Terminated (28 page)

“I think that when we didn’t come back in Barrow, he folded up the tents and vanished, along with everybody else on that plane,” Patrick said. “He’d have considered us dead. He’d have been perfectly right to do it.”

She couldn’t argue with that, but something was bothering her—something much bigger. “Patrick . . . he knows how big this is, better than any of us. He knows the risks, if the Fountain Group goes unchecked. They’ll take over strategic assets, like the military, or the government itself. Once they do that, it’s over for the rest of us. They want to live forever—them, and their handpicked best people. Sooner or later, they’ll own us. All of us. What do you think Manny would do about that?”

“He’s got the cure,” Patrick said, watching the numbers roll by on the pump as the Challenger drank down the fuel. “He’ll concentrate on taking it apart down to the molecules, until he understands everything about how it works. And then he’ll put it back together again, synthesize it, and use it.”

“He’ll act.”

“Yes,” Patrick said. “He’ll do it because it needs to be done.” He frowned, shook his head, and said, “I don’t know how long we were—in there. Do you?”

“Long enough,” she said. “Long enough for my nanites to mature and migrate.” Which made her think, suddenly, about Riley . . . who hadn’t shown any signs of the same impulse, though they were on the same schedule—had to be, since Riley’s bite had infected her. “You’re not—?”

The other woman didn’t look up from where she was loading trash from the Challenger’s trunk into the pump-side bin. “Jane used them,” she said. “Yesterday. She brought me one of her people.”

“And you upgraded him?” Patrick said. It sounded like an accusation, though he probably didn’t mean it that way.

“I didn’t have a choice,” she snapped back. “Ask your girlfriend. Doesn’t matter. He was—she doesn’t like to share. She had him put down.”

“Put down?”
Bryn said, and went very still. “What do you mean,
put down
?”

“We can still die, Bryn. Figure it out. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t easy to do, but with enough ingenuity and cruelty you can do anything.” When Bryn continued to stare at her, Riley looked away. “Acid. She dissolved him. Trust me, you don’t want to know the details.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because she could,” Patrick said. “And because she wanted to be sure she could destroy an upgrade if she needed to do so. Research and fun: her favorite combination. I’m sorry, Riley. She found ways to hurt all of us, one way or another. That was her specialty.”

Riley nodded. “At least I’m not contagious now for another thirty days. Neither is Bryn.”

“I don’t think we’re going to make it another thirty days,” Patrick said. He sounded calm, and sure, and nodded to Bryn. “Call Manny. Maybe he’ll pick up. We can hope he will.”

But Manny didn’t pick up. The phone rang, and rang, and rang, and then a distorted recorded message reported the number had been disconnected.

Manny was gone, along with Pansy, and Liam, and Annie. They’d even taken her dog.

It was ridiculous, after all she’d been through, to want to burst into tears, but . . . suddenly, that last little piece of normality being chipped away seemed to take the last solid ground from under her feet, and Bryn had to brace herself against the Challenger’s sleek fender, just to stay upright. She gently folded the phone and put it in the pocket of her fatigues.

Patrick was watching her. She couldn’t afford to break down now; she couldn’t let him down. The four of them—they might be all they had, now. She would
not
be the weak link.

So she simply shook her head. He didn’t seem surprised. Just grim.

Fueling finished, he took a trip to the station’s probably horrible restroom; Bryn used one of the smaller bills in their drug dealer’s bankroll to supply them all with water and high-protein snacks, mainly for her, Riley, and Joe. She didn’t know how the other two felt, but her stomach was aching with need, and Riley was probably just as starved.

After that, it was more than a hundred miles across open desert before any significant towns, broken by occasional twisted eruptions of ancient rocks and the twisted, spiked growths of Joshua trees and mesquite. Green balls of desert sage growing out of mounds of pale sand. Rotting shacks. A cloudless, bone-dry, unforgiving sky.

And nothing ahead.

They didn’t talk much. She offered a phone to Joe to call his family, but he refused; Riley wanted one to call her superiors in the FBI, but that was overruled fast. “Yeah, the last time you checked in with them, they had you pull a gun on me, and then they ratted us out to Jane,” Joe said. “FBI means Fucking Bastard Informants, in my book. No phone for you.”

Riley glared, but she didn’t ask again. Most likely, even she didn’t trust her people anymore, Bryn thought. Their circle of trust was about as big as this car, now.

They were still at least fifty miles out from the next landmark—Van Horn—when Bryn’s phone rang.

They all froze, staring at her as she pulled it from her pocket. The shrill ring filled the car’s interior, and Patrick said, “Wrong number?”

“Wishful thinking,” Bryn said. No choice, really. The caller ID was blank. She flipped it open and said, “Hello?”

There was a few second’s silence, and she had an intuition of the call being forwarded through a variety of cutout points, and then Manny’s voice said, “Bryn?”

“Affirmative.”

He let out a slow breath. “We were pretty sure you were all—”

“We aren’t,” she said. “Jane is.”

“You killed
Jane
.”

“If Thorpe’s cure worked, then she’s beyond help.”

“Oh, it works,” he said. “Better than any of us ever expected. The nanite shutdown takes about two minutes, five at the most. And they don’t come back.”

“How do you know—”

“You’re coming up on an exit for Highway 285. Take it northwest toward New Mexico. You’ll be met.”

“Manny,
wait!
Annie—”

Click, and he was gone. Dead air.

She felt short of breath. Two minutes. Five at most.

And they don’t come back.

He didn’t have any guinea pigs.

Except her sister.
No, no. She doesn’t have the upgrade.

What was to stop him from giving it to her? He’d have samples, she knew that. Manny always had samples. He’d probably managed to take one from her, while she was close by.

That made her feel faint and sick, and she gripped the phone so tightly she felt the plastic crack in her hand.
Don’t you fucking hurt her. Not anymore than she’s already been hurt.

“Bryn?” Patrick asked. He sounded worried.

She swallowed and said, “Take the exit to 285 toward New Mexico.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t trust Manny not to kill my sister.”

T
hey never made it to anything like a destination along the narrow highway; the signs all advertised the faded glory of the Carlsbad Caverns and all its attractions, but just over the state line, Joe said, “Pat, we’ve got a bird coming in. Check that. Two birds, eight o’clock.”

They were large helicopters, military style if not military-owned, painted in desert camouflage, and as Patrick pulled off the road, the two helicopters circled overhead in a tight spiral. One drifted down in a storm of blown dirt and tumbleweeds to settle about a hundred feet away, while the other watched from overhead.

Pansy bailed out of the helicopter’s bay and ran over to the Challenger. Bryn had the door open before she reached them, and Pansy must have expected a hug, because she smiled, but the smile didn’t last long as Bryn slammed her against the car. “What did that psycho do to my sister?” Bryn shouted at her over the idling roar of the bird. “What happened to Annie?”

“Bryn, let go—let
go!
” Pansy was no lightweight; she slipped out of Bryn’s hold and hit her with a solid two-handed shove that sent her stumbling back two long steps. Riley, Joe, and Patrick were all out of the vehicle now. None of them intervened until Bryn reached for the sidearm that went with her uniform, and then Riley restrained her.

“Easy,” Riley said. “We need to hear this.”

“Thanks,” Pansy said, and frowned as she rubbed her bruised arm. She looked—fine. Well fed, well rested. Tense, but otherwise completely normal. “Well, I
was
going to tell you all how excited we were you were still with us, but . . .”

“Annie,” Bryn said. “I want to know what’s happened to my sister.”

“Annie’s fine, Bryn. What did you think, that Manny—” Pansy got it, then, and covered her mouth with her hand. “No.
No.
He wouldn’t do that. He’s not Jane, for God’s sake!”

“Then how does he know this cure is so effective?”

“Because I convinced Brick to help us out with data mining. He found another Alzheimer’s facility being used as a Fountain Group farming operation,” she said. “The people there couldn’t be helped, Bryn. So Manny gave it to Brick, and—he tested it there. It wasn’t what he wanted to do; it was what he needed to do. But it
works
. Effective on both those with the basic nanites, the ones on Returné, or those with the upgrades.” Pansy glanced at the helicopter. The pilot was gesturing to her. “We need to go. Now.”

Bryn was not a fan of helicopters, and this ride didn’t make her feel any better about them; she clung to the hanging strap as Patrick asked more questions. She couldn’t hear much over the constant noise, but he seemed satisfied enough with the answers from Pansy.

Joe silently offered her a thick piece of beef jerky. Peppered. She took it and chewed; she hadn’t even realized she was hungry, but she quickly downed six pieces from his stash, to his evident amusement. Riley needed less, but she ate, too. Bryn thought about asking where they were going, but it honestly didn’t make much difference, because the only alternative was a jump out the door, and from this height she didn’t really look forward to the recovery.

It was a relatively short ordeal, at least, and the aircraft touched down again within an hour’s flight. Still desert, so they’d likely gone west, though Bryn’s sense of direction was never good in the sky. There was an excellent reason she’d never signed up for the air force.

Once they were out of the bird and on solid, sandy ground, she realized they’d been let out . . . nowhere. There was a single small concrete building, well pitted with age and wind. Big enough to be a small closet, nothing more. No windows. One thick steel door that had once been painted some color, but had now faded to a dull off-tan that matched the sand.

The helicopters weren’t landing here, she realized; once the five of them were out, they immediately dusted off again and beat rotors on the sky heading east. The silence of the desert was stunning, after they’d disappeared toward the horizon. One of the quietest places in the world, she’d always thought, and it seemed even more hushed here than she expected.

Pansy said, “Welcome home.” She spread her hands to indicate the expanse of nothing that surrounded them. It was inhospitable as hell, and Bryn couldn’t imagine who’d
want
to call it home beyond snakes and lizards. It felt ancient here.

And it felt unwelcoming.

Pansy walked to the small concrete structure, pressed her hand flat on the center of the door, and waited. After a few seconds, the door sagged open, with an audible hiss of air.

“Hope you’re all okay with stairs,” she said. “It’s a long way down. Watch out, it’s steep.”

Inside, the lighting was dim, from inset wire-covered fixtures that had a distinctly cold-war era look to them. Concrete, and narrow, steep stairs descending. Nothing else except a bright yellow sign, only slightly faded, that read
HIGH SECURITY AREA—KEEP ID VISIBLE AT ALL TIMES
.

Bryn pulled the door shut behind her, and felt a shiver as it locked with a heavy, forbidding
clunk
.

Then she followed the rest of them down the steps.

She counted more than a hundred before she gave up. There were periodic flat landings, which helped them all catch their breath, but by Bryn’s estimate they went more than six stories down . . . and then arrived in a large, bare room with nothing but another door.

This one, though, had no keypad, no sensors, no handle on the door. Pansy simply waited, face upturned to a domed observation camera above the entrance, until it clicked open as well.

Another missile base, Bryn thought, but it turned out she was wrong.

“Welcome to BHC-One,” Pansy said, and led them down a clean, arcing hallway with blue carpeting. “That stands for biohazard containment, by the way. Back in the day, this was where the government tinkered around with nerve gas, and then it was refitted to explore infectious agents like anthrax, botulism, lethal influenza, and hemorrhagic fevers. Anything with a rapid infection rate and high kill percentage ended up getting grown and evaluated here, all the way through the late eighties,” she said. “When they mothballed the place, they disavowed it ever existed. Most of the equipment was too expensive to remove, and nobody wanted to take responsibility for destroying the place, so it just . . . stayed here. Manny took it over ten years ago. It’s been our home ever since.”

“Home,” Bryn repeated. “I thought you didn’t actually have a home.”

“It’s where we keep what’s important to us,” Pansy said; she sounded more serious than Bryn had ever heard her. “It’s our last stand. So yes. Home.”

The upgrades to the facility must have been made in the late sixties or early seventies . . . It had that vaguely futuristic, sterile, spaceship feel to the design, including the oddly shaped doorways. Everything had, no doubt, started off sleek and white, but the plastic hadn’t aged well . . . most of it looked yellowed now.

“Yeah, I can see why you love it,” Joe said. “Comfy.”

That made Pansy finally smile, a little. “This way.”

She took a turn to the right, down another weirdly curving hall, and then opened up a door on the left.

The room was circular, midcentury modern in style, and finished out the same way, with a round bed and vaguely futuristic chairs and desks. A wall-mounted flat TV didn’t look out of place in all that.

Neither did Annie, who was lying on her stomach on the bed, watching
Star Wars
unfold on the plasma screen. Her wavy hair cascaded over her back, and she was wearing pale pink shorts and a white tank top, and Bryn had a flashback to seeing her in exactly this position, even to the crossed ankles and her fists wedged under her chin.

She’d been fourteen then. She looked just as young now.

“Bryn!” Annie exploded off the bed in a rush, grabbed hold, and danced Bryn around in a dizzying whirl. “Oh God God
God,
I knew you weren’t dead, they told me you had to be, but I
knew it
, you bitch, how could you do that to me. . . .” Annie ran out of words and just hugged her, and Bryn hugged back.

Mr. French came charging out from under the bed, barking excitedly, jumping at their feet and shins.

Home.

It felt that way.

“She’s fine,” Pansy said. “I told you she was.”

Bryn pushed her sister back and held her at arm’s length. She looked . . . great. Not a scratch. “They haven’t experimented on you?”

“Manny? No way. He just gives me the shots I need—that’s it. I talked to the fam a week ago—well, Mom and Grace, but they’ll tell everybody else. I lied. I said we were together, and we were fine. Had to keep it short, you know? But they’re not worrying. And they’re all safe. Brick has people watching.” Annie studied her face, and Bryn saw the worry in her eyes. “You look bad, honey. What happened to you?”

“Later,” Bryn said. “As long as you’re okay, I’m okay.” She turned to Pansy, who was leaning against the door. “I assume Manny wants us.”

“Manny is chewing through the straps on his straitjacket in his eagerness,” Manny’s voice said. It came from inset speakers in the slick plastic ceiling. “Pansy, quit playing happy families and get them up here. Now.”

“Yes, o master,” she said, and flipped him off.

“I saw that,” he said.

“He didn’t,” she told them. “No cameras in the rooms. I insisted. But come on. He needs to talk to you.”

“Annie comes, too,” Bryn said.

Pansy sighed. “Fine. But leave the dog.”

Bryn ignored that, too. Mr. French was too excited to be left behind, and she let him trail along after them.

There was, it seemed, an elevator after all, in the central core; it whisked them up a couple of floors, and Pansy got them past more security doors, into what seemed to be . . . an office.

Manny’s office.

He had a big white desk, chair, a shocking red rug, and a few guest chairs that matched the bloody color. Modern art on the walls that seemed weirdly avant-garde for someone like him, but Bryn had learned not to assume anything, by now.

Liam was standing next to the desk, reading a report from a file folder. He put it down as they filed in, and greeted them all with a nod and smile—but no handshakes or backslaps, not now.

Manny glanced up. He was wearing the square reading glasses again, punching keys on a laptop as if they’d done him personal wrong, and he kept typing as he said, “Never thought I’d see any of you again.”

“Glad to see you, too, Manny,” Patrick said. He offered Bryn a chair, but she shook her head. Annie slipped into it instead and crossed her legs; she seemed completely at ease, but if she was, Bryn thought she was the only one. Even Mr. French couldn’t settle down, weaving around her legs and pressing close to emphasize how much he’d missed her. “Guess Bryn told you that Jane’s dead.”

That merited another uplift of the man’s attention, and raised brows. “You can verify it?”

“I was there,” Patrick said. “If the cure worked, she’s gone. But that hasn’t solved anything, has it?”

“No,” Manny said. “There’s a reason we’re in the fucking last-stand bunker. You remember your friend Major Plummer? The one with the shiny helicopters who ran to your rescue? Plummer reports that there’s a new inoculation program being implemented in select branches of service. I think we can all guess what that might be.”

“Returné,” Patrick said.

“They’ve manufactured enough in military labs to take care of the key areas. As far as I can tell, they’re implementing the upgrades on the elites, like the Rangers, SEAL teams, and such. CIA’s probably got its own programs running. Ditto every other wannabe badass agency with initials out there. And it’s spreading. Other countries are trying to grab samples for replication.”

“What is the Fountain Group doing?”

“What they always do—profit from it,” Manny said sourly. “I know who they are. Hell, I know
where
they are. They’re the same people at the heart of everything that cuts money out of the world and stuffs it into their pockets. They own the factories. Right now, it’s covert, but they’re protected now. The government’s on board and in bed, and making sweet nanite love. They get what they’ve always gotten—power, and money. And it’s done. They’ve won.”

Bryn regretted giving up her chair to Annie, because her knees felt suddenly watery. She gripped Patrick’s arm tight enough to leave a mark. “They can’t. They can’t win, Manny. We can’t just—give up.”

He studied her in silence for a moment. Studied them all. And she got the very distinct, unpleasant feeling that there was something he wasn’t telling them.

“You have the solution,” Patrick said. “The cure works. You said it works.”

“Thorpe’s cure works,” Manny agreed, “but it’s a losing game. No way we can get enough out there, fast enough. Worse, nobody’s going to cooperate in giving it. We can’t stealth-inject a hundred, or a thousand, or a million. Or a billion. And that’s where it’s going. Exponential growth, like a virus. Nobody wants to die, Pat. Not you, not me. It’s the Achilles’ heel of the human race. Our survival instinct.”

“Parents will infect their children to save them,” Pansy said. “Why not? Who can stand to see their children die? Or their parents, or relatives, or friends? It doesn’t stop. It can’t stop until we stop it.” And they all knew that was true—Joe, standing there recently infected, was proof enough of that.

“You just—you just said it can’t
be
stopped,” Annie said. “Pansy? You’re scaring me.”

“Good,” Manny said. “Because what I’m about to show you is fucking terrifying.”

Nobody said anything to that. Liam looked down; he already knew, Bryn saw. Pansy did, too, but she just stared straight at Manny.

He said, “I didn’t want this burden. You brought it to me, Pat. You made me part of this. I’m not going to make the last decision. One of you—one of you needs to do that. Because whatever you do, me and Pansy, we’re going to be safe.”

“Will you?” Liam asked him. “What happens when Pansy falls ill? She will. It’s the human condition. She’ll develop some flaw, some disease, something that will start her on a path toward the end. What will
you
do? Let her go?”