Rachel Caine - Terminated

She nodded, and then Joe got out and walked toward the clinic. Like Riley, he did a good job of selling his distress, but instead of looking like someone in need of a fix, he walked fast, a little unsteadily, like a man urgently in need of help.

Her phone rang when he was still outside the door, and when she put it on speaker he said, “Going in, radio silence.”

She listened as he did the same exchange with the receptionist, who sounded just as disinterested with a bloody man as she did with drug-seekers, though at least she asked him a few more triage questions. He sold it just enough to need to see a doctor but not enough to be rushed through to the front of the line, and Bryn heard him settle into a chair. “In place,” he said in a low voice. “Riley’s secure. . . . Wait one.”

In the distance, Bryn heard a voice calling a name she didn’t recognize, but Joe muttered, “She’s going back. Hang on. Stepping it up.”

He must have stood up, because she heard him say, in a louder voice, “Hey, can I get some help here? I feel kinda—”

And then there was a loud, concussive thud, as if he’d keeled over and hit the floor.

Bryn resisted the urge to speak, but she quickly armed herself with a handgun and extra ammo, and got out of the vehicle. She took the keys with her, and locked it, since there were weapons inside she didn’t want to see walking away in the hands of scavengers. Then she faded into the shadows of a doorway, well out of range of the fading daylight, and watched the clinic’s brightly lit entrance.

She heard sounds and mumbling that signaled Joe being escorted to the treatment area, she guessed; within about thirty seconds he was professing that he was fine, and they must have left him alone because he muttered, “In the back. Riley’s got a bed across from me, but she’s curtained off. Will try to get a look.”

“Careful,” she whispered back, but she wasn’t sure he could hear her, and it was superfluous advice, anyway. He rose, and she heard the scrape of curtain rings as he exited his treatment area, then another similar sound as he entered Riley’s.

And then he said, in a slurred, confused voice, “Wait’ll I tell my wife about this!”

Wife.

She gasped in a breath and burst from cover, crossing the thirty feet to the clinic in seconds. The swinging door slammed open under the force of her outstretched arm, and she vaulted over the reception desk feet first, sending the openmouthed lady sitting there over backward in her rolling chair.

Bryn didn’t stop for more than an instant to get her bearings, and didn’t need to, because she could hear the sounds of things falling and breaking from her left. She charged that way, just in time to catch Joe as he staggered backward down the hall. His head wound was still bleeding, but he was now also sliced down the arm, and it looked deep. She steadied him and pushed him behind her, and took in what was in front of her.

It wasn’t good.

Riley was pinned down in her bed by a man in a lab coat armed with a scalpel. He was an older man, maybe in his early fifties, with a graying fringe of hair that clung to the curve of his skull and desperate dark eyes shining behind wire-frame glasses.

The scalpel was at Riley’s neck, pressing hard enough to draw a red bubble that burst and ran threads down her pale skin. She was absolutely still, but her eyes were open and burning.

“I may not be able to get her head completely off before you stop me, but I’ll do a fair job of trying,” the doctor said to Bryn. There was a glittering mist of sweat on his brow, but his surgical hand was absolutely steady. “A blade this sharp will make the soft tissue part like silk. Back off.”

“Riley?” she asked.

“Dr. Ziegler, I presume,” Riley said, and Ziegler looked down at her with an almost comical surprise. “You’re coming with us.”

He got in one slice that sent a fountain of blood rushing for the ceiling, but Riley had hold of his wrist by then, and she was rolling him off the bed and to the floor, and Bryn joined her fast. Together, they wrestled the scalpel away from him, and Riley sat back against the tile wall, gagging and holding a hand to her sliced throat.

“She’s dead,” Ziegler said, and bared his teeth. “And you won’t get anything from me!”

“Who exactly do you think we are?” Bryn asked him. “Riley?”

Riley gave her a silent, shaky thumbs up. Ziegler did a double take that was just about priceless in its sincerity, and watched as Riley’s arterial blood loss lessened, then stopped.

Healing.

“Oh God,” he whispered. “Oh God .”

“Not hardly,” Bryn said. “Up. We’re going.”

She grabbed a stitching kit and bandages on the way out, not for Riley, but for Joe, who was looking legitimately green now. He took the medical supplies and led the way out. Bryn had the doctor in an armlock, and hustled him out as fast as possible. The people in the waiting room had either vanished, or were trying to be invisible, like the receptionist, who was crouched down on the floor looking terrified.

Riley was right behind them.

It was a long hundred feet to the SUV, and Bryn handed the doctor over to Riley as she dug the keys from her pocket and unlocked it; Ziegler went into the backseat with Riley and Joe, and Bryn took the driver’s position. She peeled out fast, checking for any police lights, but nothing popped in the mirrors.

Apparently, responding to an altercation at the free clinic wasn’t a hot priority. Thankfully.

“Hey, Doc,” Joe said. “Whatever happened to first, do no harm ? Isn’t that still a thing?”

“Screw you, you freaks—” Dr. Ziegler’s voice faded as he looked at Joe more closely. “You’re not healing.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“You’re not one of them?”

“I’m not even sure who them is right now.”

Ziegler looked confused now. And scared. “You—you’re not with that psychopath Jane?”

“Definitely not,” Bryn said. “But you’ve definitely got my interest, Doctor. Please, go on.”

“Your friend needs attention.”

“Then do it. There’s a suture kit right there, and Betadine here in the first aid kit on the seat. But talk while you work. We may not have long.”

The doctor didn’t fuss about it; with Riley’s silent help, he opened the suture kit, gloved up and threaded the needle, then washed Joe’s arm slash with Betadine before he began the handiwork. “Sorry about the pain,” he said. “No local.”

“It’s cool,” Joe said. “One thing I love about docs—they might slice you up, but they sew you back together afterward.”

“You’ve lost a fairly significant amount of blood. You’ll want to rest.”

“Does that really look likely to you?” Bryn said, and got silence in response. “Doctor, we got your name from decrypted Fountain Group materials. What is it exactly that has you involved with them?”

“Research,” he said, and wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then continued to stitch. Bryn tried to hold the truck steady, and Riley focused a flashlight on Joe’s arm as the doctor worked. “I’ve been involved in the program for years. But I got out.”

“Let’s get specific,” Bryn said. “Tell me about the Fountain Group. Names, places, details.”

“I can’t,” he said. “They’ll kill me. They’ll kill my family. They’ll kill everyone I ever met .”

Riley must have recovered enough to speak, because she said, “Too late, Doctor. They’ll know we have you, and that makes you toxic already.” Her voice had a hideous hoarseness to it, and that leant a scary conviction to her words. “It was only a matter of time, wasn’t it? That’s why you were hiding out at the free clinic. I can’t imagine it’s your usual digs.”