Lightning Game (GhostWalkers 17)

He didn’t have time to tell me. He died. That was the weird thing. He kept bleeding. That wound shouldn’t have killed him, but it just wouldn’t stop bleeding.

You didn’t load your bullets with something to make him bleed out, did you? Rubin poured suspicion into his voice.

You’re so funny, although that’s not a bad idea.

It wasn’t the wound, but something else. Could he have been using first-generation Zenith? By now, everyone knows not to use it. Whitney had to have warned all his colleagues that it does give any soldier in the field using it the necessary clotting to stop bleeding and the adrenaline to keep going, and then it does the exact opposite and kills them. That’s common knowledge.

Diego’s sigh was in his mind. I saw no evidence of a Zenith patch, first or second generation. Whitney might not have warned Chandler because he wouldn’t have known Chandler was creating his own personal army of elite soldiers. Whitney wouldn’t have liked that, and he would have put a stop to it. I don’t think he bled out because of Zenith. It was something else. Another reason.

These men could be experiencing problems in the same way some of the other GhostWalkers do, Rubin guessed. The squirrel man you interrogated said nine were expendable. Maybe that meant they weren’t perfect. They had flaws like the orphans. Like Jonquille.

The last thing he wanted was for Chandler to use Jonquille in more experiments. She’d been adamant that she wasn’t going back to Whitney ever again. She’d rather be dead. No doubt she felt the same way if Chandler was going to experiment on her.

You said Jonquille was doing research in laboratories. What kind of research? Rubin asked. He wasn’t going to get into a discussion with his brother on how to load his own bullets with some kind of chemical that might make a flesh wound bleed more, nor did he want to think about what kind of experiment they might perform on Jonquille instead of on one of their soldiers.

I would think it would have to be something to do with lightning. You’re the lightning expert. They’re developing weapons, right? That’s Chandler’s thing. She’s the lightning bug, so to speak.

Rubin considered Jonquille his lightning bug, not the government’s. Or Whitney’s. Certainly not Oliver Chandler’s. Or his team of elite soldiers. What did this team want with her, and what research was she doing? He shouldn’t have treated her like an experiment. Diego was right, he didn’t have any real social skills. He hadn’t considered he might need them if he found the right woman. He’d never bothered. He didn’t stay very long in anyone’s company.

Did squirrel man mention which weapons they were developing?

Just about everything. The ball lightning—they have the use of that as a weapon. It isn’t known. The project was stopped supposedly for a variety of reasons, but they found the answers they needed for a delivery system and shut down funding to all other research, leaving everyone else without a means to complete them. They can create ball lightning and shoot it at a target.

Rubin thought about that. He wasn’t surprised by it. Several of the laboratories had been able to create ball lightning and shoot it at a target in the lab. He knew the military had the resources already sewn up in that area for weapons.

They also can do exactly what you did using Jonquille, although not quite as efficiently. Their ability to target using the real thing is not very effective because the split-second trajectory and timing even for a computer is not accurate.

Rubin believed that. Every experiment that he knew of had run into the same problem, other than the ones he’d personally conducted.

Why are you accurate when a computer isn’t? Diego asked.

I’m accurate with Jonquille. Not with every lightning storm. I’m already tuned to her. I can feel the lightning just the way she can. Without her, I think I’d hit the same percentage as the computer, but with her, I’m going to be one hundred percent accurate every time.

A prickle of awareness went through his body, just as it did every time an enemy was close. He’s here. Coming closer. Not as fast as his partner.

He hadn’t heard the buzz of the radio in the partner’s ear, so there was no contact between the two men. They definitely had confidence when they moved through the forest that they could track their prey. Like both Rubin and Diego, they used their enhancements—sight, smell, the senses of animals—to tell them what was happening in the forest around them.

Rubin and Diego gave off the scent of the woods. They blended in. They were accepted. The mountains were their domain and had been since they were born. Most of the creatures, like the raptors had at one time or another, hunted with them and benefited from it. They were conservators of the forest and its inhabitants. Both were careful of the fragile ecosystem, but they did their best to preserve their part of the Appalachian Mountains.