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Lydia was not a confident shooter. She wasn’t sure how the safety worked. She only had one hand.
But the image of Daniel seizing up on the floor of that concrete hallway, with Gus empty-handed beside him, gave her some kind of core knowledge in weaponry she’d never had before.
Pop!
It happened so fast, she wasn’t even sure what she had done. But as the side of the soldier’s neck blew out and the thing collapsed on her, she stared at the gun in wonder.
Then she kicked the bucket of dead bolts off.
Panting, prepared for anything, she glanced at the cyborg. It was so completely almost human that she had an odd communion with the fucking thing. Lydia looked human on the outside, too. But at least her window dressing held a conscience that no artificial life ever could—
Her arm swung the gun around without a conscious thought as a figure she hadn’t noticed emerged from the foggy, nauseating fumes.
C.P. Phalen looked like something out of aJackassmovie, her hair and face singed with soot, her Armani uniform all out of whack, one heel broken, the other stiletto cocked to the side as if her ankle had been dislocated.
Under her arm, cradled against her chest, was a medic bag that was as debris-covered as she was.
In a bored, exhausted voice, the woman said, “If you shoot me after all of this shit, I’m never having you or your man as a houseguest again. Ever.”
In the emergency exit hallway, Gus had Daniel out flat with the man’s head cocked back at an awkward angle to free up as much airway as he could. He had two fingers on the side of Daniel’s neck, and as long as there was that too-fast pulse, no chest compressions were needed. It was only if things went still that he would double-fist up, and start pumping.
The initial round of spasming paralysis had passed, and now the limbs were lax. And as one side of Gus’s awareness calculated the infinitesimal chances that Phalen or Lydia would come back alive—much less with anything he could use to help the man—the pharmaceutical researcher in him was wondering what the hell was going on with his patient.
Daniel’s skin had gone white, all over his body: As a Caucasian, he hadn’t had a lot of melanin tobegin with, but now it was as if vitiligo had taken him over. The only color anywhere on the chest or arms came from moles or the occasional freckle, and the flesh was cold to the touch, like all surface circulation had ceased.
And then there was the hair thing.
The dusting of hair on his forearms was falling off, or sloughing off, if Gus ran a hand over the limb. Likewise, on the scalp, all of the follicles seemed to be releasing, the post-chemo regrowth fuzz drifting off.
Except Daniel’s heart was still beating, and he was breathing—in a wheezing fashion, it was true, but therewasrespiration—
“Ah! Fuck!”
As Gus yelped, he brushed frantically at his leg, and in the back of his mind, he was glad no one else was around to see him sissy-scramble away from the scorpion that had crawled up onto his thigh.
Courtesy of his flipout, the thing went flying and landed on the concrete floor. And when it just sat there for a second, like he’d stunned it, he grabbed for the container and put the glass box over the arachnid.
The confinement seemed to reorient the thing, and the scorpion started pacing around, like she was ready to sting again.
“No worse for wear, are you,” he murmured as the creature pivoted toward him and seemed tomeet his eyes. “And don’t look at me like that. Did you see what happened when you envenomated that guy? I’m not looking to be white, thank you very much—”
The steel door of the tunnel swung open, and Gus didn’t bother trying to protect himself. It was either the two women he most wanted to see in the world. Or it was death in the form of something with a gun.
Or maybe a wolf who was hungry?
Whatever. He was too shell-shocked after everything—
“Daniel—is he alive?”
The words didn’t really compute, but the sight of Lydia Susi emerging buck-ass naked through the smoke, blood streaking from minor wounds, plaster dust in her hair, kind of made sense.
And then he saw his Phalen.
Catherine Phillips Phalen looked like hell in a handbasket, and the fact that she was walking on the side of her ankle was something he was going to have to take care of. If he got the chance.
As Lydia dropped to her knees by Daniel and shifted his head into her lap, Gus’s dream woman walked up and set down the med bag right beside him.
“Is he going to live?” Lydia asked. “What’s going on with him?”
