Two Weeks' Notice: A Revivalist Novel

by Rachel Caine

  That, Bryn thought, was good advice, even coming from Jane. She eased up, took a slow breath, and glanced at Annie. Her sister was milky pale, and very confused. “Bryn? You know her?”

  “Oh, we’re almost related,” Jane assured her, and draped herself over a handy chair like a sun-drowsy lioness. “I’m Patrick’s wife.”

  “Ex,” Bryn said. Just for the hell of it. That earned her a flicker of a cold glance.

  Annie’s face was so blank that it strongly resembled the whiteboard. “That’s impossible,” she said. “You mean Patrick Patrick?”

  “No, I mean the other one. Yes, dear, that Patrick. Under whose roof you’ve been living these past couple of days. The one who’s fucking your sister.” Jane outright laughed at the expression on Bryn’s face. “Do you really think I don’t keep track of who’s around him? That last was just a guess, by the way, but it was pretty safe. I knew you were playing house together, and since you aren’t five, I’d assume you were getting busy. Trust me. I know he’s hard to resist.”

  Annie’s mouth opened, then snapped shut. Bryn thought about trying to rip Jane’s throat out, again, but the same logic that had held her still thirty seconds before still held true. Jane wanted her to attack, was prodding her to do it like a picador with a bull. She wanted Bryn angry enough to ignore opportunities, and she was waving the red flag of Patrick to do it.

  You have to be smarter.

  “What’s this about—the nursing home? No, I’ll bet it was something else,” Bryn said. “Zaragosa got nervous once I talked about incubators. He was asking questions to find out how much I knew, and once I knew those things, it was obvious I knew too much. Right?”

  “Oh, don’t beat yourself up. He was going to kill you anyway, whatever you did or didn’t know; fact is, he called me at Arcadia and told me to just get rid of you. I was all for keeping you alive until we knew everything you knew. It’s Zaragosa who wanted you sent straight to the oven.”

  “It’s been Pharmadene all along,” Bryn said. She felt a little numb, and bizarrely unsurprised. “Graydon was your janitorial staff. You’ve been eliminating the Revived. But if that’s true, why send me to them at all? Zaragosa could have killed that.…”

  “Riley was the one who made the connection,” Jane said. “And she made it public above his pay grade. So Zaragosa had to be seen to take action. He figured by using you we could send you into a trap, get you blown to bits, and take care of two birds with one stone. Like I said, he’s an accountant. All about saving resources. And it isn’t Pharmadene, sweetie. Pharmadene doesn’t exist anymore, except as a name on a letterhead. The government controls it—you’re absolutely right about that—but you know what the government is particularly good at doing?”

  “Screwing up?” Annie said.

  “Huh,” Jane said, and gave Annalie a longer, more thoughtful look. “That’s a valid point. But no. They like to give work to contractors. The FBI is overworked and underpaid, and they’ve got terrorists to chase, not to mention interstate bank robbers and kidnappers and serial killers.”

  “So they outsourced,” Bryn said. “Outsourced what, exactly?”

  Jane put a finger to her lips, crossing an impish smile. “That would be telling,” she said. “Would you like to guess?”

  “The incubation?”

  “Nice, for shooting blind.”

  “Why did he make me point out the facility?”

  “Killing time.” Jane shrugged. “I was late getting here. And I guess he just wanted to confirm that you really did know where you were kept. Last nail in your coffin, Bryn. By the way, FG runs about a thousand other medically related businesses, but their real business happens to be in bioweapons research and development. Who told you about the incubation process?”

  The question was slipped in smoothly, in the same lazy tone, but Bryn’s nerves were raw and razor sharp. She didn’t answer. She and Jane continued to exchange stares for so long that Bryn lost count of her heartbeats, and then Jane finally shrugged.

  “Doesn’t really matter,” she said. “You have a pretty limited circle of friends, Bryn. We roll them up; we get everyone who might know. Sorry, Annie, but that includes family, too. You’re just along for the ride. Sucks, I know.” Jane looked over her shoulder to Robinson. “Pete, do we have a twenty on Patrick?”

  “Not at present,” he said. “I have a team at the estate, but nobody’s home. She even brought the dogs with her, which means McCallister and the butler aren’t planning to come back.”

  “Do you know where they are, Bryn?”

  “Not a clue,” she said. “And he’s not a butler.”

  “Amusing that you think that matters, Bryn. All right. This has been really nice, and Annie, lovely to meet you, but I’ve got to get back to work tracking down all the cockroaches running from the light. Tedious.” Jane rose and went to the door, opened it, and said, “In case you’re wondering, the oven you saw on the surveillance? That’s here. It’s where they dispose of live Revivals they’re done using. Sorry I can’t watch, but I’ll be sure to run the tape later.”

  The door slammed shut behind her with a boom, and Bryn and Annie were left with Robinson and his three guards. The man had a blank, soulless look in his eyes. There was no point in appealing to his humanity, Bryn realized; he didn’t see either one of them as remotely like him.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Now.”

  Chapter 16

  There was a time for fighting for their lives, and it came as they stepped outside the conference room.

  Annie had been the first one out, and her flinch and attempt to pull free of the guard holding her was Bryn’s first clue that something was wrong—more wrong. Then she caught a glimpse of the two medical gurneys lined up in the hallway, complete with restraints, and experienced a horrible flashback of being strapped down, Jane, the spoon, the surveillance video of Jason screaming in the incinerator’s flames.…

  And Bryn snapped. Hard and clean.

  Her elbow caught the first guard right where it should—squarely in the nose, shattering it and sending him reeling back off-balance. Bryn spun and followed with a sharp heel-of-the-hand blow that drove the broken bone up into his brain.

  His eyes rolled up to show whites, and he dropped. Dead, or so badly disabled it wouldn’t matter in terms of the fight. Bryn went down with him, which led to a confusion of people tripping over their bodies as she wrestled the gun out of his limp, warm hand.

  She rolled, sending another guard reeling for balance, and while he was gaining it, she shot him three times. The bullets entered under his chin and exited through the top of his skull in a bright red mist.

  Two down, but her window of opportunity had snapped shut. These weren’t mall cops; they were highly trained security personnel, most likely with military backgrounds themselves. As she reached to retrieve the second guard’s gun, she took fire from the third, the one holding Annie as a shield.

  The bullets hit her in the side, the back, and the shoulder—not the head, which would have stopped her. The damage was probably fatal, but not immediately so, and she didn’t fucking care. At all. Bryn’s legs went numb, but she twisted around and aimed left-handed.

  The agent was almost completely covered up by her sister, and he fired again, missing Bryn’s head by inches.

  “Annie, drop!” she yelled, and shifted her aim to Robinson, who was in the process of drawing his sidearm. She killed him with three shots to the face, counting on the fact that it would take Annie a second to process her instructions, and sure enough, her sister had just decided to release her knees and drop when Bryn guided the muzzle back.

  The agent was pulled inevitably forward to hold on to Annie—off-balance and with too many things on his mind. He fired, but missed, and then his hostage’s head dipped, and Bryn had a good, hard target.

  She fired three more shots, and he fell backward, dragging Annie with him. She fought free of his limp arms, grabbed his gun, and stumbled over to Bryn. “Get up!�
� Annie screamed, and dragged at her elbow. “God, Bryn, get up!”

  “Can’t,” Bryn said. She felt terribly calm just now. “One of the bullets hit my spine, it’ll take time to repair. Go, Annie.”

  “Go where?” Her sister was crying, on the verge of hysteria. “Bryn, get up!”

  “Try to get to the loading docks—that’s probably the best chance of an open exit.” There, on the opposite side of the hall, was the locked door with the ominous biohazard sticker. “Drag Robinson down there. Hurry!”

  Annie grabbed the fallen Robinson by the collar and dragged him over the guards’ bodies, then down the hall. There were alarms sounding, and it was a matter of seconds before this would all be for nothing.

  “Use his palm on the scanner!” she said. “Then swipe his card!”

  Annie did it, but she had to swipe twice before the lock clicked open. She grabbed the door and swung it open, propped Robinson’s body against it, and came back to grab Bryn under the arms and drag her in that direction. Then she kicked the dead agent out of the way and slammed the door shut. “They can get in,” she said. “And we kind of left a trail.” Of blood. Bryn’s blood.

  “I know that,” Bryn said. They were in an air lock with thick glass inset into the next door, and another scanner and—this time—a numeric keypad. Beyond that glass was another room.

  It looked like a hospital ward. Gurneys, each docked at a medical monitoring station with readouts.

  Hundreds of gurneys, all full. Most of them were occupied by elderly people, but there were a few younger ones…and Bryn recognized two of the faces.

  Riley Block and Chandra Patel. Hooked up to machines, lying as still and silent as all the others in that room. There were two people awake, wearing negative-pressure biohazard suits, checking machines and making notes on clipboards.

  Bryn raised her gun and fired into the glass, one pull after another. The first two only cracked the surface; the fourth punched straight through, and the fifth broke half the glass free of the mounting.

  A new alarm started sounding. The two Pharmadene employees inside the room turned to stare in confusion, but Bryn wasn’t worried about them; they were lab dweebs, unarmed and about as dangerous as the Pillsbury Doughboy in those inflated suits.

  Annie didn’t need prompting on this one; she reached through the broken glass and turned the inner handle on the door, and silicone seals broke with a sound that made Bryn think of lips smacking, as if the room itself were consuming people. Annie dragged Bryn inside and slammed the inner door again, not that it would help, and propped her up against the wall.

  Bryn’s body tingled and zinged as the nanites zipped around frantically trying to repair her damage. She could feel one of the bullets, the one in her shoulder, being pushed slowly back out through the wound track. Nauseating. “Unhook Riley and Chandra,” she said. “Get them out of there.”

  Annie rushed to do it, and pulled the central line free from Riley’s bone-pale arm. There was a gout of blood, and then…

  Then it almost instantly healed before Annie could even press her fingers over the spot.

  “What…?” Annie said, and looked to Bryn for some kind of explanation. “Okay, that’s weird, right? Even you don’t heal that fast.…”

  Riley Block sat up with an indrawn gasp and screamed. That was a very familiar sound, a lost and awful wail that trailed off into confusion, and then Riley opened her eyes.

  Even from the distance of several feet away, Bryn could see how wrong those eyes were. They were almost…metallic, though after a few blinks the color changed and grew darker.

  But there was something eerily reflective about them still.

  “Get Chandra. The next bed over,” Bryn said, and Annie went to the next bed where the small woman lay. She pulled out the IV, with the same instant-healing result.

  Chandra’s shriek was unearthly, and familiar.

  “Riley?” Bryn said, and the woman’s head turned toward the sound of her voice. The focus of those eyes woke something primitive inside Bryn, something that recognized a dangerous predator and went very, very still in the hopes it would go away. She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even try to move, although now she felt a jolt of agony in her lower back that meant the spinal column was trying to reconnect severed nerves. Spinal cord damage took almost as long as brain injuries to heal; she’d be effectively paralyzed for fifteen minutes or more, depending on the extent of the carnage back there.

  Now Chandra was sitting up in the bed next to Riley, graceful and feline. She swung her legs off the bed and stood up. She was naked beneath the sheet, and didn’t seem to notice or care.

  “Get out of here,” Riley whispered. “Hurry, Bryn. Go.” She tried to get up, but it seemed she wasn’t as well-off as Chandra; she almost fell as she stood up.

  Chandra walked straight to Bryn with calm, firm, unhurried strides. That darkly metallic shine was in her eyes, and it was more pronounced than it had been in Riley’s. Bryn wanted, very badly, to curl up into a ball and hide her eyes, and she didn’t even know why. Don’t. Don’t do it. Her instincts were whispering, not screaming, as if they were afraid to be heard. Don’t let her touch you.…

  When Bryn tried to pull herself back, Chandra simply closed the distance and grabbed her arm.

  “No!” Riley shouted, and lunged forward, but she went down, hard. “No, don’t—”

  A shattering wave of heat cascaded into Bryn, agony that started exactly where Chandra’s skin touched hers, and she couldn’t keep back a raw, thin scream. Annie pointed her stolen gun at Chandra, but that was useless and she knew it; she didn’t even try to fire.

  This is impossible, Bryn was thinking. It felt as if Chandra’s very touch was injecting waves of nanites into her. The same burn she was used to feeling, but bigger, stronger, more. She could almost see the thin silver threads of transference between their two bodies, but it had to be imagination, had to be—she couldn’t see something that small.…

  And then the heat, the agony, turned into waves of blessed cool bliss as the nanites traveled through her veins, her nerves, soothed every injury, every pain, like the golden touch of God himself.

  Chandra let go of her arm, and her suddenly blank eyes rolled up into her head to show the whites…and she collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  Bryn blinked in confusion. Everything looked so bright, so very bright and sharp and clear. She felt as though if she focused, she could see, and see, and see, all the way down to the very tiniest particle. The excitement of that was so heady that she felt she might laugh. I’m high, she thought. Higher than a fucking kite. Nothing scared her. Nothing mattered—not the horrified look on Annie’s face, or the fact that the door to the lab was being opened by their enemies, and they were all seconds away from being taken prisoner or shot to temporary death.

  And then she saw Jane.

  Patrick’s wife.

  That mattered.

  Jane opened the inner door, careless of cuts from the glass, and stepped inside. She was armed with a P90, but she didn’t point the lethal little machine gun; it hung on the strap around her chest. She wasn’t smiling this time; Bryn had seen her look insane, and hungry, and delighted, and vicious, but this was a whole new expression.

  She was afraid.

  “Damn. You spoiled the harvesting,” Jane said. “Someone’s going to be very upset with you, Bryn. You took nanites that weren’t meant for you, and we can’t get them back now until the new colony matures.” She stepped back behind a couple of the guards. “Concentrated fire on all of them, on my mark.”

  Riley stood up, as she finally got her balance. So did Bryn, in an absolutely effortless motion like levitation.…She didn’t even feel her muscles working at all. Annie was staring at the two of them, then at Jane and the guards behind her, and she clearly had no idea what to do now.

  But Bryn did. And as she exchanged a glance with Riley, she knew the agent knew it, too. “Is Chandra dead?” Bryn asked.

  “No,” R
iley said. “Just traumatized. She’ll be all right in about an hour.” It was an hour they didn’t have. “I’m sorry she infected you, but her nanites were ready to be harvested. It’s not a choice. It’s a compulsion, to pass them on. Like the hunger.”

  Bryn’s feel-good wave crested and began to fall; it left her with a healed, finely calibrated body. She even felt that she could think faster. Possibly even react faster. It was her body, but…perfected.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Whatever she did to me, it feels great.”

  “For now,” Riley said. “We’ll discuss downsides later. For now—” She shot a glance at Jane, and the armed men who’d filled the rank behind her. “That’s the only exit.”

  Bryn bared her teeth in a grin. “Then let’s take it.”

  Jane said, “Mark,” and two of the guards started shooting.

  Bryn didn’t even see Riley move, but suddenly she had closed the distance, and she was holding both of the guards’ necks in her hands and squeezing. Bones snapped with a gruesome popping sound, and the two men’s bodies jerked, danced, and went limp except for residual tremors.

  Dead.

  By that time, Bryn—without even consciously willing it—had crossed the room and grabbed another one. She was aware he was shooting into her, but it didn’t hurt, and it didn’t even figure into her calculations. She was razor-sharp aware of the terror in his face, though.

  That made her happy, for the approximately five seconds he was alive to actually feel the fear. It didn’t occur to her then that she’d killed him with her bare hands, with one blow, until she was dropping the next one, and then the next. She was aware she was bleeding, but it was minor leaks, quickly closing up.