Primal Page 9

  knowledged that. “True. But my point stands. I can also bring back more supplies in a single run, and I’m better suited to deal with trouble.”

  Juneau nodded. “Go on, then. I’ll finish up here.”

  Each step hurt as she completed what he’d started. But her determined hope faltered when she finished clearing all the way to the stairs. She found the doctor, still and lifeless. How the hell was she supposed to deal with this? Intellectually, she knew the dead had to be moved. Otherwise they risked disease and infection among the survivors. But the phone lines were down, and there was no one to call.

  With a murmured apology, she rolled him onto a sheet and towed him out through the broken wall. Stray dogs might get at him out here. But she couldn’t leave him inside with the living. A quick look around revealed a storage shed so flimsy that it must’ve swayed with the quake instead of collapsing. It was a little further than she wanted to go, dragging such a burden, but she couldn’t leave him in the street. Juneau opened the latch and shoved the body inside.

  Her return to the medical center went a lot slower. She was afraid of what else she’d find. But fortunately, the doctor seemed to have been alone at the time of the quake. Thankfully, he’d run a small practice.

  By the time Silas got back, she’d managed to set up a couple of tables and had covered one of them with bandages, tape, and other medical odds and ends. The painkillers, apart from OTC ones, she left locked up. Since she wasn’t a doctor, that stuff shouldn’t be in circulation anyway. Silas came in pushing a wheelbarrow full of bottled water and canned goods, his face red and sweaty from working in the afternoon heat.

  “Did you dig out a whole store?”

  His smile came and went, fleeting as a bird gliding over the ocean. “Pretty much.”

  Silas went back almost immediately, leaving her to do the setup. Good thing she stayed, too. People began to arrive with dusty faces and bloody hands. Some, she could tell by their injures, had dug themselves out of the wreckage. She gave out water and aspirin while trying not to panic.

  How the hell did I think I could manage an aid effort like this? I’ve never even owned a cat.

  “Are you a nurse?” a woman asked in Spanish.

  “No. I teach English.” Or I did. Before this. “But I’ve had basic first aid training. I can tend wounds.”

  That galvanized three or four people to queue up around her. “Me duele.”

  “Ayude a mi hijo, por favor.”

  And she tried. At least, everyone seemed grateful for the water, more shell-shocked than anything else. The survivors asked relatively few questions. Doubtless they knew she had no answers.

  A couple of families huddled together. Juneau prowled through the supplies, looking for ready-to-eat food. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw Silas had managed to save a few boxes of granola bars. They would be crushed inside the envelopes, but the packages could be slit open and the contents eaten anyway. Those she doled out, feeling helpless.

  When Silas returned the second time, she was still bandaging wounds. As she helped people, more arrived. He had another load of food and water. Two men attempted to intercept him to take what they wanted, but he stilled them with a single look. Yeah, she was incredibly glad to see him. The mood could easily turn in situations like this, and as people became more desperate, they’d do things they would never otherwise consider.

  Her knee felt better, thanks to a couple of ibuprofen and some water. He, on the other hand, looked exhausted. But he didn’t speak, merely went to work beside her, wrapping wounds with a competence that made her think he had experience.

  To her vast relief, the Red Cross arrived by nightfall. They had their own supplies to add to what had been gathered, trained personnel, and emergency lanterns. Those gave the shell of the medical center an almost festive air, if you could overlook the weariness and worry.

  The brunette woman smiled and spoke in accented English. “You did a great job. Gave us a fantastic start. You’d be surprised how often we arrive and there’s nothing done at all.”

  “Thanks. We tried.”

  Silas didn’t acknowledge his part in the endeavor. He merely continued what he was doing: wrapping a bandage around a little girl’s head. She’d wanted to help, but God, she was so done. It was such a relief to have professionals on scene now. If things went badly from this point, she could be absolved of responsibility.

  In exhaustion, she propped herself against the wall and considered what came next. Clearly her time in Ecuador was done. Everyone she knew had been in that building. Huh. Maybe it had been better when she didn’t have time to think. Despite her best efforts at self-control, tears slid down her cheeks. So much loss.

  Silas settled beside her. He smelled of sweat and dust, subtly underscored with hints of blood. It should have been alarming, just like his size, but it wasn’t.

  “They’ll start digging first thing in the morning.” She guessed he knew she was thinking about the school from her expression. His voice came low and soothing. “Sometimes they recover people alive up to eleven days after a quake, maybe more in some cases, under ideal circumstances. Try not to give up hope.”

  Exactly what I needed to hear. Juneau let out a slow breath, gradually regaining her composure. “Thanks. You didn’t have to do all this, you know. You’re a lot kinder than I deserve.”

  “You make it easy.”

  “Do I?”

  Odd, she’d never heard that before. In general, men complained about her odd fashion sense, her wanderlust, and the fact that she often dumped them after sex. A few times, she’d been accused of using them for their bodies. She seldom took things seriously, so when a guy took offense to her breaking up with him after they slept together, she always imagined him clutching a sheet to his bare chest in maidenly modesty. But the fact was, she always wondered if something better waited just over the next horizon.

  Sure, she could settle down, but . . . why? Which was why she was now thirty-three and completely unattached. She’d never owned a home or a pet. Never formed any lasting ties, apart from her family, and even they had a hard time understanding her. In fact, her brother had made a website for her called JUNEAU IS NOT IN ALASKA, which she updated sporadically with pictures of her travels.

  He nodded, his gaze gone far away. She had never seen eyes that color before. Generally they were lit by some other hue, or ringed in a softer shade, but his were all shadow, apart from the whites. In the half-light, she couldn’t tell the difference between pupil and iris; they were just black, fringed in sooty lashes. At least two days of beard bristled from his jaw, giving him a wild look. Combined with the untamed fall of his dark hair, he radiated savage, certain strength, and it was a relief to have him beside her, though she didn’t make a habit of leaning on men.

  “Most people fear me,” he said, low.

  “Because of the tatts?”

  “Because of . . . so many things.”

  “You’ll always be a hero in my eyes,” she told him.

  Silas laughed softly, but the sound lacked all amusement. “You’re alone in that. To most, I’m a monster.”

  He probably thought she’d pry. Well, that wasn’t her style. She respected other people’s privacy. If he wanted to talk, she was here. Sometimes it was good to unburden yourself to a person you’d never see again—and sometimes that made you the woman at the bus stop everyone wanted to get away from.

  “Plan on destroying Tokyo, do you?”

  He cut her an appreciative look. “It’s next on my agenda, now that I’m done with Ecuador.”

  “Long way between the two. How do you plan to get there?”

  “I don’t plan anything,” he said. “Easier that way.”

  That startled her. “Me either. And you wouldn’t believe how much shit I get over it. My great-aunt keeps telling me I’ll never snag a man if I don’t settle down. Then I ask why I’d want to catch him, if he doesn’t want to be caught.”

  “You’re not lonely?�
� he asked.

  Juneau leaned her head back and considered. “There’s a difference between being alone and lonely, a hair’s breadth, granted, but most often, I’m the former, not the latter. I make friends pretty easily, but I’m not so much with the lifelong bonds.”

  “Well,” he said. “I’m sorry about the circumstances, but glad I met you.”

  THREE

  Mockingbird spun in his desk chair, shoved off with both feet, and sailed across the room to check the status of an operative in Guatemala. His operations center would make anyone think he was nuts, based on the sheer number of computers and the far wall totally covered in reports of bizarre incidents all over the world. The map with red circles and multicolored tacks added a nice touch, too, but he was in far too deep for doubts. When he’d discovered the truth about himself, he’d gone looking for those like him. Freaks. Weirdos. It took years of sifting through the dregs, separating the real from the psychotic, although sometimes in his world, the two weren’t mutually exclusive.

  Then he learned these abilities weren’t just popping up randomly. It wasn’t natural selection, not a shift due to evolution. No, the blame lay squarely with the Foundation. He’d dug deeper into their records than anyone before. Anyone still living, that was, and the shit went all the way back to the forties.

  The first experiments had, in fact, taken place in Nuremberg. The Foundation trail led from there to Poland, until the fifties, when it bled onward to Russia, and then in the sixties, it made the leap to the United States. And no doubt there were countless tangents he hadn’t been able to track because all records had been destroyed—and everyone involved, killed. When they blew up his parents’ house in retaliation for his digging, he realized it wasn’t merely an adversarial relationship. It was war.

  For a while, he’d formed an extremely satisfying partnership with Shrike. They’d wreaked a lot of havoc. When Shrike went after somebody, he did it scorched-earth style. But Shrike had handed in his resignation, something about settling down. Man, he’d never thought that guy would get tired of the life. He’d secretly suspected they’d run out of bodies before the other man lost his taste for vengeance. But what the hell—love did crazy things to a dude. He’d married an accountant for Christ’s sake, not that she was crunching numbers anymore. They’d set up some kind of agency, offering redress and justice for those whose problems fell outside the jurisdiction of local law enforcement.

  But now the Foundation hunted people like them. Aggressively. Before the destruction of the Virginia facility, it had been quiet. Folks dropped off the grid all the time, usually the homeless or transient population. For a while, the Foundation had been culling their old test subjects, the crazy ones who failed to control their ability and couldn’t function in society anyway. Therefore, nobody cared. But now, they were taking people out of their homes: goon squads in black masks, hauling middle-class citizens off in their black SUVs, shit right out of The X-Files. The cops were asking questions, particularly in DC.

  He made a habit of monitoring the chatter, and the feds thought Mexican or Latin American kidnapping rings were spreading their wings and pushing into the U.S. Mockingbird snorted with laughter. Dumb fucks. They’d never figure this out. He sometimes wondered what it would be like to go out into the field to give them a hand, but he was realistic. His strengths lay in recruitment, coordination, and the gathering of intel. So he’d crouch like a spider, spinning webs.

  Then he actually read the screen he was staring at.

  MOCKINGBIRD, WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? MISSION COMPROMISED. THEY SET KESTREL ON ME. NEED EXIT NOW.

  He tried typing, but the terminal connection was dead. Smart. Finch was on the move. That only left the cell, if his agent still had it with him. They swapped them often, prepaid ones only, to make them more difficult to track. Not that it mattered so much anymore. But still, the Foundation didn’t accomplish all their bloodhound work through paranormal means, just the most surprising hits.

  “Shit. Shit!” He scrambled for the headset, hit the voice-scrambling software, and dialed, routing the call through four different servers. He was piggybacked on an Internet calling service, not that they’d ever find him. “You still there?”

  His man in Guatemala wasn’t as good as Shrike had been. But then, who the hell was? Finch got the job done, though, and he’d just made contact with an expat with a most interesting ability. In a few days, a nudge from Mockingbird would bring the new guy on board, provided the Foundation bounty hunters didn’t find him first. It was harder than it used to be.

  “I’m about to ditch this phone.”

  “How close are they?” He typed furiously.

  Dammit. If only those bastards hadn’t gotten a hold of Kestrel. She was going to be the death of them. Literally.

  “Ten minutes behind me. Maybe less. I already bugged out of the hostel.”

  With a sigh of relief, he finished the hack and confirmed the booking arrangements. “Here’s your extra strategy: there will be a driver waiting for you at Avenida de la Reforma. He’ll take you north to Mexico. Can you make it to the Obelisk on your own?”

  “I think so. I’m not far.”

  “Use the crowds to lose them if they get within vis-ID range. And whatever you do, don’t use your power or Kestrel will have an even easier time tracking you.”

  “I know,” Finch said. “But the show-and-tell portion of the entertainment is built into the recruitment package, you know?”

  It was. Which sucked. But there was no other way to get potential freedom fighters on board. They used code names and voice scramblers and encrypted software during fieldwork, so the Foundation couldn’t use the mind-fucker from their experimental dungeons and take down their whole network in one strike. He knew the names of his agents, of course, but he never used them; he didn’t even think them. The agents never met Mockingbird in the flesh. Nobody knew what he looked like.

  “Yeah. Get in touch when you can.”

  He hated waiting. Damn if he didn’t want to be out there, doing what he helped others do. But he’d long since made peace with his limitations and his power. There were better uses for his time, and so he went back to reviewing the files of those who had escaped from the Virginia facility. If he could close down four more holes like that one, then he’d feel like he was getting somewhere.

  He’d crossed Zeke Noble off his list of potential recruits because the man had returned home and started looking to put down roots, almost as soon as he got his life back. That kind didn’t seek after violence or vengeance. Plus, his ability would offer limited use to the operation. Better to scrub his records and keep the Foundation off his back. That much, Mockingbird could do.

  He keyed up a file and studied the photos he’d downloaded from a traffic cam. Silas Gamble. Hm. Maybe. His travel patterns had been erratic, as if he suspected he might be hunted. Wise man. He had a family, but he hadn’t tried to contact them. Another plus—it meant he wouldn’t balk at some of the things he might be asked to do. But he came with a handicap. No power, at least as far as the Foundation knew, but if captured, Mockingbird himself would try to hide his ability to prevent them from using it. Maybe Gamble had done the same. In Mockingbird’s mind, Silas remained a question mark. He shuffled Silas’s photos to the back of the screen with a click.

  Olivia Swift. Dreamwalker. Oh man, he’d love to get his hands on her. It would rock so hard to have a nocturnal mind-fucker working for him. Finch could alter memories and implant suggestions, but he had no power if he wasn’t physically in contact with his target. That limited his usefulness. Getting Olivia on his team would make this a whole new ballgame.

  But first, he had to find her. She had done better than Gamble about staying off camera. He hadn’t found a trace of her from any of his contacts. Unusual. He supposed it was possible she’d offed herself. Her profile pegged her as the least stable psychologically.

  T-89. He’d be an asset, too. Mega-power there. Mockingbird had made contact with him, and su
rprisingly, he was still with Gillie Flynn. When his agent had gotten in touch, T had told him to fuck off. Politely. He’d said he “didn’t have time for this shit,” whatever that meant. Gillie would come in less handy. Who needs a healer when you work alone? It was a shitty setup in some regards, but it was the best way.

  For now.

  Very rarely, he permitted limited partnerships, but the redhead didn’t seem like she wanted an eye for an eye, and he knew healing hurt her. At this point, he chose not to get in touch with her.

  Mockingbird tracked Finch’s movements on screen. If the agent could reach his rendezvous at the Obelisk, they’d be home free. Finch wove, probably dodging pursuers. He’d said he wasn’t far. Not in geographic terms.

  Almost there. You can do it, man.

  But then his signal light flickered and went out. Now there were fewer on the screen than there ever had been. Maybe he was kidding himself, fighting this guerilla war. Maybe it was like the war in Vietnam, ultimately unwinnable. At least that’s what his dad had always said.

  Mockingbird leaned forward and cradled his head in his hands. Fuck. What he wouldn’t give for T-89’s killing power. Just for one day.

  FOUR

  Two days later, the situation was dire. The Red Cross had run out of supplies, and survivors went hungry. That meant rioting. Silas was sorry for that, but he also knew it meant he’d tarried too long in Puerto López. There was no transportation yet, so he’d walk. It was time to go.

  For the second time, he found himself starting over with nothing but the clothes on his back. Another man might find that disturbing, but he had lost so much over the years that retaining his freedom meant everything. That was the only thing he couldn’t sacrifice.

  So he took off without speaking to anyone. He’d look for water on his way out of town. If necessary, he could go awhile without eating. Footsteps quickened into a run behind him. When he turned, he saw her—Juneau—the woman he’d saved.

  “You’re leaving.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yeah. Take care.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  Of all possible words, none could have surprised him more, except I want to have your babies. He studied her for a moment. She had braided all her hair that first day, and neither of them had bathed recently. Like him, she was grubby and worse for the wear from sleeping in her clothes and working with the Red Cross.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t stay here.”

  He almost asked about that, too—and then he realized he knew the answer. They’d dug out the school the day before. No survivors. Not the children, not her coworkers. And so she wanted to run from the memories, still raw and fresh. He understood that impulse, though it was doomed to fail. No matter where she went, when she closed her eyes, she’d see their faces and suffer the survivor’s guilt.

  “It may be rough,” he warned.

  “That’s fine. I just want to get away from here. I can help. Translate for you, if you need it. And it seems like I’m safer traveling with you.”

  Silas could never have imagined a woman saying that to him, seeing his size and demeanor as good things. Protector, not jailor. Could he switch roles, this once? He could never make up for what he’d done, but maybe he could balance some of the weight. Late at night, in that awful place, he had read their files. He remembered all their names: everyone he’d hurt, everyone who died. There had been nothing else to do, apart from watch TV. He left old shows on for noise and company, but they didn’t assuage the need for human contact.

  But down there, he had been the enemy, a collaborator who inflicted endless torment. Often, he’d thought of ending it. That way, the Foundation could never learn the truth about him, and he could stop the pain. He’d tried, once. The chip overrode his nervous system and forced him to black out. After that, he accepted his fate, but resignation was a terrible mistress.

  On the outside, Silas had only one goal now. He wanted to find the families of those who had perished at Dr. Rowan’s hand and give them closure. He just didn’t know how to go about it. For the past months, he’d kept moving, fearful of staying in one place too long. The fear of being hunted had driven him out of the country, in fact. Led him here, to this moment, with this gray-eyed woman, gazing up at him in hope he’d save her once again. How fucking unlikely.

  And yet he heard himself say, “Sure. It would be good to have company.”

  She fell into step with him. He set a slow pace, mindful of her knee, though she was moving better now. Over the last two days, she hadn’t complained, though her leg was black-and-blue below the cuff of her baggy cargo shorts. She ought to be worried about replacing her possessions, her identification, and finding a U.S. embassy that could get her out of the country before things got worse. As it stood, he had no idea of her intentions.

  It took longer than it should to work their way out of town. Twice, he glared refugees away; they were armed with rusty pipe, bits of broken glass. God knew, the last thing he wanted to do was fight, and only the fact that they obviously had nothing discouraged the looters. People prowled through the wreckage of damaged buildings, not looking for survivors, but for anything they could carry away. It felt to him like crows devouring the dead before the corpses had cooled.

  The day waned as they made it to the southern outskirts of town. Sunsets were spectacular here along the coast, all violence and blood, red sky dotted with black-purple clouds; they reminded him of pocket galaxies being born. If not for the devastation behind them, he could almost believe they were taking a low-budget vacation, as if choice—and not the lack of it—had brought them to this pass.

  What kind of woman left everything behind like this? Went walking toward the horizon with a man she’d met two days ago? Her contradictions fascinated him.

  “Where are we headed?” she asked eventually.

  “Salango is six kilometers south of here. The infrastructure may be destroyed there, too, I don’t know. If so, we’ll keep moving. Puerto Rico, Ayampe.” He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “It’s a longer hike to Olon. Sooner or later, we’ll find someplace with working phones, and buses running to other parts of the country.”

  “I don’t have any money.” But she didn’t sound concerned; it was more a statement of fact.

  He smiled at that. “Nor do I. This should prove interesting.”

  “Surviving on our wits?”

  “Exactly so.”

  “Mine are pretty sharp,” she said, and her smile hit him like a magnetic field, as if he had been flung up and outward, and then landed hard. Breathless. Yeah. She rendered him fumbling and awkward, as he hadn’t been since his undergrad days.

  Full dark fell before they reached Salango. He didn’t think they could get lost, sticking to the road, but her steps had slowed to the point that they were making almost no progress. So he called a halt.

  “I’m thinking we make camp for the night.”

  She glanced around, brow raised. “Where?”

  “What’s left of that palapa, a few hundred meters down the beach. It’ll keep any rain off us, if not the wind and the insects.”

  The structure had been built of palm fronds—withered dry now—and driftwood. It looked to him like a squatter’s hut. Half of it had pitched down, doubtless because of the shocks from the quake, but it was such a simple structure that it wouldn’t take him long to shore it up. They’d have to sleep on the sand, but compared to the lab, it would be heavenly. The sea air alone made up for any number of deficiencies.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  He nodded as he went to work. The