Honor of the Clan (24 page)

"Rooms," the other man said shortly. "Around the other side, ground floor." He pointed, turning to the back seat to toss the girl a key. "Here's yours, Deni," he said.

The kid took it without comment, and since he couldn't see her face, Luke had no idea what she thought of it. What he thought of it was that he was uneasy putting a thirteen-year-old girl in a room by herself in this kind of shit heap even in broad daylight.

"You're not staying in a room alone, Reardon. I'll take the floor," he said.

Being on the floor would suck, but there was no way he was going to stick Tramp or Kerry in there ignorant of the girl's age. He'd still rather not pass on that bit of information; the only other guy who knew was Cargo, and putting
him
in with the girl was a no-go for obvious reasons.

She looked a little nervous. No, make that a lot nervous. Make that as if she expected to be a virgin sacrifice in the name of the job. Eew. If he didn't know her age, he might have been fooled by the way they'd fixed her up, but knowing it, he looked at her and saw "kid" and . . . um . . . fuck no.

After shooting him a suspicious look that Landrum returned with his own patented "don't be stupid, asshole" expression, Cargo just looked relieved.

As Luke carried her pack and his inside, the kid was looking anywhere but at him, and clearly trying to look as if she went into sleazy hotel rooms, alone, with an adult male, every day of her life. He shut the door behind himself and set the bags down by the chair.

"Quit worrying. I know you're thirteen, and my baby sister is older than you. Get some sleep, Reardon," he said. "Mind tossing me a pillow and the bedspread first?"

The look on her face was priceless.

They went in at night.

Leaving Knoxville in the late afternoon let them get through the mountains before it was quite dark, but by the time they hit Asheville, their headlights led them along a highway almost deserted after dark.

Asheville's geography left many areas that could support homes unsuited to the kind of flat clusters of houses that squatted throughout midwestern suburbia. Towering ridges and folds in the Earth—huge to a man who'd been raised on the Great Plains—were sprinkled with a dusting of lights like stars, shining from the windows of rows of houses along the switchbacks.

Reardon was in the driver's seat. She'd driven from Knoxville, putting her foot down and explaining that she would not get anything but an ulcer from riding in the car—she patted the hood of the drab-bodied old Crown Victoria possessively—with any of them driving. Her tone said, with the disdain only an adolescent girl can muster, what she thought of their gifts in the area of ground vehicle operation.

Landrum and Privett, afraid that her attitude would make Kerry and Tramp twig to her age, readily agreed that of course she could drive. Besides, with Luke riding shotgun, both other men were out of arm's reach of her. They were starting to favor him with knowing looks, though, and he didn't like that at all.

The house they were looking for was about halfway up one of the mountainsides. Vacant neighboring house, empty lot, terrain unfavorable to clusters of homes. It was nicely isolated.

Reardon pulled into the driveway of the vacant house and cut the lights, leaving the engine running. As they got out, they could feel the cold wind scraping against their tilted faces, not buffered much by winter-bare trees. The cold bit them with all the fierceness they knew from winter trips into Chicago, but Luke hadn't expected to find in one of the Southern states.

At shortly past midnight, the lights were off in the Tyler household. Landrum thanked God that they had somehow managed to loot their own gear and take DAG's supply of such nice items as modern night vision goggles with them. He knew from other gear that there was no telling what shit the Bane Sidhe were sticking operators with these days. Genuine DAG goggles meant everybody was seeing like daylight in a black and white movie. Luke's dad had lots of those. This was like "Leave it to Beaver," if the Beave had lived in a big, falling down piece of shit house that had obviously once been a nice place, probably for someone wealthy.

He had heard houses referred to as "falling down" before, but this one actually had the porch roof propped up on one side by a series of warped, hammered-together two by fours. The only thing to indicate the windows had once had shutters was the one window that had one shutter. Two other windows were boarded up. The very small front yard sported a scattering of toys and junk.

They kicked in the front door and went in two by two, clearing the building according to their training, just as they would have in any other hostile environment. They heard the screaming of the mother and child.

Tramp and Kerry found all three cowering back in the parents' bedroom. The wife and boy were on one side of the bed, the scumbag du jour on the other.

"Wait, wait! Not in front of my wife and kid! Okay, I'll go, I'll go if you want, but not here, not like this . . ." the man pleaded.

Still in the process of pleading for his life, he moved suddenly to bring a shotgun to bear on the DAGgers. At least, he tried. Kerry nailed him before the gun had even cleared the top of the mattress.

The screaming of the wife and kid sounded far away and horrendous, and the mother fought viciously, gouging Luke's arms deeply with her fingernails as he pulled her onto the bed and pinned her. The boy was pounding on his back as he fished a loaded syringe out of a leg pocket and hit the woman with a shot of Recalma Plus.

Behind him, he felt the boy go limp and get peeled off his back, turning to see Privett laying the unconscious kid out on the bed beside the mom.

"I only gave him half a shot," Cargo said.

"Right. Cover that with a sheet," Landrum indicated the corpse. "Grab the boy, I've got Mom, we'll dump them on the couch so they don't wake up in the same room with him."

It would be impossible to spare the two civilians the grief and horror of losing their scumbag father and husband this way. They'd wake up and find him, dead. However, the Recalma did more than get them quiet without killing them. It disrupted neurotransmitters in the brain in a way that prevented long-term memories from forming. Completely. The vision of seeing Tyler killed right in front of their eyes wouldn't be repressed. It simply wouldn't be there. At all.

A long time ago, there had been a saying that you couldn't un-see things. Modern medicine had a cure for that, if you got there right on the spot. These two wouldn't remember the last one to three days. There were several drugs that could do it. Recalma had the advantage of being fast, complete, and neutralizing all the adrenaline and related stress hormones and effects.

It was easier to get men to take the shot when they knew that any civilians watching
could
unsee it, after all.

While they'd close the door as best they could, it might get pretty cold in here before morning. They piled all the blankets and stuff they could easily find on top of the two survivors, placing them right next to each other for shared body heat. On the top, Cargo put a red and blue patchwork quilt with rocking horses that he'd found in the kid's room. He noticed absently that it looked like good work—something Grandma Wendy would like. The boy was lucky somebody had cared enough to make it for him.

"She punched me. On an op. For no damn reason. Twice!" George Schmidt danced around the court, dodging Tommy Sunday to land a nice shot through the hoop. "Nothing but net," he crowed.

The gym they were in only had enough light to see clearly because it had a lot of high-up windows, many of which gaped, empty of glass. The shards scattered around the edges of the court revealed that the breakage had come from outside. The stray rocks lying around suggested its cause. Someone, or someones, had been awfully bored. That the vandalism was old, or had at least started long ago, showed from the water stains down the cinderblock walls and the warped and rotting edges of the floor boards under the breakages. George had taken one side of the room, Cally the other, when they arrived, just to make sure that every breakage was old. The gym was in one of many post-war ghost towns. Farming continued in the open land around the town, but large agribusiness had gotten larger with the post-war hybrid technologies. Hectares of waving wheat went from seed to harvest without a single human setting foot on the fields. Smart machines and engineered seed took care of all that.

In the heartland, the breadbasket of the world, agribusiness ruled. Where you could really see it was in the scores of ghost towns dotted all over the Midwest. The disadvantage of a ghost town for dropping any tails was that any car turning off a route or highway stuck out like a sore thumb. The advantage was that because cars back in town were so rare, it was hard for a tail to hide.

He could watch the roads into and out of town, but he could not watch every little tractor and truck trail the farmers used to use. The plan was to loop around and hit a road some small distance out from the town. Their tracks would be found, of course, but by then they hoped to have confused the trail and slipped away.

Meanwhile, Harrison and Sands were out in an ancient utility shed in the backyard of the slowly collapsing house next door repainting the car. Cally was making lunch on an ancient Coleman camp stove they had found, unaccountably half full of fuel, in said shed. She had appointed herself cook on the grounds that Harrison was the only other team member who could fix a decent meal from their box of supplies in the trunk. She had declared that she wasn't going to eat sandwiches twice in one day if she could help it.

Hence, George and Tommy were free for a little quick PT with an old ball that it had taken Harrison about five minutes to repair, and George was free to vent about his beaut of a black eye.

"What had happened just before that?" Tommy asked, shooting carelessly over the short man's head. To his chagrin, he missed and his opponent recovered on the rebound. He concentrated more on the game while Schmidt filled in the details of their heroic egress from the Greenville Police Station.

"Oh. So she was taking a guy down and you inserted yourself to help. Yep. That'd do it." Tommy intercepted the ball in the air and shot again; this time he made it. "What the hell is it with you two?" he asked.

When George started to say something, Tommy just shook his head, grinning. "I know James Stewart," he said. "You do not want to let him catch you cuddling up to his wife."

"
Cuddling up to her?
Half the time I want to strangle her," the other man said.

"You two are so junior high." Tommy missed the grab and watched as the ball dropped through the basket from another of Schmidt's seemingly effortless shots. Schmidt was good enough, despite his height, that the game of one on one wasn't nearly as mismatched as it might have seemed.

"You want to fuck her. Join the club. You can't. She thinks you're cute, so it's worse. You still can't. End of story, grow the fuck up," the big man said, but he said it in such a matter-of-fact tone that it was impossible to take offense.

"She thinks I'm cute?" George echoed.

"Dude. James Stewart's wife. You're damn good, but he's better. I wouldn't. And she won't, anyway."

"But she thinks I'm cute." The little blond man missed his shot by a mile, letting Sunday recover the ball for an easy lay-up.

"You're hopeless," Sunday pronounced. "Just find somebody else to screw and behave yourself until it wears off. And if you don't, don't say I didn't warn you." He focused and dropped another one right in. "That's ten. My game."

"What do you mean 'join the club'?" Schmidt asked suspiciously as they walked off the court.

"Don't look at me. You've seen my Wendy. There's a club, all right. I didn't say I was in it."

"You didn't say you weren't."

Tommy set the ball down by the door to the old locker room, which, unlike the gym itself, was dark as hell. They just had to go through there to get to the lobby of the building. "Hopeless," he repeated.

The gym at the base had water fountains on two sides. Miraculously, the chiller on one of them even worked. Aluminum bleachers stood collapsed against the walls on each side of the basketball court. The curtain at the far end of said court was open, leaving a good view of exercise machines, a free weight section, and a compressed obstacle course. All were in use, as was the matted martial arts area. The DAGgers on base, even the ones who were Bane Sidhe first, coped with their enforced idleness in a way that kept them fit, busy, and not coincidentally, together. PT was a near religion for them and, like people turn to faith and each other in times of trouble, the DAGgers immersed themselves in PT schedules that were frankly brutal, raising protests from the medics who they kept busy with over-training injuries. Bane Sidhe sports medicine, as a result of decades of Tchpth patronage and lack of Darhel interference, was leagues ahead of their prior experience. With fear of injury greatly reduced, the men took full advantage of their extended envelope. They did, at least, readily share the facilities with the permanent denizens of the base and the dependents.

The Bane Sidhe field operatives, however, made it subtly clear that
they
were sharing
their
 facilities with DAG. With the large number of DAGgers who had started as Bane Sidhe, and the others having witnessed the performance of the upgraded field operatives, especially the women, this didn't cause the friction it might have. There was respect between professionals. Rivalry, but it was a bit hard to get used to cute chicks who could and would run you into the ground or kick your ass, situation depending. Not that they were
that
far ahead of peak male athletes. They didn't always win. It was still a novel experience for those who hadn't previously encountered upgrades.

News that the equipment that achieved these results was no longer available was greeted with intense disappointment, a sentiment that was, of course, completely unrelated to the new tendency to overtrain and screw the transient, readily reparable injuries. Like stress fractures. The clinic director was beginning to scream about his budget.