7 Sykos

by Marsheila Rockwell

  Fallon snatched the gun up, but she was neither an athlete nor an action hero, and as she tried to straighten awkwardly, she saw the Latina pointing the gun at her again, her smile feral. She knew in that moment that she was going to die.

  I’m so sorry, Jason.

  And then the door burst open and Warga rushed in, guns blazing.

  Or at least that’s what it seemed like to Fallon, half-­crouched, still fumbling with her own weapon. She watched as the rapist fired two shots into the Latina’s head before the other woman could turn and get a shot off herself.

  As the curvaceous femme fatale collapsed on the floor, her head coming to rest in a pool of crimson blood and raven hair, Warga clucked his tongue.

  “Damned waste,” he said, shaking his head. “She was hot.” He took a longer look. “Still is.”

  Straightening, Fallon looked at the other psycho, freshly stitched up and bandaged. Some of his color was coming back, but that might also have been from arousal at the sight of a female corpse.

  “What the hell are you doing up here?” she demanded. “And where are the others?”

  “I might ask you the same thing, Doc. And I think you know what I’m doing up here, and it’s not something we need the others for.”

  Fallon scoffed, though inwardly she felt a flutter of fear.

  You have a gun, dummy.

  She pointed it at Warga.

  “Even getting shot isn’t enough to stifle your urges?”

  Warga laughed, ignoring her gun as he moved closer, his own weapon held loosely in his hand.

  “You’ve read my jacket, Doc. Hell, you wrote most of it. ‘Hypersexualized, equates sex with violence,’ the whole nine yards. All this shooting and blood is getting me hard, and I intend to do something about it.”

  Fallon’s finger tightened on the trigger. Not enough to engage the firing mechanism, but enough that Warga could see she wasn’t joking.

  “You’re going to have to keep it in your pants, Randy. Maybe after we bring the meteor back, we can set you up with a hooker or two, but—­

  “Or four?”

  “Okay,” Fallon said, as surprised by the interruption as she was by his amused look. “Or four. But for now, we’ve got a job to do, with no time for extracurricular activities.”

  “What about your activities? What the hell was going on here?”

  She ignored the question.

  “I saved your life. You’re telling me that doesn’t warrant a little thanks?”

  Fallon shrugged. “Thanks.”

  Warga looked at her for a moment, then laughed again. He lowered his own weapon and moved past her toward the dead woman. Fallon kept her gun trained on him.

  “That doesn’t mean you can go all necrophiliac on me, either.”

  He ignored her, knelt, and grabbed the woman’s wrist.

  “See these tats? And the ones on her neck? She’s cartel.”

  “What?”

  Warga stood, putting his gun back in his pants as he walked over to the bed where the woman’s purse was. He dumped it on the bedspread, and thick rolls of cash tumbled out, as well as a .22.

  “With this much cash, a case full of toys, and no bodyguards? Probably a hit woman. So what are you doing playing cops and robbers with the cartel, Doc?”

  “You said it yourself. She’s hot.”

  Warga’s eyebrows tried to climb onto the top of his head.

  “Wow, Doc, I had no idea you swung that way.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Randy,” Fallon replied quietly, but Warga wasn’t listening.

  “Gotta say, I’m impressed. And you’ve got good taste in women—­brunette, busty, and dangerous.”

  Fallon had had enough. She fired a shot past Warga’s head—­one that came far closer to taking off his ear than she’d intended.

  “Hey!” Warga yelped. “What the hell didya do that for?”

  “It’s time to go, Randy.”

  “Sheesh. You could have just said something.” He pocketed a ­couple of the smaller rolls. At Fallon’s look, he shrugged. “Might come in handy at some point. Not everyone in the zone is Infected, and ­people everywhere want the same basic things, especially at a time like this: sex, food, and security.”

  The observation was surprisingly astute, and Fallon realized she might need to revise her assessment of Warga. It wasn’t a comforting thought.

  He walked over to the case on the desk and started pulling weapons out of it—­a Glock like the one Fallon had, a ­couple of other pistols she didn’t recognize, several knives, and another pair of pliers. He started putting them in whatever pocket or through whatever loop they would fit in. As he did, he tossed the Glock to Fallon, who surprised herself by catching it one-­handed. Following his lead, she placed the sleek weapon in a pocket on her left hip and replaced the other in the pocket on her right. When she was done, she looked back up at Warga, who was decked out like Rambo and grinning like an idiot.

  “Locked and loaded, Doc. Let’s go. The sooner we find that damned meteor, the sooner I get my hookers. And maybe a new light bulb,” he added. And then laughed uproariously at Fallon’s perplexed look.

  Fallon sent Warga down ahead of her since she didn’t want to deal with whatever the others might think about where they’d been, or worse, speculating about why they’d been there together.

  Once he was in the elevator, Fallon stepped back into the room and went over to the bed. She ignored the cash Warga had left behind, instead looking inside the purse. As she expected, credit cards and a driver’s license nestled in little slots in the leather lining. She pulled out the license.

  The dead woman stared back at her from a blue square in the lower right-­hand corner of a miniature Grand Canyon. Not Jessica Conejo, but Carmen Gamez of Scottsdale, though Fallon suspected the woman’s true address was probably quite a bit south of that.

  She blinked to turn the camera and two-­way radio back on.

  “Book, you there?”

  There were a few moments of silence, then Book came online.

  “I’m here, Fallon. Sorry, I was trying to finish a mouthful of pizza.”

  At his mention of food, Fallon’s stomach grumbled in complaint. She ignored it.

  “I need you to find out who this woman is and what connection she has to Elliott Jameson.” She held up the license so Book could get a clear view of it through her camera implant, deliberately looking toward the door and away from the dead woman.

  “Your partner at the lab? Why?” She would have to answer carefully. She had turned her camera and radio off—­or at least had signaled that she wanted them off—­but Book would want to know what she was up to, not just why she wanted to track Elliott’s cartel connection down.

  The fact that someone could almost always keep track of her was simultaneously comforting and worrying. She didn’t really like the idea of Big Brother Book seeing and hearing everything she did and said in real time. But knowing that she could check in with Book or someone else at almost any moment had made her feel safer, less like the psychos were out here on their own. Even though, for all intents and purposes, they were.

  “Yes. Just find out, okay, Book? I’ve got to go.”

  She was starting to blink the command to terminate the connection—­to keep him from asking more questions—­when Book stopped her.

  “Wait! Fallon!”

  “What is it? I really need to rejoin the others.” Preferably before Warga started regaling them with tales of her eagerly yielding to his sexual prowess.

  “It’s Briggs.”

  Fallon put two and two together—­Book’s serious tone and the specialist’s circumstances when last she’d seen him, in quarantine with three other soldiers, waiting to see who’d been infected by Crazy 8s.

  “Is he . . . one of them now?” S
he couldn’t quite bring herself to say the word when she was talking about someone she knew. Someone she considered a friend—­or at least friendly, which was rare enough itself these days.

  “No. That’s the problem.”

  “How could it be a problem?” Fallon asked before the answer dawned on her. “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. The other soldiers became infected and started attacking him. He killed one before anyone could get in there and take out the other two. But he knows, Fallon. Knows he’s immune, and knows what it means.” Book paused for a minute, Fallon thought perhaps to swallow down his empathetic grief. She found herself hoping the young analyst was never exposed to the virus because he’d succumb in a matter of minutes. “He’s having trouble processing it all, and he wants to talk to you.”

  “I’m a neuroscientist, not a psychiatrist,” she protested.

  “A neuroscientist who’s immune to the virus for the same reason he is. But you knew sooner and had more time to come to terms with it.” Another pause. “Please, Fallon. He needs you.”

  She relented, mostly because Book was one of the only other ­people on that side of the microphone that she considered a friend.

  “Okay, I will, but not now. I’ll call you back when I have time.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” he replied. “We both will.”

  CHAPTER 29

  37 hours

  Back in the lobby, Lilith told Fallon that Light and Sansome had taken off. She could ask Book to find them, but she had just given him a task and didn’t want to interrupt him with another. Besides, if he was busy trying to find out who the cartel woman was, maybe he wouldn’t bug her about talking to Briggs. Or notice that she had misplaced two members of her team.

  Lilith, Pybus, and Antonetti sat together at the end of one of the long tables in the makeshift cafeteria. Coffee sounded good, as did food, but they’d have to wait until she found the runaways. “Did either of them say where they were going?” she asked.

  Pybus spoke up. “Hank said he was going to check the perimeter. A little while after that, Joe got up and said he was going to bring Hank back. We tried to persuade him to stay put, but he wouldn’t.”

  “Sansome isn’t a guy you want to argue with,” Antonetti added.

  “Maybe not,” Fallon admitted. “But we need him. We need—­”

  She broke off her sentence when a ratcheting sound that could only be automatic-­weapons fire echoed down the quiet urban canyon outside. “That’s ­people,” she said. “Infecteds don’t use guns. Come on.”

  The others hurriedly gobbled up the remains of their food and headed for the valet station. On the way, Fallon thanked Quinn and Parker for their help and wished them luck. Parker tried to get them to stay, but she just shook her head. She couldn’t, even if she wanted to. There were two of her ­people out there, and their mission still wasn’t anywhere near complete.

  But the truth was that Fallon was glad to leave the hotel behind. The encounter with Elliott’s torturer, followed by Warga’s would-­be rape, had shaken her more than she wanted to admit. She didn’t regret what he had done to the woman, or what she would have done to him if he hadn’t backed off. But it was still two close calls; a lot to deal with for someone who spent most of her time in sterile labs full of emotionless machines.

  The others had grabbed their weapons and followed her outside. They ran to the south side of the hotel, which is where the sound had seemed to emanate from. When they didn’t see anything there, they went to the end of the block and saw Light walking their way. Behind him was a UPS truck with bodies strewn around it.

  “What happened?” Fallon asked when she was close enough.

  Light nodded at the carnage and started back toward the truck. Fallon joined him. “Infecteds found these ­people in the back. Sensed them, somehow. Smell maybe, I don’t know. They broke in, and the ­people tried to get away. One of them did—­last I saw him, he was still running. But they caught these other three. I blew them away, but I wasn’t in time to save the ­people.”

  Fallon walked around the truck, eyeing the dead UPS driver on the sidewalk and the other two bodies behind the truck, along with the ravaged corpses of the Infecteds. She didn’t entirely buy Light’s version of events, but the humans didn’t have bullet wounds and the Infecteds did, so she couldn’t call him on it.

  “We heard the shooting inside the hotel, so I’m sure we’re not the only ones who did,” she said. “Have you seen Joe?”

  “He’s not with you?”

  “Apparently he went out shortly after you did, looking for you.”

  “Haven’t seen him,” Light said. “He’s not easy to miss, either.”

  “Let’s scour the neighborhood, then,” she directed. “Everybody watch for Sansome.”

  “We don’t have to do it on foot,” Light said.

  Fallon wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “What?”

  He held up a set of keys. “I found the keys to the truck, in the driver’s pocket. We have wheels again.”

  “Can you drive that thing?”

  “When you’ve taken an ambulance through Friday afternoon rush-­hour traffic on the interstate, you start to think you can handle anything on four wheels.”

  “That truck has six.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Okay, then,” Fallon said. “Climb aboard, everyone. Hank, cruise the streets around here. If Joe’s around, we’ll find him.” With any luck, before Book realizes he’s missing.

  They’d barely covered a block when two Infecteds came out of a parking garage, running toward the truck. Antonetti and Warga cut them down before they got close. The next group they saw was larger, seven of them, and Fallon joined in. If her survival was going to come down to being able to shoot somebody, she needed all the practice she could get.

  When they found Sansome, emerging from a driveway about six blocks to the west, she almost fired at him. She was holding the Glock up, steadying her right hand with her left and getting a bead on him when she realized who it was. “Joe!” she shouted. “Hank, stop!”

  Light braked, and the truck shuddered as if trying to shake them all off it. It was no wonder her packages so often came looking like they’d been run over, Fallon decided. She jumped down while the truck was still rocking back and forth. “We’ve been looking all over for you,” she said. Then she noticed his huge hands, which looked like he had dipped them in a bucket of red paint. “What happened?”

  “I found a ­couple of ’em,” he said. “Infecteds. I killed ’em.”

  “With your bare hands?”

  “Yeah?” He said it like a question, as if unsure what her reaction might be.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sure.” He saw where her gaze was directed, and raised his hands, fingers spread. “Oh, this isn’t all from that,” he said. “Want to see?”

  If it was just more Infected bodies, Fallon was sure she wouldn’t mind skipping it. But Lilith, Warga, and Antonetti had already climbed down from the truck, and Pybus stood at the doorway. “Sure,” Antonetti said. “Got me curious, anyway.”

  “This way,” Sansome said. He wore a goofy grin, reminding Fallon of how Jason looked when he had built something with Duplo blocks that he was especially proud of.

  They all followed, even Light after he’d killed the engine and pocketed the dead driver’s keys. The driveway led to a small parking area behind the building. The corpses were there. One looked badly beaten. The other one was worse, nearly decapitated, except all Sansome had to work with were his hands, so it was a ragged, bloody mess.

  But that wasn’t what he wanted them to see. Like some mutated Vanna White, he stood beside the parking lot’s back wall, right arm extended, open hand pointing to words written there in what Fallon wished was paint: THE SYKOS ARE HERE. The blood was still fresh, shiny and bright.

  “W
hat’s that mean?” Fallon asked, confused. “You mean ‘sickos?’ ”

  “Psychos,” Sansome corrected. “Us. Seven psychos.”

  Everyone laughed at that, but Lilith found it hysterical, almost doubling over in whoops of laughter. “That’s fuckin’ sick!” she said when she could breathe again. “I love it!”

  “That means it’s good, right?” Fallon asked softly.

  Warga nodded. “To her generation, yeah.”

  “You really don’t know how to spell ‘psychos?’ ” Lilith asked.

  “That’s not right?” Sansome replied, surprised and maybe even a little hurt.

  “Oh, it is now,” the girl said. “Nothing else will ever be right again. The Seven Sykos.”

  “Like the Seven Samurai,” Pybus offered. “Hopefully with a better ending.”

  “How does it end?” Antonetti asked. “They all die?”

  “Not all,” Pybus said. “Just most.”

  “Everybody dies,” Light said. “It’s just a matter of when and how. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d rather die here, a free man—­more or less—­than rotting in a cell somewhere.”

  “Not me,” Lilith said. “I’m never dying. Living’s too much fun.”

  “That’s not always a call you get to make,” Warga pointed out.

  “I know that. I’ve picked the time for enough other ­people. But I’m not dying. None of us are. The Seven Sykos are indestructible!”

  She broke into another fit of laughter. Watching her, Fallon couldn’t help smiling. Inside, she was wishing Lilith was right. They’d been lucky so far, and perhaps that luck would hold.

  Counting on that would be stupid, though, and she was not a stupid person—­her presence here in the zone notwithstanding. They would have to be wary as well as lucky. Even then, they might lose some ­people. They might lose the whole thing, and their lifeless, brain-­eaten corpses would be obliterated by nuclear bombs.