* * *
Jason followed the silver filaments blazing through the tunnels, lighting the way better than any headlamp ever could. They twisted and intertwined like will-o-wisps stretched to infinity, an endless cacophony of joy and mercy and love.
Jade streaked through them, cruel and capricious, but he ignored it, and the single black filament that wormed along with the rest. That way led to madness, and he would not let them touch him.
The vision had no other interpretation. Monica would die if she wasn't there, die and be lost forever, and through her death invite a darkness that had slumbered since ancient Sumer. He didn't care about the world, only about her. Fragile yet so, so strong, she rode a knife's edge that could fall either way.
He wouldn't let anyone have her, not even himself.
* * *
Matt felt it before he saw or even heard it, a deep rumbling cadence that rocked the caves and sent dust crumbling from the walls. He ran faster, lungs burning in the acrid air, hoping against hope that whatever killed those marines would lead him to his son.
He stopped just before a sharp turn, the whispers gibbering their delight at his near death. The rumbling had stopped. He held his breath, listening for any clue as to the beast's nature.
"I know you're there, Rowley." Yardley's voice carried through the chamber, far too deep for a normal man. "Why don't you come out and play?"
The whispers faded. Matt stepped around the corner and gasped.
He could just make out parts of Yardley within the bionic augmentation. The giant machine stood over twelve feet tall in a parody of human form, a collection of thick metal plates and nanofiber mesh, a robotic football player from hell. The helmet depicted a caveman-like parody of the worst of bonks, with a prominent sloping brow and huge serrated teeth through which he could just make out Yardley's eyes. Hydraulic pistons and electromuscle weaved over and even through Yardley's flesh, fusing the suit directly to his body.
"What is this, Murdock? Build yourself a new toy?"
Yardley laughed, a bray more suited to a startled cow carried by what had to be hidden speakers. "Where would I get the funds to make something like this?"
"That's the right question, but I've got a better one. Where the fuck is my son?"
Huge metallic claws like eagle's talons smashed together, then rubbed back and forth. "I'll fight you for him. Just you and me, like nature intended. And this time that bitch Sakura isn't here to interfere."
Matt smirked, projecting a confidence he didn't quite feel against the hulking behemoth. "Why would you think that?"
Yardley laughed again. "'Cause Agent Keene's got her in a van on the way to a black site to find out what makes the two of you so fucking special." He shrugged massive metal shoulders. "Everyone's got a price."
* * *
Sakura snapped awake and tried to sit up.
Metal ties held her to a gurney and sliced into her wrists and ankles as she struggled. The world swam, fuzzy and indistinct.
"I wouldn't bother." A woman appeared in surgical scrubs complete with a mask, her chocolate-brown skin a stark contrast to the bright white of her clothing. "Titanium-reinforced nanofiber. You'll just hurt yourself."
A man appeared on the other side of the gurney, Caucasian, a little too pale and similarly dressed. "An impressive recovery, Miss Sakura. Based on your current physiology we expected you to remain unconscious for at least another few hours, and a normal human wouldn't wake up at all."
The voice shouldn't have surprised her: Keene's coroner, who'd autopsied Big K.
She snarled and pulled. Muscles strained, the restraints dug deeper. She bit her tongue to distract from the pain in her wrists. Bright red blood splattered the woman, and she shied back. Sakura's arm throbbed, and with each pulse of her heart another jet of arterial blood sprayed through the makeshift ambulance.
The bonds neither heard nor yielded to her screams.
The man picked up a pair of gigantic forceps, the ends serrated, a pneumatic tube trailing from it up and out of sight. He leaned in, grabbing her left breast with the cold metal tongs, the teeth pricking her skin in almost a tickle. Only then did Sakura realize that she wore no clothes. He squeezed and twisted. Her cry of determination changed to agony and rage. She swore at him in Japanese, writhed and swore and screamed and kicked as he twisted farther, then wrenched. Her breast came free from her chest with a wet sucking sound.
She dropped back, hyperventilating, forcing her rage to overcome her panic. I will not despair. Despair is the refuge of the lost. I am not lost. I. AM. NOT. LOST.
The coroner dropped her breast onto a scale. "Point-two-one kilograms, typical for size." He smiled at his companion, who had changed her mask but still had blood in her hair. "Let's see if it grows back, and how fast."
She leaned in next to him. "Look at the ribs, still fused, or is it fused again?" She turned to Sakura and held up a chisel and hammer. "Let's find out, shall we?"
* * *
Matt dove right as Yardley punched, and the cave wall exploded over his head. Yardley's reach extended at least nine feet, and the crude-looking mechanical body did little to hinder his reflexes. The massive helmet denied Matt the easy targets—mouth, eyes, or neck. Matt took aim on the run and fired, but the next three grenades performed exactly as the first two, impacting on the surface of Yardley's armor with no visible effect.
Lungs tight in the toxic air, Matt processed his options. He drew a combat knife and closed, ducking beneath a haymaker and diving between Yardley's legs to come up behind him. He stabbed for a joint in the armor and hit flesh. Yardley kicked, and the impact shattered Matt's sternum. Blood erupted from his mouth. He hit the wall thirty feet away and dropped face-down.
He rolled to his feet and clutched his arms to his chest as Yardley charged. At the last moment the whispers warned him of the feint, so he leapt. His foot landed on Yardley's knee, and the next on his shoulder. He kicked as hard as he could, hooking his foot under Yardley's helmet. The strap snapped and it flew off, even as Matt flipped to land on his feet facing the ruined section of wall where he'd just stood.
Yardley spun. Matt ducked the first claw. The second caught his right arm. He screamed as the massive hydraulic shears closed, severing his forearm just below the elbow. A geyser of blood sprayed Yardley's mechanical arm.
Matt stumbled back, his regenerates overwhelming the first signs of shock and suppressing the pain to a dull ache.
Yardley grinned, his face barely unrecognizable under the maze of wires and connections. "Problem, Rowley? You might need that."
He swept forward, hunched, talons spread.
* * *
Jason stopped and turned off his light. "There it is."
Confused, Monica killed her own. In the distance she made out a faint fuzz, neither bright nor dark and in that fact different than everything else around her. "What is it?"
He said nothing in the pitch black. Then, "Come on. We're almost out of time."
They stumbled forward, picking their way across the uneven floor toward what resolved into the opening of a much larger cavern. The light didn't flicker but looked too flat, too lifeless, to be sunlight.
Afraid, Monica put a hand on Jason's shoulder. "Sweetie, you need to tell me what's up there."
Jason pulled away and kept walking. "Your son."
She followed.
* * *
"Come on, Matt. How am I supposed to kill you if you won't come out?"
Matt slithered deeper into the crevice, beyond the grasping mechanical claws. Lightheaded from blood loss, he sighed in relief as the spurts from his arm slowed to a trickle and stopped. The itch rivaled only that in his chest as the least pleasant sensation of his existence.
Yardley reached into the entrance of the small opening and dug his claws into either side. With a grunt, a layer of rock broke free. He punched and bashed at the exposed shale, reducing it to chunks and powder. In five minute's time, he'd managed to get three feet closer to Matt
with no more than six feet to go.
"This rock is soft, Rowley. Soft and weak, like you."
Matt lacked the energy for witticisms, so he said nothing.
"Come on, Rowley. Where's your sense of fun?" Murdock shredded another foot of siltstone and shale, claws mashing away at either side of the entrance to give him more room to work.
Matt tried to wiggle back farther, but the crevice ended just behind him. His obliterated ribs had almost recovered, but his arm would take hours to heal. He took stock of his inventory: a combat knife, two flash-bang grenades, and a bandoleer of ammo for a shotgun Yardley had crushed against a wall.
His mind turned to Yardley's question. The suit must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, perhaps as some sort of counter to Augs in the pre-ICAP days. It had the look of a prototype, blocky and inelegant in exactly the way any politician would see as a waste of time. A discarded DARPA or black project, some mad scientist's dream shelved for newer, more elegant options.
Armor covered all of Yardley's vitals, leaving only the occasional bit of meat exposed, but given his past and level of mental instability, Matt put no faith in shock or general trauma for shutting the behemoth down. His forearms and legs were entirely enclosed in vicious talons made of something stronger than steel. It reflected light like steel but demolished the walls of the cavern without any sign of even minor damage.
As the man-machine tore through another foot of rock, Matt formulated a plan.
* * *
A string of LED light bulbs hung from the walls, thirty or forty in all, plugged into some kind of metal box Monica didn't recognize.
She tore off the gas mask and rushed toward the crib with a sobbing gasp. "Oh, my baby!"
Adam stood against the side railing, head halfway above the padded bar, and watched her come with his typical "just woke up from a nap" smile. He looked no worse for the wear, impassive and chubby and healthy. A case of diapers sat next to the crib, alongside crates and crates of 1990s-era MREs.
His smile grew when she reached him and he lifted his arms. She picked him up and squeezed him tight, and he gurgled happily at the contact. "Mama."
"Yeah, baby, Momma's here. And Momma ain't going nowhere anymore."
She turned and frowned. Jason kneeled next to them, head bowed, hands clasped in prayer. The huge cavern sported sixteen cots and an entrance big enough for a tractor trailer. Shelves lined the walls, loaded with foodstuffs and sundries, toilet paper and paper towels and cigarettes.
"Jason?"
Rees's lips moved. She caught a hint of Latin or Greek or something.
"JASON!"
He started, and looked up at her, eyes far too at peace for their situation. "Yes?"
"I don't think we're alone down here."
He turned and took in the underground barracks. "No, maybe we're not."
"Let's get the fuck out of Dodge."
He shook his head. "We can't. You have to be here."
She carried Adam over to him, held him in front of Rees's face. "Look at him. This is my son, goddammit. We got him. So we need to get the fuck out of here, right now, before any of these psycho bastards come back. I don't care what happens to me, but we need to get him out."
Jason smiled. "I'm sorry, but we have to stay here. This won't end unless we face it."
Monica shrieked.
* * *
Matt pulled a flash-bang from his bandoleer and waited until Yardley could almost grab him. He ducked and rolled, taking the impact with the floor on his right shoulder before throwing the flashbang at the wall.
His regenerates compensated for the blinding light and deafening boom even as he came to his feet at a dead run. He took the passage on the left, and then the left again, each too small for Yardley's exoskeleton to fit.
The passage narrowed until he could just squeeze through, and only then by pulling off his helmet. He left it behind.
Behind him a methodical cacophony hammered his ears as Yardley reduced the walls between them to rubble with tireless zeal. Matt cringed at the louder sounds, whole sections of decaying rock ripped away under the relentless onslaught. He wriggled farther and farther down the artery, praying it led to an escape.
If it didn't, when Yardley caught him, he'd die.
* * *
"Fascinating." The dark-skinned woman prodded Sakura's breast even as the flesh writhed around her fingers. "Does it work with more sensitive organs?"
Sakura couldn't scratch the unbearable itch, couldn't scream around the rag stuffed in her mouth. The pale man picked up a power drill, attached an eight-inch spade bit, and revved it a couple of times.
"Kidneys, you think?"
The woman bobbed her head back and forth, pondering. "Sure. She's got two, so if something fails we won't lose the specimen. Work from the side. No reason to cause more trauma than we have to."
He rolled his eyes and gave Sakura a wink. Then he plunged the bit into her abdomen and pulled the trigger.
* * *
Adam back in his crib behind a pile of sandbags, Monica pried open another large floor locker with a crowbar. After bats, swords, knifes, clothes, and food, she sighed in relief. "At least one of these assholes has good taste." She pulled the camo-pattern Remington R-15 .30 RAR from the locker, exactly like the one Matt had gotten her for Christmas four years prior, grabbed the only magazine—loaded with nine rounds—and slammed it home with an authoritative click.
"Can you shoot?" She chambered a round amidst a vague memory of Jason and Matt in middle school, coyote hunting on Schneider's chicken farm for ten bucks a pelt.
Jason shook his head. "It's been decades."
She grabbed the .308 Marlin bolt-action out of the locker and tossed it to him, followed by a box of twenty bullets. "Even if you don't hit nothing, you might get people to keep their heads down."
As if on cue, voices rang out down the passageway, laughing and happy. Monica took aim and waited for the first man to round the corner.
A cute brunette with boobs only a teenager could possess slapped an African American man on the shoulder as they walked up the slope into the room proper. Monica fired, turned, and fired again.
The man dropped like a rock. The woman had whirled at the first report, and Monica’s second round caught the side of her face. The bullet tore through her cheekbone in a spray of blood, bone, and cartilage, and she stumbled back, hands to her ruined flesh. Screaming, Monica fired again, center of mass, and the girl sat down.
A shadow dashed across the hall into an alcove that hid him from view.
"COME AND GET SOME, YOU FUCKHEAD FUCKERS!" Monica rolled left, then trained her rifle on the side of the door she'd watched the shadow run to.
Spots of light flashed from deep in the hallway, and bullets pinged off her position.
"Jason! SHOOT HIM!"
Jason lay frozen, watching the hall down his scope, one eye closed, knuckles white on the stock. He pulled the trigger and the bullet ricocheted high, but the shooter stopped shooting. Monica sent a round that way for good measure, then rolled again behind another cot.
A rifle appeared around the corner and sprayed bullets. Monica ignored the indiscriminate fire, took aim, and fired. Fingers vanished in a spray of red gore, and the weapon fell to the ground.
Jason fired into the hallway, and someone yelped in alarm.
Monica popped her magazine. One round, plus one in the chamber. "Jason, you cover me, okay?"
His blank look inspired no confidence.
"When I get up, fire into the hallway. Reload and fire again until I'm up against that wall, as fast as you can. Can you do that?"
Eyes wide and full of tears, he nodded.
"Ready? Go!"
She bolted for the doorway, and Jason fired a round. She'd taken eight more steps before he fired another. Six more and a shadow rolled out into the hall. She fired the Remington twice and the figure rolled back out of sight. Jason fired again as she hit the wall.
Chris Malec's
voice rolled over her, her Sifu telling her to be calm even in the worst excitement. She closed her eyes, listened. On the other side of the wall three voices murmured back and forth, all male, all worried but confident.
Jason fired as she rounded the corner. The man training his assault rifle on her stumbled back, blood spurting from his mouth. She kicked a rifle up into the air, spun, and chopped another man in the neck.
She screamed as a knife tore through her foot, a searing pain that jolted straight up her spine. Stepping forward she kicked anyway, jamming the hilt up under the chin of the man who lay on the ground. She gasped and fell as her leg went numb.
Wriggling backward, she grabbed an assault rifle off the floor, pointed it down the hall, and pulled the trigger. It jerked upward on full auto, both blinding and deafening her in the enclosed space.
Jason appeared behind her, grabbed her under the armpits, and dragged her back toward the large room. She fired another several shots down the hall for good measure.
She grabbed for the knife and Jason slapped her hand. "No, wait. If it hit the artery you'll bleed out too fast."
He untied her shoe, looked her in the eyes, and grimaced. "Ready?"
She shook her head. "No."
"Ready to do it anyway?"
She closed her eyes, nodded once, and opened them. "Do it."
She yanked out the knife as he pulled off her shoe. It didn't hurt at much as it could have, and she took the lack of gushing geysers of blood as a good sign.
"Ow, that fucking hurts."
Jason packed the wound with strips of cotton torn from a dead man's shirt, tied it tight with more of the same, and helped her up.
She took a step, keeping most of her weight on the heel. She took another, and though she limped hard it could have been a lot worse. She said as much.
He looked down at the dead men. "I've never shot anyone before." He made the sign of the cross over their bodies.
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