Earth Thirst (40 page)

The lower half of his face is wet with gore, as is his jacket, shirt, and tie. It can't all be from the bloody nose I gave him, and then I realize he's taken blood—probably from the technicians who had been down here monitoring the project. A nasty sort of severance package.

He feints twice, and then lashes out with his foot, kicking the desk toward me. I don't have much room to back up—the fifth terrace wall is not far behind me—and so I leap over the desk. He expects the move, and he punches me in the chest with the post as I come within range.

It hurts—having a piece of metal driven into your lung always does, but it is better than the same going through your heart. Escobar hangs on to the post, thinking he's going to hit me with it again, but I'm too close now and I get hold of his wrist, peel his hand off the weapon, and get my other hand under his elbow. I jerk one hand up and the other one out—a simple motion that moves his arm in a direction which he has little leverage against—and I feel tendons tear and bones break in his arm.

He howls and I let him go. His elbow is shattered. Everything below that point is useless.

“I can fight with one lung,” I wheeze, trying not to think about the wet flow of blood running down my front. “Can you fight with one arm?”

“I don't need to fight you at all,” he says.

Which is more than clue enough as to what's behind me. I dodge to the side as the chimera comes crashing down on the desk. Escobar steps back, not taking advantage of my wandering attention, and as the chimera snarls at me, I grab the end of the metal post in my chest and yank it out.

This hurts more than it did when it went in.

The chimera come at me, mouth wide. It can't see me; it's simply reacting to olfactory and auditory cues, which means its reactions are driven by the same. It's not aware enough to get out of the way as I ram my fist into its open mouth. It coughs and struggles for a second, and then I grab it by the shoulder and slam its head down on the desk. My fist goes back farther than a hand normally should, and its entire body shakes as the back of its skull comes apart.

I snap my left leg back, catching Escobar in the hip as he tries to grab me from behind. I'm not the sort to stand and stare at my handiwork. Not when there are other enemy combatants around.

He lumbers back, catching up against the slab in the center of the pit. I pull my hand out of the mouth of the dead chimera and keep my distance. He mistakes my pause for reticence. Or weakness. “Having trouble getting enough air?” he sneers.

“A little,” I wheeze. “How's the elbow?”

“It'll heal,” he says. “Flesh and bone always do.”

“I can't let you birth any more of those monsters,” I say.

“Hypocritical, don't you think?” he replies. “Given what we are.”

“Maybe it is our prerogative,” I point out, “given what we are.” I laugh, and then fall to a fit of coughing and choking, as the pain from my leaking lung lights up my brain.

“They need to fear us,” he says. “That's the only way they'll adapt. If they don't adapt, they're just cattle. If they don't want to reason, then we'll take away that privilege. They can be mindless worms. It makes no difference to me.”

“But we came from them,” I point out. “We were human once, you and I. All of Arcadia was human once.”

“Not anymore,” he says, his expression hardening. “We evolved. They didn't.”

He starts to lunge at me, but is brought up short. Something is holding him to the slab. As he tries to figure out how he's caught, I grab him by the shoulder and by the knot of his tie. I push him back, bending him over the slab. He struggles in my grip, but I've got leverage on him, and I manage to push him down enough that Phoebe can grab him with her other hand.

She gets her hand in his hair and holds him down, his head back. I press my thumb against his carotid artery, and keep pressing until I have his attention.

“We're stewards,” I tell him, “not mass murderers of an entire species.”

I flick my thumb, my nail cutting his flesh, and as his life blood begins to pump out of his body, I release him and stand back. Phoebe—nothing more than a fiery-eyed skeletal wraith—snaps the restraints that had been holding her down, and sinks her teeth into Escobar's neck.

He doesn't cry out as she drains him. He stares at me, the light slowly fading from his eyes. I'm the last thing he's going to see, and his outrage at this finality sustains him for a very long time.

FORTY-SIX

A
s soon as Escobar dies, I head for the wall, scaling back out of the pit as fast as I can with a hole in my chest. The thunder of gunfire has dropped off, too much for my liking, and I'm starting to feel apprehensive about having abandoned Mere. It hits me what I missed in our last conversation, and I climb faster, a growing sense of dread that I've made the wrong decision.

At the top of the terraces, bodies are scattered—both Escobar's security force and Secutores. Escobar's men have scented strips attached to the lapels of their BDUs. They don't smell particularly pungent—gardenia with a faint hint of cypress and cedar—but it's clearly enough of an olfactory signal for the bees to distinguish between friend and foe.

I hear gunfire from the lab, the rattle of an assault rifle, and the noise is punctuated by the solitary sound of a handgun. In the wake of the last shot, all I hear is the distant buzz of bees and the faint noise of a wounded man whimpering in pain.

In the pit, Phoebe has left the slab. She's climbed up to the fifth level and is breaking open one of the nearly ripe pods. Making sure none of the chimerae survive.

I run for the lab, which is a single story building with two wings, extending laterally from a central entry. Secutores corpses lie both in and outside of the room. Some coming; some going. It looks like the door was enough of a bottleneck that they tried to turn it into a defensive position, but couldn't hold it. I scoop up a discarded assault rifle, check its ammo, and replace the magazine. Half full. Green stripe on the magazine. It'll have to do.

There's a wounded Secutores man in the corner, trying to stay conscious, and he's slipping into a fog as I approach. He can't lift his rifle in time, and I pin his hand with my boot. “Leave it,” I tell him, pointing my gun at his chest. His face is puffy with bee stings, and he's leaking from a round or two that managed to slip under his vest. I lift my foot and he takes his hand off his weapon. I kick it away from him and lower mine. “You're going to die,” I tell him. “Your way or mine?” I show him my teeth, and he shudders once and then slumps, his chin dipping forward.

It's been a long time since I scared a man to death. Usually it takes longer, and I'm happy it was quick. I push his head back so that I can get at his neck, and I drink enough to do something about the hole in my chest.

There are bodies and a blood trail leading into the right-hand wing. Toward the helicopter pad. I follow the trail, my gun ready. I clear each room as I go, moving as quickly as I can toward the end of the hall, where I suspect I'll find what I'm looking for. It's an old habit. Always clear the building. Never assume otherwise.

I get to the end eventually. The blood trail leads into the last room on the right. There's a temporary wooden door at the end of the hall. If my sense of the facility's layout is correct, beyond that door is the helicopter pad. I ease up to the last door and carefully push it open another few centimeters.

Nothing happens until I duck my head in to look. Gunfire rattles, followed by the spattering echo of bullets chewing through the wall next to the door. I quick-look again, drawing another fusillade. It's delayed. Whoever is shooting at me isn't at optimal efficiency. Their response time is sluggish.

I move to the other side, and push the door open with my foot. This time, there's no gunfire. The door swings open and gently bumps into the wall. I'm on that same side, protected by both the door and the wall. “How are you doing in there, Tony?” I call out.

“It's not going optimally,” Belfast responds.

“I can imagine,” I reply.

“It has promise, though,” he says. “If you're still alive, then I made the right choice.”

“What choice is that?” I ask, even though I have a pretty good idea. My stomach sinks as I wait for his response.

“Silas?” Mere's voice is weak and ragged.

“I've got your girlfriend,” Belfast says. “Again. Fuck. You know this bitch shot me earlier?”

I shouldn't have left her.

I risk one more look. Belfast lets me have this one because he wants me to recognize his position of strength.

The room inside is an unfinished lab. There are lab bays, heavy installations that divide the room into several channels. At the end of the one directly in line with the door, Belfast has sequestered himself between several overturned desks, protecting both his flanks. He's resting against a crate, and there is a jumble of gear next to him.

Mere is lying on the floor in front of his makeshift fort. Her face is pale, and she's got her hands pressed against her side. There's too much blood—on her face, her hands, her clothes, on the floor around her. Too much.

I rest my head against the wall, trying to block out what I've seen. Part of me is analyzing the entire scene—calculating angles and trajectories, running through assault scenarios. None of them bode well for anyone in the room. Least of all Mere.

“Yeah, I hear she got the drop on you earlier,” I call out. “I'm glad you didn't put one in her out of spite.”

He coughs. “I'm a professional, Silas. Got to protect my assets. She's my ticket out of here.”

“How is that going to work?” I ask, all the while trying to figure out the odds. What's his response time going to be like? Is he going to shoot her or me if I charge him? If he knows he's going to die, will he put a round in the back of her head, professionalism be damned? Or does is he clinging to the idea that I'll let him go?

“What happens to your ticket if she bleeds out?” I ask.

He laughs, and some of my questions are answered in the wet sound coming out of his lungs. “Nobody wins,” he says.

“How do you figure that?” I ask. “If I walk away, I win.”

Mere whimpers from the floor.

“No, you don't,” Belfast rasps. “You don't know anything. Escobar is dead, I take it. So he can't tell you anything. Your bitch girlfriend dies, which doesn't help you any. And if I die, well, this whole place goes up too. You get nothing.”

He's got a detonator of some kind. I don't recall seeing any explosives on the way in, but he could simply have a few bricks of C-4 on him. Maybe even a dead man's switch that closes if he dies. The whole room goes up. Given the loose structure erected around me, a fire would burn through it very quickly. He's right on that point. Nothing would be salvageable.

I sigh. “What are your terms?”

He chuckles again, trailing off with a wet cough.

There are no terms, I realize. He knows he's dying. He's just stalling me.

There's a whisper of sound in the hallway, and Phoebe is there on the other side of the doorway. Her hair is pale again, and her skin is flawlessly pure. She's almost as pale as the albino chimerae. She's killed them all by draining their milky blood. She's a perfect union—both mother and child.

“Tony Belfast,” she calls out. “Can you hear me?”

There's a long silence and then his voice comes out of the room. “Y—yes. I hear you.”

“Do you know who I am?” she asks. Without waiting for his answer, she steps into the doorway, framing herself perfectly for him. He can't miss.

And he doesn't. Phoebe's body shakes and jerks as Belfast empties his entire magazine. Her wounds weep pink fluid—not quite blood, not quite water. There is no smoke, though, no change in Phoebe's expression that suggests she's bothered in the slightest by the weed killer component of the rounds.

I see the corner of her mouth curve into a smile as he shouts at her. I hear his gun rattle as he throws it aside, and I know he's going for his detonator. I start to move, but Phoebe's already there, leaving nothing but a ghost of motion in the doorway.

Belfast screams, but his cry is abruptly cut off.

I go to Mere instead, lifting her into my lap. “It's okay,” I whisper, brushing her matted hair back from her face. She shudders in my arms, struggling to block out the gurgling wet sounds coming from behind her. She's been shot on the left side, at the top of her hip, and it looks like the bullet went through. The wound has been bleeding heavily, and she's pale and shivering. She's lost a lot of blood.

There's a way to solve that problem. I raise my wrist to my mouth.

“No,” Phoebe says. She discards Belfast's body, his neck a red wreck, and she wipes her mouth clean of his blood. “If you give her blood, it'll only save her today,” she says, “But she'll have to be buried if she's going to live longer. She'll have to be taken to Arcadia.”

“So we'll take her.”

She shakes her head. “I can't let you do that.”

“She's going to die,” I protest.

“Of course she is,” Phoebe says, her voice surprisingly gentle. “All living creatures do. That is the cycle of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things. And who are you to break that cycle for her?”

“I've already broken it,” I whisper, lowering my face to Mere's. “I saved her once already.” I press my lips to hers. “And I'd do it again.”

Mere stirs in my arms, her eyelids fluttering. She sighs painfully, her face tightening. “Silas…” she breathes, looking up at me.

“I'm here,” I say. “I'm right here, Mere.”

EPILOGUE

T
he dirt road is barely a road at all, and it peters out at the edge of an unruly field of untended cassava. I have to walk the motorcycle the last half-kilometer, lifting it over the meter-wide trunk of a big-leaf mahogany tree that has fallen across the break in the forest.

The shack sits on an elevated rise, looking out over an unnamed river that disappears into the wilderness of the Darién Gap. The building sags a bit, but the roof is sound and there is a short sloping overhang in the front so that the runoff from the rain doesn't pool around the building. The porch is screened with mosquito netting, and the windows on each side of the shack have wooden shutters. There's a simple lean-to in the back, a piece of corrugated metal that provides some shelter for the generator and the motorcycle.