Chapter 34

  Alan Sheppard

  Alan led the way, Glock drawn, safety off, but really they all followed the bouncing ball. It had a mind of its own, and it seemed to know where it was going even better than its owner, the great Nicholas Carter. Alan didn’t care to think about how it had a mind of its own, or why, or what kind of crazy place it had come from. (The same crazy place, he knew, where Heidi was.)

  It felt good, in a way, to be back on the job. Back in the line of fire. The old thrill was there, undimmed by age. The boots, the vest, the belt. Full alert, enemies nearby, heart pounding. But this time he was not alone. Nor did he have a team of highly trained operatives behind him. He had two Carter siblings, and one of them would be worse than useless in a fight. Which made this an escort job.

  Rebecca had earlier suggested going back, finding the others, regrouping. Her brother had overruled her. The priority was finding the door—making sure it existed, knowing its location. Then they could go back for the others. He claimed that everyone would be fine as long as Shape and Sky were with them. Nick placed a lot of faith in the combat ability of those two. Alan had witnessed little in support of the claim, but then again Elmer Sky had made Leah a sky quilt out of nothing, and Amelia Shape had created a bridge of light over which the ALL-Rover had easily crossed the chasm. So, again, he wasn’t going to question it.

  “In over my head,” he said. He hadn’t meant it to be an audible comment, but Rebecca had sharp ears.

  “Aren’t we all,” she said. She wore her full traditional attire: broad leather hat, jeans and plaid shirt, revolver and bowie knife at her belt, rifle across her back. “If you ask—”

  Alan cut her off with a sharp gesture. They stopped behind him, quiet. Something was wrong; the ball had stopped bouncing. The three of them, he and Rebecca and Nick, stood in a lounge area, offices ghostly in the mist on all sides. He’d seen a break room just like it plenty of times back at the OI lab in New Zealand. Round tables, water coolers, snack machines. And…

  He crouched low. Rebecca followed suit immediately, but had to drag down her brother and shush him as he began to ask a question.

  “Who’s there?” a voice demanded. The accent was Canadian. It was a man, and he sounded serious. Though Alan couldn’t see him, he could practically hear the fact that he was heavily armed just in the way he spoke.

  Alan was considering how to respond when someone else saved him the trouble. “October Industries, of course.” It was a female voice, and it came from the opposite side of the room—the room that Alan was in the middle of. He signaled for the other two to follow him as he began a low crawl along the floor, but it was already too late. Neither October Industries nor the intruders, which Alan could only guess to be the mysterious strike team he’d heard about, hesitated to open fire on the other.

  He and Nick had discussed what to do in case of a sudden encounter with one or the other of the potentially hostile forces in the OI Labs. They could probably reason with the Canadian strike team, convince them they were on the same side—that is, against OI. On the other hand, Nick seemed fairly sure that he could talk his way through a meeting with any OI agents, provided that one of “the three” was not present. He was ‘Nikola Raschez,’ after all.

  This situation, caught in the crossfire, was the worst case. Still, Alan almost believed they would get through it without trouble. He had crawled nearly to a side door through which they could make an exit. Then someone on the OI side deployed the big guns.

  It had been gunfire until this point. Bullets pinged off the tables, shattered glass, and occasionally knocked over a chair, but it also stayed well above ground-level. The experimental energy weapons at OI, on the other hand, were chaotic and indiscriminate in their destructive capacity.

  Alan heard it charge up, and he knew what it meant. Nick must have known too, because he cried out as loud as he dared, “Brace yourselves!”

  It didn’t matter. The person on the other end of the weapon had terrible aim, or they had decided to simply sweep the room in order to blast debris at their enemies. The result was that Alan and the Carter siblings, along with most of the tables and chairs in the break room, were lifted into the air and flung violently into the mist by a wave of pressure that knocked the breath from their lungs and made their ears pop painfully.

  Alan recovered in a moment, wincing at the high-pitched ringing in his ears that drowned out all other sounds. His blurry vision resolved as he rose shakily to his knees. People shouted nearby. Someone was aiming a gun at him, someone dressed all in combat gear and not wearing orange and grey. Alan raised his hands, tried to say something like ‘don’t shoot, we’re friendly,’ although he couldn’t be sure whether he actually said anything resembling that.

  Then he saw Nicholas Carter, sprawled on the ground nearby in a very awkward position, a pool of red spreading under him. Rebecca knelt over him, shouting his name.

  The man in front of Alan with the gun turned his attention back to the more immediate and obvious threat; he ducked down as a sizzling streak of blue energy carved through the plaster wall over his head.

  Alan ducked too, but Rebecca did not. Alan looked again at Nicholas Carter and realized that he was looking at a body. Nick had clearly broken several bones, but he had also been shot. When had that happened? While flying through the air, in some streak of bad luck? Or after landing, by the special forces?

  Rebecca didn’t seem to care. She unholstered her revolver, stood, and put three shots into three visible OI agents across the room, in rapid and precise succession.

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  Alan tackled her to the ground just before the air where she had been standing exploded in retaliation. She almost broke his nose with a rear elbow strike, but he held on. “Calm down,” he whispered fiercely in her ear, trying to ignore the suddenly strong scent of her hair. Her struggling ceased, and she relaxed in his grip.

  The firefight re-engaged with renewed vigor. Alan didn’t know the numbers, but it sounded as though a few remained on each side. It hardly mattered. A few was more than enough to put an end to him and Rebecca. It took only an instant of bad luck.

  “Hey,” said a rough voice nearby. Alan released Rebecca and rolled over to see the barrel of a shotgun and behind it a visored helmet. “What—” a squawk from the radio inside his helmet interrupted the question. “Copy,” he said. There was a brief pause. Alan couldn’t see the man’s face, but then he tensed, sighted the shotgun more directly on Alan, and Alan could guess what he had just heard through the radio. A command from his superiors, probably including the phrase ‘any armed individual.’

  But Alan couldn’t dodge out of the way because Rebecca was right behind him. He initiated a desperate effort to rise up, move the barrel aside in time, disarm the man. It wouldn’t work; this was how he died. But his body might shield Rebecca.

  Some small object shot in from the side of his vision the instant he began moving; it struck aside the barrel of the shotgun. The man fired; the shot went wide, barely. Alan lunged, gripped the weapon. Rebecca, suddenly revealed behind him, put two bullets through the visor.

  Another special ops agent had seen everything, was raising his weapon. Alan wrested the shotgun from the dying man but couldn’t get it turned around in time. He didn’t have to; Rebecca’s gun fired again, once (last shot), and took the man in the neck. His neck had an armored covering; the shot might not have been lethal, but it was enough to stop him from retaliating for a moment. Long enough for Alan to fully command his newly acquired shotgun and place a round directly into the agent’s helmet. The shotgun had a serious kick; the man’s visor cracked. Alan didn’t know if he and Rebecca had killed the man, and neither of them waited to find out.

  They fled in the direction they’d been heading, leaving Nicholas Carter dead on the floor. Two October Industries agents tried to stop them; Rebecca vented her rage upon them with unnecessary violence.

  A minute later, sweaty and heaving for breath, Alan and Rebecca came to a halt, though the bouncing ball was still there with them, urging them on.

  Rebecca’s expression was hard. She wasn’t the type to break down and cry—not when there was danger, not when there was work to be done. She would save it for later.

  But he still had to ask. “You good, Rebecca?” Meaning, could she keep going?

  She nodded, her icy grey eyes staring far away. “I thought for years he was dead. I was right, in a way. Now it’s no different.” But it was different. He could see it. She flicked her eyes over to him. “And call me Becky.”

  He nodded. “We make a good team, Becky.”

  She wiped blood from her neck. She had blood all over one side of her body. It wasn’t hers. “Sure,” she said. “The white knight and…this.” She held up her bloody hands.

  The white knight. That’s what he’d always wanted to be to Heidi. Despite his profession, that was how he had wanted her to see him. Alan reached out and placed one hand against Rebecca’s. “‘This’ is fine,” he said. “My hands aren’t clean either.”

  “I hope you don’t expect me to forgive anyone anytime soon. Not Nick, and not the bastards that killed him. That killed Kate.”

  “I don’t expect that.”

  She wiped her hands on her pants, leaving bloody prints, and adjusted her hat. “I don’t care what that preacher man says. I’m going to kill them for that.”

  “Well,” he said. “I’m not Dwayne.”

  “Thank god.”

  “And I’ll stick with you. On your six, remember? We had that deal...”

  “Oh, you’re accepting it now?”

  “If the offer stands.”

  She smiled grimly and began reloading her revolver. “We’ll kiss later, Alan.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  “So don’t you dare die on me.”

  “Same to you.”

  “We’ve both got kids depending on us.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s go.”