Under the Knife(113)

RITA


Finney was about to shoot Spencer.

He was about to shoot Spencer.

Without thought, Rita hurled herself at Finney. She didn’t care about the blood dripping from her abdomen, and from the crook of her elbow where she’d pulled out the IV from her arm; or that she was drawing breath in painful gasps through her raw and swollen throat; or that she was shirtless.

Twenty years of anger management vaporized in an instant by the gun aimed at Spencer’s head.

Finney, intent on Spencer, didn’t see her coming. She crashed into him from the side, shoving his arm holding the gun away from her as he fired. The bullet went wide, striking the metallic casing of Morpheus, displacing a rubber hose—

(The one connected to the oxygen tanks)

—attached to its side. The bullet’s impact produced a flintlike spark, a jangle of broken metal, and a hiss of escaping gas.

A flame appeared from where the bullet had displaced the hose: an orange tongue that licked the wooden pallet on which Rita had been lying. The pallet’s edge began to smoke, then burn, the flames rapidly spreading across its surface.

Toward a stack of red gas canisters stacked on the floor next to the pallet.

As she struggled with Finney, a detached part of Rita’s brain processed this—the bullet spark, the flame, the spreading fire, the red tanks of gas—and thought, Oh, shit. That can’t be good.

Finney yelled and stumbled sideways. Not knowing what else to do, Rita kept a vise hold on his arm and bit the back of his hand holding the gun.

Finney screamed a second time.





SEBASTIAN


An indisputable fact: Finney had shot him.

Another indisputable fact: He, Sebastian, was a fucking idiot.

Idiot!

How could he have been so fucking stupid?

Finney had to have planned this from the very beginning. It made perfect sense. So fucking obvious now. He should have seen it from a mile away. Hell, part of him even admired the Machiavellian bastard for it.

Once the authorities discovered Wu’s body hooked up to the auto-surgeon, they’d be investigating this clusterfuck for years, trying to figure out how she’d ended up on the wrong end of a scalpel. With Sebastian also dead at the scene, Finney could arrange for any story he wanted to tie Sebastian to Wu and plant additional evidence. He could have made Sebastian and Wu look like secret business partners whose relationship had soured, or lovers engaged in kinky sex. It didn’t matter.

Finney would also have to bring Cameron into it now, of course. But three bodies instead of two would simply generate more orgiastic Internet speculation once the story broke. Totally plausible.

But that was all water under the bridge. Sebastian had more pressing concerns: like, the physics of bulletproof vests, and like, how-the-fuck-was-he-going-to-get-out-of-this-thing-alive?

Okay.

So he’d been an idiot. He’d dropped his guard for a moment. But he wasn’t a complete moron. He’d slipped on body armor before tonight’s activities, concealed underneath his windbreaker: an ultrathin state-of-the-art vest he’d obtained from a friend of his at DARPA, so slim and flexible as to be undetectable without close inspection. Perfect for not arousing Finney’s suspicion. He couldn’t say that he’d suspected Finney would shoot him, exactly—he’d just sensed the potential for a shitstorm, and prepared accordingly.

By no means was this the first time he’d been shot. And here was the thing that Sebastian had learned over the years about bulletproof vests:

They’re not all that fucking bulletproof.

Most people had it in their heads that if you wore a vest, you were fucking Superman.

Bullshit.

Finney had shot him with a Glock 9 mm, the muzzle velocity of which was somewhere on the order of thirteen hundred feet per second. Sebastian had been standing close, well within ten feet. Two of the four shots had been direct hits: one to his abdomen and one to his chest. The other two had missed.

So, okay, yeah: The vest had stopped the two bullets. But at that range, it had been like getting hit twice by a baseball bat.

Swung by a major-league home-run champion.

On steroids.

The abdominal hit had knocked the wind out of him, and now it hurt like a son of a bitch, nearly eclipsing the pain from his broken nose. It was going to leave one hell of a mark, for sure. But from what he could tell, at least it hadn’t done major damage.

The chest was a different story. Maybe the angle at which the bullet had struck him: at the thin border of the armor’s protective material, near his armpit. It felt like a broken rib, maybe two, on his right side. Each breath was an agony, a thousand knives sticking him in the side at once.

Ignore it. Suck it up. Move your ass.

Lying on the cement floor out of the light, he heard someone moving, back near the makeshift operating area, but couldn’t see a goddamn thing from where he was.

Training and instinct had to be his guides. He slipped the conduction gun from its holster (dammit, why hadn’t I brought a real goddamn gun?) and, staying low and quiet, using stacked construction materials as cover, stole through the shadows to reconnoiter and gain position on Finney.

He heard scuffling, a shout, more scuffling, a second shout.

He peeked around the corner of a large crate.

And couldn’t believe what he saw.

Finney had picked the wrong chick to mess with!