Bloodshot

by Cherie Priest

  Ed Bruner, formerly Major Bruner, now retired … was pretty much exactly what I’d expected. An average-sized man, probably buff once, but age and inactivity had made him soft. His hair was starting to gray, and it was cut fairly close to his scalp. Not quite the buzz of an army drone, though. He’d let it get a smidge of length on top. I liked to think it indicated a rebellious spirit buried somewhere deep down in that middle-aged schlub.

  I already knew he didn’t like to play by the rules. Maybe the military hadn’t been such a good fit for him after all.

  “You,” he said. One word. All he needed, really. Until he saw Adrian, at which point he said, “You?”

  My partner in crime answered. “Us.”

  “That was a hell of a trick,” the major conceded.

  “It’s kind of you to say so,” I said, “but it wasn’t a trick. We were starting to bore each other with all the pretending. It was time to throw down before you lost interest.”

  “Or before I forced your hand,” he said, his eyes narrowing, trying to follow us both.

  He didn’t move, which was smart. I wasn’t visibly armed, but Adrian was holding the major’s own .38, aimed steadily at its owner.

  The old man’s eyes darted back and forth between us. Me immediately in front of him. Adrian off to the right, holding point by the hallway. “Forced my hand?” I said, sitting down slowly on the edge of his mahogany coffee table. It put me about ten feet away from him. This is to say, I was outside his immediate lunging distance … but he was well within mine. “I don’t know what, precisely, you think you forced. I just got tired of it, that’s all.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Think whatever you want. I’m not afraid of you,” I said in all honesty. “Even though I know what you’ve done. What you’re trying to do again.”

  “You don’t have any idea what we were about—what we were doing,” he objected.

  I shook my head. “I’ll admit we don’t know all the ins and outs, but we’ve read enough of your paper trail to have a pretty damn good idea.”

  “If that were true, you wouldn’t be here.”

  I sat up straighter. Then I leaned back on my hands—like he’d surprised me, but I was prepared to roll with it. “Wow. It’s all or nothing with you, isn’t it? Meet me in the middle ground for a minute, will you? I have some follow-up questions.”

  He snorted. “And you think I might answer them?”

  “It depends on how badly you want to survive this little meeting.”

  His eyes slipped over to a bookcase off to my left. That’s because he kept a big knife there, a cousin to the carbon steel foot-long that I gave up and let Adrian keep. I let Bruner look, and didn’t call attention to it. Why bother? I’d already swiped it, to replace the aforementioned carbon steel foot-long. It was the only piece of weaponry I was carrying at that particular moment, but it didn’t matter. We all knew I didn’t need it in order to bring him a whole lot of discomfort.

  “You don’t have any intention of letting me out of here.”

  I told him, “It’s smart of you to suspect that. But it’s all going to come down to how useful we think you are, and how good your information is. If we’d seriously wanted you dead and nothing else, your B-positive would be all over that screen right now. And you can take that to the bank.”

  He swallowed. “What do you want to know?”

  “That’s the spirit! Let’s begin at the beginning,” I suggested. “Project Bloodshot.”

  “What about it?” he asked. Working hard to stay cool as a cucumber. Neither completely succeeding nor utterly failing.

  Adrian chimed in, “It closed, but it didn’t die. Just like you retired, but you didn’t go away.”

  “Sounds like you already know all about it,” Bruner snapped.

  But Adrian said, “No, not all about it. I don’t know what really happened to Isabelle deJesus.”

  “Who?”

  “My sister. Subject 636-40-150. Her name was Isabelle. She was a vampire. You kidnapped her—”

  “No,” he interrupted, but Adrian didn’t let him get any other words in edgewise.

  “You experimented on her. You took her hearing, like you took Ian Stott’s vision. Why?”

  Bruner snorted. “What do you mean, why? It was just a job, same as any other except that it was so damn interesting. The combat applications of their … of your”—he nodded at me—“abilities. They were epic. They were paradigm-shifting if we could harness them for the military. And anyway, who gives a shit? You’re the monsters, and you’d do worse to us, given half a chance. I’ve known some of your kind. I’ve seen what you do, to yourselves and people like us.”

  “Monsters? Is that what you think? We’re none of us more monstrous than we were before we turned. If you don’t want to believe that, then I won’t make you, but you ought to be kicking yourself, you know. It’s a hell of an opportunity you’ve squandered. You should’ve just recruited some of us on the up-and-up, but now that’s never going to happen. There’s not a vamp on earth who’d have anything to do with you, now.”

  One corner of his mouth lifted in a sneer of irony—the worst kind of sneer, in my opinion. “Is that what you think?”

  Well, yeah … but I refused to show him that I knew I might be wrong. I asked, “After Bloodshot went belly-up, why’d you start it again?”

  “That’s a complicated answer.”

  “Break it down for me,” I said, hoping I injected the command with a hearty dose of menace.

  “I, personally, didn’t reopen the damn thing. Surely you can understand that, can’t you? I was just a guy collecting a paycheck. I didn’t have the authority or the resources to take it elsewhere.”

  It almost made me sad, how calm and cool he was. This was a guy who’d been under fire before—literally, I imagined—and he’d come out the other side as a guy I could almost like, if he weren’t a total fucking maniac. My initial impressions held true. We were more alike than either of us would’ve admitted. I cast a glance at Adrian, still keeping his distance, and still just as tense but calm as the rest of us. I wondered if he was thinking along those same lines, or if he was too angry with the major to identify with him in any way.

  As if my glance had given Adrian a nudge, he asked the next question. “Then who did pull the trigger? Who paid to launch it as a civilian operation?”

  He smirked. The son of a bitch actually smirked. “I don’t know the whole answer to that,” he flat-out lied. Then he said, directly to me, “But what I do know, you won’t like.”

  “There’s not much about you or your program I do like, so whatever you want to spill, I think I can take it,” I replied.

  His hands waved casually, idly … like he was trying to remember a recipe for soup. “I never heard the whole story, but I do know he’s one of yours.”

  “One of … what?”

  “He’s like you. Undead, or whatever.”

  “Why would a vampire fund something as bizarre and fucked up as Bloodshot?” I demanded to know. “That doesn’t make any sense—”

  “He’s a real self-hater. Didn’t want to become like you. It was forced on him, as a punishment for something—and don’t ask. Because I don’t know what.”

  “No.” I shook my head, taking my eyes off him for an instant, then remembering myself and locking down his gaze again. “No, that’s not true. That’s not how it works with my kind. The Houses don’t turn people to punish them. It’s a gift. A reward.”

  “It’s not much of a reward if they mutilate you first. Eternal life is pretty shitty if you can’t see, or hear—or taste or smell. Really, honey. That’s my idea of hell.”

  He had my interest now and he knew it, but he’d told me more than he meant to—and he didn’t know that. His story had a note of truth.

  I only know of that punishment being doled out once every hundred years or so. It isn’t common. And on the rare occasion this terrible sentence is handed down, it’s always given to a ghoul. Vam
pires consider it a form of high irony, and fitting of only the severest betrayals. It’s used as a bedtime story to keep other ghouls in line. It adds the necessary element of threat to a relationship that’s entirely too important to be left at the mercy of love, or other friendly sentiments.

  I said, “You’ve got a point there. It must be a miserable way to spend eternity.” And it would be eternity, too. Other vampires are forbidden from killing such a punished ghoul. Usually, he was kept in a cellar or something—watched like a hawk, to make sure he (or she, there I go again) doesn’t run out into the dawn to end it all.

  It’s a serious punishment, intended to last. Vampires are vindictive. And they have very long memories, with plenty of room to hold very long grudges.

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter. He’s holed up so tight even the bloodsuckers can’t get him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  He was getting worried. I could tell it in the way he licked at the corner of his lip, and his eyelids kept twitching as his gaze jerked back and forth between us. “Sykes,” he finally said.

  I knew it. “And how’d he get so tightly holed up?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and the fear that was just now starting to waft off his skin implied he was telling the truth. Why was he getting scared now? Probably because he couldn’t see the Glock he kept taped under a bookshelf. It ought to be at his eye level, and it wasn’t. He was coming to suspect the truth—that we’d been here awhile, and we’d taken away all his toys.

  “Take a guess,” I ordered.

  “Money. Money’s my guess. He’s loaded. Richer than God.”

  “How’d he get that way?”

  “Department of Defense stuff. Designing … designing long-range, high-definition satellite surveillance systems. He sold everything to the government, cashed it all out. He still has his own grid, but he made his money on the patent.”

  “So that’s how you followed me.” A statement of fact, not a question. It was a relief to know for certain. One more thing to be afraid of, yes. But one more thing I could take precautions to avoid.

  Again he swallowed. “You didn’t make it easy. Driving those generic piece-of-shit cars. They’re hard to tail, even from the sky. We only picked you up by keeping an eye on the deJesus house, then we lost you again once you’d picked up that faggot in the high heels. Goddamn Atlanta and its goddamn traffic,” he muttered, but he was looking at Adrian funny—like it’d just now dawned on him that the faggot in high heels had a .38 pointed at his head.

  Well, the state of Atlanta’s transportation infrastructure was one thing we agreed on. “So the most common-looking cars are harder to follow, eh? Good to know.”

  “Any idiot could figure that out. Zebras on the Serengeti know that.”

  Adrian interrupted with a loud, “Ha! So you did lead them to me!”

  “Fine. But only technically, dear,” I said.

  Bruner kept talking, like he was impatient with the both of us. “You know, if you hadn’t been crazy enough to take me up on the invitation to visit my office, we’d have never caught up to you again. I still can’t believe that worked.”

  It was my turn to squint with suspicion. “How did you know it was me?”

  “I played a hunch. We were watching your warehouse, Abigail. You obviously knew what was inside it, but I know for a fact you didn’t come or go when you said you did. You gave yourself away.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. That’d been one hell of a slick play on his part, but I didn’t want to give him any credit, so I didn’t. I lied through my teeth instead. “So we played each other. Nice.”

  “You? You played me? How?”

  “I didn’t know where you kept your base of operations. You told me right where it was, and trap or no, me and him”—I cocked a thumb at Adrian—“still got inside, got what we needed, and got out in one piece. So the joke’s on you.”

  Then I remembered how Cal had died, and how hard it’d been on Ian, and I thought it wasn’t a very funny joke.

  “Wait a minute,” Adrian said, frowning. “Back up just a second. You said you picked her up in Atlanta, watching my parents’ place.”

  “How else would we have found her? Or you?”

  Ah. I saw where he was going. Good point. I noted, “But you’d already found me in Seattle.”

  “Found you?” The major looked genuinely confused. “We had your warehouse on a list of suspicious places, yes, but nobody from our crew found you there. The place was empty when we checked it. We didn’t even see your squatters. Look, if anyone chased you down, that wasn’t us.”

  “Then who?” I challenged him.

  “The military, I guess. Bloodshot was closed, but it was top secret and the army doesn’t want anybody looking too closely. You were the idiot who played with a tainted file.”

  He was right, of course. And as the big picture dawned on me, I was flabbergasted. “You’re telling me … that I shook Uncle Sam’s tail in Seattle only to pick up yours in Atlanta?”

  “Sounds like it,” he grunted. “We’re all using the same tech, you know. And listen, we weren’t trawling for you in Atlanta, not really. We were looking for him.” He nodded at Adrian. “All we wanted was the shit he stole from Holtzer in the first place, and when you got in the way, Sykes put you on his wish list, too. So it looks to me like if it weren’t for bad luck, you’d have no luck at all, honey.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Adrian murmured.

  Something about the tone of my wayward SEAL’s voice actually penetrated the major’s smug reserves. He said, more softly now, “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

  “Tell me what happened to my sister. We know she escaped when Jordan Roe was destroyed.”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  Adrian said, “You sure do say that a lot for someone who wants to survive until dawn.”

  “I don’t know!” he insisted. “She was just one more thing we lost in the storm. The roof came off, the walls fell in, and the subjects who didn’t die, disappeared.”

  “You didn’t kill her?”

  “No! We just told her family she’d died so you’d lay the fuck off! You were keeping her name in the papers, enlisting missing persons organizations, and drawing too much attention to her! We didn’t need the scrutiny!” He was talking in exclamation points now. I noticed it, and I liked it.

  “So she’s still out there.”

  “As far as I know, yes!”

  As far as he knew. But there was a lot he didn’t know, like maybe the House had gotten hold of her—though my phone call to Atlanta implied she hadn’t gone home to roost. But they still knew of her, and they knew more than they were willing to tell me, which was going around a lot lately. The entry-level ghoul whom I’d finally badgered into talking … he was the one who told me she’d gone deaf, but that’s all he could be persuaded to say. If he knew where she was or what she was doing these days, I couldn’t pry it out of him over the phone.

  Of course, it was always possible she’d been caught and killed by something or someone else. Or she might’ve ended it all herself—which was a distinct possibility. Not every young vamp is cut out to go it alone, much less with a significant disability and a House that had turned on her. With all that stacked against her … some people would give up.

  “Well?” Bruner asked, since I’d been quiet while pondering these things.

  “Well what?”

  “Well, are you going to leave me alone now, and get the fuck out of my house?” Ooh. Fake bravado. Almost as obnoxious as real bravado.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” I said slowly.

  Then, faster than he could blink (no, literally), my hands were on his throat and my knee was on his chest. He’d leaned back so far that the chair nearly buckled under both our weight—and he was gasping, more with surprise than the pressure I was not yet applying.

  In the next moment Adrian was at my side. He reached
into the back of my belt, where I’d stashed the major’s knife. He did it fast, but not so fast that I couldn’t have stopped him if I wanted to.

  I didn’t want to. I let him slash at Bruner’s throat just beneath the place where I held him, and together we let him bleed. Bruner’s eyes bulged, and he struggled to speak.

  But he didn’t say anything. And we didn’t, either.

  When we were sure he was dead, and that no one would reasonably expect a vampire to have done it (yes, I know how that sounds), we torched the place and left. Bruner wasn’t the beginning and end of the program, no. But he was a big, nasty part of it; and without him, it wouldn’t be half so effective.

  And there was one more thing I hoped Bruner’s death might accomplish.

  I hoped it might force the mysterious Jeffery Sykes to emerge from whatever hole he was hiding in. After all, we’d now killed two of his lead researchers and one of his parkour recruiters. He’d need more people. He obviously needed more vampires, too—because he’d put me on the shopping list. Oh, sure, first he’d wanted to help me find that paperwork, because he needed it, too—but once I had it in hand, he didn’t just want the files. He wanted me. So he came after me. And I believe the record will reflect, that was a huge fucking mistake.

  But I had time, and now I knew what to watch for. I also knew to drive less, and change cars more frequently. I knew to plant a few false leads in a few other cities, to beware of men in black suits, and to watch for urban explorers.

  And I knew to start looking for Jeffery Sykes.

  18

  I lost my storehouse holdings in the raid that nearly spelled the end of Domino and Pepper’s leisure squatting, but I recovered some of that loot, too—from the federal facility downtown where it was cataloged as evidence but, as far as I could tell, mostly tied up in red tape. Serious efforts to identify and return the property hadn’t been made, or if they had, they’d met with minimal success.

  It was difficult to say how much the authorities knew about what they’d found.

  Bruner had staged the initial raid, but he didn’t have any real interest in the building’s contents, since I, personally, was not among them. The stash had just been dumped off at a precinct storage facility where cold-case miscellany and stray evidential bits were sent to be forgotten.