Rachel Caine: Two Weeks' Notice

The question was slipped in smoothly, in the same lazy tone, but Bryn’s nerves were raw and razor sharp. She didn’t answer. She and Jane continued to exchange stares for so long that Bryn lost count of her heartbeats, and then Jane finally shrugged.

“Doesn’t really matter,” she said. “You have a pretty limited circle of friends, Bryn. We roll them up; we get everyone who might know. Sorry, Annie, but that includes family, too. You’re just along for the ride. Sucks, I know.” Jane looked over her shoulder to Robinson. “Pete, do we have a twenty on Patrick?”

“Not at present,” he said. “I have a team at the estate, but nobody’s home. She even brought the dogs with her, which means McCallister and the butler aren’t planning to come back.”

“Do you know where they are, Bryn?”

“Not a clue,” she said. “And he’s not a butler.”

“Amusing that you think that matters, Bryn. All right. This has been really nice, and Annie, lovely to meet you, but I’ve got to get back to work tracking down all the cockroaches running from the light. Tedious.” Jane rose and went to the door, opened it, and said, “In case you’re wondering, the oven you saw on the surveillance? That’s here. It’s where they dispose of live Revivals they’re done using. Sorry I can’t watch, but I’ll be sure to run the tape later.”

The door slammed shut behind her with a boom, and Bryn and Annie were left with Robinson and his three guards. The man had a blank, soulless look in his eyes. There was no point in appealing to his humanity, Bryn realized; he didn’t see either one of them as remotely like him.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Now.”

There was a time for fighting for their lives, and it came as they stepped outside the conference room.

Annie had been the first one out, and her flinch and attempt to pull free of the guard holding her was Bryn’s first clue that something was wrong— more wrong. Then she caught a glimpse of the two medical gurneys lined up in the hallway, complete with restraints, and experienced a horrible flashback of being strapped down, Jane, the spoon, the surveillance video of Jason screaming in the incinerator’s flames.…

And Bryn snapped. Hard and clean.

Her elbow caught the first guard right where it should—squarely in the nose, shattering it and sending him reeling back off-balance. Bryn spun and followed with a sharp heel-of-the-hand blow that drove the broken bone up into his brain.

His eyes rolled up to show whites, and he dropped. Dead, or so badly disabled it wouldn’t matter in terms of the fight. Bryn went down with him, which led to a confusion of people tripping over their bodies as she wrestled the gun out of his limp, warm hand.

She rolled, sending another guard reeling for balance, and while he was gaining it, she shot him three times. The bullets entered under his chin and exited through the top of his skull in a bright red mist.

Two down, but her window of opportunity had snapped shut. These weren’t mall cops; they were highly trained security personnel, most likely with military backgrounds themselves. As she reached to retrieve the second guard’s gun, she took fire from the third, the one holding Annie as a shield.

The bullets hit her in the side, the back, and the shoulder—not the head, which would have stopped her. The damage was probably fatal, but not immediately so, and she didn’t fucking care. At all. Bryn’s legs went numb, but she twisted around and aimed left-handed.

The agent was almost completely covered up by her sister, and he fired again, missing Bryn’s head by inches.

“Annie, drop !” she yelled, and shifted her aim to Robinson, who was in the process of drawing his sidearm. She killed him with three shots to the face, counting on the fact that it would take Annie a second to process her instructions, and sure enough, her sister had just decided to release her knees and drop when Bryn guided the muzzle back.

The agent was pulled inevitably forward to hold on to Annie—off-balance and with too many things on his mind. He fired, but missed, and then his hostage’s head dipped, and Bryn had a good, hard target.

She fired three more shots, and he fell backward, dragging Annie with him. She fought free of his limp arms, grabbed his gun, and stumbled over to Bryn. “Get up!” Annie screamed, and dragged at her elbow. “God, Bryn, get up!”

“Can’t,” Bryn said. She felt terribly calm just now. “One of the bullets hit my spine, it’ll take time to repair. Go, Annie.”

“Go where ?” Her sister was crying, on the verge of hysteria. “Bryn, get up !”

“Try to get to the loading docks—that’s probably the best chance of an open exit.” There, on the opposite side of the hall, was the locked door with the ominous biohazard sticker. “Drag Robinson down there. Hurry!”

Annie grabbed the fallen Robinson by the collar and dragged him over the guards’ bodies, then down the hall. There were alarms sounding, and it was a matter of seconds before this would all be for nothing.

“Use his palm on the scanner!” she said. “Then swipe his card!”

Annie did it, but she had to swipe twice before the lock clicked open. She grabbed the door and swung it open, propped Robinson’s body against it, and came back to grab Bryn under the arms and drag her in that direction. Then she kicked the dead agent out of the way and slammed the door shut. “They can get in,” she said. “And we kind of left a trail.” Of blood. Bryn’s blood.

“I know that,” Bryn said. They were in an air lock with thick glass inset into the next door, and another scanner and—this time—a numeric keypad. Beyond that glass was another room.

It looked like a hospital ward. Gurneys, each docked at a medical monitoring station with readouts.

Hundreds of gurneys, all full. Most of them were occupied by elderly people, but there were a few younger ones…and Bryn recognized two of the faces.

Riley Block and Chandra Patel. Hooked up to machines, lying as still and silent as all the others in that room. There were two people awake, wearing negative-pressure biohazard suits, checking machines and making notes on clipboards.

Bryn raised her gun and fired into the glass, one pull after another. The first two only cracked the surface; the fourth punched straight through, and the fifth broke half the glass free of the mounting.

A new alarm started sounding. The two Pharmadene employees inside the room turned to stare in confusion, but Bryn wasn’t worried about them; they were lab dweebs, unarmed and about as dangerous as the Pillsbury Doughboy in those inflated suits.

Annie didn’t need prompting on this one; she reached through the broken glass and turned the inner handle on the door, and silicone seals broke with a sound that made Bryn think of lips smacking, as if the room itself were consuming people. Annie dragged Bryn inside and slammed the inner door again, not that it would help, and propped her up against the wall.

Bryn’s body tingled and zinged as the nanites zipped around frantically trying to repair her damage. She could feel one of the bullets, the one in her shoulder, being pushed slowly back out through the wound track. Nauseating. “Unhook Riley and Chandra,” she said. “Get them out of there.”

Annie rushed to do it, and pulled the central line free from Riley’s bone-pale arm. There was a gout of blood, and then…

Then it almost instantly healed before Annie could even press her fingers over the spot.

“What…?” Annie said, and looked to Bryn for some kind of explanation. “Okay, that’s weird, right? Even you don’t heal that fast.…”

Riley Block sat up with an indrawn gasp and screamed . That was a very familiar sound, a lost and awful wail that trailed off into confusion, and then Riley opened her eyes.