Hush (The Infected: Ripped to Shreds Book 1) (33 page)

"I was sent to keep an eye
on you, Bridget. Just so you know, I'm not sure you were really wrong. Lauren
isn't evil, but you kind of called that one. Can anyone keep her from escaping?
I mean, maybe, but for how long? Still, leave her alive for now, and I can
double check her information. We should get June to do that, too. If she wants,
I mean." The woman wasn't
her
imaginary friend after all.

Rigsby nodded, closed his eyes
and sat still for about five seconds. Then a rather cute looking woman in jeans
and a leather jacket showed up. She was made up, and looked like she was
planning on going out on a date, rather than work. Her look shifted a lot
however, because she was designed to not just read minds, but also be a shape
shifter. That she only moved from one hot looking female character to another
was all about how Rigs thought about her however.

There was a raised hand, and a bit
of a smile, then a grimace as June looked at Bridget hard.

"You ripped her
arm
off? Ouch. I'll go see about what I can find from her. Seriously though, that's
messed up." There was no real scolding in the tone about it.

Then the woman vanished, before
Bridget could do more than make a hard face about it all. She covered that by
putting cake in the middle of it, rapidly. She knew what she was doing however,
and that no one there would be fooled. Not even Brian.

He was about to lecture her over
the idea, when Cindy shook her head.

"Anyway, Rigs, you'll be
glad to hear that
you
aren't in on the latest coup. I can call you that,
right?" She hadn't asked, but it was how he referred to himself
internally, so it had kind of been picked up.

His desire to end her life didn't
change at all, but his words were calm and polite sounding. Nearly playful.

"Sure. What do I call you?
Cinderella
?"
As soon as the words were out of his pointy mouth, he had to fight a wince,
since he hadn't meant to be a dick about things, and didn't want to make fun of
her name in particular.

She just shook her head, and kept
a straight face about the whole thing. She didn't care what she was called.

"Cin is good. Cindy works,
too. Anyway, since you're in on the side of right and good, or whatever, we can
use your help with some things. Babysitting me and Impulse here, for instance.
I haven't gotten anything on it yet, but Bridget thinks there might be some
kind of attack from Team Two tonight. She's been putting out subconscious
prescient predictions the whole time I've known her, and they seem to be pretty
accurate. This one could just be her worrying over nothing though, since I
guarantee you the second to last person that I'd even want to bother fighting
would be her." That got everyone to nod, even though they were all
considering very different people for the number one space.

Brian was thinking of someone
called Tesseract, for instance. Rigs was thinking about
Proxy
, and
Bridget was more worried about Penny Cooper from the front office than anyone
else. That one was odd enough that Cin had to stop and try to figure out why
that was, exactly. After all, the woman was just a person, even if she might
not be seen all the time. That one was due to the fact that Bridget really
liked her, and didn't want her to be hurt.

It was a strange thing to
consider, but honest enough, most likely.

Brian looked at her, wanting to
ask who was in her number one spot. He kind of feared that it would be him, but
she shook her head.

"
Trivia
."

No one told her that was stupid,
though it was clear that Rigsby didn't know who the heck that was. He kept
eating, since he had to put food away about at the same speed that Bridget did,
more or less. The big difference was that he didn't sleep. There was no down
time for him to get away from his rage. Not even a moments rest, when he wasn't
struggling to hold off and not take out a big portion of the world.

Even knowing that he wouldn't
survive the attempt for more than a few moments, it was a constant temptation.
She nearly suggested that genetic treatment of Dr. Burrows, when it flashed up
that he'd already had it. It would either start kicking in at any time, or not.

On the good side for him, his
subconscious mind already knew that it was working. He hated everyone still,
but it was nearly half of what it had been even a week before. At that rate
inside a week he'd be no worse off than he had been his whole life. Given that
he'd managed to not kill anyone for the first fifty years of his existence,
that would work pretty well for him.

Brian looked at his little plate
of food, and was contemplating not eating it, fearing that he'd get fat again
if he let himself go for too long. It was a real eating disorder, which he
knew, but that didn't make it easier for him to not take part in it. That kind
of thing wasn't an idea that she would have really guessed at herself. He
seemed so normal.

For a person that went off to
kill at random times like he did.

Almost as if it were listening to
her, the story, written on what seemed like a computer screen, told her that he
was about to transfer out. Almost as if seeing the same script, he stood, and
started to jog away, speeding up near the end. Then he was just gone. It wasn't
even like vanishing really. He wasn't there, but it happened so smoothly that
it was hard to track.

The interesting part for her was
that she could see what was going on with him, the screen describing it all. It
was an interesting fight for him, since he was taking the place of an adult
man, who'd been about to be mugged to death. The three guys had knives, but
that wasn't helping them much, since two of them were trying to run, and the
other wasn't much of a fighter.

She winced, and shook her head,
as she read the words.

"Well, those aren't happy
guys. Oooh." She looked at Bridget and explained. "Proxy just crushed
a guys ball sack.
Aaaaand
they're down. Now he's breaking their arms and
legs." It took a few seconds, but she was able to point at the right spot,
more or less, just as he was coming back.

Bridget started nodding then, and
moved over to hug her. Then she waved at Brian, searching him for wounds. There
were none. Not even a serious bruise on his hands from hitting people.

"He's fine. The guy,
um..." She had to cross link to find the person that was replaced, and
found the business man, Bart Threwn, to be running away. He didn't know what
had happened, but the older guy was happy enough not to be dead. "He's
fine now, too. Jogging in a good direction."

Brian picked up on what that
meant, and smiled too.

"Cool! You tracked me the
whole time?"

"Yep. It wasn't even hard.
Just like reading a book."

That meant she got to go with him
to the head office to write up a report. Which meant Bridget had to come too.
She wasn't thrilled about it, since it harkened back to the idea that she was a
kid in so many people's minds, but moved along anyway, carrying a large plate
of food with her, so she didn't waste anything. Like time in which she could
stuff her face, or the good food. That was one of the things that seemed to be
real enough, though Cin hadn't checked it out for herself yet.

The food there seemed to be
better than decent.

Rigs opted to stay, not seeing
the need to do anything in particular. His plan involved doing some baking for
the next day, after the official meal. Bridget had come early, in order to not
be trapped in the room with Lauren's angry, traitorous friends. To her that one
just seemed right. Team Two was mainly made of evil people after all. Her old
friends, that had tried to kill her father. Over lies.

Some of them needed to die, of
course. It was written in blood red, and extra bold print. Bridget had plans
for that, but taking out Level first made sense to her on a level that was
nearly OCD. Lauren was probably a class six, and no one else on the team could
match that. Few in the whole world really could. Bridget was one of them, but
that didn't mean she could let herself be stupid about things with Team Two.
Pushing them, letting them work as a group, or worse,
forcing
them to,
was a poor idea.

No, if she wanted to remove them
from the world, or some of the worst of them anyway, it was going to take
planning, patience and care. A lot of her meditation learning had been to allow
her the control she needed not to fly off the handle and just attack like a
moron. If she waited long enough, there would be chances to take them down,
eventually.

One by one, she would.

The girl tried to act calm and
collected, carrying her plate with both hands, to prevent the heaps of chicken
and potatoes from sliding off. She moved at the same speed that Brian did,
which meant that Cindy got to stretch her legs out a bit. They headed back to
the same building she'd worked in that afternoon, to find that a meeting was
going on off to the side.

At least that seemed to be the
case.

Really, it was six people inside
the room, which had an open door to it, and Marcia Turner screaming into a
speaker phone.

"No! We know that you're in
on this Burkes. Report in now, or well be forced to come for you. You don't
want that. This is treason." Her voice dropped an octave, and about fifty
decibels suddenly, becoming nearly a whisper. "Damn-it. I trusted you. You
have five hours to get here. If you try to do anything else..."

There was a laugh then, from the
other side of the box on the table. The people arrayed around it all seemed to
be thinking different things. Two of them were military men, and neither was
absolutely certain they weren't behind what was going on. Senator Roberts
hadn't been told about anything, or heard any hints, but he had spoken to a lot
of people that were simply afraid of Impulse now. That was ridiculous, since
she was only a girl, and not that hard to get along with, but he could get the
general idea.

The man on the phone... Well,
that part was interesting. He was a man, and was, indeed
playing
the
part of Agent Burkes, but now that she had a point of connection to him, Cin
was getting a dual overlay. The top level, which was the man in question, and
the secondary one, which told a very different story indeed.

About who the man
really
was. Cindy moved forward and spoke out loud, staring at the words of the second
set of info. It did keep trying to overlay Agent Burkes words over it, but she
focused and was able to work it all out, if with a bit of effort.

She made her voice sound strong.

"Sam Burwell. Three two nine
Oakley street, Listell Nebraska. Age thirty-four. Wife Carleen Burwell, one
son, Kennedy, age eleven." She got the attention of everyone in the whole
room, including a gasp from the man that was supposed to be Agent Burkes on the
phone. That was enough of a giveaway that Turner glared at the phone, then took
a single deep breath, working some of it out. "He doesn't know what
happened to Burkes, but had to make physical contact with him in order to copy
him like this. He's been paid for this... Um... Let me see here... You have your
account with B of A, right Mr. Burwell? I have the account number here."
She really
did
. It was strange, because there was no way that this guy
could have remembered it on purpose, but he'd looked at it recently enough that
she could pluck it from the words on the page that floated over the phone.

Pushing Turner out of the way she
lunged for the paper in front of her and snagged the pen from her fingers. The
woman was fast enough mentally to understand what was going on. Plus, this
meant that her buddy, Burkes, might not be a traitor.

Oh, he was probably
dead
,
but that was still better than the other options. She could forgive him for
dying on her. Not for betraying their own side.

The Senator got things next, even
though he didn't recognize her in the slightest. At first he thought that she
might be June, of all people. They'd met before, and he knew that the woman
could change shape. What he didn't know was that she was an energy projection
and not a person. That was required to hide Team Four, which was basically just
Rigs.

One man, or bear, depending on
how he identified, who could end them all. One filled with nearly total rage,
which thankfully was dying down now.

As soon as she scribbled the
right number sequence down and the name of the bank, complete with branch,
and
the name of the branch manager, Cin dropped the paper and pen, then moved back.

Then Turner spoke, her voice
nearly smarmy.

"Sam, is it? I think that
you'll want to work with us now. Do you understand? You can't hide from us, and
we aren't going to just let you walk away. It would be a shame for little Timmy
to grow up without a father, wouldn't it?" The woman was smart enough to
know the the name was Kennedy, so she was doing that one on purpose. Intending
for Cindy to correct her, to show how much Marcia didn't care that much about
the boy.

She really
did
however,
which was interesting. Cindy didn't, so she cleared her throat.