Shadow Unit 15 (10 page)

"Fire axe," Natalie says. She sounds so calm, a little exasperated. Like a supervillain chopping the door down is an everyday nuisance.

Dice's gaze fixes on a chair. Just one of the plastic garden chairs the residents get to use. Not a weapon, which is why they have it. It's close enough to grab and throw—but would it do any good?

It might buy Eddie a second. It might buy Natalie a second, and Dice can see from the look on her thin pretty face that she's not going to go down without fighting. But she has to get close, and the door is all the way across the room—

The chopping stops, is replaced by a prying creak and crackle. Then a hesitation. Then a hard, hard thump—the impact of foot on wood. These doors are as old as Idlewood, oak and chestnut, solid core. Cut from trees of a size that haven't been seen on the East Coast in over a century.

It holds for a second, and buys them all another second of life.

Dice hears a frustrated, animal sound through the door. He squeaks, like a mouse, and Susanna gives him a comforting little headbutt since she can't squeeze his hand.

"Don't worry, Dyson," Natalie says. "I've been in worse spots."

That's when Dice notices that she's taken off her gloves.

The door crashes open, rebounds, is caught. Dice hopes Eddie blocked it with his Hand rather than taking it in the face, but he doesn't have time to think about it now.

"Hide-and-seek?" says a shockingly ordinary voice. "That's one of my favorite games."

Dice jerks himself to his feet, not daring to think. He grabs the featherweight plastic chair and slings it overhand, screaming, then leaps over the table to follow it up with a charge.

He makes it two steps. And then he stops, not because he runs into some enormous wall of anomalous energy, but because what he sees is Eddie swinging out from behind the broken door and piling into the side of the brown-haired, balding, middle-aged guy who stands there lazily swinging a fire axe. It's the Hand that Eddie hits the other guy with, and the other guy—skinny, unprepossessing—bounces off the doorframe and staggers a step.

The walls shake. Plaster dust sparkles in the sunlight through the window.

But the other guy comes back swinging. Definitely a jammer, to take a hit like that. He's got the axe, and he knows how to use it. It loops into the air. Eddie blocks it with the Hand. The axe doesn't rebound; Eddie's grabbed it, grabbed it with thin air. He rips it out of the other guy's hand and swings it around—

Eddie screams. He clutches his gut, though the other guy hasn't touched him, and doubles over. Blood—so much fucking blood, everywhere, suddenly, pouring from his nose and eyes, soaking his trousers. Dice screams, too, "Leave my brother alone!" and plunges forward again. Eddie's dropped the axe, and Dice is aiming for it. But he skids in the blood, scrabbles, clutches the damned thing's handle and finds himself flailing on his back like a turtle.

He looks up, and sees the man who has to be Joseph Lawrence Hakes—Bloody Larry, though Dice isn't supposed to know about that—looming over him.

"You're adorable," Hakes says, and lifts up one hand to make a goddamned finger-gun. A sharp cramp spears Dice's middle.

The axe is wrenched from his hand and whirls through the air. For a moment, in passing, Dice would swear he felt the brush of his brother's nonexistent fingertips. Hakes ducks; the axe thumps into the doorframe; the seething feeling in Dice's gut eases. He tastes seaweed and copper. He sees Eddie straighten up, ripping the axe free with the Hand.

Dice hears Hakes' howl of outraged fury, and the slippery horrible thump as Eddie crumples and falls.

Dice lifts his head. The axe is all the way over there—

A blur. Red hair, quick hands. Natalie, wielding her bottle of water like a sword. Clear fluid splashes from it, a bright arc, slashing across Hakes' face. Washing into his eyes. His wordless rage turns into a scream of pain; he clutches his face, then casts about blindly.

Acid,
Dice thinks, but some of the fluid splashed him, too, and on his lips he tastes the unmistakable fizz. It burns worse than he's used to. It must be very concentrated.

"Peroxide," he says.

"Chemically, very similar to water," Natalie remarks. She grabs his collar and his belt loop and drags him back, away, toward Ramachandran and the staff. "I need a better trick. He isn't down."

And Eddie is. Lying in the blood, not moving. Still bleeding, a slow well visible between his lips. How fast can you drown in your own blood? If you're a gamma? How fast then?

If you're a gamma, how fast do your eyes clear from a chemical burn?

Hakes has staggered away from the door. He's casting about, groping: a hellish game of blindman's bluff. Dice sees Susanna raise her head from behind the table and begin creeping—tiptoeing—toward the axe. He wants to yell to her to watch out, but that'll give the game away.

Then the part that seems like a hallucination happens. Because Dice sees an old man walk into the room—sedately, unconcerned. And with him, a young mixed-race woman, holding his hand. Except, is she there, or is she not? When he's looking at her, he can see her clear as day. But as soon as he glances back at Hakes, Dice is pretty sure he imagined her.

She leads the old man up to Hakes, though, and the old man stops in front of him. Hakes windmills, and the old man just stands.

"You, fellow," the old man says. "You need to stop that right now."

Hakes stops. Perfectly balanced, suddenly, though his eyes are swollen shut and even from across the room, flat on his back, Dice can see whitish foam bubbling from between the lids.

"Who are you?" Hakes asks. He reaches out, slowly, calibrating on the voice.

The old man draws himself up. "Someone whose home this is, sonny. And you won't take the roof from over my head, or from over these people's heads, either. I won't have it. People need to keep warm!"

Hakes' clutching hands grasp the old man's arm, twisting in layers of robe and cardigan. Dice tries to start to his feet, but Natalie gives his clothes a yank and he falls back down again. Susanna has forgotten she was going to get the axe and is just crouched now, staring.

"Don't call me sonny," says Joseph Lawrence Hakes. He reaches blindly toward the old man's head.

"Respect your elders," the old man answers. He lifts up his free hand—clad in a fingerless mitt that Dice recognizes as Hafidha's knitting. He presses the tips of his fingers to the side of Hakes' head.

Hakes jerks, recoils. But the old man is holding
his
sleeve now, and he can't pull away. Hakes' hand seems to be stuck to the old man's cheek as if frozen there, and a bluish rime is spreading up his hand, up his arm, along his temple, down his throat. He gasps, shivers violently, sags to his knees. He falls, and the old man bends over him. His teeth chatter. His heels rattle against the floor. He screams a long, shivering scream.

No one steps forward until he finally lies still.

The old man straightens up and dusts the frost off his hands. "Ahh," he says, pink and happy. "Who'd like a nice cup of coffee, now?"

Dice yanks himself away from Natalie. He crawls across the floor, the terrible cramps not yet subsiding. He drags himself through the slick of Eddie's blood. He sprawls across his brother's good arm and tries to press his fingers to Eddie's throat.

Eddie's eyes blink. They focus on Dice. Eddie's lips move, and something like the touch of phantom fingers ruffles Dice's hair.

"It's okay," Eddie says. "It's okay, big brother."

The breath finishes coming out of him.

It does not go back in.

Dice puts his head down on Eddie's bloody shirt and wails between clenched teeth, not even able to form the word,
no
.

"Fuck," says Natalie, behind Dice. "I know this isn't the time or the place, but I need a sandwich
right now
."

*

Sol feels a spurt of sweet relief when his phone rings, and he recognizes the number as the main line at Idlewood.
It's all okay,
he tells himself.
Something we'll laugh about tomorrow.

Falkner forwarded him Hafidha's text. He knows Falkner, Chaz, Lau, and Tan are running close behind him. He knows that they're coming in force, and that Falkner's made the decision not to involve the local sheriff's department. He thinks that that turned out to be a good call.

The relief lasts until he answers the phone and hears a tight, controlled voice on the other end of the line, faint Puerto Rican accent, crispness of a professional in an emergency. "Mr. Todd?"

"Speaking."

"This is Leon Garcia at Idlewood. Hafidha Gates asked me to call you. We have a big, big problem here."

"Leon," Sol says. "Is Rupert Beale there?"

"He was," Leon says. "He was the last sign-out before the power went down."

*

Daniel Brady has probably felt this useless once or twice before in his life, but just right now he is hard pressed to think of when. He stands in the doorway of the minimum security rec room and counts bodies. Only two, and it could have been worse. And one of those is the right one, the best of all possible worlds if there has to be a casualty.

But then there's Eddie, and—

Not now, Danny Brady,
he tells himself. He looks around at the survivors. At Dice with Eddie's head cradled in his lap. At Natalie stuffing a handful of Cheetos into her mouth, and Henry Clark—
what the hell
—pouring cream into a steaming mug of coffee. At Susanna, huddled over beside Ramachandran and two staffers whose names Brady doesn't know, offhand, though Hafidha would. And that flicker of movement in the corner of his eye is probably Renee.

He had come into the room at high ready, and now they are all staring at him. Sheepishly, he lowers the muzzle. Stopping Hakes was only half his job.

"Come on," he says. "We're evacuating. There's at least one more on the loose."

The awful fluorescent lights overhead pick that instant to hum violently and buzz back into life.

*

Somebody was in for a hiding if Sol ever found them. It had taken him a good three minutes to hotwire a switch to replace the smashed controls on the emergency generators, and he'd jammed a wire right up under his thumbnail, deep enough to make it bleed. The good news is, they are humming now. And as he is clearing the area outside before stepping from the shelter of the generator shed, his phone buzzes against his hip.

He glances at it. It's Brady.

He slides a thumb across the glass. "Talk to me," he says.

*

The lights flicker. Stutter. Go back on and burn steady, and Hafidha pulls the gas mask down over her face and walks a little slower, a little more carefully, now. She's coming up on the doorway to the wing of Idlewood where the old monsters live, and she's wondering just what exactly she, gunless, is going to do if she opens up that door with Allison's passcard and discovers Mrs. Chow crouched in the corridor, chewing on somebody's thighbone like the law of conservation of mass and energy doesn't apply.

Throw the last pocketful of Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs at her and run.

Then there's a crackle in her head, and a few hundred yards away, Leon types on a tablet with his thumbs.

EMILY IS ON CAMERA. HEADED TO YOUR OLD ROOM.

Suze Zettler's room. There's probably a more politic way for Leon to have put it, but Hafs isn't about to pick nits with the man whose pastry is keeping her from fainting.

She types back, STAY FROSTY.

Brady, on the headset. "Hakes is neutralized. Evacuating the minimum security residents. I have Henry, and I think maybe I have Renee, too. One casualty."

She doesn't ask who. If it weren't going to upset her, he would have said already.

She breathes a sigh of relief. "Good work."

Brady says, "Duke says the cavalry is ETA five minutes."

Hafidha says, "Partridge is going after Suze."

There's a pause. Then, "Godspeed," he tells her. Which is fine. If she's going to put up with anybody's God, Daniel G. Brady's is high on the list. And his secret middle name is safe with her.

"Radio silence," she replies.

"For now," he answers.

She turns right back away from the door to the scary wards and heads downstairs. Not that her old room is any less fortified. Not that anything is scaring her, right now.

Maybe she'll be able to talk to Partridge. Maybe she can figure out her mythology. Hafidha remembers that weird interaction this morning and doesn't stop walking, but she bites her lip. Something there, some clue.

She and Brady had been talking about Ashley Campbell, just a moment before, who had died in an accident caused by a bizarre mechanical failure. And the reporter who died, Matthew Sheehy. The reporter whose freak accident had not included a mechanical failure, but apparently something like the fear Hafidha had so recently experienced herself.

Oh. If Ashley Campbell were the victim of a gamma, if that gamma were someone she and Emily Partridge both knew... or, hell, Partridge could have been inoculated at work, just as easily. If she had suffered some sort of devastating personal loss and failed to report it to H.R., as specified in her contract...

The computers are coming to life. Hafs takes the stairs down, not ready to risk an elevator, and reaches out to riffle through Emily Partridge's personnel files. They spill open for Hafs. Including the familiar name of Emily's high school.

And the name of her listed next of kin.
In case of emergency, contact Ashley Campbell.

"Oh, sweetie," Hafidha says, a pang of sorrow so sharp she feels the Bug stretch in luxury. "Oh, I'm so sorry, child."

Ashley had been a witch; had requested a green, pagan burial. Which meant it was very possible that that was Emily's religion as well, and that it might have a bearing on her mythology.
Harpy, damn it, I need you. And where are you, now?

No. Hafida snaps her bracelet. She pauses at the bottom of the stairs.