Bone Rider (17 page)

“Nope.” Riley shook his head, tracing the sunlight seeping in through the gaps in the heavy curtains. “I kicked the fucking door shut so hard it got stuck, and hauled ass.” Straight out the front door at a dead run. If he hadn’t still had his overnight bag in the truck from their last weekend trip, he wouldn’t even have had his ID and driver’s license. Though, honestly, right then he hadn’t thought about that. He’d been in full-out survival mode.

“I’m an idiot sometimes, but I don’t fuck mafia.”

What happens when you fuck mafia?
McClane wanted to know, sounding almost as tense as Riley had felt after his nightmare.

“Nothing good, that much’s for sure.” Fuck. No way was he going back to sleep. Might as well get up. He rolled out of bed with a grunt that was eight parts disgust and two parts habit. “Misha’s not exactly small fry, either.”

Actually, he might even have hesitated if Misha had been involved in non-lethal shady dealings. Misha meant—had meant—a lot to him. Assassinating people, though? Riley couldn’t live with that. Didn’t want to live with that.

Sometimes, killing just kind of happens
, McClane offered carefully.
It’s not personal. It’s not… it’s not done out of meanness
.

“Shooting someone in the head in his own home with a sniper rifle doesn’t
kind of happen
,” Riley snapped. He made his way to the bathroom once again, pulling open the curtains as he passed. “Killing in self-defense or in defense of others? All right. If there’s no other way out, okay. For money? Not okay.” He snatched up his toothbrush, then stopped to glare at his reflection in the mirror. “I don’t get why you have such a problem grasping the concept. You said you’re an armor system. Armor’s supposed to protect, not destroy.”

Armor and weapons system
, McClane corrected. His little hooks were digging into Riley’s insides again, this time along his back and in his ribcage. Instinctively, Riley arched and tossed his head like a horse fighting an inconsiderate rider.

“Claws,” he gasped.

Sorry
, McClane apologized immediately, easing up and soothing away the sting with what felt like wet swipes of a dozen tongues.
Sorry. Sorry. Maybe we should change the subject?

“Sure,” Riley sighed, relieved and disappointed at the same time. He’d never talked about Misha before, not with anyone. It had felt surprisingly good to get some of it off his chest. Confession was the emotional equivalent to puking, Riley supposed. Something bad went down, bits of it came back up, you felt better. His belly rumbled a little in response to that.

Hunger
, McClane diagnosed.
Can we get more nachos?

“How about I introduce you to breakfast food instead?” Riley suggested, squeezing toothpaste onto his brush. He glanced at his watch and blinked. It was almost nine. Wow. He must’ve slept like the dead before the nightmare had hit. Rush hour had to be almost over, which meant there was time for a nice, leisurely breakfast before they had to hit the road again.

Where’re we going next?
McClane asked, curious.

“Dunno yesht,” Riley mumbled around his toothbrush. He spit, glanced up, and flashed a foamy grin at his silver-eyed-again mirror image. “How ’bout west? Wanna see Carson City?”

You could show me New Orleans
, McClane suggested sweetly.

“I could try to barf you into the shitter,” Riley shot back.

McClane didn’t lose a beat.
Carson City sounds awesome
.

“Good choice.”

W
HEN
she’d been ten years old, Leandra Butler had learned three things the hard way: one, it didn’t matter if you could run faster, hit harder, and calculate better than any other girl; boys never took you seriously, anyway; two, in some places, single black mothers were more likely to get laid off than single white men; and three, shitty things happened to good people even when their situation was bad to begin with, because life wasn’t fair.

They weren’t easy lessons to learn, because it was her mama who sat in the kitchen crying at night and it was her big sister in the wheelchair after a hit-and-run. Happy endings, it turned out, were for other people… or maybe they really only happened in fairy tales. The Butler family sure didn’t get one. The driver was never found and the insurance didn’t pay for everything and her mama didn’t get her office job back. Little Lee stood by feeling angry and powerless, too young to help, too old to be oblivious. They scraped by, because the Butlers were a tough breed and because they simply had no other choice. After a while, her mother found work again, but most of the time she had to juggle two or three part-time jobs, always and forever losing one and looking for another. Kitty adapted to life in a wheelchair even though she never stopped hating her useless stick legs. Lee tried not to be underfoot, kept her head down in school, and aced every test. It made her mama happy. It made Kitty roll her eyes and call her “nerd” in that half-envious, half-proud kinda tone. Being smart was a good thing.

Growing up, Lee discovered a few more facts of life and like the sharp, ambitious kid she was, she internalized the information and then set out to climb out of the framework trapping her. She knew no one would help her, because no one cared about her but family. That was all right, though, as long as she didn’t forget. Her mama and sister provided her with the emotional safety net she needed, if nothing else. There was no money for college, but the United States Army offered education benefits, scholarships, and career opportunities aplenty if you were willing to commit yourself. Since Lee had long realized that the notion of independence was a pretty illusion, and, despite all talk to the contrary, society as a whole was still in fact a patriarchy anyway, she saw no reason to shy away from joining the military.

The Army was happy to have her. The only surprise was that she ended up in the medical field. Or maybe it wasn’t, because deep down Officer Cadet Leandra Butler was still nerdy little Lee B. who wanted so badly to help her sister get up from that hated chair and make her long, beautiful legs healthy again. She wasn’t disappointed to find that wasn’t going to be an option. She wasn’t. People told her time and again she’d never be anything but a grunt, or a nurse, or that she wouldn’t be able to hack army life and was going to muddle through only to slink away with her tail between her legs when her contract expired. Leandra stared at them impassively, shrugged her bony shoulders, and said, “We’ll see.” Then she proceeded to get a doctorate, got involved in high-security projects, and started to work her way up the ranks.

The lessons she’d learned at the age of ten stuck. She always had to work harder, be better, be tougher than her male colleagues, but she wasn’t bitter about it because she’d known it was going to be that way. No use bawling about injustice. Nobody would change things for her; that wasn’t how it worked. You wanted a better life, you had to get off your ass and fight for it yourself, and live with the fact that a lot of people were going to call you a bitch for not taking their shit. So when there was talk about budget cuts, she made sure to be indispensable, because she was a single black woman officer and well aware of what that meant. When shitty things happened anyway, she did what her mother had done: she cried in private and then bucked up and did whatever was necessary for damage control.

Now, just shy of forty, Lt. Dr. Leandra Butler was one of the leading military neurologists, heading a team of top scientists in a high-security facility, and was angling for a captaincy and a second doctorate, this time in anatomic pathology. She had little to no personal life and frankly didn’t particularly mind. If she had wanted two-point-five kids and a picket fence, she’d have chosen a different line of work. Her mother had passed away painlessly in a comfortable apartment financed by Leandra, and she’d died knowing fragile Kitty was cared for and not-so-fragile Lee was thriving even in the male-dominated environment of the US military. She’d grudgingly accepted that grandkids weren’t going to happen, which, frankly, had been a relief. Leandra was as happy as she was going to get, she supposed. She might not have been much closer to making her sister walk again, but she was definitely one of the people who might just make it possible for future generations to heal paraplegia. She’d reached a satisfying status quo.

Then a bona fide spaceship crashed in Texas and Leandra got to examine three charred alien corpses, and suddenly the future was rife with a million new possibilities.

W
HEN
they first discovered the missing alien, Leandra reacted like a soldier. A hostile, extraterrestrial creature or weapon was at large on United States territory. It was a threat. It had to be found and destroyed. She was relieved when she first met General Young. Young was Special Forces, the kind of specialist who got results and got them fast. His reputation preceded him; the man was a legend. There was a keen intelligence behind that deep voice and the aging-jock good looks, different from Leandra’s own brand of smarts but no less valuable. It was reassuring to see. Thanks to military command structure, Leandra could put the whole mess into the general’s apparently quite capable hands and wait for another set of blackened remains to study.

As the hour grew later, though, a different voice started to make itself heard from the back of Leandra’s mind as she stood bent over the dissected body of one of the aliens. It was the scientist speaking: the part of her that never stopped seeking knowledge, never gave up on finding a way to see Kitty run again.
Look at this
, the scientist said as she poked at a muscle jam-packed with fine metal fibers.
I bet you dollars for donuts these little bastards double as a secondary nervous system, or at least they could if the host’s system failed
. And God help her, but that made her stop and reconsider her position. There might be answers in there, solutions to a lot of the problems that constantly brought her up short in her research.

The beings in front of her were dead, burned and compressed by the force of the explosions that had stopped them. There was just enough left to give an impression of what had been there, but probably not enough to reconstruct it. It was like staring at the pages of a badly damaged encyclopedia, getting glimpses of all that lost knowledge, wanting more. The secrets held within these corpses might open doors way beyond her desire to find a method to repair a damaged spinal cord.

It was an epiphany, but not of the pleasant kind. She needed the remaining alien creature alive in the name of science, for the sake of her sister and countless other people who had no hope of recovery now, but might just get another chance if Leandra and others could learn how these presumably artificial systems worked. Of course, she’d only recently given a certain general a long list of all the reasons why negotiating with the entity was going to be extremely dangerous and a seriously dumb idea. She might as well have told him to just nuke the critter and be done with it. The bitch of it was that this rather martial piece of advice was still sound, and the general was not the type to risk the lives of his men for possible scientific advancement. At least, not without sufficient motivation. An order from higher up might do the trick.

Leandra didn’t relish the thought of going over Young’s head. It was a shitty thing to do and it certainly wouldn’t help their working relationship. It meant losing respect wordlessly given and making an enemy far up the totem pole. She could talk to the general and try to convince him, but she’d tried that before and it hadn’t led to the intended result. A female officer who changed her mind was considered fickle, too emotional to do her job properly, too soft. Another of those lessons learned.

She didn’t have much time to make her decision. Talk to Young and risk getting dismissed or overruled? Or skip the middleman, take it one higher, and deal with the inevitable repercussions? The president was a civilian, more likely to consider potential medical benefits that went beyond military use. He’d also recently lost a close family member to cancer, which might make him more willing to listen to her arguments. She wasn’t a fool; she wasn’t going to insist on retrieval at any cost. All she wanted was that they try.

In the end, it was Lt. Dr. Butler who sent off a modified version of her report to the Commander in Chief without informing General Young about it, but it was Lee who made her do it.

U
NLIKE
in the movies, tracking someone via satellite didn’t yield immediate results. It might’ve gone faster if they’d involved other agencies (NASA and Homeland Security came to mind), but the Commander in Chief had slapped a black label on the matter and enforced an information lockdown. It was a sensible decision given the delicate nature of the situation, but it meant keeping the number of people involved to an absolute minimum. This was why a trusted four-star general was doing the investigating and why two Alpha detachments stood by in Fort Bragg, just in case. Young would’ve preferred to move them closer, but he had orders to keep a low profile and he honestly didn’t believe he’d need them. This was a search-and-destroy mission, but it wasn’t a terribly complicated one despite the unique circumstances. You didn’t need special operatives to fire a grenade launcher.

Thankfully, Warrant Officer Cabrera was good at what she did. The non-authorized personnel had long been kicked out of the room and so she’d gleefully confiscated several workstations. She was going after the data she needed with single-minded zeal, mainlining energy drinks and muttering under her breath. In the general’s experience, the muttering was a good sign when it came to specialists, so he left Cabrera to her job and focused on his own part in this hunt.

One of the immutable laws of any operation was to know your enemy. Since the enemy in this case was something unprecedented, Young went to the only sources available to him: Captain Mark Brennan and the other survivors of the first encounter, and Paul Riordan, the trucker who’d spoken with the alien and lived to tell the tale. They all had been quarantined in the deepest level of the Basement even though it didn’t look like they’d been infected with anything. Dr. Weston, the physician in charge, had handed in a long, comprehensive report on the tests done and the lab results gained, then summed it up for the general over a cup of coffee in a much more straightforward manner.