What Happened To Lori - The Complete Epic (The Konrath Dark Thriller Collective Book 9)
Page 47
Her brother stood up, looked away, then met her eyes. “I’ll be back for you. I swear.”
“Go, Grim. Hurry.”
He took off down the corridor.
Lori walked to the rear wall, closed the window, and waited for her cot to form. Then she sat down and tried to calm herself.
A guard walked past Lori’s cell, but she didn’t even glance at him.
Her thoughts were focused on her husband.
THE WATCHER ○ 9:31+pm
Redhead Number 64 paces his kitchen, occasionally walking over to the dry erase board to jot down some remedial calculus.
“If everything remote here works by pheromones, and the electronics are organo-plastic, why am I still in this faraday cage?”
“Because underestimating your abilities is a mistake my predecessors made, Mu. I intend to live longer than they did.”
“I’m flattered you consider me a threat. But I think we could benefit mutually if our differences were set aside, and we worked together.”
“And yet, you haven’t killed me. Why not? If I’m so frightening, why not just get rid of me permanently?”
The Watcher stares at Mu. “You are familiar with Ophiacodon.”
“Of course.”
“Of all the… threats
“Heartbreaking. I’m aware of how close to your people you are.”
The Watcher ignores the sarcastic jab. “More than the giant Desmodontinae. Or Titanaboa. More than any species of Dracohors or Phorusrhacidae. More than all the dire wolves and short-faced bears and megatherium combined. More than any of the… mutations.”
“They aren’t mutations. You know that.”
“Several months ago, my people voted to hunt down and eradicate the Ophiacodon. Overwhelmingly, they voted to destroy them all. But I overrode that decision.”
“Why is that?”
“Because sometimes things that are dangerous might become useful.”
“So free me. Put me to use.”
“You are unique, Mu.”
“I am the opposite of unique. I am ubiquitous.”
“Here, you are unique. I would no more destroy you than a famous work of art.”
“That Turkish thug, Kadir. He tried to flatter you the same way you flatter me. How did that turn out for him?”
The Watcher stares hard at Mu, into his single red eye. “If we are trading threats, I still have the dissector.”
“To dissect me, Watcher, you’d have to take me out of this cage.”
The Watcher turns away from Mu and goes back to the monitors.
GRIM ○ 10:22+pm
Grim continued to wander the corridors, unable to find any rooms to enter, unable to find anywhere out of sight to rest.
The gland thingy he’d gouged off the grey had long since dried up, making it impossible to mark his pathway with alien blood.
He laughed to himself.
Grim stumbled around another turn, everything looking the same, blending together. A rat maze.
Grim had no plan. He had no idea how to even start a plan.
Grim came to another fork, trudged to the left, and noticed a slight difference in the light.
Grim backtracked a few steps.
Grim continued forward, this time paying attention to the dim lighting rather than direction. Every time the path divided, he followed the bluer hue. The color became deeper and richer as he continued. After several dozen turns, the hall opened into a huge great room, so tall Grim couldn’t see the ceiling.
He walked into the center of the space, and blue light became white.
Grim slowed, focusing on the color, taking small steps to his left; nine o’clock.
The white light changed to deep red.
He returned to center, and took the three o’clock route.
Yellow.
Grim chose to follow the red path, and the large room narrowed to another identical corridor. As he walked, he concentrated on what he knew.
Grim braced himself for the zap of the supplication collar, but then remembered he already took it off.
He stopped walking, realizing the implications.
It was the first hopeful thought he’d had in hours.
Grim smiled at the thought as he followed the red.
The window stretched across the entire hallway, and Grim hadn’t even known the plastic was see-through until the lights came on outside.
The exterior looked like a rainforest, same as in Lori’s cell, with huge light towers stretching off into the distance, blending into the trees.
Grim startled, seeing movement, and watched a dragonfly the size of a cat come up to the window and hover there.
Grim held up his hand, ready to tap the plastic, and something clawed darted out of the trees and snatched the bug out of the air, flying off into the night sky.
Grim tried to make sense of what he saw.
His brain told him a large bird had killed the dragonfly. An eagle or hawk.
But his eyes disagreed.
PRESLEY ○ 11:41+pm
The bombs dropped, explosions that rattled Presley’s teeth and blinded her even through tightly closed eyes, and the limbs and guts spread across the battlefield like an ever-growing stain, and walking through the carnage—
Kadir. Enormous. Grinning.
An army of greys marching behind him.
Her own screams woke Presley up, and as she jack-knifed into a sitting position, she noticed a guard in her room.
Using the nightmare adrenaline, Presley pushed off the plastiform bed, lowering a shoulder to bodycheck the guard—
—and then her supplication collar activated, dropping her to the floor, knocking her out.
When she awoke, the guard stood outside her cell, the wall sealing behind him.
Presley tried to stand, and immediately fell off balance.
She stared.
“You need to keep quiet.” Holly, from the cell next to her. “What did they take?”
Before Presley could answer, Holly began to shout. “I wasn’t talking! Leave me alone! Please don’t—”
A zapping sound, and Holly went quiet.
Presley reached out tentative fingers, tracing the curve of the stump on her ankle.
Her mind lapsed back to Fabler’s job interview, him demanding to know what meds Presley took.
But her thought process got even more perverted than that.
With only one good foot and one good hand, escape will be much harder.
But in three or four more days, it will be physically impossible.
FABLER ○ August 27, 2017 ○ 8:36am
After driving all night and through the morning, powered by caffeine and beef jerky and rage, Fabler found the address in San Diego, a cabin tucked away in the winding woods of San Elijo hills.
He immediately knew he’d guessed correctly.
Like his cabin, this house had no neighbors close by. Plenty of trees. Plenty of cover.
Fabler parked off the road, put on his still-damp armor, and used the Magula Benchloader Hardigan had sold him to quickly fill all six thirty round magazines with 5.56x45mm NATO ammunition. He seated one in the rifle and charged the bolt, clipped two more to his belt, and then loaded six plus one Sabot slugs into the Wilson shotgun. Then he wasted ten minutes squinting at an Army manual the size of a phone book, learning how to fill and operate the M9 flamethrower.
Fabler put some bottled water and food into his backpack, hefted the M16, and headed into the woods.
After finding a good hiding place along the tree line, Fabler dropped his gear and peered at the house through binoculars.
Two stories, Spanish colonial, large windows with the shades up. Fabler zeroed in on a man in a robe.
Red hair.
Writing something on a large white dry-erase board. An equation of some kind.
Fabler hunkered down with his gear and waited.
Time passed.
Fatigue wormed its way into Fabler’s bones and settled there.
When Fabler found himself getting sleepy, he concentrated on Lori’s face.
In his mind, he could picture every freckle. Every fine line. The crinkles in the corners of her eyes when she smiled. The furrow in her forehead when she got pissed at something he did.
More time passed.
Clouds appeared.
Rain came.
Jake continued to fill the white board with scribbles. Lots of numbers and Greek letters, and a few English words. Ion drive. Bridge. Galactic year. Negative mass.
Fabler checked his watch.
He drank a bottle of water. Swallowed some aspirin. Ate some jerky.
Fabler dismissed the thought.
Fabler chewed his lower lip; a habit from his childhood.
Occam’s Razor. The simpler explanation is usually the correct one.
Fabler slathered more antibiotic ointment on his wounds.
More time passed.
He slathered on sunscreen.
More time passed.
He took some caffeine pills.
Jake McKendrick had erased all of his work and started over. The word tachyon had been circled twice, nanofridge written beneath it, and next to the words a drawn diagram.
Again Fabler dismissed the thought.
He remembered a time in Dombak. He and Grim, waiting around for orders.
Grim had asked “What if we never get our orders?”
Fabler had questioned what he meant. Grim elaborated.
“What if T-Man took out our base?”
“Someone else will get in touch.”
“But what if no one does? Everyone dies, our orders get lost, we go to the base, it’s gone.”
“We hike to Mortaritaville.”
“And what if Anaconda is gone?”
“The entire Balad Air Base is gone?”
“Sure. Yeah. What do we do then?”
“Then we find a phone and call Fort Benning. Or is that gone too, Grim?”
“You’re not getting what I’m trying to say here, Fabler. This is an existential question. All our lives, we’ve been ordered around. Parents, teachers, bosses, the Army. Orders, orders, orders. And where did it get us? Sand up our asses, waiting for more orders. But what if the orders stopped? What if there were no more orders?”
“Then we’d be free.”
“Free to go home?”
“No. Free to hunt down bin Laden and kill the son of a bitch ourselves.”
Fabler remembered laughing and clapping his friend on the shoulder. “There will always be orders, Grim. Let’s hope we live long enough to follow our own.”
But sitting there, waiting for the greys, Fabler wasn’t sure he believed that anymore.
Fabler closed his eyes.