7 Sykos

by Marsheila Rockwell

  The patrol found small clutches of Infecteds: three, four, seven, up to ten once. By the time they drove away, all the Infecteds were usually dead, though a few times one or two got away. They were acting like the typical ones she had known all along—­not taking cover, not using weapons. She saw no evidence of cooperation or advanced brain function.

  Was the attack on Bass something else, then? How did they coordinate that? How did they know to use weapons—­even if those weapons were meant for close-­up work when they needed long-­range firepower—­or to seek cover from the hail of bullets the defenders sent their way?

  At Scottsdale Road, they left the highway and drove south. The name changed to Rural Road. They continued, over the Salt again, then west on Rio Salado and south on Mill into Tempe. One of the guys in the truck—­Fallon hadn’t learned any names, and didn’t want to—­said that there had been a lot of Infecteds reported in the area. All the guys were still hyped-­up from the battle and wanted to shed more Red-­eye blood.

  Fallon couldn’t deny that she felt the same way. There was a camaraderie in the air despite her efforts to deny it. They were engaged in a struggle against a common foe. They’d won some fights, and those victories primed them for more.

  Then, the walkie-­talkies in the truck bed crackled to life all at once. A voice that Fallon recognized through static as Ben Reedley’s came through the tiny speakers. “If anybody’s got eyeballs on those uniformed fucks who came in with Al Cuaron earlier today, don’t lose them. I want them back here, on the double. Alive, if possible, so I can talk to them before I administer the appropriate justice.”

  Fallon froze. Everybody in the truck was staring at her and Sansome. How to play it? She could run, but the other Sykos might not follow—­and she’d probably be shot in the back for her efforts. She could try to convince them that he was talking about some other uniformed fucks. She could pull a gun and shoot everybody in the truck, but that would still leave her and the others outnumbered and outgunned.

  Before she could even formulate a plan, as they were approaching 7th Street—­Fallon could see the Steak & Shake sign—­they ran into another ambush.

  Once again, vehicles had been rolled across the road, and with the buildings hemming it in on either side, the way forward was closed. Rodent spun his trike around to go back the way they’d come. It was harder for the trucks, and the first ones had just started trying to back and fill their way into 180-­degree turns when Infecteds swarmed from within and behind the storefronts on the north end of the block. The Raiders opened fire on what looked like a hundred or more of them.

  Fallon had an uncomfortable feeling. She spun around, looking toward the roadblock to the south. Sure enough, Infecteds were flowing between those vehicles like water finding cracks in a dam.

  “Behind us!” she shouted. She and Sansome started firing in that direction, and some of the Raiders joined in.

  Then more Infecteds emerged from the buildings on either side. The block echoed with automatic-­weapons fire, the shouts of the Raiders, the inhuman moaning and growling of the Infecteds. Smoke filled the air. Windows shattered, blood sprayed, the sidewalk turned crimson, and the gutters ran with red rivulets.

  The Infecteds had numbers on their side, and they managed to drag a few Raiders from truck beds and off ATVs and motorcycles, but they couldn’t stand up to guns and cases of ammunition. Gradually, their numbers were depleted. It was obvious how the battle would turn out.

  Fallon spoke a few words to Sansome, then found Light and told him the same thing—­firing all the while. Keeping up appearances. Light and Sansome did the same, respectively finding Warga and Lilith, while Fallon tracked down Pybus. He was alone in the big F-­350 while the Raiders who’d been in it performed mop-­up duties.

  Within minutes, they were all in that truck, with Light at the wheel. “Go!” Fallon shouted as soon as Sansome slammed his door.

  Light gunned it, up on the sidewalk, rolling over the bodies of Infecteds and a few fallen Raiders, glass crunching beneath tires, scraping trees. Raiders shouted at them. Rodent swiveled his Uzi in their direction, but Warga fired a ­couple of bursts from his M249, forcing the Raider to dive from his seat and take cover. Warga and Sansome leaned out the windows and fired at the other vehicles, taking out tires, puncturing engine blocks. Raiders fired back, but the way Light was weaving on and off the sidewalk, their rounds did little serious damage.

  “I feel a little bad about leaving them there with the Infecteds,” Fallon said when they were in the clear. “But not too bad.”

  “You’re a Syko,” Lilith reminded her. “Feeling sorry for other ­people is for chumps.”

  “They have walkie-­talkies,” Fallon continued. “They can call for help.”

  “I’m so relieved,” Light said, sarcasm dripping from every syllable.

  The truth was, Fallon should have felt worse than she did. What really bothered her wasn’t the fate of these particular Raiders but the fact that the Raiders as a whole seemed to have a long reach.

  And the Sykos had just made enemies of every one of them.

  With luck, maybe the Infecteds would finish off the ones trapped in Tempe before they had a chance to tell anyone who’d stranded them there.

  CHAPTER 40

  15 hours

  “Why were they even with that group? They’ve got less than seventeen hours to wrap this up,” Robbins demanded, here on one of his increasingly frequent visits to check on the Sykos’ progress.

  “They didn’t have a choice—­it was that or get killed by a horde of Infecteds. And as you just saw, they got out of the situation as quickly as humanly possible.” Book tried not to stress the word “humanly,” but he was pretty sure Robbins thought the Sykos had some sort of superpowers because their brains allowed them to function with less empathy than most. Just like individuals with Williams syndrome were empathetic to the opposite extreme, the amount of empathy displayed was a result of genes—­missing ones in their case. But whether they had too much or too little, they were all part of the human spectrum.

  Of course, he couldn’t say that to Robbins. Not because the general wouldn’t understand—­Book knew he was an intelligent man—­but because it wouldn’t matter to him. His only concern was the clock ticking down to Phoenix’s destruction, not the mental condition of those he’d sent to jam its gears.

  “Anyway, they’re back on track now, and I’ll get in contact with Fallon to make sure they stay that way.”

  Robbins snorted, but he knew by now that was the best he was going to get out of the analyst, so he just nodded, said, “See that you do,” and left the room.

  After the door closed, Book changed the view on one of the monitor screens back to the hit he’d gotten off the driver’s license Fallon had shown him. He’d hacked into the FBI’s facial-­recognition database to get it, and boy, was it a doozy.

  Carmen Gamez was the widow of Enrique Gamez, a recently deceased drug kingpin from Sinaloa. The FBI’s operating theory was that she’d come to Phoenix to assure her U.S. connections that even with Enrique gone, business would go on as usual. The U.S. was her biggest market, after all, and Arizona was her gateway. What business she might have had with Elliott was the million-­dollar question.

  “Fallon? Can you talk now?”

  There was a long enough pause that he started to wonder if there was something wrong with her transmitter, then he heard her mumble, “Not really, but I can listen.”

  Good enough, he thought.

  “Your Latina torturer is—­was—­the wife of the head of the Gamez Cartel. Enrique, her husband, was killed a few weeks ago, leaving her nominally in charge. She’s a long way from Sinaloa, which is probably safest for her right now. And she likely came to shore up her American counterparts.”

  “Warga was right, then. Cartel.”

  “Did you know Elliott was meeting with her?”r />
  “Of course not. How would I?”

  Her denial sounded genuine.

  Of course, she was a psychopath, and they were damned good liars. But he believed her surprise and the anger behind it.

  “He is your partner.”

  “Was,” she murmured, the view from her implanted camera changing from the windshield of the crew cab and the road in front of her to the side window, presumably to keep the others from realizing she was talking. Book could barely hear her over the road noise, so he had to assume it was working.

  “You don’t have any idea why he might have been?”

  “Not a fucking clue.”

  “Okay,” Book said. “Since you won’t tell me why you care, I don’t know if it’ll help—­and I’ll probably be thrown in prison for even telling you—­but I have located other high-­ranking members of the cartel, hiding out from the Infecteds at the Mesa Country Club, on West Fairway, off Country Club Drive. They’ve got a cutting-­edge video surveillance system; I’m still trying to tap into it.”

  “Thanks, Book. That does help. Gives me somewhere to look, and it’s on the way.”

  “Hey! Earth to Fallon. You in there?” It was Light’s voice, angry and suspicious. Book saw Fallon’s camera view change again as she turned to look at the EMT. From the expression on his face, it was clear the jig was up.

  “Looks like you’ve got more pressing matters on your hands right now. I’ll contact you when I have more information.” Fallon didn’t respond, but Book hardly expected her to, given the circumstances. “Be careful.”

  “Always,” she said, but Book couldn’t be sure if she was talking to him or to Light. “Did you want something?”

  “Yeah, I want something,” Light said, braking and pulling the truck over. “I want to know who the hell you’ve been talking to, and I want to know now.”

  “ . . . and that’s why I hid the two-­way with Book from you, even though I shouldn’t have. And why it’s so important to get the prototype back,” Fallon said. “To cure ­people like us.”

  Light scoffed, both at the excuse and the idea.

  “What makes you think any of us want to be cured? I like what I do.”

  “I’m sure that’s true, and you might not want to be cured, but there are others who would.”

  “You?” he asked. From the way her eyes flicked away from his for an instant, he knew it was true. “Why? You haven’t killed anyone. As far as I can tell, your being a psychopath has had nothing but benefits for you—­immune to Crazy 8s, your own lab, top in your field. Hell, you’ll be able to parlay all of this”—­he gestured toward the windshield, taking in the wrecked cars, dead bodies, and general chaos—­“into a freaking bestseller. Why would you want to mess with that?”

  “I have my reasons,” she said, her lips compressed and her brow furrowed. She clearly didn’t want to talk about it. Which only made Light want to talk about it more.

  “Maybe you really did kill someone before all this, but were so good at it that it didn’t come up in your background check.” Her face didn’t change. “Burn down a building? Kick a puppy?” Still no change. “Maybe it’s not you that you want to cure?” Ah, there it was. He didn’t think her lips could get any thinner, but they did. “Someone else, then. Husband? No, if you have one, he’s a wuss—­you’d never marry someone you couldn’t control. None of us would. Oh, I know!” He smiled triumphantly. “You have a kid.”

  Her shoulders slumped infinitesimally, signaling defeat.

  “I do,” she admitted. “A son named Jason. He’s three.”

  “And you’re afraid he’s inherited your brain abnormality,” Pybus said quietly from the second row of seats. “If he has, you want to be able to fix him before he turns into one of us.”

  “Or you,” Lilith, who was seated between her and Light, added with particular relish.

  “Or me,” Fallon agreed in a small voice, looking out the window again. Maybe blinking back tears.

  Light was stunned to realize he actually felt sorry for her. Pity, anyway, if not actual compassion. He changed the subject, glaring into the rearview, daring the others to contradict him.

  “Whatever. As long as you keep that thing away from me, it’s all good,” he said. “We’ve got more important things to talk about, anyway.”

  Fallon’s gaze returned to his, sharper now, maybe even appreciative.

  “Such as?”

  “We’ve been talking, comparing notes. The attacks at Bass, the ambushes—­that smacks of conscious planning. And unless they just set up the latest ambush in hopes that someone would come along eventually, like those earlier ones, it means there’s some kind of communication between the ones who managed to escape from the first ambush and the ones laying the second one.”

  “Happenstance,” Pybus opined, “Monkeys accidentally writing Shakespeare.”

  “Bullshit,” Lilith said, and Warga shook his head, “I’m with the egghead on this one.”

  “Joe? What do you think?” Fallon asked, meeting his eyes in the rearview.

  “I hope Caspar is right,” Sansome said after a moment. “But I don’t think he is.”

  Light figured that pretty much described all of them, Fallon included. They were all secretly hoping the Shakespeare faction was right, doubting it all the while.

  After a few minutes, Sansome slapped the side of his ruined head. “Stop it!” he said.

  “What the hell?” Warga asked him.

  “I have this stupid song stuck in my head. It’s all ‘Sugar Sugar.’ ”

  “The Archies,” Pybus said. “The number one single of 1969, believe it or not. The ultimate bubblegum record. Wilson Pickett covered it in ’70 and did it better.”

  “Jeez, will you both shut up with that oldies shit? Caspar, you can sing, right?” Lilith asked.

  “So ­people tell me. Country-­western music, mostly.”

  “Sing something that’ll get the song out of his head. And keep you from giving musical-­history lessons.”

  Fallon turned in her seat. Pybus sat back in the seat, crossed his arms over his chest, pressed his lips together. “I think I might have something,” he said.

  “What?” Fallon asked.

  Pybus took a deep breath and started to sing. “By the time I get to Phoenix, she’ll be . . .”

  After that, conversation lagged. With the eastbound 202 and all its on-­ and off-­ramps completely jammed, Light was off-­roading. He’d found a place where the K-­rail placed during road widening had been knocked aside by an out-­of-­control semi, forced the truck through, and was now driving on the shoulder, between trees—­over the smaller ones—­and saguaros. As they approached Alma School Road, he brought the truck down into the staging area for the ongoing ADOT construction, zigzagging through belly dumps, water tanks, and other random oversized yellow equipment that Light didn’t have names for beyond the bulldozer and the backhoe.

  As they were bumping across the poorly graded ground, Fallon suddenly pointed off to the right.

  “What’s that?”

  Light looked. He didn’t see anything at first, and then he did.

  Smoke.

  “Let’s try to get a little closer. If there’s a new fire, it might mean some ­people are in trouble.”

  “Yeah, like 4 million of them,” Lilith muttered, but both Light and Fallon ignored her. Abruptly, he was reminded of a family on a road trip, Mom and Dad in front with the troublemaker teen in between, the three older boys in back, each immersed in their own thoughts. Which made him “Dad” and Fallon “Mom” and, frighteningly, wasn’t all that far off the mark.

  Light slowed and brought the truck closer to the smoke, which was black now, easier to see. He could even smell it through the vents now—­not the pure, clean scent of a wood fire but the acrid odor of industry in flames.

 
As they inched nearer, the story revealed itself, and it was firmly in the horror genre. The Infecteds were once more going from building to building, this time in a small industrial park on the corner of Alma School and McLellan. But where before they would enter the building to search for survivors, now they were setting fire to the buildings to flush those survivors out.

  “I know where we are,” Fallon said suddenly. “There’s nothing but residential homes to the south and east. It’s only a matter of time before they start in that direction and put entire neighborhoods to the torch. And with no firefighters able to respond . . .”

  “Burn, baby, burn,” Lilith breathed, almost reverently.

  “That street across from us is Harvest,” Fallon said. “If you take it, then your first left, you can get us back to McLellan without having to go past them. Then it’s a straight shot down McLellan to Country Club.”

  “You’re the boss,” Light replied, preparing to step on the gas.

  Just then, an Infected stepped out from behind a house on the corner, heading north—­no doubt going to join the hundred or so of his brethren partying around the bonfire. He saw them just as they saw him.

  Worse, a group of Infecteds at the fire turned and looked straight at them, too, as if the first one’s seeing them somehow tipped off the rest. That group started south, toward them, as did the lone Infected on Harvest.

  Light didn’t need Fallon to tell him what to do next.

  “Path of least resistance,” he said, and gunned it. Light mowed the single Infected down like he was a stalk of wheat and the Ford F-­350 Super Duty was a seven-­ton scythe in Tuxedo Black Metallic, then tore down Harvest and made the left, leaving the group of Infecteds that had spotted them still heading south to where they had been, while they were now headed north.