Two Weeks' Notice (29 page)

If it had been secure enough for the two of them, it was a good bet that any other Revived individuals they’d taken might be kept there as well…and there were some more still missing. Chandra Patel, for one. And Bryn owed it to Chandra, too, to try to get her out of this horror.

The gunshots had drawn attention all over the nursing facility—lights blazing on, voices babbling—and as Bryn tried to make her way through the garden, she had to keep to the ever-sparser shadows. She’d just made it past the gazebo when someone thought to turn on the full security lighting in the garden, which lit it up like a football field; Bryn sprinted for the edge of the bushes and out into the darkness beyond.

She didn’t hear anyone yelling on her trail, so she headed straight for the cinder block building, slammed her back against the wall, and tried to
think
. She checked the clip, and controlled a burst of frustration—
should have picked up that bitch’s gun, too
—as she assembled a tactical plan. She’d have to go in through the front entrance, where two of the big male nurses were standing; either or both of them could be armed, and she didn’t know for certain if they were guilty parties or just innocent dupes. She’d rather have tried the rear exit, but the alarm had stopped sounding, which meant they’d closed the door. She didn’t have superstrength or anything. Being hard to kill didn’t qualify as much of a superpower.

If cockroaches were superheroes
…

Someone spotted her shadow against the brick outside, and she heard a yell. A flashlight flared bright, and she moved for the reception area, fast, with the gun pointed at the two nurses. One raised his hands immediately. The other looked stunned.

“Open the door,” she ordered. No reactions. “Hit the button and open the door!
You!
” She pointed at the one who hadn’t raised his hands, and he reached beneath the counter.

She had just enough warning to dive out of the way as a shotgun blast tore through the cheap wood. The nurse yanked the gun free and fired again, nailing her left arm
with pellets, but she shot back, two fast bullets to his chest, and he went over backward and took the shotgun with him.

She switched aim to the other nurse, still frozen with his hands in the air. “Open it!” she screamed.

He slammed his fist down on a button, and she heard the harsh metallic buzzing as the lock clicked free.

Bryn hit it hip-first, and cried out at the agony that zipped up her arm and across her body from the shotgun damage. Didn’t matter. She had to duck to avoid a volley of shots from the other side. Another armed caregiver. That just didn’t seem safe, somehow, having all these guns around the elderly. She didn’t want to shoot back—too much risk of hitting a patient—but she didn’t have much choice, and putting him down with a bullet in his side had the benefit of getting her a handful of room keys.

She found Carl in the third room, strapped to a gurney. He hadn’t been tortured, or at least there was no evidence of blood, which was a mercy. No time to extract him, though. She left him and tried the other doors, looking for Chandra, the other Revived she knew was in their hands.

She didn’t find her, which meant either she’d never been here or it was far too late.

She just barely had time to make it back to Carl’s room and strip away his restraints fast before more gunfire sprayed her way. He was staring at her uncomprehendingly, and for a few panic-stricken seconds she thought they’d drugged him so thoroughly he wouldn’t be able to move, but then he snapped out of it and said, “Bryn? Oh my God, are you here to rescue me?”

She laughed. It rang hollow in the room, and had a bitter, wild edge. “Sure,” she said. “Why not? Get up, you ass. We have to get out of here.”

“I’m sorry about…you know,” he said, as he slid off
the bed. They hadn’t let him keep his own clothes, either; he was wearing—of all things—some dirty pair of denim overalls that sagged around him, and an equally dirty T-shirt.

“Selling me out?” she asked. “They used your Protocol. You didn’t have a choice. Never mind. Get down in that corner.” She shoved him toward it and backed to cover him, facing the door. She’d locked it, but she couldn’t have taken the only set of keys, and even if by some miracle she had, these weren’t the type to play a waiting game. “Did you see Chandra in here?”

“I didn’t see
anybody
,” he said, “except that woman. Jane.”

“Jane’s dead now.”

“Thank God.” His voice was trembling, on the edge of cracking. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t. I couldn’t—”

Bryn couldn’t really blame him; she’d been forced to cooperate, too. That didn’t mean she had to
like
it. She checked the clip in her gun. Only three shots left, and she had the strong feeling that wouldn’t go far.
Damn
, she was missing her riot baton. It made a great close-quarters weapon.…

She spotted the aluminum cane in the corner a few seconds later, and laughed. It was the adjustable model—press in the round button, and the bottom section slid up and down. She slid it all the way out, weighed it, and then decided the top part of the cane was better weighted—more momentum from the heavy plastic grip.

She was back to being the spider, waiting for the fly…until the fly arrived.

The door banged open, and two tear gas grenades rolled inside. Bryn tried to kick them out again, but doubled over, coughing and choking on the fog, and through her tears she saw someone stride forward with a gas mask covering half her face.

Jane.
There was no mistaking those eyes. Of course. How could it have never occurred to Bryn to think she was one of the Revived?

“Surprise,” Jane said, but it wasn’t really. And then she kicked her in the head, several times, until Bryn went dark.

Chapter 14

W
hen Bryn woke up, fuzzy and sick, it all seemed that much worse. She’d wasted a lot of bullets on Jane, and it seemed pretty annoying to be kicked to death by her afterward. But somehow, in the rearview mirror, Bryn couldn’t understand why she hadn’t just assumed it from the beginning, that Jane was Revived; half of those she’d met were clinging to sanity with both hands, and the other half had lost their shit entirely.

Jane was the same order of psychopath as Fast Freddy Watson…someone whose darker tendencies had been liberated by the drugs, who wasn’t afraid of death or pain or reprisals.

It wasn’t good news, and the worst part came when Bryn realized just where she was.…

Back in her original predicament.

Bryn’s gaze focused up on the same grimy ceiling light, the same cracked paint, the same fluttering spiderweb. The same spider sitting patiently in the center, waiting for a new, juicy snack to wander by.

She didn’t bother trying her restraints, or even turning
her head to see if Jane was there. She knew the woman would be.

“Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to Revive
you
?” she asked the ceiling, but she meant it for Jane, and turned to look at the woman’s dim shape in the dark where it sat comfortably, legs crossed.

Jane shrugged and flipped a light switch, and Bryn winced. The damage from the tear gas had healed, but she still felt unusually sensitive to the brightness…but then, the nanites were overworked now, struggling to keep pace with both the body’s natural self-destruction and that imposed on it from the outside. She could expect to be hurting soon…and for any further damage to be slow to heal.

“I’m useful,” Jane said. “To the right people. Cheer up, Bryn. You can be useful, too, if you work hard, study, eat your vegetables, and, above all, stop fucking around with me.”

“Sorry,” Bryn said. “That’s just never going to happen. Maybe you’d better get your badass little spoon again. Or raise your game to a full-on spork.”

Jane leaned over her, and what was in her eyes was like looking through a peephole into the darkest, emptiest hell Bryn could ever imagine. “You,” Jane said, “are going to tell me anything and everything. You’re going to beg me to ask you a question. You’re going to want to tell me so bad you’d crawl over hot coals to lick my ass. Understand me, sweetie?” Her tone continued to be warm, sweet, bizarrely likable. “You are
mine
for as long as I want to play with you. Nobody’s coming to get you. Nobody’s taking you away. There’s no hiding.”

“Prove it,” Bryn said. She didn’t blink. She’d let go of all that fear, all that pain, all that
anguish
that had been haunting her since she’d woken up screaming for the first time with the taste of that plastic bag on her tongue. She
had life, unlimited life, for as long as those nanites could scurry their little mechanical asses through her tissues and give it to her.

And she was going to use it to spit in Jane’s face for as long as possible. If it was insanity, it tasted sweetly metallic, as if she were chewing tinfoil. She didn’t care anymore.
Couldn’t
care anymore.

I think I broke myself,
she thought, and almost laughed.

Jane blinked first. Then she took a step back, cocked her head, and frowned, just a little. “You’re a weird little thing,” she said. “I mean that completely as a compliment. But—Oh, damn it! Does this happen to you? You’re getting really focused and there goes the cell—” Jane’s phone, Bryn realized, was ringing. The ringtone was Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” If
that
wasn’t appropriate…

“Yes?” Jane asked, and put the phone to her ear as she turned away. She strolled toward the door. Bryn focused up on the spiderweb, on the spider, on the cocooned future lunch. Maybe she wasn’t the spider
or
the fly. Maybe she was the web. Sticky and impossible to tear apart, no matter how hard the struggle.

“Are you
kidding
me?” Jane said, lowering her voice to a hard whisper. “
No!
No, I’m telling you, this is the
one
. You do not want to waste this opportunity—trust me. We need—” She stopped talking and stood very still. “All right. You’re the boss.”

Those last words didn’t sound like her at all. None of the cheer. None of the macabre joy. Just flat syllables. Jane hung up and dropped her phone back into her pocket, put her hands behind her back, and spun around to face Bryn with her face pulled into an utterly false smile.

“Aren’t you just the luckiest damn girl in the world?” Jane asked. She was smiling with teeth, and it looked as
if she wanted to bite chunks out of something. Maybe Bryn. “I think maybe you are.
Sweetie.
Well, I have my orders. Let’s get this fucking show on the fucking road.”

She lunged for the bed, and Bryn tensed all over to get ready for the pain. It didn’t come. Jane stomped on something on the bottom of the gurney’s rails, and Bryn felt the bed lurch as the brakes released.

Then Jane shoved the gurney out from the wall and steered it toward the door.

Bryn’s breath rushed out, and she felt every muscle in her body tighten.
No, no, don’t take me to the incinerator.
…She knew what was coming; she’d seen it. But she wouldn’t beg, not Jane. Never.

“Relax,” Jane said, and gave her a bright, delighted, upside-down smile. “You look so tense, baby. We’re just going for a little fresh air.” She opened the door and pushed Bryn’s bed out into the hall, which still smelled of gun smoke and spilled blood. They’d be a while cleaning up the considerable property damage, which gave Bryn a bizarre sense of satisfaction. She’d hurt them. Not as much as they’d hurt her, but still. She hated to go down without a fight.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked breathlessly. “What the hell broke you this bad?”

She surprised Jane, for once; the woman glanced down at her, and there was a momentary gleam in her eyes that wasn’t driven by madness, chaos, or bloodlust. It almost looked…human. “It’s never just one thing,” Jane said. “It’s like falling out of love. You look back and suddenly you don’t know who that person was that fell in love with him, because it isn’t you. You know what I’m talking about, Bryn. A year ago, who were you? Not who you are right now. And you’ll keep changing, because out here on the fringes, there’s no gravity left to hold you down.”

One of the nurses was dead, and two were wounded; she saw the sheeted body, and one on a gurney while the other was being bandaged. The survivors glared. Not in the Revival club, Bryn thought. Not important enough to whatever this bizarre cause might be.

Jane kept pushing her right through the door at the end of the hallway, out into the night air. There was a thin, tentative blush of dawn on the horizon. “I found the old man’s cell phone, by the way,” Jane said. “In the drawer. Still on.”

“Good for you.”

“If you think they’re going to come running to find you, they won’t,” she said. “I had a guy drive it south of the border. Ought to be deep in Cartel Land by now. With any luck, your white knights will go riding into a bunch of machetes and get mailed back in wet little pieces.”

“Don’t pretend like you’re not fucked,” Bryn said, very pleasantly. “The signal got out, and they will have traced it, because those phones like that? The ones for old people? They make them very easy to locate. In case someone falls and can’t get up.”

Jane looked pinched around the mouth this time, and pushed the bed faster. “You think they’ll come rushing into some old folks’ home, guns blazing? Don’t be stupid. By this time, there’s no trace of you in the main building to find. They’ll think it was a decoy.”

“It’s hard to cover up the damage back there. All those bullet holes. All that blood.”

“That’s why, in fifteen minutes, a fire is going to gut the inside,” Jane said. “Terrible tragedy, all those innocent people caught like that. Three of our staff are going to die trying to save them.”

“Three? I only killed one.”

“Well, you wounded two, and I don’t want to explain
it to the cops. Much easier if they die selfless heroes. Do you know what the word
verisimilitude
means?”

“You’re hard on your minions.”

“Oh, baby, you watch too many bad movies, and I don’t have minions. I have
coworkers
. Being paid by the same company doesn’t make us family, and they’d shiv me in the back for an extra dollar an hour. Just like in any other business.”