Ruins (31 page)
“How can you tell all that?”
“If it was a real gunfight, they wouldn’t have been single shots, and we would have heard more than one gun.” He looked at her. “And if the sniper had hit what he was aiming for, he wouldn’t have had to shoot a second time.”
They crept down the road toward the sound, until the residential street gave way to a four-lane road with a massive shopping center on the other side. The closest building was a restaurant with a silhouette of a lobster on its sign; the parking lot was mostly empty.
Looks like everyone in Hicksville decided to die at home,
thought Kira. Beyond the restaurant was a strip mall, with a few of the storefronts blackened from a decades-old fire.
Well,
thought Kira,
everyone but the looters.
“It came from over there,” said Falin, pointing past the strip mall to a multistory shopping mall two parking lots away.
“That’s good open ground,” said Kira, “easy to defend. Someone in a top window could shoot anyone who gets too close.”
“The shot came from inside,” said Green. “Which means I don’t know what this means.”
“It means it’s easier to avoid,” said Falin. “Back up a block, and we go south with cover and forget it ever happened.”
“I’d like to know what it is,” said Green, watching the mall with sharp eyes. “But I don’t need to. On the very small chance whatever it is comes after us, we’re better off out there than approaching a sniper’s nest.”
“What if it’s someone who needs our help?” asked Kira.
“If I die before expiration,” said Green, “it’s going to be because you said somebody needed our help.”
“I know,” said Kira. She scanned the parking lot, looking for anything out of the ordinary. “If you both say it’s safer to turn back, we turn—” She stopped suddenly. “Wait.”
“I see it too,” said Green. “A body, in the snow by that stand of trees.”
“We have to check it out,” said Kira.
Green sat silently, deep in thought. “It should be safe,” he said at last. “We can advance under cover of that restaurant without anyone in the mall seeing a thing. Jansson can cover us from here in case of an ambush.” They conveyed their plan quickly and efficiently between them, the link doing most of the work, and then Green and Kira ran forward, feet kicking up thick tufts of snow. The trees and the body beside them were just beyond the cover of the restaurant—a small strip of dirt and grass that had once separated the parking lot into traffic lanes now served as home to a full line of young trees. They glanced back, got the okay from Falin, and ran forward again to sink down in the shadows of the miniature grove.
The body lay on its stomach, barely covered with snow; he had fallen recently. Kira reached for his neck to feel for a pulse and recoiled with a disgusted curse when her hand touched a cold, wet hole.
“What is it?” asked Green.
“Gills,” said Kira, recovering from the shock. She rubbed her fingers compulsively, as if she was trying to physically wipe away the memory of accidentally sticking her fingers inside them.
“Interesting,” said Green. “Apparently the Blood Man brought some of his toadies with him and one of them got snagged by that sniper.”
“So the sniper might be inside that mall,” said Kira. “Now we have to go in.”
“I know,” said Green, though the slight pause before he spoke showed how reluctant he was. “I told you you were going to get me killed.”
“I have three more weeks,” said Kira. “Give me a chance.”
Green signaled to the others, and they regrouped by the back wall of the restaurant, well out of sight of the mall. Green explained the situation and mapped out a plan to approach the mall safely. They ran slightly to the right, around a bank and through the strip mall to another residential street beyond; this gave them cars and fences and houses to hide behind, and when they reached the larger mall they were already behind it, running across a narrow loading zone to a windowless blue wall. One of the loading bays was open, and they climbed through to the darkened warehouse.
At this point their communication became entirely nonverbal, and even with her adrenaline pumping Kira had to concentrate as hard as she could not only to detect all the link data but to interpret it. Emotional cues as simple as
SEE
and
SUPPORT
seemed to have much deeper meanings, sending one Partial ahead and another to a flanking position. The team moved seamlessly through the aisles and shelves, and eventually to the mall and the storefronts beyond, and Kira simply followed Green, stopping when he stopped, hiding when he hid. The link data sounded an alarm in her nervous system, and Kira found herself raising her rifle before she even understood why, firing down a hallway as a figure she hadn’t even seen dove smoothly into cover. Falin took up a firing position by the base of an escalator, and Jansson did the same in some kind of café across the hall. Green and Kira and the final soldier, a man named Colin, raced down the hall toward the fleeing shape, only to dive to the floor and scramble for cover when the entire mall seemed to explode into gunfire, bullets flying in all directions at once. Kira crawled into a clothing store, past the racks of snarky T-shirts to the sturdier wood of the counter, and covered her head with her hands. The soldiers started firing back, and Kira was deafened by the noise, until suddenly the shooting stopped and she heard a voice echoing through the halls.
“Whoa! Whoa! Everybody stop shooting . . . everybody else. This was a carefully calibrated ambush that was not intended to catch what looks like . . . an entire squad of Partial soldiers? What? What are you even doing here?”
Kira raised her head. She recognized the voice.
“Look, fellas,” said the voice, “we are trying to engage in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a psychotic murderess right now, so if you’d all just keep your noses out of other people’s business, we could get back to the nightmarish hellscape that our lives have become. Or you could just help us find her. Unless you’re working with her, in which case I really ought to stop talking, and we can all get back to shooting each other—”
“Marcus?” Kira shouted, standing up and edging carefully into the hallway. Green and Colin were both there, in cover positions of their own, linking their confusion. “Marcus Valencio! Is that you?”
There was a long moment of silence, and then she heard him again, his voice shocked and uncertain.
“Kira?”
K
ira looked up and saw Marcus on an upper balcony, leaning over with wide eyes and his jaw hanging open in abject surprise. He looked like he’d been living in the wilderness for weeks, his bronze skin flushed with sweat and adrenaline.
“Kira!”
“Marcus!”
He ran back toward the escalators, and she did the same, racing to meet him, and he clattered down them and dropped his rifle and flung his arms around her, kissing her joyously and lifting her in the air. She clung to him, laughing and weeping and kissing him back.
“I thought you were dead,” he said, over and over in her ear. “When the messages stopped and the Partials stopped looking, I thought they had you.” She felt his tears on her cheek. “What has it been, a year? A year and a half? How are you even alive?”
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, too happy to let go of him. Marcus, her best friend for years, her boyfriend for some of them. Last time she’d seen him he’d been skinny and pale, a medical intern so focused on his studies he barely left the hospital, and now he was toned and lean, quick and alert, as at home in his weathered combat fatigues as he’d ever been in his scrubs. She kissed him again. “What are you doing here?”
“Quiet down,” said Falin. “Didn’t you say something about an ambush and a murderer?”
“Crap, yes,” said Marcus, and pulled Kira down behind the escalator. “Also: murder
ess
. Don’t be sexist, women can murder people too.”
Falin looked at Kira. “You want to tell us what’s going on here?”
“Marcus is one of my best friends in the entire world,” said Kira. “And he’s here apparently . . .” She looked at him and trailed off, waiting for him to fill in the rest.
“We were trying to find Senator Delarosa,” said Marcus. “I’ll get to that later. While passing through here, we got jumped by two Partials: They got three of us, we got one of them, and then we managed to set up what we thought was a pretty solid trap. A better one than we’d planned, it turns out, since we only hoped to catch one Partial, not . . .” He looked at Kira. “Six.”
Her heart tightened, twisting into a nervous ball. The count of six only worked if Marcus knew her secret: the murderess he’d been hunting, the four Partials Kira was traveling with, and Kira herself. She swallowed nervously. “So you know.”
“Yeah.” He closed his mouth tightly, looking at the floor. “I didn’t know for certain until just this moment, but we had kind of put all the pieces together last year.”
Kira let out a long breath and gave a dry, humorless chuckle. “I guess that saves me the trouble of finding a good way to tell you.”
“Actually I would love for you to find a good way to tell me,” said Marcus. “Knowing that it’s true and actually understanding anything about it are two completely different things, and this . . .”
“I wish I knew what to tell you.”
“How long have you known?”
“Since Morgan captured me,” said Kira. “The first time, when we broke Samm out of prison and crossed over to the mainland. When you rescued me from her, I . . . didn’t know how to tell you. You hated Partials—everyone did.”
“He seems fine enough working with Partials now,” said Falin.
“Meeting one you can work with makes all the difference,” said Marcus. “He’s a buddy of mine, and he’s chasing Delarosa right now, which is something else we need to talk about—”
“Movement!” shouted a gruff, older voice.
Marcus looked up sharply. “Is it the other Partial?”
“Don’t know who else it would be.”
“That’s Commander Woolf,” said Marcus. He grabbed his rifle from where he’d dropped it and shouted a question to the vast, empty mall. “Are we all pretty clear on the issue of friends and enemies? I don’t want anyone getting all excited and shooting the wrong person.”
“A friend of Kira’s is a friend of mine,” called Green.
“And a friend of Marcus has my sympathies,” called Woolf. “But no, I won’t shoot them.”
“She just went off the link,” said Green. “She probably put on a gas mask.”
“Damn,” said Kira. “That’s going to make this a lot harder.” She brought up her rifle and checked the barrel, making sure it was loaded and ready and safe. “You said you had an ambush planned?”
“We have snipers on the upper floor,” said Marcus softly, “bait down there and there.” He pointed along the main hallway, terminating in a clothing-filled department store, and then along a perpendicular hall that led toward a food court. “She took the main hall, probably going after Woolf, since he was the bait in that one, but he’s still talking, so he’s obviously okay. She must have got past him when you showed up and we all started shooting each other.”
“We’ll help you catch her,” said Kira. “We’ve got some questions of our own.” She stood up and jogged down the hall toward the department store, keeping close to the wall with her rifle pointed down. Falin followed close behind her, and she felt the combat coordination flare back to life on the link. Marcus followed behind, running to catch up. “Are there any other exits?” she asked him.
“Two ground-floor doors, but we have people outside both of them.”
“So we won’t go outside,” said Kira. “Let’s keep this among people who’ve already learned not to shoot at us.”
A gunshot rang out from the department store, and Falin muttered, “Tell that to her.”
“Woolf’s in trouble,” said Marcus, and surged forward, but Kira held him back.
“This is the third exit,” she said, pointing to the mouth of the department store. “If we go in there and she gets around us, she’s coming straight back here. Don’t let her past you.”
Marcus nodded. “I’m glad we could have our tearful reunion before I crapped my pants from fear.”
She grinned and slapped him on the back, and he ran to find a good watch position while Kira and the soldiers swarmed into the department store. They walked carefully, watching one another’s backs, clearing each new section and display and rack of clothes before moving on to the next one. The clothes in the store were old, but relatively well preserved; some animals had been in here, and spiders had covered the shelves and corners with gauzy white webbing, but the mannequins still stood, posing proudly, ancient sunglasses perched jauntily on their featureless, yellowed heads.
“Commander Woolf?” Kira called out. “Are you still here?”
There was no answer, and Kira proceeded grimly; the man was either dead or a prisoner. The center of the department store was a tall, open area, three stories of balconies connected by a crisscrossing series of escalators. She caught a flash of movement on the third floor, somebody jostling a rack of suits, and pointed it out to Green. He relayed it silently through the link, and soon the entire group was moving—not toward the escalators, but to the staircase in the back wall.
“The escalators are a death trap,” Green whispered. “They’re long and straight with no cover; she could pick us all off on the first one.” He turned to Jansson. “You stay here and point out any movement you see on the link—our target’s got a gas mask on, so she can’t listen in.” He and Falin and Colin opened the door and moved quickly up the stairs, checking each corner carefully, and Kira followed, still trying to keep up with the rapid link commands. She expected them to bypass the second floor, since the movement had been on the third, but they stopped and did a sweep of that floor as well, leaving Colin to watch the stairs and make sure the shooter didn’t sneak past them on the way down. They were hemming her in, slowly but surely, clearing every possible hiding place and backing her into a final, inescapable corner. They stayed away from the edges of the balconies, but they could still feel Jansson on the link, watching out for them from below.