Family (3 page)

I felt the emotion rise. “I will.” I did it quick, so he wouldn’t see it – I raised my hand and clubbed him in the side of the head. Not too hard, but enough that his eyes rolled back. “Sorry,” I said as I lifted him onto my shoulders, careful not to touch his skin against mine. “No time for an argument.” I turned to Scott. “We go out the back and we run. If they want to come after us with a helicopter, we’ll find a big rock and take it out of the damned sky.”

“Sounds oddly familiar,” Scott said with an ironic smile, leading me out of the entry to the living room and into a kitchen in the back of the house. Andromeda followed us; if she had an opinion, she didn’t voice it, but she seemed to be taking everything in. The kitchen was white; linoleum, cabinets, countertops – the whole room felt bright, aided by a floor-to-ceiling sliding glass door that had the shades pulled back from it, the sun illuminating the room.

Sudden motion drew my eyes as Scott adjusted Reed on his shoulders and then lashed out with a kick to the kitchen table, sending it flying through the sliding glass door, breaking it to pieces as the table launched out and flattened two guys in black with submachine guns who had been easing up to it.

I heard the staccato sounds of gunfire pour into the windows on the sides and front of the house and I ran for the sliding glass door, only steps behind Scott. I scooped up one of the submachine guns from one of our fallen attackers, taking a second to stomp his head as I passed. I noticed Scott do the same and we both opened up with bursts of gunfire on the corners of the house as we ran, firing less for effect and more to drive the bastards following us into cover where they wouldn’t be able to shoot us – hopefully.

The backyard of the house went several hundred feet to the treeline of the woods behind it. To me it was an open question whether we’d even make it to the woods without getting hit. I vaulted over the cedar railing of the deck, Zack heavy on my shoulders. I heard Andromeda behind me and saw Scott go over as I landed. I ran, feet pounding against the grass. Another burst of gunfire caused me to zag, but it didn’t slow me. I turned and fired an offhand three-shot burst that forced a guy behind the corner of the house as I peppered the wall next to him with lead.

I fired another for good measure as I hit the treeline, but this one went wide; I was firing a submachine gun at long range and with one hand; even though I was stronger by far than a human, I wasn’t a miracle worker, and the gun kicked quite a bit. I heard bullets pepper the trees over my head, and branches snapped. One hit me in the side of the face as I passed. I veered behind a tree and fired again until the magazine ran dry. I flung the gun as I came over a slight rise and zagged behind another tree, altering my path to give me better cover. A look back confirmed it: I couldn’t see the house anymore, the trees allowing me to screen myself from their sight and line of fire.

We ran for minutes, outpacing our pursuers. I could not hear anyone other than Scott, puffing as he ran alongside me, following the natural veer of the landscape. I saw him, his face scratched and slightly bloody from where low-hanging branches had hit him as he passed. Andromeda made not a sound behind us, and I had to look back to make sure she was still there.

The woods were sparse, covered by a layer of dead pine needles, the underbrush not too thick here as we ran down, heading into a natural valley. I saw water in the distance, I thought, though it was hard to tell through the trees and the underbrush.

“Let’s go east for a while,” Scott said. “Unless there are any objections?”

“None here,” I said. “Every direction is the same to me – except for the one we just came from.” I looked back to Andromeda, who had stopped about twenty feet behind us, and was holding still, her tourist t-shirt the oddest contrast to her locks of sandy brown. Her face was perfect peace, a contradiction to the way I had met her, screaming, furious. “Andromeda?”

She was staring into the distance, beyond us, and I had started to slow to wait for her. “It doesn’t matter,” she said softly, and even across the distance between us I understood her words.

“It matters,” Scott said, having stopped himself, rebalancing Reed on his shoulder. “We need to get to cover, and find a way to dodge them for a while—”

“Irrelevant,” she said. Her eyes were locked on me, and I could see something behind them, something she almost seemed to want to say, but couldn’t find the words for.

“Andromeda?” I asked, uncertain. I had stopped, and could hear Scott’s breathing behind me. The wind was warm, a little drift of heat running across my face. The breath ran through me, and I could feel Zack’s weight on my shoulders, anchoring me to the earth.

“We need to keep moving,” Scott said, and I saw him looking around, as though our black-clad pursuers would descend at any moment.

“There is no escape. They have been waiting for this.” She seemed so certain, I didn’t feel it in me to argue, so I just listened to her. It felt as though all motion had stopped around us, like the woods had frozen, and the sounds of the crickets and birds had ceased, leaving a wall of silence around where we stood in the shade of the forest.

“No time for a defeatist attitude,” Scott said. “Let’s keep moving.”

A gunshot rang out, louder than the submachine guns we had been firing, clear and punctuating. Scott blanched and so did I. I saw Andromeda look down as she fell to her knees. A crimson stain spread outward from the center of her chest, a steady dribble of red running down the front of her white t-shirt. She hit her knees, then fell sideways.

“No,” I gasped, and ran to her, felt the rough ground beneath my knees as I landed next to her, dropping Zack without thought or ceremony. “Andromeda,” I said, touching her cool skin. I felt a prickle of activity; she had been only one of two people I’d ever met that I could touch without harming, and as my hand landed on her arm, I didn’t feel the usual draw of her soul through me, the way I did with others.

It felt…normal? “Andromeda,” I said again, cupping her face between my palms.

She let out a breath and coughed, a racking spasm that brought blood to her lips, little drops of it dotting her cheeks and chin, as it came out in a fine mist with every breath and settled on her pale face. She grabbed my arm, pulling me closer, then locked her hands on my face, staring into my eyes. “Remember me, Sienna Nealon,” she said, gasping for breath. “Know this…there is a traitor among you, in your Directorate.”

“A…what?” Scott said. He was next to me now, watching Andromeda, his eyes wide, his sandy blond hair streaked with dirt and grime from the ground. “A traitor?”

Her eyes flickered open, and she nodded, then focused on me, her brown eyes fading. “Remember me,” she said, her eyes still locked on me. “Remember me when you are cast back into the darkness, and I will light your way – I will show you the way.” Her next breath brought up more blood, but she smiled through it. She looked up, past me, into the sky. “The sun…haven’t seen it…for…”

Her grip on my arm loosed, the light faded from her eyes as she went limp in my arms, the smile disappearing from her face as the muscles went slack.

Chapter 3

“No time to mourn,” Scott said, abrupt, a mask of control wavering on his face. “We need to go.”

“She’s dead,” I said, whispering. “She’s dead, and—”

“And we’re next,” Scott said, snapping his fingers in front of me. “You know this. You’re the toughest among us. Come on, Sienna, come back to me here. I need you for this. We have to get out of here.”

I ran my fingers over Andromeda’s neck, thrust them against the skin, pushed hard, hoping for a sign, a pulse, anything. I waited almost ten seconds, but there was nothing. “Okay,” I said, and hoisted Zack up on my shoulders. “We go west. We haul ass.” I felt my face harden, felt the emotion slip away, behind a wall somewhere, into a box perhaps, in the basement of my mind where I couldn’t hear it, where nothing but the slamming of a metal door remained to mark its passage. “And if we can find a way to do so, we kill these bastards – every one of them.”

“I don’t love our odds here,” Scott said. “You think the Directorate is on their way with some help?”

“Possibly,” I said, lifting Zack up and taking a step forward, then another, before breaking into a run. “But I wouldn’t like to bet my life on them.”

“I think you’re gonna have to bet your life no matter what. I suspect that helicopter has thermal imaging, and they’ll keep tracking us until we find a town or some other way to lose them. Any ideas?” he asked.

“Keep running.”

We ran for minutes more, time seeming to stretch as we went. I tried to focus on taking one breath, one step at a time, tried to put Andromeda out of my mind, along with the thoughts of what would happen next. After a while the scenery ahead changed; I could see the light shining down, the trees ending. “Veer left,” I said, and we did, following the treeline down. The chopper was behind us, I could hear it. We continued our run, over hills, through ravines. Every once in a while, it got quiet, and a few minutes later the chopper would fly overhead, sending the two of us scrambling for the nearby trees to hide behind until it passed.

It overflew us again, and ahead I saw daylight. “Woods coming to an end again,” Scott said. I could hear the alarm in his voice. I looked right, and knew he was thinking what I was: we had two directions now cut off to us, west and south. “Back the way we came,” he said, “either east or north.”

“We just came from directly north,” I said. “Maybe if we work east for a while—”

The sound of a gun blast sent me to my knees and a sapling a few feet from me exploded into shards of soft wood, snapping in half where the bullet passed through it. “Great; the local lumberjacks are pissed off,” I muttered as I tried to get back up.

“When you chop down trees with a .50 cal sniper rifle, I don’t think you get to call yourself a lumberjack,” Scott said from nearby. “Pretty sure that’s against the union bylaws.”

“I know this is ironic coming from me,” I said, “but this hardly seems the time for bad jokes.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t know there
was
a time for bad jokes.”

“Try the Oscars. There are so many there, no one will even notice.”

“You’re taking her death well,” he said, flat on his belly, looking directly at me.

“I didn’t know her well,” I said, brushing it aside. “And we’re in a life or death situation of our own.” I felt the tug of emotions. “I may cry a little later.”

“So you do have feelings,” Scott said with a quicksilver grin.

“A few. Don’t tell anyone, okay? I might lose my rep around the Directorate as a total badass.”

“That’s not your reputation,” he said, his amusement dying.

I watched him for about a half-second, pondered what he meant, and stopped thinking about it as another shot boomed in my ears. “Think he’s getting closer?”

“He doesn’t need to,” Scott said. “He’s got friends. All he needs to do is pin us down while they approach from our sides or back, box us in.”

“Envelopment,” I said, remembering what Parks had called it when he was instructing us on small-unit combat tactics. “Any ideas for how to get out?”

“My well-oiled mind is failing me at present,” he said, rolling onto his back as another shot echoed overhead. “We stand up, they pop us. We belly crawl, they catch us and kill us when they surround us. We surrender…” His voice trailed off, and I thought again about Andromeda, who I had barely known, and I could see by Scott’s reaction that he was thinking it too. “What do you think they want?”

“Our heads,” I said, pulling Zack’s body closer to mine, feeling him snug against my side. “On a pike.”

“Oh, good, and here I thought they were only interested in us to harness and enslave our metahuman powers.”

“You don’t fire a fifty cal at things you don’t want dead,” I said sadly.

“We’re metas; we can take the damage better than a human. They might think we can survive a hit or two.”

“Andromeda was a pretty powerful meta,” I said. “She didn’t.”

“You don’t know that for fact.” He stared back at me, looking across his body, leaves mussed around him. “We had to leave her behind, but she might have healed from that, given time.”

“You think so?” I felt a surge of irritation. I hadn’t considered that. “You didn’t voice it at the time.”

“I don’t know it’s so,” he said as another bullet thundered into a maple tree a few feet from us. Loose leaves, stirred by the impact, drifted down to us, one of them landing on Scott’s face. He blew it away. “But I needed you to realize we had to leave her behind rather than carry the whole world on our backs while we’re trying to escape.”

“You ass,” I snapped. “What about Zack and Reed? Should we leave them behind, too?”

“If we wanted the best chance to live,” Scott said, dirt all over his tanned face, “yes, hypothetically that would have been a good move. Lighter to travel and all that.”

“‘Hypothetically’?” I said, annoyed, and I heard the sounds of movement in the underbrush around us as the chopper came around again, the blades thrumming in the summer air. I felt the sunshine on my face through the branches overhead.

“It’s just a theory,” he said, calmer than I was feeling, “and it doesn’t look like we’ll ever know the answer now.”

“Scott.”

“Yes?”

I tried to think of the things we’d been through; we’d met when he said some unkind things to me in the cafeteria at the Directorate and followed it up by leaving a nasty note under my door. We hadn’t really fought since then, but he’d annoyed me more than once. “You are…” I tried to think of the nice things he’d done for me, and there had been a few. “…an amazing person.” I couldn’t quite keep the irritation out of my voice, though, and whether it came from the past, the fact that he’d convinced me to leave Andromeda’s body behind, or just my aggravation and stress from the fact that I was fairly certain we were going to die in the next few minutes, I couldn’t really be sure.

“Your words say ‘amazing’, but your tone says ‘asshole’.” He didn’t put a lot of spice into his riposte; the first black-clad figure had appeared only a dozen yards away and was easing toward us one slow step at a time. They had us dead to rights, an easy kill. Scott started to stand, and his hands were in the air.