“Yeah, there’s that,” Sean admitted.
Kev wiped moisture out of his eyes. “It’s funny, about Bruno. I think one of the reasons it was so easy for me to bom cith him years ago is because he reminded me of you.”
Sean looked alarmed. “Me? Bruno? That spastic bonehead? That smart-mouthed clown? Surely you jest.”
“Nope.”
Sean settled back into his seat and contemplated the rainspotted windshield. “Uh. Yeah. I’m not quite sure what to make of that.”
“Under the circumstances, I suggest you take it as a compliment.”
“Weird compliment, if you ask me, but at least you’re being real with me again. Thank God for small favors. I’ll even thank Bruno.”
If we ever get the chance. The thought hung there, unvoiced.
Kev gathered up the floppy disks and slid them back into the jewelry box. They propped the laptop against the dash and waited.
33
The camera followed her home from school, watching from a chillingly short distance as she hauled her knapsack up the stoop and into the house. She appeared to be about sixteen, judging from the haircut, the puppy fat. Then the camera cut to an odd, leaf-framed angle that she i
dentified as being somewhere right outside her bedroom window, at just the right angle to peek in the gap of the venetian blinds.
She peeled her clothes off and headed naked into the shower.
The video cut abruptly to an indoor shot. The vidcam nudged the bathroom door open, staring at her blurred form behind the plastic curtain. She sang tunelessly as she sudsed up.
Cut to her room, staring at her clothes on the floor. Focusing in on her underwear, twisted into a ball. The latex-gloved hand grabbed them, looked at them with intense interest. Sniffed them.
Cut to some other space, without much light, the back of a van, maybe. The gloved hand yanking open its pants, training the camera on the flushed, erect penis that poked out of it. The gloved hand wrapped her pink panties around its penis and began to rub.
Lily dragged her gaze away. No need to watch this filth. The first two times through had been enough. But she kept thinking about Howard. How staring at that distilled hatred and cruelty must have made him feel. What it would do to a person, to a parent, to be ground down by terror and guilt, year after year. And she’d been so angry at him, too. He’d had his daughter’s rage and disappointment to burden him on top of all the rest of it. Never a chance to explain, or to excuse himself. No wonder he’d fallen to pieces. She was halfway there herself.
She glanced up at the screen at the wrong moment and caught the come shot and the camera’s long look at the wet mess on her wadded panties. How absolutely disgusting. She had to clench her guts and concentrate to keep from tossing that miserable lunch they’d provided. She was going to need every last calorie. Not for a bid for freedom—she didn’t aim so high or presume so much. Just for a chance to change the cards on the table. To see if she could shake loose of doom for a minute or two. Even that would be a victory.
She’d been glad to have something to do with her hands while she tried not to watch that video montage. She’d found a manufacturer’s label on the mattress frame, peeled it off, and hunched in the corner, taking care to look defeated, terrified, and pathetic. In that position, she’d rolled the gummy adhesive off the back of the papere m into tiny, grayish globs of sticky rubber and attached them to the insides of the first joints of all her fingers. Sixteen little balls of goo.
When that was done, she hunched lower, shook her hair down over her face for that classic madwoman-in-the-attic look, working with the card full of red dots with extreme care. The drug would kill her, if Zoe spoke the truth. Lily had no reason to doubt her. Not about this.
It was hard. Her hands were clammy and stiff, and it was difficult to peel the spots off without touching the drugged adhesive side. She attached the protective paper side to the balls of rubber so that they clung, lightly, to her fingers, drug side out. No direct contact.
When that was done, she crossed her arms and dangled them off her knees in a loose, casual way that hopefully looked natural.
The door lock rattled. Terror exploded through her synapses, jagged and stuttering like paparazzi flashbulbs. This was it.
The door swung open. It was Melanie. She had a strange, bugged-out look in her eyes, a misty glow, as if she were high.
Lily’s brain was in lock mode. Her stomach lurched, a speed elevator plummeting to hell.
“Get up,” Melanie ordered.
Instinct took over. Lily hunched, hiding her face against her knees. A pitiful, huddled ball. Helpless. Destroyed. Poor me.
“I said to get up!” Melanie’s voice cracked like a whip, but Lily just wailed incoherently and rocked, curling tighter.
The woman made an impatient sound. “Oh, for God’s sake.” Her sneakers squeaked as she strode over to Lily, grabbing a handful of hair at the nape of Lily’s neck. She jerked it up, brutally hard. Lily let out a high-pitched yelp, flopped, kicked as Melanie lifted her—
And grabbed both of Melanie’s wrists. Held on, hard. Squeezing.
Time froze, and in that eternal instant, Lily felt the woman’s shocked realization through the hand that was wound into her hair. A split second of disbelief, and then a tremor, but her grip did not loosen. Lily pulled against it, gritting her teeth against the pain, to look up into Melanie’s face.
Melanie’s jaw sagged. Her hand in Lily’s hair tightened into an unrelenting claw. Her eyes bugged. Her mouth began to work, her tongue to protrude. Her face turned purplish. Lily let go of the woman’s arms, tried to unwind Melanie’s fingers from her hair. Little red dots were stuck all over Melanie’s wrists. She did not attempt to remove them.
She toppled. Lily’s weight tugged her to the side. She thudded to the ground, jerking Lily down by the hair, and oh shit, that hurt ...
Melanie began to twitch, convulse.
Lily struggled to loosen the woman’s fingers from her hair, but it was a literal death grip. She pulled free with a muffled shriek, leaving a generous handful of hair still wound around Melanie’s clenched fist.
Melanie was jittering, jerking. Foamy pink saliva came from her mouth, twin streams of blood from her nose. Her feet drummed the floor. Her eyes were frozen wide, spotted with red.
Lily struggled to her feet, staring at the woman for about ten blank, completely stupid seconds before her brain jolted into action. They were both wearing jeans. She could buy some time.
She dragged Melanie into the corner, propping her where she had been sitting. The woman had lost control of her bladder. Blood poured out of her ears. Jesus, how horrible.
The shoes. Melanie had shoes. Her fingers shook so hard, it was almost impossible to unknot the laces of Melanie’s high-top sneakers and pry them off her feet. She fell back on to her ass as the second one came off and prayed that no one was watching as she tried to tug them onto her own feet. She left them unlaced, rummaged feverishly through Melanie’s pockets. She found a cell phone, which she slid across the floor to the far side of the room. A bunch of keys, yes. A utilitarian knife attached, excellent. Too good to be true.
It took endless, fumbling minutes at the door to find the right key. She tumbled out into the corridor, looked up and down the deserted hallway. It was eerie. Dusty and mildewy, like a grandma’s attic. No one in sight. No alarms. No voices. No footsteps. She darted toward a glow of light and came to a wide open space where the corridor became a balcony with a curving double staircase leading down to a great hall with a domed ceiling that towered two stories above her head.
And below, an enormous door, with greenery beyond it, glowing through the window glass. Freedom. She stared at it. She could run, like a rabbit. She might even break free.
But what about Bruno? She knew he was here. She’d heard King’s orders. He could be behind any one of these doors. He’d come here freely, letting himself be captured to keep them from hurting her.
She started tr
ying doors. She had no choice.
She couldn’t leave this place until she found him.
“Holy shit.” Sean’s eyes were wide as they peered into the monitor. The object of his amazement was the guy who was now forcing the lock on their storage unit. “That’s . . . no, that can’t be—”
“No, it’s not,” Kev cut in. “It can’t be, and it’s not.”
Sean shook his head, bewildered. “But he looks exactly like—”
“No,” Kev said. “Look again. He’s too young. Twenty, maybe. And too pale. His hair’s ash blond. And he’s not tall enough, and his shoulders don’t have the bulk of Bruno’s. And his eyes are set closer.”
But Sean’s head could not stop shaking. “This is so fucked up. So this is one of the lost siblings Petrie was going on about. But how about the other guy? He doesn’t look like Bruno at all. But he could be the guy that Aaro and Zia described from the hospital.”
Kev shrugged, indifferent. It was eerie, yeah, but he didn’t care whose siblings they were or weren’t. DNA be damned. They worked for the guy who was fucking with Bruno. That made them walking dead men.
Getting dead, of course, only happening after they performed the last and possibly only useful task ordained for them on this earth. Which was to lead Kev to wherever Bruno was. Please. If there was a God, he begged for this much grace. The rest he’d take care of himself.
“I still think we should have tagged her,” Sean fretted. “We could have remote activated a dummy tag as soon as they got on the road.”
“They’re not stupid,” Kev repeated. “They’d have found it. That’s what they’re doing right now. Searching her. Not just sweeping her, but physically searching her. That’s why they’re not already on the road.”
Agonizing minutes passed. Kev stared at the screen, desperate to move. Air rushed back into his lungs when the young Brunoesque dude poked his head out. He backed out, holding monster chick by the shoulders. Mr. Bland had her by the legs. She was still wrapped in the tar but less tightly now. They heaved her into the back of their vehicle without gentleness or ceremony. The Bruno look-alike slammed the door and headed for the wheel, like he was done with an unpleasant but necessary job of work.
“Huh,” Sean murmured. “I am not feeling the love here.”
“Maybe monster chick is tough to work with,” Kev surmised.
“Ya think? But still someone ordered them to pick her up. Maybe they’re short on staff. A lot of them got dead recently.”
“Good,” Kev said darkly. “Dead is good.”
The vehicle was on the move. Sean fired up the van’s engine and nudged it to the end of the street so they could see when the black SUV poked its nose out of the storage facility’s main entrance.
It turned away from them, thank God. If it had turned right, the Butthead Brigade would have had a dead-on close-up view of Kev’s and Sean’s mugs behind the old van’s windshield. Their first stroke of luck.
Sean hung back, let a car or two get in front of them on the busy street, and pulled out after them.
“Melanie? Melanie! Respond immediately!”
What in the hell? King tossed the com device down and swung around to click open the monitor that showed Lily Parr’s room. Still those legs were stretched out, the bare feet looking pale and cold. The video played on; nothing had changed. Melanie had not yet arrived.
His blood pressure rose. Useless bitch. Unable to perform the simplest task. She’d been too fuddled by the intense orgasm he’d so unfortunately granted her. God knows, she didn’t deserve it.
He had never felt so irritated, so exposed. Every last one of his elite cadre of personal operatives was either dead or trying to cope with these irritants and tormenters. Leaving him alone to take care of all the myriad details of his enterprise—personally.
And they were extensive. Currently, he was monitoring the young ones in the programming room, who had been scheduled today for the eight-hour sessions of combat programming. He’d considered canceling it, but it had annoyed him to think of his smoothly running machine being disrupted by these hooligans. So he’d ordered Hobart and Melanie to retrieve the teens from the satellite dormitory facility and set them all up this morning, right on schedule, as if nothing were amiss.
So at this moment, ten of his trainees, aged thirteen to eighteen, were hooked up to the programming consoles, their senses and brain functions augmented by King’s own brilliant drug cocktails, processing massive amounts of information at accelerated rates. With each of them, he came closer to his ultimate dream of plumbing the vast realms of untapped human potential. And using it for his own ends.
But he’d been forced to spend the last half hour checking their vitals, their brain waves. Eight of them were fine, but two of them, A-1423B, also known as Annika, and F-1684C, also known as Fallon, looked destined for the cull. The stressful DeepWeave and drug combination was provoking something like epileptic seizures.
Pity, but still. This crop’s 80 percent success rate was statistically quite good. A steady improvement. In the beginning, back when he started with Zoe and her vintage, he’d enjoyed a 30 percent success rate. Indeed, if Zoe appeared to him now, with all her obvious flaws, he’d have culled her before she reached the age of eight.
Yes, his standards edged ever higher. That pleased him, this slow but steady ma toward complete perfection. Utter control.
But it was a sensation he was not at liberty to enjoy today, with his staff scattered to the four winds, or dead, or falling to pieces. And he had the little ones to think of, too, the two children produced from the last of the viable embryos obtained from Magda. He’d had them brought over today with the notion of showing them to Bruno, for entertainment value as well as professional curiosity. He wondered, for instance, if that mechanism of noble self-sacrifice that had worked so well with Lily would work with the babies, too. If his son would feel an immediate bond with the children because of shared DNA. After all, look what mere sex had reduced him too, poor boy. Fascinating question. Brain candy.
Still. It had been self-indulgent to order the children delivered today. There was no one to attend to them when they woke from their drugged sleep. Hopefully that would not happen for hours yet. Their pod leader had been sent away, not being privy to the secrets of his enterprise. He’d decided years ago to outsource early child care for reasons of cost-effectiveness. Changing diapers and wiping mouths did not require millions of dollars of specialized training. The pod leaders were well paid to do exactly as he requested and to tell no tales—but they weren’t welcome on the premises today.
Once the actual programming of the children began, he used only DeepWeave programmed staff, so as to avoid misunderstandings. Only a DeepWeave alum could understand the totality of his vision, or have the necessary loyalty and commitment.
He sighed and swung the chair over, clicking on the video monitor of the quiet, out-of-the-way room where the children lay in their drugged sleep. No movement.
He swung over to the opposite bank of computers and checked the tracer embedded in Zoe’s clavicle, as well as the ones in Zoe’s cell and Rosa Ranieri’s. Zoe’s signal was stationary, but the two cells were clustered together, on the move. He hit the key that brought the overlaid satellite photo onto the map and zoomed in. Yes, it appeared to be the same vehicle. So it was true. They’d left Zoe unconscious in the storage unit, and one of the McClouds was driving his wounded brother to the emergency room. They had not determined which brother was wounded, but it hardly mattered. McClouds were interchangeable.
He grabbed the earbuds, listened. Muffled cursing and groans were all he heard. No conversation. King sat there, drumming his fingers. He disliked leaving the nerve center of his operation unmanned, but Melanie had not presented herself. Anger simmered inside him. He pulled up Melanie’s mortal commands from his personal database to have them fresh, at his fingertips. He’d ask her to swallow her own tongue. Choke to death at his feet. That would calm his nerves nicely.
; He strode toward Parr’s room, thinking about the groaning, whining McCloud with his bullet wound. Odd. The research he’d done on the McClouds would have suggested utter stoicism in the face of pain. But one never knew. Some of the toughestseeming people were as soft as butter inside. And the opposite was also true. Take Lily Parr. Remarkable toughness. The riff about fertilizing her ovum for his next crop of research subjects had sprung into his mind out of nowhere while editing that video for Bruno, but the more he thought about it, the more the idea appealed.
Then again, he’d be gambling with the genes of her wretched failure of a father. Still and all. Chances were, her mother’s attributes would predominate. Howard had been intelligent—that trait he shared with his daughter in full. But he’d had none of Lily’s courage, her drive.
He mused about it tenderly as he inserted the key, imagining the results of the union of himself and Lily Parr. Their beauty, their fire. They might well surpass his and Magda’s progeny, in terms of potential.
The door swung open.
He stood, frozen, while the information battering at the doors of his perception simply would not enter. He noticed the video still rolling. A seventeen-year-old Lily Parr, taking a shower. One of his favorites.
Then the doors of his realization burst inward, all at once.
Melanie lay dead in the corner, mouth gaping. Her jaw, neck, and chest red with blood. Eyes bulging. How . . . ?
The red dots on her arms came into focus. Transdermal Melimitrex VIII. There was at least five times a fatal dose stuck onto her wrists. He’d taken them for drops of blood at first glance.
Death had released control of her bodily functions. He gagged delicately. The silence of the place seemed suddenly menacing.
King backed out of the room, staring to the left, the right. This was unprecedented. Himself, alone in this huge place, with no allies. Just ten drugged teenagers in the programming room, two drugged toddlers in the far wing—and two hostile elements on the loose.
Blood and Fire Page 46