Undead and Underwater (20 page)

Fred had never been prouder of her friends in her life (except Madison wasn’t her friend). Their eyes widened, yes. Madison sucked in a breath; Jonas leveled a long stare of contempt at Ran. They didn’t scream. They didn’t cry. They didn’t beg for their lives.

So, of course, she took her example from theirs, and simply looked at Hedley Ran the way a picnicker looks at a line of ants marching toward Potato Salad Hill: annoying, but no real threat. To Fred’s intense pleasure,
Ran
was the one who seemed shaken and shocked.

The Skittles Boys were worse off, pale and sweating and their gazes darted here and there; none of them could settle on any one thing to look at. Betsy’s crumpled body? Noooo. Madison’s pale, sorrowful face, Jonas’s contempt? Her own scorn? No and no and no.

“Oh, starting to sink in?” she asked. “It’s real, boys. This isn’t Final Fantasy XXXVVIII. That?” She pointed to Betsy’s body. “The state of Massachusetts calls that felony murder and they get pissy about it. That’s life without parole, and it’s on all of you. I assume you’ve all got good lawyers on retainer? A cheap one in this town charges five hundred an hour.” She had no idea what a lawyer, cheap or otherwise, charged, but five hundred sounded pricey. Their blanched expressions told her the shot had hit, hard. “I’m sure Ran here will happily foot the bill. Get it? Foot the bill? Because, in case you can’t tell, he’s got no feet.”

“You see,” Ran said quietly. “It cares nothing for its friends. It’s not human, and it’s wrong to treat it as one.”

“You’re the one who isn’t human,” Madison said quietly. She had cried silently, helplessly—but had stayed with them. Hadn’t run or begged. Hadn’t flinched away from the shot, from Betsy going down. “She didn’t even know me and she wanted to help. You won’t ever understand that kind of thinking. My mother tried to tell me about people like you.” She shook her head. “I’m not a good listener.”

“Shut up, cunt.”

“Hey!” Fred seized Madison’s wrist and pulled her behind her, shoving a pissed Jonas back with the other hand along with an I’ve-got-this glare. “You’ve got us all here, you’re getting what you wanted. There’s no reason to talk to her like that when you could be calling
me
a cunt.”

“Yeah,” Jonas spoke out, still hovering protectively near Madison. “Fred’s used to it; call her the cunt, the whore, the bitch, the shrew, the witch, the tart, the twat, but leave Madison alone!”

“Thank you, Dr. Bimm. And, uh, Jonas.”

“My
friends
call me Fred, so you’d better start, Madison. There. There! You see what you’ve done to me?” she cried to the man in the chair. “You’ve made me befriend Madison Fehr! You evil bastard!”

“Enough of this.” If Ran had been rattled earlier, he was getting himself back under control now. “We need to do the test and get rid of the witnesses, then move the device. In that order.”

“That would be the doomsday device?” Fred asked. “When you’re not blaming strangers for your wife’s death and committing felony kidnapping and murder, do you sit around in your wheelchair watching old spy movies? Doomsday device. Christ.”

“It will work,” he insisted, answering Fred but speaking to Jonas. “Tell it to have no fears on that account.”

“Fred, Ran says his machine’s gonna work and not to worry about it or anything.”

“I have tolerated its presence here long enough, hers and the other fish she takes to mate. Now is the reckoning I promised my wife, and
it
isn’t the only one who will suffer.”

“Fred, Ran says he’ll get you, and your little dog, too.”

She could have laughed to see confusion chasing anger across Ran’s face.
He can’t understand. He’s got guns and thugs and a doomsday device and he’s sure we’re in his power and he can’t understand why we will not take him seriously. And he never ever will. And that’s the funniest fucking thing I’ve heard all day.

“You won’t laugh when it works,” he hissed, rattled into speaking directly to Fred. “Doubting my design is a mistake.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll work, Dr. Ran. I’m absolutely certain your Doomsday Device will work. No problem there; your doomsday device is going to be a mechanical marvel. That’s not the issue with your doomsday device. I’m not worried about whether or not the doomsday device you’ve no doubt spent years building will work. I’m concerned about your doomsday device because it’s . . . you know. A
doomsday
device.”

“It can make all the mockery it likes,” Ran began.

“Thanks. You look embalmed. What’s worse is I suspect this is actually a good day for you. And you still look wretched. She’s dead.” Pointing at the “corpse.” “And she looks a lot better than you do.”

“Oh, that.” Ran looked down. “Throw that in the tank.”

“Which one?” Fred asked, honestly interested.
Let’s see, there are over seventy separate tanks on the main level alone, not counting—

“The big one, of course. The one we need for the test.”

Fred didn’t like the sound of that at all.

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

Betsy’s dead body went in with the inevitable splash, and they all watched it sink. Fred thought she certainly looked dead, and from Jonas and Madison’s expressions, they thought so, too. Pale, blanched. Blood-stained shirt. Eyes frozen open and staring, drifting down and down and down.
Please be alive, you Minnesotan blond bloodsucker; I would be losing my shit for real if I thought you were truly as dead as you looked.

“Get on with the speech.”

“What?” Hedley Ran asked, again startled into answering her directly.

She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head. “Oh, come
on
. You haven’t gone to all this trouble, making nice with Madison to trick her out of her key cards and rounding us all up in here and dropping sly little hints you think are subtle about your doomsday device and going on about how I’m not human and will pay the price, blah-blah, you haven’t set all this up to
not
tell me all about your evil genius plan and how we’ll rue the day we killed your wife, except no one in this building, and I’m betting no one in this state, had anything to do with that, but what are mere facts to a mad scientist?”

Ran ignored
mad scientist
. “We needed your friend, yes. When my research was complete and the device was built, we needed a test site. The NEA was perfect for a number of reasons.”

“It’s a miniature ecosystem. It’s a small, controllable version of what you want to do on a large scale,” Fred said glumly, “so it’s the perfect test site.”

“Well, yes,” Ran said, taken aback.

“Whatever you’ve built is going to do something to the oceans that won’t thoroughly wreck the planet. Poison that doesn’t affect landers, or high-secrecy sound waves, or . . . anything that will kill the Folk without killing the planet for who’s left.” She rubbed her forehead. “But you don’t dare just unleash it on the world. Not without testing it first. Test it here, make sure it works the way you want, and at the same time you can destroy the building which housed the evil fish bitch who killed your wife and unborn son, except I didn’t.”

“Well, yes.”

“Also wiping out all the witnesses.”

“Well.” Ran shrugged modestly.

Fred stared into the tank. For years, those fish and reptiles and mammals had been her responsibility. She kept a close eye on them, gauged their health, kept track of what they ate, noted any illnesses or unusual deaths. Yes, they could be a pain in the ass. Yes, she knew they disliked her and thought she could be more accommodating to their needs for ’80s glam rock. But they were living creatures, they had feelings and fears and, if they had to live in captivity, she could at least make sure they were safe.

No matter how much they annoy you, no matter how big a pain in your ass they are, you’re in it, Fred.

Great. Now she was hearing the vampire in her head.

“Hey!” she shouted, startling Ran so much that he slumped for a second. “Nobody kills off those little jerks but me! And since I wasn’t planning on it, you don’t get to, either.”

“You can’t stop it,” Ran snapped. “The device is wired into the building’s power grid. I control the device, and my men control—”

Even though Fred had been expecting something, her heart still lurched when the lights went out.

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

There were muffled sounds of a struggle, and she wasn’t sure where the gun was, and Fred had less than a second to decide. So she dived at the source of all evil, and knocked Madison Fehr out of what she feared would be harm’s way.
This only happened because we have an intern program at the NEA. Interns are the source of all evil. I have decided.

She’d expected the shot but was still aghast at their stupidity—she could barely see, so she knew damned well Ran and his Skittles couldn’t see
at all
.

And their decision is to shoot? They could just as easily hit each other!

“Just stay down,” Fred said, and heard Madison’s affirmative gasp. Not that the poor girl could move; Fred was sticking to her like sand on feet, reasoning that she could tolerate a bullet far better than Madison. Hell, she hadn’t known fiancé number two even a month before he’d had to dig a bullet out of her shoulder.
Betsy’s right: getting shot sucks. Maybe if we stay flat enough, I won’t be.

Fred’s eyes had adjusted, though she knew the others were still blind. Jonas had somehow gotten to a Skittles Boy in the dark and incapacitated him, but now was standing, uncertain and trying to see.

“Get your ass on the floor!”
she hissed. Stupid brave dumbass gentleman! These were just the sort of people who could get her killed.
“Down, down! All the way down, FLAT! Now don’t move!”

He obeyed at once, knowing she could see, but being Jonas, it wasn’t in him to let the screaming go by. “Say it, don’t spray it,” he muttered to the tile, and Fred snickered.

Then she saw what was coming up behind Hedley Ran, and the laugh stuck in her throat.

It was Betsy, dripping wet and
pissed
, Betsy who had somehow swum up the side of the tank after floating along the bottom for fifteen minutes. Betsy had not only swum to the top unmolested by the sharks, but had slithered up and out of the water and over the side of the tank
without making a sound
, which Fred would have thought impossible, because moving water made noise. Still, the vampire had done it: she’d not only gotten out and gotten down, but she came up behind Ran, jerked him out of his chair, bent over him, and—

Ran screamed.

Once.

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

The power came back on with non-dramatic ease. No flickering, no fumbling. No sinister bomb countdown. One second, they were trapped in the dark with a vampire, and then they were trapped in the light with a vampire.

He said the device was tied to the power, but someone cut the power. Now the lights are back on, which is either wonderful or terrible.

Betsy was standing over Ran’s body, his blood smeared from her lips past her throat, her blood all over the front of her shirt. Ran looked like a pile of trash someone had crumpled and tossed.

“You guyth okay?”

“Depends,” Fred muttered, rolling off Madison and standing. “What’s wrong with your voice?”

“Nothing. I thwear!” At Fred’s glance, she shrugged. “My fangths come out when I feed, thmell blood . . . like that. Taketh a minute to go back.”

Fred started to laugh. A tension releaser, for sure; it had been a stressful evening. “But that’s so absurd! It’s the least suave sexy cool thing I’ve ever heard! TV vampires don’t lisp!”

“That’th not my fault. Don’t laugh, it’th a real problem,” she complained.

“Sorry,” Fred gasped between giggles. “So sorry!” She steadied herself and snorted one last giggle. “Sorry. Ask me how much I needed that.”

“Say it twice. I’m not gonna lie.” Betsy’s eyes were bright and her cheeks flushed. She looked beautiful, despite (because of?) the blood. Vibrant.
Alive.
If there was still a bullet hole in her chest, Fred couldn’t see it. The tear, yes. The hole, no. “I’ve been dying to do that for the latht half hour.”

I laughed because it’s one thing that makes her seem less sinister. It’s okay. She’s a good guy. If she wanted us dead, there were only a million opportunities. She saved us. It’s all right.

“I’m pleased you are pleased, my own.”

Fred screamed. She’d had no sense of the man,
no
sense. But he was there, as if conjured by a wish. Some of the most intense fight-or-flight impulses lit up her nervous system and she realized she’d jerked back from him without realizing she’d moved.

“I beg your pardon,” Betsy’s insane husband said, and inclined his head in a polite nod. “I meant to reassure, not startle.”

Startle? I’m startled when I stub my toe. You did not startle me.

“Perfect timing, babe,” Betsy announced, stepping over Ran without looking.

“The timing was yours, Elizabeth.” Betsy’s insane husband went to her and dropped a light kiss on her blood-splattered cheek. Casual as the kiss was, he was looking her over with care, as if to reassure himself she wasn’t hurt. “As we decided, if you didn’t call me at a certain time, I was to create a diversion.”

“No wonder you didn’t care if they took our phones.” Jonas hadn’t screamed, but he was very pale and kept his distance from both vampires.

“See?” Fred cried, looking around the room. Two of the Skittles had killed each other in a cross fire. Jonas had knocked the other one out. Sinclair must have tackled Sunkist on his way in; Orange Shirt was unconscious, and his left eye was blowing up like a bike tire. Betsy, of course, had rid the world of Ran. “This! This is why you don’t fire a gun
when you can’t see anything.
Idiots!”

“Lucky for us,” Jonas said.