They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (33 page)

In the metal siding beneath the door lock, s
omeone had scratched:
'Regardless of what we do, our karma has no hold on us' - Bodhidharma
. That sounded fucking dark, but whatever, I didn't plan on staying long.

Passing through the door put me in
a
short
wood-
paneled
hallway
circa 1974.
Looked like a
hunting lodge
.
There were
five doors
leading off the hall
; two on each side
and
one at the end that
would
open out
to
the rest of the building and a huge, empty
work floor.
It
was covered in hazmat and high voltage warning signs
and
a 'Trespassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again' one to go
along with it. T
he sound of
several
generators
running
came from behind it.
I avoided it like herpes and
checked the offices for Tracey
since
I hadn't found her in
any of
the tents I
checked outside. T
he three assholes
had to be keeping her close to them the way they were using her in town.

I put my ear to the
first
door on my left, but I couldn't hear
anything
over the noise of the generators. I tried the knob. Unlocked. Of course it was. I thought fire, hot, hot, white hot fire, ready to burn any motherfucking thing that came at me, and pushed it open.

The smell was a disgusting thing that attacked me in the fucking face. There was nobody in the room, probably only because a human being couldn't survive in it. I threw a couple of candle light
-sized
flames around to light up what looked like a hobo's ER.
F
ood wrappers
and trash
covered the floor, just everywhere, shin-deep. Heart monitors and hospital equipment were jammed up in one corner, baled together with wire.
Another corner had f
our black garbage bags covered in flies. And in the center of the room was a steel table with what looked like a clear brain on it. A real. See-through. Human. Brain.
Next to a
set of surgical tools in that blue shit they put combs in the barber shop and
red gas can labeled
'Reagent Bath.'

I killed my lights, got th
e fuck out and closed the door.

Jesus, man. Just, Jesus.

I
took a couple of breaths, put that shit aside, and
put my hand on the knob of door number two across the hall. I thought fire and eased the door open.
A bank of four televisions, two of
them showing surveillance outside
the
metal
building and two showing 'No Signal,' were on a desk against one wall. Catty-corner to it was another desk with three flat screen computer monitors linked together.
Nothing
moved
in the room, but somebody was slumped in front of the computers.

"Hey, guy," I said, ready to burn some ass.

The slumped figure didn't move.

"Shit." I took another breath. I knew what was coming.
I lit up
candle lights in the office
.

The walls were papered with pages
from
porn magazines from all over the world.
Really sick shit
, like the kind they found on governors' and senators' computers right before they had to resign
.
The pages
had blood on them, which led
back
to
the slumped
guy
slumped
. He had
one arm on the
desk and the other on the floor;
on the floor and completely de
tached
from the rest of his body
. Somebody had ripped
the fucking thing
off.
Not only that, but his skull had been caved in, and the rest of him looked
beat to shit.

"Fuck," I said under my breath.

The arm on the floor had a tattoo of Daffy Duck tying off to shoot up
. The elbow floppily bent the wrong way
. I
t looked like the wrist had been crushed.
This was Duck
, this was the fucking guy
.
And it
sure as hell
looked like
somebody had torn his arm off and beat him to death with it.

I told him "Have fun in hell" before
I
killed the lights, shut the door and
got the fuck out.

In the hallway, I loudly whispered, "Trace!
" No answer came.
There were
two offices left.
"I swear, you better be in one of these," I said. She
had to be in one of them
. Or I was just plain fucked.

I tried the
next
door,
ready for any-fucking-thing it could throw at me. It was dark, so I threw up some more lights and nearly set the place on fire; it was packed with paper boxes and stacks of old newspapers to the ceiling. But in the middle of all of it, duct-
taped to
a chair, was Tracey.

Layers of tape were wound around her
head to cover her eyes and ears. M
ore
of it
went around her
and the arms of the chair
to keep
her
sitting in it
. She didn't look like she was awake, and there was
an
IV taped into her left arm
that
hooked her
to a bag of clear fluids
dripping
on a hospital stand.
A pair of men's boxers that were too big for her had been duct-taped to her waist
so they would
stay on.
A
white rag
had been shoved underneath her to sit on. It was
stained
with blood.

I
pushed
her chin up so I could check her throat. She was breathing.

I
shook
her head. "Come on, wake up, Trace.
"

Nothing
.

I plucked her cheek with my finger. "
Tracey.
Wake up."

That didn't work, so
I disconnected the IV
in her arm
. Who knew what the fuck they were pumping into her. The hole bled badly when the needle came out, so I heated the wound to cauterize it
.
This was just my fucking luck.
The cops would be raiding any minute now, and this was what I nearly got killed trying to get to.

I found a knife on a rolling hospital table next to the chair and made a cut on my thumb. If I understood right, the nanites
in me
were programmed to spread out through
the
bloodstream. I squeezed the cut to get a good dollop of blood
and smeared it on Tracey's face and
squeezed
another one into
her mouth.
T
hey would find their way into her system
, maybe
start repairing some of the damage
done to her
.

A yell out on the work floor was cut short.

Fuck.

I shook
Tracey's
shoulder. "Come on, wake the fuck up. You have to get us out of here. You need to 'port us out, Trace."

Still nothing.
My way out of this place was fucked.

I shook the hell out of her and pressed my mouth to the duct tape
on
her
ears
. "Wake.
Up.
"

But i
t wasn't working
.
They had doped her up hard
.
And that meant Silvy was in the driver's seat in Pyramiden.
In
all the shit
in that room
, there wasn't a single picture, cell phone, laptop or anything else Tracey needed to visualize all the teleports
that had been happening in town, not to mention she wasn't even conscious to do them.
I should have fucking known they didn't trust her enough to do it.

I bent down and asked in
the
taped ear, "Silvy, you in there? I know you are.
Silvy
. If you can hear me, use Tracey to 'port me out. I'm right in front of her."

No hiss.

"I'll do whatever you want Silvy. I'll, fuck, just name it."

Nothing.

Something slammed into the o
ther side of the office wall and knocked boxes
over.
Scared the
shit
out of me.

I kicked a chest of drawers stacked with old newspapers. "
Goddammit
, Trace, you're useless, swear to God." All the shit
I had done
to get to her and she couldn't do a damn thing for me.
I had no way out.
Fuck me, man.

I knelt down face-to-face with her.
"Trace, if you're fucking with me, stop
it
.
Please get us out of here.
I don't care about you getting Will in on the bunker
job, okay? I don't care anymore.
Fuck my old life,
too,
I don't care, all right?
You and me are square.
Just get me
the fuck
out of here."

She still didn't move.

"
Silvy,
get me out
.
"

I leaned against the chest of drawers.
Nothing happened.
I was fucked.

My eyes drifted down
to that blood-stained rag
. And the worst parts of
that video flashed in my head.

God, I needed a cigarette.

"Hey, Trace," I said to her. She didn
'
t move. "You know I compared every woman I dated to you after Europe? You were the standard, man, if you can believe that shit now. You were this cool, crazy chick who could hold her own. And fucking
sexy
, too.
I don't know what--"

Something else hit a wall out on the work floor. And another yell went quiet.

I rubbed my eyes.
Fuck.
"So what the fuck do you want to do, then
, Don?"
I asked myself.

My candle lights had involuntarily gotten hotter than the fires of hell without me noticing. They roared wild
and out of control
.

What did I want to do?
I knew three
fucking
assholes that needed to be taken down a shitload of pegs.

I checked Tracey's pulse one last
time
and thought about our time in
France
.

"I'll come back for you, Trace," I told her
and shut the door
.

The door at the end of the
hall was unlocked just like everything else
.
The three assholes might have been unprepared for everything, but fuck if I was.
I fished Rosemary's badge out of my pocket to cause a little confusion and buy me a few
extra seconds if I needed them.
I thought fire, I thought ice. Power shit was a game of mind, not muscle, not body. Had to keep sharp.
My heart was fucking jumping and pumping.

T
he huge cavern of a workspace was cluttered with machines and computers the way the other rooms were cluttered with garbage.
There was so much homemade electronics and computer crap they must have owned stock in Radio Shack.
The portable generators lined up along one wall cranked out power to
bundles of
cables strung
everywhere
on rubber-coated
hooks
. A giant cylinder
labeled
'Cooling' fed liquid into flexible plastic tubes that draped over servers and machinery. Even with all the coolant, the whole place was hotter than the desert outside. Just w
alking in made me light-headed.

Chalk lines on the floor criss
crossed
nearly every inch. White chalk circled
the location on the floor of
each server stack, sparking coil, numbered switches and every other piece of technical shit in the place
.
Co
lored chalk lines
were drawn between the
circles
, linking them in a web
that the
wiring
followed
.