Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2)

by SL Huang

  I needn’t have worried about finding them. I burst out the door onto floor seven just as a gunshot went off.

  I kicked through more doors, tearing around corners toward where I had triangulated the sound—

  Three more gunshots. Four. Five.

  I’d drawn my P7. I smashed the butt of it into the glass door to the back offices; it shattered spectacularly—

  Six. Seven. Eight.

  A conference room was ahead of me.

  Nine.

  I burst through the door.

  Morrison Sloan stood on one side of the room, his arm sticking out with a handgun as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it. Except that he did. I took in six bodies on the floor in the first second, and Imogene Grant was the last one standing, backed against the wall, her face slack and uncomprehending—

  Sloan’s finger tightened on the trigger one more time. I thrust my fingers into my pocket and then dove in front of the gun, hand outstretched, just as he fired.

  I felt the impact in my palm as my phone stopped the bullet, a punch through the metal, but the force calculation was laughably simple, and I knew the layers of casing and chips and battery had been enough. I landed heavily on my side on the conference room table and twisted back up as Sloan fired twice more, but I kept the phone in line with the barrel—it dented and buckled in my hand as each slug hit—

  I thought, shit, he fired more than ten rounds; that gun’s not California legal and a Glock 17 holds seventeen rounds plus one in the pipe—he’d been firing before I got here—maybe a lot—

  My other hand gripped my own gun, but I didn’t know where to shoot. How did one kill a robot? Where was the weak spot? I had no idea how the hardware was set up—whether I should just Swiss Cheese him—an inane jabber in my mind wondered if this would reset my count with Arthur—

  Sloan frowned slightly. “You’re not one of Satan’s horde. You’re not one of the ones who tried to take us over with the artificial people.” His gun hand dipped. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  I had no idea what to say to that. Did he know what he was? Fuck, what even counted as “knowing” for him?

  Come to that, how was he here? If his programming was anything like Liliana’s, he didn’t have the motivation, the internal drive, to decide to go and find an illegal firearm and figure out a way in through Arkacite’s security and commit murder—

  The realization crystallized much more slowly than it should have. “Someone sent you,” I said. “Who? Who was it?”

  “I did it for the people,” he said. He gestured vaguely at the room full of bodies. “They’re the ones who unleashed the scourge…” His eyes drifted behind me, as if only just seeing what he’d done.

  I wanted to shoot his silicone skin full of holes and shake him, demand to be told who had programmed him, what was going on, but he wouldn’t know, would he? He couldn’t tell me what he hadn’t been programmed to.

  Rayal might be able to find out. She and Checker could dig into his head, see who had written the code to make him come here, who had put a weapon in his hand.

  “Put the gun down,” I said. I could tie him up. Take him out with me. How strong was he? Never mind; I could estimate the upper limit of tensile strength for the metal in his limbs. I wished I could knock him out, but I didn’t know how without damaging him, damaging the evidence we might need.

  “Are they dead?” he said. The frown between his eyes deepened.

  I didn’t look. I thought the answer was probably yes. Grant made a small whimpering sound behind me. “Grant, see to your people. Sloan, put the gun down. Now. Or I’ll shoot you.” He could understand threats, right? The AI would know how to respond. The AI would know to acquiesce.

  “I killed them,” he said, sounding confused. “It’s wrong to kill people.” He raised the Glock to his temple, pressed the barrel against the artificial skin there, and pulled the trigger.

  The sound was muffled and dull, buried by metal, and the bullet didn’t exit. Sloan didn’t collapse immediately—he stumbled for a minute like a malfunctioning doll, his hand still holding the gun frozen at his temple and his jaw working, strange sounds coming out of his mouth that only vaguely approximated speech. Then he twitched, stopped, and toppled over like a felled tree.

  I jumped down and pried the Glock out of his fingers. So that was how you killed them. As easy as with humans.

  “Grant,” I said, turning. “Call the paramedics—”

  Imogene Grant was slumped at the base of the wall, her chest soaked with red, bubbles of blood forming on her mouth.

  She’d been shot once already before I entered the room. I hadn’t noticed.

  I dashed over, dropping the pistols, pressing the heels of my hands down hard over the swamp of blood. The wound sucked against my palms. I got my jacket off and wadded it against her, my mind automatically calculating blood volume and loss—

  Fuck the math, I thought, and pawed at her clothes one-handed for a cell phone that hadn’t been crushed by bullet impacts. Medical science had come a long way; maybe they could put enough blood back in her body—

  Grant clutched at my wrist. “Our fault,” she whispered.

  “Shut up,” I said, twisting out of her weak grasp and pressing both hands back down on her chest as I scanned the room. Her mobile wasn’t in her pockets—a purse, maybe? Or did one of the scientists have a phone? My gaze raked across them; they were all far too still for the paramedics to help. Jesus…

  “No,” said Grant. “Listen…we started it. We stole from them first. I didn’t think…lead to this…”

  “Wait. Funaki?”

  Her eyes tried to focus, begging me to understand her last confession.

  Holy crap. The impossible NLP. It had to have come from Funaki Industries’ research—been one of their corporate secrets. An industrial espionage war that went back decades, Harrington had said. How much more had Arkacite stolen to built their ’bots? How many of the breakthroughs were really Funaki’s?

  “You aren’t responsible for this,” I said. “Funaki didn’t send this guy against you, all right? Someone else stole him from them.”

  “Stole…?” she breathed.

  She hadn’t even known he was one of the ’bots. She’d thought he was the guy on TV railing against AIs thanks to the ones Ally Eight had built, thought he had come to put his words into violent action.

  It was too much to try to explain. “I’m going to move for a minute and find a cell phone,” I said. “Hang on.”

  “Wait,” she said. “They…they took him…”

  “Yes, he’s a robot and someone stole him. Now stop talking.”

  I gingerly took my hands off her and scooted over to the nearest body—an Asian man, his glasses askew where he’d fallen face down and blood soaking the carpet around him. I pulled at his pockets—there, a phone, finally.

  I lurched back to Grant, pressing down again on her wound as I brought the smartphone to life with my other hand—

  She was still, her eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

  I stayed frozen for several long, long seconds. Then I released my blood-soaked jacket slowly, rocked back on my heels, and dropped the phone.

  This was my fault. If I hadn’t spent so long talking down Sloan, if I’d gotten to her sooner, Grant might still be alive. I’d known there were potentially injured people behind me. I should have shot Morrison Sloan in the head and been done with it.

  Mechanically, I stood up and took my blood-soaked jacket with me. I wiped off the cell phone and tossed it back to its owner, then picked up my gun and returned Sloan’s to his hand. The police would find some forensic anomalies here, but they’d probably be more concerned with the fact that they had a robot murderer.

  I pushed open the door of the conference room and made my way to the front of the building to look down out the window. The crowd outside was surging against the police line, the security forces breaking.

  The mob would get in to find their job
already done for them.

  I took the stairs back down to the ground floor and got out the way I’d come in, stopping in a washroom to do a quick scrub job on my hands—it wouldn’t do to walk outside looking like someone who had just killed the seven people inside. My jacket was a lost cause, but I swathed it in paper towels to carry out with me. I’d look weird, but not like a murderer.

  Once I got back to my hole in the wall and climbed out through the rubble, I circled around to the front, skirting the fringes of the crowd and looking for a car to steal. Pushing, protesting, shouting people shoved by me. I fought my way out to a side street, away from the crowd.

  I was walking in a daze, not paying attention, and by all rights I should have died in that moment.

  Instead, some small part of the back of my brain that was still alert heard the rifle report.

  Some small part of the back of my brain heard the rifle report and realized the bullet hadn’t beaten it.

  Some part of my brain that was way too good at what it did to be even close to normal heard the rifle report, realized the bullet hadn’t beaten it, thought “subsonic round,” and still had time to react.

  Before the rest of my brain had parsed what was going on, my body was twisting and dropping. Something kicked me in the arm as I went down, hard, knocking the wind out of me even though it was my arm, it wasn’t—

  And then the pain hit.

  Fortunately, I was moving before it had registered, and in a blind haze I continued my roll underneath the nearest car, putting the engine block between me and the direct line to where the muffled sound of a subsonic rifle round had emanated from.

  Oh God. Oh God.

  I struggled to breathe and not pass out, the acrid odor of engine oil clogging my senses, the pavement under my back digging into my spine. My entire right arm was an explosion of agony; the hyperawareness that usually helped me with injuries quailed away from it—I forced my senses through—

  The round had shattered my right humerus, bullet lodged against the bone, oh God, it hurt—

  Fuck, I hated being shot.

  I pawed around with my left hand and found my paper-towel-bundled jacket; I smashed the whole massive ball against the entry wound and black spots immediately danced in my vision. I managed to undo my belt one-handed and get it up around my chest, binding the arm to my side with the paper-towel-and-fabric blob smashed against it like a protruding tumor.

  The bundle was becoming heavy and wet, my blood adding to Grant’s.

  I couldn’t stay here. I scooted to the other end of the car, steadied my breathing, and did some math.

  Vectors. This was easy. I knew exactly where the sniper had been. I slipped out the other end of the car so that if he had stayed, waiting for me to pop up again, not a hint of my silhouette would inch into his line of sight. I crept to the next car, biting my lip against the pain and breathing deeply. If he’d stayed put, he wouldn’t see me. If he’d stayed put…

  I snuck all the way around, a laborious ten minutes of inching and crawling and scooting and running—maybe he thought he’d killed me; would he go down and check? Maybe he’d taken one shot and then rabbited, worried someone had heard him, or that I could come back and track him…

  Which is exactly what I was doing.

  The apartment building was a few doors away. I wondered what he’d done to the tenants in the flat he’d chosen for his nest. Killed them? Tied them up? Made sure they were out of the house?

  I was about to find out.

  I took the stairs, the pain in my arm dragging at me as I pounded up the flights. The bullet trajectory sped backward, upward, telling me exactly which apartment, which room. I stumbled to the right door and smashed my heel into it next to the jamb, splintering the lock, exploding the door open, my gun in my left hand. My right arm dangled uselessly below the elbow from where it was buckled to my side.

  A tall, gray-haired man in black whipped around from where he’d been staring through his scope out the open window. A white guy, middle-aged—probably in his fifties, though he was handsome in a grizzled sort of way, and his build was still fit and athletic, hardened sinews standing out under his tanned skin.

  His hawk-like gaze took in the handgun I already had aimed at him, and he slowly raised his hands.

  “Hi,” I said, kicking the door shut behind me, where it banged against the broken jamb.

  The sniper said nothing.

  “I’m in a really bad mood,” I said. “And you just shot me.”

  His eyes strayed to the bloody mass of towels strapped to my arm.

  “I’m very hard to kill, as you can see,” I said. A shiver crawled down my spine as I said it. If he’d been using a standard rifle round, I’d be dead. He must have chosen subsonic out of a noise concern—his rifle sported a large, heavy suppressor as well.

  Fuck. He’d been so close.

  “Who sent you?” I said.

  He said nothing.

  “There are a bunch of people making my life difficult right now,” I said. “So I’d appreciate a little clarity. I’m in a lot of pain, and I’m not at all opposed to putting you in the same state. So answer. My. Fucking. Question. Who sent you?”

  He still didn’t answer.

  I didn’t need him to. Despite what I’d said, I already knew who he worked for. The robot at Arkacite hadn’t given any sign of knowing who I was, and nobody else involved would have escalated to killing, especially not with a human sniper. (A robot would make an excellent sniper, I thought. The math…the patience…oh, fuck.)

  The muscles in my legs twitched and shook. I needed to get off my feet. I needed to take care of the bleeding hole in my arm. I needed to go somewhere I could sit down and swallow an entire bottle of prescription painkillers. “Tell Mama Lorenzo she’ll have to try a lot harder than that,” I said shortly. “Now step forward and put your hands on your head.”

  He blinked.

  “No, I’m not going to kill you.” I should, I thought. He’d done his damnedest to kill me, and how many expert snipers could Mama Lorenzo have on speed dial?

  But fucking Arthur had gotten into my fucking head, and I’d just let seven other people die on my watch, plus possibly Noah Warren, and the Japanese scientists and a whole mess of robots who weren’t technically alive but still…and for some reason the decision to take one more life…

  If I let him live, maybe it was all right if I didn’t reset my count. Maybe it was these choices that mattered. I didn’t fucking know.

  I searched him and pulled off his sidearm, a sleek little high-quality Browning, and made him tie himself up with a cord from the curtains before I put down my gun and reinforced his job one-handed with some duct tape I found in his sniper bag. Then I looked down at the street to make sure no one was walking underneath and tipped his rifle out the window.

  Gravity sucked it down and shattered it against the sidewalk. Satisfying. More satisfying if I’d been able to steal it—it was a nice rifle—but a girl can’t have everything.

  “Did you kill the people who live here?” I asked. I wondered how long he’d been waiting here, patiently. The Mob had clearly realized I kept returning to Arkacite, set up shop for when I inevitably came back…“If you didn’t kill them, maybe I just leave you,” I offered. “Maybe I don’t call the cops.”

  He didn’t say anything. It was becoming irritating.

  “Mama Lorenzo doesn’t like innocent people getting hurt,” I said. At least, I’d thought she didn’t. I thought of Tegan and Reese and Cheryl.

  My would-be killer still stayed silent, and I gave up. Someone had probably noticed the falling rifle by now anyway and called the police. Heck, the cops were all next door at Arkacite; it shouldn’t take them long.

  I picked up the landline, dialed 911, and left it off the hook. Then I let myself out of the apartment.

  I had to brace my hand against the wall as I made my way down the stairs. The blood loss was making me dizzy.

  CHAPTER 28

&nb
sp; I LEANED back against the wall at Miri’s place and dug into my arm with a sterilized pair of tweezers from her medicine cabinet, biting down on a towel and trying not to pass out, and tuning out Arthur as he railed at me.

  “Goddammit, will you please stop and let me call you a doctor!”

  “Nnnn,” I said through the towel. The bullet outlined itself in my mind, nestled against the bone. HolyJesusChristfuck.

  “Russell, I’m telling you, you ain’t supposed to try to get it out. You gonna hurt yourself worse. You listening?”

  I eased the tweezers through my flesh and up against the slug. I anchored them, considered the lack of friction, and tightened my grip. With one quick tug the bullet was out—

  —a new wave of pain slammed into me as I yanked; my throat closed and bucked and I almost threw up into the towel.

  “Hey. Hey. Russell.” Arthur was crouched next to me, touching my face. “Hey.”

  I spat out the towel. My face was cold with sweat. “Find me something to splint this thing with.”

  “Russell, please. You might need surgery. And if it gets infected—”

  “I’ll see your doctor when all this is over,” I said. “Now find me something to splint it with, for fuck’s sake.” The words came out weaker than I wanted them to.

  When I’d practically fallen through Miri’s door covered in blood, Pilar had whisked Liliana—who’d been cheerfully conscious again—into the bedroom, covering her eyes. She’d popped back out to make sure I wasn’t dying and there wasn’t anything she could do, and then gone back to babysitting.

  Rayal was sitting in the corner, her face in her hands. She hadn’t taken the murder of her entire team well.

  Checker came back out of the kitchen with a bowl of warm water, more towels, and another first-aid kit. “Here—I’m going to go check the closets; she’s got to have something better than Neosporin—”

  I grunted. I didn’t know why I hadn’t gone back to one of my bolt holes. I had better medical supplies in all of them than Miri probably had in her whole apartment, but I’d jacked a car and driven here automatically, my mind in a fugue state. Probably from the blood loss.