Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 (26 page)

A
ndrew's bones
seemed ready to give up. His muscles couldn't hold the exhaustion any longer, and now it felt like if he went to sleep, he might simply die rather than wake up again, which didn't seem like such a bad idea.

He moved up the outdoor stairs, his hand on the railing, each step feeling like the last few feet of Mount Everest. He was going to check on Lane and make sure everything was alright in the room. He had called Lane's cell but no one had answered. Lane could just be saying,
Fuck it
, and not answering because he felt the same bone breaking tiredness as Andrew. Likely even. Still, Andrew needed to check, just in case.

He finally made it to the top of the staircase.

Don't stop here. If you stop here, you'll never get going again.

He moved forward, one foot in front of the other, thinking that he might kill Lane for not answering. Just shoot him in that chair with all those cigarettes at his feet, because Andrew still had to make the return trip back down to stare at those damn computer screens, watching black dots move across a landscape that he wasn't allowed to see.

"Fuck him," Andrew said, meaning both Will and Lane. He arrived at the door and knocked on it.

No one came.

"Open the goddamn door, Lane. It's me."

No one answered.

Andrew gritted his teeth as he pulled his key out of his wallet. He put it in the card reader and then pushed the door open. He had forgotten just how much Lane smoked, but the haze that stretched across the room assaulted all of his senses at once. He blinked a few times, trying to clear the haze from his eyes, knowing that it wouldn't leave his nostrils or his clothes.

"Damn it, man. Why didn't you answer?"

He saw Lane then, for the first time in hours. Lane looked a lot different than the last time Andrew had seen him. He lay face down on the floor, blood leaking from his ear and creating a puddle around the outline of his head, though it looked like the bleeding had stopped. Andrew glanced at the bed, checking for the two kids, but knowing that they wouldn't be there. That they were gone and on the run. That they had done this to Lane, somehow, and Mother Mary, it wasn't good.

Andrew stepped over Lane's body and checked the bathroom for a brief second, immediately seeing the murder weapon, a bent and bloody shower curtain rod.

He walked outside, flipping the lock on the door so that he could get back in easily if he needed. He pulled his phone from his pocket, not wanting to make this call, but knowing there wasn't any choice.

"Yeah?" Will answered.

"They're gone."

"Who?"

"The two kids."

W
ill hung up the phone
.

He should have killed them. He thought about it when they first grabbed the two, but decided against it. Decided that he could kill them whenever he wanted, and that it wasn't necessary to do it just then. And now the two kids had killed one of his men and were on the lam.

He put the phone on his left leg, staring at the field he had first come here to look at.

Rigley sat next to him and he could see her staring from his peripheral vision. He wasn't going to look at her yet, though. Because this was a fuck up. A large, large fuck up that Will hadn't thought possible.

You're trained to think of all possibilities. Twenty years ago, would you have made the same choice? Fuck that, even three years ago?

Three years ago those two kids would have been dead and in a hole the moment they told him what he wanted to know.

Fuck Rigley and whatever she was going to say. She hadn't told him to pull the trigger, and Will knew that she couldn't have done it herself. Fuck her boss too, if somehow this bubbled up to that level (
somehow, Will? This is long past the point of not reaching the highest levels of the US Government
). The real thing bothering Will was why he made the choice. Why he had been so foolish.

"Well?" Rigley said.

"The two kids we picked up, they're gone. They killed one of our guys."

Will didn't look over at her, but just stared straight ahead at the trees.

Rigley lifted her hand into the air and slammed it down on the dashboard. She left it there for a second and then hit it again, harder, and again, and again.

"WHAT THE FUCK, WILL? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN THEY'RE GONE AND KILLED ONE OF US?"

Will put both hands on the steering wheel though the car was parked. "Just what I said."

Rigley turned so that her back was against the door and she looked fully at him.

"I heard what the fuck you said."

"We'll find them."

"The fuck we will. How are we going to do that, Will? We have half our men showing up in these goddamn woods and the other half still looking for the alien you can't seem to find. Need me to bring more men in, Will? Maybe I should bring in the entire National Guard. Do you think you could find them then?"

A few seconds passed in silence.

"What were you thinking?" she asked.

"You knew they were up there. You didn't say to get rid of them."

Will heard Rigley swallow and then only her silence.

When Rigley told him about this job, he hadn't thought this was the end of his career. He thought it might be a big point in said career, something else to add to the old resume, but definitely not the end. Fifty might be ancient for most people in this business, but not for Will. He had at least ten years left in him. Now though, sitting in this car and having Rigley Plasken stare at him from across the vehicle, he knew that it was over. Was it his choices that did it, or was it the situation? Was it not killing those two high schoolers or was it that he had completely failed to capture what he came here for?

He let the kids live because they were young. There wasn't any other reason for it. Because they hadn't lived life yet and for some reason he decided that they should. Will had known he would need to kill the other two kids, those infected, and had he somehow thought that by letting the two in the motel room live a little longer, he could atone for that future act? Atone? As if he answered to some god? It was laughable to even think that, but somehow he must have thought it. That letting those two live for a few more hours would make up for the murder coming to his hands.

He hadn't made such a choice before, and he knew that he could never make a decision like it again. A momentary lapse of judgement, maybe, but a disastrous result. It didn't matter that Rigley was glaring at him; it didn't matter what she thought—not really. He had fucked up, somehow at fifty let a budding conscience influence his thinking.

"They're irrelevant," he said. "The town is surrounded; they won't escape and they're not infected. What matters is the thing in those woods. We get that and everything else works out fine. Once we kill it, we'll go get the kids and wrap this thing up."

"How many times are you going to spew bullshit and act like its pearls?"

"No more bullshit. We'll end this today, either one way or the other."

T
he one-way
mirror showed Rigley a hundred men, some walking around, some sitting. Talking, reading, or watching television. The mirror stretched around the circumference of the room, so that whoever was monitoring could look in at any portion they wanted. Rigley didn't need to do that. She understood what she was looking at.

"Nothing's happened like in the other bunker? No exploding heads?"

"No," Will answered.

"Then how do you know they're infected?"

"We don't for sure. But we didn't know the other bunker was infected either."

He wasn't getting it yet, but that was fine. He would soon. Rigley was in charge here, despite what this man wanted. This wasn't a corporation where everyone needed to play nicely.

"You didn't really answer my question. If we don't know that they're infected, then why are we taking them off the street? The reports show Sherman growing outward again."

Neither looked at each other, but watched the seemingly normal men do their seemingly normal tasks.

"The truth?"

"Yes, the truth," Rigley said.

"I think it knows it's being watched. I think that it's adapting to its situation. In the other bunker, it tried to spread, and did an okay job, but in the end we put it down because it tried to spread too openly. I think all of the people in that room are infected, and I think Sherman is living inside them—in their brains, but not trying to spread yet. Because it knows we're here and will kill it the moment we see it."

"How many people are we bringing in here each day?"

"About ten. Anyone that has had contact with Sherman. Ten new people into the field each day, ten out each day, into this place."

"Lord. No wonder it's growing, Will. Why don't you just leave them out there if they're going to die anyway?"

Will looked at her, his brows furrowing. "We don't know that they're going to die. We don't truly know if they're infected. Our scans aren't picking up anything; these are precautions."

Rigley started walking the length of the mirror, slowly, watching the people inside. "How long do you plan on keeping them here, then?" She said, her voice rising as she moved further away from Will.

"We haven't figured that out yet. We just know we don't want them possibly infecting anyone else."

"Yet we don't know they're infected, right?"

Will didn't say anything and Rigley didn't look back at him.

"Send them back out," Rigley said. "All of them. If they're infected then let them die out there amongst the growth, fighting it. Not in here where they can spread it to us."

"All of them?"

"Yes. We have to kill this stuff, Will, not keep ourselves safe."

"It's not us I'm worrying about, it's them."

"Our job isn't to keep them safe either," she said. "Put them back out in the field and let's see what happens."

Will watched her continue walking around the outer perimeter of the room. She didn't look back at him, and at one point put a finger on the glass, allowing it to trail next to her as she moved.

Put them back out in the field.

Let them die out there.

He didn't know what had happened to this woman, but something serious must lie in her past. Something that must have broken her, and when whatever broke had grown back together, it grew back harder, and this was the end result. This woman walking around a bunch of men on death row, trailing a finger across the glass as if she was a child.

R
igley stood
in front of the door, the red light casting down on her skin, giving it an evil hue. She stared at the word above:
Her.

She didn't need to ask who her was, because there had only been one her, one daughter not named, but they had been close to it, hadn't they? There were a few names she and her husband could have chosen (
don't want to say his name, Rigley?
): Samantha, Cassandra, or Elle. They never got the chance though, because 'her' ended up as a stream of blood inside a toilet.

Why had Rigley come here, to this door? With so much going on outside, in reality, why was she at this door on the inside?

Because when you understand what's up here on these floors, you'll be able to fix it all.

Fix it all.

Is that what this was about, fixing everything? Somehow finding the answer to all the problems outside of this place, all the problems she encountered in Grayson? She doubted it, somehow. She didn't think this place had been built to solve problems, but to hide them, to make sure that she didn't have to face them out in the open—because Rigley didn't think she could handle them.

Yet here she was, standing outside of the door that probably was the impetus behind this whole setup.

She watched her hand move up to the door and twist the knob, a hand that she owned, but one she didn't feel she had control over. Rigley didn't even try to fight it, because something in her said it would be a waste of time. Something said that the time for fighting was over, that whatever fight she was supposed to try to win had long ago been lost. These were the spoils, and the spoils of this fight went to the loser.

The doorknob felt cold on her palm, colder than the air already causing goosebumps across her arms. Luckily, her hand didn't hold it for long, but pushed open the door with one shove, revealing a large, dark room. Large, though, might have been the wrong word, because the thing could have been tiny or infinitely large, such was the blackness. It could have stretched forever, or Rigley could be looking at a wall five feet in front of her.

All she knew for sure was that she didn't want go in, that she would rather have been placed inside that quarantine room back in Bolivia, placed inside that wrap around one way mirror and next to every one of those infected soldiers. Rigley didn't want to go a step further, not into this room, anywhere but that. She hadn't felt this dread the entire walk down the hall, but now it held her like some kind of massive giant, with a grip that would never, ever break.

Her feet stepped inside, and she understood the hallway she just walked down as she moved through the door. The cold, it didn't emanate from the hallway, but from these rooms. The doorknob was near ice because this room could have been a night in the arctic. Her breath streamed from her mouth in long, white wisps of air.

The door slammed shut behind her, echoing in the stillness.

From her left came the only light in the room.

A painting that looked like it belonged in a museum. The same red glow that shone down outside of the room, shone down from lights above the picture. A red rope, the fancy kind that blocked off onlookers all around the world, wrapped around the painting. Rigley watched the picture grow as her feet took her to it, the fear growing inside her with each unstoppable step.

She saw it clearly maybe ten feet from it, and tears burst from her eyes immediately. It wasn't anything disgusting, wasn't a toilet full of red water, but a beautiful woman. Young, maybe in her early twenties, with brown hair that curved perfectly around her slender face, and pale, porcelain like skin without a blemish. The woman smiled at something, a genuine smile, not one put on for the painter. She was looking away, at something out of the picture, and her brown eyes danced with happiness.

Rigley understood what she was looking at; the words above the painting, highlighted in red, said The Land That Could Have Been.

Rigley was looking at her daughter, or who her daughter would have grown into. A beautiful, happy young woman. This is what would never be, because it could have been but wasn't.

The tears fell down Rigley's face, but still her feet didn't move.

"This is why,
" the painting said.

Rigley's eyes widened at the sound. It wasn't a speaker implanted into or around the painting, the voice came
from
it.

"
This is why everything you want will be lost.
"

Another red light came from the black heavens to her right, illuminating another painting, and there she saw her husband (
Josh, Rigley. Say his goddamn name: Josh
). His arm was interlocked with someone, and he was dressed in a tuxedo, wearing a smile that said it might be the happiest day of his life. Rigley didn't need to see the person connected to the arm that Josh held; she knew who it was. The painting was the picture of a wedding that would never happen, a picture of her daughter walking down the aisle.

"
You've already lost everything
," the first painting said. "
And now you'll lose more. Are you ready?
"

Her feet turned her then, completely around, so that she looked across the black cavern.

A sign turned on, looking just like those outside this ice chamber. On it, in red letters brought from hell, the word 'Bolivia'.

Rigley's feet started their walk.