This Broken Veil (Ran Book 2)

by Joshua Guess

  Together we set the stage for what would hopefully be the last conflict between my people and Phillips. I had a sinking feeling that the universe wouldn’t let it end with words.

  21

  I will admit to a certain amount of stagecraft in how the tableau was set. A small part of wanting the scene set just so was psychological. In any discussion in which negotiation played a role, you shot for every advantage possible. The rest was purely a practical concern; the three remaining soldiers had bombs strapped to them and I needed to situate myself safely outside of their blast radius.

  I heard the truck approach long before I saw it. The thing stopped a hundred yards away, five figures approaching me on foot once it went still.

  “Hey,” I said to the group in a loud voice when it was close enough. “You’ll want to stop there. You’re far enough away that the explosion won’t kill you.” I gestured to the three bound soldiers.

  Phillips stared at the men angrily. “You wanted to talk. Let’s talk.”

  To my surprise, he and the guards came forward, only stopping about five feet from the captives, which put them about thirty feet from me.

  I sat in the back of a pickup, feet dangling over the lowered tailgate. I held a rifle in my hands, barrel at a low angle ending near the captives. I’d faced them away from me, with the custom bomb I’d use as a trigger staked into the ground at their backs. If I shot it, the binary explosive would detonate and the force of the blast would set off more of the stuff the prisoners wore like ridiculous jewelry. Everything was put together to focus the worst parts of the blast away from me, which was what allowed me to be relatively close but still safe.

  “Can’t say this looks like a good start,” Phillips said. “Taking my men hostage and strapping bombs to them is the kind of shit I take very seriously.”

  I shrugged. “Figured you would. Couldn’t think of another way to get you to sit down and talk. Needed a guarantee you’d behave.”

  He nodded as if this made perfect sense. I let my gaze flicker across his guards and was surprised to find Garcia among them. Though I suppose it made sense, as a normal person might hesitate to blow up someone they knew and maybe considered a friend.

  “So how do we do this?” Phillips asked. “You give me your demands and if I don’t agree you blow everyone up?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. I’m going to keep this gun handy while you free your guys. Or rather, while your people do it. You and I are going to chat with a healthy distance between us.”

  Phillips raised an eyebrow. “How do you know I won’t try to take you? Or have you shot once my soldiers are no longer in danger?”

  “Two things,” I said, putting up a pair of fingers. “One, I don’t know. You might. That’ll tell me something about you. I’m putting a lot of faith on our conversation, because you seem like a decent man. Two, you won’t have me shot. I don’t think you’re the guy who orders a cold-blooded killing. If it’s going down, you’ll do it yourself.”

  He glanced at the bound soldiers. “How do I know you haven’t set traps on them?”

  I smiled. “You don’t. But I didn’t. Not only did I not have time, but it would kind of defeat the purpose of using them to draw you here to talk. Feel free to look carefully if you like, but the explosives are just attached to those MOLLE harnesses with scrap wire I found in the shop.”

  “Do it,” Phillips ordered. “But be careful. Take your time, no surprises.”

  He moved toward me, stopping about ten feet away. “Say your piece.”

  I cleared my throat. “Okay, well, not much to the first part. Your people took me, my people let it happen without a fight. I can guarantee that won’t happen again. So it seems like the best course of action is you consider Bastion off-limits. No harm, no foul. Everyone goes on with their lives.”

  Phillips looked at me with a familiar gaze. It was the delving expression every psychiatrist, every cop—including my boyfriend—had ever used when trying to get a read on me. It took in my mannerisms and appearance, judged my words, absorbing every piece of data possible to make a decision. “What’s the second part?”

  I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding. “John is dead. You could probably carry on the research with the doctors you have left, keep things pretty close to how they’ve been back at your fort. Can’t say I’m a fan of how you’ve been doing it, but without him I think at least the treatment of the prisoners you take will be more humane.”

  His eyebrows raised in surprise. “You’d be okay with that? After being taken yourself?”

  “No,” I said, a little heat in my voice. “There’s a world of difference between being okay with something and knowing you can’t do anything about it. If I go back home and more soldiers come looking for me, I’m okay with my people fighting back if they choose. I wasn’t before, but now that I’m on the other side of that decision, I have a better understanding of it. What I’m not willing to do is ask them to crusade against you and the other groups like yours in what would ultimately be a suicide mission. There have always been shitty things about the world people can’t change, and this is just another one of them.”

  He grunted in agreement. “Lady, if anyone knows that, it’s me. You don’t wear this uniform for as long as I have without learning firsthand how dumb and angry people can be, and how hard it is to change that. But I’m still not hearing a second option.”

  “Join us,” I said. “I get the impression you’ve hated what happened at that clinic. That it bothers you on a deep level. So what I suggest is you and your troops—all of them—pack up everything and come to Bastion. Housing would be a problem at first, but we can fix that.”

  For the first time, Phillips looked shocked. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Oh, I totally am,” I assured him. “Think about it. Your people can provide much better security than mine, who will then be free to focus way more on rebuilding and farming. We wouldn’t have to split our attention as much, which would give us the chance to do a lot more specialization. We could breed more than just chickens. We could have bacon again, Colonel.”

  Again he hit me with that searching look. “And?”

  This was the part that made me nervous, because it would force him to consider going directly against his orders in addition to asking him to abandon his post. “If you do, we make Bastion worthy of its name. We turn it into a free zone where no one can be snatched up and taken prisoner. A refuge for people like me who have one weird variation of the Nero virus or another.”

  Behind him, the three soldiers began rising with the help of Garcia and the others, their makeshift bomb vests left on the ground. Phillips looked over his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  They nodded at him, one mumbling a “Yes, sir,” while the others turned their attention to us.

  Phillips looked at me, his face suddenly both more relaxed now that his men were free, and more weary than I’d ever seen it. “There’s one major flaw in your logic, Miss Lawson.”

  I very much didn’t like that. “Never said I was perfect. Which part do you have a problem with?”

  His eyes went dead, hard as stones. “The part where the trap your people led mine into cost eight lives. Eight irreplaceable human beings whose only crime was to follow orders. I can’t let that pass.”

  And before I knew what was happening, my right shoulder was in agony. The sudden burst of pain was followed by the distant report of a gunshot as the sound caught up with the bullet. The force of it caused me to reflexively drop my weapon as muscles and nerves went haywire under the assault.

  Three of the four guards were on me faster than I could process. For the first time in ages, I didn’t even consider triggering the Shivers. I was wrestled to the ground and cuffed before Garcia had time to shake off her stunned expression and move up to help. Guess the old man hadn’t warned her ahead of time.

  Phillips looked down at me, something like pity warring with the determination in his tired eyes. “If it makes
you feel any better, the offer is tempting. But my men would never trust me to lead them again if we didn’t hold someone responsible for the loss of their friends.”

  I could only hope that whatever punishment fell on me would be the end of it. At least I could do that much for my people.

  22

  No one was experimenting on me, which was the only silver lining to being back in my cell. I was living in the same weird timelessness of solitary once more, judging the passage of days by meals eaten. Everything I might use to kill myself had been taken from the room. There was no bed, only a mattress. I wore no shoes. My toiletries were kept in a separate room where a female guard watched me when I performed my once-daily shower and other ablutions.

  Fact: a person can end their own life by running at a wall with enough speed and the proper angle to snap their neck.

  Also a fact was that my tiny cell offered too little room for either.

  I didn’t actually want to die, but I was so bored that I didn’t bother suppressing the habit of looking at my surroundings from every possible angle. And yeah, depending on my circumstances I might decide that death was a better choice. But that would be a rational decision, not one based on a lack of fight in me or depression.

  Based on the number of meals, it was after lunch on the fourth day when I got my first visitor. Visitors, if we’re being accurate.

  They didn’t ask me to put my hands through the hole so they could be cuffed. There was no warning at all. I was actually sitting on the toilet when the door burst open and the room filled with rushing bodies who hauled me away half-naked.

  When I tried to shout, one of them punched me in the face and told me to be quiet. To my shame, I obeyed. It’s easy to judge from a distance and say a person should have reacted in a way you feel appropriate. At that moment, being dragged along and exposed, the urge to avoid antagonizing my captors was overwhelming.

  I was pulled up stairs, through the narrow maze of crooked alleys between the flaking stone buildings, and down another set. I would have known the door in front of me opened without seeing it; the smell of blood and death from inside hit me like a brick.

  My captors threw me to the floor and backed away. I snaked my hands down to my loose cotton pants and yanked them up with a hurried shimmy.

  I had one knee up and the other on the cheap concrete floor when I finally got a good look at the room, the sight chilling my blood.

  The soldiers around me stood against the wall behind a chain link fence clearly meant to allow for observation. Across from me, a Reaver crouched with its bulging muscles already tensed for a fight.

  “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding,” I hissed. “Did you motherfuckers just Thunderdome me?”

  Proof that I had indeed been Thunderdome’d came a few seconds later when the Reaver launched itself forward like a guided missile.

  I rose to my feet and kept on going, doing a dancing leap to the side just far enough to avoid being hit. My timing was good enough to bring me back to the ground to land a perfect elbow to the middle of the Reaver’s back. The impact drove him face first into the concrete and I ran like a gazelle toward the other side of the room.

  I stayed calm. Really calm. I pushed down the rising urge to trigger. I needed to stay focused, to think clearly. I could always let Nero loose in my bloodstream if it came to that, but I was never going to match this thing in pure strength. What I did have was a better mind, a lot of training, and finesse. Assuming my injured arm and shoulder didn’t give out on me, that put us on roughly even terms.

  Not that the Reaver was stupid, exactly. The thing bounced to its feet and turned to watch me owlishly with predator eyes. The changes wrought in his kind left intelligence unaffected, but profoundly altered the way Reavers thought. According to Radio Lovecraft, the parts of the brain that managed aggression were cranked up to eleven, while tamping down things like morality. Which sounds weird, but empathy and compassion are key components when dealing with right and wrong, and those things are certainly affected by changes in brain chemistry.

  Hyper-aggression was a survival trait for Reavers given how much fuel their bodies needed to survive. If it chipped the edges off their ability to reason in the process, it seemed a fair trade off for the returns the disease provided.

  He didn’t rush me a second time. That was a surprise tactic. Now he slowly circled like a bad Star Trek alien, watching the way I held myself as I moved. That my arms were at less than stellar efficiency couldn’t be hidden. The stitches were a dead giveaway even if the stiffness wasn’t obvious.

  When he came for me the second time, it was with arms raised in a boxer’s stance. Not defensive in the least, just ready to knock me unconscious with a single hit. He could do it, too. These fuckers were strong.

  I let him get closer in a series of small errors, letting him think my defenses were weak. The last step was the most dangerous. That was when he had the best shot at giving me an easy concussion.

  Here’s a lesson about men and aggression: the two often fit together in predictable ways. Guys think in terms of their upper body, as this one did. It was difficult to break that kind of ingrained habit without training. So when he rocked forward, fist extending in a vicious jab with the speed of a cobra, I went the one direction he wasn’t expecting.

  I dropped straight down. His reach was extended, his attention wholly forward, his reaction slowed by the effort of focusing his limited attention on hitting me as hard as possible.

  Another fact: Reavers feel pain more clearly than regular humans. Hitting the male of the species in the junk was a tactic I’ve used on them more than once. This time when I did it, I took advantage of the full-body spasm which followed by surging forward, knocking him on his ass, and throwing all my weight into a joint lock on his ankle and knee.

  I spun into the lock, feeling the joints tighten and then creak. I torqued with every ounce of strength I had, letting the Shivers flow through me, and felt the muffled, wet cracks resonate through my limbs.

  The Reaver shrieked in abject misery, the sound cutting off abruptly when I stomped my bare foot onto its exposed throat.

  Silence filled the room like a held breath, broken only by the dying sounds of the Reaver behind me. The soldiers all wore balaclavas, leaving small ovals with eyes showing the only parts of their face visible to me. The surprise in them was obvious. No one expected the injured woman to beat the monster.

  “You cunts,” I said to them, voice low. “Do you even know what these things do to women? Is that how you get your rocks off, by watching someone get raped and murdered?”

  One of my captors grew angry, eyebrows knitting into a harsh V. The eyes of another grew wide, as if the possibility had never occurred to them.

  I was furious, and even the brief activity and bout of Shivers left me tired. I wasn’t quite to the point of pushing my luck, however, so when it came time to be dragged back to my cell, I let them do it.

  But I tried my hardest to commit those eyes to memory.

  When my door opened in the middle of the night, I was already up and crouched in a defensive posture by the time the light from the hallway lit me.

  The silhouette was feminine, familiar. “Hey,” it said.

  “Garcia,” I replied, not letting my guard down. “Here to take me to another zombie fight club?”

  She made a quietly angry noise. “I’m so sorry that happened to you. If it makes you feel any better, the people who did it are in cells, too. Well, locked in rooms up in the dorm. We didn’t want to put them anywhere close to you.”

  “Afraid of what I’d do if I ran into them?” I asked.

  Garcia sat beside the open door, the light spilling on half her face and leaving the other half in darkness. “No. Afraid of what they’d do to you.”

  I stayed crouched but leaned back against the wall myself. “How’d you even find out? I didn’t say anything when dinner came.” I paused. “I was afraid my guard was one of them.”

  “
They turned themselves in,” she explained. “Didn’t have much choice since you killed that Reaver. Guess they were more worried about what would happen if they didn’t fess up. Apparently the plan was to make it look like they were taking you out for a little light exercise and that you somehow got away and stumbled through a not-quite-closed door leading to that containment room.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “God, that’s stupid. Did they actually think that would fly?”

  “I guess they did,” she said. “And that’s a sad state of affairs. People don’t think clearly when they’re angry and stressed, and this whole situation is terrible for both those things. I think they were more interested in seeing your blood than caring about consequences.”

  I snorted. “Right up until the consequences dick-slapped them in the face, that is.”

  “Yeah,” Garcia said. “That’s kind of why I’m here. I wanted to make sure you were all right, and to let you know this actually might help you with the trial.”

  I blinked, then laughed. “Trial? Seriously? I’m actually a little curious to see what kind of case law will be used as precedent here.”

  “It’ll be fair,” Garcia said. “Seven person panel, majority decision. They’re taking all factors into consideration, including that you were brought here under duress.”

  I raised my hands palms out. “Whoa, let me just stop you right there, honey. I’ll tell you exactly how it’ll play out. They’ll make a big show of impartiality, give weight to my many tribulations, then vote four to three that I’m guilty. Because the people who might sympathize with me will be too scared of the ones out for blood to disagree with a guilty verdict out loud, but the reverse is definitely not true.”

  “You can’t know that,” she argued.

  I sighed. “I absolutely can. You were there when Phillips took me. You heard him. He sees this as a necessity, because he understands the politics. You honestly believe some sham trial based on how the judges in it feel rather than stuff like actual case law is going to be anything approaching fair for me? Come on, Garcia. You’re smarter than that. This is a salve for the masses, end of story. I can’t be found innocent without your boss losing control of half his troops.” I cocked my head to the side. “Honestly, it’s hard to blame him. It’s good politics. I’d probably do the same in his position. Phillips is willing to do anything to keep his people together and functioning. If it wasn’t going to end with me being executed or whatever, I’d applaud.”