The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) (30 page)

“Fuck this,” Leslie said. “I’m not carrying him. Stick him in the chair. We’ll push him.”

They threw my limp body into Kowalski’s office chair. I slumped to the side. There were pops and cracks coming from downstairs. Gunfire. Leslie grabbed me by the shirt, shoved me upright in the seat, and took hold of the back of the chair to haul me away. My heels scraped on the floor as he rolled me backward away from Doc McCaffrey.

“See you soon, Miles,” she said.

I tried to spit, but all I got was blood dribbling down my chin. I don’t think it had quite the effect I was going for.

The goons dragged me down the hallway in the opposite direction I’d come from. We passed a stairwell, and I heard the echo of boots stomping up the stairs. The goons quickened their pace.

We went through a door and down a wide corridor that lacked the fancy styling of the rest of the floor. Finally, we stopped outside a bare metal elevator with oversized doors. Leslie jabbed the call button. Something deep in the bowels of the building rumbled to life.

“Hey,” I rasped. “Leslie. Why’d your mother give you such a girly name, huh?”

“Shut up.” He pressed the call button a couple more times, just to make sure the elevator knew he was in a hurry.

“You want me to ask your mom next time I see her?” I asked. My head drooped to the side, and I didn’t have the strength to pull it back up. “I was gonna go visit her in the morning. You know how horny she gets in the mornings.”

“The doc doesn’t need your tongue. Don’t make me cut it out.”

The elevator doors slid open silently, and the goons dragged me inside. Leslie punched the button for the basement.

“You know, your mom always said my tongue was my best feature,” I said. “You should hear the way she screams when I—”

He clocked me in the mouth with the butt of his machine pistol. Compared to the fires raging inside me, it felt like getting a massage while sipping cocktails on a beach in Thailand. One of my incisors was loose when I probed it with my tongue, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

When I could see again, I let my eyes fall on the digital display above the door, reading off the floor numbers as we descended.
6
.
5
.
4
. Every one brought me closer to the basement, and my inevitable mulching.

“Hey,” I said. “I’ve worked it out. You don’t even want the crystals, do you? You’re just going to turn me into Soylent Green. You sick bastards.”

“You don’t ever shut up, do you?”

“I’m not known for it,” I said.

“Well, you’ll be silent soon enou…” The elevator slowed and stopped. I glanced at the floor display.
G
.

“What the fuck?” Leslie said.

The doors slid open. The three scruffily-dressed guys with submachine guns looked as surprised to see us as we were to see them. They were no more than five feet away. For a moment, my goons stared at the Collectivists, and the Collectivists stared back. Then everyone started shouting at once.

“Drop the guns!” Leslie screamed, waving his machine pistol at them.

The single Vei gangster went bug-eyed and snarled, his shark teeth bared in a classic Vei threat response. I wasn’t liking how close the barrel of his gun was coming to being pointed at my chest. My heart feebly tried to pound. I flopped down a little lower in the chair.

The doors started to close again, but one of the human Collectivists shoved his foot in the door and stopped it. I could tell from the way he was looking at me he knew who I was. Leslie must’ve seen it too. The goon’s hand closed around my neck. Cold metal pressed against the side of my head.

“Drop the guns,” Leslie said. His voice was cracking. “Drop them or I drop Franco. I’ll splatter him right here. Then no one gets him. Drop the guns. Drop ’em!”

No one looked inclined to do any such thing. I was most worried about the Vei gangster. Vei are unpredictable at the best of times, and this one looked about ready to blow his top and smoke the lot of us. With the grip Leslie had on me, I had no chance of dropping to the ground to avoid the shootout. It was funny in a way, how much it scared me to be looking down the barrels of those guns. I was going to be dead in an hour anyway, and just ten minutes ago I’d tried to kill myself. But now here I was, every instinct urging me to stay alive.

Gunfire burst out, echoing in the elevator. My spine—or what was left of it—turned to ice. But I didn’t fall. Neither did Leslie or the other suit-and-tie goon.

The three Collectivists weren’t so lucky. They all stood there for a second as the blood leaked from the holes in their chests. All the fire had gone out of the Vei’s eyes. He said something to himself in Vei, but I was too far gone to translate it. Then all three dropped to the ground. Their blood mixed and trickled into the crack at the door of the elevators. The guy who was blocking the elevator door with his foot was still in the way.

Leslie’s grip left my neck, and he sighed deeply. The other goon had gone whiter than his shirt. Neither of them had touched their triggers.

“Was that Sean who shot them?” Leslie said. He stuck his head out the doors. “Sean—” He jerked upright. “Who the hell are you?”

Gunfire ripped through him, and I watched the back of his skull turn into pulp. His body slumped across me for a moment, before sliding to the floor. The stink of death and piss and shit and gunsmoke burned in my nostrils. I dry retched, but my guts had nothing left to give.

The white-faced goon dropped his gun. It landed on the elevator floor, engulfed by an ever-growing pool of blood. The goon pulled himself into a ball in the corner, trembling.

A figure appeared in the doorway. He was tall for a Vei, dressed in a button down suit. Aran. The Vei that’d sliced my ear, the one I’d rescued from the Collective at their base. He just couldn’t stay away from me, could he? He raised his assault rifle. But it wasn’t pointed at me.

“No,” the trembling goon said, holding his hands out in front of him.

It did nothing to stop the bullets ripping through his face. Aran stopped firing. The goon slumped. They were all dead. All but me and Aran.

“Wha…?” My brain couldn’t keep up with what was happening.

Aran shook his head, tossed his assault rifle aside, and pried the machine pistol out of Leslie’s hands. “Talk later. My brother’s outside in the car. We need to get you out of here.”

I tried to make sense of the words coming out of his mouth. I gave up. “Wha…?”

He sighed and kicked the dead Collectivists out of the way, then grabbed the back of my chair and scooted me out of the elevator. “They want you, Franco, all of them. I don’t want them to have what they want. They want to process you and your precious crystals while you’re alive, before they have time to degrade. But they’ll take you dead and fresh if they have to.”

He pushed me along a wide corridor. Gunfire was still cracking throughout the building. In the distance, I could hear sirens.

We were approaching a fire escape door. Aran smashed in the glass of a fire alarm on the wall and pulled the lever down. The alarm started screaming, and the door opened automatically. He dragged me out into the night. The smell of the city nearly drowned out the taste of smoke and blood in my mouth.

“So, you’re here to save me?” I asked.

“No,” Aran said. “I’m here to keep you alive long enough so you can die where they can’t get to you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Close enough. Lead on.”

He dragged me across the empty parking lot to the waiting car, his brother behind the steering wheel. I looked up and tried to see stars, but to me, everything was just the color of blood.

TWENTY-SEVEN

I lay curled up in the back of the rusted old Impala, feeling every bump as we tore down the road away from the AISOR building. My vision was fading in and out, or maybe that was just the strobing of the streetlights outside. I wasn’t going to be hanging around much longer, but at least I’d have the chance to tell Vivian that McCaffrey was running this messed up game. Or I would, if I could get my numb fingers to operate the buttons on my cell phone.

“Aran,” I rasped, pushing the phone toward him where he sat in the front passenger seat. “Find the number for Vivian in my contacts and dial it for me.”

The Vei reached back and took the phone, but he hesitated. “Who’s Vivian?”

“A cop.”

“No cops.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “I need to tell her so she can end this.”

Aran stared out the windshield and gestured to his brother in the driver’s seat. “We’ll end this.”

“You already got one brother in hospital—”

“He’s dead,” Aran said. “Dead like my sister.”

Shit. “You two will be dead too if you keep at this,” I said. “This is beyond crazy. Make the damn call.” The irony of my argument didn’t escape me. Look at me, the voice of reason.
Call the cops. Let them handle it.
Do as I say, not as I do
.

Even looking at the back of his head, I could see Aran’s cheeks twitching. If he was a cat, his ears would be flat against his scalp. He glanced at his brother, who shrugged.

“We’re in deep,” the brother said in Vei. “Maybe the stinking human is right.”

“Hey,” I said. “I can understand you, you know.”

Aran ignored me, scowling. Looking past him, I could see buildings and construction sites flashing past, but I was too far gone to know what direction we were going.

He cursed again, enough to make even me cringe. Then he jabbed buttons on the phone and turned around to press it to my ear. It was ringing.

“This is Vivian,” she said. Voicemail. Even so, the sound of her voice settled on me like a warm blanket. “Leave a message.”

“Vivian, I’m pretty much gone, but I got some information for you. It’s not Kowalski behind this. It’s a doctor who works with AISOR, name of Faye McCaffrey. She was a research partner with Kowalski and Bohr, and she’s been masterminding everything. She looks like someone’s grandmother, but she’s got a nasty set of teeth. I figure she’s been watching me for a while, working out how to get her hands on me. I don’t plan on letting her. I don’t know exactly how it fits together with the Collective, but you’re smart enough to figure that out without me.”

Aran’s brother started slowing the car, and Aran gestured at me to wrap it up.

“I figure the explosions and gunfire is a tip off that the Collective have cranked this fight up to full scale war. Hell, that’s probably where you are now. I trust you to take care of this.”

I paused. My throat was burning with the effort of speaking, but that wasn’t what was making it hard to get the words out. “Vivian, I…” I pictured the way she looked the first time I met her in that police interrogation room. So stern, so hard, so beautiful. And then the last time I’d seen her, after I’d turned up at her door and she’d nursed me back to some semblance of health. Still beautiful, but in a softer way. Still a cop, but a real, intelligent woman as well. I closed my eyes.

“Stay safe, Viv,” I said.

I waved the phone away, and Aran hit the end call button.

Aran’s brother pulled the Impala over and shut off the engine. Aran reached over, slipped my phone back into my pocket, and bared his sharp teeth in a predatory grin. “Come on. We must get you off the streets. They’ll be scouring the city for you.”

I nodded. We didn’t have the luxury of an office chair this time, so the two Vei helped me out of the car and took me under each arm, the machine pistol dangling from Aran’s other hand. There were no streetlights here, and I didn’t recognize the neighborhood. Someone had spray-painted indecipherable tags on several of the apartment building walls—memories of my wasted youth ran through my head—and there was so much trash in the gutters the street must’ve flooded every time there was a light shower.

“Where are we?” I rasped, cringing with each step as they hauled me down an alley. In the gloom, I could just make out a short staircase leading to a basement door.

“Silk Dragon territory,” Aran said.

It wasn’t the Silk Dragons’ best neighborhood, that was for sure. The stairs were so narrow we couldn’t go down three abreast, so the two Vei had to turn awkwardly and half-carry me like a mattress down the stairs. When we got to the bottom, Aran fed a key into the door and kicked it open. It creaked more than my bones did.

If I had to describe the basement apartment in one word, it would be “dank”. By the looks of it there had once been carpet, but it had rotted away long ago. The light above flickered menacingly. Through my fading vision, I gathered the apartment was just one room plus a tiny bathroom through a sliding door. The whole place wasn’t much bigger than your average shipping container.

The brothers lowered me onto a piss-stained mattress in the corner. I curled back into my favorite fetal position. Aran’s brother bolted the door behind us, and then we fell into silence. The smell of mold was greater the closer I got to the ground. Far away, I could still hear the sirens, but the only sounds in the room were a steady dripping sound in the corner and the scurrying of something that may or may not have been a rat.

So, this was it. This was where I died. To be honest, I was starting to regret leaving AISOR. At least they had air conditioning. But I guess I couldn’t be picky. It felt strange, though, just lying here. Nothing left to do. Nothing but wait to die. I wondered if it would hurt. More than I already hurt, I meant.

I was hearing music inside my head. Probably not a good sign. It was the same song we’d played in my dream, the one we wrote. “Destiny is No Excuse”. A moment later, I felt a presence beside me. I didn’t have to look to know it was another Claudia hallucination.
I did it
, I told her inside my head.
Kind of. I found your killer. It took a while, but I did it. The cops will take care of the rest.

Then why didn’t I feel happier? Sure, I was dying, but that wasn’t such a big deal. There were still things nagging at me, details obscured by my dying brain and the missing puzzle pieces. It was like getting to the end of a movie and having the last fifteen minutes chopped off.