They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy Read online

A hurricane stepped up to me in the blink of an eye. He even stopped checking his e-mail. "Thefuckyousay, bitch?"

  I gave him a long pause to annoy his impatient ass and put raw heat into his wind-burned face while I stood up to look down on him. "I said it takes no time at all to pop a blood vessel in your goddamn brain, you fucking piece'a shit. Get. The fuck. Out."

  What felt like a loooong-ass silence followed before Run ALC finally said in a way-too-fucking calm voice, "Ifeel you,but,man,I'mheaded up through Canada backtoCali,I needasmuch cashasyoucanspare.I gotyouraddress. I'llpayyouback." His eyes watched me like a wild dog, just waiting for me to say no. Even standing there, he flickered so fast I could hear the static electricity popping off him.

  "You want money?" I said because I couldn't think of anything else.

  "Ifyoudon't mind,yeah." The kid's fists were clenched, ready to explode.

  I yielded. I didn't need another Wilmont Avenue or another fucking Kamikaze. "I got some money in the bedroom," I told him. "You can have it and get out."

  He followed me back there, and I handed over the rest of the cash I had from my plane ticket downgrade. I tried like hell to keep my hand from shaking while I gave it to him. I hoped to God he would just fucking take it and leave. Because there was only one way left for this to escalate, and only one result if it did.

  "Damn, player,yougenerous," he said without any trace of gratitude. He put his hand up to clasp mine. I ignored it. "Comeon,man,don't be likethat," he insisted, vibrating the hand to get me to grab it.

  I grabbed his fucking hand and shook it.

  "Mybrotha," he said with empty, hollow eyes. "Hey,Imayneed to buysomefavors on myway. YoumindifI get somecardsfromyou,too?"

  "You want my fucking credit cards, too?"

  With that, Run ALC decided he was bored with me.

  In a heartbeat, he was gone out of the bedroom and back, tearing the carpet and breaking the doorframe where he grabbed it to slow himself down. And in that heartbeat, I had a chrome-plated gun put in my face.

  The kid who could probably move the speed of sound pulled a gun on me. Jesus, kids had gotten stupid.

  He cracked the pistol upside my head and sent me halfway across the room with stars in my eyes. He whipped the credit cards and my bank card from my wallet and pressed the chrome barrel to my head. The buckets of sweat all over him mixed with the smell of gun oil.

  "What'sthefuckin'PIN,bitch? Huh?Yougonnatellme whatIcanandcan'tdo? Fuckyou, man! Fuckyou! Hurryup'cause I gota datewiththat blondebitchin 1410, baby."

  I could have heated up the gun's grip, but the kid was so fast he would be able to feel it and pull the trigger before it was hot enough to drop. Same thing with burning his skin or clothes. But the two seconds I didn't say anything must have been an eternity to him because he kicked me in the side three times the following second.

  He tore ass out of the room. My hand had almost finished wiping the blood off my temple when he appeared back in the doorway.

  "Hurryupwhat'sthefuckin'PINforthecard?What'sthefuckin'PIN,puto?Thefuckin'PIN!Gimmethefuckin'PIN," he screeched at such a high speed I didn't understand the words.

  My head rang, but I concentrated hard as I spat out my PIN code to him and cranked up two pockets of heat; one of them a thousand-degree wall between me and him to keep him off me.

  "Now get the fuck out," I said, dizzy from the effort.

  Run ALC disappeared with a rapid "fuck you," and a split-second later, I heard the sounds I was waiting for: a gurgled yell and a crash so hard it rattled shit on my dresser. Then a spurting hiss like a garden hose.

  I sat on the floor, head in my hands. I had a stabbing pain in my ribs where he had kicked me. I sat there for a long time, knowing what waited for me in the other room. I was in no rush to actually see it.

  "Gonna have to move out," I muttered.

  I picked myself up off the floor, stopped the bleeding on my temple with a damp rag from the bathroom, then made my way to the living room, prepping myself for what was waiting for me there, where I had put the second pocket of high heat.

  The frame of my apartment door had been crushed and the door itself cracked nearly in half. A spray of red blood bathed my walls started from a point a few steps before that, but there had been plenty red left there on the frame where Run ALC's head hit the studs and caved in. With his speeder heart rate, he had bled out in no time. All over my fucking apartment.

  I had used the only thing I had to trip him up: a line of invisible heat hot enough to ignite and burn through human flesh on contact. Right at his neck height. It had seared halfway through his neck and staggered him, and he slammed skull-first into the door frame.

  The motherfucker was dead on my floor with every ounce of his blood painting my living room.

  The first thing I thought was that the girl in 1410 would never know how fucking lucky she was. Other than that, it was like everything else had turned off with the shock, every feeling. I pulled my recliner out of the pool of blood, wiped it down with a dishtowel that I burned in the sink and sat down to chain smoke and think. I turned off the basketball game. Nothing seemed real, though. None of it.

  And finally, a flash hit me as to why.

  It fucking wasn't.

  Rory's psychic was fucking with me. Tracey was paying her to screw with me for mouthing off, to teach me a lesson. Fuck, and I had fallen for it. I stared at the body. It wasn't real, I could tell. Hell, it still looked kind of like it was breathing. So I just stared it for a while, waiting for the psychic to get bored with me and thinking at her every obscenity I could come up with because I knew she was in my fucking head, until the next thing I knew, I woke up with a nosebleed. Standing up. Wearing my fireproof suit.

  On the coffee table beside me, my cell phone showed the simple message: 'Picture Sent.'

  "Oh, fuck--" I said to nobody before blinding white light filled my eyes.

  When I came out on the other side, I fell to one knee. I was in the glow of harsh white lights in pitch black night. My head pounded and my ribs hurt like hell. I threw up in the dirt at my feet. I hadn't eaten any of what came up.

  "Well, God, Don, that was supposed to get you full of calories before you came," Tracey said from beyond the headlights. "Are you all right? Everything's fucked here."

  A massive metal door embedded into a rock wall buckled as something screamed and slammed into it from the other side. I recognized the door from the pictures in the booklet; it was the entrance to the bunker.

  I wiped my damn mouth on a thick, fiberglass glove. Tracey had on like a metallic radiation suit that had been torn.

  And standing next to her, his face cut and bruised, was Will.

  He cracked open a can of beer and held it out to me with a worried look on his face. "Donnie, man, why's there blood all over your fucking suit?"

  Chapter 9

  Fifty Pounds of Shit in a Forty Pound Sack

  Will helped me up off the ground and put the beer in my hand. "Get that in you, son. We need you right."

  Thoom. The thick door shook. Rocks tumbled off the stumpy mountainside.

  I tossed the beer aside. I had blood all over my damn suit.

  "Don," Tracey barked. "Hey, are you here with us? Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

  Just like in Missouri, I didn't give myself time to think about what had happened and moved on. "My ribs hurt. Why didn't you give me any warning for this shit?"

  Thoom. The reinforced concrete doorframe spider web cracked.

  "Jesus," Tracey gasped.

  "Shit, that's bad, right?" I asked her.

  "Just burn it. Hot as hell."

  "Who's on the other side?"

  "Burn it."

  "Who is it?"

  Will broke in, "It's a fucking monster, man. Thing's huge and is trying to kill us."

  "Was it somebody with you?"

  Thoom.

  Tracey shouted, "It's not with us. It's one of the test subjects. Would you fucking deal with it?"

  "Did you
attack it first?" I shot at Will.

  "Donnie, come on, man, don't do this shit right now. It'll kill us all."

  Thoom.

  I heated up the air on the other side of the door to somewhere between a running car engine on a summer day and what my oven felt like on its highest setting to get whatever it was in there to back off. I used to have all kinds of specific temperatures and metal melting points memorized in my head, but they had all gone on to Neverland with my high school locker combination and most of my twenties.

  The thing behind the door screamed, but still pounded at it. "Get away! Get away! Get away! Strangers have to leave!"

  I dumped every drop of built-up anger, frustration and pissed-off hell I had into spiking the temperature up to somewhere between a steel mill reheat furnace and what I kind of remembered a propane welder's torch to felt like.

  Dizziness and tunnel vision started to set in, but I didn't let up. The thing in the bunker screamed and hit wildly with more noise than damage. The heavy door softened and drooped on its hinges from the heat, groaning as it warped.

  I let up and fell back to my knees, exhausted. Whatever was on the other side had finally stopped.

  Will pulled me back up on my feet. I doubled over, hands on my knees, to catch my breath.

  "Jesus," Tracey muttered. "Take a minute, good job. We're going to hit you with a psychic bullet, all right? Just take a minute to--"

  "Aw, for fuck's sake," I spat out, "just tell me what I need to know. I hate that shit."

  "Can I finish what I was saying? Can I? Okay, you need to know it all, all right? So take a minute to catch your brea--"

  "You're standing there doing nothing, Trace. Just fucking tell me whatever it is you want me to know! God damn."

  "Okay, you're fine I see," she said sarcastically.

  I raised myself upright, my ribs hurting as I stood. "Just tell me."

  "Okay, I'm sending you back," Tracey said. "You don't want to help and you just want to bitch? Fine. We'll figure this out."

  Will stood beside her. "Donnie, come on. Don't be an asshole."

  For fuck's sake. I was the asshole. "I can't believe you brought me here. And you dragged Will into this shit, too."

  "Don--"

  "Just shut up, Trace, okay? Fine. Whatever. Who's doing the bullet?"

  A black-haired mulatto chick in her mid-thirties and sporting way more piercings in her ears than I cared for stepped out from behind Will, wearing another pants and jacket thing that looked like it was made of aluminum foil. "Hey, I'm Rosemary," she said. "You done this before?"

  "What's with the foil suits?" I asked.

  Tracey quickly answered, "They block the microwave emissions from the active denial pain transmitters. We shut the transmitters down, so you don't need one. You ready?"

  I nodded and took a deep breath. "Yeah, yeah. Anybody got something I can bite on?"

  "Nope."

  "Great. Fuck it." I took off one of my gloves and bit down hard. It tasted like the worst kind of plastic; I took a few deep breaths and told the girl, "Be fucking gentle," through the fiberglass.

  Will grabbed me under the arms to hold me up on my feet.

  A few seconds later, a migraine hit me like I'd been stabbed in the head and kicked by a horse at the same time while new memories were written into my brain. Tracey's psychic only barely had the ability to do it or she was just fucking bad at it; it was like a first year medical student with a handful of power tools doing brain surgery. I would have thrown up if I'd had anything left in me.

  When it was over, I pushed Will away from me. I was still pissed at him. "Great," I told Rosemary. "Now I hate somebody named Saundra Wilson who fucked my boyfriend at his twenty-first birthday party." I put my glove back on.

  The psychic girl laughed with a shocked look on her face. "Oh my God, I'm sorry. Sometimes other memories of the psychic get all mixed up with the memories I'm writing."

  "Yeah, I know, that's why I hate it. And you're three days late for your period. Thanks a lot for that shit."

  "Oh, my God. I'm so sorry."

  Tracey snapped her fingers at her. "Rosie, go get a towel and some water for him. Don. Where'd all the blood come from, Don?"

  "I dunno. One of Rory's circle-jerk pals paid me a visit. We got into it."

  She shook her head. "Fucking Rory. Christ. You did what you had to do."

  "You weren't fucking there, Trace, so shut the fuck up."

  "Is the other guy alive?" Will asked.

  Tracey looked at him like he was a moron. "Are you fucking looking at him? Unless the guy can live without any blood in his body, then, yeah, he's dead."

  I gave her a middle finger. "Trace, shut it."

  Will squatted next to me. The right side of his face was bruised and starting to swell up. "You all right, man?"

  "Fine," I said. Sand stuck to the blood on my suit. Fuck it, couldn't think about it now. I'd think about it later; wasn't like the body in my apartment was going anywhere. "Looks like we got a fucking Kansas City," I told Will.

  "Yeah, pretty much," he chuckled.

  Rosemary laughed from the back of the waxed black Hummer with no license plates.

  I pulled my head up. "Are you reading me right now?"

  Rosemary shut the rear door of the Hummer and came back with a clean white towel and a cold bottle of water for me. "I'm not reading you. It's just hard to block out other peoples' thoughts sometimes. Sorry, okay?"

  I opened up the water and gulped it down. My mouth tasted like vomit. "How 'bout you try harder around me?"

  Years back, Will and I had been hired in Kansas City by some woman to rob her business so she could collect on the insurance. The plan was that we would deliver all the stuff to her boyfriend's house and she would cut us in on the insurance money when the check came in. What we did instead was fence the entire truckload of inventory and keep the money because fuck if we were gonna wait around for her insurance check. She reported us to the cops with no clue that we had given her aliases, and we had only talked with her on the phone, so she had nothing at all to give the cops. And she fucking admitted to hiring us for insurance fraud when she tried to get us arrested.

  So from then on, a Kansas City was any situation with a woman in way over her head.

  And that woman was Tracey.

  I went over the high points of the psychic bullet before I forgot them. One of Doland's test subjects was loose and going apeshit up and down the bunker complex because they had broken in. It was an unstoppable, autistic, psychic-proof giant. Stagga Lee and my replacement, some kid named 'Splode' who could generate heat by touch, had what the notebooks and hard drives but were stuck somewhere between the vault and the bunker exit. And Tracey couldn't teleport anywhere within the bunker or she would set off the radio pulse fail-safe that would kill everybody.

  "I'm getting real sick of being yanked around by psychics," I said to Tracey.

  "I didn't think you'd without a ninety minute bitch session, sweetheart," she said.

  "I can tell you're kissing my ass because you called me sweetheart," I said. "And your girl here can't do anything to that thing in there? She knocked me on my ass."

  Rosemary shook her head. "No. I'm mostly just a remote sensor. The mental stuff is harder, and he's not affected by it anyways. There's way more shielding in this place than we thought, so I can't get very good mental mapping, either. My brain has like one bar in there."

  Tracey handed me a cigarette. I tucked it behind my ear and wiped my suit down with the towel. She pulled one out for herself and waited patiently for me to give her a light. The cigarette trembled between her lips, and I noticed her hands were doing the same thing.

  "The map of the place came through to you okay?" she asked me.

  "Yeah, it's in here. Go get Lee and the other guy and then we're done, right?"

  "And the merchandise. That's the plan. We're going to shift in from here where Lee and Splode are."

  "And trigger the fail-safe? I
thought we weren't supposed to do that."

  "The client wants it done no matter what. Fail-safe's got at least a thirteen minute warm-up. We'll be gone before it hits."

  I threw the towel aside and lit both our cigarettes simultaneously. "Well, that sounds brilliant."

  "It's either that or go running around in there with that thing."

  "Whatever. So I notice you didn't pull Jim in for this?"

  "Way too psycho, sweetheart. He didn't make the final cut."

  "Guess you didn't need his nanites after all."

  "No, we did. Lee's got them in his system now."

  I looked at Will. He just shrugged. "I don't know who the hell y'all're talking about."

  "Jim just went along with that?" I asked Tracey.

  She blew smoke in my direction with a flat, "Yep. You're also very fucking welcome, by the way, that I got you a replacement, too. I know you didn't want to do this. But I guess you don't see that I did you that favor."

  I took a long, smoky drag. "Yeah, well, you kinda fucked up my thank-you by dragging my boy here into it behind my back, didn't you?"

  Will cracked his knuckles one at a time. "Hey, don't get up her ass about that, man. I don't wanna be your boy, wanna be a man."

  "You're a fucking idiot," I told him.

  Tracey handed me an ear bud radio. "Hey, how about everybody tables stupid, pointless discussion until we're all done. Put this in your ear to stay in contact if we get separated."

  I twisted it into place. "We're sure this is what we want to do?"

  Tracey answered my question by teleporting us all into the bunker with a white hiss.

  She put us in the middle of a wide room where four gray corridors met. This whole part of the bunker had been turned into a swank living room. Lee sat in an armchair, his metallic jacket on the floor beside him. He tried to say something, but Tracey's teleport had triggered the alarms, and a loud buzzer kicked on from a dusty loudspeaker near the ceiling, and high-pitched static blasted from our ear buds. We tore them out and threw them at the floor.

  I melted the wires in the loudspeaker to kill it.

  "Shit," Lee said loudly. "What the hell's goin' on out there?"

  Tracey huffed and reformed her sagging pony tail. "How's it going with the vault?"