Patrick Lee - The Breach

He stared at her. Stared at the others, too. They looked back at him, almost as lost as the dead that lined the wall.

He had to leave them. It wasn't even a choice. That didn't take away the guilt, though.

The crucial seconds were racing by. He shook the trance and looked down at his still bleeding right hand. The blood trail would give him away. He stooped and grabbed the Medic from where he'd dropped it. Held it in his left hand. Aimed it at his right, the way Paige had aimed it at the wounded man in Zurich.

He pulled the trigger, and found out he'd been wrong a few minutes earlier when carving his hand with the metal loop. That hadn't been the limit to how bad pain could be. Not even close.

His breath rushed out. The edges of his vision darkened. He held on. Stayed on his feet. Looked down at his hand as the pain faded. The thing hadn't fixed him perfectly-skin and muscle still hung in strips-but the wounds had hardened over, as if cauterized without any sign of being burned.

He grabbed the backpack, shouldered it and turned to the others.

"Ninth number on my phone," Paige said again. "And don't get killed."

Travis managed a smile. No more seconds to burn. He burned one anyway. Knelt and kissed her. Soft, intense, fast. Then he stood, looked at her for another half second, and ran from the room, grabbing one of the guards' rifles as he went. As he reached the elevator doors, he saw the stairwell door next to them shudder. Some other door in the stairwell, high above or below, had just been opened. They were coming.

Three presses of the button, then hold for a five-count. He reached to do it, then stopped.

Fifty feet away, Paige's office door stood open. On her desk, where he'd left it yesterday, was the black case containing the transparency suit.

Twenty seconds to reach it and come back to this spot. None to spare thinking about it. He sprinted for the office. Through the open door. Grabbed the case, turned, ran hell-bent for the elevators again. Three presses. Hold for five. Those five seconds felt like minutes.

The elevator doors parted on darkness, with faint light coming down from high above. He saw the elevator cab just a few stories below, its roof a mess of piled cable. Its brakes must have stopped it against the wall. To his left he saw the inset ladder. He wedged the black plastic case into his waistband and stepped to the rungs.

As he climbed, he saw that Paige had been right. The top of the shaft had been blown away, revealing a patch of deep violet sky with a few stars visible in it. That opening was ten stories above. Even as he considered the impossibility of reaching the top before Pilgrim's people arrived and saw the elevator doors standing open, he felt the ladder rungs vibrate in his hands. A moment later he heard the deep clatter of their footsteps descending past him in the stairwell on the other side of the wall. Any second now With a muted ding the doors onto the shaft slid shut twenty feet below. The soft thump of their merging synched perfectly with the crash of the stairwell door being kicked open, and the riot of running footsteps in the corridor just outside.

Travis remained frozen on the ladder, the rifle in one hand, and sighted on the closed doors.

The footsteps faded.

But they'd be back soon. When they reached the conference room, how long would it take them to figure out where he'd gone? Where else was there?

Travis slung the rifle and climbed again, quickly. Seconds still counted. Pilgrim wasn't with the men who rushed into the conference room. Five of them. Armed. Pissed. They reacted to the two dead gunmen, then saw the blood trail leading from their corpses to the group of captives. The path Travis had taken. One or two of the men looked down, seeking a continuation of the trail out of the room and confused at not finding one.

"Where's the hero?" the first gunman said.

Paige said nothing. She wondered if they'd start executing the survivors to make one of them talk.

Then the man who'd spoken seemed to figure it out-enough to make a decision, anyway. He turned and led his group out, leaving one behind to watch the room. Ten seconds later Paige heard them stop at the elevator shaft and begin straining to pry apart the doors manually.

She felt her stomach twist. It was happening too fast. Unless Travis had climbed very, very quickly, he couldn't be out yet. She heard the straining voices suddenly pick up an echo: they'd opened the doors to the shaft. An instant later they were firing. Full auto. So many shooting at once, it was just a monotone roar. She could picture them, not even looking up the shaft as they reached in and fired. Not needing to, with that kind of firepower. Nothing up there could live.

She tried to make herself ready for the sound that was coming.

She heard it. She wasn't ready.

A man's scream, drenched with the kind of terror only something primal could induce. Like a long fall. The scream echoed down the shaft from somewhere high above. Then silence-even the guns had stopped. A full second later came the impact, something crashing down onto the roof of the elevator cab as loud as a grenade blast.

It might as well have been her own body hitting, for the effect the sound had on her. Tears again, hard and unbound. They did nothing for the pain.

Voices in the hall. The men coming back. Laughing about something. She wiped her eyes on the knees of her jeans, and looked up as they entered the room. They were lugging Travis's body, one man to a limb. They dropped him right in front of Paige.

Travis's eyes-not quite staring in the same direction as each other-were pointed more or less toward her, and the side of his head was caved in to the depth of a soup bowl.

She wanted to hold in the screams, both to save face in front of her people and to deny Pilgrim's men the satisfaction.

Neither reason was enough. When she finally got control-a little control, anyway-she found that Pilgrim's men were still there. Staring at her, it seemed. No. At the space beside her. Where Travis had been bound earlier. They were looking at that space, and at his body lying on the ground.

They looked scared.

Like they'd just realized exactly who they'd killed. The man their boss specifically wanted alive, for whatever reason.

"What do we tell Pilgrim?" one of them said.

The largest of them shook his head. "Nothing. Hour from now, he'll have the Primary Lab open. That'll make him happy, maybe enough not to fucking kill us for this."

They left the room, leaving three behind on guard.

There was nothing left of the pole barn on the surface. The walls and roof had been blown away by the same blast that had ripped open the top of the elevator shaft. Probably a football-sized lump of C4 dropped from high above by one of Pilgrim's men, on the way down.

Travis stood next to the gaping hole in the concrete, surrounded by open desert, cool in the predawn twilight. To his left, the pile of old cars that had leaned against the back wall of the building had been sent sprawling. All that had withstood the explosion had been a heavy-duty charging station for the all-terrain electric carts. Two of the three carts were wrecked, but one of them, plugged in and charging on the far side of the station, had been sheltered from the blast wave and remained intact.

After all the strange things he'd experienced in recent days, he'd just set the bar a few clicks higher. Somehow the word replica didn't quite capture the feeling of looking down at a perfect copy of your own body. Because, in a real sense, it hadn't been a replica. It'd been him. Him, to the last atom.

Only dead.

There was a vague silver lining: once you'd stomached the surreality of looking into your own corpse's glassy eyes, it didn't take much more grit to shove it over the edge of an elevator shaft.