Meridian Six Part 6

I jerked my gaze toward her. Before I could respond, movement to my right caught my attention. Rabbit was backing away, shaking his head. "I--I," he stuttered, face pale.

"Stop." Icarus commanded.

My vision filled with scarred Icarus in the foreground and the fires of the Troika's death machine burning in the background. Rabbit's head shook back and forth. I couldn't blame the kid for his fear. Icarus wanted that child to run toward Castor and his dragon, but anyone with an ounce of self-preservation would have run and kept running.

The kid stumbled on a rock. "Rabbit," Dare said, lurching forward. But Icarus shot her a look to stay out of it.

"I ran once, too." His quiet admission stilled my feet. He nodded. "During the battle of New York."

My eyes flared. "You were there?"

He nodded but kept his eyes on the kid. "I was twelve. Old enough to hold a gun, my father said. Old enough to fight."

I swallowed hard, remembering the chaos of those horrible days. The hunger and the noise and the smell of decay.

"Mom had died months earlier from an infection in her lungs. Dad tried real hard to teach me how to be brave in a fight. We sparred all the time and he made me practice shooting until I could hit a bull's eye every time." He licked his lips. "But all that training? It wasn't anything like the battle." His eyes went soft focus like he was watching a horror film in his head. Finally, he shook himself. "When dad got shot, it ... broke me. I'd been so gung ho to kill as many vamps as I could until the moment I saw the red of my father's blood on my own skin. He kind of slumped over and I just snapped. Before I knew what I was doing, I was running as fast as I could without looking back. It wasn't until a few blocks later that I caught back up with myself. I still had the gun but I'd left my father's body behind in a gutter." His voice thickened with remorse.

I blinked quickly to clear the stinging. Rabbit was frozen, entranced by the story.

"I threw up twice before I gathered enough courage to go back. The battle had progressed and had taken over the block where I'd left him, so I had to be very careful. Luckily, I was pretty small for my age and could hide whenever a vampire patrol rolled past. It took me half an hour to get back the distance it had taken me five minutes to cover before."

Behind Icarus, Dare had gone quiet. Her expression was pained, like she couldn't decide whether this talk was what Rabbit needed or whether to protect him from the truth. I looked back at Rabbit and realized he was the same age as Icarus was in the story. d.a.m.n.

"When I got near the spot, a patrol had already found dad. I crouched behind a car and watched as one of the vampires nudged the body with a boot. It took everything I had not to rush out and attack that b.a.s.t.a.r.d for daring to disturb my father's dead body. But then the first scream reached me."

Rabbit squeezed his eyes closed.

"You see, my father hadn't died from the bullet."

My head started shaking to reject the horrors I knew were about to spill from his mouth. "Icarus--"

"Once they realized he was alive, they decided to play a little game."

"Stop," Dare whispered. "Please."

Rabbit's eyes opened wide as saucers. I wanted to punch Icarus for putting the kid through this. But then I realized that Rabbit didn't have the luxury of innocence. None of us did.

"First they stretched his body over the hood of a car. Then they took turns wounding him in increasingly elaborate and creative ways. By the time I came roaring from my hiding place, they'd ripped out one eye and peppered his arms and legs with more bullet holes and bite marks." His voice had taken on an edge of steel. "I managed to put a bullet through my father's brain and kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who took his eye before they took me down. If a superior officer hadn't come by and stopped them they would have done the same thing to me before they killed me. You see, dad was old and wounded, so he didn't matter. But me? I was strong and young, and the officer said the Troika would need slaves to build their empire once the war was over." He pointed a finger toward The Factory. "So yeah, I understand the need to run, but I also learned the hard way the price for my selfishness. If we don't stand up for our own, who will, Rabbit?"

Rabbit looked at Icarus with eyes older than they'd been ten minutes earlier. "But if we die, who will be left to fight?"

"If we don't fight, we might as well be dead."

Rabbit's Adam's apple bobbed convulsively in his throat. A shudder wracked his body, but he gathered himself together and stood straight. "Okay. Let's go."

"You sure, kiddo?" Dare asked.

Rabbit looked at her with an expression I hadn't seen from his innocent face before. Rebellion mixed with resentment over her insistence for treating him like a kid. "I'm fine," he snapped.

She quickly tamped the wounded look and nodded. "Let's do this."

Icarus smiled at the pair and then looked at me. "Well?"

I nodded, suddenly soul-tired. "Let's get it over with."

Eight.

Down near the water, the air was colder and damp. The kind of cold that grabbed onto your bones with skeletal fingers.

Icarus waved us toward a dark mouth jutting over the river. Closer, I realized it was a drainage pipe. "All right. Those incinerators need an external fuel source. Most likely they've got ma.s.sive propane tanks nearby with pipes leading underground into the Factory." He pointed toward a large, lone building about a hundred feet from the fence. Three guards in Troika uniforms stood out front with large guns. "There."

"a.s.suming we could get past them," I said, "what's the plan?"

Icarus removed something from his backpack. "We only have one chance with this." I squinted through the dark and saw a black device with a mess of wires and some sort of putty on the back. "If we can set this off on near the tanks, it'll cause a chain reaction through the pipes and destroy all the furnaces. The trick is to get in and out undetected so they believe it was a malfunction instead of an act of aggression. We can't risk the Troika retaliating against the people in the blood camps."

When we'd come up with this plan with Saga I'd argued that we needed way more than the four of us to pull it off. But it had taken us two days of walking to reach The Factory, and it would have taken three times that to contact another patrol group. Even longer for them to rendezvous with us. So Icarus wasn't kidding when he said we had one chance. If any of us were captured this plan was toast.

"I'll do it," Dare said.

Icarus shook his head. "The only way in is through this pipe. You won't fit." He was right. The pipe was narrower than the expanse of an average adult's shoulders.

My eyes swiveled toward the twelve-year-old child to my left. Dare's face went ghost pale. "Icarus, no--"

Rabbit ignored her and perked up. "I get to do it?"

Dare grabbed Icarus's arm and dragged him away. Rabbit cringed, like his mom and dad were fighting, and looked at me. "She treats me like a baby."

"She cares about you. That's a good thing."

He shrugged. "Sometimes she cares too much."

I wanted to lecture him and tell him to thank G.o.d that someone gave a s.h.i.t about him. I wasn't under any illusions that Rabbit's life had been easy, but at least he never knew the soul crushing loneliness of having no one to depend on but himself. "Are you sure you're up for this?"

The instant I said it, I regretted the question. No doubt he'd see it as a challenge.

His chin came up. "d.a.m.n straight."

The cold night breeze carried Dare's raised voice toward us. Icarus's quieter responses were swallowed, but soon enough they both came to join us again. Icarus looked resigned and Dare looked defeated.

"All right, Rabbit, you're going to shimmy through the pipe. It'll lead you to a grate inside the compound. You'll have to sneak out of the pipe and get into that building." He took a few moments to show the kid how to engage the bomb. "Set the timer to two minutes from the time you engage it. That will give you a little lead time to get as far from the building as possible before it blows."

Rabbit practically pranced with excitement as he listened to the instructions. Dare hung back, staring off toward the river in the distance. Further downstream, the lights of Nachstadt created a surreal glow on the horizon. "You okay?" I asked, moving closer.

She shook herself and dragged her eyes from the lights. "I smell death on the air."

"Hopefully Troika deaths."

She just looked at me without speaking.

"Dare, Six?" Icarus called back. "He's ready."

Dare sighed and dragged herself out of whatever heads.p.a.ce she'd retreated to. "The master calls."

I looked up at the dim stars that were determined to be seen despite the city's lights and the Factory's fires. "Please." I wasn't sure to whom I was pleading or even what exactly I was asking for. I just knew that if anyone in the entire world needed help at that moment it was us.

Rabbit hung outside the tunnel long enough for us to take positions on a nearby rise. We needed to have a bird's eye view of the compound so we could warn him if any guards were close. Icarus held a small remote in his hand. A punch of the b.u.t.ton would set off a small shock on a sensor around Rabbit's wrist. It wasn't the best warning system, but it was all we had. Besides, even if we'd had a more sophisticated verbal warning system, we couldn't have risked interference getting picked up by the guards' walkie-talkies.

Once we were in position, Icarus sent a quick double-zap to the kid to let him know it was time to go. We were far enough away that Rabbit looked incredibly small and very young beside the dark river and the pipe's wide mouth. An instant after Icarus. .h.i.t the b.u.t.ton, the kid looked down at his wrist and then waved to signal he'd received the message.

Dare let out a long, nervous breath. I shot her a look that I hoped was rea.s.suring despite my own nerves. Were we really sending that kid into a heavily fortified compound alone? The list of things that could go wrong was so long, it was laughable.

"There he goes," Icarus whispered. We all tensed as Rabbit's wingtips disappeared into the hole.

Dare raised her binoculars. "The guards do a lap around the building every two minutes. If he can time it right, he'll be able to enter the outbuilding through the window in the back between rounds."

"The trick will be getting out of range before the explosion goes," Icarus said in a grave tone.

When she responded, Dare didn't lower the binoculars. "If he dies, I'm holding you responsible."

"If he dies, we all will," Icarus shot back. "Either from the bomb or when the guards find us."

We all fell silent then. The minutes ticked by like years. The orange light from the furnaces lit up the compound like the fires of h.e.l.l. Figures in black Troika uniforms swarmed the perimeter and the buildings. And my heart thumped in my ears like war drums.

"There he is," Dare whispered, pointing. I grabbed the binoculars from her. Sure enough, a small head was peeking out from a grate not twenty feet from the outbuilding. I held my breath as the mop of hair rose a little higher and his eyes appeared to scan the area.

But before he could gather his courage and climb out of his hiding place, a commotion near the compound grabbed our attention. The wind whipped up and landing lights flashed to announce the arrival of a transport rover bearing the Troika's official seal.

"d.a.m.n it." Icarus raised his voice over the high-pitched whine of the rover's engine. He punched the b.u.t.ton to indicate Rabbit should stay put. The rover landed in the center of the compound and was quickly surrounded by every guard in the vicinity.

"Hold on," Dare said. "Look." She pointed to the outbuilding, where two of the guards ran from their post to join those surrounding the rover. That left only one guard at the front and the back completely unguarded.

Icarus checked to be sure no guards were approaching the area around Rabbit's grate. When the coast was clear, he punched the b.u.t.ton twice. A couple of seconds later, Rabbit burst out of his hidey hole and ran as fast as his skinny legs would carry him toward the window at the back of the building. My heart pounded in time with his footsteps. "Come on, kid."

Rabbit reached the back wall of the building and paused. From my vantage point, I could see his bird-thin chest heaving from the exertion. His head swiveled from side to side, looking for any ambushes. I looked toward the rover and froze. Astyanax had already exited the craft and Castor was climbing out after him. The General was tall as a tree and built like a tank. Where the guards carried a.s.sault weapons, Astyanax carried no weapons other than his ma.s.sive fangs, which protruded from his mouth like a saber tooth tiger's.

By comparison, Castor was smaller and more elegantly turned out. He wore a sleek black business suit and a blood red tie. His blond hair was slicked back and his too-red lips stood out lushly against his milk-white skin. Despite his refined appearance, I knew for a fact he had the eyes and the personality of a venomous snake. You never knew when he'd strike, but he always did. Once his feet hit terra firma, Castor spun around to admire his latest victory in his quest to become the top engineer of nightmares for humans. He spread his arms wide and laughed. His breath hit the chilly air and rose like smoke.

"Quickly," I urged. "If we can get the explosion to go off while they're taking their tour--"

"He's moving toward the window now."

Rabbit fumbled to remove the package from his shirt. Icarus was watching the guards while the kid worked. "s.h.i.t," he said. "The guards are going back to their posts now that Castor and Astyanax are going inside for their tour."

Sure enough one of the returning guards broke off and started his way around the building. "Get him out of there!" Dare shouted.

"He's almost done," Icarus argued. "A few more seconds."

"There's no time." She lunged for him and grabbed the remote. Taken by surprise, Icarus lost control of the device easily. She punched the b.u.t.ton hard. Down in the compound, Rabbit jerked and looked around quickly. Seeing no one, he shook his head and returned to fumbling with the b.u.t.tons on the device. Dare cursed and hit the b.u.t.ton again. "C'mon, kid, run!"

In just a few more steps, the guard would reach the corner. Once he rounded it, he'd see Rabbit and all h.e.l.l would break loose. Dare hit the b.u.t.ton three times in quick succession. The kid must have finally gotten the message. He jumped away from the window and darted back in the direction of this grate and freedom.

The three of us jumped up from our crouches. "Run! Go, Rabbit!"

The kid was ten feet from freedom when the guard came around the corner.

He was only five feet away when the bullet hit him in the back.

Nine.

Even if I lived to be a hundred, which was frankly looking less and less likely every second, I would never forget the moment when Rabbit fell. Time slowed like we were watching through water. We were so far away we couldn't hear the gun go off, but we saw the bloom of red an instant before the kid stumbled to his knees. I don't remember exactly what happened next, except that once time caught back up with the three of us, we were screaming. Dare had fallen to her knees and covered her ears with her hands. Icarus shouted "Rabbit!" and then fell ominously silent. I'm not exactly sure what I said, but I knew that my throat hurt and tears fell cold on my cheeks.

All of this happened in less than a minute. Then, down far below, a swarm of black surrounded the kid and blocked our view. My eyes searched the area, looking for something, any sign of hope. Somehow my gaze landed back on that window and the small black device still attached to the gla.s.s. I hit Icarus on the arm. "The bomb!"

He dragged his eyes from the vampires surrounding the kid and looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. "What?"

"They didn't find the bomb."

He shook himself, like a man waking up from a deep sleep and grabbed the binoculars from me. "f.u.c.k me." He looked down at his watch. "It should have gone off by now."

Dare stood on the edge of the rise, staring at the ma.s.s of black figures. "He's alive," she whispered. She reached back and grabbed my sleeve. "He's alive!"

I stumbled forward and looked where she was pointing. The black uniforms had parted. One of the vampires pulled Rabbit up from the ground. At first, it appeared he wasn't responding, but, then, he got his feet under him and his head rolled back. I grabbed Icarus's binoculars. "Holy s.h.i.t! She's right." The kid's eyes were open and his mouth was moving. I couldn't tell if he was screaming from pain or merely begging for his life. Regardless, he was alive. I rounded on Icarus. "We have to save him."

He stared hard at the unfolding drama far below. The guards were dragging Rabbit toward the center of the compound. No doubt they planned on taking him to Castor for instructions. If we could make the bomb go off before they decided on a course of action, we might have a chance for getting Rabbit away from the guards.

Finally, Icarus looked at Dare with sorrow. "It's too late for him."

She launched at him, punching at his chest and face with wild hands. "f.u.c.k you! We're not leaving him!"

"Stop, Dare. Stop!" He struggled to get her flailing limbs under control. His scars were pale against his flushed skin. "Listen! Our only chance to save him is to set off the bomb. Stop!" He grabbed her by the upper arms and shook her. "If the bomb goes off he's dead anyway."

She stumbled back, sobbing. "We have to try!"

My chest felt like someone had bound my ribs with steel bands. Icarus looked at me for help. All I could think was that I would not let another child die by Troika hands. "That bomb has to go off no matter what. We need to get over that fence. You two go and wait for the first explosion and then grab the kid and run like h.e.l.l."

Dare sniffed. "What about you? How will you get out?"

"We don't have time to argue about this. We need to get in and make this happen or we'll lose Rabbit and any chance to pull off this mission," I said. "If you make it out alive, we'll rendezvous down river, in the abandoned church."

With that, I turned my back on the pair before they could stop me. There was no other way this could play out. If I tried to save Rabbit and Castor saw me, he would stop at nothing to kill all of us. Better for him to believe this was a ragtag team of random rebels.

It took me a few minutes to make it to the fence. In that amount of time, the furor over capturing Rabbit still hadn't died down. The guards had done a quick sweep of the area round where he was captured, but finding nothing, decided to gather in clumps near the main building to watch Castor decide what to do with the kid. I tried to keep my eyes away from that area because I couldn't afford to be distracted by what they were doing to the kid. Losing my nerve now would sign all of our death warrants.

As I neared the fence, I listened for the tell-tale hum that indicated electricity. Even though it was silent, I still threw at small metal wrench at it to be sure. When it hit without causing a spark, I knew it was safe to climb. I should have been surprised the Troika hadn't bothered electrifying the fence, but they always underestimated what a group of determined rebels could accomplish. The metal fence was twelve feet high but the pillars were made from wood and stone, which gave me hand- and footholds and some semblance of cover until I got to the top.

I landed on the other side and crouched down to the b.a.l.l.s of my feet. A quick glance around proved that the area was clear. Further into the compound, I could hear shouting and the sounds of running boots. But for now I was blessedly alone. The outbuilding that held the propane tanks was fifty feet from the fence. I ran there full-tilt and reached the back of the building in no time.