The Black Tide (Outcast 3)

He stopped abruptly, his expression shifting from confusion to horror in quick succession. I snapped a gun from my belt and fired, but his reactions were just as fast as mine. He dove out the closing door, and the bullet pinged off the metal and went who knew where.

My time here had just moved into the red zone.

I shifted my aim to the scanner that controlled entry into the room and blasted it. Sparks and black smoke flew as the screen went dead. Though the door was now locked shut, I doubted it would keep anyone out for long.

As a siren began to sound, I killed the woman then stepped over her body and walked across to the chemicals cabinet. I'd made a promise to the soul of a dead child, and I intended to keep it. Had there been any sort of hope for the little ones within this room, I might have hesitated, but the scientist had basically confirmed what the child had told me. It was far better that they die a painless death now than spend who knew how many more weeks or months in unremitting agony.

I was all too familiar with such a death. I would rather break a vow than allow it to happen again.

If this lab was anything like the labs that had developed us, then there would be some means here of putting down unwanted test subjects. After a moment, I found what I was looking for—pentobarlazol—a newer, swifter-acting form of an eons-old drug. It was basically both a sedative and an anticonvulsant, and in higher doses it gently put the subject into a deep sleep even as it shut down heart and brain functions. I’d seen déchet injected with it, and knew it to be a quick and peaceful death.

I clipped the gun back onto the utilities belt and then grabbed the bottle and several syringes. It didn’t take long to inject the pentobarlazol into the feed lines of all the children.

In all the lines but one.

I just couldn’t do it to the happy little girl. She, out of all of them, had some hope of survival. She deserved a chance, and I was going to do everything in my power to give it to her.

I put the pentobarlazol back into the cabinet, dumped the syringes into the medical waste chute, and then primed two of my remaining four RTX devices. I stuck one under a bench near the cribs, and another on the wall behind one of the metal cabinets. As the sound of approaching steps began to echo in the antechamber, I pulled off my stolen jacket, detached the drip feeds from the little girl, and carefully constructed a sling so that I could carry her.

She made no sound. She merely placed one little hand on my chest, right above my heart, as if drawing comfort from the sound.

The footsteps stopped outside the door. I hurried across to the guard I’d darted and quickly stripped off his body armor. I loosened the side straps, then carefully pulled it over my head. The guard was much taller than me, so not only did the heavy vest drop past my hips, it completely protected the little girl. Once I’d tightened the straps, I wrapped a light shield around the two of us and hurried over to the internal door. Fortunately, this one wasn’t scanner locked, and it opened to reveal another laboratory—one that appeared to be at the epicenter of their pathogen development. I concealed another RTX and then drew a gun and walked over to the corner of the room near the door that led back out into the antechamber.

Even as I stopped, five soldiers quickly but silently entered the room. Three moved toward the other lab while two positioned themselves either side of the open door. My fingers tensed around the gun, but attacking either man really wasn’t the best option right now. To have any hope of getting out of this place in one piece, I needed to slip past without being sensed.

I eased off my boots and hung them on the back of my belt. I was no master at walking silently, and the combination of the boots and these floors meant there would at least be some noise, no matter how quiet I tried to be. It might not have been obvious when everyone had been intent on helping the fallen scientist, but there was no such distraction now.

I drew two guns and then sucked in the light shield as tightly as I dared. It would shimmer if it touched either man and that would be enough to at least raise suspicion. They might not know what a light shield was, but they would undoubtedly suspect something odd was happening and react accordingly.

After crossing mental fingers and praying that the luck I’d been gifted with so far continued, I headed for the door. But just as I was going through it, a third soldier appeared and tried to do the same. I had little choice but to thrust him out of the way and run.

/> The two soldiers guarding the door immediately spun and opened fire. One bullet caught my leg and sent me stumbling, but I somehow retained balance and jagged sideways, running to the right and around the outer ring of the antechamber rather than directly across it. Bullets pinged off the walls, floors, and ceiling, deadly missiles that came very close but didn’t hit. The noise of all the gunfire was deafening, but the soldiers themselves were quiet.

As was the child. She just gripped my shirt fiercely, as if intent on hanging on no matter what happened next.

A gruff order was barked, and the gunfire immediately ceased. I slid to a stop, trying to control both the sharp rasp of my breathing and my surging fear. The tunnel—and the safety it represented—was close. So damn close. If I could get into it, become nothing more than shadowed particles, I could avoid the worst of the gunfire by rising to the ceiling and moving swiftly out of this place.

But there were still soldiers piling out of the tunnel; some formed a line in front of it, blocking any hope of an easy exit, while others were beginning a methodical sweep of the antechamber. If I remained still, I’d be caught. Not just by those soldiers, but by a lack of strength that would surely happen sooner rather than later if the amount of blood now soaking my pants was any indication. Even if it wasn’t currently dripping onto the floor, it soon would be. And that, in turn, would be a very easy path to follow, shield or no shield. At least there weren’t any shifters amongst the soldiers—there couldn’t be. They would have scented both the blood and me by now.

Not that it really mattered, because the soldiers were drawing closer and my options were fast running out.

I took a deep breath, raised my guns, and unleashed metal hell as I ran full pelt at the tunnel. Even as some went down, others returned fire. A bullet grazed my cheek, another my lower thigh. Others thudded into both the sides and back of the body armor, and it felt like someone was pounding me with a heavy wooden bat. But even though each successive bullet hurt like hell, and breathing was becoming more and more difficult, the armor was working. So far, there’d been no hits to my chest. The little girl remained safe and untouched in her cocoon.

But blood from my other wounds splattered beyond the boundary of my shield. It didn’t matter—nothing did but getting us both safely into that tunnel.

Two soldiers ran at me. I shot one, dodged the other, and continued. But they knew where I was now and it would only be a matter of seconds before they took me down.

I had one chance, and one chance only.

I reached back, grabbed the remote, and pressed a button. The lab to my right exploded into a ball of fire, heat, and chaos. Such was the force of the explosion that it engulfed the men nearest it and sent others flying. I ran, with every ounce of speed and strength I could muster, at the two men who still blocked my way. They must have sensed my approach because their guns rose as one. Even as their fingers tightened on the triggers, I threw myself down onto my back, firing both guns as I skidded through the small gap between them.

The light shield disintegrated in the heavy darkness of the tunnel, and I immediately reached for the shadows. As the force of it surged through me, I touched the top of the little girl’s head with a bloody hand and silently said, Don’t be afraid. What happens won’t hurt you, but it is necessary to escape.

Again, she seemed to understand, because she made no sound even though the switch to particle form was as fast and as brutal as anything I’d ever experienced.

The change had barely finished when the second of the bombs went off. As smoke and heat billowed into the tunnel and sprinklers dropped from the ceiling and began spraying the entire area with water, I pushed upright and kept going, keeping as high as possible.

Gunshots pinged around us, but, as I’d hoped, the main barrage was not aimed high. They didn’t know what I was, didn’t know what I was capable of. I could only pray it remained that way, at least until I managed to get out of this place. If anyone thought to contact Dream and tell her what was happening, I was in deep trouble.