Make it look good.
Rhys didn’t have to feign the fear that started his heart racing and sent his feet pounding against the reddish soil and into the trees. Darting a look back over his shoulder, he saw a hatch drop open like a giant, dark maw spewing several armed and suited troops as they hopped out. He faced forward and put all his concentration into leading them on a chase without actually getting away.
At least until he crashed into Schuyler. She caught him easily, though she was knocked off-balance. Her Jug strength saved her from being slammed to the ground.
“Come on!” She jerked hard on his arm. “Shit! Who the fuck is that? Since when does the Clean Zone have skim-craft?”
“No!” Rhys tried to rip his forearm free of her grasp, twisting violently enough that he thought he’d lost some skin. “They’re here for me. You need to go!”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Darius would—”
“Darius knows!” he hissed, shoving her away. “I have to let them take me. Go find Joe. He’ll explain.”
He saw the frantic movement of her eyes as she worked her way through that, saw her struggle with whether or not to trust him.
“I don’t have time for this!” He looked frantically behind him as he heard the sound of the kidnappers calling to one another, getting closer. “Try to track my course, leave a trail Darius can follow. We didn’t count on them not transporting me by ground. Please. Just go!”
Schuyler took two steps deeper into the woods, then stopped and met his eyes, her chin lifting. “Even a Jug can’t chase a lightcar from the ground. If Darius can’t track you, you’ll need someone on the inside to help you get out.”
“They’ll kill you—” he started to argue, but then it was too late. The voices were practically on top of them. “We have to make it look good.”
Schuyler grinned savagely. “With pleasure.”
The first armed and suited figure to emerge from the trees caught her feet square in his chest as she launched herself at him horizontally. She moved with dizzying speed and crushed him to the ground as she tore his weapon from his hands and then bent down to rip his mask off. Another person entered the clearing to find himself staring down the barrel of Schuyler’s newly acquired assault rifle while the man on the ground wheezed desperately, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
The instant of hesitation on the part of the new arrival was enough for Schuyler to flip her rifle and smash the butt against his mask, dislodging it. He reeled backward, howling in pain and fear, and Rhys saw a smear of blood on the semitransparent, copper-toned face shield.
Schuyler spun to face two more guns trained on her, and then something cold and metallic pressed against Rhys’s skull behind his ear. A woman’s voice barked, “Drop it!”
He had to hand it to Schuyler, she put on a good show of being torn between the need to keep fighting and the urge to save him. It was all the more astonishing for the fact that she actually did a convincing job of looking as though she cared if he died. He’d half expected her to tell them to shoot him.
Slowly, Schuyler lowered her weapon to the ground, keeping her hands spread wide, her eyes still burning with a barely banked battle rage. He’d seen a similar fury in Darius, Xolani, and even Kaleo once. Bloodlust. Heightened adrenal responses. Once a Jug was caught up in the heat of a fight—or sometimes sex—it took them a while to come back down. Until then, it was uncertain whether they could make themselves stop.
“Please don’t hurt her,” Rhys pleaded, a convincing quaver seeping into his voice without any effort on his part. “We’ll come along quietly.”
“Damn right you will,” said the woman holding the gun on Rhys. He felt her make a gesture, and the man on the ground—the one whose mask Schuyler had torn off and whose gun she had stolen—sat up and grabbed something off a clip on his belt.
An electric sizzle crackled in the air, and then Schuyler was on the ground, convulsing with two golden darts stuck to her neck.
“Schuyler!” Rhys almost forgot he was supposed to be cooperating, until the gun drilled against his skull behind his ear, where the bone was barely protected by flesh.
“She’ll live for now,” the woman detaining him said through her mask. “Bring her with us!” she called to her comrades, jerking Rhys into motion. “We don’t want her reporting back to anyone, and the docs at the lab will be shitting themselves to get their hands on a Jug.”
Darius swore as he and Xolani paced outside the intake center. Her attempt to petition yet again for an audience with the Science Committee had gone nowhere. Now they were spinning their wheels over the ramifications of the Clean Zone government actively seeking the Alpha strain and reaffirming to themselves that they were doing the right thing in letting Rhys act as bait. Each point they discussed felt like a band of steel around his chest, confirming that he had no choice but to risk Rhys. He rubbed his sternum, his helplessness battering his ribs and lungs and temples. “Fuck.”
“I’m s—” Xolani broke off, pressing a hand to her own chest while she shook her head as if trying to clear her ears. Then her eyes widened, and she stared at him. “Someone’s using grav-repulsion turbines nearby. Who the hell has a lightcar these days?”
The squeezing, drumming feeling in his chest disappeared in favor of what felt like a direct kick to the gut. He saw the realization dawn on Xolani’s face.
“Fuck!” He took off at a dead sprint, knowing Xolani would only be a pace behind him. As they rounded the building to head down the familiar road toward the reservoir, he heard Titus and Toby burst out the front doors of the intake center and shouted to them, “They’re taking him by air!”
Joe was gone. From the footprints Toby was able to locate, it looked like Joe was chasing after Rhys by ground, trying to track the flying craft as far as he could. There was no way he’d be able to keep up with it for long, but maybe he’d have a sense of its trajectory.
In the clearing where they’d made their camp, they found Zach Houtman. Darius grabbed him by the throat, driving him against a tree. “I’m going to rip your fucking head off,” he snarled. “Where are they going with Rhys?”
“I don’t know! But I want to help!” Zach protested, gripping Darius’s wrist in a futile effort to pull it off his windpipe. “Please!”
“Why didn’t you tell us they’d take him by air?” Darius snarled.
“I didn’t know!” He met Darius’s glare steadily, despite the red creeping over his face as Darius’s hand tightened on his larynx. Darius dropped him with a mutter of disgust, and Zach sprawled on the ground for a moment, coughing. “I had no idea how they’d been getting people out of the Clean Zone.”
Xolani’s mouth tightened. “We just lost any hope we had of tracking them.”
Zach shook his head. “No. Nico has been searching for the research facility for years. He’ll have an idea where we can look for him.”
Darius grabbed him by the shirt front and jerked him forward. “Walk,” he growled in Zach’s face. “Whoever the fuck this Nico is, I want to talk to him. Now.”
“He was keeping an eye on Rhys from the woods. After that he was going to approach you, tell you where they were headed.”
“Why hasn’t he introduced himself before?” Xolani demanded. Darius watched her fall in step to box Zach in on one side while he closed off the other himself. Toby fell in behind, while Titus took point.
Zach bowed his head. “I’ll let him explain that. He had his reasons.”
“This is bullshit,” Toby snapped behind him. “Fucking cloak-and-dagger bullshit. Instead of coming to us yourselves, you use Rhys to persuade us. How are we supposed to trust you?”
“We didn’t know if you’d help us. Honestly, I’ve been working in the DPRP for so long now, I’m not even sure who I trust anymore. I’ve been keeping an eye on Secretary Littlewood since the overthrow, watching him build up the DPRP from a powerless committee to one of the most influential departments in the government.” Zach paused for a moment b
efore gesturing for them to go east around the southern shore of the reservoir. “People are terrified of another outbreak, and he’s been able to use that terror to generate a sense of fervent nationalism. As long as the population believed the DPRP would keep them safe, they would go along with anything he proposed.”
Xolani rolled her eyes. “That’s all very enlightening, but why Rhys?”
“Because Littlewood is a psychotic predator. He’s a sadist, a rapist, and a murderer. I’ve seen what he does to people. I helped put a teenaged boy out of his misery because whatever Littlewood raped him with perforated his colon so badly he was going to die of sepsis.” Zach’s lips curled in disgust. Another red-hot shot of rage pulsed through Darius at the thought of Rhys in the hands of someone like that, but Zach’s next words were even more chilling. “That’s the kind of man who wants to become a Jug.”
For some reason, his words gripped Darius in a way that the thought never had. Before, it had sounded almost antiseptic to hear Rhys report that Littlewood wanted the Alpha strain. It was entirely different to consider someone like that being a Jug.
“He’s that bad?” Xolani’s expression mirrored Darius’s own horror, and she voiced what they were all thinking as they stutter-stepped to a halt, the revulsion in her tone a verbal expression of the ice clawing at Darius’s chest.
“If Nico is right about him being the rapist, then yes. And I have no reason to doubt Nico.” Zach’s eyes were bleak. “You know information on Alpha transmission was part of the DPRP’s request for field reports from the Jugs. And since we found out that Alpha was transmissible, he’s been working to get his hands on it.”
“It’s not possible,” Toby argued. “The tech for that level of viral engineering doesn’t exist anymore.”
“It does if you get your hands on one of the virologists who originally worked on Bane, and gain access to the lab facility where it was developed.”
“Oh shit,” Xolani whispered. “How?”
“Her name is Dr. Thanh. She was a researcher with Pentagon BioWeaps R&D and General McClosky’s right hand when developing Bane. It was her brainchild.”
Darius stared for a moment longer, then shook himself out of his paralysis and gestured for them to continue in the direction Zach had indicated. “How do you know this?”
“I didn’t until the DPRP started collecting data on the whole population. They expanded the interviews they were doing on the new arrivals and started collecting data on everyone who had arrived since the overthrow. Somehow, in the first few years after the pandemic, she had managed to make it through quarantine and into the population unnoticed. She was using an assumed name. I think the Jugs found her in Nevada.” Zach sighed. “She’d been here about five or six years when I interviewed her, took her blood sample. Then a few months later, she vanished. She was the first one to disappear, in fact, and it happened right after the DPRP got their off-site research facility operational. She had a husband and two children in the Clean Zone. She’d built a life for herself. There was no reason for her to have left of her own free will.”
“How do you know it’s Dr. Thanh?” Xolani asked.
“I’d been making copies of all my interview records before turning them over to the DPRP, so I looked up her file, saw that the name she had given me in her interview was slightly different from the one she’d used when they put her down in the intake logs, back before Perimeter Security began collecting more thorough information. Like she couldn’t remember the exact identity she’d used back then. I realized something was off— Keep going left along this trail here.” Darius adjusted their course at a fork in the faint trail through the trees, and Zach continued his explanation. “I managed to speak to her husband, and he told me she’d always been very secretive, even paranoid, about her life before she came to the Clean Zone. But she had developed a bit of a drinking problem and let things slip when she was drunk. Including her real name and the fact that she blamed herself for what happened.”
Darius kept putting one foot in front of the other, shoving aside his fear for Rhys in order to focus on the task at hand and to process what he was hearing. “I’m still not understanding how you figure Littlewood wants to be a Jug.” He glanced sidewise at Zach again. “It makes more sense to assume Littlewood wants to engineer a vaccine than it does to think he wants to get his hands on Alpha.”
“Did you miss the part where I said he’s a sadistic rapist? Of course he wants to become a Jug. Imagine the damage he could do, the harm he could inflict.”
“You got proof of that?”
Zach scanned the trees around them as if looking for someone. “Not the sort that would hold up in court. All I have is a first-person report from a man who had the misfortune to spend a night in Littlewood’s clutches before the pandemic. And that man wouldn’t be allowed to testify in a Clean Zone courtroom.”
“Why not?” Toby asked.
“Again, I’ll let him explain that.”
Xolani paused. “Even assuming it’s true, I’m having a hard time seeing how one guy—even the head of the DPRP—can use the resources of the department for such a singularly personal agenda without anyone knowing.”
“Exactly. Which is why I need someone to get a look at the records being kept inside the research facility. We need to know how high up this goes. You of all people know how much mistrust there is within the Clean Zone for the Jugs. Are they trying to even out the power imbalance? I don’t know.” Zach made a frustrated sound. “And I don’t know what is happening at the off-site facility, or what is happening to the people who have been abducted. Maybe the legitimate research into finding a vaccine is being used to cloak the alternate agenda. Or maybe people are so afraid of another outbreak that they’re willing to do anything if they think it’ll prevent that. Stop.”
Darius froze at Zach’s demand, and without a word, the five of them closed together, forming a loose, outward-facing circle. They scanned the perimeter, waiting for something to approach.
“Give it a few minutes,” Zach said. “Nico and I have been passing each other word through Gillett Morris at the intake center. He knows we’re here.”
They all froze, their hands dropping to their sidearms.
Zach continued as if they weren’t all ready to shoot whoever came walking out of those trees. “I knew Rhys had captured Littlewood’s interest, and I knew a large part of that was predatory rather than scientific. The more I was let in on the testing the DPRP scientists wanted to do on him, the more I realized they weren’t interested in Rhys’s immunity. They were interested in your attempts to infect him with Alpha, in his ongoing exposure.” He blew out a long breath. “That’s when I knew Nico’s instincts about what Littlewood was up to were right. I put it together—how the intake interview questions all focused on trying to find survivors who’d slept with the Jugs they’d been recovered by. They didn’t just want Bane, they wanted Bane Alpha. Why else would they possibly want that, except in the hopes of replicating it?”
Toby made a derisive sound. “I’m still not sure I buy it. I hate these Clean Zone fuckwads as much as anyone, but can they really be crazy enough to try to harness the Alpha strain? If anything, it sounds like they want a sample of the virus to test a vaccine they have in development.”
“That’s because you don’t know Littlewood,” someone called from the trees, and a man stepped into the clearing. Darius blinked as he heard the rest of his people mutter in amazement. “I do.”
“Who the fuck are you?” The guy scratched at some vague memory in Darius’s mind, but he couldn’t place the face.
“I’ve seen you before,” Xolani said, at the same time as Toby burst out, “I know you!” They all turned to stare at him. “You were a friend of Kaleo’s. Sierra Company, right?”
The guy nodded. “Yes. Nico Fernández. I left Sierra Company after we went to Texas.”
“Left?” Xolani said with a dubious frown.
“Well, I let them believe I had died in the fighting
.”
“What the fuck is going on here?” Darius demanded.
“We need to go after your Rhys, I know, but we’ve got bigger problems.” He pointed to tracks in the red-gold dirt at the base of the scrub pines. There were deep gouges and the underbrush was trampled, as though there had been a struggle. “They have Schuyler. She was with Rhys when he was taken. And that’s much, much worse than if they just had Rhys. Because now, they really do have access to Alpha.”
After a moment, Darius lowered his gun and shrugged his rucksack off his shoulders, his eyes never venturing from Nico.
“Start from the beginning.”
Zach ached from trying to match the Jugs’ pace all day as they came as close as they could to double-timing. Even on the bicycle he’d been using since his days of riding from the Clean Zone to the Jug enclave outside the quarantine ring, before the overthrow, it had been a challenge to keep up.
Darius and his people would have left Zach behind if not for Nico, who had threatened to leave them to find Rhys by their own devices if Zach didn’t come along.
“Thanks for that,” Zach said now, approaching Nico’s watch post from the campfire. The sun had set over the red rocks and scrub brush, leaving a chill in the air reminiscent of the first months they had known each other, when spring had finally started after that fateful blizzard.
“Just try to keep a distance from all of us, okay?” Nico gave him a muted smile. There was a tension in his posture that said if Zach took another step closer, Nico would retreat. That tension had been there since Nico had left Sierra Company and returned to live outside Colorado Springs. “You’ve spent the last six years working to stop Littlewood. I’m not going to let them leave you behind when it’s finally time to act.”
“I appreciate the thought, but what can I truly do to help?” Zach shook his head, sighing. “Maybe they’re right and I should stay behind.”
Bane Page 11