The Plague Forge [ARC] (19 page)

Skadz turned back toward Prumble’s vantage point and winked his flashlight twice.

Prumble fired the sniper rifle four seconds later. One single deafening
crack
and the street went dark.

“Go, go,” Skadz said.

Sam was already moving, letting adrenaline take over in a familiar addictive mental state she’d craved for so long. She’d felt it the day before on that street in the Narrows, but this was different. This was an assault on a guarded facility, not a sudden street brawl. It wasn’t hard to pretend she was somewhere outside Darwin—in Japan, or Israel maybe—pushing in on a choice site crawling with subs, Skyler at her back and Jake watching them from some distant perch. For the first time in months, she felt absolutely in her element, and she reveled in it.

Sam rounded the corner and surged forward toward the fence line. Cries of alarm were already echoing off the flat surface of the factory. Off to her left she saw the power junction box, a lick of flame roiling up from a hole in its side. Flashlights began to play across it. Two or three guards were already there, calling for a fire extinguisher. With any luck, they’d assume the crack of the sniper rifle had actually been a failure of some component within. Though Sam didn’t think it would take them long to notice the puncture went inward and not outward, a few seconds was all they needed.

She raced toward the southeast corner of the fence and looked for the stone Skadz had placed there the previous night.
There
. She angled toward it, lowered her shoulder, and burst through the fence in one swift motion. Skadz had cut the chain links in a perfect vertical line, then arranged the two sections of fence so they still appeared to be whole. Someone would have noticed eventually, but for their short-term goals the ploy worked perfectly.

He’d chosen the best possible location for their entry. Two rows of tall, rectangular steel boxes formed a passage of sorts. Sam moved more slowly now, having only the reflected light of the guards’ flashlights to illuminate her path. Cables as thick as her arm snaked around on the ground. She didn’t make any effort to quiet her footfalls with all the guards running about, but the footing was still treacherous.

At the end of the aisle was a simple maintenance door. Sam gritted her teeth as she approached, hoping to find it unlocked. She’d never find out, because three meters from the door it opened from the inside. Sam pulled up so fast that Skadz plowed into her back. If not for the nearby steel box to steady herself, they both would have fallen.

In the darkness it was hard to tell for sure, but she thought the person who emerged from the door was a factory worker, not a guard. She saw no hint of a gun or any weapon for that matter, just an average-sized man. His focus was on the electrical fire, and after only a short pause he rushed out toward it.

Samantha leapt forward and caught the door just before it clicked closed. She yanked it open, letting Skadz hold it so it wouldn’t swing shut against her back, and went inside.

When Skadz came in behind her and the door did close, the space went completely black. “Flashlights,” she whispered, turning on the torch she’d attached to her shotgun with black electrical tape. Skadz held his in one hand, the miniature machine gun in the other.

A long hallway ran north, closed doors in regular intervals along each side. Down at the far end she saw a sudden flare of warm yellow light. A match being lit, then the glow of a candle.

“Stairs,” Skadz said. He gestured toward a door to their right. “Jaya said the basement.”

The door handle turned when she tried it. Sam pulled it open and cringed as the hinges creaked. She went in and down, two flights to the end of the stairwell and a lone door. This one was locked. “Shit,” she said.

“Kick it in,” Skadz said. “They’ll be on to us any second.”

“Can’t. It opens this way.” There was only one other choice. She leveled her shotgun at the handle and braced herself for the noise about to come. Her finger tensed on the trigger.

Then she let up.

“What—”

Sam placed a finger on Skadz’s lips. “Listen,” she whispered. “Footsteps.”

The shuffling sound of shoes on carpet, and getting louder. She pushed Skadz back a few steps and pressed herself against the wall behind where the door would open.

When it did, Sam grasped it and pushed back slightly, raising her shotgun in the same motion. In the heat of the moment she’d forgotten to turn off her flashlight, a realization that came too late. The person who’d come through the door stopped on the first step of the stairwell and turned around.

Sam was about to fire when she recognized Blink.

“I know you,” the girl said, bewildered and half asleep.

“Where’s Jaya?” Skadz asked.

“He went home.” Her facial tic began to manifest as she became fully awake. Hard, reflexive blinks.

“Good,” Skadz said. “Do you know where the special suit is? The big one he’s been working on?”

“
I’ve
been working on. I made it.”

Sam smiled at the doe-eyed child and gripped her by the shoulder. “Tell us where it is, honey.”

Blink pointed at a door a few meters down the hall, a flicker of fear starting to show on her face. Sam knelt down in front of her. “Do you know where Jaya lives? Where he’s staying?”

Her face became stern, as if suspecting a trick. “They gave us some space at the stadium.”

“Go to him now,” Sam said. “Don’t look back, okay?”

The girl stared at Sam until her blink reflex broke the spell. She nodded once, shrugged out of Sam’s grip, and took off down the hall like a spooked cat.

In the room she’d pointed out they found the custom-made environment suit laid out on a work table. The outfit was a patchwork of different-colored materials—yellow, red, black. Sam had to stifle a laugh as Skadz loaded the suit into a backpack. Prumble would look like an overweight parody of some lesser comic-book hero when he donned it. She could hear his protests already.

“Let’s go,” Skadz said, hoisting the backpack’s straps over his shoulders.

Sam took point again and retraced their route back to the first floor. Power to the building had yet to be restored, but she heard much more activity above as they climbed the steps. The first-floor hallway was well illuminated now by candles and LED lanterns as people moved about. Their hushed voices and urgent pace meant they now suspected foul play. On the last few steps Sam turned off her own flashlight and readied her gun.

She opened the back door just as a guard was coming through. A skinny man, Pakistani, she thought. His eyes went wide when he saw her. He started to yell something, the sound choking off when she slammed her forehead into his nose. A feeble gargling sound escaped his lips as he fell backward. Samantha immediately surged out into the yard, her focus on the gap in the back fence.

“There!” The cry of alarm had an odd tone. A youth to it, a feminine pitch. Strange enough that Sam glanced right as she ran forward, and there was Blink. The girl was on one knee, her hair caught in the fist of a Jacobite guard. Four, no, five others stood around. The child looked terrified, the guards full of wrath.

Before Sam could react, Skadz fired. His tiny machine gun hummed, dispensing rounds so fast it sounded like one continuous expenditure. Sparks and tiny explosions of dirt flew from the pipes around the guards. The one holding Blink dropped to his knees, then toppled over to one side. The girl, smartly, lay flat on her stomach and covered her head.

The other guards dispersed. One more had been wounded, but not so bad that he couldn’t move. Skadz’s gun could rain bullets, but their small caliber had little stopping power. Sam, on the other hand, carried the opposite. She hefted her shotgun and fired at the nearest guard. He’d partially covered himself behind some pipes. Her slug burst the tube in a spray of yellow liquid, then continued on into the chest of the man. He slumped. Sam pumped another round into the firing chamber.

A crack of thunder boomed from down the street, and another guard fell. Prumble, a better shot than he’d let on. Sam grinned as she fired again, missing. Skadz moved behind her and then, on her left now, sprayed the rest of his clip in the general direction of the guards. When the hail ended Blink suddenly got up and sprinted away.
Good,
Sam thought. She didn’t want the girl caught in the crossfire.

“It’s that pilot!” someone shouted. “The immune!”

Oh, fuck
. She couldn’t place the voice; it sounded farther off. She saw someone running off into the maze of pipes and machinery, fired in that direction, and missed badly.
Fuck, fuck
.

Finally the guards started to shoot back. Sam heard a bullet whiz past her head and dove for the cover of the corridor of metal boxes that led to the fence.

“We’re nicked,” Skadz said.

“Plan B,” Sam replied, hefting a grenade from her vest.

“Oh, bloody hell,” he replied. He was up, then, sprinting for the fence.

She pulled the pin and hefted the explosive around the corner. Every ounce of suppressed disgust she’d felt working for Grillo the last two years seemed to flow out her fingers with that toss. Her sense of captivity, the constant guilt she felt when facing her comrades at the airport, her shame for having helped Grillo earn his position of power. All of it melted away as the grenade sailed into the air, unstoppable, a point of no return. She’d be her own woman again. She’d be free of the glorified slumlord and his flock. Free, and hunted relentlessly.

Sam ran.

The grenade exploded.

Something
else
exploded, too.

One of the chemical storage tanks, or one of the pipes. She had no idea. All she knew was she was off her feet, a blinding wash of heat searing her right side as the shock wave threw her into a steel box on the left. Her shoulder took the brunt of the impact. Sam stumbled, used one hand to steady herself and push back up, and then she was running again. Skadz waited at the back fence, holding it open with one hand, the other clamped tightly on a primed grenade.

She dove through the hole in the fence as a third, smaller explosion rocked the supply yard. People were screaming now. There was sporadic gunfire mixed in there, too, but they must have been shooting at shadows because no bullets fell near her as she rolled on the asphalt beyond the fence and came up.

Skadz’s grenade exploded between the back door of the building and the aisle of metal boxes. Sam shielded her eyes and felt the punch of the explosion in her rib cage, then she raised her shotgun and unloaded the remaining rounds she had in the chamber.

“Go!” she shouted to Skadz, and he did. He raced past her into the darkness. Sam threw the spent shotgun to the ground and drew her backup pistol. Movement caught her eye, on the street outside the fence. Jacobite guards, a patrol maybe, running around the side of the building toward her. She ran perpendicular to their path and kept going when she cleared the edge of the fence. Pistol raised, she pulled the trigger as she ran across the street, firing for effect as her gaze fell squarely on a dark alley. They were shooting back, bullets peppering the side of the building that formed one side of the alley’s mouth. Something tugged at her leg but no pain came with it. She barreled into the alley’s mouth running full speed, hoping in the total darkness that nothing would trip her.

Light filled the space, sudden and bright as the sun itself. She heard the explosion—no, explosions—a split second later like a rapid drumbeat. More chemical tanks going up. Or maybe Prumble’s three grenades. All of it at once? Even around the corner and five meters into the alley, she felt the heat of it on her back.
The whole damn place must have gone up,
she thought.

Every instinct she had told her to keep running, but she stopped anyway and dropped to a knee. A fire consumed the Selby Systems building, providing enough light for her to reload her pistol and check her leg. The bullet had passed through the back of her pant leg. In one side, out the other, without so much as touching her skin. Sam realized she’d been holding her breath and exhaled. Her hands began to shake, the impact of everything that had just happened collapsing on her all at once. She sucked in a breath as if trying to pull courage from the very air itself.

“Run, Sam. Fucking run,” she muttered through clenched teeth. She’d taken an alley at random and had no idea where she was. Skadz and Prumble were fuck-knows-where. Through sheer force of will she rose to her feet again and moved farther down the alley.

It was a dead end. A block concrete wall with a happy face spray-painted on it. She looked at the single-story buildings to the left and right, hoping for a ladder and finding none.

“There!” someone shouted from the mouth of the alley.

Sam reacted instantly. She ran the last few steps toward the wall, threw her pistol over the top, and then jumped. Her fingertips just managed to gain purchase, and she grunted with effort as she pulled herself up and over, not even looking at the ground on the other side as bullets began to slap against the concrete where she’d just been. Her feet hit something soft. A pile of dirt had accumulated against the wall on the other side. She hit it and toppled forward into a lame attempt at a roll. The soft mound had cushioned the fall, but it had also swallowed her gun like a rock thrown in a pond. She took one step back toward the pile, struggling to see now with a wall between her and the light of the fire.

Voices came from the alley she’d fled. Sam gave up on the gun and ran into the night.

Into the Maze.

Chapter Twelve

The Flatirons, Colorado

30.MAR.2285

The cave entrance had a rough oval shape, ten meters wide and twenty tall with plenty of irregular indents and outcroppings to imply a natural origin. Tania didn’t entirely believe that, but at the very least she figured portions of this pocket in the mountain had existed for millions of years, and the rest formed when the shell ship arrived.

Runoff water dribbled down from the cave mouth in a series of tiny frigid waterfalls, splashing against a pile of gray rubble that had accumulated around the base of the entrance. Spiderwebs ringed the ragged opening and flapped in a gentle breeze that shifted in and out as if the mountain itself breathed. A sudden rush of sound made Tania’s heart lurch. Tiny black birds scattered from the cave, rushing around her head so close she felt the air displaced by their fluttering wings. She glanced left and right, somewhat embarrassed at being startled, hoping that either Vanessa or Pablo had felt the same way. Both the immunes wore hard expressions, though, and held their weapons halfway raised with a finger on the trigger. The sight of this reminded her of all the training she’d undergone, and the fact that she was, for better or worse, the leader of this expedition. She forced the nervous grin from her face and turned back to the cave mouth.