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He grabbed the ear-buds, listened. Muffled cursing and groans were all he heard. No conversation. King sat there, drumming his fingers. He disliked leaving the nerve center of his operation unmanned, but Melanie had not presented herself. Anger simmered inside him. He pulled up Melanie’s mortal commands from his personal database, to have them fresh, at his fingertips. He’d ask her to swallow her own tongue. Choke to death at his feet. That would calm his nerves nicely.
He strode towards Parr’s room, thinking about the groaning, whining McCloud with his bullet wound. Odd. The research he’d done on the McClouds would have suggested utter stoicism in the face of pain. But one never knew. Some of the toughest seeming people were as soft as butter inside. And the opposite was also true. Take Lily Parr. Remarkable toughness. The riff about fertilizing her ovum for his next crop of research subjects had sprung out of nowhere while tormenting Bruno, but the more he thought about it, the more the idea appealed.
Then again, he’d be gambling with the genes of her wretched failure of a father. Still and all. Chances were, her mother’s attributes would predominate. Howard had been intelligent—that trait he shared with his daughter in full, but he’d had none of Lily’s courage, her drive.
He mused about it tenderly as he inserted the key, imagining the results of the union of himself and Lily Parr. Their beauty, their fire. They might well surpass his and Magda’s progeny, in terms of potential.
The door swung open.
He stood, frozen, while the information battering at the doors of his perception simply would not enter. He noticed the video still rolling. A seventeen year old Lily Parr, taking a shower. One of his favorites.
Then the doors of his realization burst inward, all at once.
Melanie lay dead in the corner, mouth gaping. Her jaw, neck and chest red with blood. Eyes bulging.How…?
The red dots on her arms came into focus. Transdermal Melimitrex VIII. There was at least five times a fatal dose stuck onto her wrists. He’d taken them for drops of blood at first glance.
Death had released control of her bodily functions. He gagged delicately. The silence of the place seemed suddenly menacing.
King backed out of the room, staring to the left, the right. This was unprecedented. Himself, alone in this huge place, with no allies. Just ten drugged teenagers in the programming room, two drugged toddlers in the far wing—and two hostile elements on the loose.
He sidled down the corridor, punching Julian’s code into his com.
“Sir?” Julian said. “We’re on our—”
“Get back here!” he hissed savagely. “Parr killed Melanie, and escaped! I’m alone, and I don’t know where she is in the building!”
King hung up, peeking into the control room. Neither Ranieri nor Parr appeared to be in there, so he sped to the locked cupboard in the back, pulled out the revolver. Furious at himself, for the arrogant choice of the Walther PPK as his emergency weapon. He’d liked the streamlined elegance of the small weapon. He’d considered it to have more of a ceremonial value than anything else. Who could have dreamed of a situation in which he would need even six shots, let alone the seventeen of a semi-automatic with a clip? He’d molded an army to take care of those gritty details for him, and where were they all now?
Damn Ranieri. Damn Parr. He needed them dead.
A glance at the screen to track the tracers that identified Hobart and Julian’s positions showed them still heading toward him at a gratifyingly fast clip, but still too far away for comfort.
He slunk to the door, peered out. Nothing but the creaks, pops and moans of an aging mansion over a century old. A warren, full of places for concealment, possibilities for ambush.
He finally recognized the unpleasant sensation tugging at the underside of his intestines, like hanging icicles.It was fear. Banal, stupid, helpless fear, of events that could not be controlled.
How dare they put him in this position. He, who had gone so far, accomplished so much. Anger steadied him.
They would pay, for making him feel like this. They’d both pay.
Screaming.
* * *
Pain.Jagged, flashes of light, and every jolt, every sway hurt.
Zoe’s eyes burned, her ears roared. A warm stream of blood was coming out of her nose. She was used to it. It was a common side effect of her special meds. But it tickled.
Zoe tried to reach up to scratch it. Her shoulders flared like hot coals. She was trussed, arms behind her back. The pain began to come into focus. Dark, smothering. A plastic tarp, stinking of mildew over her mouth. She struggled, coughed, spat blood.
Someone ripped her plastic shroud off her face. It let in a cold sweet rush of oxygen, and a flood of blinding light.
“Coming around?”Slap, slap,the blows made her skull pulse with white hot fireworks of agony. “Had a nice nap?”
She squinted to squeeze tears from her eyes, which felt swollen, full of fluid, like they were going to pop out of her head. Focused on the face. Dislike registered before recognition did, but it clicked into place in a second. Hobart. That useless sack of shit who had been on her team in Seattle. The one who had fucked her up with incomplete supplies and inadequate intel. “What are you doing here?”
“Taking out the trash,” Hobart said.
