Xenofreak Nation, Book Three: XIA (11 page)

Scott landed on his feet on the cab and immediately dropped down behind the lip of the back of the truck. From there, through the sheets of sprinkler water, he saw a circular scorch mark surrounded by broken tiles, which told him his grenade had rolled into the middle of the lobby. There were no bodies nearby, but he spotted some of the xenos hiding behind the body scanners and x-ray belts, while others had taken refuge in the elevator alcove. He couldn’t see much beyond the alcove, but he got the impression the food court had been trashed. He presumed the counters at the various establishments there were also providing cover for the xenos.

What had started as a mob appeared to have dwindled to maybe twenty determined men and women. Most, if not all, would be Xbestia. He set the birdcage and printer down and called, “Cover me!”

As the others responded with a hail of bullets, he jumped off the truck, retrieved the cage and printer and ducked inside the cab. He shoved the cage onto the passenger seat so he could shut the door. Perky screeched in protest at the rough treatment.

He grinned when the truck started right up, thinking,
something’s finally going right
.

He backed up over the debris into the lobby. Water rained down over the windshield, so he turned on the wipers. Bullets began to hit the exterior of the truck with dull, metallic thunks, and broken glass crunched under the tires as he performed a three point turn. When he backed the truck into the hole, Chief Joe appeared from behind the closest x-ray conveyor belt and, even though the xeno knew the truck was essentially bullet-proof, emptied his clip at the windshield. The Native American xeno’s mouth worked as he shouted obscenities Scott couldn’t hear in the cab. Chief Joe would undoubtedly recognize him, but there was nothing he could do about that now.

Once he’d angled the truck so it blocked most of the hole, he shifted into park, removed the keys and slipped between the seats into the back of the truck. As soon as he opened the back doors, he tossed the rifle to Alton, who said, “Yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

Alton dropped flat to the ground and army-crawled under the truck. Scott knew he’d been a sniper in the war, so from behind the front tire, he’d be able to target xenos as soon as they raised their heads to shoot. With Alton providing cover, Shasta shuttled the survivors into the truck.

Scott went around and looked up at Bob and Nicola. The back of the truck was higher than the cab, but the truck was no longer directly under the platform. Bob stood frozen with his hand on the handle of the second floor door.

Nicola scowled and shoved past him. She made the jump easily, sat down, flipped onto her belly and dropped to the ground. She gave Scott a look that was both triumphant and filled with disdain. Then she started for the driver’s door, clearly planning to get to Perky’s cage. Scott grabbed her arm and said, “Get in the back.”

She frowned, but he didn’t hear what she said over the thud of Bob’s feet hitting the top of the truck – only when Scott looked up, he saw it wasn’t his feet. Bob was lying flat on his back, and at first, Scott thought he’d just slipped on the wet roof of the truck. He’d landed with one arm sticking out over Scott’s head and it took a moment for Scott to realize he hadn’t just botched the landing – he’d been shot.

Chief Joe would have known the instant Scott began backing the truck into the stairwell that Scott’s intention was to rescue his trapped coworkers and escape in it. With the truck blocking the hole and Alton providing cover, any shots fired towards the stairwell were unlikely to hit anything. Unfortunately, one of the xenos had gotten lucky and hit Bob.

Scott swore, shoving Nicola out of the way before grasping Bob’s arm and pulling the prone man down into his arms. Bob’s eyes were shut tightly, his mouth open in shock. The bullet had missed the vest completely; his khakis had a hole in them not far below the beltline. There was blood, but not much.

Bob was heavy and didn’t seem capable of standing.

“I need some help here!” Scott called.

Shasta glanced around the back door of the truck. “Alton! Let’s go!”

Alton took another quick shot before rolling out from under the truck and springing to his feet. He took one look at Bob and said, “I’ll get his legs.”

Between them, they got Bob into the crowded truck. The XIA and security staff inside were quiet and hollow-eyed. Several were injured, with bloodstained, makeshift field dressings. Nicola was sitting cross-legged on the floor. When Scott backed in, she held her hands up, so he lowered Bob’s torso in front of her. She pulled the tech’s head and shoulders onto her lap, cradling him gently.

Shasta was waiting for them behind the protection of the rear tire. “Last one.” She lifted her chin at a figure slumped in the corner behind the barrier. “I gave him an extra dose to keep him compliant, so moving him will be a challenge.”

Bob had been heavy, but Lupus was much taller, a big man with dense muscles. He was dressed in a short-sleeved, prison-orange jumpsuit and was conscious, but barely responsive. He had no shoes, just white socks with dirty imprints of his feet on the bottom. He smelled awful, a combination of human body odor and wet dog. Scott thought at first he wasn’t even aware of what was going on, but when Alton helped him haul Lupus to his feet, Lupus’ shaggy head swung Scott’s way. Eyes at half-mast in his hairy wolf face, he slurred, “Going to kill you.”

Scott turned away in disgust. “What, with your breath?”

Lupus dragged his feet most of the way to the truck, making the short journey as difficult as possible. Not far from their goal he suddenly went limp, head lolling forward. The sudden weight of his body as he sagged to his knees jerked his wrist out of Scott’s grasp. As Scott turned to prevent him from crashing to the floor, he felt a hand at his belt and knew the collapse had been a trick.

“Grenade!” he yelled as he clamped both hands around Lupus’ forearm, digging in with his claws and forcing the arm backward. Almost simultaneously, Alton knelt and clasped Lupus to him, pinning his free arm and getting him into a headlock. Scott knew in a close fight Lupus had the advantage, but not against Scott and Alton both, and not while under the dulling influence of whatever drug Shasta had given him. The grenade itself was no threat as long as Lupus couldn’t pull the pin.

“Let it go,” Scott said through gritted teeth. His claws were deeply embedded in Lupus’ flesh, but even as rivulets of blood began to trail down his arm, Lupus kept a death grip on the grenade.

A gun barrel appeared against the grey and black fur on his temple and Shasta said firmly, “I
will
do it, Agent Quinones. You are not worth risking my people.”

Lupus abruptly relaxed, but before Scott could retract his claws and retrieve the grenade, it dropped, bouncing off Lupus’ right calf and rolling a few inches away from his stockinged foot. Scott barely had time to register the danger when Lupus shifted his weight onto one knee and swept the other foot out, shooting the grenade on a trajectory that sent it under the truck and into the lobby.

“Present for you, Joe!” he howled.

Chief Joe now had a high-powered concussion grenade, courtesy of the man he’d come to rescue.

Maddy left the female xeno, whose name was an unxeno-like ‘Rose,’ guarding Fournier’s six soldiers. Those men watched warily as Maddy forced their leader to march towards the abandoned manufacturing plant. Other than the steady plod of their footsteps, the only sound was the wind whistling mournfully through sagging utility pole wires, and the clatter of dried leaves swirling in the space between two rusty smokestacks. To Bryn, the site seemed more than just neglected; it felt like a ghostly, sinister presence lurked here.

The stucco covering the walls of the main building had been beige at one time, but was now cracked and crumbling, spotted with hundreds of spider webs that held a multitude of insect corpses. The busted-out windows were boarded up and spray painted with the message, ‘Danger. Keep out.’ Everything from the walls to the concrete was covered in a thin layer of some filthy, greasy-looking substance.

The Warehouse had been deliberately uninviting on the outside, but underneath it, Fournier’s facility had been clean and sterile. Bryn wasn’t surprised to find the inside of this building had fresh paint and shiny black flooring. It was a huge open space with bare steel I-beams as columns. It was lit throughout by hanging fluorescent fixtures. Most of the floor was empty, but a strange structure had been set up at one end; a large geodesic dome with clear, flexible plastic walls. Connected to one of the structure’s triangular frames was a loudly humming row of what looked like air conditioners, but which she figured was probably a hospital-grade air purification system. Inside, there were white cabinets and tables holding electronic and medical equipment. A woman in a lab coat looked up from a microscope, but none of the other seven or eight people seemed to notice as Fournier and company trooped past. This was Fournier’s new bioengineering lab.

Just like the Warehouse, the back wall had been allocated for office space, but here it hadn’t been built as part of the original structure. Fournier had brought in what looked to Bryn like a prefab school trailer, lifted on a raised platform. The bald xeno’s shotgun never wavered as Fournier took them up a set of metal steps and walked along the platform to the only door.

“This is the control room,” Fournier said.

Dillo opened the door to a small space so crowded with equipment it fairly hummed with electricity. A very thin man with a crooked nose looked up, his face the picture of surprise. He was sitting in one of two office chairs. On the desk in front of him was a holoscreen with two dozen camera views of the plant and Fournier’s house. The views of the fields were peaceful – there wasn’t an impala or cheetah in sight. One view showed Fournier sitting in his living room, apparently relaxing and watching a show on holovision. Padme had replaced the live feed with recordings.

“What the…?” the man started to say.

“Hands where I can see them.” Dillo sounded amused.

The man slowly lifted his hands, staring in confusion at Fournier.

“You’re fired,” Fournier said.

Maddy pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and addressed the man. “You must be Curtis. Padme told me you were a wretched little man. I see she’s described you well.” She turned to Fournier. “Really, Nicolas, couldn’t you have found someone a
little
closer to her level of intelligence?”

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a holophone. Seconds later, Padme’s face appeared. There were hollows under her cheekbones and dark smudges under her eyes. Bryn knew from Scott that she was pregnant, but she looked thinner, in an unhealthy way. In the background of the holo, Bryn recognized the opulent salon on Maddy’s yacht.

The Pakistani girl cringed when she caught sight of Fournier in the holo on her end, but Maddy was quick to reassure her. “He’s well under control, don’t worry.”

Padme lifted a hand to rub the fur on one of her cow ears as if it soothed her. “Good.”

“You heard?” Maddy asked.

Bryn raised her eyes and caught sight of another camera dome mounted to the ceiling, a reminder that Padme had been watching and listening the entire time.

“Yes,” Padme said. “The nanoneuron program is kept on a standalone machine, a portable 3D printer. I installed a tracking device on it. Pull the bottom drawer of the desk all the way out.”

Dillo nudged Curtis aside and did as she asked, dumping the contents on the floor. He held the drawer up; taped to the back was a tiny pinkynail drive, the kind that connected to a holophone.

“I told you where it is,” Fournier said. “The XIA have it.”

“Shut up.” Maddy peeled the tape off the drive with her long fingernails and plugged it into her phone. Underneath the holo of Padme’s head and shoulders, the words ‘Globalocate 2020 installation in progress” appeared. A moment later, a window popped up in the lower right corner with a set of coordinates and an address.

Maddy read it and glared at Fournier. “How did they get it?”

“Tactical error on my part. With Padme in the wind, I decided to send it where I didn’t think anyone – particularly her – would look.”

“Lovely. Well, I suppose that’s it then.” Maddy nodded at the bald xeno and Bryn instinctively stepped back, bracing for a shotgun blast.

“Wait!” Fournier held up his good hand. “I can give you new eyes.”

“What?” Maddy was obviously thrown by Fournier’s out-of-the-blue declaration, but she rallied quickly. “I’m not letting you operate on me! You really are a nutter, aren’t you?”

“I’m not offering to do it myself. Ask Padme. I’ve perfected a technique to implant crocodile eyes into a human and I’m willing to trade that information for my life.”

Maddy, who was still holding her phone, turned to Padme’s holo.

“I want him dead,” Padme said, “but I owe you too much to lie. He can do what he says.”

Fournier stood a little taller. “You’re losing the sight in your one working eye, aren’t you? I can give you better vision than you could even imagine.”

Maddy stared at him, clearly torn, but after a moment, she gnashed her teeth and snapped, “I’d rather be blind. At least then I’d have the satisfaction of knowing you aren’t tormenting some other innocent girl with your perversions.”

She turned and started to walk away. With a wave of her hand, she said with finality, “Kill him.”

The bald xeno raised the shotgun to his shoulder, but never fired. Instead, he made a choking sound and slowly keeled over, dropping to his knees and then flopping forward in the doorway. Dillo stepped behind Fournier, placing Scott’s gun against his cheek and crying out, “Your Majesty! Get down!”

Bryn didn’t wait to see what Maddy did, she pulled Mia backwards past the fallen xeno into the relative safety of the control room. The walls of a prefab certainly wouldn’t stop a bullet, so she whispered, “We should get down, too.”

As she and Mia squatted by the wall, Curtis the programmer began typing madly, probably in an effort to wrest control of the security system from Padme. Bryn looked up at Dillo’s severe face as he stared upward, scanning the dark corners of the main building. She assumed he was looking for a sniper even though she hadn’t heard a shot. Fournier, too, was looking around, a small smile on his face, eyes bright with hope. None of the men noticed as Bryn tugged the sawed-off shotgun out from under the lifeless hand of the bald xeno and fit her finger to the trigger.