The Gender Plan (The Gender Game #6)(96)

Tim danced back a few feet and then planted his legs wide, ducking low under the wild, sweeping haymaker the woman leveled at him. He stepped in close as the woman’s swing carried her arm past him, grabbing a fistful of her shirt and planting one foot on her stomach. He used her momentum to drag her down as he lowered himself to the floor, rounding his back and then rolling her over him, his foot shoving her forward so that she flipped over him. Her head and shoulder hit hard against the concrete ground.

Quickly scrambling to his feet, Tim turned as the woman began to move, her hands bracing on the floor as she pushed herself up. I didn’t give her a chance to get up again—I shot her dead, and pressed forward. “C’mon,” I said. “We gotta get into that room.” Because if all of the wardens inside the plant are like that… we gotta make it through as soon as possible.

I tested the door sitting on the top of the stairs, making sure it could be stepped on without tripping us up, and then moved through the open doorway onto a catwalk, inside one of the water treatment rooms. Pipes wider than I was jutted out of walls in any direction, seemingly at random. I kept my back to the curved side of the building as I stepped past the massive pipes coming through the wall just a few feet to my left.

“Don’t shoot!” a feminine voice cried, causing me to hold up. “I didn’t sign up for this. I surrender!”

“TRAITOR!” shouted another voice, and I ducked back as gunfire exploded in the room, filling the area with bullets ricocheting off of pipes, whistling at high velocity until they found some concrete to stop their flight. It died quickly, and I poked my head out again, studying the dim shadows under the pipes.

“Anyone who wants to surrender, throw your guns on the ground and put your hands up so we don’t shoot you!” I shouted, and launched myself over the railing, down the five-foot drop to the concrete below. I used my right arm—my left still felt like ground meat stuffed into an overstretched sock—and landed solidly on my boots, dropping behind a set of three pipes that rested inches off the ground, rising in a leveled slope up toward the ceiling.

I could see a wide hatch standing open on the pipe opposite me, and a large red barrel tipped on its side, leaking a milky white fluid into the water rushing by. Then gunfire erupted in the room, and I ducked down as it came dangerously close.

“Right side, right side!” Greg shouted, and I stood up and fired at the general area, sparks from my gun and the guns on the area above lighting it up, only adding to the red glow that illuminated the space. I angled left when I saw a dark figure emerge from behind a grouping of smaller pipes, gun in hand. Her focus was on the catwalk, so she never had the chance to see me, or the bullet that caught her in the head.

I turned and saw a woman standing over the hatch, cupped hands to her lips, water streaming through her fingers. She met my gaze, going wide-eyed in surprise when she realized that I saw her, fear crossing her features. Then, quicker than I would have thought possible, her face began to change, and before I knew what was happening, she had ripped off the hatch allowing access to the pipe and flung it at me like a frisbee.

I ducked down under it and squeezed the trigger wildly, and she went down. A few more shots were exchanged, and then it was done, a chorus of “clear” beginning to fill the room. I came around the pipes in a hurry, pulled the barrel off the hole, and righted it, stopping it from polluting any more of the water source while making sure to keep my hands well away from the milky substance.

“Henrik,” I said, pressing my fingers together. “I just watched a woman drink from the water she was ‘poisoning,’ and then rip off a hatch weighing about forty pounds, and fling it at me hard enough to take my head off. They—” I paused as Gregory appeared from around another set of pipes, guiding an olive-clad woman with sleek chestnut hair toward me.

“I surrender,” she said immediately, holding up her hands to show she was unarmed. “I didn’t sign up for… whatever the hell that was.”

“I’ll get back to you in a minute,” I transmitted to Henrik before disconnecting the transmission. “It’s all right,” I told her. “We won’t hurt you. What’s your name, and what happened?”

She tugged at her uniform and squared her shoulders. “Janice Stevenson,” she said, swallowing. “We were getting ready for you to come in, and then Vanessa drank the water and… and went insane. There’s no other way to put it. Those were our orders, but they lied to us! They told us that they got wind of a terrorist chemical attack happening in the next couple of days, so we’ve been trying to flood the water with these. We were told to drink the water if the terrorists… if you were close enough… They said it would inoculate us against certain poisons if you tried to use chemical weapons. The rest of us thought we were fine, but Vanessa panicked and started drinking the water and just changed. She killed Gwen, just like that, and then she came after me, but… then she heard something at the door and went after it instead.”

I held up my finger to her as I began to transmit. “It’s confirmed,” I said grimly. “And the Matrians have orders to drink the water if we get close to them.”

“There’s more,” added Janice, almost impatient to get her story out, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “We were also given pills to take in emergencies to protect against chemical attacks. Now I’m worried they’ll just do the same thing.”