Hellbent (29 page)

This was no time for philosophy.

Bullets banged against buildings and ricocheted off the sidewalks at my feet. I took it off road, leaving the sidewalks and the
brightly lit oases of NASA buildings for the quieter, darker, soft-shoed progress of the lawns. Just once I felt the sting and ping of a round snapping into the turf nearby—casting up grass, dirt, and pebbles. I wasn’t worried about any near-misses, though. If they had a trained sniper watching from wherever, that was all right with me. Let him waste his ammo. I’d be well out of his range shortly after I was out of his sight.

(Look at me, assuming masculine pronouns. I’m a shitty feminist, it’s true. But surely the sheer statistical majority of snipers are men? Does this let me off the hook?)

To her everlasting credit, Creed didn’t actually stop chanting. Her words snagged when I hit bumps, and her cadence became forced more than the easy, steady stream of syllables she’d spewed out before. Of course, she was being carried at something close to the speed of sound, so power to her for not losing her place, or however it goes when you’ve clearly memorized hundreds (thousands?) of words on a very destructive, sensitive subject like “assassinating people via hurricane.”

On and on she spoke, breathlessly, fiercely, practically in my ear.

On and on I ran, not fully certain of where I was headed, apart from “back toward the building this lady is trying to blow up, and then behind it.”

I crossed my fingers and prayed that Adrian had found a suitable getaway vehicle, and decided to assume the best, since he hadn’t offered any objection when I gave him the assignment in the first place.

Above us the sky was moving in a big black block, broken up by the shadows and outlines of clouds bigger than mountains, sailing in dark and monstrous from the Gulf. Lightning cracked among them, lacing them with light that was smothered almost instantly, as if it’d drowned in oil.

I tried not to look.

It was hard not to look, or it was hard until the rain started—and then it was hard to hold up my face because the droplets were huge, jabbing down from the hideous, plague-sick night clouds like vengeful thumbs. I blinked against them, but running as fast as I was, they only hit me harder and smacked me to the point of stinging—and to the point of wondering if one could be flayed alive by raindrops.

I clutched Elizabeth against me tightly, trying to shield her by holding her head and torso inside the hollow of my neck, and up against my breasts—taking the brunt of it if I could. In retrospect, it was
her
damn storm; I should’ve let her get smacked around by it for a while, but I didn’t. Even though she was larger than me, taller by a couple inches and heavier by twenty or thirty pounds, she felt fragile in my arms.

At the edge of the parking lot I stopped, stunning us both—but not stunning her so badly that she ceased her susurrus whispers, even as I set her on her feet and she swayed there, then leaned on me, then stood upright without me. Upon letting her go, I shook my hands like they’d fallen asleep, for they were racked with pins and needles. Then I stood there, shivering and clutching myself while her power gathered and her bone glowed like the moon.

After a moment, the pattern of her mumblings drew to a close and she bent forward to rest her hands on top of her knees. Her head hung down. She breathed like she was fighting the air for every lungful. I could see that she’d finished something. I could tell it from the cracking shock of light that cut the sky from horizon to horizon, and the way the wind screamed in waves that came steadier and steadier, until the whole world was a wall of billowing air that couldn’t be fought, cajoled, or reasoned with. I could see it in the way the undulating aura dissipated, and left her concretely
before me without any of the distortion she’d carried with her thus far.

“Elizabeth?” I asked her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

Before she answered, a squeal of tires somewhere far away—no, somewhere very close—made a valiant effort against the buffeting wind and the persistent noise. I craned my neck and looked around, hunting for the source and hoping like hell it was Adrian, because if we hadn’t lost those security people, they could well be coming up on us. Or the cameras. Shit, there were cameras everywhere. If they had any kind of central authority, someone in Building 110 was watching every camera in every zone. They’d spot us eventually.

This wasn’t that.

My first guess was the right one: It was Adrian, screeching around a line of parked vehicles in a big-ass Hummer. “I thought they quit making those,” I said to no one, and the storm ate my observation. Who cared if it was old, new, or vintage? It was exactly the kind of vehicle someone might need to move through a hurricane, and fuck me but we needed something to move us through a hurricane.

Had Elizabeth thought that far ahead? Had she ever planned to leave in one piece, or was she expecting to sit down and die in the place where she used to work? But there I went again, trying to rationally analyze an irrational situation. Besides, I had her. I could ask her later, when we were someplace dry and unassailed by meteorological mayhem.

At the edge of the chaos, I heard people’s voices. I looked behind us, worried about more gunshots and thinking that I sure was glad some earth-hating redneck fascist had bought a war vehicle in which to tootle around southeast Texas.

No worries. Well, not the worries I expected. The security
people were out there, yes—but they’d either lost interest in us, or they hadn’t figured out we were the people they’d been chasing earlier.

They were distracted by other things at the moment, namely the crowd that was leaking out of the banquet building via every door that would allow an exit. The overdressed guests were shouting to be heard over the weather commotion, and some were saying, “Bugger all this for a lark,” and heading toward the parking lot. Bowed against the wind, ducking wind-tossed debris, and in some cases holding menus over their heads for the world’s most inadequate rain protection … they pooled around the building like a bunch of morons. Who the hell leaves the shelter of a big, secure structure when a sudden storm comes galloping onshore?

But maybe they weren’t total morons. I want to think they sensed that something wasn’t right, or that they needed to escape the venue rather than hide inside it. They couldn’t have known it was the right thing to do, not on any conscious level, but instinct is funny sometimes.

So are cell phones, and iPhones, and the kinds of devices that might have told them they were being subjected to a very
personal
form of attack. Everyone who’d subscribed to severe weather alerts would’ve gotten a text message that something messed-up was under way.

And, I had to conclude, no one could’ve guessed how quickly it would come. I’m sure some of them assumed they could outrun it and wanted to head home to beat the rain. Even so, it all felt counterintuitive to me. Maybe that’s because I don’t know dick about hurricanes. Perhaps there’s some protocol with which I’m unfamiliar, but I doubt it. I think it was just people being people. Being clueless, and inadvertently self-destructive.

Adrian squeezed the Hummer between two cars with cheerful
abandon—the kind of cheerful abandon that creates a great rending of steel and leaves paint chips and broken light covers everywhere. It put him right in front of us, though—stuck in his headlights.

Through the windshield, I could see his face. It was contorting into something like surprise, confusion, suspicion, and outright disbelief. Fair enough. I hadn’t told him I was bringing company.

No time to fight with him about it.

I dragged Elizabeth to the back passenger’s-side door, wrapped my chilly hand around the rain-soaked latch, and gave a yank that almost pulled the door off, but didn’t. It opened, and I bodily tossed my companion inside.

She didn’t put up even the slightest token of resistance. From looking at her, I assumed this was due to the fact that she was exhausted. We both appeared half drowned and run ragged, but I hadn’t been hanging around summoning the elements all evening, so between the two of us I was in better shape.

As I climbed into the passenger’s seat and whipped the door shut, I heard her say, “Ah. There it is. In time, I hope.” Then she put her head down on the seat, and exhaled with a smile that signified a job well done—or vengeance well achieved. Or that unicorns were bringing her diamond cough drops, I don’t know.

She wasn’t dead, but she was out cold.

I knew it immediately. The presence of her psyche disappeared from mine, as neatly and suddenly as if someone had flipped a switch—meaning, of course, that her aforementioned plans of controlling twisters were out the window, unless she’d somehow programmed them before passing out.

“What the hell have you done?” Adrian all but shouted at me.

“Don’t yell. I’m right here. And you—get us
out of here.
”

With a draw of his elbow he threw the Hummer into gear, but
not without complaining. “You brought her along for the ride? Have you completely lost your mind this time?”

“I couldn’t leave her,” I countered. “People were shooting at her. And she seemed nice.”

“Nice?” He hit the gas and the wheels spun, then caught and shot us forward. The windshield wipers were banging back and forth full tilt, doing virtually nothing to clear the view but giving it the ol’ college try.

“Nice enough. I wanted to help.”

“You’re deranged.”

It was rude of him, yes, but I didn’t press it. I grabbed the seat belt instead and strapped myself down. I’d never been inside a Hummer before, so the buckles, braces, and
Oh-Shit
bars were in an unfamiliar formation. Struggling with the buckle, I got myself fastened into position just in time for Adrian to hop the curb and take us bouncing across the flooding prairies of neatly mowed grass that lay in strips among the compound’s structures.

“Where are we going?” he asked me. “And what did she mean?”

“As far away from here as we can get. Inland, whichever direction
that
is. And what do you mean, what did she mean?”

“Inland? That’s the best you’ve got?”

Conveniently enough, there was a compass built in a bubble on the dash. It said we were going south, which wasn’t good. “North, then. North or west. Look.” I poked the bubble, and the small globe within it swayed. “Turn around.”

“Ha.”

Behind us, the fastest of the vehicle-owning engineers had made it to their chariots, and the parking lot was clotting with a honking knot of fender-benders. “We need a detour. And just before she conked out back there, she said
It’s here, and in time
, or something like that.
What’s
here?”

I craned around to see into the back. Adrian took a sharp left turn and Elizabeth Creed rolled off the seat, down onto the floorboards.

My bad. I should’ve strapped her in, but at the time it hadn’t seemed like the most efficient use of those scrambling moments. She was probably better off down there anyway. She didn’t have as much room to toss about and get herself hurt. But she wasn’t really the focus of my attention now. After making note of her position, the only thing I could see was the back windshield.

Or that’s not quite what I mean. I looked toward the windshield and saw nothing but a sheet of black. At first I thought it was a ludicrous tint job, the kind that douchebags sometimes get when they want to pretend like they’re drug dealers. But no, it was not a tint. Just the sky, which was falling down.

“Adrian …”

“I’m going as fast as I can!”

The Hummer scuttled over the curbs and over the grass at a speed so uncomfortable that every bump felt like someone punching me in the tailbone.

“Get us away from the banquet hall. Or the cafeteria—whatever that was.”

“I’m. Working. On. It.” He informed me through gritted teeth.

Something huge and round smacked loudly against the front windshield, breaking off one of the wipers in a violent, smashing twist. Lightning told me it was a stop sign. The brief blip of illumination also told me that it’d cracked the windshield, but the structural integrity held.

We weren’t driving anymore; we were wading through the fiercely blowing litter of the entire NASA compound, all of it being hurled via winds traveling so fast I shuddered to speculate. Rocks, leaves, a bicycle, and a single cell phone kamikazed the
Hummer en masse. We bullied onward, despite the fact that we couldn’t see where we were headed, and if it weren’t for the bumbling bubble compass, we would’ve no doubt driven around in circles.

“Shit,” Adrian declared. “Shit shit shit shit
shit.
”

“I heard you the first time.”

“This place is a goddamn maze!”

“I have maps!” I remembered.

“Fat lot of good they’re doing in your bag, there.”

“Give me a second, would you?”

I unzipped the sodden duffel and retrieved my bag, which was not quite soaked through. That damn duffel was “water-resistant” at best.

It dawned on me that I should pray I hadn’t broken any of the bones, but right then and there it seemed like a minor hypothetical calamity compared with being trapped in a space compound while a hurricane and all its attendant twisters came barreling toward us.

“Got ’em,” I announced, and I flipped through the damp sheets in a frantic hunt for the pertinent schematics. “We need a point of reference.” Gaining one was easier said than done, since water cascaded over every window, and on the other side of the water was nothing but mobile darkness incoming. “Forgive me, but I think I have to roll down a window.”

“No.”

“Yes. Can’t see anything with it up. My apologies, but here I go.” I pressed my first two fingers down on the window button like I was taking its pulse. The sheet of tempered glass went skootching jerkily down until I was on the receiving end of a downright
biblical
facial.

I squinted against the water and leaned my head out as far as I could—then unbuckled my seat belt so I could climb up on the
window and sit on it Dukes-of-Hazzard-style because, son of a bitch, if we didn’t find our way out of this rat trap soon we were all going to fucking drown … or possibly be picked up and chucked into a wall by that giant tornado behind us.