Lone Wolf (17 page)
Transition.
It’s like a badly cut trideo. One moment I’m sitting comfortably in the Tsarina’s front seat, the next I’m sprawled grotesquely across something hard and jagged, head down, hoop in the air. My face is freezing, my back’s scorching hot. There are sounds in my ears, but the horrible shrieking-ringing inside my head’s too overpowering for me to make sense of them. When I try to open my eyes, I feel the eyelids move, hut I’m still blind. I try to move, but my body’s not paying attention to the messages my brain’s sending it. I feel like I’m in a fragging nightmare, which suddenly sends me into a panic. Or maybe it’s the turbocharged nerve-jolts of fear that do it. My legs and back spasm, and I roll over onto my right side. Something sharp and cold lances into my left buttock.
It’s the pain—precise, crystalline, localized—that seems to clear the fog from my mind. I’m lying out in the road, on top of wreckage of some kind. My eyes are open, but I can’t see because there’s something warm and sticky in them— blood, what else? A car crash . . . Then I remember the flaming comet.
And I’m rolling—madly, over and over to the right. Away from the direction the comet came, off the wreckage, and onto the cold, wet pavement. Frag the pain, frag the fact I’ve got something driven deep into my ham, frag the fact that my back feels like it’s on fire. If I don’t react fast— now—I’m dead. Still rolling, I drag my left hand across my eyes, trying to wipe away the blood, while my right hand pulls out my H & K.
I can see again, but I’m rolling over and over so fast I can’t make sense of anything. Night sky, flames, wet pavement, flames, night sky again. The ringing in my head’s decreasing, and now on top of it I can just hear the roaring of flames. And a woman screaming—high, continuous, throat-ripping . . .
Then another sound, one I’ve heard before, a fast-paced triple concussion. Ba-ba-bam, and my face and hands are flayed with fragments of pavement. I roll again, this time getting my hands and one knee underneath me, then, with a convulsion of all my major muscle groups, I fling myself to my feet. I’m dizzy and almost go sprawling again, but I manage to keep my balance—just. An instant later I almost trip over a curb, but I turn the move into a stutter-step and cut hard to my right. Ba-ba-bam again, and a garbage container next to me turns into shrapnel. Another stutter-step,
cut left, and I risk a look over my shoulder.
In the middle of the road, the main body of the Tsarina is blazing madly, the rear of it twisted and torn into some horrible kind of sculpture. Flames are leaping merrily from inside the driver’s compartment. The screams have stopped, and I know that’s a blessing. The front part of the car, the portion ahead of the passenger seat, is lying a couple of meters from the rest of the wreckage—not on fire, by some strange chance—smashed free when the impact of the missile split the Tsarina in two right at the front axle.
There’s movement on top of a low building across the way—a single figure, I’d guess—and two more on the road, moving cautiously toward Cat and the car that’s her crematorium. The wire takes over and I send a couple of quick bursts their way. Just to keep them preoccupied, not with the expectation of doing damage. I know they’re armored, just as I know who and what they are.
All that took a split second, and fragging good job. The Mossberg combat gun across the way roars again, and this time the triple-shot pattern’s so close I can feel it.
There’s a rage inside me, a terrible, burning thing I’ve never experienced before. It feels almost like it’s separate from me, with its own needs and wants and personality. Just like the wire feels sometimes, but more so. The rage wants nothing more than to wade out into the road, emptying my H & K into the figures—into the killers—before I’m cut down myself. So does the wire.
But I can’t do that, I can’t die. Not yet. I’ve got things to do, I tell myself, and the rage inside me understands that. I’ve got to find out the
why,
and I’ve got to confirm the
who
(though I think I’ve got a pretty good fragging idea), and then I’ve got to pay a few less-than-social visits. Once I’m done with that, then whoever wants to can cut me down.
I fake right, then cut left with every joule of energy in my body. The Mossberg devastates a lamppost a good half-dozen meters away from me, only now the SMGs are joining in the fun. Too late. I’m down an alley, out of the well-lit street, back into the darkness and the shadows that I know so well. Let the Lone Star Fast Response Team troopers clean up the mess. There’ll be an accounting soon enough.
I run on into the night.
Book Two
Insanity. Fragging insanity!
I'm lying on a creaky, uncomfortable bed in Room 2LR in one of the drekkiest flophouses I’ve ever had the bad fortune to encounter. There are honk-stains on the carpet, bloodstains on the mattress, and when the heater kicks in the reek tells me a previous occupant didn’t bother making the short walk down the hall to the drekker. Still, it’s the closest thing I’ve got to home at the moment. I needed sleep and I needed the sense of security—false or not—of a roof over my head and walls to keep out the wind and rain. If it wasn’t safe crashing in a flop when it was just the Cutters out after my hoop, it’s even more risky now. Maybe I could have kept wandering the streets until I got so fragging tired I started making drekheaded mistakes and didn’t have the mental wherewithal to compensate for them, but dossing down for a day or so seemed like the more viable alternative.
Frag knows, I didn’t get that much sleep anyway. It was just short of 0430 by the time I'd boosted a car—my bike’s still behind a restaurant in Montlake, assuming nobody’s managed to defeat the lock and security system yet—and rolled out to the Tarislar area of Puyallup. A major selling point for this whack of turf was that it’s about as far as you can get from downtown and not be in Salish-Shidhe territory, but that’s not all I had in mind when I headed south. Though the Cutters are everywhere, their presence in Tarislar is only minimal. Add to that the fact that Lone Star rarely patrols this elven neighborhood, and it becomes just
about the safest place for me to hunker down at the moment.
Tarislar’s a hole, don’t let anybody tell you any different. The region between Kreger Lake and Harts Lake, it used to be a flash place to live, or so I’ve heard. Sometime around the turn of the century, it suddenly blossomed from a rural area into a “bedroom community,” sprouting mid-rise apartment blocks like fungus. Then, of course, property rates kinda slipped a tad when Mount Rainier erupted and spewed toxic mud and other drek over the area now called Hell’s Kitchen. They slipped even further when the prevailing winds shifted, bringing the reek of the Kitchen—with all its associated toxins—wafting over it. People moved out just in time to make space for the influx of elves pouring southeastward after the Night of Rage.
So that’s Tarislar today, a “temporary” haven for elves who’ve never been able to move elsewhere, an area of decaying buildings filled with squatters and cities of shacks built on parks and golf courses. Charming.
Still, as I say, it was exactly what I was looking for. I don’t know why, but the Cutters have few elves among their ranks. It could be racism, but it probably has more to do with the dominance of elf-based outfits in Tarislar. Non-elven gangs aren’t going to make much of a dent against that. Lone Star, too, is mostly human, and that could well be one of the reasons for low police presence in the area— lower, even, than the “E” level of enforcement throughout the rest of Puyallup. Conversely, as a human, I stand out like a fragging sore thumb in Tarislar, and everybody’s going to take note of the
celenit
—the “unevolved monkey-man”— walking the streets. But at least the odds are against them reporting me to anyone who cares.
So, to continue, it was about 0430 when I hit Tarislar, and close to an hour later by the time I’d found a flophouse that would take me. I didn’t have much choice, which is the only reason I ended up at the rat-infested flea circus called The Promise. (Promise of what? Bed bugs, or a nice skin rash maybe?) Into bed by 0540, call it, for twelve-plus hours of blissful, uninterrupted sleep . . .
Which categorically refused to come. Oh sure, I did drift off now and again—for five or ten minutes at a time, before
the nightmare woke me up. The same nightmare, every
fragging time, a replay of the ambush on Montlake Boulevard. The missile hitting the car, the FRT troopers on the roof and advancing across the street. Cat’s screams as she burns alive. Sometimes the car raptures under the missile’s impact, throwing me free. Sometimes it doesn’t, trapping me inside while the flames rise up around me and Cat shrieks in my ears and I can see the satisfied grins of the troopers as they come forward to watch the fun . .. I shake my head, hard. Even just remembering those nightmares is unbearable. I check my watch—1300 hours, or close enough, which means I've had seven hours of something you couldn’t quite call sleep. It also means the gutterpunk elf who opened the lobby door when I pounded on it, and charged me entirely too much for a room, has had seven hours to rat out the
celen
in room 2LR to anyone who’s expressed an interest. The facts that my skin’s unpunctured and I’m still alone—not counting the multilegged creepy-crawlies—hints that I’m safe enough for the moment.
I sit up, slide my butt up toward the head of the bed so I can lean against the wall. My gaze settles on my black jacket, hung over the back of the room’s single chair. The back of the jacket's scorched, the synthleather delaminated and blistered in places by extreme heat. All I can figure is that the fireball from the exploding missile spread forward through the passenger compartment, was deflected downward by Cat’s raised seat, and hit me in the small of the back to lick up toward my shoulders. Same with the shock wave, except it probably “echoed” in the space under Cat’s seat, delivering enough energy to crack the monocoque at its weakest point, the front wheel-wells. Pure luck I’m still alive, then. Luck that favored me and deserted Cat.
The rage churns and twists inside me like a live thing made of hot metal, but it’s under better control now. It’s not going to go away—I don’t
want
it to go away, not till it’s satisfied—but at the moment it feels more like a useful tool. Something I can control, whose power I can channel and focus, instead of it controlling me. That’s what I hope, at least. It’s an extension of something they taught us in the Academy: get angry when you have to, but
use
the anger. I don’t think my instructors were thinking about anything like this, but the result’s the same.
The Star. Thinking about the Academy rips off the ... well, call it the mental equivalent of a scab over a painful train of thought. My eyes burn, and my throat tightens like
someone’s got me by the windpipe.
The Star’s betrayed me, there’s no other way of reading it. They’ve put me “beyond salvage”. Like the Cutters, Lone Star has decided that Richard Larson is “out of sanction,” to be eliminated with extreme prejudice. And like them, the Star sent out the equivalent of a hit team to fry me. And, still like with the Cutters, I recognized them—after the fact. The biggest difference from the gang is that the Lone Star attempt brought with it a higher level of collateral damage than I really want to remember right now . ..
Why, frag it?
Why?
The questions parallel those I wracked my fragging brains with after Marla and friends tried to scrag me at the Wenonah. Why did the Star decide I must die? And why did it have to be an ambush? Frag, they could have brought me in, debriefed me, then fragging poisoned me, if they had a mind to.
No, wait, I’m missing something here, aren't I? I’m talking about “them” and “the Star” as if it’s a definite, known group. But is it? By frag I think so. I think it’s Layton, Drummond, and McMartin, that fragging unholy triumvirate who strung me along and kept me from coming into the light, then set up the parameters of the meet. Cat even said it was Drummond who sent her out to make the pickup. Doesn’t that lock it in? Doesn’t it prove Drummond’s fragging complicity?
It’s so tempting to say “yes,” to pick out a nice, defined well-known target for my hatred. But it’s not necessarily the case. Remember, we’re dealing with someone—or some faction—that has penetrated the Star’s data fortress, that has gotten in deep enough to dig up my connection with Nicholas Finnigan. That kind of penetration gives them more power and control over Star operations than I really care to think about.
Like, try this as a possible scenario. Drummond and crew want to set up a meet. They figure I’m going to be jumpy—a good guess—particularly after being kept dangling for a day, and decide to send someone I’ll recognize and trust. Drummond knows the Seattle data fortress is compromised, so he accesses the Milwaukee files to find someone I know, and comes up with Cat. Unfortunately, IrreleCorp, or whoever, is
in deeper than he thinks, and intercepts the data request—or
maybe they’ve already got their hooks into Milwaukee anyway, it doesn’t matter.