Or maybe they’d just kill the guards in a fit of rage.

  Ugh. That would be kinda on me.

  “One thing at a time,” I muttered. “Is anyone working in the infirmary?”

  “That new doctor,” Bletchely said. “Sigourney Weaver.”

  I almost snorted. “Helen Slaughter.”

  He blinked. “Oh. Wow. ‘Hell and slaughter’? How did I not notice that before?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said, trying to pull up camera feeds of the wheel. “You’ve managed to pull off hell and slaughter all by yourself, no need for help from her.” Though I had a feeling she could probably take care of herself, wherever she was. “Anyone else working? Anyone defenseless?”

  His eyes darted. “Well … there’s me …”

  “Someone worth saving, I mean.”

  His mouth moved up and down. “I—I—I’m worth saving—I have people who count on me–”

  “Bullshit.”

  His eyes went up, as he tried to think. “Well … okay. But I do have a Shih-tzu …”

  “I’m sure someone will adopt it.”

  “But it’s already a rescue dog!”

  “Is there anything else I can do from here to slow the progress of any escapees trickling around the ring?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No. You’ve done everything you can. They’ll come this way.”

  “They were already going to, dumbass. You saw to that, remember?” I left him lying there and went back to the desk, scooping up the Sig in my working hand as I went.

  “You’re … just going to leave me here?” he asked, sliding down a little.

  “I’d take you with me, but … honestly you stand a better chance of survival here,” I said, almost to the door. I looked at the monitors. There were definitely prisoners coming this way now. I couldn’t count how many, or tell which level they were on, but they were coming this way. Probably a half dozen at least.

  “Take me with you,” Bletchely said, pulling himself up. He was a bloody mess, mostly because of me.

  “I don’t need any more dead weight right now,” I said, holding up my right hand in all its uselessness. “Stay here. Hunker down. Or go join June in the storeroom if you’d like—but you better run, cuz … trouble’s coming.” I smiled and turned the knob, pushing out with my back, and leaving the warden alone in his office to contemplate the hell coming his way … that he’d unleashed on himself.

  39.

  Reed

  New York

  “Office building is clear,” Greg said through the fritzing of my earpiece. “Confirmed. Got a drone heading into the silo now …” A minute passed. “… Silo clear.”

  I was heading across the parking lot toward the old factory, trying to muster up my non-Dutch courage. There seemed to be little doubt that whatever remained here, it was likely to involve the Custis family, with all their meta power.

  “Have you actually encountered these people before?” I asked. Augustus and Jamal were with me, but Angel was leading the way, rifle in hand. Eilish was bringing up the rear, about twenty feet behind us, watching like something was going to jump out at her.

  “Just saw the patriarch across the parking lot,” Augustus said, “right before somebody put a faux boulder through the reporter he was talking to.”

  “Such a nasty little frame,” Jamal said. “I still bet he shocked that poor bastard to lock his muscles. Keep him from dodging.”

  “Couldn’t have happened to a bigger douchebag, but still,” Augustus said, “dude didn’t deserve to die. And we didn’t deserve to be made patsies for it.”

  “These people are sidewinders,” I said. We were almost to the looming, dark main entry into the factory. The overhead lights were glowing down, shedding gentle illumination over the parking lot.

  Greg popped up out of nowhere, a little remote control in his hand. “Drones are going in now. I’ll see if I can get—” He paused, cocked his head. “One of them just went down. Two. Three …”

  “Someone’s using electricity in there,” Jamal said, stiffening slightly.

  “That would seem to suggest at least one of the Custis family is present,” I said, holding up at the door. “J.J.—you have the exits covered from above?”

  “I’m watching,” J.J. said. “Nobody’s running. Yet.”

  “Ooohkay,” I said, “well, we’re in here in as big a numbers as we’re gonna get. Jamal, if you lead the way, can you absorb any stray voltage?”

  “Should be able to, yeah,” Jamal said, and he started through the door.

  “I’m on your six,” Angel said, sweeping in after him. “You sop up the electricity, I’ll return fire.”

  “Aim for the leg, okay?” Jamal pocketed his phone. “We need these suckers alive.”

  “Leg hit doesn’t guarantee that,” Angel said, “but I’ll try not to kill ’em.”

  “Heh,” Augustus said. “That’s something Sienna used to say.” He exchanged a look with me. “About there not being any safe place to shoot a person.”

  “Well, she’d know,” I said, ducking in after Angel and Jamal. “She’s certainly shot enough of them.”

  “How many did she kill up in Maple Grove?” Augustus asked.

  “I don’t know that they issued a tally,” I said. The factory was dark, and we were in an entry hallway. Jamal and Angel were ahead; the hall snaked right. “But from what I saw from the air … a hundred? Two hundred, maybe?”

  “Oof,” Augustus said.

  “That’s … probably not going to be easily explainable at her trial, then,” Eilish said, following in after Greg. “‘Why, no, your honor, I swear I didn’t kill all those people—some died of blood loss, y’see, not the initial shot’ …”

  “She saw a problem and dealt with it,” Greg said. “They were mercenaries with illegal weapons in the employ of a drug cartel with a hostage,” he waved his hand toward Angel, who looked back and nodded, “and trespassing on private property. If the police had been called to deal with it, how many dozens of the cops would have been killed in the exchange of fire?”

  “Maybe you should be her lawyer,” Eilish said.

  “I could explain away almost everything Sienna has done, very easily,” Greg said, and frowned. “Lost another drone.”

  “Electrical surge,” Jamal said. He and Angel were poised at the edges of a doorway that—I was guessing—led out onto the factory floor.

  “Should we go quiet?” Angel asked, meta-low.

  “They know we’re coming,” Greg said, looking up from his control. “I haven’t seen them on camera but they keep blasting my drones out of the air.”

  “That’s no reason not to at least try,” I said. “Let’s—”

  A bolt of lightning shot in through the doorway, catching Jamal flatfooted. He jerked and spasmed, the blast of lightning like something out of the last Thor movie, larger than any normal bolt had to be.

  Jamal went flying into the wall, the stray voltage bleeding off into the concrete floor and making my feet tingle.

  “Whoa!” The rifle flew out of Angel’s hand and her hair stood up on the ends, little shocks sparking between the strands. She staggered and took a step back.

  And that was just from the excess voltage that bled through the ground from where Jamal had been standing when the blast hit him.

  “Welp, either they’ve taken the superserum, or combined their powers to go full Thor: Ragnarok on our asses!” I shouted, creating a wind tunnel effect behind Jamal’s fallen form that blew him back down the hall toward us and relative safety.

  Augustus caught his brother, thrusting a finger into his neck. “Still alive. Guess he just exceeded his storage capacity.”

  “Think it exceeded … more than that,” Jamal said, teeth clamped together like his muscles had all been contracted.

  Another flash lit through the doorway, and Angel screamed and hit the deck. Lightning surged through the wall where she’d been standing a moment earlier; her reflex speed powers had saved her as the electricity clawed through into the hallway, a tree-trunk sized bolt spending against the far wall.

  “If they’ve got … power like that,” Jamal said, his jaw gradually unlocking from the shock as he spoke, “I think we can assume … they can read the electromagnetic signature of a body at this … distance.”

  That was worrisome. “Everybody out!” I shouted, and blew them all out the way we came, into the night.

  Except Augustus, who anchored his feet, the concrete floor busting apart, rock and gravel elements crawling all up over him. His face disappeared under a suit of stone armor, and the rocky grip disappeared as he flexed, now ten feet tall and growing. “Time for the big boys to get in here and do their thang, amirite?”

  “You’re right,” I said, rising up off the ground, and raised my voice. “STORM WARNING!” I shouted down the hall.

  And then I started a tornado in the factory.

  40.

  Sienna

  I ran down the long, curving hall, alone save for me and my bestest friend, Sig Sauer. Fifteen bullets, that was all I had. Fifteen bullets and my wits. And a broken hand.

  Hopefully the fifteen bullets and my wits would do the trick, because the hand? Still useless. And aching. Oh, so aching.

  The clang of footsteps on the metal was worrying, especially when I heard the echo of steps approaching me. I was sure that, based on the tempo, I had metas heading my way, so I stopped and tried to make myself a silent hole in the hallway. Maybe if I was lucky, they wouldn’t know exactly where I was before—

  “What have we here?” a dude with a wobbly neck asked, coming around the corner. He walked with a hand on the front of his pants, and his upper body swayed, like a snake dancer coming out of a jar. He was bald, and there was an awful lot of delight in his eyes considering where he was and what he was facing down.

  “Hi, I’m Sienna Nealon, and I’ll be your warden today.”

  “Pffft, you hear this bitch?” Snakeboy turned and spoke to the two guys behind him. “She think—”

  I blew his brains out.

  Fourteen bullets to go.

  “Lay down on the ground and place your hands behind your heads,” I said, trying to give these guys the benefit of some doubt. Not a lot, mind you, because they were powered and I was not. “Or I will be forced to kill your asses. As well as the rest of you.”

  “Bitch, you ain’t—” The next guy piped up. He was missing a couple of teeth, which I was thought was interesting.

  I aimed for the black hole that was his mouth, and I hit it. His eyes widened slightly as the bullet struck home, blowing his spine out the back of his neck. He toppled forward.

  Thirteen bullets to go.

  Not bad for shooting offhand. Without my powers or another hand to stabilize my aim.

  “If you make me repeat myself, it’s going to be with a gunshot,” I said.

  “I hear you,” the last guy said, putting his hands behind his head, which was covered in hair as black as night itself. “And I—”

  A blast of red energy shot out of his hand as he just about reached his ears. It might have singed his hair; I didn’t stay still and watch. I jumped for the floor and his attack definitely singed the back of my hair, giving me some (more) split, burnt ends along the side of my head.

  I hit the deck and failed to roll forward, because I lacked momentum. The spearing pain of my landing shot through me, and instead I rolled sideways by instinct alone.

  It saved my life.

  That red blast zapped through the decking where I’d landed, gouging a six-inch hole as it bounced back up and down the hall. I raised my gun as I rolled sideways, more concerned with putting some cover fire in the air to mess up his aim than actually putting him down. I fired twice and he shouted; a little blood trailed out of his left arm thanks to a graze.

  The world went upside down and right upside up again as I rolled and fired, rolled and fired. Two more shots, two clean misses, but he was jumping and lunging for cover that was nowhere to be found, caught between trying to run and trying to hide with nowhere to actually do either of those things.

  I came out of my next roll against the wall from belly to thigh, at a forty-five degree angle, out of space to move in that direction. My head was still spinning, vision swimming slightly from inverting over and over, my now human inner ear lacking the meta balance that would have been oh so useful just now.

  Leveling my Sig, I placed the sights on his upper body and squeezed, trying not to overdo it. The explosion of sound followed my shot, damned near deafening me, and my head rang as I fired again.

  The dark-haired prisoner slumped to his knees, and I pumped a last shot into his head, blasting the top off of it and finishing the fight.

  Nine bullets left.

  Shit.

  “Well, that was unfortunate,” I said to his corpse as I picked myself up. On the plus side, I’d rammed my broken hand up against the ground and the wall as I rolled, and hadn’t really felt it, so—yay. It was now numb.

  I held it up, black and blue and misshapen all over. Hardly the ugliest thing I’d ever seen, but definitely not pretty by any categorization.

  Staring down the hall, I checked to be sure there was no one following in the immediate wake of these idiots.

  It was clear.

  “Great,” I said, under my breath, to myself, since there was no one here to partake of this moment with me. “Three down, only nine bullets to go. Why can’t anything be freaking easy?”

  There was no answer. I didn’t really need one, because in my heart of hearts, I knew the answer.

  And it was because in some way … I’d earned this.

  41.

  I had almost made it to the entry when I ran into my next bout of trouble. Of course it couldn’t last long.

  Someone jumped out at me in the intersection and caught two bullets in the chest for the trouble, and a third in the head.

  Six bullets left. Damn.

  “I’m gonna have to Deadpool this,” I muttered, looking down the hallway. The fact that they’d half-assed so much of the retrofit construction of this place was unsurprising to me. That they’d left out so many vital functions was … well, my years in government had taught me that stupid shit like that happened all the time. It was the one constant I’d found—you could give the bureaucracy a huge budget, and they’d find some way to blow it on crap that didn’t matter while ignoring the two or three things that really did.

  It wasn’t the top reason I’d left government service, but it was a resounding frustration, and one that was in danger of biting me in the ass here. Hard.

  The corridor was just long and ugly, curving its way around in a slow circle over the course of a quarter mile or better. More danger lurked somewhere out there in the form of the prisoners that hadn’t decided to wait things out in the cell blocks, or throw themselves all willy nilly into the teeth of the guards at the gates.

  In other words, the smartest, most calculating, and probably most dangerous prisoners were the ones that waited ahead. Ones not docile enough to stay in safety but not moronic enough to charge into death. I was familiar with the type, and they were the sort who would probably delight in finding a twentysomething girl with zero powers to turn their attentions to.

  Fortunately, this powerless twentysomething lady was possessed of six bullets and less than usual compunction about using them than most people.

  Grunting. That was the first sound I heard as I made my forward. It was not a good sound, more the noise of exertion and pain, someone fighting back against a foe. I was taking it slow, trying not to make too much noise, my prison shoes soft against the decking—but not soft enough for my tastes, not when I was up against meta hearing.

  Whatever was going on ahead, though, was way loud. Loud enough to cover my meager footfalls. I hurried up my pace, listening as I went, Sig at low rest. I altered that plan and raised it to shooting position, figuring pretty much anyone I ran across was too fast for me to not have the weapon ready to fire. The time it took me to bring up the barrel might have been acceptable in an encounter with a human, but with a meta? And my reflexes slowed? Too big a risk. Safety rules be damned.

  I came around the curve and saw. The grunting suddenly made sense. Three male prisoners surrounded a female guard, with another dead or just out on the ground, trickle of blood across the temple. It was a knot of orange jumpsuits turned blood red by the overhead lights, everybody standing off at arms’ length.

  “You got a fight in you, lady,” one of the prisoners said. He bared his teeth like an animal. “I like that.”

  “Then you’re gonna love me,” I said, and opened fire as they turned.

  It took four shots; the two went to the heads of the first two prisoners. The last guy juked at the last second and I missed the first shot. Second got him center forehead, drilling him and evacuating his brains. It wasn’t a bad bit of marksmanship, if I did say so myself.

  “I had that,” the guard said, annoyed. Of course it was Owens.

  “Sure you did,” I said, lowering the Sig. Two bullets remaining. Damn. “Glad to see you survived the lockdown.”

  She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Was that you?”

  “Warden panicked when I tried to get him to douse the whole place in suppressant,” I said. “Tried to initiate lockdown, failed. So he reversed course and threw open the doors instead, hoping he could kill me by turning this place into Mad Max: Fury Road without the cars.”

  “He did what?” Owens asked, giving me a double take.

  “He chickened out,” I said. “Tried to turn this into The Running Man. Sort of. But with prisoners.”

  Owens just shook her head. “Can you say it without the pop culture references I don’t understand?”

  “How have you not seen Fury Road or The Running Man?” I asked.

  “I’m not a movie person.” Owens shrugged. “I think I get the thrust of it, though, what with prisoners running around everywhere.” She kept her baton tightly in hand. “What the hell are you doing in all this?”

 

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