The Lost & Damned 2

by Keira Michelle Telford

  Silver doesn’t know how to respond to that.

  “You really believe that my father helped Phaeden to set you up?” Red asks.

  Silver contemplates a lie, but thinks better of it. She nods her head. “I do.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “Okay.”

  Silence.

  *************************

  Alex wakes up alone. He reaches for the other side of the bed, but Silver’s not there.

  Both the note and the ring are gone.

  *************************

  Red pours Silver a glass of water in her kitchen, and as Silver accepts the glass with her left hand, Red hears the tell-tale, metallic clink of a ring. She stops in the midst of the trade-off, her hand still on the glass.

  Confused, Silver hesitates. “What’re we doing here?”

  Red pulls the glass back, re-depositing it on the counter. She takes Silver’s left hand and explores her with her fingertips, finding the engagement ring. Self-conscious, Silver yanks back her hand.

  “That’s progress.” Red grins.

  Silver retrieves the glass of water and takes a sip. “It’s definitely something.”

  “It’ll make the paper, that’s for sure.”

  “With an array of complaints, no doubt.”

  “Don’t be surprised. That’s just what you get for working in an old boy’s club. They do seem to have some trouble abiding change.”

  “Too many assholes like McKean, that’s the problem.”

  “Well, there’s one less of those, thanks to you.”

  Silence.

  Silver swirls the water in the glass. “How the hell did you find out about all of this so quickly?”

  “I have my ways.”

  “See, that’s why I need you in my Division.” Silver slides the glass back onto the counter. “You have insight.”

  “No, I have a phone.”

  “Good. Use it to call the Governor and arrange a meeting.” Silver heads for the door.

  “Where’re you going?” Red calls after her.

  “I have to go down to BioScience and donate more blood.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  “I guess.”

  “The vaccine?”

  “Either that, or some lab tech has a fetish.”

  “How long?”

  “It usually takes about twenty minutes. Why? Will you miss me?”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “What do you want? A stop watch? It could be days or weeks. I’m not sure.” She hesitates in the doorway before leaving. “Either way, call the Governor.”

  *************************

  The City Bridge gate opens and a convoy of incendiary trucks spills out into the Out District. These machines are tankers loaded with butanol, with spouts to spray the butanol out left and right. They spread out into different streets and begin to douse everything in sight.

  Maydevine watches their progress from a secure observation room within the Omega DDH. Behind him, Alex tumbles in through the door, expecting to see Silver. He looks around the room, his desperate gaze catching Maydevine’s attention.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I guess not. I thought Silver would be here.”

  Maydevine turns back to the screens, disinterested in Alex’s latest personal dilemma. “She was invited, and so were you. I figured the two of you were …” He runs a quick glance over Alex’s scruffy hair, unshaven face and casual clothes. “Busy.”

  Alex feels the first pang of worry.

  “I haven’t seen her since yesterday.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Our Dead Friends

  Tippety tap, tap, tap.

  Silver knocks on the door to the BioScience lab.

  No answer.

  Peeking her head around the door, she finds the place deserted.

  “Hello?” She steps into the room and begins to look around. “Anyone home?” She checks her invisible watch. “Hmm.”

  Behind her, a door opens and closes and she’s surprised by Ethan Raine, his nose buried in a medical chart.

  She thinks back to their last meeting and tries to break the ice softly, with a gracious—albeit rather out of character and thus slightly disingenuous—smile. “Oh, hey. It’s my best friend.”

  Ethan Raine looks up, but doesn’t share her smile. “Take a seat in the chair, please.”

  All business, he indicates toward something that looks like a dentist’s chair. From a safe distance, Silver eyes it with suspicion.

  “That looks brutal.”

  “Not as brutal as me being called out here on a Sunday—my day off—to make small talk with you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Silver shakes off her jacket and slides into the chair while Ethan Raine prepares the equipment he needs.

  “Fortunately, this won’t take long.”

  He ties a rubber band around her upper arm, and swabs the crook of her elbow with an ethanol solution before withdrawing a hypodermic needle from a nearby table.

  “How many vials this time?” Silver wonders.

  Her question is ignored.

  “Turn your head, please.”

  Silver frowns, but obliges. “I’m not squeamish.”

  Ethan Raine sticks her with the needle. “I know. I bet you didn’t even flinch when you watched Lockie McKean get eaten alive.”

  She turns back, just as Ethan Raine withdraws the needle from her arm and releases the rubber band.

  “Excuse me?” She winces as the room begins to sway. “What’re you doing?”

  “Cleaning up after our dead friends.” Ethan Raine finally smiles.

  Silver tries to get up out of the chair, but she stumbles. “What did you do to me?”

  “Oh, come on. You remember this feeling, surely? It’s just a little ketamine-Rohypnol solution.”

  Silver tries to keep herself upright, but fails. Knocking over a small table of medical implements, she falls to the floor unconscious.

  *************************

  Alex drops his keys into the dish in the hallway of his apartment. The lights are out and the place is silent. With no sign of Silver, he checks his cell phone again.

  No missed calls.

  For the millionth time, he speed dials Silver’s number. It rings and rings, and finally goes to her voicemail—now full—so he hangs up.

  Something by the phone in the hallway catches his attention: a notepad, with Silver’s handwriting scrawled on it.

  BioScience @ 2pm

  Alex snatches up his keys and heads back out the door.

  *************************

  Alex finds the door to the BioScience lab slightly ajar, so he pushes it open and surveys the room.

  It’s empty and silent.

  Walking through the room, he catches sight of Silver’s jacket, still draped over the dentist’s chair.

  He draws his gun. “Silver?”

  Silence.

  “Ella?”

  Alex finds the table that Silver tipped onto the floor, its contents scattered. Satisfied that the place is empty, he rushes out of the room with only one thing on his mind.

  *************************

  Back in his apartment, Alex logs into the Police Division security network from his home computer. Accessing the platinum tag GPS tracking system for Omega employees, he initiates a trace on Silver’s tag.

  Something’s blocking the signal.

  “Fuck.”

  He attempts to back trace her tag by bringing up a list of every location she’s been to in the last twenty-four hours. First, he uncovers her late night trip to the Belt. After that, he tracks her back to his apartment before she left for Red’s. Finally, her tag record shows that she arrived at the BioScience lab, right on time.

  With her time and location confirmed, he cross references other Omega tags to isolate who else was with her in the lab at the time she
disappeared.

  One name.

  Ethan Raine.

  He grabs his cell phone and dials Maydevine.

  “We’ve got a problem.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Vengeance, Part Two

  Headed by Alex, a unit of six Police Division Agents blows open the door to Ethan Raine’s comfortable Sentinel District apartment, using a small C-4 charge. In regulation uniform, armed with standard issue PP-2000 sub-machine guns, they storm into the apartment and clear every room systematically, until they reach the bedroom.

  Alex is in the kitchen when the first responding Agent calls out for emergency medical assistance over the headsets. Inside the master bedroom, Ethan Raine is hanging from a homemade noose tied around the ceiling fan, and Alex nearly swings the door into his dangling legs when he bursts into the room.

  “Cut him down,” Alex orders.

  He calls for an ambulance while the other Agent uses a hunting knife to slice through the electrical wire, and Ethan Raine’s limp body drops to the floor at Alex’s feet. Knowing that he’d be dead by the time the EMT unit even arrives, Alex kneels down beside Ethan’s body and pulls the wire away from his neck, urging the other Agent to help him perform CPR.

  First, Ethan sputters.

  A gasp and a cough, and he begins to regain consciousness. While he’s still disoriented and choking for air, Alex hauls him up off the floor and dumps him into the chair he used to hang himself. Setting aside his PP-2000, he pulls out an HK USP handgun instead.

  “Leave,” he commands the other Agent without taking his eyes off Ethan.

  The Agent hesitates.

  “That was an order,” Alex asserts. “Take the others and wait outside—now.”

  Alex ushers him out of the room, locks the door behind him, and turns back to Ethan, who’s only just beginning to realize what’s going on. He flinches as Alex approaches him with the HK USP, which is aimed straight between his eyes.

  “Start talking.”

  “Keep dreaming.” Ethan forces a smile.

  Without warning, Alex smacks him across the face with the butt of the HK USP and cracks his zygomatic bone. “You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who likes it rough, so this might work out a little better for you if you cut the crap and get right to the good stuff.”

  “This isn’t the Hunter Division, you know.” Ethan spits blood. “There will be repercussions for this.”

  “Don’t count on it.” Alex pushes the gun against Ethan’s temple. “Where is she?”

  “Shoot me.”

  “Later.”

  Alex holsters his gun and looks around the room for something to spice up the interrogation. He spies an open closet, a toolkit inside. Within seconds, he locates a pair of pliers and walks back across the room to Ethan, catching him in the midst of a fumbled escape. Trying to bolt from the chair, Ethan trips up on the electrical wire. Still weak from hypoxia, he collapses on the floor.

  Alex plants a steel-toed boot on his back, forcing his face against the floor. “Better luck next time.”

  Uncharacteristically callous, and drawing on some of the residual Hunter Division venom still in his veins, he pulls a hunting knife from his belt and slices Ethan’s hamstring tendons at the back of his knees. Deaf to Ethan’s squeals, Alex heaves him up off the floor and deposits him back in the chair.

  “This time, sit still.” He wheels Ethan’s chair over to the foot of the bed and sits down in front of him, wiping the blood off his hunting knife onto Ethan’s clothes before holstering it and retrieving the pliers. “Now that we understand the seriousness of this situation, I’m going to ask you again.”

  Ethan tries to look away, tears of pain in his eyes, but Alex grabs him by the chin and forces him to make eye contact.

  “Where is she?”

  Pulling his face away, Ethan refuses to answer. So, without letting his anger show, Alex removes Ethan’s tie and uses it to bind his left wrist to the arm of the chair. Giving him no chance to plead—or to capitulate—Alex takes the pliers and pulls out one of Ethan’s fingernails, tearing it out right from the nail bed.

  Ethan bites at his lower lip, trying not to cry out. “It’s too late.” He locks eyes with Alex. “You’re too late.” He tries to smile, confirming the time with a clock on the wall. “The incineration began fifteen minutes ago.”

  Alex’s face drops. “She’s in the Out District?” He shakes his head. “That’s impossible. The city’s on lockdown. The only traffic allowed in and out of the city gates in the last twenty-four hours has been the transport trucks charged with the disposal of the corpses from the evacuation.”

  “I know.” Ethan grins.

  Alex pushes the chair away from him, disgusted by Ethan’s cruel enjoyment of Silver’s possible murder. Calculating tactics in his mind, he gets up and begins pacing the room.

  “Look, it’s nothing personal.” Ethan spits more blood. “Your people shouldn’t have gotten in the way.”

  “Of what?”

  “The Fusion Project.”

  A bell rings inside Alex’s head. “The vigilance committee?”

  “Phaeden’s magnum opus.” Ethan nods. “A virus that could destroy the Chimeran and Fusion colonies, eliminating everything that stands in the way of the Third Reclamation.”

  “Phaeden’s dead,” Alex snarls.

  “But his work lives on.”

  “On whose orders?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  Alex draws his gun and aims it at Ethan. Ethan squirms in the chair, his body slowly succumbing to shock and numbing further every second.

  “There’s more going on here than you know,” he mumbles, the world beginning to tumble into shades of gray.

  Alex shoves the gun against Ethan’s chest. “You’re responsible for the deaths of thousands.”

  “We slaughter animals, that’s all.” Ethan fights back against a swell of nausea in the pit of his stomach. “We’re just butchers.”

  “And the human cost?”

  “Human infection was never part of the plan,” Ethan confesses. “After Phaeden’s death, the release of the new virus was pushed ahead. We didn’t have time to complete the trials.”

  Alex’s finger closes in over the trigger and he shoots Ethan in the knee, the instant wave of pain jarring Ethan back from the verge of unconsciousness.

  “What was that for?!” he cries out.

  “Being an uncompromising asshole with no respect for human lives.” Alex aims his gun back at Ethan’s temple. “Now, who’s ‘we’?”

  “I engineered the virus and McKean introduced it into the environment. He was the only one who had access, through his position in the Hunter Division.”

  “And Silver found out about it?”

  “We had to eliminate her.”

  “But she survived.” Alex frowns. “And the Governor already knows everything, so what purpose does her death serve now?”

  Ethan shrugs. “Consider it vengeance.”

  “For what?”

  “Lockie McKean.”

  Alex loses it.

  *************************

  Maydevine enters the hallway outside Ethan Raine’s apartment and finds Alex’s unit of Agents—and the EMT unit—standing there, making small talk. Upon his approach, they stand to attention and fall into a respectful silence.

  Scanning all the faces looking back at him, Maydevine’s expression turns grave when he realizes that Alex’s face is not among them.

  A gunshot.

  Maydevine pushes his way inside the apartment and crosses paths with Alex, already on his way out. A quick glance into the bedroom, and he discovers Ethan Raine on the floor, lying in a pool of his own blood.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Unstoppable Force

  Regaining consciousness in a dark, squalid room, Silver rolls over onto her side and tries to focus her brain, still groggy from the drugs. The floor feels damp against her hands and she
smells the air, and the liquid residue on her fingers.

  Butanol.

  As the cylinders start firing in her woozy head, she begins to realize where she is, and she smells something else.

  Smoke.

  Trying to get to her feet, she’s nearly crippled with pain shooting through her ankle. Weak and vulnerable, she falls back down to the floor, the tumble jarring bruised ribs from the beating she received before she was left for dead.

  Her ankle’s sprained, but not broken, and although the pain sears through her nerves like fire, she struggles to get on her feet again. Balancing herself against a nearby table, she achieves verticality. Her head swirls, and teeters on the brink of unconsciousness as her body battles to compensate for her low blood pressure, her heart suddenly racing to deliver oxygen to her brain. Her vision falters as a rapidly encroaching grayness pushes its way in from the periphery of her sight, forcing her to clench her eyes tight shut.

  Bent over the tabletop, she dips her head down and waits for this lightheaded feeling to pass, hoping to prevent her collapse. Her empty stomach, seasick from the swaying, unstable world of her brain’s disorientation, threatens to bring up bile, but she holds it back, forcing her breathing into a deep, steady rhythm.

  Outside the window, she can see flames already engulfing the building across the street, and she knows that her margin for error is slim. If she passes out—if she stumbles or falls—she risks succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning long before the flames ever reach her, and the air is already chokingly thick, hot, and toxic.

  Stinging from the intruding billows of smoke, her eyes fill with tears and she looks around the room to locate the nearest exit: a window at the back of the building. This second floor window backs out onto a small, stone-built courtyard that’s not yet touched by the fire.

  Exploring the hallway, she finds an Old World fire extinguisher mounted onto the wall. Thinking fast, she uses it to smash the glass in the window—her only escape—before dragging herself to the ledge. The outside air meets her welcoming lungs with a cool, crisp breeze as she clumsily positions herself, then drops down to the ground below.