They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (14 page)

"
Don, can you hear me?
" Lee yelled in my ear.

I nodded and pushed him away.

"You're welcome, motherfucker," I barely heard him say. He had pulled me back into the vault room. The fresher air in there cleared my lungs out while Lee kept talking and pointing and talking more as if I could hear one goddamn word he said. His eyes were red and streaming tears from the gas. I yelled at him to back the fuck off until one thing he kept repeating got through my hearing loss.

The
fail-safe
.

That snapped me the fuck out of the mental fog. Just in time for the wall I sat against to thunder and crack against my
back and send me to the floor.

I crawled away and opened my eyes for a few seconds of bleary sight, long enough to see Rosemary huddled in a back corner of the room rinsing chlorine gas out of Tracey's eyes with a bottle of water. Next to them, Splode was still pinned under the vault door, white as shit and grabbing at and plead
ing with Tracey to get him out.

Before I could figure out where Will was, he joined us at twenty miles an hour when Agent Red slammed him through the
other side of the broken wall.

They hit some piping, and water spewed from the opening they made. A chunk of masonry that would have taken my whole eye out bounced off the gas mask I still held on my face instead. Will had landed on his face on the floor right in front of me, choking on dust and gas.

Red jumped through the hole in the wall and landed on him, holding his wrists to the floor. Dirt and clay fell off his olive flight suit and body armor in clods. The motherfucker must have tunneled through the fucking earth to bust in on us.

Tracey blindly grabbed Rosemary's sleeve to get a feel for where exactly she was, then teleported her out of there. Lee didn't want any part of this resisting arrest shi
t and hung back out of the way.

I pushed up to my feet, my kidney and ribs still throbbing, and stumbled back into the living room while Will buck
ed Red off and they went at it.

"Throw him in the gas! He doesn't have his mask!" I shouted at Will, but he couldn't hear me.

Tracey still needed a minute to get her shit together. Until then, I would have to buy us some time. I kept the gas mask pressed tight to my face and scoured the floor until I found what I figured had to be around there somewhere. As much pain as I was in, I was still in good enough
shape to commit another felony.

I clicked the safety off the shotgun Red had dropped on the cherry wood. If this whole thing went the way it was probably going to, using a gun on him instead of my powers would mean less prison time. And I knew he was bulletproof, so none of that 'Attempted Murder' shit, either.

A sharp crack echoed out from the vault room behind me, followed by a "
Goddamn-shit-ass-motherfucker
!" from Will.

He had broken his hand on Red's face. The guy's skin and bones were that hard.

I eased up beside them, leveled the shotgun with one hand while I held my mask on with the other and pulled the trigger right in Red'
s face like a fucking gangster.

The recoil killed my ribs, and I just about dropped the damn gun. The blast managed to mess up Red's crew cut and kind of maybe almost powder burned his face. Bu
t he didn't even look up at me.

In the corner of my eye, Lee disappeared next. The shotgun vibrated and jerked in my hands until I lost my grip on it and it broke in three places. I had heard Red had some kind of sonic-matter-manipulation-resonance-crazy-shit powers, but I'd forgotten all about it. He didn't even have to look away from pressing his forearm against Will's Adam's apple to do it.

"Do any of you know what kind of danger we're al
l in?" Red shouted at the room.

Will was breaking the floor beneath them as he struggled underneath Red's hold. Splode was rambling or singing or some shit. And with the gas from the living room coming into the vault, Tracey had lost her shit all over again and was throwing up in the corner. And the goddamn
fail-safe
was still warming up to fire off at any minute.

So I joined in the stupid.

I lit Red up like a Christmas tree on fire. His flight suit blackened and curled like paper and charred off of him in the fireball. The shotgun shells he had on him blew like Chinese New Year while his body armor turned to slag. Even his boots
melted into pools on the floor.

"Hey, fuck, that hurts!" Will yelled at me as the boiling composite plastic dripped on him and fired pellets shredded at his clothes. "
God-damn, man!
"

The effort of the burn nearly made me pass out. Red looked like his skin might have been tanning, though. The sonofabitch wiped his melted armor and burnt clothes off, never letting go of Will with one hand. The dude was t
here buck naked in front of us.

And, yeah, I looked and, yeah, he was bigger than me.

I pushed myself into lightheadedness to turn the heat up on his bare skin. "Trace, hurry the fuck up!" I managed to get out before I became annoying enough to get Red's attention. In a blink, he had shifted his hold to grab Will by the back of the neck, flew him out of the room with a rush of air strong enough to knock me down, and before I could get back on my feet, have me back up against a wall so fast I di
dn't even know how I got there.

"
Stop fighting me, for God's sake!
" he roared in my ear. "Where's the remote
sensor? We
all have to get the hell out
now
."

That's when we both noticed glowing lines reaching across the floor and up the walls like that snake cell phone game, giving off an intense orange light. They crossed and spread led back to one source: the back of Splode's twitching left hand. His head rolled drunkenly from side to side on the floor. "Get me out, Tracey. Get me out, Tracey."

He was going to blow the whole room if Tracey didn't teleport him out.

The lines spread into
the living room and got hotter.

"Stop the heat!" Red yelled in my ear, putting enough pressure on my wrist to make it feel broken without actually breaking it.

"It's not me," I shouted.

Suddenly, I was out of the vault and back outside by the main door. Red's hand was still on my wrist, but it fell right off because it wasn't fucking attached to the rest of him. I c
ursed and kicked the hand away.

And that's when I saw Doland's creature twisting and ripping the shit out of Tracey's black Hummer.

Tracey showed up beside me. "
Oh, fuck me
," she yelled when she saw the creature, her voice going up a damn octave. "God damn Jesus Christ! Fuck! Kill it!"

I shook my head, trying to catch a second wind. "Fuck that. I'm not--"

The giant turned and looked at us. Its eyes were red from crying, and he had food caked on his cheeks and neck. Some kind of lesions, some infected, peppered his body, and a red rash covered his thighs and upper lip beneath his nose.

The sound of an explosion ca
me from deep within the bunker.

"Ws that Splode of the
fail-safe
?" I asked, making no moves that might set the surprised giant off.

"All your fucking fault," Tracey muttered, pulling out her phone and fingering screens while the thing screamed at us and chucked pieces of Hummer our way. In another second he was gone, the Hummer was gone, and the ground twenty feet around where the
truck
had been was smooth as glass. A loud sucking sound pulled us forward then an explosive burst of air knocked us to the ground.

"Fuck
you!
" Tracey yelled up at the dark sky. She cupped her hands over her mouth and called out "
Rosie!
" but trailed off and fell to her knees. It was her turn to throw up from exertion. She collapsed to the ground, shaking, with a weak "Fuck."

"Will?!" I shouted.

Then white li
ght hit my eyes and blinded me.

It took a couple of seconds for me to realize that I hadn't been fried by the
fail-safe
and that I didn't smell sand anymore. I was back in my blood-sprayed apartment. The silence was deafening.

I was back. Alone and out of breath with Run ALC's corpse.

Scorched Earth

I immediately grabbed my cell phone.

The last number called was Tracey's, and I mashed the button to call it while I went into my bedroom and shut the door so I could act like there wasn't a body getting colder in the other room. The call rang and went to voicemail. I punched in Will's number next, and his phone did the same. I called Tracey's back and left her a message while I stripped off the bloody, dark fiberglass.

"Hey, call me back as soon as you get this. I've got a job for you over here. If you talk to Will, tell him to call me."

I balled the suit up and carried it into the bathroom, leaving a trail of blood droplets in the bedroom carpet. With a heave that made my ribs scream in pain, I threw it into the bathtub with a loud, wet thud. I spun the clear plastic knob for the hot water and watched the steaming tap pour out onto the suit from the showerhead before I cursed a blue streak and turned the hot water off and put on the cold instead because the fucking suit wasn't supposed to be washed in fucking cold water or it would be fucking ruined.

I tried Will's number again. The water in the tub turned brownish-pink as it poured over the suit. No answer from Will, so I left a message. "Hey, call me when you get this." I sat on my toilet in my underwear, trying to catch my breath. My hands shook; every little noise or creak made me jump. Another trip into the bedroom, and I grabbed my cell phone charger and a fresh pack of cigarettes. I plugged the phone in and set it on the edge of the sink, watching it and waiting for somebody to call. I didn't know which felt more like a dream: the body dead on my floor or the shit that had just happened in North Dakota.

I called Will again. No answer.

Slapping the pack of cigarettes against my palm about killed my ribs, and the pack slipped out of my hand into the bathtub. I scrounged another pack from my dresser along with an elastic bandage that I tried wrapping around my ribcage. But it wasn't long enough and after fifteen minutes of trying to make the damn thing work, I just set it on fire, threw it in the bathtub and called it a, "Fucking piece of shit-ass motherfucker."

I ch
ecked my phone. Still no calls.

I finally got a fucking cigarette lit in my lips and breathed in nicotine. My lungs were still fucked up from the gas, though, so
I coughed and saw stars again.

"Fucking
shit
." God, it hurt to cough.

I shut my eyes and tried to clear my head and concentrate on the smell of the cigarette smoke. I still had a body and a murder scene in my living room, though. I punched the wall and ripped the toilet paper holder off in frustration. I took the lid off the toilet tank and smashed the mirror with it, then broke the lid on the side of the tub.

I grabbed
my phone and got online.

Run ALC had a listing in the Post-Human Database.
Name: Angelo Luis Cabrera. From Escondido, California. Wanted in New Mexico, Arizona and California for drug running, and in California for Assault with Enhanced Biological Processes.
I scrolled down the page
past his biography and stopped.

Suspected to have a son in the Escondido area.

The motherfucker had a kid.

"God dammit," I said to the broken mirror.

Next I searched for any news on Wilmont Avenue. The names of four of the dead had been released with one name being withheld at the family's request. Matthew Phillips - 22-years-old, Jackson Clark - 17, Tyneesha Allen - 34, Macy Sterling - 23.

Sterling was a mother of three. Jesus fucking God. I put the phone down and made sure it was still charging. Checked my missed calls. Nobody had called.

There were still a few Lortabs will hadn't stolen from the medicine cabinet, so I swallowed a couple of them.
I just needed a few m
inutes to get my head together.

I called Will again. No answer.

"Okay. Fuck. Ok
ay." I sucked on the cigarette.

Red had removed him from the scene, flew him off somewhere so he didn't have to fight him and could focus on the rest of us. And Red seemed like he knew the
fail-safe
was about to go off and what it would do. So when me and Tracey 'ported out, he would have gotten out even with just one hand. And, of course, he would have grabbed Will fr
om wherever he had stashed him.

I rubbed my eyes. Will was in fucking custody.

I had
told
Tracey not to involve him.

Now it was Lee's arrest all over again. Will had a head full of our names. No way
Tracey would just let that go.