Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [136]
I let Adrian drive back to the hotel.
I was shaking too badly to do it myself; I was too wound up and frenetic, and too flustered and wounded to be any use—not right then. He was driving fast and hard, but not running into anybody and not causing any wrecks in his wake, which was better than I would’ve done. For a flash I had a small worry about running the red lights, and about getting caught on one of those stupid traffic cameras, but I forgot it almost as soon as I thought of it.
We had bigger problems. Worse problems. Real problems.
Behind us, the Office of Experimental Bioengineering Research burned itself to ashes, and as we fled the scene fire trucks and cop cars barreled toward it.
14
Not for a minute did I believe we’d burned the whole building down. They’d catch it before it got that far, in a big old stone place like that. Best I could hope for, it’d take the whole office and maybe the whole hall, leaving it a graveyard of charcoal and bones.
I said out loud, “There must be backups.”
“Of what?” Adrian asked through tight lips. Never taking his eyes off the road. Considering his path, and snapping the Malibu’s wheel around to take us a new way, closer and closer to the hotel. Christ Almighty, I probably could’ve run faster.
“Backups of the paper trail. Nobody …” My mind wandered briefly. I led it back. “Nobody just files things anymore. It’s all scanned and stored on disks. Or on someone’s computer, somewhere. Or a thumb drive,” I rambled on.
“Bruner probably has it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But I bet he doesn’t have all of it.” Then I said, right as we pulled around to the hotel’s valet parking, “I’m going to kill that motherfucker, and I’m going to enjoy it.”
We leaped out of the car, and Adrian tossed the keys to the nearest uniformed dude. As we started to run he said, “I thought I had dibs.”
“Fuck your dibs,” I said, and I bypassed the elevator altogether, heading instead for the stairs. If Adrian wanted to wait he was welcome to, but I was going to fly like an eagle without him.
The emergency exit door banged shut behind me and I didn’t hear Adrian follow; but then again, I wasn’t listening for him. I was concentrating on the stairs, two or three at a time, pumping for all I was worth and simultaneously wishing I had a beverage to refresh my strength … and forgetting I had one. It was just as well. There wasn’t time. There was only the unending staircase, crooking ever-upward.
I burst onto the floor where our suites were conjoined, and before I rounded the corner I knew something was wrong. Before I’d staggered, panting, upon the scene I could smell it—a wet mess of metal and plasma. Before I’d opened the door—and before I’d even seen that it’d been forced—I knew that something was horribly, horribly incorrect, and that nothing was going to be the same, ever again.
Sometimes I overreact.
This was not one of those times.
Without even thinking to draw my gun (just as well, since it was empty and back at the office), I shoved myself against the door and forced it inward, flapping with a crash against the closet door and shattering the mirror there.
My entrance startled two men who were busying themselves by going through Ian and Cal’s things. They jerked to attention at the sight of me, but they didn’t stay that way long. I flung myself at them, faster than they could’ve processed—and I broke one’s neck before he had time to lift the Taser he’d been holding in his free hand. I tasted the crackle of electricity and smelled the sizzling ozone as the thing deployed, even as he died. It fired straight into the wall and the two little prongs stuck, vibrating and shining, humming and harming nothing.
The second