Root of Unity (8 page)

My eye registered it in the instant before it landed, and I launched myself up in the breath of a split second, wrenching open the front passenger door of the van and pivoting behind it. An explosion crashed across my impromptu shield and the metal slammed against me like it wanted to flatten me.

My head ricocheted off the side of the van. My vision was vibrating. I couldn’t hear. I’d lost my gun.

What the
fuck,
Molotov cocktails didn’t
explode—

Except this one had.

My hearing buzzed in and out, muffled and badly tuned. Shouts. Doors slamming. Boots tromping on the ground.

I stumbled back from the door that had protected me. The other side of it was on fire. So was a good part of the pavement where I’d just been sitting next to the hood, napalm or something like it coating every surface, flaming globs dousing the side of the overpass spectacularly. The heat scorched my skin, and my lungs strained with every breath as if someone were smothering me.

Somewhere in my head I registered that this must have been their own brand of modified incendiary, a nice little bomb helping splash the napalm around. A thousand times deadlier than a normal Molotov cocktail.
Great.

A smattering of automatic fire tore into the van again, and I ducked, covering my head as more glass rained down. They couldn’t see me—did they know I was still alive?

A soft click. I wasn’t sure how I heard it; everything was still muffled and ringing; but my brain immediately knew:
lighter.

Another flaming bottle soared over the roof of the van.

The world slowed only to the parabola of projectile motion. The bottle sailed down, tumbling end over end, the flame on the soaked rag flaring as the wind of its passage whipped at it.

I swung my arm down and around in a circle and came up right underneath it, like my arm was a freaking golf club, and smacked the heel of my hand against it, cupping it with infinite gentleness and then following it up with increasing speed until I let it fly back the other way, bottle strength estimates ricocheting through my head along with maximum decelerations because the one thing I
absolutely did not want
was for the bottle to break against my hand—

I felt the momentum transfer echo through my arm and the flame blistered me, and then the bottle was flying back the way it had come. Exactly the way it had come.

The world sped up again. My sleeve had caught fire. I smashed it against myself to smother it as I ducked.

The math of free fall meant I knew exactly when the bottle would hit the ground: height of zero, solve for time. I didn’t hear the bottle shatter, because the explosion was too loud.

The van rocked against me like a giant had smacked it, the metal bowing and rippling as the concussion ripped through. My hearing rang out into complete silence for an instant before tuning back in. Screams tore through the air, the screams of men coated with flaming chunks of napalm, men being devoured by third-degree burns. The other side of the van was on fire; the napalm had splatted against the metal, and the flames lit up what was left of the driver’s side window and licked up to rise in hungry spirals above the van’s roof.

I dropped to the ground and pawed around until I found my Colt. The crushing heat pressed against me, making me heady and faint. The air molecules scorched my trachea.

My unseen enemies had devolved into chaos, shouting and shrieking. I rolled under the van—the narrow band of visible ground across from me was full of blood and fire and flailing limbs curdling into blackness as they burned. A few of the men had escaped the carnage and were still standing. I shot them all in the legs. And I didn’t shoot to wound. I shot for the arteries.

Their feet splayed and collapsed under them, and blood spurted along with a few abortive bursts of gunfire. Bodies hit the asphalt and weapons clattered to the ground, and more people screamed.

It was hard to focus through the flames. It was hard to breathe. The sips of hot air kept choking me.

I’d counted six burning bodies on the ground and shot three more. That was nine, plus the one I’d killed in the SUV made ten. Would they really have sent more than twelve? Would they?

I might’ve gotten them all already. If there were any left, they were probably fruitlessly trying to stop their friends from bleeding out or burning to death…

Or they had their sights set on the van, ready to pop me the instant I showed myself.

I tried to think. My brain felt like it was cooking in my skull. My eyes scratched and watered; I tried to blink them clear. Options. What were my options?

Only one back quarter panel of the van wasn’t on fire. I rolled in that direction and scooted back out from underneath, then snuck toward the tailgate, shrugging out of my jacket as I went. I stuck my gun hand under it like a tent pole, and then poked the jacket-covered gun out past the back of the van.

More gunfire deafened me, and I yanked my arm back down, tearing the cloth off my Colt. It had one hole torn in it.

One hole. They’d fired fourteen rounds in two seconds with those freakin’ automatic rifles, and only one had hit.
Idiots and their automatics.

I had no time: I wasn’t behind the engine block anymore, this heat was undoing me, and if these guys let loose, one of the rounds would eventually go straight through the van and hit me. But I didn’t need time, because the gunfire had pinpointed their locations.

A little less than one chance in fourteen I’d get my hand shot off, depending on how fast I pulled the trigger. Thirteen in fourteen that I wouldn’t. Those were pretty good odds.

I closed my tearing eyes, drew the trajectories in my head, and poked my Colt out again, this time with the muzzle pointed out and without a jacket covering it. My finger jumped against the trigger twice.

The second guy got a four-round burst off. Then I heard two thumps.

Better than I expected.

I took a choking, ragged breath and leaned against the side of the van. I had to move, I kept telling myself. Had to move.

I pushed off and stumbled away, at an angle so I was still hidden from the SUVs and the majority of the men I’d taken out. Just in case there were any more. I smacked into the cement of the overpass and slid down, breathing shallowly. The cement was cool. I pressed myself against it.

My head was ringing—or maybe it was my ears, or maybe it was a combination and I was concussed again. I concentrated. I have a fine-tuned awareness of my own body—it’s necessary for me to align with the mathematics to take out mooks, but it’s also terribly convenient for injuries.

Of course, that assumes I can concentrate.

It took me a few minutes, but I figured it out. Both ear trauma and another concussion. Fantastic. And I was suffering damage from the heat, my system going haywire in a dozen minor ways. Lungs. Skin. Eyes. Throat. My stomach flipping into nausea in response, as if it thought it could vomit up everything that was wrong.

The top of my shoulder was bleeding, too, though not badly. I mashed my torn jacket against it and concentrated on breathing. Inhaling stung, the air scraping through my trachea like it wanted to shred me from the inside out. Oh, and my left hand was in a lot of pain. Blistered. Some dermal trauma. Because it had been on fire. Right.

I kept my eyes and ears open—at least, as much as I could, through the tearing and the ringing—but the street was calm, and apart from the soft whoosh of the flames continuing to burn, I heard nothing. Good. I wasn’t inclined to investigate until I’d definitely given the gentlemen I’d shot in the legs enough time to bleed out. There was still a chance one of them would have enough strength to pull a trigger, and why tempt fate?

I dug out a fresh magazine and reloaded my Colt. The metal was heavy. My fingers fumbled on it before managing to click the new mag home.

From here I could see the two men I’d shot last. The bodies were still, a pool of red gleaming around them, their rifles fallen across their chests. AK-47s, I noticed. Cheap and reliable, like a Molotov cocktail. I wondered what they’d put in the bottles to add the explosion—that was a neat trick.

Of course, it hadn’t worked out terribly well for them.

I waited a few minutes longer than I had to. I told myself it was just to be safe, but getting up also seemed a little bit difficult right now. Finally I pushed myself to my feet using the wall and led cautiously with the barrel of the Colt as I came around the back of the van.

The carnage was gruesome, even by my standards. The corpses who’d been hit by the napalm had been blackened into an inhuman mess. Most of them were still burning. The stench in the air gagged me.

Around them, the area between the van and the SUVs had become a blood slick, the crimson gleaming in the low light under the overpass. One of the men I’d shot in the leg had attempted to tourniquet himself. It hadn’t worked. One of the other men I’d shot had caught on fire after falling. I couldn’t tell if he’d been dead already when it happened.

I gave the massacre a wide berth.

One of the men twitched. It was hard to believe he could still be alive; his whole lower body was curdled and black, small flames still licking against him. I shot him in the head as I went past. It was the most merciful thing I’d done all day.

The van was still half on fire, as was the closest SUV. The vehicle next to it had a .45-inch hole spider webbing the windshield, and the driver slumped against the wheel in his own spatter pattern of red—the first man I’d shot. The third SUV was behind the other two, and had escaped more or less intact.

I thought about searching the other two vehicles, but I hadn’t done great with the van, and even as isolated as this place was, we’d made a lot of noise. The cops might be on their way. I’d dallied here too long already.

I pushed my Colt back into my belt, got into the third SUV, and drove away.

Chapter 8

The bad
guys—whoever they were—had put a tracker on their own van. They could probably find the SUV I was in, too. I stopped five streets over in a run-down residential area and stole a rusted junkpot from in front of a house that had grass that was far too long and cement blocks scattered in the yard. Then I hit the freeway, jumped down three exits, pulled off in a strip mall, and grabbed an inconspicuous Honda.

I was a long way out of LA proper and far from any of my bolt holes. I stopped at a drugstore and bought gauze, antiseptic, and a few other random first-aid supplies, using the self-checkout so I didn’t get any nosy questions from a cashier. Then I went back to the Honda, sat in the driver’s seat, and patched myself up, taping a dressing over the wound on my shoulder and wrapping the burned hand. The burn was an odd sort of discomfort—half pain and half numbness, with a stinging sensation underneath. I put it out of my head.

I’d picked up a new phone along with the medical supplies, having dropped mine somewhere in the fray and forgotten to go back for it.
Idiot.
I texted Arthur the new digits and then dialed Checker while I snugged the gauze over my hand; I put the cell on speakerphone and tore the tape with my teeth while I waited for him to pick up.

“Hello?”

“It’s Cas.”

“I’m guessing from the new phone number that something didn’t go as planned. What happened?”

“Ambush,” I said.

“Good God. Are you all right?”

“Of course,” I said. My voice was scratching. “Though I left the street on fire. Have the cops found it yet?”

“You left the
street—
what—”

“It wasn’t my fault,” I said. “They brought napalm. Or something napalm-like. Has someone called it in yet?”

“Checking,” he said. “Aw, Arthur would be proud, you bringing in the authorities. This time of year LA’s a tinderbox; it’s not a bad idea.”

That hadn’t been what I meant, but I didn’t correct him. “It’s just north of the 263, off the Puesta del Sol exit.”

“Found it. Yeah, we’ve got fire department. And police, and…” He trailed off, a frown in the last words.

“What?”

“From what I can tell, the cops are being superseded by someone else. I can’t see who.”

“NSA?”

“I don’t know. Who attacked you? Who were these guys?”

“The same ones who ran Arthur and me off the road, I’m assuming,” I said. I finished my rudimentary first-aid, leaned back, and flexed my hand against the bandaging. Painful, but I had my whole range of motion.

“Did you get their pictures for me? License plate numbers?”

Fuck. I hadn’t even thought of that stuff. Like I always told Arthur, I was a shit detective.

“It’s okay,” Checker said, when I hadn’t answered. “I’ll be able to pull things from police records, though it’ll be a few hours before their CSU stuff hits the system. Can you believe it, you’d think in this modern era we’d have everything connected instantly, but no.” When I didn’t say anything, he prompted, “Cas? You there?”

I’d been thinking about the bad guys’ MO. AKs and Molotov cocktails were common as a bad haircut. But Molotov cocktails rigged to explode as these had, those were something more unusual…and they’d geared us up with a pretty nifty car bomb earlier…plus the souped-up grenade…

“Cas? You all right?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. My head felt like steel wool, sharp and stinging and a dirty tangle, and the nausea still nagged at me. Being in the midst of a street-sized bonfire for too long could apparently make you sick. Who knew. “I’m here.”

“Why don’t you come back to the Hole? We’ve got more data to track now. Maybe we can—”

“No.” My brain buzzed, trying its best. I hadn’t taken the van for that long of a ride before stopping and searching it…

I tried to think back. It was hard to focus. No more than fifteen minutes of driving, no more than seven spent searching the van before the SUVs had arrived.

Twenty-two minutes. They wouldn’t have wanted to go above the speed limit, not with the hardware they were carrying. Plus figure a couple of minutes for noticing the van was on the move and gearing up…

There wasn’t all that much out this way. And it was unlikely they would’ve expected someone to find the van in the first place, so no reason for them to have had men babysitting it. I was betting I could find their hideout.