Just as Ryan and his team rounded the corner, a squad of shifters burst into the hallway, charging straight at them.
Then, when they spotted Ryan’s group, the onrushing muties thundered to a halt. They stood in the middle of the corridor, sizing up Ryan and his people with narrow-eyed stares of suspicion, just as Ryan’s team did the same thing to them.
Sensing an opportunity, Ryan addressed the man he thought was the leader of the muties. “We don’t want a fight,” he said evenly. “We’re not your enemies.”
The corridor shook with another quake as the mutie leader thought it over. His men’s eyes flicked alternately between him and Ryan, watching for a sign from either one.
“Are you the ones causing these quakes?” the mutie leader asked finally. “Destroying the balance of the Shift?”
“Absolutely not.” Ryan shook his head. “We’re only here to find a friend of ours.”
“Did she cause the quakes?” asked another mutie, perhaps the leader’s second in command.
“It’s a he,” Ryan replied. “And I don’t see any possible way he could have done that.”
“Liar!” shouted the second in command. “Norms always bring destruction!”
“Enough!” The shifter leader snapped an arm stiffly upward. “We don’t want a fight, either. We just want to get out of here.” He stepped to one side and gestured for the other shifters to do the same. “You go your way, and we’ll go ours.”
The rest of the muties followed the leader’s example and made room. Ryan nodded and started forward, with his team close behind.
But midway down the corridor, the second in command leaped from the ranks and charged at Krysty.
Before the attacker had taken his third step toward her, a blastershot boomed in the corridor, and a round punched through his skull. The impact jerked him sideways, then he dropped to the floor in a bloody heap.
All eyes flashed to the shooter, Ryan, as he calmly lowered his handblaster. “Thought we had an agreement,” he said slowly.
“We do,” the leader stated firmly. “Let’s go,” he told his people, and they headed down the corridor.
Some moved more slowly than others, white-knuckling weapons and giving Ryan’s group the stink eye, but no one crossed the line laid down by the second in command’s corpse.
“Assholes,” Hammersmith muttered as the two groups slipped past each other.
“Less talking, more walking,” Ryan urged, though his idea of walking, as he hurried down the corridor, was more like a full-tilt run.
* * *
DOC KNEW HE was near the end of the chute, but he wasn’t sure what to do when he got there.
Exo was somewhere behind him, coming up fast. His voice seemed a little bit closer every time Doc heard it.
That meant Doc wouldn’t have time to do much of anything when he left the chute. No sooner would his feet hit the ground than Exo’s would do the same…at which point, all bets would be off. The maniac shifter had already beaten him repeatedly in casual meetings with no provocation; Doc could only imagine what he would do to him now, when Doc had tried to escape him.
Exo’s nonthreatening comments didn’t offer any clues. “Looking forward to having a chat when we get out of this,” he called through the chute. “We’ve really got our work cut out for us, Doctor H.” Somehow, the lack of blatant threats was more frightening than if he’d just come out and screamed a litany of terrible things he was going to do to Doc.
Suddenly, the old man swooped around a bend and saw a circle of sunlight in the distance. Heart pounding, he raced inexorably toward that circle, even as he knew from the map in his head that it represented the final exit.
The chute angled upward, and Doc’s momentum carried him toward the light. He would be outside in seconds.
Jaws clenched, muscles tensed, he tried to get ready, tried to prepare himself for the prospect of fighting for his life against the lunatic mutie.
* * *
JAK SCOWLED AS Union hauled off and bashed another control panel with the crowbar. “Why destroy Shift and everyone? Not make sense.”
“Not if your sisters weren’t murdered by the locals, it doesn’t.” Again, Union wrenched back the crowbar and smashed it into the console. A storm of sparks erupted in her face, forcing her back a step.
“Sisters?” Jak thought about taking her down before she did more damage. He knew he could, with the weapons in his hands, but then he wouldn’t hear her story. He wouldn’t get the answers he wanted more than anything, to explain why a woman who’d seemed to care for him could have been lying to him from the start.
“Four of them,” Union added. “All whitecoats, specializing in treating animals with the energies of the Shift. They developed hybrid creatures and turned them loose in a wilderness area, hoping to evolve life-forms that could clean up the ruined ecosystem of the Deathlands. That one area became their outdoor laboratory.”
“Devil’s Slaughterhouse.” Jak nodded as the pieces fell together in his mind. “Sisters made beasts that attacked us there.”
“And they were murdered for it. The locals executed them when some of the Slaughterhouse creatures attacked a ville and killed some people.” Her face contorted with rage, she let the crowbar fly again, shattering a computer monitor. “My sisters were trying to help, and they were murdered for it.”
“Wait.” Jak leaned against a welding unit as the latest quake nearly rocked him off his feet. “Four sisters, you said?”
“Yes!” Again, she hammered the console with the crowbar. “Four!”
Jak knew that what he was about to say was true before he said it. “One was named…Taryn?”
Union swung the crowbar without answering.
“And the others,” Jak said. “Names Rhonda…Dulcet…Carrie?”
“Yes!”
Finally, Jak felt as if he was getting the picture. The four women in one body—they were all dead sisters, or at least echoes of their personalities. But one question still remained about those women and that body.
“If four sisters in there, who talking now? Not sound like Sasha.”
“Because there is no Sasha,” Union snapped. “Sasha was just a lie to hide our real reason for being here.”
“The lucky sister! The one who survived!” As she said it, the quake rumbled and crashed like thunder. “The one who will help the others get revenge for their deaths!”