by Jay Posey
OUTRIDERS
JAY POSEY
CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Legals
For Max, and for Pop
ONE
CAPTAIN LINCOLN SUH had three minutes to live.
Two minutes, fifty-seven seconds to be exact. He wasn’t supposed to know that, but he did because in the double-paned glass separating him from the observation room, he could just make out the ghostly numbers, reversed in reflection. Numbers, ticking down.
In other situations, he might have prided himself on having noticed the detail. But given what he knew about the people in control at the moment, he doubted that reflection was an accident or a mere oversight. They knew the kinds of people they brought into this room… the kinds of people who were used to noticing the little things. People like Lincoln, who had been trained to notice them, were expected to notice them. There wasn’t much else he could clearly make out in that elevated observation room: shadows, blinking lights. But he could see that timer, counting down the last seconds of his life.
He himself was in a sterile beige room, along with two white-coated technicians. Only one of them, the woman, seemed to be doing anything useful. The other one was a beefy-looking fellow with hands too rough and eyes too sun-squinted to be a true egghead. He held a clipboard and moved from machine to machine, playing as though he were running through a checklist. He wasn’t a very good actor. Conveniently, all the machines he was moving between happened to keep him between Lincoln and the single door. Which seemed unnecessary, since they’d strapped Lincoln’s ankles, thighs, wrists, chest, and head all down to some sort of cross between a gurney and an inclined operating table. He’d thought it all excessive when they had first hooked him in, but now that his adrenaline was pumping, he wondered if it was enough. He tested the straps, just to check. They creaked a bit under the strain, and though they didn’t stretch or give him any extra room, he felt some play in the strap around his right wrist. Maybe enough to get his hand free.
Two minutes, eighteen seconds.
Lincoln couldn’t stop his mind from soaking up all the details, from formulating plans even though he knew he wasn’t going to escape. They’d strapped him to the table, but he’d noticed when they brought him in that the table wasn’t secured to the floor. There was an intravenous tube feeding fluid into his left forearm. If he thrashed enough, he might be able to tip the table. The big guy by the door would have to get involved. Get the right hand free, IV tube around the big guy’s neck… How long before the security team crashed in? Thirty seconds maybe. Call it twenty.
No. He wasn’t going to escape. Lincoln would have shaken his head at himself if he’d been able to do so; the strap around his forehead prevented him from turning his head at all. He’d spent so many years finding his way out of tough spots, it was impossible to turn it off even when he wanted to. He took a steadying breath and reminded himself that this was what he’d signed up for. More or less.
He glanced over at the lady technician, the real tech, and looked out of the corner of his eye to try to get some sense of what was about to happen to him. Well… he knew what the result was going to be. It was the process he was worried about.
She had her back to Lincoln while she worked some touchscreen. He couldn’t catch enough of a glimpse to make sense of anything, and when she stepped away, the screen blanked out. The technicians had obviously been instructed to remain silent throughout the procedure, and even though she’d probably done this so many times for it to become routine, it seemed like maybe the woman coped with the whole situation by avoiding even eye contact with her patients. She moved amongst the various displays and terminals, checking settings, making adjustments; even when she had to interact with something near him, never once did her eyes stray to Lincoln. Her face was a blank slate; focused, running through her mental checklist. Lincoln knew the state well. He was the same way before every mission.
He glanced back up at the observation room.
One minute, ten.
His breathing had gone shallow again. And he realized his hands were balled into fists so tight it was making his knuckles hurt. There wasn’t much else he could control at that point, but he didn’t want to die like a man in fear. He had made his choice. He wanted to face it like the man he was; a warrior, resolute and strong. He inhaled, long and steady for five seconds. Held for five seconds. Let it out for another five. Held empty for five. Repeated the process. These were his final breaths. He’d do it under his own control, on his own schedule, not panting it away in a panic.
Thirty-three seconds.
The female tech moved over and stood beside Lincoln, checked the straps, made a final adjustment to the intravenous tube in his arm. As her rubber-gloved hand touched his forearm, her eyes flicked up to his. It was only a split second, but Lincoln saw not the cold, clinical evaluation he expected. Instead a warm sadness reflected there, belied by the otherwise flat expression on her face. A moment before she withdrew, she rested her fingertips on his shoulder for a bare second, a show of support and comfort, undoubtedly against regulations. A kind gesture of reassurance, reminding him that he wasn’t alone in those final moments.
She pulled away and nodded to the white-coated grunt by the door.
Nine seconds.
It was true, Lincoln discovered, what they said about your whole life flashing before your eyes. But it wasn’t the way he had always imagined. The flashes weren’t sequential, they didn’t come packaged in a nice, neat recap of all the important moments and happy highlights of a life well lived. It was more like waking up in the middle of the night in a cold-sweat panic, all the scattered thoughts hitting you from every angle at once and ricocheting off one another before there was any chance to grab hold of one of them. A firehose flood of acute images and raw emotion and dreams unfulfilled.
A click, a beep, a sudden whirring sound from somewhere behind Lincoln’s head. He inhaled sharply as he fell through the bottom of the world.
Darkness descended, accompanied by a faint rushing noise, like a distant waterfall. Then, silence.
And so it was on a sunny spring Wednesday morning that Lincoln Suh, Captain, United States Army, breathed his last and died.
* * *
“CANDIDATE ONE SEVEN ECHO,” a voice called in the darkness. An angel, come to guide his spirit to its final place of rest. Her voice was warm and stirred his heart. “Candidate One Seven Echo,” she said again. Candidate One Seven Echo. It wasn’t his name, but they’d called him that so often over the past fourteen weeks that he responded to it instinctively as if it was the name his own mother had given him. It took conscious effort to command his eyelids to open. The lights were low, and it took a moment for his eyes to remember how to focus. When they did, Captain Lincoln Suh realized he recognized the face staring down at him. Not an angel: the lady technician.
“You’re done, candidate,” she said.
“I died,” Lincoln said. The tech nodded. “And now I’m back.” The tech nodded again. Linco
ln shrugged. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.” She let slip a subdued smile and the way it brightened up the room, Lincoln thought she might be an angel after all. Half, maybe.
“Any numbness in your hands or feet?” she asked. “Metallic taste in your mouth? Ringing in your ears?”
Lincoln took a quick physical inventory, and then shook his head. “No ma’am, everything feels right as rain. Did you do something to me while I was out? Besides kill me, I mean.”
“Any of those symptoms can indicate incomplete resynchronization with your nervous system. If you notice any of those, particularly with sudden onset, you’ll need to report it immediately.”
“What about out-of-body experiences?” Lincoln asked. The technician made a face but otherwise ignored the comment. She started towards the door while she finished the last of her obviously routine speech.
“We’ll keep you under observation for half an hour or so and if your vitals remain steady, someone from cadre will come to escort you back to your facility. If you experience any of the symptoms I mentioned, have any unusual sensations that concern you, or any difficulty recalling previously strong memories, press the button on your right.”
Lincoln glanced to his right and saw a beige rectangular box with a chunky red button on it. The whole thing seemed about fifty years older than everything else in the room with him. And it was only then that he realized he was in a different room than the one he’d died in. That struck him as the kind of thing he should have noticed pretty much the instant he’d come to.
“Any questions?” the tech asked.
“Sure,” Lincoln said. “What do I do while I wait?”
She opened the door part way. “I recommend you rest, candidate.”
“Uh oh,” he said. “Ma’am?… I might have to press this button after all.”
The tech stood at the door, eyebrows raised.
“Problem?”
“I press it if I have any memory issues?”
“Yes?”
“Well, ma’am, I can’t remember the last time I got thirty whole minutes to myself to rest.”
“You’ve been dead for an hour, sir,” she answered. “So technically they gave you ninety.” She flashed her quick smile then slipped out and pulled the door closed behind her.
Lincoln chuckled and laid his head back. Dead for an hour. And thirty minutes to recover. Based on everything else he’d been through for the Selection course so far, that seemed about right. He worked his jaw, flexed his fingers, wiggled his toes. He was still dressed in his T-shirt and pants. Even had his boots on. He didn’t feel any different. Certainly not like his entire consciousness had been taken out and stored on a system for sixty minutes while his body went cold, even though that’s exactly what had just happened.
The Process.
That’s what his instructors had called it. Cadre Sahil had said it was almost the final test in Selection, and was the worst because it was the only one you couldn’t prepare for. You either had it or you didn’t. He hadn’t specified what that it was, exactly, but Lincoln had the feeling that was just part of cadre’s game. Cadre Sahil had just casually dropped that little nugget and then changed the subject, knowing full well that the candidates’ minds would latch on to it and run wild imagining the worst possibilities.
Getting through Selection was mostly a mental game, and cadre loved to play it. It could seem almost like torture at times, but it was a mercy, really. If cadre could get in your head and make you quit, that spared you a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering in the short term, and saved a lot of other good lives in the long term. As rough as training could be, Lincoln knew from experience that “training cold” was never as cold as “real-world ops cold,” and the highest-risk exercises were only about half as risky as the real deal. If training could break you, then the real world would destroy you, and in the small, special units that Lincoln served in, one person coming apart on mission was likely to take a bunch of friends down with him. Better to weed those folks out early, help them find a better fit.
It wasn’t a failure, not really. This was the third special operations unit that Lincoln had volunteered for, and he’d been accepted on both of his previous attempts. He knew from experience that he wasn’t fundamentally better than any of those candidates that had bowed out of Selection along the way, either this time or any of the times before. He wasn’t even sure that he wanted it more than any of those other men and women. Lincoln just wasn’t very good at quitting, and he’d served enough to know that his body was a lot more resilient than it would ever admit. And nobody had been able to kill him yet.
Well. Except the one time. The Process he’d just gone through was a thoroughly controlled affair, but for all intents and purposes he’d volunteered to let his country kill him and then bring him back to life. Death-proofing, somebody had called it. Seemed about right. Once you’d experienced the sensation and come back from it, the theory went, it made it easier to ignore the survival instinct-driven fear and just focus on getting the job done. Funny, they’d told him something similar about drowning when he’d gone through the underwater operations training course and they’d sent him twenty feet down with his arms and legs bound. It’s not the water that kills you, it’s the panic that robs you of your ability to clearly define the problem and find the solution. Ignore the fact that your lungs are filling up with liquid, and those extra seconds just might be what you need to get back home. Probably not a perfect analogy where literal death was concerned, but after everything he’d just been through it was the best his brain could do.
Lincoln didn’t try to understand all the ins and outs of the procedure, but he knew the basics. Brain on backup. Some team of two hundred-pound heads had figured out how to map an entire consciousness, keep it in storage, and then reintegrate it back with the body. Theoretically, if Lincoln’s body suffered catastrophic damage, it was possible to offload his… what? Soul, he guessed, until the doctors could get all his pieces put back together. Once he was all Frankensteined up, zrooop they put his soul back in, and the army got to count one less KIA. Theoretically.
People had a lot of theories.
Zrooop. That’s the noise Lincoln imagined the Process made when his consciousness got stuffed back into its original organic housing. He didn’t know why. It just seemed like a zrooop kind of procedure to him.
Apparently it was mindnumbingly expensive to run the program, which was one reason that not everyone in uniform rated the treatment. The other reason was that the whole thing was about forty different kinds of Ultra Secret. He’d had to sign about a thousand pages’ worth of waivers and releases before he’d been allowed just to try to qualify for Selection. After qualification, he’d signed a whole truckload more. By that point, he’d pretty much given up reading them, so he wasn’t even sure whether or not his own body was technically his property, or that of the US Government. He couldn’t recall all the particulars, but he was pretty sure if he ever mentioned even the acronym of the codename of the facility where the Process had been developed, his existence would be formally and utterly erased. And given what he’d seen in his time amongst these people, he had very little doubt that getting erased was way worse than death.
Still. He’d done it. He’d volunteered, managed to stay in the Selection program long enough to reach the critical moment, and then when the time came, he’d given his life for his country. And they’d been kind enough to give it back.
Lincoln closed his eyes and tried not to think about it too much. Nineteen minutes later a man opened the door and walked into the room, and then knocked after he’d already let himself in. Lincoln looked up to find one of his instructors, Cadre Sahil, staring back at him. Early, of course. And of course it had to be Cadre Sahil. Lincoln still hadn’t been able to figure out if he’d done something to make the man hate him, or if the instructor just thrived on the suffering of others, but no one had driven him harder or been more vocal about his disappointing performance than Cadre Sah
il.
“Hey OneSev,” Cadre Sahil said, swallowing the last syllable as he always did. “You ready to roll?”
“Don’t know,” Lincoln said, sitting up. “The nice doctor said I got thirty minutes.”
“That’s regular people time. You ain’t regular people, are ya?”
“No, cadre.”
“That’s right.”
Lincoln waited a couple of seconds to see if his instructor was going to say anything else. Cadre Sahil’s expression didn’t change, and he didn’t seem likely to continue any further conversation.
“Well all right then,” Lincoln said.
Cadre Sahil dipped his head in a half nod. Lincoln swung his legs over the edge of the bed and eased himself to his feet, taking it slow just to be safe. Every muscle was sore and fatigued, but that was normal these days. As far as he could tell, he was as fit as he ever was. He walked over and stood in front of Cadre Sahil. Practically towered over him. Lincoln was just a hair under six feet tall with his boots on, if he stood up as straight as he could; Cadre Sahil was maybe five-foot four. But by Lincoln’s estimate, Cadre Sahil was about twice as wide in the chest and arms, and ten times harder than steel.
“Let’s roll,” Lincoln said. Cadre Sahil stepped to one side and gestured for Lincoln to head out. The corridor was empty, lit only slightly more than the room had been, and just as beige. It was like they’d built the whole place to blend into itself. Easier to be forgotten that way, maybe. Cadre Sahil followed him out and then overtook him to lead the way; he didn’t seem to have any problem knowing which corridors to take. He always walked with a forward lean, chin down, long strides, like he was headed to break up a fight. Or maybe to start one. In the past fourteen weeks, Lincoln couldn’t remember having ever seen anyone, regardless of age, rank, or size, who hadn’t gotten out of the way when Cadre Sahil was coming through. They walked in silence for a couple of minutes, until Lincoln broke it.
“So what’s next on the agenda, cadre?” Lincoln asked, as they walked out of the medical wing, or wherever it was they were.