The Living End (14 page)

Nedry stood me in the corner of the room and shut the door, putting two inches of steel between us and the gunman outside. He didn’t lock it. If the room was soundproof, I had a chance at taking him down without drawing the guard’s attention. If not, I might as well hang a target around my neck and brace for the gunshot.

Nedry put his back to me. He puttered around the shelves, laying out a hypodermic needle sized for a horse and arranging a scattering of jars and vials as he hummed tunelessly under his breath.

“Take your clothes off and lie down on the gurney,” he said, not looking back.

I was taking a hell of a risk going up against an unknown mage with armed backup ten feet away, not knowing how or what could trigger the alarm and the lye deathtrap, but I’d tilted the odds as far in my favor as I could. Unless I wanted a firsthand experience of what that dead monster in the hall had endured, it was time to make my move.

I hesitated, just for a heartbeat.

Nedry smelled the change in the air. His head jerked up, taking in the room’s reflection in the chromed cabinets. The image bounced off his glasses and back again, redoubling into an infinite void with all of his attention on just one thing: the expression on my face as I dropped the zombie act, hardened my eyes, and called a spark of magic to my fingertips.

I
t all happened in the space of a breath.

Nedry’s face contorted in rage, his puffy lips peeling back in a grimace as he lunged for a scalpel. He twirled and whipped it through the air with perfect aim. The gleaming blade streaked toward my eye like an arrow. My cards crackled with energy, and the queen of spades flung herself into my outstretched fingertips, carrying my hand up with her momentum.

The scalpel’s blade punched through the card’s face, stopped dead in its flight. Then the hex Nedry had laid on the scalpel kicked in and sent a vicious shock down my arm that left me numb and reeling, like I’d just clamped my palm over a Taser and pulled the trigger.

Fight-or-flight kicked in, and the adrenaline flowed. I gave the gurney a savage kick, sending it rolling into Nedry and knocking him against the counter. He fell back, fumbling for his hypodermic needle as the lab door flung open and the guard’s silhouette loomed on the threshold.

I reached up, grabbed the surgical light fixture, and heaved. The boom arm flew, and Nedry had to throw up his hand to keep the fixture from slamming into his head. The guard’s rifle swung up toward me, but he paused, frozen in surprise for a second, as another card leaped out of my pocket and into my hand.

That was all the time I needed. The gun clattered to the floor and so did the guard, clutching at the card buried halfway in his throat as arterial blood guttered down the front of his camouflage fatigues.

Nedry was on his belly, reaching for the needle where it had rolled between the gurney’s wheels. I stomped down on his hand hard enough to feel bones crack under my heel. Then I dropped my knee onto his back, grabbed his other hand, and wrenched it behind him.

“If you want to die today,” I hissed in his ear, “go ahead and scream.”

He wheezed out his pain through gritted teeth. His fractured hand flopped on the tile like a dying fish.

“We’re going to play a game,” I said. “It goes like this. I ask questions. You answer them. If you answer them correctly, you win valuable prizes, like the ability to continue breathing.”

He grimaced and shook his head. I gave his arm a hard twist to keep him focused.

“Question one. The jets in the cell where you’re keeping the prisoners. What triggers them?”

“The—the silent alarm at the reception desk,” he said. “Who
are
you? Are you a cop?”

“You wish you were that lucky. Question two. How do I deactivate the system?”

“I don’t know. Just go to the utility room and turn off the water main, I guess. I don’t know. I’m not the damn janitor. God, you fucked up my hand—”

“Focus,” I said, giving his arm a tug. “What are Lauren and Roth up to? Why are you turning these people into monsters?”

“We’re not—” he started to say, then coughed. “We’re not turning these people into
monsters
, you asshole. That’s just a side effect. We are on the cutting edge of magical science, and you have no idea,
no idea
, what you just stepped in.”

I hauled him to his feet, keeping his arm pinned behind his back. On the other side of the room, I caught his expression in the glossy chrome fixtures. Despite the pain, he had a nasty little lizard smile on his puffy lips, and I didn’t like it.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I said. “You’re going to be a good little hostage while I free those prisoners. Then you’re going to take me to Lauren Carmichael.”

“Sorry, champ,” he said, “but my backup just arrived.”

He stared into his reflection on the far side of the room, our images redoubling and bouncing back in the mirrors over his eyes. I glanced to the doorway. Nothing there but a dead man and a pool of stale blood. The fix was in. Nedry was too confident to be bluffing, but I couldn’t figure out his angle.

“What, you expecting a guard patrol?” I said. “I’m betting you’re the star of the show around here. They won’t shoot as long as I’ve got you.”

“Don’t look now, but there’s somebody behind you,” Nedry said.

There was nothing behind me but the polished chrome counter and a span of mirrored wall. I took a step back just to be safe. My hip bumped against the cold metal.

“Guess what,” Nedry said. His voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s
me
.”

Hands burst from the mirror, six identical hands at the end of six identical white-sleeved arms, and grabbed me from behind. Nedry’s face flashed on every reflective surface in sight and every mouth tittered and leered as the real man slipped free of my grip. Hands clamped down on my arms, my wrists, my throat, hauling me back against the counter and pinning me fast.

I’d never seen a trick like that before, but I didn’t have time to admire the technique. Nedry didn’t stick around. He broke and ran, no doubt going to fetch more of Caine’s mercenaries and come back with some serious firepower.

Or trigger the alarm and kill every single hostage in that death cell.

I twisted my left arm hard, breaking loose, while the mad giggling of dozens of reflections echoed in my ears. I flailed wildly, trying to grab something I could use from the scattering of surgical tools Nedry had left behind. My fingers closed around a heavy steel shaft, and as my thumb pressed down on a toggle switch, a vicious circular blade on the end of the shaft whirred to life. Bone saw. That’d do. I wrenched my arm, leaning as far sideways as I could, and pressed the saw against the mirror.

The reflections screamed.

As the saw chewed into the glass, spitting glittering dust, the hands released me and yanked back into the mirror’s depths. The spell broke on a sudden gust of heat—there, then suddenly gone, leaving nothing in the room’s reflections but me as I dropped the saw and staggered away from the counter.

No time to rest. I ran for the door, pausing to crouch down and pry the sleek black rifle from the dead guard’s clenched fingers. I could turn cards into deadly weapons, but they were lacking when it came to the intimidation factor. An assault rifle wouldn’t have that problem. Then I patted the corpse down, dipping my fingers into his pockets, and came up with a heavy ring of keys.

I’d never beat Nedry to the front desk. I darted back toward the cell, keeping the rifle up with its butt braced against my shoulder, and tried the handle on a door marked Utility. The bare-bones and dusty room on the other side held the building’s main boiler, fuse box…and two steel vats, eight feet high and half as wide, hooked to a pair of metal mesh hoses that ran up into the ceiling.

Killing the power wouldn’t work. Any security setup worth its salt had the alarm system on an independent circuit, specifically so guys like me couldn’t shut it down by yanking a few fuses. I wasn’t dealing with amateurs here. That left the vats.

The machinery joining the vats was a nightmare jumble of pipes and flanges. Since you couldn’t really hire a professional plumber to set up your deathtraps, some clever techie on Angus Caine’s payroll must have done it himself with whatever parts he had on hand. The one thing that looked familiar was a valve jutting out at the bottom of the assembly, right under a pressure gauge.

It looked like a cutoff valve. Assuming I had any idea what I was looking at. Assuming it would work. Assuming the whole rig wasn’t an elaborate fail-safe, a trap that would start the killing rain as soon as I turned the wheel.

That was a hell of a lot of maybes.

No time to think. Nedry would be seconds away from the front desk, probably with a platoon of thugs on his heels. I had to decide, right then and there.

A drop of icy sweat slid down the side of my face as I took hold of the valve and gave it a twist.

Nothing happened. No rattling, no gurgling sound surging through the reinforced pipes, nothing at all. I turned the wheel until it couldn’t budge another inch, hoping I’d cut off the system. If not, things were about to go from bad to worse.

I got to the cell just as the alarm started to whine.

I fumbled with the guard’s key ring, jamming key after key into the heavy barred door as Eric, Leroy, and Bull shouldered their way through the crowd of zombies. Leroy looked up at the sprinkler heads and grabbed the bars, rattling them as hard as he could.

“C’mon, man,” Leroy cried. “Get us out of here!”

Angus Caine’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker.

“All right, lads, we’ve got a situation gamma. Containment team to the breach point. Everyone else rally on me. Facility’s compromised, full burn. Purging the cells now.”

“Come
on
!” Bull shouted. I tried another key, but the lock didn’t budge. My hands shook but the next key slid in and greeted me with the smooth sweet feel of the tumblers rolling over. I slid the cell door open, and the men burst out into the hall, just ahead of…

…nothing. The sprinklers dangled over the prisoners’ heads, motionless and silent. The cutoff valve had worked after all.

“Don’t celebrate just yet,” I said. “He said a containment team was coming to the breach. I’m guessing that’s Nedry’s lab, which means they’ll be heading this way. Leroy, you said you were military, right?”

“Long time ago, yeah, but I still got it where it counts.”

I handed him the Tavor. “Here. You can use this better than I can.”

Eric frowned, probably doing the same head-math I was. He looked from the closed double doors on one end of the hall up toward the bend in the corridor about a hundred feet in the other direction.

“We’ve gotta fall back,” he said. “This is a shooting gallery. Second they come through those doors, we’re screwed.”

He was right, but I hadn’t seen anything resembling defensive cover. We could stay here and get chewed up in the hall, or run and get bottled up in Nedry’s lab. Then I snapped my fingers.

“No we’re not. They don’t know I killed the sprinkler feed, right? As far as they know, everyone behind those bars is dead. That means when they come through they’ll be looking straight ahead, not at the cell, at least for a couple of seconds. Tunnel vision.”

“So we stand just inside the bars, off to the side,” Eric said. “Let ’em pass ahead of us and hit from behind.”

Leroy checked the rifle’s magazine and flicked off the safety. “Rock and roll, baby.”

I didn’t like our odds. Four men, three of them half-starved and only two with weapons, against a team of professional mercenaries?

I hoped we didn’t lose the element of surprise, because that was the only thing standing between us and the grave.

C
rouching behind the bars of the open cell, we waited. One of the double doors swung open.

A slim metal cylinder arced over the threshold, clattering onto the stone floor and rolling to a lazy stop. I had just enough time to take a deep breath before one end burst and clouds of voluminous white smoke hissed out to fill the corridor.

I had expected trained soldiers. I didn’t expect tear gas.

The Xerxes troops hustled in fast, four of them moving two by two, faces shrouded behind oval-eyed gas masks that made them look like a flock of hungry owls. By the time one glanced to the side and noticed the cell was full of living prisoners—and the door was wide open—it was too late for him. Leroy’s rifle erupted in a quick three-round blast and blew the back of his skull open.

Eric barreled out of the cell and into the white fog. He threw himself onto the closest mercenary, all fists and feet and violent hunger. Bull was right behind him. Leroy squeezed off another burst as the tear gas billowed and swallowed us all.

My eyes stung like I’d stuffed slivers of fresh-cut onion under the lids. My burning lungs spasmed out the poisoned air as fast as I could breathe it in. I charged into the fight. A white-hot blast of gunfire strobed to my right and chewed into the wall. Off to the left, another rifle spat fire and sent a silhouetted body slumping to the ground. I ran up behind one of the guards and threw myself on him, yanking at his mask and ripping it off his face. He pulled his trigger, firing wild and blind, and someone else grabbed him from the front, tore the rifle away, and slammed him in the gut with it.

When the toxic smoke cleared and the fighting was done, four dead men lay sprawled and shattered across the bloodstained floor. Three of theirs. One of ours.

I slumped against the cell bars. Across from me, Eric’s face was a puffy mess of tears and dried snot, and I figured I couldn’t look much better. He cradled a stolen rifle in his lap, pointed lightly at the one Xerxes merc still breathing on the floor. Leroy hadn’t come out so good. He sucked air between clenched teeth and cupped his free hand over a stain on his side that seeped red between his fingers.

Bull was facedown and long gone.

Behind me, the other prisoners mostly just lay where they’d fallen, gagging and spitting in the aftermath of the gas, but too far gone in their drug dreams to do anything but moan and hold their heads.