Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition)

  Finally I radio home. “Teddy, my man. It’s total recall time.”

  Chapter 26

  April 8th, 2068

  Luke

  Five minutes after the comms go down there is an alert in the mainframe of the Blood security database declaring that no less than six-hundred-and-twelve individual agents are currently being recalled to the base. That’s a shit ton of Bloods.

  This does not turn out to be true. Less than half show up. In fact it’s only about a hundred and fifty.

  We’re ready for them: I’ve already overridden the security system and everything that once turned this building into an impenetrable fortress now makes it a prison. The Bloods are shepherded – not by people but by locked doors and overridden elevators – onto one floor where they are locked and monitored. The trick is never to get close enough to let them do any damage. None of their prints or retinas will work to override the new security. They don’t have high enough clearances – they’re all reds and blues. Had a gray been here, he or she would have been capable of the override, but since I’m the only one in existence … bad luck, losers.

  I have no intention of killing these people. The first wave of casualties was a necessary regret so that we could take the building, but the rest don’t need to die. They’re loyal to the government, so we just need to become the government.

  What’s really freaking me out is the whereabouts of the other four hundred agents.

  The only Bloods that should be left free are the forty or so currently guarding the Gates, but since they can’t call for backup and we now have their ammunitions and supplies stores, we should be able to take them out.

  But where the fuck are the rest? I have no comms to contact Teddy, not until he gets them back up again.

  “My math skills aren’t very good, I’ll admit, but these numbers aren’t adding up,” Will points out.

  “We’re missing 76 percent of them,” Shadow says.

  “Wow, Rain Man, on the other hand, is apparently very good at math.”

  “It’s actually 75.6 percent, if we’re being technical.”

  “Jeez, what other hidden talents do you have?”

  “Quiet,” I snap unkindly. They both fall silent. “Teddy, you there?”

  No answer.

  “I don’t like this. It’s against protocol and they don’t do anything against protocol. The only person who can override it is Shay. But since the comms are all down I don’t see how he could have.”

  “Is there some way to override the security from where he is?” Dave asks.

  “No, it’s manual – why we had to get inside this building to do it.”

  “Could he have diverted the agents elsewhere?”

  “He can’t – the comms are down,” I reiterate impatiently.

  “But what if he just told them,” Dave insists. “Like, face to face. The old fashioned way.”

  “Why would he have access to four hundred agents at once?”

  “At precisely the moment we make our attack?” Will agrees.

  “How would he have known?”

  Dave spreads his hands. “You don’t want to see it but it’s right in front of your eyes.”

  I stare at my brother, unease uncurling in my guts.

  “We have a mole,” Shadow says aloud.

  “We’ve suspected him all along!” Dave exclaims. “I fail to see how this could be a surprise to you.”

  “Zach’s not a mole!” Will says. “He’s just … a bit of a douche.”

  “Wake up,” Dave orders. “He’s Shay’s son. And you haven’t seen the insidious hold Shay has over everything he touches, but I have. Zach’s a slave to it – they all are. Whatever he’s been cooking up with Josi either means she’s in on it with him, or he’s leading her into a trap.”

  “Well, then I guess it’s a bloody good thing she’s handcuffed to our silo,” Will points out.

  Except …

  “Except she’s not,” I say softly.

  *

  Josephine

  I’m alone now. I’ve found my way into the parliamentary room. There is a long table down the center, a trickling water feature on the back wall and a glass skylight in the roof. The walls are covered in faint, almost invisible DNA strands. It reminds me of the DNA molecule sculpture in Shay’s front yard. If the freak thinks he can change our DNA then he’s got another thing coming.

  I climb onto the table and wind the skylight open. Air rushes in and soothes my overheated face. I could wriggle my way out of it right now, I could be standing in the sky.

  But I don’t. I climb off the table and take my seat at the head of it.

  I tap on my earpiece and ask softly, “Are you in place?”

  No response.

  I ask again and wait.

  But still no response comes from Zach. The only person I have chosen to rely on for this suicide mission. And he should definitely be responding right now. Unless something has gone wrong.

  Too late, the door opens.

  *

  Luke

  “We’ve got eyes on security cams from here, right?” Will asks, taking his seat at one of the tech consoles. He’s a whizz with it – not like Teddy is, unfortunately, but still damn good. Before we know it we’re looking at footage from within the Gates. “If Shay knows what we’re doing then maybe he’ll give himself away somehow.”

  “What, by miming his thoughts to the camera?”

  Will shrugs and starts scrolling through the four trillion cameras that monitor the quiet little community. Since we have no way to contact Teddy, or anyone else for that matter, and we have no idea where the missing four hundred Bloods are, there’s not much to do but peer through the holo visuals and hope for a clue to what the hell is going on here.

  I’m caught in a very difficult place. I chose to believe in Josi – against all my better judgment I chose to believe in her trust in Zach. But maybe I was wrong to do that. Maybe Dave’s right and the sniveling little bastard has betrayed her.

  Why did I give him the key?

  The footage of the grand hall and the parliamentary rooms flashes up. We see, together, the six fully armed and armored Blood agents marching for the door to the room where waits a single, lonely girl.

  “Let’s go,” I say, even though if we enter that compound we’re likely never getting back out.

  Not one of them argues.

  *

  Josephine

  “Josephine Luquet. What a nice surprise.”

  I don’t stand up. He looks just as I remember him, with that hooked nose and cold, cruel eyes. He’s flanked by half a dozen Bloods in full swat gear – helmets and machine guns and all. Which is a real bummer.

  I smile. “Gosh, is all this for me? I’m flattered.”

  “You’re to be my most prized possession, dear. I can’t help a little excitement at having you here, laid out on a platter for me.”

  “I suppose not. We’re all human, after all.”

  He smiles. “Now there I might have to disagree. I’ve seen you, you know. Blood agents often wear cameras as well as earpieces and that footage gets sent back to base. Human, I am afraid, you are not.”

  “Maybe not, but whose definition should we go by?” I ask. “Because I’ve seen things too. I’ve seen children in labs and bodies in cages and people demented by rage and lack of rage. I’ve seen a statue of your first wife, the one you claim died of plague. I’ve seen a birdless sky after you shot them all dead. And I’ve seen the broken nose and the sliced mouth and the scarred body of your only son.”

  His mouth hardens at the mention of Zach. “You’re a brain-damaged child,” he says simply. And then he shoots me.

  It’s a shorn-off shotgun, of all things. I have a millisecond to think where the hell did he get that and then the force to my chest sends my chair rolling on its wheels and slamming into the wall. I’ve had a lot of injuries in my life, but I’ve never been shot in the chest before. It’s a wrecking ball to my ribs. It’s all the air gon
e in a great whooshing vacuum. It’s pain exploding out from the core of me to all the furthest points. I blink my sightless eyes as I scramble for breath.

  I wasn’t expecting it. I’m certainly not expecting him to shoot me again.

  He does.

  This time the force slams my head back against the wall and the pain is lower, in my guts, making them churn and roil and oh god I’m about to puke. My hands are tingling and I can’t feel my feet. I have a gun but I can’t reach for it, I can’t move, I can barely work out if I’m still conscious. Things have broken, things have definitely broken.

  He’s too close. Not even the vest will stop the force of his next bullet from skipping my heart if he does it again. I can feel it now, stuttering in my chest, flailing wildly against the impact.

  I manage to drag my eyelids open. I’m coughing badly and can’t stop. Through my streaming eyes I see Shay watching me. He’s so smug I want to scream but I can’t stop coughing.

  “What did you think was going to happen?” he asks me. “I’d let you sit there and reveal whatever plot you’ve set up?” He moves closer, his finger on the trigger, double-barrel still aimed at my heart. “That’s not how the world I built works. In my world, I win.”

  Jesus, why did I think he wouldn’t kill me? I thought he would want me alive to cut open and study, I thought it would buy me time. I forgot about his ruthless decisiveness.

  I ignored how dangerous he is, thinking I could be more so.

  “Your men aren’t yours anymore,” I wheeze clumsily. I wanted to do this well, to see the look on his face when he realized he hasn’t won at all, but I’m ruining it, rushing to the end, wanting the pain in my chest gone. Every time you think you’ve grown used to pain, that it can’t possibly bother you any more, it does. It really, really does.

  Where the fuck is Zach? Why hasn’t he come? A terrible thought refuses to be denied: he’s left me here. Or lured me here. And that will be the end of me.

  “We took the Blood base,” I gasp. Clumsy, clumsy, clumsy.

  That’s when he smiles and I feel cold inside. “You think I didn’t know what you were planning? You think I didn’t know where you’ve been hiding?”

  Inside my bruised chest my heart thumps. It hurts, it hurts so much.

  He moves closer, right up close to my face. It’s an insult, getting this close to me: he knows I can’t move to hurt him. But just to land his point home, he cracks me over the skull with the butt of his shotgun.

  The world flashes with a bright light and then spins and spins and spins. I can taste metal and I think my neck has disappeared. Instead there is a head lolling on something that can no longer hold it up.

  “You’re rats in those tunnels, scurrying around in filth and waste, bringing disease and unrest to society,” I hear Shay tell me. I hear it above all else. “So I did the only thing I could. I sent exterminators to clean you out. Four hundred of them.”

  He looks at his watch. Into my blurry eyes. “They should be about done by now.”

  *

  Luke

  We’re close. The Blood compound is near the Gates, for obvious reasons. We don their combat gear, take one of their vehicles and bluff our way inside. They’re undermanned, it seems, which means the four hundred missing Bloods aren’t here. I take one of them hostage and use his eyes and prints to get access to the main building, and then through several doors. The security is lax beyond belief – there’s something big going on. Some reason Shay thought he’d be safe from attack.

  It’s too easy to reach them. Way too easy. I’m nervous as we cross the glass corridor and approach the parliamentary room, unhindered.

  The doors are wide open. They’re waiting for us.

  My eyes scan the room. Take in the sight of Josephine draped on a chair at the end of the room, blood streaming from her skull, a strange wheezing sound drifting from each of her breaths. It sounds like she’s punctured a lung. And worse, more terrifyingly, one of her eyes – obviously the one that got impacted by whatever wound cut open her head – has ruptured. All the blood vessels around her black eye have burst. She looks almost grotesque, stranger even than the Furies appear, with her one blue eye remaining unscathed. It’s like looking at two different faces at once.

  My heart reaches wildly for her.

  “Luke Townsend,” Shay greets me. “Returned for more tests?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Or maybe,” Shay goes on more softly, “you miss it.”

  My eyes move to his without my permission.

  “The blood moon and its monstrous power,” he says. “Doesn’t it just kill you, Townsend? That the worst thing I ever did to you was take that power away from you? You tell yourself you wanted the blood moon’s help in destroying me, but it was more than that. You liked it, didn’t you?” He moves a little closer. “I know you. I created you.” He looks now at the other people in the room, lingering on Shadow and then Josephine. “Each of you.”

  Fear flickers in and out of my heart like an old black and white movie. Not at his words. But because we got to him, at long last – five of us, armed and well trained, all of us wanting him dead – and yet I can feel in the room that he still holds the power. His Bloods have their weapons trained on us, for starters. His own gun hangs easily in his hand. But it’s more than that.

  “Door,” I say softly to Shadow and Will, who fall back to watch the door. Dave stays by my side.

  I could raise my weapon and take him through the skull, but I don’t think I could do it before a dozen bullets riddled my body. I consider doing it anyway.

  While I think, I ask, “Why’d you make it so easy to find you?”

  “Because I don’t need it to be difficult,” Shay answers. “I only need it to be difficult for you to leave again.”

  If this turns into a gunfight, everyone in this room is dead. That’s fact. But I have to kill him somehow. I have to change the dynamic.

  I stop thinking about power and dynamics as soon as he starts talking, just, as I’m sure, he planned. This is all his design, I now see.

  “The missing Blood agents,” Shay says, and even clever as he is, there’s still pride in his voice. Still a sick, childish arrogance. “I’ll paint you a picture, shall I? Four hundred Bloods moving their way through the veins of the earth, destroying everything in their path like the deadliest virus of all. Made for this very purpose. To cleanse. You and yours, Townsend – your day is over. This is how I deal with disease: I wipe it from the world.”

  The floor disintegrates beneath my feet.

  My mother and father. Pace and Hal, Teddy – all of them. More than seventy people, including children and elderly, all friends and family. All slaughtered.

  I can’t move. I’ve disintegrated with the floor.

  “Oh god,” I hear Will whisper.

  Shay is so cold as he looks at me, watching for my reaction. I’m too empty to give him one.

  No. Scratch that. I’m not empty.

  I thought I knew rage.

  I didn’t.

  I thought I knew violence.

  I didn’t.

  But before tonight is through, Shay will know these things, even if I have to show them to him with a body full of lead.

  *

  “We all know it. It’s been said by anyone with a modicum of intelligence throughout history. Love is weakness. It’s a disease that ravages the mind and body and leaves you soft. I will forge a world cleansed of its mess, that I promise you.”

  We are listening to his tirade because he has left us no other choice, unless – the gun battle, unless all of us dead.

  “Love was what lost you this fight,” Shay goes on. It occurs to me that he’s biding time, waiting for his four hundred soldiers to return from their slaughter and finish us off. Which means I have to get to him before that happens.

  “Misplaced love, unfounded trust. It destroys everything, in the end.”

  He’s talking about the mole. And he’s right, I suppo
se. We trusted the wrong person and here we are, undone.

  I trusted the wrong person, because I love her.

  All the threads that tie me to my certainties are unraveling. My mother and father – oh fuck – no, don’t think about them, not yet. Hold onto your control. Hold it with those steadfast hands of yours.

  Except they aren’t anymore, are they? They’re useless, powerless hands, just as I have become, standing here waiting for the end to decide which of us to take, when once I would have made all the decisions myself.

  I hear Shay say, “You’ll be arrested first, condemned and then executed as terrorists by firing squad. My agents will be making their way through the compound now. You’d do best not to fight them.”

  I can’t see a way out. I can’t. My mind is full of black, poisonous rage. It’s full of regret.

  *

  Then.

  She says, through the gasping, scraping wheeze of her lungs: “No, they won’t.”

  *

  All eyes go to her. She can’t move – that much is clear. She’s taken two shotgun blows to the chest, by the looks of the mess of shirt and Kevlar. Her head rests on the wall, her body limp like a ragdoll’s. That kind of punishment could easily have killed her, even with the vest. The force of the shots gets distributed more widely and is more than capable of smashing a person’s abdomen to pieces. She’s lucky to be alive.

  But the expression in her ghoulish eyes speaks nothing of pain or luck. The expression in her eyes is one of deep certainty.

  It’s predatory.

  “Your agents would have lived. But you sent them down into the bowels of the world. You ordered their deaths when you thought you were ordering ours.”

  “What are you talking about?” Shay demands.

  “You think I didn’t know about your mole?” she wheezes. With a coughing laugh she adds, “You heard and saw what I wanted you to.”