Virtue had given me a personal code for the built-in shield on the lapel pin I was wearing; it had been her own, because there was nothing executives guarded more closely than their personal shield codes. The first bullet bounced and put a hole in the expensive wooden paneling nearby. But Virtue’s shield, like Miss Pozynski’s, was single use.
The second bullet hit, tumbled, and took out part of my lung. I felt it, but I was too busy to hurt, because I was unleashing a precise, murderous stream of fire at Miss Wade Lymon, whose shield was a hell of a lot better than Virtue’s, but still not CEO quality. She took five bullets before it failed. Five more after. I ended up with another round in the shoulder, and had to change gun hands. A nuisance, but not critical.
I grabbed Miss Wade Lymon by the collar of her very expensive suit and towed her to the wall, and the access panel, which was virtually identical to the one in Tarrant Clark’s outer office. She wasn’t dead. Not quite. Which meant that I could enter the code for her, and her DNA would still work the lock, if I moved fast to do it before her pulse failed.
It took Virtue twenty long seconds to send me the final code. We couldn’t get it ahead of time; it cycled every three minutes. But I had it, punched it in, and pressed Miss Wade Lymon’s shaking, barely living hand to the keypad, then dumped her off to the side as the door slid open.
Leo Pannizer rose from behind his desk. There was a virtual display open in front of him, and I saw Tarrant Clark standing there, looking relaxed and formal and quiet. As if he wasn’t under the final act of a death sentence.
Unlike Clark, this man was not ready to die. He held up both hands. I could read the shaking terror in his face. “No,” he said. “No, please, I’ll offer you a place on my own household staff, a generous raise—you can name your own salary. . . .”
I shot Pannizer in the face until the clip was empty, then dropped the gun because it had done no good at all. The CEO’s personal shield was better than anyone else’s. There were dogsbodies coming, of course, but they’d have to navigate security to make it. I had seconds to live, but those seconds still counted.
I went with the knife. The shield wasn’t designed to guard against low-velocity attacks; that was what Miss Wade Lymon had been for, and the dogsbodies, and all the security measures.
Mr. Pannizer surprised me by producing a gun from virtually nowhere, but he never got a chance to shoot. I kicked it out of his hand; slammed him backward to the lush, beautiful carpet; and slid the knife into his chest. I watched his eyes flicker wildly, then start to dilate.
“That’s for the kids who died on the Cup Train,” I said. I twisted the knife. “That’s for the ones who got off.”
Then I sat down, knife left in Pannizer’s chest, and relaxed, because I’d done my job, and there had never been a way out of this, anyway. It only took about ten seconds for someone to trigger my choke collar. I expected them to throttle me with it, but instead they just choked me gray and left me there, gasping and helpless.
The dogsbodies arrived. So did additional Administrative Assistants. Nobody killed me, probably waiting for orders from the Board, who had to quickly convene to appoint a new CEO. Not to mention deal with the inevitable hostile takeover attempts by competitors, although that really wasn’t my problem, or ever would be. Big politics.
No, all I had to do was sit, bleed, and wait for someone to finish me off. And watch the body of Leo Pannizer, the man who’d designed the Cup Train plan, attain room temperature.
That part was kind of a pleasure.
I must have dozed off at some point, because someone touched my face to wake me up. I blinked. My eyes had trouble focusing.
Virtue. Virtue was kneeling next to me, getting her knees all bloody in the sodden carpet. Her hand felt warm and very good.
“You did well,” she said, and her voice was trembling. “Zay. You did it. You made him pay the fare.”
I wanted to nod, but instead, I found myself smiling. “You’re welcome,” I said. I felt distant, somehow. All but gone. I wondered if this was how Miss Naia Wade Lymon had felt as I was using her to get access to Mr. Pannizer. “Did it work?”
She swallowed, and tears bled down her cheeks. “Yes, it worked. Mr. Clark is the new CEO. You just stay still. Medical will be here soon. It’s not as bad as that. I’ll make sure you get fixed up just fine. He’s promised you a promotion, Zay, you won’t be a dogsbody anymore. . . .”
There was a commotion across the office, and a wave of people entered—black-coated drones, some higher-level Admins and executives, and in the center, Tarrant Clark, the new CEO. There wasn’t a speck of dirt or blood on him.
He stepped right over Pannizer’s body and said, to no one in particular, “See that his family is compensated according to the policy, and take care of the cleanup.” People scrambled to see who could do his bidding first.
Not Virtue, though. She stayed right where she was, on her knees, looking up at him. Clark nodded to her. She nodded back, smiling a real and lovely smile through her tears. “We did it, sir,” she said. “Zay did it.”
“Thank you, Virtue,” he said. He still sounded calm and kind. “You’ve performed amazingly well. You have my sincere admiration for your skill, dedication, and resourcefulness. But you realize that the same qualities that made you so valuable on my way up make you a real liability now that I’m in power. Nothing personal. It’s just business.”
He nodded, and the dogsbody standing at his elbow pulled out a gun, aimed, and shot her once, in the head. She didn’t have a shield on; she’d given me hers, and I’d spent it. The noise blotted out everything for a second, and then Virtue was down, a sprawled weight across my chest. I held on to her, the way I’d wanted to before, and I couldn’t wrap my head around it. What had just happened? Virtue—Virtue was dead.
For succeeding.
“Him too,” Clark said, and the dogsbody focused his aim on me now. Oddly enough, Clark still looked kind and sad and a little regretful. “You really gave exceptional service today, Zay,” he said. “Thank you. I wish things could be different.”
“Why?” My voice sounded thin, but surprisingly normal, all things considered. “Why kill her?”
“Because she was brilliant,” he said. “And persistent. And sooner or later, she’d have realized that there were flaws in my story. I couldn’t leave someone as deadly as Virtue Hardcastle at my back.”
“So you lied,” I said. I felt distant, only partly there, but some spark kept me going despite all the blood I’d lost, all the punishment. “It was you behind the Cup Train all along. Should have shot you when I first saw you,” I said.
“Yes, you probably should have. But I cultivated Virtue, and you trusted her,” he told me. “Not your fault. You’ve served well, Zay. Both of you have. Thank you. I promise you, I’m going to do a complete ground-up reorganization in this place. You’ve made it possible for me to make things better.”
I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. Blood on my lips, Virtue dead in my arms, and I was laughing.
“Mr. Clark!” one of the Admins said urgently, and showed him a handheld. “Sir, something’s—something’s wrong.”
Clark waved the handheld away impatiently. “Fix it. That’s your job.”
“Sir, I can’t. Some kind of Company-wide blackout. Critical systems are failing, one after another. . . .” The Admin was on the verge of panic. It was real damn funny. “Sir, we’ve just lost missiles. And half the defense grid!”
They forgot about me, even Clark, and for a while there was a lot of suppressed panic, people running, shouting . . . chaos.
Virtue would have been so proud.
Something hit me across the face and startled me awake. I hadn’t even realized I’d been resting until the pain came back. The world looked watery and thin, and I knew I didn’t have very long now.
Clark was glaring at me. He looked years older now, and no longer sad or resigned. He looked enraged. “What the hell did you do? The systems are down, all
of them are down! Tell me what you did!”
“Not me. Virtue. She built a fail-safe. You shot her, and you triggered the program.” I had to pause for breath, and coughed out a mouthful of salty blood. “Was supposed to be her revenge on Pannizer if he killed her to get to you. She never expected you to betray her.” I watched his face and saw the shock sinking in. “So if you’d let her live, you wouldn’t be CEO of a dying Company.” I was short of breath now, bubbling blood in my ruined lung, but I laughed anyway and spit up red, right in his face. “For a first executive decision, it sucks.”
He shot me, of course. Several times, which should have hurt but really didn’t, as if my body had just given up on transmitting the messages. I felt the choke collar engage again, but distantly. And as I slipped off into a comforting, warm darkness, the last thing I heard was him shouting for people to do something. Fix things.
But they’d already been fixed, but good.
The last thing I felt was Virtue’s body warm in my arms.
The last thought was, This is the best day I’ve ever had on the job.
Retirement came fast, but it came clean.
And that last sound, faint and sweet, was the sound of a CEO, screaming in pain, as the dogsbodies won.
Pale Rider
by Nancy Holder
SHARDS, ASHES, AND a freaking carton of batteries. Inside the dusty box, there were dozens of double-A six-packs.
Dana whooped, victorious. Lowering herself to a squat on the balls of her feet, she pushed back her dreads and caressed the treasure with her flashlight beam. Then she set the flashlight on its end so that the light bounced off the ceiling, picked up one of the packs, and wiped off the dust. She turned it over, examining it for an expiration date. The printing was too faded. She grabbed the flashlight and was just about to unscrew the head so she could test a sample battery when she heard the creak of a floorboard. She wasn’t alone.
“Shit,” she whispered. As quietly as she could, she clicked off her flashlight and stuck it into the pocket of her hoodie. Then she grabbed the heavy carton and stood, listening. Her heart pounded.
Nothing. Maybe she had imagined it. Or the poor old house was settling some more.
She quietly shuffled out of the room. This was the third time in two weeks that she’d found batteries in places she and her roommates had already searched. She had just known to go inside the ramshackle house and step through the filth and the trash to what appeared to be a home office. Even though she and Jordan had been there before and had carted off anything usable. But this time, she could see the floorboards in her mind, and she’d pried them up.
In the disintegrating world, change was not usually your friend, but life had made an exception.
There was another creak, and then a growl, and something charged at her. She screamed and tore out of the room with her carton. Whatever it was, it followed her into the hall, kicking up years of dust and trash while she banged into the walls from side to side with the huge box. She kept yelling, barreling around a fallen door into pitch-black darkness.
My gun is in my other pocket, she thought.
She whirled around and tried to throw the carton at her attacker—where she thought it might be—but the box was too heavy and it just tumbled through the darkness to the floor. Stumbling backward, seeing nothing, she got the gun out of her other pocket and fired. The thing howled. Dog. Coyote. She fired a couple more shots and ran out of the house. The wooden porch gave way and she crashed downward through the rotted boards to her waist.
Bathed in amber moonlight, a mangy dog leaped out of the shadows. Dana was trapped. She let out a bellow as it launched itself at her.
It howled; then its limp body smacked against her right arm and it crumpled in a heap beside her. It didn’t move. Panting with fear, she planted her palms on either side of her body, fingertips brushing the dog’s dirty, matted fur. She pushed up and out of the hole, propelling herself to freedom as she flopped onto her front then threaded her legs free.
The dog was twitching and panting. Oh, God, rabies. Had it bitten her? With a shaking hand, she felt around for her gun, unsure when and where she’d lost it.
No luck.
She tested her footing. Nothing sprained or broken. She stepped back into the house, listening hard, feeling along the floor with the soles of her sneakers for the gun. She still couldn’t find it. She could come back for it later, but there was no way she was going to leave the batteries. They were just too precious.
Ear cocked, she groped around for the carton, found it, and picked it up again. She was trembling. She didn’t feel any pain. No bites, then. Hopefully.
A creak.
She turned back around to leave. Her knees gave way and she almost slid to the floor.
Silhouetted by moonlight, a man stood in the doorway. Spiky hair, long coat, boots. Her heartbeat went into overdrive.
His dog, she thought, cold and terrified. He set it on me.
They faced each other without speaking. She kept it together. You didn’t live as long as she had—she was seventeen—by losing your cool. But she was very scared.
“I have a gun,” she said.
He raised his hand. “This one?” he said in some kind of accent.
Oh, God. Oh, God, oh, God, she thought. This was what she got. Jordan had told her not to scavenge alone. But she had just known they had to get the batteries tonight. Jordan was down with a bug, and no one else had felt like going.
She licked her lips and raised her chin. “I have another gun.”
“You can have this one back,” he said. The accent was German. He sounded like a movie villain. He looked like one in his long coat. She felt naked in her sweatshirt, sneakers, and board shorts.
“Stay away from me. I’ll call my guard dog on you,” she said, but her voice cracked and she realized she was losing her grip on the carton. Icy sweat was streaming down her body.
“I mean you no harm, Delaney.”
She jerked, even more afraid. That was her given name, and no one at the house knew it.
He raised his hands above his head, and she saw the outline of her gun. She didn’t know what to do. Rush him? Run back into the darkness? Where there might be another dog?
Then suddenly, there was no carton in her arms. It was in his. And they were on the sidewalk outside the house.
“What the heck?” she said.
“Schon gut, keine angst.”
He was very tall, not as old as she had thought—maybe five years older than her—and in the moonlight, she saw that his hair was blond. His eyes were light and he had a superhero face—flared cheekbones, square chin. Pierced eyebrow. Maybe that was a tat on his thumb. He was muscular, his long black wool coat stretching across big broad shoulders. These days, most people were a little too thin. Like her. She was all crazy black hair, brown eyes, and bones. “I got your name from your aunt. Well, from her things. I haven’t actually met her.”
“What aunt?” she asked him cautiously. She and her mom had kept to themselves until her mother’s death three years ago. She didn’t know any of her relatives.
“Aunt Meg.” He waited for her reaction. The name meant nothing to her.
“She’s white,” he added.
Her stomach did a flip. Maybe this Aunt Meg was from her father’s side. Dana didn’t even know his name. Dana’s mom had never told her white ex-boyfriend that she had gotten pregnant.
“What things?” she asked, catching her sneaker toe on a crack in the sidewalk. Their neighborhood looked like a bomb had gone off. Things fell apart all the time. She caught her toe again. Despite the heaviness of the box against his chest, he reached out a hand to steady her. His fingers were very warm and pale against her dark skin.
“Where is she?” she asked. “Aunt Meg?”
“She used to work for my family. In a manner of speaking.” He took his hand away. “My distant relatives.”
She stopped walking. “It was nice of you to Taser that dog and all,
but just, you know, get to the point.”
He stopped, too, and faced her. “It’s a sad world when someone who knows a family member of yours is greeted with such hostility.”
“This world is more than sad. I don’t know that you know her,” she countered. “You’re just a name-dropper in a coat.” When he kept looking at her as if that didn’t compute, she said, “I need more proof.”
He nodded. “Fair enough.”
She looked to the right, at a boarded-up building, and had a funny feeling. His face came into her mind, and then there was something black and rectangular. She squinted as she walked, trying to make sense of it.
“Hey,” said a voice, and she jerked her head up. She and the guy were standing in front of her house, which she shared with Jordan, Lucy, Mike, and Anny. The strays that had become family. Wrapped in his bathrobe and plaid pajama bottoms, Jordan was standing on the porch, shotgun pointed in their direction. “What’s up?”
“We have a rule,” she told the guy. “No strangers in the house. Ever.”
He looked from her to Jordan and back again. “My name is Alex Ritter. There. I’m not a stranger. It’s okay to let me in.”
Jordan hesitated. “What?” he said fuzzily.
“It’s okay,” the guy—Alex—said again.
“Cool.” Jordan nodded calmly and lowered the shotgun.
Dana was stunned. “Jordan?”
“It’s really all right, Delaney,” the man—Alex—said. “I swear it to you.”
“It’s not,” she insisted. Too late, she remembered that he still had her gun. She bounded onto the porch beside Jordan and reached for the shotgun. “We don’t know this guy. And he is weird.”
Jordan kept hold of the shotgun and opened the front door. “Come on in.”
“Lucy!” Dana shouted. “Anny! Mike!”
Then they were in the house, and her four roommates were oohing and aahing over the carton of batteries, which Alex was doling out to them like Santa Claus with his bag of presents. Dana looked around wildly. She had lost more time. And this creepy man in black was inside her house.