Resurrection Express (15 page)

4:58

Jammed out. The detonator, screwed up by the hot pulse inside the lead casing. We can’t blow the pipe. I see my father’s face drain white. He starts reworking the sequence on the keypad but it’s useless. Hartman, you poisonous snake. Your people designed this death trap just for us, didn’t they? The female voice slices the air like a laser—
danger, danger, danger
—and I half expect to hear that awful fat bastard laughing at us over the speaker system. My father backs away, quickly loading an incendiary round into his Smith and Wesson, aiming right at the big clump of plastic explosive, yelling at us to get in the stairwell. Bennett runs for it. I’m right behind her, pulling my father with me. He stands fast, telling me to run . . .

4:59

. . . telling me he’s sorry.

For everything.

He tells me to kiss Toni for him when I see her.

No.

No, goddammit.

You’re not gonna die for me.

Not here, not like this.

I won’t let you die because of my mistake.

I grab him again and it’s desperate, as I scream the words—but he spins with the butt of his gun, and something like a rock in a fast wheeze of wind smashes me in the forehead.

Bam.

The world goes almost black as the pain thunders above everything.

I drop to the floor in slow motion.

Seconds pound like hours.

Someone is pulling me back across the floor.

Toward the stairwell.

My breath leaves my body all at once.

I hear his voice shout back at me as I begin to lose consciousness . . . but it’s clear as day in my head . . . the last words of my father . . . the man who made me . . . the man who failed me . . . the man who brought us all to this final moment . . .

“
I’m sorry, son . . .”

. . . and the whole room behind us explodes.

•  •  •

5:01

I
hear the C-4 go off just at the edge of being awake. It’s still ringing in my ears as I struggle up from blackness. My forehead swells where he hit me, to save my life. It was me or him.

Dad . . .

I’m in the stairwell with Bennett and we’re still alive. The vault didn’t blow. Only the power to the vault, and the time lock with it. The door of the stairwell is ripped halfway off its hinges from the concussion of the explosion, jammed into the wall at a weird angle. Bennett has to use her shotgun to clear the way. I don’t even hear the blast of the 12-gauge round, my ears are ringing so bad. The door falls into the room and lands with a ten-ton crunch. I struggle to my feet and follow her back in.

Dad . . .

Nearly the whole inside of the room has been obliterated, scorched. Peeled back in layers that expose the circuitry and wire and cables. There’s no body.

Not even a corpse for a casket.

Never a coffin for a Coffin, you always said.

I always knew it would be this way, too.

I thought the same thing back in jail, when they told me you were gone and I would never see you again. Now, it’s for real.

Forever.

Dad . . .

Goddamn.

And it’s my fault. If I had listened to the girl. If I had run when they told us to. If I had never let them talk me into this crazy shit. If our lives had been normal, the way you always said they should be. But everything always goes away. It’s all temporary. Family is disposable . . .
love cannot stay
 . . .

The rage thunders in me.

I want to kill everyone. I want revenge.

No.

Calm down.

Let it go . . .

But I can’t.

I killed my father.

She sees me about to blow, sees the redness in my face and eyes, my teeth grinding in the awful burn of the moment, everything bad surrounding me in a sizzle. And she puts her hands on my shoulders, her voice eerily serene:

“Take it easy. We’re okay.”

Teeth gritted harder. Reeling it in.

Just barely.

The vault is blackened from the explosion, but it’s open. I was right about the indie power source—didn’t realize it was controlling the sequence on the time locks until too late. That’s what the secondary pulse inside the lead casing of the power line was. I went through all that punishment for nothing. My dad died for nothing.

I killed him.

No. Don’t think that way.

He died for us.

For you and me, Toni.

Just don’t think about it at all.

•  •  •

W
e open the thick vault door the rest of the way. It’s like pushing your stuck car into a filling station. It would have been easier with more men. They’re probably miles away by now. Radio silence. We’ll find a way back somehow. Once they figure out the building didn’t blow, they’ll be looking for us anyway.

This is so bad.

Inside, the vault has smooth walls, no shelves. I run my hands across the shiny steel, looking for hidden switches, depressions, anything. Nothing at all.

Except.

In the center of the room is a black metal suitcase. I kneel down in front of it and flip the latches. It’s not even locked. It might explode in my face if I open it.

I don’t care. I have to look.

I’m still alive two seconds later.

Inside the suitcase are seventeen flat plastic casings, about three inches square, with USMB ports. Portable hard drives. Latest technology, a terabyte each. The drives are all nestled in custom foam slots inside the case. There’s a couple of flash drives, too. I run my fingers along the rows of shiny black.

Click, click, click.

I snap the case shut and say out loud:

“So this is it?”

Click.

Hammer down hard, right behind me.

And the voice of the Sarge, not on the headset:

“I’m afraid it is, kid.”

•  •  •

I
put my hands up and turn around slowly. I’m looking right down the barrel of his Ruger SR9. At this range it’ll remove my heart and feed it to him. His Predator is slung on his back. He wants accuracy, not a two-for-one sale. A couple of his men are just on the other side of the door, Hecklers ready to sling hash.

“You dumb son of a bitch,” the Sarge hisses at me. “What were you trying to pull? You could have gotten us all killed.”

“You didn’t have to hang around. I told you to run.”

“Yeah, you did, didn’t you?” He sneers when he says that, as if I’m making some kind of smartass remark. Spits on the floor. “Where’s Daddy? He buy the farm or what?”

“Something like that.”

“I’ll be sure to send flowers. Now step away from the merchandise.”

Bennett puts up one hand. “Hey, man, calm down.”

“Shut the fuck up.
You’re
on my shitlist, too.”

I don’t move.

The Sarge bores into me with his eyes burning white. “I said, step
away
from the suitcase. Come over here next to the girl. You two get real cozy. And get your hands where I can see them. Do it
now,
both of you.”

He re-aims his gun right at my head.

I don’t move.

“I’m giving you to the count of three, you little fuck.”

I don’t move.

Dad . . .

This is what you died for?

This
was the important thing?

“One . . .
two
 . . .”

“Okay, okay, whatever,” I finally say.

And I take two steps to the left, next to Bennett.

“Get in here,” the Sarge calls to the two men with machine guns. “You guys are in charge of the package. Keep an eye on our friends, too. These kids are
dangerous
. Ain’t ya?”

I don’t answer him.

Keep my hands in the air, keep my eyes on the guns aimed at us.

The two grunts beat their feet inside the vault, one of them sliding his machine gun onto his shoulder by the strap, the other keeping a bead on me. The smaller of the two has brown hair and a big scar on his nose, looks twenty or so. The one with his gun still up doesn’t look like anything. A ghost in ninja black. He holds his position near the vault entrance. That means one still left, probably covering the stairwell. I’m in a spiderweb.

Scarface grabs the suitcase, steps back behind the Sarge.

The one aiming his Heckler near the door makes a scared noise. “We should get out of here, sir. We’re six minutes behind—”

“Not just yet,” the Sarge says, taking two steps closer to us with the gun.

“This is
insane
!” Bennett spits. “You can’t shoot us!”

“Maybe you’re right and maybe you ain’t . . .”

He holsters the gun. Pulls that big Rambo knife off his hip.

“. . . and maybe there’s just not enough room on the express.”

Takes two more steps. One more. Almost to us.

Right in Bennett’s face now:

“You wanna see the face of
God,
little lady?”

The knife, two inches from her right eye. Closer.

“She did her job,” I say. “This isn’t the army.”

“You’re right, boy, it ain’t.
This is resurrection
.”

The knife stabs toward her.

•  •  •

T
he hard scent of erased memories hits me again, and something short-circuits in my brain, slowing everything in the world down . . . as the knife glimmers in one white-hot instant . . . a million thoughts supercolliding and pinwheeling back like bullets on a high wind . . . and I feel all of those thoughts and none of them
as they hover at the edge of the Sarge’s blade
 . . .

And time freezes.

The razor-sharp point one micromillimeter from Bennett’s unflinching eyeball.

My fist stabs out.

Catches his wrist in midair.

And then . . .

•  •  •

H
e almost howls when the crack of bone hits him, senses my training too late, his fingers going dead and letting loose the blade just as I swing up with my right fist, into his jaw. He bites hard through his lower lip. Chokes on a piece of it, blubbing on bloody backwash. Bennett stumbles back into the wall, still damn near paralyzed by the shock of the moment, as I put my palms in the Sarge’s midsection, knocking him back into the two guys on the vault door. It’s a pushing-hands technique they taught me when I was nineteen, sends your target flying backwards on his own feet with a lot of momentum. When he hits his men, they stumble through the door like ten pins, their heads knocking together. One of them bounces and slides along the floor, dazed. Someone’s finger hits the trigger, can’t tell who, and a single bullet plays the lottery with us, zanging back and forth all over the steel walls. I hear it buzz past my face like an insect in the half second before I go for the blasted floor of the vault room outside in a roll. There’s a meaty slap behind me as
the bullet strikes home and Bennett makes a noise like she just swallowed a bug.

I hear her hit the floor as I come up in a fighting crouch, the ghost in black stumbling on his feet, swinging around with his weapon, firing blind from his tumble on the floor. His next shots cut into the Sarge and nearly tear him in half—a quick burst of thunder and a sharp spray of blood and human debris blowing across the room like a slash of black-and-pink and red all over.

Sergeant Maxwell Rainone stumbles and falls, deader than hell.

I roll again and another insect buzzes at me, missing my head by inches.

Just out the corner of one eye, I see Bennett waffling on the blasted floor, blood oozing from her arm. She’s struggling to get to the shotgun hanging off Rainone’s back.

Scarface swims in semi-consciousness on his feet, trying to put himself in the game again, with the knockout reflex screaming at him that he’s defeated. Before he can figure out what happens next, I shoot up from the floor, grab his left leg in a scissor clamp and hit the lower fibula just right so that it blows the bone in half through his skin and clothing. The crack is like a gunshot. No blood jets out, just jagged ivory teeth. I’m shoving him in front of me like a shield as I do that, the Black Ghost firing and firing, the bullets tearing at Scarface, not getting through his Kevlar. I duck behind his body and jerk my eyes shut as he takes all six shots, the sheer raw concussion hitting him like anvils, crushing everything inside his rib cage to jelly. I hear the gun fire three more times, bombs that make me deaf. Scarface doesn’t scream, his lungs collapsing. Then, suddenly, there’s another roar of thunder and the shooting stops. I hear a body drop to the floor. I don’t see what happens to the Black Ghost because I’m still hiding behind my human shield—which is dead meat on two feet now.

I let the body fall and it slops into the scorched floor of the big room.

I see that the Black Ghost is dead on the floor, too, swimming in a lake of his own blood, half his head erased. Someone shot him and it wasn’t me. Maybe it was God.

Maybe
—

Clack.

Heavy metal on heavy metal.

I look up to see a long black tunnel to nowhere aimed in my face. The guy from the stairwell, his pal Heckler locked and loaded.

“Wait,” I tell him, and then I try to say something else, but the sound chokes at the back of my throat as he pulls the trigger.

Too late. I’m already dead, point-blank.

Then something goes
click
and does a sickening crunch inside the gun—and I can’t even believe it happens. It’s a million to one, the sound of steel snapping in one millisecond as I stare my death right in the eye.

The sound of the rollerlock jamming.

The bullet tries to fire and explodes in the chamber, blowing his hand off.

It’s like a white hot
zang
that erases time for a half second, then expands into a high-pitched shriek of tearing flesh and metal, a piece of bloody shrapnel whizzing by my face as I duck the spray.

And then his forehead bursts apart.

He plunges backwards in a meaty thunder and everything he ever had on his mind rains down after him, his blown-to-hell machine gun falling uselessly at his side. He joins his buddies on the floor, all three of them stiff and bloody—wreckage among the wreckage.