"And you think they're among us?" The host kept his voice too soft in the habit of public radio personalities.
"How could I doubt? God saw the hubris of augmentation and smote the wicked to the ground. Arakiel's cult slaughtered thousands before he disappeared. And let's not forget Ramiel in many places at once, until that man revealed his true form as an Ifrit, a monstrous creature of fire and sand. These names are not coincidence, they are known to us. They are the egregoroi, the Watchers, who came down from heaven to lie with human women and for their crimes were cast into the pit of Tartarus."
Matt pulled the truck into the crowded parking lot and killed the engine but not the radio. The man spoke at length, prodded by the host, about angels and devils and the occult, a mish-mash of religions and legends informing his opinions. He got the nature of Gerstner Augmentation dead wrong, but his hypotheses about Arakiel's "vanishing" hit a little too close to home. As far as Matt knew, that egregoroi—or the glass pillar he'd become—collected dust in a cold iron cage at a black site in Mumbai.
"Well," the host closed, "you're listening to Religion Today on National Public Radio. We've been talking angels with Nigel Rush of St. Augustine, Florida, Doctor of Ancient Mythology, Divinity, and Archaeology. Thank you, Doctor Rush."
"Pleasure being here. Be safe."
Matt grunted. He wouldn't have pegged the gawky, creepy man a "Nigel."
Bumper music trickled out of the speakers, so he killed the power and went into the store, grabbing a cart from the rack on his way in.
He sighed at the lines. Nothing provoked panicked spending on things you should already own like an impending snowstorm. People packed aisles half-emptied of staples like bread, batteries, and bottled water, their carts overflowing with more of the same. The hurried, harried crowd made the case for shopping cart traffic laws and still managed to bog everything to a standstill. Matt grabbed a gallon of milk, two packs of diapers, and a forty-pound bag of dog food, then headed for the checkout.
Twenty minutes later and fifty bucks poorer, he pushed the cart out the door. And stopped.
Two men in Titans jackets leaned against the truck, one brown-haired with a smarmy, used-car-salesman's smile, the other a frowning brute, maybe six-three, two hundred fifty pounds, with a purple-and-yellow bruise stretching from temple to ear. Matt pushed the cart to the truck and loaded the groceries in the back.
"Can I help you gentlemen?"
They circled the truck so he couldn't see their hands, or whether they had anything under their coats. Matt leaned against the tailgate and tried to look as nonchalant as possible.
The brute spoke. "We know who you are, Rowley."
"Well that's obvious."
Smarmy lost his smile. "We know what you are." He rounded the truck, hand in his jacket.
Matt raised an eyebrow.
Brute stepped up to sneer down at him, a gesture that would have intimidated Matt a few short years before. The large man struck not the slightest twinge of fear in him.
Matt ignored him in favor of staring down Smarmy. "Okay, so here's how this works. By that bruise I figure you're the assholes who threatened my wife and kid, so that makes me inclined to hurt you. She didn't shoot you, but she's a lot nicer than me and doesn't kill people for a living. I'm not going to throw the first punch, but at the first hint of violence I'm going to cripple you both. And that hand in your jacket's looking mighty violent to me."
Smarmy pulled his hand from his jacket and rested it on his hip.
Matt locked eyes with Brute. "You said you know what I am. Good. I've killed men twice your size with my bare hands and didn't even break a sweat. You ever see what the Hulk did to Loki?"
Brute didn't blink, but he took two steps back.
"That's better." He looked from one man to the other, then stepped forward to stare up into Brute's eyes. "Now what do you want?"
Brute took another step back, so Matt grabbed his jacket and yanked him closer, raising his arm to lift the man to his tiptoes in a lightning-fast show of casual strength.
"You're not going anywhere." His eyes flicked to Smarmy. "You, either. Y'all came here for a reason, so let's hear it."
Brute's smile revealed a chipped front tooth and clean, minty breath. "You think you're hot shit, but you're not. I'm—"
"You all right, Rowley?" Chris Wilcox leaned one arm out of his car window, his massive frame wrapped in a black down coat fit for Siberia.
"Sure. Would you mind calling the sheriff? I'm looking to have these men taken into custody for menacing, attempted kidnapping, and I'm going to guess illegal possession of a loaded handgun without a valid Tennessee carry permit. Meantime, Chris, you might want to clear the area."
Chris's eyes widened. He fumbled with his phone and the clutch at the same time. The car lurched, then rolled out of sight as Matt turned his attention back on his prey.
"Where were we? Oh, right. You were telling me why you're here." He let go of Brute and dusted his hands off.
"You won't get away with this," Smarmy said.
A tiny laugh escaped Matt's lips. "I think of the three of us, only one is on a first name basis with the police force in White Spruce. Y'all come into my town, threaten my wife and child, and—"
"Your child isn't the only demon-spawn." Brute's grin had returned.
Matt squared off against him, putting his back to Smarmy. He felt the impact of the bullet through his skull a half-second before the pistol had cleared the holster. His foot darted backward, crushing Smarmy's fingers against the pistol at his hip.
Brute grabbed his neck.
He spun, pivoting Brute on his hip, and brought him down as hard as he could. The large man's head shattered on the asphalt, splattering blood and brains across Matt's boots. He rolled left, letting Smarmy get off one off-hand shot for the cops' benefit before crushing his wrist against the side of the truck.
Smarmy screamed as the gun fell from limp fingers.
Matt kicked the weapon away, smashed his palm into Smarmy's, denting the truck on the other side, then snap-kicked both knees hard enough to tear cartilage with audible "pops". Smarmy fell on his back, and Matt stomped his right shin, obliterating the bone.
He knelt next to the whimpering blob of meat and spoke, his voice soft like an NPR host. "I warned you."
A man wailed, a frightened cry of pure sorrow.
Matt whirled.
"Someone call an ambulance!"
"Oh, my God, she's been shot!"
"Call 9-1-1!"
Matt bolted toward the voices.
Bob Morgan's daughter lay on the sidewalk in a ring of people, blood pooling beneath her. The fifteen-year-old gritted her teeth, and tears poured from her eyes. Matt shouldered his way through, dropped to his knees, and jerked up her shirt to expose the wound.
A tiny hole below and to the right of her belly button gushed blood.
Matt wiped his gore-spattered hands on his pants and pulled out his multitool. "Gauze. Now!"
Someone ran for the store, but his life condensed to the immediate. More blood gushed. He couldn't wait.
He tore a strip from his shirt one-handed and passed it to somebody. "Wad that up." The knife sliced across the bullet hole. She writhed, and he begged her to be still. He hacked through her abdominal wall, fascia, and muscle to expose the viscera below, sawing more than he wanted to with the not-quite-razor-sharp blade. She kicked, and he straddled her legs to hold her down. Pushing her intestines out of the way he exposed her left iliac artery, clipped by the bullet on its way through. Hot blood washed over his fingers, but he grabbed the wad of cloth from his other hand and squeezed it around the throbbing, sticky, pencil-thin band.
Shit wafted up to his nose.
He looked up, right into her father's worried eyes. "Bob, I've stopped the bleeding. She's going to be okay, but we need that ambulance, now."
It took eight agonizing minutes—whispering encouragement and squeezing to ligate the artery and trying not to scream at his own stup
idity for letting Smarmy fire his weapon—for the paramedics to arrive.
Sarah Mason put her petite, latex-gloved hands over his, then slid around it to grip the shirt. "I got her."
Matt shook his head.
"Matt, I got her!"
"You don't. I've got her artery ligated, but when I let go, she's going to bleed out. You're not strong enough. Nobody's strong enough. You need staples, clamps, something. Now."
They locked eyes, then Sarah nodded. "Okay, Matt. I'll get clamps."
"And her intestine's perforated!"
Sarah gave him a bloody thumbs-up on her way back to the ambulance.
Some time later, they hefted Morgan onto a gurney and put her into the first ambulance. The police stood around the second, eight uniformed officers keeping people away from the scene, waiting for the detectives and lab techs en route. Matt watched the first ambulance pull out, sirens blaring. He wiped his hand on his shredded shirt, smearing blood across his abdomen, and approached the police.
Deputy Broadbent hitched up his belt and reached out a hand. The black-haired, skinny twentysomething shied back when Matt held up his own, still wet with the Morgan girl's blood.
"Tell me what happened here, Rowley."
Matt looked down at the human filth who'd threatened his wife. Brute couldn't get any deader, and paramedics swarmed Smarmy's unconscious, sedated body, his legs twisted at odd angles on the dark gray pavement.
"These men attacked me. I defended myself."
Broadbent squirmed in place. "Cory says you had that guy by his jacket before he called."
Matt nodded. "I did. The other pulled a gun when the big guy tried to strangle me. I reacted."
The interrogation lasted ten minutes in the parking lot, the car ride to the police station, and then another three hours. He recounted every detail, exactly, a dozen times, and had to explain eidetic memory to three separate detectives, even demonstrating it with parlor tricks before they let it go.
He only left out letting Smarmy—Brendan Coleman based on his ID and fingerprints—fire a shot to justify his deadly response. They released him without charges at two p.m. and gave him a ride back to the parking lot. He called Sakura on the way to the hospital.
"Yes?"
"Hey. Where are you?"
"Hotel. This after-report on Atlanta is troublesome. I don't know who will believe it."
"Don't spin it," Matt said. "Just report what happened and let the powers that be worry about what's true. That girl those guys found, the one from the boat, she wake up yet?"
"Yes. She's resting still, but vitals are back to normal, no sign of lasting damage. Her parents are there. Quarantine is lifted."
"Good. How's Kazuko?"
"Resting. Why?"
He filled her in, emphasizing what Brute—Joe Klippelt—had said about "demon-spawn." "The only other person I know that fits that bill is Kazuko."
"Probably others. Many Augs have children, but Adam is the only one post-augmentation. ICAP kept excellent records."
"Do we trust these guys to know the difference?" Humans for Humanity ran the gamut from neo-Nazi to fundamentalist Christian to hard-left anti-GMO conspiracy theorists. Only a hatred for Augs united them.
"No," Sakura said. "But I've seen many strangers around the ward and hotel today. I think I'll go to the hospital, sleep on a cot tonight."
"Want backup?"
"I wouldn't turn it down."
"All right. Let me tie things down here, get Monica some protection, and I'll be up."
He booked a flight two hours later, just in time to miss the storm.
* * *
Sakura walked through the hotel lobby, scanning the unfamiliar faces for anyone paying too much attention. Two men and one woman, all Caucasian, sat at a corner booth and paid too little, looking at anything and everything other than her. They'd stopped talking when the elevator had opened, though, and resumed their murmurs with too much haste.
Rowley couldn't get here fast enough. She stopped ten feet from their booth and looked at her phone, and not one of them looked up at her, even after she coughed.
The front door slid open in a blast of frigid air. Sakura had never felt Minnesota cold, except on high-altitude jumps, and the locals assured her the worst had yet to come. She slid across the ice-slicked parking lot, already bathed in orange streetlights despite the time. Visiting hours on the oncology ward ended at six p.m., but the night nurses had made her a permanent exception.
She shivered in the cold until the bus arrived, paid the fare, and sat in the back behind a small man eating pungent green shrimp curry which reeked of grass, citrus, and coriander. A silver Cadillac SUV followed the bus four blocks, then split off west toward the hospital. She ground her teeth through the ride, got off in front of the main entrance, noted the silver Cadillac in guest parking, and stalked into the eighteen-story building.
The lobby smelled of astringent shit, antiseptic and unchanged diaper.
Forty seconds later she walked out of a side entrance, took a picture of the license plate, and uploaded it to Janet LaLonde. Sakura took the stairs. Her phone blipped as she reached the eighth floor.
The Cadillac belonged to Rocky Sweetman, whose daughter Onnoleigh had poured tens of thousands of dollars of her trust fund into Humans for Humanity on her eighteenth birthday two months prior. Onnoleigh's face matched the girl in the lobby, cute and blonde with too much makeup. A quick scroll through "Ona's" Facebook found the other two: David Gerrold, retired policeman, black hair and round face, and Samuel Burns, a bald, surly-looking former gunnery sergeant in the US Marine Corps, now a self-defense instructor in Fairfax, VA.
She took the remaining six floors two steps at a time and hit the landing sweating and breathing hard. Eschewing the dramatic entrance, she listened at the door. She heard nothing, so she cracked it open.
Gerrold sat at the bench in front of the nurse's station, reading manga. How children's entertainment became an American pastime she'd never figured out. His eyes twitched upward when the door moved, and his hand slid into his jacket. She couldn't fight a gun at thirty feet, not anymore.
She let the door close, stood just to the side, and counted. The Psychology of Security Forces textbook she'd penned for the Tokyo Police Department put a curious guard's investigation time at anything under two minutes. After that, they lay in ambush.
A hundred and seven seconds after she'd jostled the door, Gerrold opened it. She put one knife under his chin, just hard enough to draw blood, and the other against his eye. He blinked and winced as the razor-sharp blade sliced his eyelid, deep enough to hurt but not enough to bleed, a paper cut from five inches of steel.
"Step out."
He stepped into the stairwell, eyes wide.
"Remove your firearm with your left index finger and thumb, and drop it on the floor."
It hit the tile with a metallic clatter.
She pulled the blade from his eye a half centimeter, enough to let him blink. He did, eyes watering, and she took the opportunity to body-block him against the wall opposite the railing. The knife remained under his jaw. These Americans stood so damned tall.
"You know who I am?"
"Yes," he said through clenched teeth.
She lifted his chin a little further with the blade. "You know how quickly I can kill you?"
"Yes."
"What is your intent with my daughter?"
He hesitated, so she drew a line down his cheek with the other knife. He hissed as blood welled along the cut, and tears flowed from his eyes.
"What is your intent with my daughter?"
He blubbered. "It's not about you. You're just means to an end."
She lowered the other blade just enough to let him speak clearly. "Continue."
"Ona doesn't care about you. Rowley's the end-game. You're just a stepping stone."
"What are your plans for Kazuko?"
He closed his eyes, hard.
"What are your plans for Kazuko?"
/> He swallowed. "We . . . we're going to kill you both."
Sakura jammed the knife up through his mouth into his frontal lobe and yanked it out before he had a chance to twitch. He gave her a confused, pained look. She wiped the blade on his arm as his eyes glazed, then she stepped back, letting him tumble down the concrete stairs.
She called Matt. It kicked to voicemail without ringing.
She picked up Gerrold's weapon and racked the slide, snatching a round from the air as it flew from the chamber. A Sig-Sauer P229, the .40 caliber had more kick than she liked, but it beat a knife nineteen times out of twenty. She didn't bother checking the body for extra magazines and instead shouldered through the door, weapon raised.
The head nurse smiled in recognition and then screamed. She ducked behind the desk as Sakura stalked toward her, clearing corners on the approach to Kazuko's room.
Burns poked his head out of Kazuko's room, a confused look on his face. Sakura pulled the trigger twice and the weapon boomed. Red mist puffed out the back of his head and he crumpled to the floor.
Ears ringing from the too-loud reports, she approached the room on the balls of her feet, careful to make no sound.
"Isuji Sakura!" Ona's young voice shook with nervous energy. "I have your daughter."
"Is she alive?"
"For the mom—"
Sakura rounded the corner and took in the scene. Ona half-crouched behind the bed, holding her daughter in a headlock, cheek to cheek, a shaky hand pointing her pistol at the doorway.
"—ent."
Sakura shot Ona twice in the face, the pinprick holes marring her cheek and eye almost simultaneously. Kazuko screamed. Blossom closed the distance, took one look at the gray matter and blood splattering the heating unit in front of the window, and turned the upraised gun to the door.
She picked up the phone left-handed, but before she dialed she looked at her daughter. She spoke in Japanese to avoid any confusion. "Get in bed, keep your hands in sight. The police will be here soon, they will have guns and will be brash and loud in the American fashion. You must not make sudden movements. Understand?"
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