Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1)(65)

“Shut up,” the smaller one said. “We’re looking for a woman. She lives in this building. Hold on. Where is that photo?” He patted his pockets. “Tell us which unit and we’ll leave you to jerk off in peace.”

Malcolm realized that his pants had been left open and were now starting to fall. “I have no idea who—”

Whack. The blow rocked his jaw. Hurt like a motherf*cker. The big man let him fall back down onto the lumpy couch cushion and wandered off.

“This is her,” the smaller guy said. “Take a good look.”

Malcolm’s eyes watered as he peered at it. The girl in the photo was hot as hell. Big eyes, lush lips, long dark hair. Out of his league and his budget.

He shook his head. “Never seen her.”

“She could look different,” the guy said. “You know, like wearing a wig, or glasses. Think about all of your tenants. Rule out the ones that couldn’t possibly be her. Tell us what’s left. We’ll do the rest. Of all the young white female tenants in your building, which one of them could be her?”

“I don’t know,” Malcolm said desperately.

“Check this out.” The big guy held out another photo for his colleague to look at.

Malcolm blinked to to focus on it. His six-year-old niece and eight-year-old nephew at a birthday party. He’d taped the picture on the fridge.

“Love to Unky Malcolm from Emil and Isla,” the guy read from the back of the picture. “How sweet. So, Unky Malcolm. If you give us the unit number, we’ll walk out the door, and we won’t hunt down Emil and Isla and do things to them that oughta make their bodies impossible for their mother to identify.”

“There’s a young white woman in six-oh-eight,” Malcom blurted. He kept on babbling. “It could be her, but maybe not. She came about four months ago. Thought she gave me a fake ID, but I didn’t argue, not with four months rent in advance and—”

“Thanks, Malcolm. We don’t need the details. Of course, you never saw us.” The bald man smiled, showing off silver eye-teeth. He tucked the photo of Malcolm’s niece and nephew into his coat pocket. “I’ll keep this. Do we have an understanding?”

Malcolm nodded frantically.

“This woman will be gone soon,” the man went on. “Clean out the room. Rent it again. She never existed. Any records you had of her have to disappear. Understand?”

“What did she do?” he blurted out.

“She’s bad to the bone,” the bald guy said. “Your building will be safer without her. Good man. You did the right thing.” The man’s glinting teeth flashed again. “Thanks for your help, Malcolm.”

Malcolm sat there after the door closed behind them, his feet resting in a puddle of beer. After a while, he realized that the couch beneath him was soggy with warm piss, and he was still nodding.

He just couldn’t seem to stop.





Chapter 19


Mark looked around the restaurant table at the faces of the five prototype slave soldiers he’d awakened. He was struggling with rage. His AVP bubbled hot and crazy.

It had been easy to pick them up. They had been situated relatively near to each other. After taking Brenner in Cheyenne, he’d picked up Rich Hobbs from a gym in Rock Springs, and then driven to collect Ty Matthews at a stereo store at a strip mall in Logan, Utah. Then came Raquel Mendoza who cashiered at a pharmacy in Baylor Flats, Utah, and Mike Breyer, who worked on a road crew outside Salt Lake City.

Gathering them was no big deal, but now that he had them, they were bugging the shit out of him. They were perfectly capable of speaking, but none of them would speak a word to him unless directly commanded to do so.

They defied him constantly in the only way they could. With passive silence. Although the place was otherwise empty, so no one but him was noticing.

Brenner’s huge hands kept flexing and clenching as he stared at Mark. His fingernails were still stained with the dummy’s fake blood. The man’s unrelenting rage had been unsettling at first, but Mark had quickly gotten used to it. Sort of like riding a half-broke horse.

But now the phenomenon was multiplied by five. They glared at him en masse. He recognized the look of trapped, seething rage. He’d felt it on his own face.

Too f*cking bad. Everybody had their time to squirm. He’d done his time and now they could do theirs. In his service.

They’d pay for their attitude. At his earliest convenience, at the highest pain setting and for the longest time he could risk without causing neurological damage.

But in the meantime, they needed fuel. Which dovetailed with his last pickup.

This was the last of the prototypes. A female, R-Gen 57-1221, also known as Sierra Horst, aged twenty-four. She was a waitress at a strip mall steak house outside Salt Lake City. She’d just served them all big glasses of ice water.

She gave them a big smile as she brought the man across the room his bread basket and soup. Like the others, she was a stunning specimen. Tall and stacked, with blue eyes and a bouncing blond ponytail, she did the waitress uniform more justice than it deserved. Maybe her shoulders were a little too heavily muscled and her calves too stringy and defined for his tastes, but even so. She’d had a much more advanced iteration of Braxton’s muscle-and-bone cocktail vectored into her genes than Mark, and would have been brainwashed into compulsive exercising just like her other fellow slave soldiers, so it was hardly her fault. They’d been sculpted by psychopaths.