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Now she guessed all that was over, which was sad, because she’d been . . . happy. As happy as a dead woman could be, she supposed. She’d liked the work, the calm, steady, useful work of caring for those who were gone—and those who’d been returned against their will through the magic of super-science. She’d been den mother and counselor to many of those who’d been addicted, against their will, to Returné. She’d seen some adapt, and some give up.
The consequences of giving up were pretty horrific, because the drug was designed to keep you going at any cost, and as its nanites lost efficiency, you simply . . . decomposed. But stayed alive and aware until the bitter end.
I’m not going out that way, she promised herself. If necessary, she’d make Patrick or Joe swear to load her into a crematory oven and burn her to ashes. It would be awful, but relatively fast, at least.
Second thought, maybe she should ask Riley to do it, and they could make a mutual destruction pact. Riley would understand.
Riley’s cell phone rang, and she answered it, listened, and made a monosyllabic response. Then she hung up and said, “Heads up. We’ve got word of some kind of intercept being planned. Brick’s on it, but keep your eyes open—” It was prime territory for it, Bryn thought; the narrowing road out here in the country meant that their escort stayed ahead and behind, but couldn’t fully box them in.
But the flat Kansas fields didn’t seem to offer any kind of obvious threat, either.
They watched tensely for anything big enough to present a threat, and for miles—almost fifty miles—they saw nothing, unless the enemy had taken to recruiting thermal-surfing hawks overhead as surveillance.
Up ahead, Brick’s SUV flashed its lights, and took an exit, heading for the access road. Bryn wondered why, but then she caught a look at Joe’s gas gauge—they were running low, too. And the sign they passed said LAST GAS FOR 150 MILES, so she supposed it was sensible enough. The Shell station up ahead looked ancient and deserted,
and it was on the other side of a train track.
She was looking out for everything, but somehow, she forgot to watch out for roadside IEDs.
Bryn saw the car abandoned by the side of the road, half in the ditch about twenty-five feet from the tracks, and even with her experiences in Iraq, her personal experience at being nastily surprised by such things, she didn’t immediately key in on it as a threat. It was positioned crookedly, one tire off, and there was one of those Day-Glo stickers on it that showed the local police had tagged it for towing. Entirely normal, and any other time and day in the USA, entirely safe.
But not today.
She didn’t even see it go up; her head was turned away, checking the other side of the road. She didn’t hear it, either, because before the sound reached her and rolled over her like a tank, the impact had already thrown the SUV up in the air and flipped it partly over, and her body was too busy trying to sort out all of the unnatural inputs—sound, light, heat, gravity twisting out of shape, pressure, pain.
And then the SUV landed on its side with a boom like cannon fire—tinny in her shocked ears—and rolled over on its top in a gritty chorus of bulletproof glass warping and cracking. It didn’t have enough momentum to keep tumbling, so it rocked to a stop, and for a second Bryn held still, waiting for her body to tell her its status.
Good to go, apparently. Aches and pains that she’d have normally felt faded under adrenaline, and besides, the nanites were good for one thing, and that was healing damage.
The cabin was full of smoke, and she heard coughing. “Patrick?” Her fingers scrabbled for the seat belt release, and she found it and pressed. That dropped her onto her neck and shoulder, and she slithered around over the broken glass to ease the strain. “Joe? Riley?”
“Riley’s good,” came the agent’s voice, and then Riley’s body slipped out of the upside-down restraints and rolled next to her.
“Joe here,” Fideli said, and coughed again. “Fuck. Hey, Pat, you sleeping in? Because we’re in some trouble here. ” While he talked, he was working the release on his seat belt. It was stuck, but in seconds he had a combat knife out of its sheath and was slicing through the thick fabric like silk. Riley squirmed back to give him room to drop; he did it more elegantly than either she or Bryn had done, but then, he’d probably had more practice.
Patrick didn’t answer. He was hanging limp, bloodied arms dangling. Joe cursed under his breath, rose to his knees, and cut the man free. Bryn, without prompting, helped ease him down. Behind her, she heard more glass breaking, and metal groaning; Riley was forcing open the driver’s side door with muscular kicks.
There was a firefight going on outside the toppled SUV, a thundering chatter of bullets punctuated by a low rumble and a loud blatting horn, and what the hell was that . . . ?
Joe had taken hold of Patrick beneath the arms and was crab-walking backward, dragging the other man with him. Bryn shook the lingering fog out of her head and turned to the cracked window next to her. Impossible to see what was going on, so she smashed it out with a flurry of quick punches. Cuts and breaks didn’t matter.
There was a spotlight rushing toward them, and the sound of metallic screeching pierced the noise of combat, and Bryn had time to realize that the vibration was coming from the railroad tracks, the railroad tracks underneath the SUV that she was in, and the headlight was from a black locomotive rushing toward them with the pulping force of God’s biggest hammer.
Riley realized it, too, and from the other side of the SUV she grabbed Joe and heaved, hauling him and Patrick out with one bone-shaking pull and dragging them at an angle backward to a ditch.
Bryn bailed out of the window she’d broken, hit the hard, vibrating metal of the tracks, and didn’t have time to get out of the way . . . just enough time to roll off the metal and onto the wood and gravel in the center.
The train went over her like a storm, a roaring black hurricane of steel and smoke, burning metal and sparks. She was facedown, cheek pressed onto the sharp chunks of rock, and the smell of burning oil overwhelmed her.
She didn’t hear the train hit the SUV, but it must have, because it kept moving, thundering over her and gradually easing to a stop still parked on top of her.
She made sure it was stable, then shakily crawled out between the smoking wheels, slithered down the embankment and rolled into a weed-filled ditch that was smoldering with pieces of the exploded car.
The battle was in full force up on the road.
Half the escorting SUVs were trapped on the other side of the tracks, barred from them by the train; Brick’s two other teams were still in the game and laying down hot fire to keep the attackers—from the goddamn train now—from firing down on Riley, Pat, and Joe, who needed cover badly. Bryn took only a couple of seconds to take the situation in, and focused on the body-armored assault team in the boxcars of the freight train, who’d slid aside the doors and were pouring semiauto fire at the guardian SUVs, trying to take them out first.
Bryn lunged back up out of the ditch, grabbed hold of the back passenger door of their wrecked, mangled, chopped-in-half SUV, and braced herself. All about leverage, she told herself. The door was twisted and hanging loose anyway. Go.
