Necropolis (47 page)

“What deal?”

“In exchange for his help, I said I wouldn’t kill her. Unless I had to.”

“Dear old dad,” sighed Nicole. “Makes me all misty.” She blinked twice in rapid succession to bring the targeting system in her veil online.

“She killed you! Twice! She’ll kill us all if she gets the chance.”

 
“Her squad and her comm systems are down. By the time she gets back to her people in Necropolis, we’ll be safely ensconced at Arg-é Bam and the Conch and the President both will have the story. There’s a big world out there that ain’t gonna be thrilled she played it for a sucker.”

Then, out of the blue, Donner’s smile dropped from his face like he’d been sucker-punched. For a moment, she thought he’d decided to break his promise to Daddy and kill her. Then he rocked on his feet and raised his hand against his forehead, looking gray. “Whoa,” he stammered.

“What’s wrong?” said Maggie.

“The Workahol,” he said. “It just cut out.”

“Shit,” said the smarty, grabbing his arm. “Your reborn system metabolized it faster than normal.”

“Poor angel,” said Nicole. “That’s gotta hurt.”

And fired.

66

MCDERMOTT

T
>he Lifetaker reacted before the eye could blink, dematerializing enough to let the energy pulses pass right through it. It wrapped one of McDermott’s men into itself like a shroud, suffocating him while it continued to fight the other two.
 

McDermott and the techs backed up against the dead environmental controls.
 

They all heard the second guard’s spine snap. The female tech fainted, unable to stomach another serving of reality. She was lucky; she got to miss the Lifetaker thrust an appendage
into
the third guard and squeeze his lungs until they burst. Gray cottage cheese spilled from the dead man’s lips. The Lifetaker dropped the bodies and swung around to them.

“Fucking demon from hell!” McDermott shrieked.

It cocked its head protrusion. “Nothing supernatural about me, boss. I’m just your garden-variety smarty.” It started forward, issuing a screeching metal-on-metal laugh that threatened McDermott’s shaky composure.

Wait a minute—

The male tech howled, his sanity deserting him, and tried to scramble up the wall.

A smarty—a machine!
That was it!

He pulled the EMP grenade from his belt. It was the last thing he ever thought he’d need. But it paid to be prepared.

Thank you, God
, he thought, as he pulled the pin.

67

DONNER

I
t happened all at once and very slowly.

My adrenals failed beneath an avalanche of lactic acid, muscles swamped by a kind of pain and fatigue I’d never known before. There was fur in my throat, cotton in my head.

Maggie strode to me in alarm. Elise took a step back, confusion in her eyes, a clementine blush on her cheeks.

“Poor angel,” said Nicole. “That must hurt.”

She flung her arms out at us, palms upturned. Two blades fired from her sleeves, shooting across the room, quicksilver flashes too fast for me to react to.

Max leapt sideways, but even jazzed he wasn’t fast enough. The projectile caught him across the right triceps, severing muscles and tendons, turning his arm into dead weight. Blood drenched his side in arterial paroxysms.

Elise stumbled back into me. In that instant, there were a million things I wanted to cry out. But all I could do was watch. I tried to lift my arms, but they were underwater, wrapped in chains. She was at my side just as the blade arrived. It sliced through my Beretta. Then it passed through her midsection as if she was made of gossamer and not flesh and I had time to register her puff of air across my cheek, her familiar scent filling my nostrils, her look of shock and satisfaction burning into my mind.
 

Then she fell, hair flowing. She seemed to meet the ground lightly, like petals strewn from a careless hand. I screamed, dropping down beside her, watching her blood flowing too fast and too thick into the carpet beneath, clamping my hands to the top of my head in horror.

She grasped my elbow, patting it, and then she closed her eyes and let herself slide down to the place she’d hidden from all these years.

Before I could even moan out a denial, a concussion boomed from somewhere outside.
 

Maggie cried out. I looked up to see her sizzle and jerk like she’d stepped on a live wire. She burned nova bright for an instant and flashed out of existence with a pop, like an old flashcube. Her orb dropped to the carpet, smoking.

Darkness claimed all.

68

DONNER

S
omewhere a generator cleared its throat. Emergency lights snapped on, bathing us in white shafts.

I looked around.

Nicole had fled, taking one of the blades with her.

Max struggled over to Elise, but I knew she was dead. I was violently sea-sick. My jinxed equilibrium sent me reeling sideways, arms flailing. Somehow I managed to stay on my feet.
 

“What was that?” I grunted.

“EMP grenade,” Max said, his teeth clenched. He fell back on his haunches, his good hand clamped around his shoulder, blood leaking around his nails. “Someone in the bunker must’ve used it to kill the Lifetaker.”
 

“Is Maggie dead?”

“Don’t know. Those things have a limited range. Maybe she’s just temporarily offline.”

I tore a piece of material from my smartskin sleeve. “Let’s get a tourniquet on that arm.”

He put a hand against my chest, stopping me. “Forget me, I’m okay. Get that bitch.”

I stood. Struldbrug was going to regret ever bringing me back.

My Beretta was in pieces. The blade that had pierced it was lying on the carpet, dull with blood. It had ricocheted through a metal bust of Sophocles, taking his eyes with it.
 

I picked it up by its hilt and ran outside.

***

McDermott came out of the bunker just as I stumbled onto the driveway. He pointed his plasma pistol at me and tried to fire, but its insides had been fried by the EMP. He tossed it down, grinning, flexing his arms. “Good,” he said. “As it should be. You and me.”

“You watch too many holos,” I said.
 

I put all my energy into one move.

I threw myself forward, tucked into a ball. I came out of the roll low, my arm extended, the blade deep in his abdomen. His mouth formed a perfect “o” of shock, his golden irises ringed in wide surprised white.
 

“Sorry,” I said. “No time for a showdown.”

I yanked the blade sideways. It tore through his obliques and came free in a spray of blood and tissue. McDermott fell to the cement, dead as love.

Pain shrieked up my limbs like screech beetles, biting and tearing. Only the thought of Nicole escaping got me to my feet. I moved to the front of the house, fighting nausea, shaking my head to clear the black spots from my vision.

Nicole stood on the hillock behind the cemetery’s fence. She must have paused in her flight to watch me kill McDermott. Now I saw her whirl and disappear down its far slope.
 

There was a crack of thunder and the heavens opened up, drenching me in an instant, making my camo and my night optics useless.
 

I tore the headpiece off and ran toward the cemetery.

69

DONNER

T
he rain beat at me like a living opponent, every drop lancing through my tattered nervous system like a blow. The screech beetles had turned into locusts, devouring my muscles and tendons, consuming my strength in a million tiny bites.

I stumbled twice before I even reached the fence. When I hauled myself over it, I lost my footing. For a second I thought it was all going to end there with me impaled on the iron gate. Somehow I avoided the worst of the spikes and barbed wire and got myself across the top. But I slipped on the way down and hit the ground hard, on my back. The concussion sent so much torment through me that I blacked out for a minute.
 

I picked myself up. Blood ran out of my mouth—somewhere along the line I’d bitten my tongue. Part of my mind, my lower reptile brain, screamed at me for rest, telling me to curl into a ball under one of the big oaks, just drift into an exhausted stupor and forget everything. But I had one more job to do.
 

Sometimes no choice was the best choice.

Lightning tore holes in the sky, revealing purple-black clouds that looked insane with rage. The trees were dead, their trunks serving as their own grave markers, their twisted arms reaching to the sky for a reprieve that never came. They had resisted the elements for as long as they could, but now chunks of bark and wood hurled down with every fresh slash of water.

The weeds that overgrew the place were a sickly white-gray. Somehow they’d survived the enzyme, but only barely. Matted and dense, they clutched at my ankles, trying to snare me. Hidden beneath their chaos was an obstacle course of markers, rocks and roots.

I went down three more times, the last one an ungainly pitch headfirst against a headstone that made me see sparklers and hear brass bells.
 

Behind me, over the storm, I thought I heard voices calling my name.
 

I really hoped that it was Maggie. I didn’t know what I would do if she wasn’t okay.

I staggered forward through the headstones.

The place was enormous. So many lives. When I was tiny my dad had taken me to a cemetery; I’d seen the headstones and asked him how they got them to grow out of the ground that way. He’d laughed himself silly. The question didn’t seem childish now. God did grow headstones for us. And our epitaphs were already written.

Ten feet further I almost fell into an open plot that had been half-filled with leaves and debris. Only a sizzle of lightning revealed it in time. Arms pinwheeling, I staggered back onto my ass, cursing.
 

The lightning and thunder went to their corners for a round break. The rain took the opportunity to redouble its efforts. It was so gelid that my fingers were numb around the knife.

Then, without warning, the Blister went out.

One minute its electromagnetic discharges were sparking into the sky, crimsons and maroons splashing the firmament. Then, nothing. I could still faintly make out the shape of the domes, reflecting the city lights below, but they themselves were off-line.
 

Struldbrug had promised to fly back and find Adam and the President, tell them everything: how the Shift was a farce, that neither reborns and norms were infectious to the world, that the Blister hadn’t been designed to keep the Shift in but to contain her deadly Retrozine-C while it destroyed everyone. Them included.
 

I guess they believed him.

Somewhere I heard a howl. Nicole had seen it, too.
 

Without sky flash and Blister, it was terribly dark now.
 

Onward.

The thunder uttered a growl and the rain increased its pummeling. I stopped, disoriented. The darkness of solid objects was indistinguishable from the black canvas before me. The rain blanketed all sounds.
 

This was hopeless. I couldn’t track Nicole in this void. She could be anywhere, far away by now.
 

Then the lightning returned with a vengeance, sundering a tree maybe three hundred feet distant. The wood literally screamed. In the flare of its illumination, I saw her. She’d ducked out from behind a mausoleum when the electricity struck. She froze for a second and we saw each other, our eyes locking over the distance. Then she sprinted over a hillock.

I ran after, determined not to lose her again.

When I staggered to the top, she was gone. Water spattered the stones ahead of me, but she was nowhere.

How had she—?

Too late I realized she’d been baiting me. She’d let herself be seen deliberately, to lure me forward to this position. Perched there like I was, at the top of the rise, I’d stand out clear as day when the next lightning bolt hit. A perfect target. She would double back around.

I turned in alarm, my feet tangling in the thick vegetation. Jesus, this couldn’t be happening.
 

My knife, where was my knife?

The next bolt of lightning struck, and there she was, just a few yards below me, her arm already raised to throw.

I fumbled my own blade up with insensate fingers, but the hilt slipped from my grasp to tumble into the dark grass.

Find it, where did it—

Her dagger took me in the chest. I felt it pierce my breastbone, but its blade was so finely honed I didn’t know it had penetrated deeper until I felt my heart try to beat around the metal. And shudder.

Then I was falling backwards, down the hill toward an empty mawing mouth. Just like she’d planned. The sides of the earth opened up and swallowed me, black walls rushing toward the sky around me. I hit the bottom of the empty grave with barely a gasp.