She grinned. Then stifled it. Maybe Cade’s remark about her age bothered her more than she wanted to admit.
She shook it off as she found the fire escape in the alley. Rust-eaten ironwork, only used for smoke breaks by people in the offices above the Wiltern. But it would do.
She hopped up, and was at the second story. Another leap, and she swung forward easily onto the roof.
She took a moment to orient herself, laying the map in her head, memorized with a glance earlier that night, over the real-life grid of the city lights.
There. Her destination was that way.
She stilled herself, prepared for the shift.
It would have been easier if she had eaten. But then, she would have missed Cade entirely.
She wondered, not for the first time, why she remained so attached to him.
She remembered feeling something for him. Fierce and hot and bright, like the sun.
But like the sun, she couldn’t see it anymore.
It was the memory of the feeling that kept her coming back. She wasn’t sure she would like it if she forgot that sensation.
Plus, over a century old, and Cade was still sexy as hell. That helped a lot.
She slipped out of her dress, wearing nothing underneath.
She folded the dress into a neat square, then slipped the dress and her shoes into her bag. She slung the strap of the purse around her neck.
For a moment, she just savored the cool night air on her bare skin. She imagined someone in the nearby buildings, a guy working late maybe, glancing out of his window, unable to believe his eyes when he saw her.
She tilted her head back, ran her hands over her neck, her breasts, her flat stomach. Imagined her watcher watching this, getting excited. Hoping she would touch herself some more.
Then she grinned. This ought to wither his erection.
And she started to change.
She shoved all thought out of her mind. Pushed her mass to her center. Lengthened her tendons, stretching herself, feeling joints pop into new positions. Sucked marrow from the inside of her bones, stored it elsewhere.
Distantly, she heard the cracking noises as her skeleton set into its new position. She reached inside herself, as if withdrawing arms inside her sleeves, and pushed outward, pulling the skin away from her ribs, forming a great wing of flesh on each side.
Then she stopped thinking rationally, as her skull flattened at the cranial sutures, giving her a more aerodynamic profile.
She would operate mainly on instinct now, heading toward her destination, which shone in her mind like light through a keyhole in a dark closet.
She stepped off the roof. The wind rising off the street caught her, and she began gliding across the night sky.
TWENTY-FOUR
Part of this high resistance to damage is due to the altered
physiology observed in subject’s full-body MRI and X rays (see
Appendix: “Medical Imaging”). Subject’s muscle density is roughly
the same as aramid fibers (Kevlar = 1.50 g/ml), or nearly 50
percent higher than standard human muscle (1.06 g/ml). His
bones have a tensile strength more than twice that of an average
human (300 MPa vs. 150 MPa).
—BRIEFING BOOK: CODENAME: NIGHTMARE PET
I
t took Zach a while to notice the black car following him. All his attention was on Konrad’s Ferrari and the unfamiliar L.A. streets.
Then, with a burst of acceleration, the Ferrari sped through a red light. Zach slammed on his brakes as a delivery truck swept through, horn blaring.
Konrad’s Ferrari was gone, and Zach had left a burnt-rubber trail to the middle of the intersection. He put the car in reverse, to get out of the oncoming traffic.
That’s where he saw the black car for the first time, back at the light.
The tinted windows revealed nothing. Both cars just sat there, as if waiting for the starting flag in a race.
Zach checked the streets around him, checked the in-dash navigation system and realized something else. He was almost in downtown L.A., and he had no idea how he’d gotten there.
The light turned green. Zach didn’t move. Neither did the other car.
Not a good sign, Zach thought.
Zach wasn’t completely stupid. He took his phone out of his pocket, and hit the button on the touch screen marked CADE.
Cade answered immediately.
“Is Konrad moving?”
“Oh, we’ve got a
lot
of catching up to do,” Zach said.
“Where are you?”
“Not sure. I tried to follow Konrad ...”
“And?”
“Sorry, I thought you were going to yell at me there.”
“I assume you already know that was a bad idea.”
Zach looked at the black car, still just sitting there, next to him.
“You could say that. There’s someone after me. Black car.”
“You’re sure?”
Another driver behind the two cars honked. Zach, startled, hit the gas. The black car took off a few seconds after he did, and maintained a steady pace a car length behind.
“Cade, they’re right here.”
“Don’t panic. I’ll be there soon.”
“I don’t know where I am.”
“I’ll find you.”
“Cade?”
“What?”
“You sure this car doesn’t have a rocket launcher?”
“Just keep driving. I’ll find you.”
There was a click, and Cade was off the phone.
Zach made a wild left turn, realized he was going the wrong way down a one-way street.
The black car followed him, keeping its distance.
Definitely
not a good sign, Zach decided.
CADE TOUCHED ANOTHER BUTTON on his phone’s screen, and a map of Los Angeles popped up. Zach’s GPS beacon showed him on the edge of downtown—about five miles from where Cade was standing.
Wilshire was bumper-to-bumper with Friday-night traffic.
Cade began to run.
A few people gave him looks, but he reached a side street before he really started to move.
At the end of two blocks, he was sprinting. He stayed in the center of the road, his feet making a sound like a continuous drumroll. In one of the pocket neighborhoods behind the Miracle Mile, a car ran a stop sign, right in front of him.
Cade vaulted it easily. The driver never saw a thing.
Cade kept running.
ZACH WATCHED the rearview mirror, rather than the road. Before he knew it, he was lost. He didn’t even know Los Angeles had railroad tracks, but he’d crossed them several times. Freeway overpasses, offering the promise of escape, were above his head, but he couldn’t seem to find any on-ramps. He’d look up, grinding his teeth, wondering why the hell anyone ever said this city was easy to drive around.
Through it all, the black car stuck to his tail like grim death.
He’d managed to find himself in an almost totally deserted section of town, concrete on all sides, and a bridge—bridge? Since when did L.A. have a river?—in front of him.
A streetlight above went dark. As if that was a signal, the black car revved its engine and closed the gap between them. Its headlights grew huge in the mirror.
The car tapped his bumper.
He slammed on the gas, and the sedan nearly leaped off the road, pushing him back in the seat.
Whatever special government engine he had under the hood, his pursuer had something better. The black car closed the gap, tapping his bumper harder this time.
Zach’s phone started beeping. Not really a good time to take a call, he thought.
CADE PUT HIS PHONE AWAY, with a small amount of frustration. The boy wasn’t answering. That would make this slightly more difficult.
As he thought this, he was running at about forty-five miles an hour on the overpass, not yet breathing hard.
The phone’s GPS tracker put the boy right below him.
He saw both of them—the sedan, driving wildly, and the black car behind it, smoothly accelerating to follow
Slightly more difficult, but not too bad, he decided.
Without breaking stride, Cade jumped over the concrete barrier, out into the empty air.
ZACH SWERVED AROUND A CORNER—and slammed on his brakes.
Dead end. The only thing between him and a concrete drainage canal was a chain-link fence, topped with razor wire.
He didn’t have a lot of time to consider his options. The black car appeared at the end of the street, then accelerated toward him.
CADE STOOD IN THE ALLEY where he’d landed. Zach had raced by a second before. Cade heard the screech of brakes that told him Zach had just discovered the dead end.
Cade put both hands on the edge of the dumpster, filled with metal parts from the machine shop out front.
The pursuit car’s engine told him it had found Zach. He heard it rev and then peel rubber.
He waited, for just a second, calculating the time it would take for the black car to reach the end of the street, for him to reach the end of the alley.
Then Cade put his legs into it and started running, pushing the dumpster along in front of him.
ZACH BRACED FOR IMPACT and wondered if it was going to hurt when he was knocked over the edge.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the rearview mirror. The headlights got bigger again, the sound of the engine roaring—
Something hit the car, knocking it clean off the road. The headlights jerked out of view so fast it was like they were shut off.
Zach turned around in the seat, not believing it.
A dumpster had come out of the alley like a missile, T-boning the black car at the driver’s door.
The dumpster rolled away, crushed from the impact. The black car, crumpled up on one side, rested against a row of parking meters, some of them bent and snapped.
Zach felt eyes on the back of his neck, and turned in the other direction.
Standing in the street, in the sudden burst of steam from the black car’s smashed radiator, was Cade.
Cade walked over to the car.
A thick man in a suit stumbled out of the ruined driver’s-side door, fumbling for a gun in a shoulder rig.
Cade knocked him to the pavement. Then he grabbed the edge of the crushed door, pulling it right off its hinges, and flung it away.
He dragged the passenger out. Zach caught a glimpse of bright blond hair as Cade deposited her on the ground by her companion.
Zach got out and ran to Cade’s side.
Cade examined him. “Are you all right?”
Zach got a really good look at the side of the car now. It was totaled. The wheels were bent off the axle.
“Yeah—I just—holy shit, Cade, how did you do that?”
The blonde shook herself and tried to stand.
Cade moved between her and Zach. She staggered a little on her high heels.
Zach felt a little ridiculous, being protected from a 105-pound. He stepped forward, brandishing his fake creds like a shield.
“You’re in big trouble, lady,” he shouted. “We’re with the Department of Homeland Security.”
She focused on his badge. Then she laughed and stood up straight.
At first glance, you could have mistaken her for a corporate lawyer, or maybe even a TV reporter. She had that kind of brassy, too-perfect attractiveness.
“No, you’re not,” she said, as she brushed the broken safety glass from her blouse.
“We
are.”
She flipped out her own badge.
“Helen Holt,” she said. “Special liaison to DHS.”
Zach stood there looking at it for what seemed like a long time. Cade didn’t say anything.
Zach looked at the blonde again. She gave him a smile that would put any spokesmodel to shame.
“Well ... crap,” Zach said.
TWENTY-FIVE
1957—“Teenage Monster” incident, Camden, New Jersey—Another experiment with Konrad’s work leads to a local doctor, last name Carlton or Karlton, assembling a creature from the parts of several deceased teenage athletes. After the creature murdered several people, Operative Cade dealt with the doctor and his experiment.
—BRIEFING BOOK: CODENAME: NIGHTMARE PET
T
he other man got up off the pavement. He was limping, but didn’t say anything about it. He showed Cade his own badge, which ID’d him as Reyes, also with DHS.
“Mind if I pick that up?” he asked. He pointed to his gun, still on the ground.
“I wouldn’t,” Cade said.
Reyes grimaced, puffed up his chest. Looking to salvage some scrap of his pride. “You going to stop me?”
“Yes,” Cade said. Matter-of-fact. No bluff in it. Reyes considered his options and then wisely chose to join Helen, leaning against the car.
“So you guys going to give us a ride, or what?” she asked.
Cade ignored the question. “Why were you following him?”
“Your colleague was stalking one of our assets,” Helen said. “That caught our attention, you might say.”
“You’re protecting Konrad? Why?”
“I’m afraid that’s classified,” she said. “Let’s just say Konrad is vital to national security interests that don’t concern you.”
“I don’t suppose the president knows about these interests.”
“Oh, do grow up. Plausible deniability. Ever heard of it? The politicians can’t be trusted with the hard facts. You should know that by now.”
Cade stepped closer to her, radiating menace now.
“Perhaps you want to let me in on the secret.”
Zach could feel Cade’s anger. Even Reyes flinched a little.
Helen stood there, serene. “I’m not afraid of you,” she said.