Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [59]
Deep breath.
Double-check the gear.
I climbed atop the crate, keeping my head low until the last possible second.
And I dove.
I flew out hands-first, with as much kick as I could manage. They saw me. They had to have seen me—my feet weren’t quite as slick as the rest of me, and I splintered the frame on the way out. It sounded like a gunshot, or maybe it’s only that gunshots followed my exit. It took them a minute to track me, to find my trail, to even figure out which direction I’d run … but they did, and they began to chase me.
I assume they saw the hole I left in their chain-link fence when I shot through it like a Japanese bullet train.
I didn’t care. I was so freaking elated that I’d done it—I’d gotten away with it! Fuck those men in black and everything they stand for!—that I didn’t care I was trudging at light speed through snow deep enough to drown in. I didn’t care that my thighs ached, and my chest hurt from sucking down the icy night in fits and gasps. I didn’t care that they were coming right for me, and that behind me I could hear the guttural cough of snowmobiles being cranked into duty.
I was almost back at my car.
And they hadn’t found it yet.
After the preternaturally speedy run through the forest, the mundane task of retrieving my keys and forcing them to navigate the half-frozen car door lock seemed impossibly slow. But I did it. And when I started the car and started driving, I’d left the snowmobiles far enough behind me that even if they knew where I was, they wouldn’t have been able to catch me.
All the way back to the hotel, I breathed so hard I coughed fog onto the rearview mirror, and even though I was so cold I could barely move, I didn’t think to turn on the car’s heater until I’d already gotten the thing into the parking garage.
You could make an argument for the fact that I’d been lucky.
I’d argue with you, though. I scarcely think one can call an outing “lucky” when it involves being shot at by commandos, locked in a barn, and set on fire.
Gotta admit, I didn’t see that coming.
I didn’t honestly think they’d sacrifice the whole joint just to nab me. Even if it was the kind of place where information went to fossilize, it blew my mind that someone had issued that order and told someone to pull the trigger on it.
So to speak.
This only served to underscore, reinforce, and otherwise buttress my neurotic insecurity and all-out paranoia with regard to this case. Whatever I was chasing was serious. And someone out there was serious about keeping me away from it.
Sadly for that mystery someone, I had actually scored some pretty useful loot … or loot that had the potential to be useful. And unlike the PDF that started this whole mess, the feebs, the feds, the whoevers … they had no idea what I’d gotten my grubby little hands on. For all they knew, I might’ve found nothing at all—or Bigfoot’s DNA profile, or Batman’s birth certificate.
Good. Let ’em sweat. The assholes had burned the place down behind me, so now they’d never know, either.
And what did I find?
Oh yes. That’s the part where you could make a case for “lucky.”
Buried at the bottom of some files that had otherwise been coded and classified into near uselessness, I found a lead on one of the experimental subjects. I’d have been happier with details on my burgling competition, but it’d have to suffice—and hey, it was one more lead than I’d had earlier that evening.
So I ran with it. And less than twenty-four hours later, I was on a plane to Atlanta.
6
I’ve never cared much for Atlanta.
It’s crowded and hot, and even in the dead of winter it doesn’t get dark as fast as it does up in the northern hinterlands where I usually hang out. This means I have less people-interaction business time, and less running-around time in general. Yes, I keep a safe house there, and yes, I was happy to find myself back in a cushy spot instead of a hotel room, but I wasn’t so charmed