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“Yeah, he’s coming as soon as he can. I told him it was a numerical thing, but I don’t know enough to give him any more information than that.”
Z glanced around the basement again, not that anything had changed in the last five minutes. The place looked like it had been ridden hard and put up wet, all the bucking fuckets—
Fucking buckets, that was.
“I need a vacation,” he muttered as he went over and checked out one of the Home Depot drywall specials.
The thing was filled with the oily black blood that coursed through Lash’s veins, and Z had a feeling it was because the slayers threw up after they were turned. Always buckets at the induction scenes. There were also smudges of the nasty shit all over the floor, and articles of stained clothing lying around like dead soldiers on a nuclear battlefield.
Phury nodded to the stairwell that had been blown open. “I think we need to relocate until reinforcements come. This site is beyond not secure. For all we know, the slayer wasn’t leaving, but going for backup, and we’re about to get ambushed.”
For a split second, Z saw his twin properly, in the way he always did when there might be a threat coming, a final snapshot in case something went badly: Phury was standing under one of the ceiling lights, and with his long, multi-colored hair pulled back in a tie and all that black leather, the similarities between the two of them were even more clear—and as the center of Z’s chest got tight, the shot of fear was a reminder that having his blooded brother by his side in the field was always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, because they were twins, there was no one better to fight with. They had a sixth sense on what to do and when with each other, and that coordination, whether there were weapons involved or it was a hand-to-hand combat ground game, was deadly.
Really handy when you’d infiltrated one of Lash’s lairs, tipped your hand to your presence by chasing off alesser, and were rolling the dice on maybe becoming the target of a coordinated attack.
But their closeness was also a weakness. The flip side to their connection was that he and his twin were not objective when it came toeach other. Not only did they have families of their own to return to, but because of their history? There was an enmeshment that didn’t promote the kind of objectivity required by war.
“Well, I think we should stay,” Z said. “Butch and Rhage are up on the street, monitoring the entrance, and more of us are on their way.”
Except Phury was right, the street access wasn’t the real problem. If the slayers pulled a reverse Uno and swarmed through the tunnel seal with their Ken-doll-looking evil master?
“Has Lashneverheard of a mop,” Xcor announced as he drew his shitkicker through the ooze on the floor.
The stocky Band of Bastards leader lifted his foot and glared at the tread on his boot, his distorted upper lip curling off his canines.
“I don’t think that male’s worried about any Yelp reviews,” Phury tossed back. “The intel was right, though. This is alesserfactory—”
The scent of Turkish tobacco preceded the arrival of the resident computer genius, and as V bottomed out at the lower level through the busted fire door, the brother took a last inhale and flicked the butt off to the side like the whole building was his ashtray.
“Gentlemen,” he said as he came forward. “What we got.”
“You tell us,” Z said as he went back over and Vanna White’d the vault door. “And fair warning, we might have company soon.”
“When do we not, true? And could someone turn off that fucking elevator alarm?”
There was a ringingpop!as a bullet was discharged into the Otis. Then Xcor glanced over his shoulder and lowered his gun. “Fixed it for you.”
“I love you, man. I mean”—V put his gloved hand over the black daggers strapped to his chest—“Ireallylove you.”
With that out of the way, the brother went to the keypad and took out a black box the size of his hand. As he hovered whatever the hell the device was over the square of numbers, Zsadist palmed up both his guns—and Phury and Xcor did the same, the three of them establishing a guard perimeter around Vishous while he worked. The good news:In this corner, there were no ceiling lights, no doubt to conceal the tunnel entrance, so there was a little coverage here—assuming those stairs all the way across the induction scene were the only other way down to the basement.
Assuming a flood of slayers didn’t flush out of the vault door.
“Goddamn it.” Vishous straightened. “Whoever set this up knew what they were doing. I’m not getting in with the usual hacks. It’s encoded that well.”
Zsadist eyed the steel oval. “If I try to blast this open, I could end up bringing the entire building down. But if that’s where we’re at… that’s what I’m going to do. Lash is using this tunnel to move through the city—and I wonder how many others he has.”
Vishous took out a hand-rolled and nodded. “Set the charge and blow it. We can watch the show from a block away.”
As the others covered him now, Z took out the rest of the C-4 he’d brought with him. Just as he was considering whether he needed to dematerialize back to the off-site garage to grab some more, he stopped. Looked around. Measured the distance to the stairwell, the elevator… and the contours of the tunnel’s steel portal.
“I have a better idea,” he said softly.
Under the bridge. Of course.
As Evan stepped out of the tidal wave of men and women, he looked up at a rumbling sound overhead. A semi was going across the suspended strip of asphalt above him, and he measured the reinforced beams and pylons that held the Northway up. Then he refocused on the homeless camp that had taken over the two-block area underneath. In between the tents and the shopping trolleys full of dirty clothes and sleeping bags, there were people standing bent in half, their addled bodies drifting like seagrass in the still, stinky air. Others were wandering with restless compulsion, their withdrawals animating them even through their malnutrition and illnesses.
It was bleak. It was sad.
