The blows come out of nowhere and everywhere, all at once. They’re not all that powerful but land in such rapid succession and in sensitive areas like my kidneys, ribs, and jaw that they smart like heck.
I look around the seemingly empty corridor and fire my weapon literally at the shadows, convinced I am fighting an invisible enemy, but the slugs ricochet harmlessly down the halls.
“Oh, right,” a voice chuckles behind me. I whirl and fire, but the speaker is suddenly standing directly to the right of where the voice came from.
It’s Dad. “Silly me. I was about to say this fighting style must be familiar to you, but I guess it wouldn’t be, would it? You had your dustup with Telic and the rest of Generation Zero before your last mindwipe. She’s been accelerated into the timestream so can act a few seconds before everyone else. Wild, isn’t it?”
I look around but don’t see any Telic. I don’t have any idea what that person looks like, but I don’t see anyone else at all. “Where is she? Did you turn her against the rest of Generation Zero? Where are you keeping them? I don’t want to hurt you, Dad, but I am not leaving here without them.”
Dad blinks wonderingly. “You’ve changed in so many ways, I thought maybe the mindwipe didn’t take this time, but . . . hmh.”
With difficulty, I point the gun at him. I don’t like doing it. I think of us tossing around the football beneath the wheeling gulls.
But then I realize that’s the only thing I can remember doing with him. My filial devotion to him, such as it is, is another phantom limb. It’s cake. “Don’t make me do this.”
“I’m not making you do a thing. Not at the moment, at any rate. Nor anymore. Sorry to say, son, this is the end of the road for you. Dodge—Red Cell—wasn’t exactly the most popular person around here, I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear, and I might have been able to talk the PRS Board into sparing you even after you turned him into a birthday candle, but after this latest stunt . . . I mean, you do know you’ve wiped out over half the security force here, don’t you? Even if that wasn’t enough for the board to authorize terminating you, the sheer number of meetings and Google Doc condolence forms I’m going to have to fill out for the next ten days or so makes me want to terminate you.”
His eyes gleam, nested in their crow’s-feet laugh lines as always, but his voice is so cold. The conclusion I’ve been avoiding for days now seems unavoidable. My palms are sweating and I have to tighten my grip on the pistol.
“You’re not really my father, are you?” I ask, voice cracking.
He just makes this little shrug, damn him. “I’m the closest to one you’ve got, or will ever have. But the short, simple, truest answer to your question is . . . no.”
“Then I am trying to figure out why I shouldn’t pull this trigger like I would on any other faceless PRS goon.”
“Lifeline, Cronus,” he says, and I don’t really know what those two words attached to each other are supposed to mean.
At first.
The air ripples and parts visibly between his hand and my chest, and suddenly my shirt and the skin and muscle beneath burn in a way I can’t even describe. I know it’s the raised hand of Garrison (don’t call him Dad, he’s not your dad, not really) who’s doing it, so I roll sideways behind a table. His hand follows me like a spotlight, and all at once it’s the table that’s now being eaten away into amber embers with an unnatural sizzle.
I look down: My nanites are trying to rebuild the front of my rib cage, but it’s much slower going than usual. Somehow, instinctually, I know: It’s because I have fewer of them than I had before. The power Dad—Garrison—has just used on me has actually destroyed the nanites that were once there. Panic spikes, and I try to tamp it down. I have a feeling that takes me a second to place because I haven’t felt it in a long time:
Fear. Blind, existential fear.
There are powers out there that can kill me.
“Cronus is truly an amazing kid,” Da—Garrison is saying, walking slowly around the table to get another shot at me. “He could have really been something, had I allowed him to be. But his power has a much better home with someone who knows how to use it. And that person would be me. He slipped from my grasp once, but you brought him back in the end.”
When Garrison blasted the table, he blew one of the seats and the metal arm that attached it to the rest of the unit free, so I grab it and sling it as hard as I can at his head.
“Lifeline! Castle!” he barks, and a translucent force field wraps around his entire body. The plastic seat bounces harmlessly off his eyes.
I manage to get my feet under me. As I rise, he twists his waist and shows me the back of his head. It’s shaved in the rear, and I can see a small red bump. “It’s all in there. The sports car that makes you look like a horse and buggy, Bloodshot. A neural implant, developed with your nanomachine technology, that can give anyone psiot powers—well, anyone, provided their neurology is compatible with the tech. Whether or not I am is a bit of an open question in that regard, given my migraines, but I’m trying to stay positive. Still, you think I was going to let anyone else get ahold of this power? Son, have I ever told you about Edwin Drake, the man who invented oil drilling? Well, I am not going to end up like—”
I fire three quick rounds at the implant, but the slugs ping futilely off the Castle force field. I tell my nanites to try to latch on to it remotely, but the signal is scrambled. Also . . . distant? I’m not sure what that means.
Garrison brings his head up with a smile. “Ha! That scrunched-up nose on your face means you’re trying to remotely control the Hard CORE, doesn’t it? Sorry—we engineers love our acronyms. Cybernetic-Organic Retrofitting Engram. This little chip can swap signals from preserved parts of psiot brains in and out of my own. And to do so, it has to use an advanced, constantly shifting nanotech that’s simply too complex for your own nanites to push around. Sorry.
“These bugs learn almost as fast as yours. Their processing time has decreased by a factor of twenty since I blasted you with Pulse power in the Nursery back in Idaho. Watch: Lifeline? Animalia.”
Switching between powers means he has to drop the shield. I fire, but as he said, the transition is almost instantaneous. A flat, monochrome substance ripples across his body. My bullets embed in that shell with dull cracks, stopped cold. Then the trigger clicks under my finger with no result. Out of ammo.
“Our shrinks concluded the psiot code-named Animalia was scared by a Japanese cartoon her older sister was watching on TV when she was very young. So she wrapped herself in animated forms because it made her feel fearless, by embodying what scared her most.
“But she’s a little girl. I’m a man. I have a man’s fears. Loneliness scares me. Betrayal is something you always have to look out for. And persistence. A thing that keeps coming back and coming back, no matter how many times you’re sure you’ve killed it.”
Garrison’s voice growls in a familiar, respirator-assisted rasp as he expands into muscly veins and grotesque teeth, bulbous eyes, a chest full of tentacles. It’s Red Cell—back from the dead but now ten feet tall and bulletproof.
With a hollow bark, this grotesque copy of Dodge swats the pistol out of my right hand with one veiny claw and then launches me across the room with the other. I slam into the metal shutter sealing off the kitchen from the rest of the cafeteria. It buckles and collapses, and I am bouncing across the tiles, finally stopping against the metal prep islands in the center.
This is not going very well for me.
Garrison/Red Cell is still talking. Why do people always want to rant at me while they’re beating me up? I’ve got to start fighting ninjas. They’re deadly but silent.
“I know you’re going to find this hard to believe right now, kid, but I really am a sentimental old fart at heart. Part of me wants to just subdue you, and wipe your memory again, and try and give you a fresh start, but I suspect flushing your short-term has fallen victim to diminishing returns. Turning you over to the Gen Zero kids corrupted you, made you all gooey with sentiment. An insidious impulse toward mercy has been hard-wired into your behavior now. We’re not going to be able to just point you at a psiot and say ‘Fetch!’ anymore.”
He kicks the door in with one monstrous foot and splinters and cracks the lintel as he shoves his massive bulk through the doorway.
I holster my one remaining gun and grab one corner of the giant twelve-burner oven against the wall and pull it into the aisle as far as I can, putting it between me and him and slowing his advance down. The gas pipes rupture with popping hisses. Red Cell strides toward me, grinning. He has me caught. Still, I pull cast-iron skillets and steel pots hanging from hooks on the ceiling and hurl them at him. He bats most of them away with a growl, but a few find their mark, cracking his Extreme-Dodge shell and, more importantly, mussing up that smug facade of his.
“I thank you, then, for convincing me,” he breathes, “to shove you headfirst into a cyclotron and tear you apart atom by atom.”
He leaps up onto the oven with a roar, and that’s when I grab a Scripto wand lighter off the counter, click its flame, and toss it at the exposed, hissing gas pipes. There is a solid wall of sound and heat like I’ve never felt. The fireball blows him one way and me another, through the double doors at the far end of the kitchen.
With a whine and a stuttering spritz, the bunker’s fire-control system turns on above me, and in addition to all the other things I have going for me, I quickly become drenched from the sprinklers overhead. The hiss of foam comes from the kitchen, as well as the extremely satisfying sound of Red Cell screaming in agony, which ratchets up gradually into Garrison’s actual higher-pitched timbre.
Every inch of me is begging to lie down and not get up again, but I ignore the urge and pull myself up by the drinking fountain mounted on the wall. I’m not literally on fire anymore, so that’s a positive development. Blackened bits of skin and flesh fall off the surface of me as I move.
Also, Dr. Motormouth may be annoying as all get-out, but amid all his verbal vomit, there were a few chunks I can actually use. All that talk may have been to try to conceal the fact that the Hard CORE has one obvious weakness I can exploit.
Now all I need to do is find it.