Terminated

Two Weeks’ Notice

“Caine’s second series entry continues to raise the bar for urban fantasy. . . . It deals realistically and compassionately with both the undead and the dead and achieves depth in the process.”

—
Library Journal

“
Two Weeks’ Notice
is good, fast-paced fun, and dives headlong into the action and high stakes one comes to expect from a Rachel Caine novel. The writing is brisk and competent, and as with the first book, I’m continually impressed with the fascinating take on ‘zombies’ in this series. . . . Bryn is a heroine [who] earns a place in a reader’s heart.”

—The Book Smugglers

“[Caine] captures the sinister side of corporate America in this unique mix of urban fantasy and conspiracy thriller. . . . It was action-packed, full of twisty plot turns and surprises and a few ‘I didn’t see that coming’ moments.
Two Weeks’ Notice
would make an awesome TV series. If you enjoy conspiracy thrillers with a touch of urban fantasy, you are in for a treat.”

—Badass Book Reviews

“Caine has succeeded in adding a different twist to a tired genre and created an increasingly complex series populated by strong characters pitted against übervillains. . . . The fast pace and sinister story line carry readers deep into the underbelly of greed, government control, and a lust for power. This is a series worth watching.”

—Monsters and Critics

“An entirely fresh take on zombies. . . . Layered characters and well-interspersed action scenes make the story exhilarating and engrossing.”

—
RT Book Reviews

“Bryn is a fantastic character—a strong, independent woman with a soft side for her family and friends. . . . With even more suspense and chills than before, this sequel is an impressive blend of sci-fi zombie horror with the feel of a dark urban fantasy.
Two Weeks’ Notice
is an extremely fast-paced, action-packed adventure that holds on and doesn’t let go.”

—SciFiChick.com

Working Stiff

“One hell of a first novel in what looks to be a must-buy urban fantasy series. From world-building and plotting perspectives,
Working Stiff
completely rocks.”

—The Book Smugglers

“Caine’s imaginative new series starts with a bang as she puts a frightening new twist to corporate greed and zombies. Fast-paced and full of surprises, this is one exciting thrill ride packed with both the best and worst of human behavior.”

—Monsters and Critics

“A fun, thrilling new series. . . . Bryn is a capable and multifaceted heroine . . . a great new take on the popular ‘zombie’ subgenre. Even more interesting, perhaps, is the way Caine has her characters show respect for the dead—something that’s missing from nearly every zombie book I’ve ever read. Well done, indeed.”

—SFRevu

“Completely engaging and impossible to put down. This unusual, macabre tale will attract both urban fantasy and zombie fans alike.”

—SciFiChick.com

“An utterly fascinating and unique plot in the urban fantasy arena . . . it will draw you in and not let you go until the very last page.”

—Bitten by Books

“
Working Stiff
has an interesting story line and there isn’t a brain-eating zombie in sight. Conspiracy upon conspiracy made for a good read.”

—Night Owl Reviews

“[Caine] gives us another strong leading female character who has the right balance of emotion [and] kick-ass to make her come off of the pages as real to the reader. . . .
Working Stiff
has a steady pulse, pulling the reader from beginning to end to see how it all turns out.”

—Fresh Fiction

“From page one,
Working Stiff
was a wonderful surprise. . . . Bryn’s careful, quiet personality is so winning and fierce, I was captivated.”

—All Things Urban Fantasy

“A smart zombie novel that goes beyond the typical reanimation explorations and delves into the world of big pharma and corporate takeover. . . . This series is shaping up to be a very rewarding and interesting new addition to the urban fantasy genre.”

—Alpha Reader

“An intriguing new twist on the zombie mythology. . . . If you’re looking for a twisty, fast-paced, escapist read, hop on the Revivalist train and settle down with
Working Stiff
. You can say, ‘I was a fan from the start,’ because if Caine can keep the suspense flowing in future books, this story has HBO series written all over it.”

—
Fort Worth Weekly

PRAISE FOR THE WEATHER WARDEN SERIES

“The forecast calls for . . . a fun read. . . . You’ll never watch the Weather Channel the same way again.”

—Jim Butcher,
New York Times
bestselling author of the Dresden Files

“With chick lit dialogue and rocket-propelled pacing, Rachel Caine takes the Weather Wardens to places the Weather Channel never imagined!”

—Mary Jo Putney

“A fast-paced thrill ride [that] brings new meaning to stormy weather.”

—
Locus

“The Weather Warden books are an addictive force of nature that will suck you in.”

—
News and Sentinel
(Parkersburg, WV)

“Chaos has never been so intriguing as when Rachel Caine shapes it into the setting of a story. Each book in this series has built-in intensity and fascination.”

—Huntress Book Reviews

“Rachel Caine is still going strong, throwing one curveball after another as she continues to shake up the status quo. She successfully maintains a sense of impending doom and escalating tension as the stakes get ever higher. . . . I really like this series, because it’s urban fantasy that . . . tell[s] something exciting and original and ever changing.”

—SF Site

REVIVALIST

Working Stiff

Two Weeks’ Notice

Terminated

WEATHER WARDEN

Ill Wind

Heat Stroke

Chill Factor

Windfall

Firestorm

Thin Air

Gale Force

Cape Storm

Total Eclipse

OUTCAST SEASON

Undone

Unknown

Unseen

Unbroken

THE MORGANVILLE VAMPIRES

Glass Houses

The Dead Girls’ Dance

Midnight Alley

Feast of Fools

Lord of Misrule

Carpe Corpus

Fade Out

Kiss of Death

Ghost Town

Bite Club

Last Breath

Black Dawn

Bitter Blood

Fall of Night

A REVIVALIST NOVEL

Rachel Caine

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Roxanne Longstreet Conrad, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

ISBN 978-1-101-62643-6

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

To my mom, Hazel Longstreet,
who instilled in me an early love of books and writing. This one’s for you, Mom, with love—because you’re a survivor.

This book wouldn’t exist without the incredible patience of my editor, Anne Sowards, and the constant and awesome support of my assistant, Sarah Weiss. LOVE!

T
he real problem with becoming a monster, Bryn thought, was that you didn’t know whom to trust.

Bryn Davis, monster, paced the floor in silence, surrounded by her friends and allies, and she didn’t dare trust a single one of them. Not fully, not now. Only one of them knew the truth of what she’d become . . . and even though Riley Block already shared the secret, and the curse, Bryn didn’t know whether she could, or should, trust her.

As for the rest of them, they would be torn between horror and fury and pity, but someone would make it a mission to see her dead, and someone else would defend her, and it would tear everything, and everyone, apart.

Some secrets just had to be kept in utter silence.

“Bryn?” her lover, Patrick McCallister, said in the kind of voice one uses when the first few tries don’t break through the haze. She stopped and looked up to focus on his face.
He’s tired,
she thought, and despite how conflicted she was about her own situation, she wanted to comfort him. She loved him. It came from someplace deep inside, a wellspring she couldn’t block even when she tried. “Bryn, did you get anything from the Pharmadene lab to tell us what they were working on in there?”

She felt a wild urge to laugh, but it was the same self-destructive impulse one might feel standing on the edge of a cliff.
Tell them,
something mad in her whispered.
Tell them, jump, just let it all go.

Because she certainly had something: proof. The problem was it was coursing through her veins, twisting her into something that was even further from human than she’d been before. It was a far cry from being a dead woman, revived with a miracle nanotechnology drug and dependent on it for daily survival, to whatever she was now. Because her little life-mimicking machines had new programming.

Military programming.

Can’t tell him that,
she thought, and shook her head instead. “Didn’t have time to do much exploring, since they were trying extremely hard to kill us,” she said. “It looked like what I saw at the nursing home—they were using innocent people for nanotech incubators. Breeding more of the nanites. This was probably some kind of . . . factory farm.” Not a lie, not quite. The nanotech was real, and they had been breeding it in the unconscious, drugged bodies. It was just the
type
of nanotech she was silent about.

“Riley—” McCallister turned toward the FBI agent sitting silently with her back to the wall of the small room. Bryn had rescued Riley Block from a hospital bed in that terrible lab, and as different as the two of them were, as fundamentally antagonistic in many ways, they had this secret in common. Riley didn’t look up, but then, there were people in the way. Too many people. It felt terribly, oppressively crowded—this cheap motel room they’d rented as their temporary safe house was meant for a sweaty couple with no interest in anything save the bed.

Bryn felt constantly short of breath, on the verge of violence and screams. She wondered whether Riley felt the same.

Riley finally raised her head, and beneath the signature black bob, she seemed far away. Thinking, just as Bryn was, about her circumstances.

Patrick wasn’t done trying to elicit information, and he pounced on the opportunity. “Riley, did
you
get anything from the lab?”

“No,” the woman said, which was an outright lie. “No idea what they were doing, but Bryn’s probably got it right. I was unconscious most of the time.” She lied beautifully, Bryn thought, with just the right amount of flat indifference and just the right amount of eye contact. “How long do we have to stay here?”

McCallister shot a glance toward his old friend Joe Fideli, who was stationed at the window, looking through the quarter-inch slit between the glass and the curtain without disturbing the fabric. Those two men, Bryn reflected, had never lost their Army Ranger alertness, even though they’d cashed out years back—but then, Joe made his living guarding people. Fideli shrugged. “No way to know,” he said. “We’re still good for now.”

Meaning it appeared that their enemies hadn’t traced them here. Yet. It had been a hell of an escape from Pharmadene, the government-run drug company, and the chaos had worked to their advantage, but that didn’t mean that their enemies wouldn’t be on the case and tracking them down. Oddly, that probably wasn’t the government itself—only a rogue body inside of it. So they weren’t totally screwed yet.

Then again . . . it was impossible to know, but Bryn suspected that the nanites coursing through her body—Version 2.0, these tiny life-supporting machines—were
fully
trackable if the Pharmadene team still had the tech online to do it. Riley had the same issue. They’d done plenty of damage there, but had it been to the right equipment?

Despite the risk of discovery, she wasn’t sure how much they dared tell her friends and allies . . . but she needn’t have worried, because Manny Glickman, their burly mad-scientist-for-hire, was on it already. How in the world Patrick had first met the man was a mystery to Bryn, but one thing was certain: Manny had skills.

He also had a big backpack of stuff, and he’d unzipped it and handed his girlfriend, Pansy Taylor, a syringe from its depths. “Better safe than sorry,” he said. “That’s a frequency blocker for the nanites. Bryn, you and Riley had better take it. I’m not sure they can lock on you anymore, but I’d rather assume they were smart and we are smarter.”

Of all the people Bryn didn’t want knowing about her involuntary nanite upgrade, Manny was at the top of the list. Manny was brilliant, but he was also paranoid as hell, and although she wasn’t sure he could kill her by himself, he’d damn well try, and he’d have something hidden in that bag that would be a nasty, premeditated surprise. Manny didn’t like being at anyone’s mercy and he didn’t trust anyone, except possibly Pansy and Patrick McCallister.

Pansy herself was a bit of a puzzle, because she seemed so . . . damn normal. Forthright, sweet, and yet fully capable of handling herself in a fight if necessary. She eased past Patrick and Joe, and stepped around Riley’s outstretched legs to crouch next to the woman and give her an apologetic smile. “Large-gauge needle,” she said. “You’ll feel it—sorry.”

“I wish that was the worst thing that’s happened to me today,” Riley said, and rolled up her sleeve. Pansy administered the shot into Riley’s bicep, then safety-capped the needle and approached Bryn with the same needle—no point in worrying about infection with the nanites on the job. Bryn took it without comment. It did sting, and then it burned, but as Riley had said, it wasn’t the worst thing in her day. Not by a long shot.

“Excuse me, but can we discuss our resources?” That question, diffidently offered, came from the tall older man, Liam, standing near the bathroom . . . and Bryn realized she had no context for Liam now. Before today, she’d known him as the urbane administrator/butler at Patrick’s family estate—an Alfred to Patrick’s uncostumed Batman, in a way. But since she’d seen him firing an automatic weapon while coming to her rescue, and looking as calm doing that as greeting guests at the front door, she wasn’t sure she had any handle on him at all.

“Go ahead, Liam,” Patrick said. “Let’s get all the bad news out now.”

“I can get us funds from the black account, but they’ll cut us off soon enough. I initiated transfers to dump cash into various offshore accounts before I joined you today. They’ll find some of it, of course, but not all. I estimate we may be able to count on a few million, no more—at least until this is resolved.”

That sounded like a lot of money to Bryn, who’d grown up poorer than most, but she guessed that when you were expected to support a group of this size of fugitives on the run, and fight along the way, what seemed like a fortune might dwindle quickly. But then, Patrick’s family had been insanely wealthy, in a way that made most of the legendary one percent look comfortably middle class. Oddly, Patrick didn’t control the cash; his parents had put it all into a foundation administered by Liam. For being disinherited with prejudice, though, Patrick still did well for himself. Thankfully. The only thing worse than running for your life was doing it flat broke.

Bryn’s sister Annalie had been uncharacteristically silent, huddled in the corner near Liam, but now she said, “Where are we going to go? Where
can
we go? They’re going to find us, aren’t they?” She sounded scared, but more together than Bryn would have expected her to be. Annie had never been tough—she was the flighty, impractical sister, the kindhearted one who constantly picked up good causes and dropped them in favor of even better causes. Never quite doing the right thing but trying for the right reasons.

And also, she was terrible with money. Terrible.

But none of that mattered anymore, because Annie, like Bryn—and Riley—was effectively Dead Girl Walking. The nanites—originally developed as a pharmaceutical called Returné, with the ambitious aim of reviving the recently dead on the battlefield—did their programmed job and kept them all breathing and talking and having a simulation of life, but something in their bodies was . . . broken. What kept them going wasn’t resuscitation; it was life support. Annie still needed daily shots of the drug to keep going.

And Bryn and Riley had needed them, too . . . until the newly upgraded nanites had taken over back in the Pharmadene secret lab. Before they’d gotten away, Riley had claimed that these new, improved bugs powered, repaired, and reproduced themselves without any supporting shots at all.

She’d also said they were infectious. And Bryn supposed she had firsthand proof of that, because God only knew, someone had infected
her
with the stuff.

Now she had about thirty days to find a way to stop it or she’d pass on the nanites to some other poor bastard who was susceptible, once they’d matured within her. She’d infect someone. Spread the . . . the disease. Increase the army of nearly invincible soldiers for their enemies—at least, that was supposed to be the goal of the whole twisted program.

The implications of her condition were only just beginning to take hold . . . and the dangers.
I need to tell them,
she thought, and looked at Riley.

Riley was looking at her, too. As if she knew what Bryn was thinking. She gave Bryn a small shake of her head.
Don’t.

“I need—” Bryn said, but Riley spoke at the same time, louder.

“We need some food,” she said, and that was true; it woke an instant and uncomfortable surge of hunger inside of Bryn that shocked and horrified her. Because what she craved wasn’t just
food
. The nanites powering her now—these nanites needed protein. Meat. A lot of it. And they weren’t picky about its source. The scientists had been hideously practical in their design of the little monsters . . . because one thing you could always find on a battlefield was
meat
.

“We’ll eat once we’re safe,” Joe Fideli said, still staring out the window. “Can’t exactly call out for pizza right now.”

The prospect of having to wait to satisfy that craving was, frankly, terrifying. Bryn tried to ignore the hunger clawing at her, but she knew what it signified: the nanites needed power. And sooner or later, the nanites would take her conscious decision making out of the equation and simply find food—and look, there was a whole room of meat on the bone right here. Between her and Riley, it could be a bloodbath.

“Bathroom,” Bryn said, and lunged for the door. She slammed and locked it, and dry-heaved into the sink, then raised her head and looked at her chalk-pale face. Her mouth felt dry, and she drank a few handfuls of water from the sink. Cold and fresh. It wasn’t much, but it might help. She sank down on the toilet seat and put her head in her hands, shaking now. Trying not to think too hard about what her life had become.

Dead Girl Walking.
That had described her before. But what was she now? A supercharged, meat-craving freak capable of passing on her sickness.

Say it.

Okay, then.

She was now a fucking
zombie
.

The worst thing about it was that she couldn’t even really make a choice to end her own threat; the nanites that had kept her together before had made her mostly invulnerable, but these—these were military grade. She couldn’t even count on killing herself if things got worse.

She was pretty sure the nanites wouldn’t let her.

And she was pretty sure it would definitely get worse.

There was a soft knock on the door, and Patrick’s voice. “Bryn? You okay?”

“Sure,” she said. She wiped her face, although she was sure she hadn’t shed any tears, took a deep breath, and stood up to unlock the door. He blocked the exit for a second, studying her, and she met his gaze without flinching. “I’m just exhausted.”

“Do you need a shot? You look pale.”

“I’m okay for now,” she said. God, the shots. If she didn’t own up to her new condition, she’d have to figure out how to explain to him about the shots. “It’s just been—a lot to handle.”

“I know,” he said, and stepped in to give her a hug. “I’m sorry.”

He felt so good, so warm, so solid . . . and she felt herself relax against him, just a little. He smelled good, too, as unbelievable as that might have been, after the day’s fighting. He smelled like . . .

Blood.

Meat.

He smelled like food.

Bryn broke free and stepped back, suddenly cold again, and said, “Sorry, I need a minute.” She slammed the door on him and locked it again, and took another look around the bathroom.
I can’t do this. I can’t handle this. I can’t be around people I like, people I love . . .

Because it wasn’t safe.

The bathroom had a small frosted-glass window, but there were bars on the outside. The motel hadn’t heard of fire regulations, evidently, because there was no quick-release on the bars, either.

It didn’t matter.

Bryn smashed the window, pushed the bars out from their moorings with one hard shove, and slithered out through the narrow opening. Her hips fit, though the concrete bricks scraped them raw, and the rest was easy enough. She thumped to the weedy, trash-strewn ground, took a second to get her bearings, and then headed for the eight-foot concrete wall a few strides away. A single leap took her to the top, right about the time she heard the door breaking down inside the motel room. She looked back in time to see Patrick at the broken window. He looked stunned.