momentarily mesmerized by the dark red stain that began to bloom across her chest, and then looked up just in time to see the butt of a rifle coming toward her face.

  The three men dove to the floor as shots rang out around them. Calder and Jimmy went immediately into a defensive mode, moving behind the furniture in order to bring out their own weaponry. Calder snatched the small pulse rifle that Jimmy tossed him, and Jordan could do nothing but stare when Calder threw him a pistol. It landed at his feet with a thud and spun momentarily before he reached down with a shaking hand to grasp it.

  “I don’t know how to use this!” he shouted over the racket around them.

  Calder shook his head and gestured to him.

  “Just aim and shoot, but keep it pointed that way!” he shouted, pointing his own gun at the front of the cabin.

  Jimmy had finished loading up his own weapons, and belly-crawled to Calder.

  “We need to get to the bunker,” he said loudly.

  “No way; they have us pinned down.” Calder shook his head, but Jimmy patted his arm and pointed.

  “There’s a hatch in the back bedroom, leads to a tunnel that connects to the bunker. It’s our only chance. The walls are fortified, but they will only withstand so much before they give.”

  Calder nodded, then motioned for Jordan, who sat huddled behind the couch, his arms covering his head. Calder motioned for Jimmy to go ahead to the bunker as he dove toward the cowering form.

  “There’s an underground bunker we can go to. Follow Jimmy!” he shouted as bullets began ricocheting around them, the cabin’s defenses failing.

  Jordan continued to cower, so Calder grabbed him by his clothing and literally tossed him toward the hallway, shouting, “Run!” as he gathered up the rest of his gear and turned to follow.