Resurrection Express

by Stephen Romano

  “Take it easy. We’re okay.”

  Teeth gritted harder. Reeling it in.

  Just barely.

  The vault is blackened from the explosion, but it’s open. I was right about the indie power source—didn’t realize it was controlling the sequence on the time locks until too late. That’s what the secondary pulse inside the lead casing of the power line was. I went through all that punishment for nothing. My dad died for nothing.

  I killed him.

  No. Don’t think that way.

  He died for us.

  For you and me, Toni.

  Just don’t think about it at all.

  • • •

  We open the thick vault door the rest of the way. It’s like pushing your stuck car into a filling station. It would have been easier with more men. They’re probably miles away by now. Radio silence. We’ll find a way back somehow. Once they figure out the building didn’t blow, they’ll be looking for us anyway.

  This is so bad.

  Inside, the vault has smooth walls, no shelves. I run my hands across the shiny steel, looking for hidden switches, depressions, anything. Nothing at all.

  Except.

  In the center of the room is a black metal suitcase. I kneel down in front of it and flip the latches. It’s not even locked. It might explode in my face if I open it.

  I don’t care. I have to look.

  I’m still alive two seconds later.

  Inside the suitcase are seventeen flat plastic casings, about three inches square, with USMB ports. Portable hard drives. Latest technology, a terabyte each. The drives are all nestled in custom foam slots inside the case. There’s a couple of flash drives, too. I run my fingers along the rows of shiny black.

  Click, click, click.

  I snap the case shut and say out loud:

  “So this is it?”

  Click.

  Hammer down hard, right behind me.

  And the voice of the Sarge, not on the headset:

  “I’m afraid it is, kid.”

  • • •

  I put my hands up and turn around slowly. I’m looking right down the barrel of his Ruger SR9. At this range it’ll remove my heart and feed it to him. His Predator is slung on his back. He wants accuracy, not a two-for-one sale. A couple of his men are just on the other side of the door, Hecklers ready to sling hash.

  “You dumb son of a bitch,” the Sarge hisses at me. “What were you trying to pull? You could have gotten us all killed.”

  “You didn’t have to hang around. I told you to run.”

  “Yeah, you did, didn’t you?” He sneers when he says that, as if I’m making some kind of smartass remark. Spits on the floor. “Where’s Daddy? He buy the farm or what?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’ll be sure to send flowers. Now step away from the merchandise.”

  Bennett puts up one hand. “Hey, man, calm down.”

  “Shut the fuck up. You’re on my shitlist, too.”

  I don’t move.

  The Sarge bores into me with his eyes burning white. “I said, step away from the suitcase. Come over here next to the girl. You two get real cozy. And get your hands where I can see them. Do it now, both of you.”

  He re-aims his gun right at my head.

  I don’t move.

  “I’m giving you to the count of three, you little fuck.”

  I don’t move.

  Dad . . .

  This is what you died for?

  This was the important thing?

  “One . . . two . . .”

  “Okay, okay, whatever,” I finally say.

  And I take two steps to the left, next to Bennett.

  “Get in here,” the Sarge calls to the two men with machine guns. “You guys are in charge of the package. Keep an eye on our friends, too. These kids are dangerous. Ain’t ya?”

  I don’t answer him.

  Keep my hands in the air, keep my eyes on the guns aimed at us.

  The two grunts beat their feet inside the vault, one of them sliding his machine gun onto his shoulder by the strap, the other keeping a bead on me. The smaller of the two has brown hair and a big scar on his nose, looks twenty or so. The one with his gun still up doesn’t look like anything. A ghost in ninja black. He holds his position near the vault entrance. That means one still left, probably covering the stairwell. I’m in a spiderweb.

  Scarface grabs the suitcase, steps back behind the Sarge.

  The one aiming his Heckler near the door makes a scared noise. “We should get out of here, sir. We’re six minutes behind—”

  “Not just yet,” the Sarge says, taking two steps closer to us with the gun.

  “This is insane!” Bennett spits. “You can’t shoot us!”

  “Maybe you’re right and maybe you ain’t . . .”

  He holsters the gun. Pulls that big Rambo knife off his hip.

  “. . . and maybe there’s just not enough room on the express.”

  Takes two more steps. One more. Almost to us.

  Right in Bennett’s face now:

  “You wanna see the face of God, little lady?”

  The knife, two inches from her right eye. Closer.

  “She did her job,” I say. “This isn’t the army.”

  “You’re right, boy, it ain’t. This is resurrection.”

  The knife stabs toward her.

  • • •

  The hard scent of erased memories hits me again, and something short-circuits in my brain, slowing everything in the world down . . . as the knife glimmers in one white-hot instant . . . a million thoughts supercolliding and pinwheeling back like bullets on a high wind . . . and I feel all of those thoughts and none of them as they hover at the edge of the Sarge’s blade . . .

  And time freezes.

  The razor-sharp point one micromillimeter from Bennett’s unflinching eyeball.

  My fist stabs out.

  Catches his wrist in midair.

  And then . . .

  • • •

  He almost howls when the crack of bone hits him, senses my training too late, his fingers going dead and letting loose the blade just as I swing up with my right fist, into his jaw. He bites hard through his lower lip. Chokes on a piece of it, blubbing on bloody backwash. Bennett stumbles back into the wall, still damn near paralyzed by the shock of the moment, as I put my palms in the Sarge’s midsection, knocking him back into the two guys on the vault door. It’s a pushing-hands technique they taught me when I was nineteen, sends your target flying backwards on his own feet with a lot of momentum. When he hits his men, they stumble through the door like ten pins, their heads knocking together. One of them bounces and slides along the floor, dazed. Someone’s finger hits the trigger, can’t tell who, and a single bullet plays the lottery with us, zanging back and forth all over the steel walls. I hear it buzz past my face like an insect in the half second before I go for the blasted floor of the vault room outside in a roll. There’s a meaty slap behind me as the bullet strikes home and Bennett makes a noise like she just swallowed a bug.

  I hear her hit the floor as I come up in a fighting crouch, the ghost in black stumbling on his feet, swinging around with his weapon, firing blind from his tumble on the floor. His next shots cut into the Sarge and nearly tear him in half—a quick burst of thunder and a sharp spray of blood and human debris blowing across the room like a slash of black-and-pink and red all over.

  Sergeant Maxwell Rainone stumbles and falls, deader than hell.

  I roll again and another insect buzzes at me, missing my head by inches.

  Just out the corner of one eye, I see Bennett waffling on the blasted floor, blood oozing from her arm. She’s struggling to get to the shotgun hanging off Rainone’s back.

  Scarface swims in semi-consciousness on his feet, trying to put himself in the game again, with the knockout reflex screaming at him that he’s defeated. Before he can figure out what happens next, I shoot up from the floor, grab his left leg in a scissor clamp a
nd hit the lower fibula just right so that it blows the bone in half through his skin and clothing. The crack is like a gunshot. No blood jets out, just jagged ivory teeth. I’m shoving him in front of me like a shield as I do that, the Black Ghost firing and firing, the bullets tearing at Scarface, not getting through his Kevlar. I duck behind his body and jerk my eyes shut as he takes all six shots, the sheer raw concussion hitting him like anvils, crushing everything inside his rib cage to jelly. I hear the gun fire three more times, bombs that make me deaf. Scarface doesn’t scream, his lungs collapsing. Then, suddenly, there’s another roar of thunder and the shooting stops. I hear a body drop to the floor. I don’t see what happens to the Black Ghost because I’m still hiding behind my human shield—which is dead meat on two feet now.

  I let the body fall and it slops into the scorched floor of the big room.

  I see that the Black Ghost is dead on the floor, too, swimming in a lake of his own blood, half his head erased. Someone shot him and it wasn’t me. Maybe it was God.

  Maybe—

  Clack.

  Heavy metal on heavy metal.

  I look up to see a long black tunnel to nowhere aimed in my face. The guy from the stairwell, his pal Heckler locked and loaded.

  “Wait,” I tell him, and then I try to say something else, but the sound chokes at the back of my throat as he pulls the trigger.

  Too late. I’m already dead, point-blank.

  Then something goes click and does a sickening crunch inside the gun—and I can’t even believe it happens. It’s a million to one, the sound of steel snapping in one millisecond as I stare my death right in the eye.

  The sound of the rollerlock jamming.

  The bullet tries to fire and explodes in the chamber, blowing his hand off.

  It’s like a white hot zang that erases time for a half second, then expands into a high-pitched shriek of tearing flesh and metal, a piece of bloody shrapnel whizzing by my face as I duck the spray.

  And then his forehead bursts apart.

  He plunges backwards in a meaty thunder and everything he ever had on his mind rains down after him, his blown-to-hell machine gun falling uselessly at his side. He joins his buddies on the floor, all three of them stiff and bloody—wreckage among the wreckage.

  Bennett slumps against the open door of the vault, the shotgun smoking.

  I almost smile at her.

  She lets the gun fall to the floor and clutches her shoulder, which is perforated and soaked through with arterial red now. Starts pulling a field pack off her back, racing to stop the bleeding.

  “Fuck,” she says, huffing through the pain, her voice fast and desperate. “God damn fuck . . .”

  • • •

  I can’t think of a thing to say. She looks at the two men she just shot in a sort of detached shock, unwrapping bandages from the kit.

  She’s never killed anyone.

  She’s never caught a bullet before.

  I can feel it, like electricity in the blasted room.

  Three tours on the front lines, death surrounding her from all sides, and she’s never had to pull the trigger herself. The horror of it is scrawled on her face, red disbelief glowing bad in a galaxy of freckles. Like a jaded kid who finally just grew up, real fast. I don’t envy her that. I’m forcing myself not to think about it. We have bigger fish to fry.

  I switch my headset to an outside frequency and start yelling at our ride:

  “Mission scrubbed. We’re coming out.”

  The pilot crackles back and he sounds really nervous.

  • • •

  We come out of the building exactly twenty minutes late. Bennett’s right arm is useless, trussed up in a sling. The chopper is still waiting. I’m hauling the package from the suitcase in the Gold’s Gym bag and part of my rig is on my back, the most important part. The part we’ll need later. The pilot looks worried behind the stick. He turns to us as we board the big machine, his words all slurring together in a panic: “You okay? Where’s the rest of the guys?”

  I pull the pistol off my right hip just as Bennett closes on him from behind, shoving steel against the side of his head.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” she whispers in his ear. “I know how to fly one of these, too.”

  He freezes. “What the hell are you doing?”

  I get closer to him. “Hedging my bets.”

  8

  00000-8

  GO TO ZERO

  Ten miles from the Texas Data Concepts building, we force the pilot to set us down in an open field just off a winding country back road. The sun still isn’t up. I tell the man flying the ship to bail and Bennett holds him in her sights while I lash his right arm to a thick tree limb with the titanium plasti-cuffs and pat him down. I take two LG Rumor Touch smartphones and a pistol. He was loaded. I pull the batteries out of the phones and shove them in my bag. It’ll be hours before the cuffs dissolve, and hours on top of that before this guy reaches anything that looks like civilization. By then we’re long gone, me and Bennett. I’ve already phoned in our ride to the underground.

  It takes us thirty minutes to get to it.

  Bennett flies the machine like a one-armed bandit.

  • • •

  I know a few crooks in Houston. Some of them still owe me favors. I have all their phone numbers memorized.

  Kim Hammer is a gangbanger who used to be a man—she was a weird piece of work before the operation, but now she’s an even stranger lady who still gets respect from the homies and the white-collar mob guys in this town. That’s mostly because of her connections inside the Treasury Department that allow her to get unregistered machine guns and other army goodies—plus drugs, fake papers, all the usual gangster business. When I text her that I have a slightly used helicopter for sale, she tells me where to land that bitch and I name my price. She only haggles a few minutes.

  After I use the pilot’s cell, I pull the batteries again, smash it and toss what’s left out the window. Do the same with his backup phone. Even destroyed, those things can lead the bad guys right to you, if they know what to look for and where. I once pulled a trace from an Apple satellite off a ghost signal hovering above the remains of a gutted iPhone that had been snapped in half and tossed in a gutter. It’s hard to kill one of those. Better to leave them behind and stay off the grid. LG technology isn’t as advanced as the Mac people, but you never can tell. Wireheads get smarter every day. Anyway, I can get new phones at Walmart. They’ll be a lot less dangerous to use, too.

  As the first rays of morning begin to haunt the horizon, we hover over a concrete landing strip at a compound near the woods just outside of Sharpstown.

  I look at my watch and note the date and time:

  7:30 A.M.

  October 23.

  Damn.

  Bennett’s shoulder is killing her—literally—but she lands us smooth and easy. There’s a Cyclone fence hanging in gnarled tatters on all sides of the tarmac, an abandoned building that looks like the remains of an old factory in the center of everything. Kim’s people will meet us here soon. She said it would be an hour. She said this place was secure.

  But first things first.

  I get out of the chopper and start screaming.

  • • •

  The rage rises to the surface and consumes me under the terrible blowback of the whirling helicopter blades, so loud and raw and primal that my heart threatens to blow and my throat skins itself, like paper peeling from the walls. I fall to my knees and pound the cement with my fists. Red heat rises from my body in the maelstrom. And then everything else explodes, too . . . all the years I worked for Dad, all the years he tried to pay me back however he could, for rolling with the weirdness, the jobs where I watched dozens of men die at his command, die because it was necessary, die because he was a killer, die because he was protecting me, and I hate what I see in those memories, I hate him for being that way, for pulling me down with him, for putting me in that vault with him, for standing there and letting hims
elf die while I lived.

  A voice . . . breaking over everything:

  Come back.

  Back away from this.

  It will be the death of everything you love to give in now.

  “Goddammit, snap out of it, Elroy!”

  The voice breaks over everything, and I realize it’s not in my head.

  It’s not the voice of my masters.

  It’s not the better angels.

  It’s the woman.

  Bennett.

  The storm that surrounded us is gone, and the air is still, the prop wash vanished in the cool Texas breeze. I’m on my knees and my knuckles are shredded and bleeding. The helicopter has stopped rumbling, the blades still and silent. And the woman’s voice is ringing over mine as her hand grips my shoulder . . .

  . . . and . . .

  . . . just a little at first . . .

  . . . I back the rage off.

  I listen to my own heart, which wanted to explode just a few seconds ago. I use that sound to pull myself to shore, the slime and the fire still clinging to me. It hurts. But I make it back. Just a little at first. Then a little more . . .

  I look up and I see Bennett. She is kneeling next to me, terrified and bleeding. There are tears on her face. There are tears on my face, too.

  For my father.

  Dad . . .

  I close my eyes and I see him one last time. I see him spinning with the butt of his gun, to club my lights out. I see the look on his face behind the blow. The look that begs me to forgive him.

  The look that redefines everything . . .

  I see him when I am five years old, sitting in that courtroom—a terrible place that smells like chalk and looseleaf notebook paper and the lies of men. I see his face when they sentence the redneck trash who killed my mother. The face of defeat.

  I failed you, son.

  I see him when I am eight years old, my heart much colder now, filled with hard realities that only come when you live on the street and eat garbage—we’ve lived on the street for six months now, moving from place to place, and now he’s telling me he has to go away again, for a long time, that he might even be killed on the inside. I have to be a man now and take care of myself. I see his face when he tells me it’s all his fault.