Edge Walkers (2 page)

“Meaning you do want me to cut corners to—?”

“No, this isn’t…I’m not asking you to sacrifice anything. And that’s not always about giving up something. Look up the word sometime. I just …you need to make this happen.” Kerrou turned away, but he glanced back at the others and offered a bland smile. “I’ll let all of you know tomorrow if you need to start polishing up your CV’s for new positions.”

The door shut behind him with a snick and Carrie punched a balled fist on the keypad, hitting the master lock.

Glancing at her, Zeigler ducked the obvious comment and muttered, “Bunkers? We’re selling a bunker detector now?”

Mouth dry, chest tight, Carrie couldn’t answer. Dammit, this wasn’t... She cut off the thoughts. She couldn’t do anything with them.

Thompson stepped up to her side. “Y’know—he’s right in a way. Why don’t we show him what pushing this project off the edge can do?”

Chand’s mouth lifted a fraction and his dark eyes lit. “Max wattage? Awesome.”

For a moment, the idea temped—throw everything into a grand gesture that would either take out power to most of the facility or give them a breakthrough success. That would have been a plan her old man would have loved—go for the glory. Which meant it wasn’t one she’d take. She liked reasonable options.

Scrubbing a hand through her hair, she shook her head. “Same protocols. But we’ll compress the timeline—finish a test every half hour, compile notes at the same time. Kerrou can have his analysis by end of day if we work through lunch.”

“And dinner, and breakfast tomorrow,” Thompson muttered, reaching for the bagels. But Chand moved to his station. The tech kept his back to everyone as if monitoring power levels needed his full attention. Perching on the stool in front of her laptop with Thompson to her left, Carrie checked the new program, buried everything else under the blessing of work to do.

“Starting background noise,” Chand said. “Power at ten percent.”

“Pattern is running,” Thompson said, managing to sound pissed they weren’t doing more. “You’ll see data in three, two...” He pointed at her.

Downing half her coffee, Carrie pushed her glasses on and stared at the monitor. Her stomach soured on the coffee, twisted on a fresh set of nerves. But the wave forms showed up, a perfect readout—intersecting lines rode her computer, color-coded to mineral content. She started to smile, but the screen flashed white and blanked. Frowning, she hit the keys to bring up a command line and check her code.

Behind her, Chand said, tension strung high, “Power’s climbing. We’ve got a surge. It’s off the scale.”

“What—but I said—” Carrie started to look up, but her display distracted with a fresh burst of scrambled data. Glancing at the mineral samples, she let her words trail because she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. A black streak split the air overhead, sparks glinted, forming into something like ball lightning. The smell rose, sharp as burning metal, dry like electronics frying.

“Shut it down. Shut it all down!” she yelled.

Thompson stumbled to the main power breaker. The black line cracked open, tore through the room, and hovered, an impossible rip of nothing. Heart stuttering, Carrie froze. Thompson turned toward the split, Chand stepped back, and light fell from that black crack with a blinding flash. Static and feedback screeched. Carrie slapped her hands over her ears. The light flared brighter, forcing her to squint. Under the shriek of electronic, another scream—raw, ragged, human—bounced off the walls.

Twisting, eyes watering, Carrie tried to see who it was. And where the hell was security? This was a damn military facility—there ought to be security. Shadows, dark shapes darted though the blinding brilliance. She yelled out names and someone turned, a shadow in the brilliant light.

“Chand?” she yelled again, made it a warning, because that stumbling shadow wasn’t moving like anything human.

Reaching out, she snagged someone’s arm—the tech. He’d frozen. She pushed him to the ground. He went, knees buckling. When she looked up again, two dark shapes clashed...two of her guys, the shapes familiar and yet not. Something warm splattered her. A metallic tang stung the air, wrapped the back of her tongue. She started forward, tried to push through tearing light and sound. Thompson staggered into her, his face slashed bloody, eyes wide, tears streaking his face.

She grabbed for him, tried to get him on the floor, under a table, away from that crack of nothing overhead. He knocked her back as the ozone heated, split sharp and bright, and the force of an explosive wave struck her chest. She fell, her shoulder cracking into the wall. Breathless, dizzy, she pushed up, her hand scraping rock. She’d slammed into the minerals.

The next scream—Zeigler’s—sounded wrong. An inhuman screech. Something dragged at her, tugged like a riptide with teeth. She clawed to her feet, fought for a grip on the granite, but there was nothing to hold. Nothing but noise and light, the world telescoping into darkness before she fell into that black well splitting the room.

CHAPTER TWO

I can’t see how I could have done things differently. But the experiment deserves everything that’s going to be said of it—not because of the results, but…the others didn’t deserve what happened. And the fact that it’s led me here—that shouldn’t be a regret, and I have to hope it won’t be. — Excerpt Carrie Brody’s Journal

Carrie woke in a church, or the ruins of one, and was lapsed Catholic enough to flash instant guilt for an uncovered head—the leftovers from an old school church in an old school childhood. She lay still, thoughts tumbling, memories tangling, and her mind stuck on the emptiness of not knowing how she’d gotten here. Sitting up, the headache registered, vibrated along with the rest of the aches in her body, a jackhammer at the back of her skull. A groan slipped out and memory woke with a ragged echo of terror.

She’d been in her lab. She had not been run over and rolled into a crypt the way her body seemed to think. Something had gone wrong. Mind-stealing adrenaline surged into battered muscles and put her on her feet in a panting scramble.

Big mistake.

The bare altar tilted, the transept swayed. Or maybe that was her. To stop going back down onto stone, she put out a hand, found more stone to touch in a pillar carved into the wall. Shaking but on her feet, she stared at her hand. It seemed intact, like the rest of her, except for the dried blood blackening her skin, flaking like an old vacation tan.

Oh, God.

Staring at blood gone dry, she wondered with distant sanity how those stains had gotten there. Other memories trickled in—she hadn’t been alone. Her team…

The blood wasn’t hers.

She choked on a muffled sob and the rest of her memory blanked like the fall off a cliff. She swayed. Stone cut her palm as grabbed at it to stay on her feet. Easing over to put her back against the pillar, her running shoes scraped on a floor that looked as if it hadn’t seen a broom in decades.

Think, dammit. Pull it together—you don’t even know what you’re remembering.

Patting shaking hands over herself, she took inventory. Torn lab coat, ruined shirt, a body that trembled as if she’d been struck hard and left ringing. She found empty pockets in her trousers and nothing leaking out, just more tears that didn’t want to stop. It was shock, she knew, scrambling her nerve endings, her body chemistry shaken like a cocktail.  Shock and she wasn’t sure what else.

She swiped at the wet streaks on her face, brushed at the rest of the damage on her body. Dust rose and bruises encouraged her to move careful, but move before stiffening muscles froze her like a plaster saint.

Oh, god, she was on the edge of losing it.

Pulling in another breath, she let it out in a slow exhale. She wrapped her arms around herself to stop the shaking. What, did they keep butchered meat here? That wasn’t a good thought. Rubbing her arms against the freezer-burn cold, she looked around.

She needed an answer about where she was—where was anyone? She sure as hell was not in a secure lab with an experiment running. Had it gone really bad and she was out cold and dreaming? That seemed possible. But it was hard to tell, particularly in a church by moonlight.

Please let this be me unconscious and lost in hallucination.

Only that didn’t seem a good option either.

It seemed as if it was night and it was cold enough to be the desert in winter after sundown. But she’d been at work during the day. Right? She bit down on her lip, and drew in a long breath, and tried to pull together thoughts that kept unraveling and scattering.

Where the hell was everyone?

She stopped the next question before it could start because she had a feeling she wasn’t going to want to hear the answer to that one. She wasn’t ready for the full truth. Not with her head pounding and memory half fractured. Better to just collect data. Let the auto-pilot of rational, analytic training take over. That was almost safe. So she looked up.

Something lit the dark sky, a sky left open due to large holes in a roof that was more empty space than covering. Bits hung loose and looked ready to crumble before they hit ground. Above the roof, whatever turned the sky that sludgy murk-purple wasn’t a something bright enough to be the sun. She managed to put that together under the dull thud of her aching body and the spin-cycle of threatening nausea. She tried for more—scientific observation had always been her lifeboat.

Leaves lay scattered like ash across the floor. The stone construction looked as if it went back a few centuries, but the damp mold that crept out from the dark corners lent an atmospheric stench of decay which you never got in a horror flick. Something else smelled even worse and her mind skittered past any level of identification.

Okay, not doing smell, just visual.

Stone. Gray stone. Blacker inky stone, so dark in the shadows that obsidian would look bright due to its ability to reflect the filtering light. She wished for stainless steel tables, or laptops blinking reassurance and logic. Or for a few security cameras.

The intrusion of constant observation had always stirred resentment before, but she could have gone for just one camera now. And someone on the other end who could see her. But there was just a ruin to see, not even a chunk of glass in the thin, narrow, arched crumbling masonry that had once been windows and seemed about to qualify as skinny doorways. Nothing on that stone ledge of an altar. Except one thing behind the stubby remnants of what should have been a railing that looked hacked off at the base. The something lay flat and left her thinking about sacrifices.

But it was just cloth on the floor, spread out, tattered, and so dirtied by age that color had ghosted to a generic grunge. The cloth seemed like a body, raised as it was. She decided it had to be more like a bed. Not a great one, but a place to lie, with the black rubble of a fire before it.

She edged closer, because it was something to think about other than her missing people—or maybe she was the one missing. How had she made it from sterile military lab to this…this church with a bed?

And dolls that stood in a line behind the sackcloth.

No, not dolls. Too ugly, with more of that tattered colorless cloth wrapped into crude bodies. Arms and legs stuck out in a stiffness she could feel, the faces and the drawings of hair had been made by black smudges. They stood in a row, six of them, almost looking treasured, tucked against what should be holy of holy ground.

Voodoo sprang to mind and ancient religions that made the Old Testament seem yesterday’s fresh print. That started the edge of hysteria again, a choked, crying laugh. She slammed down on it because she also heard the scrape of a step behind her.

She spun.

Bad move.

She went down on her butt with a whump that took her breath. She couldn’t see anyone. Just those damned shadows.

“Chand? Thompson?” she called, willing them to answer. They didn’t. Instead, a stranger moved from no light to the light of whatever moon or streetlight hung over this place, spilling gloom.

“It’s okay. I won’t hurt you. You’re safe.”

It didn’t feel safe, but that voice did. His words echoed soft and low, and almost kind. Odd to think that, with a concussion still pounding in her head and dried blood on her skin. Trustable, if that was even a word, and she knew she was in worse shape than she’d thought when the shaking hysteria popped up from where it was lurking under the nonsense rambling.

“Where…? What…?” She couldn’t get the words pulled together, and she rubbed her fingertips over her forehead, tried to pull her mind together.

She grabbed another deep breath, braced her hands and her feet flat on the floor because that felt like balance where she sat cornered, and she took in the robes that hung open, off this guy’s wide shoulders.

Robes?

You didn’t see that every day. But he wasn’t a priest, or any kind of monk, not in tattered robes and jeans, faded and torn and fitted to long legs. The robes were more of that hundred-year cloth, the fabric so worn it had become second skin, something he didn’t think about. The cloth bared a muscular arm here, showed a flash of rib there, and looked so mended it wouldn’t last another round with a needle.

And blood stained it.

She got that in one—only chocolate or blood made that soul deep smear, and this didn’t look the kind of place that would have much chocolate around. It could use it.

So could she right now.

Dragging in another short, sharp breath, she went over her limited options. At least this guy didn’t have a knife or a gun. Not in his hands.

The only metal in sight was the faint flicker off a silver cross hung from his neck by a thin dark cord over what might have once been a black t-shirt. Not the usual cross, but one with all the points reaching the same length. A cross to go with those Voodoo dolls?

Wetting dry, cracked lips again, she forced the words out, because she had to know. “Where are they? The others?”

He shook his head and glanced away. She decided he looked as if he lived on the streets, with his pale skin, and his hair spiked and short as if he cut it with a knife and his own hand. He looked a fighter, a warrior, and she’d never had much use for that. On that cheerful thought, he took a step toward her.