Riley didn’t trust that, and kept hold of her, but let her have another big chunk of the salami. She chewed and swallowed again, a process that had nothing of pleasure to it and everything of desperation. She ate at least three huge hunks of the stuff before suddenly the need just . . . switched off, like a circuit being cut.
She burped, mumbled an apology, and handed the rest back to Riley, who offered her—incongruously—a napkin. Bryn used it to wipe the greasy residue from her mouth and hands.
“Sexy,” Riley deadpanned. “Better?”
Bryn nodded. The taste of meat was metallic and sweet in her mouth, and she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to give an actual answer in words. She was still shaking, but that was terror, not hunger.
She hoped she’d never get the two of those confused. The idea of hurting Joe Fideli brought tears to her eyes, and she couldn’t look at him as, with Riley’s help, she walked to the truck and climbed inside.
Lonnie wasn’t looking too happy anymore. He seemed scared, flinching from meeting her eyes, and he was only too happy to put the truck in gear as Joe settled in next to him while Bryn and Riley sat on the bunk behind them. “You—you were dead,” he said. “Not just wounded. I saw you, lady—you were fucked.”
Bryn didn’t have the energy to try to convince him otherwise. He’d seen it, he knew it, and it terrified him. Fair enough. It had spooked Joe, too; she saw it in the wary way he studied her, as if he was waiting for her to turn feral again. She gave him a shaky, apologetic sorry, and he nodded. Not like he quite trusted her, but as if he understood she was trying.
Lonnie’s wide brown eyes were staring at her from the rearview mirror. He looked away when she glanced his way. She knew she ought to feel something about that—feel sorry, maybe, that he saw her as such a monster. But truthfully, it didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered that much.
Nothing except that blood-smeared syringe in its nest of duct tape, that Riley was still holding.
Joe said, quietly, “Lonnie, focus. You’re nearly done with us—I promise you that. We just need you to take us the rest of the way and we’re done. Another two hours, tops.” He patted Lonnie on the shoulder, brother to brother, and Lonnie didn’t flinch from him, at least. Though he did shoot him a doubting look.
“You—you’re going to let me go, like you promised, right?”
“Absolutely,” Joe said. “And I want you to do me a favor, man, I want you to call in a 911 on the fire when we’re pulling away, okay? Just tell them the billboard’s on fire and you’re not sure what happened. You would normally call a thing like that in, right?”
“Right,” Lonnie agreed. He took a deep breath, and nodded. “Okay. Okay, we can do this.”
“Bet your ass,” Joe said. “Now let’s roll.”
Lonnie engaged the gears, and the truck growled forward. The blood-angel that Bryn had left on the road surface disappeared under the tires, and then they were past the smoke, to the clear air beyond. The truck was moving at decent speed by the time they crested the next hill, and beyond it was . . . a normal world. Hawks soared the skies, planes skimmed the roof of the world, and on the ground it was just blank, empty road and countryside, with some scrub houses in the distance. They’d probably have seen the smoke, Bryn thought. Maybe even the explosion.
Lonnie made his emergency call, and reported it as simply as possible; his voice was shaking, but that probably wasn’t too unusual for someone calling in a thing like that, especially on a long-haul drive. He looked relieved when it was over, she thought, and settled in behind the wheel to drive.
She dismissed him as unimportant, at least for now, and focused herself on more important things. Who the fuck are these people? She was shaken, she had to admit it. Somehow, while they’d been driving, the Fountain Group had found out who Thorpe was, tracked down his allegedly foolproof contact, and probably tortured and killed him. . . . Then, instead of sending an assault force (since the last overwhelming onslaught hadn’t gone so well for them) they’d done something incredibly smart—they’d gone unmanned low-tech. There’d been some surveillance, most likely remote-piloted, but they’d thought that they’d be able to take out Thorpe, his weapon, and (as a bonus) at least one of them, too.
And they nearly had, with something as simple as a pressure bomb. Something you could build from plans on the fucking Internet.
Whoever was running this—and Bryn was now sure it wasn’t Jane, Jane wasn’t sane enough, or flexible enough, to plan this way—it was someone capable of making cold-bloodedly rational decisions. Losses and gains, offset by risks. Varying tactics. That wasn’t Jane; she was smart, and brutal, but she wasn’t a fantastic tactician.
Bypassing Jane and getting to the brains of the operation would stop this, stop it dead and cold. Then she could destroy Jane, but it was important just now to learn something from her enemy—to change tactics.
“We need to get out,” Bryn said.
Lonnie sent her a startled, scared look, and then Joe turned and frowned at her. “What?”
“Just trust me on this,” she said. “We get the hell out of this truck, and head out on foot. Then we split up, and you give me Patrick’s burst transmitter. You and Riley, you get back to whatever hole Manny is hiding in. Please, Joe. You know me. You know I’m right.”
“Right about what?” Riley asked sharply. “We’re two hours from our goal. If we ditch our transportation, we add a day of hard hiking. Besides, do you think you can run off on your own, without backup, and get anything accomplished? Jane is out there. And she can call on half the military and, for all we know, half the law enforcement in this country. She’s rich in resources, and we’re not. Don’t throw away what little we’ve got.”
Joe was watching her without replying. She felt closer to him than to Riley, even now—even after both of them had experienced the infection of the nanite upgrades. Joe was basic version 1.0 human, and he had always had her back. Always. Even when he couldn’t trust her not to turn flesh-eating monster on him, which was . . . quite a lot of trust.
“Yeah, I get it,” he said after a long moment. “Lonnie, stop the truck.”
Lonnie clearly didn’t want to, but he hit the air brakes, and the truck sighed to a halt on the road’s shoulder.
“You can’t let her do this,” Riley said, and put a hand on Bryn’s shoulder as she tried to get up. “No. Just—no, Bryn. This is the wrong move; I know it. I’m telling you, just stay. We need to stay in the truck.”
Bryn looked at her for a long moment, and then shook her head. “We can’t,” she said, and moved Riley’s hand away. “I see something. You don’t. You take that vaccine to Manny and get him to start making more. I think we’re going to need it. Badly. We have no idea how far the Fountain Group has taken this—how many upgraded foot soldiers they have besides Jane.” She nodded at the duct taped syringe.
Riley pulled her sidearm. She did it in a motion so fast Bryn hardly even saw it; the muzzle of the gun stopped with perfect precision in line with Bryn’s eyes. Close range. Messy. “I have no idea what you think you’re doing, but you’re going to get yourself killed,” Riley said. “Stay with us, and help us get this to Manny. This is precious. It’s more important than you or me or any of us or all of us. It can stop them.”
“Riley—we don’t even know if it works,” Bryn said. “The Fountain Group had access to that syringe before we did; they could have swapped out the drug with saline, for all we know. If they did, if they’ve got the genuine cure and we don’t . . . they can take us out, and we’ve got nothing. Thorpe told me something important, and I need to follow it up.”