Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(84)
Blood on her tongue. Glass in her hair. Pain lancing through her skull. Ana groaned, peering out through the shattered windshield. Kaiser had been thrown loose in the crash and was lying motionless on the cracked asphalt. She couldn’t see Cricket. The truck had landed on its roof, with Lemon suspended upside down by her seat belt, groaning and senseless. Any second now, another payload of missiles would come flying from those Tarantulas. She had to get out, had to stop them… .
Ezekiel unbuckled his seat belt, collapsed almost on top of her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Blinding light in her head. Screaming in her ears.
The lifelikes stand above me. The four of them in their perfect, pretty row.
They have only one thing left to take from me.
The last and most precious thing.
Not my life, no.
Something dearer still.
“I …”
She heard boots on gravel, the soft chink of approaching spurs.
The Preacher’s voice, dry as shale.
“… coordinates seven-seven-twelve-alpha. Priority one. Priority one. Check your fire, Omega, repeat, check your fire.”
Ana heard heavy footsteps, the crunch of tank treads in the dirt. The hum of servos and the hiss of pistons. Her head was white-hot pain. Static ringing in her skull where she’d cracked it. She put her hand to her Memdrive, felt a deep split in the housing beneath its pseudo-skin. Her fingers came away soaked with blood.
The four figures part, and a fifth enters the room. Male. Broad shoulders, silhouetted against the glare. The others look to him, expectant.
“I can’t,” the newcomer says.
“You must,” they reply.
“I won’t.”
The leader offers his pistol. “You will.”
“Ezekiel … ,” Ana said.
The newcomer wipes his hand across his eyes.
But finally, he takes the pistol.
“Oh god …”
She looked into the lifelike’s eyes. That old-sky blue. Those eyes that had looked at her with such adoration as they lay together in her room. So much pain as he raised the pistol and aimed it at her head …
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“It was you,” she whispered.
“What?” Ezekiel blinked. “What was me?”
Tears blurring the world around her. Memories finally coalescing. The last remnants of those final hours. The five of them, standing there in that cell above the carnage they’d made. Gabriel, Uriel, Hope, Faith.
And him.
They have only one thing left to take from me.
The last and most precious thing.
Not my life, no.
My love.
“You …” She choked on the word, unable to breathe.
“Ana …”
She scrambled backward through the broken window, out onto the dusty road. Blinding sunlight. Tears fracturing the world into a million shining pieces. The Preacher stood there, a pistol in one hand, what must have been a flamethrower in the other. Cricket crawled out from beneath the truck, dented and wobbling. The little logika shuffled to Ana’s side and put his arms around her.
“Are you okay?”
Half a dozen siege-class machina were gathered on a small ridge above them, lighting her up with targeting lasers. Autoguns and plasma cannons and missile batteries focused on Thundersaurus’s ruins.
But Ana’s eyes were locked on Ezekiel. Horror. Anguish. Rage. The picture of him lifting the pistol in that cell, aiming at her head.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I hear the sound of thunder.
And then I hear nothing at all.
“You shot me … ,” she breathed.
Cricket looked back and forth between Ana and the lifelike. “What?”
“Get him away from me,” she gasped.
Gunfire. Six bullets, blasting the asphalt in a neat semicircle around her.
“Settle down there, missy,” the Preacher warned.
“Ana … ,” Ezekiel pleaded.
“Get away from me!” she screamed.
The Preacher fired again into the air, hollering at the top of his lungs.
“EVERYBODY JUST CALM DOWN, GODDAMMIT!”
Silence rang as the shots faded, the bounty hunter nodding to himself as if satisfied. He holstered his pistol, waved the flamethrower at the wreckage and spoke with a graveled voice.
“You might wanna crawl outta there, Snowflake. ’Less you want me to forget my manners and ventilate Miss Carpenter’s head. She’s still worth some creds dead, after all.”
The Titans turned their weapons on Ezekiel as the lifelike crawled from the wreckage. Their optics aglow, autogun barrels beginning to spin up.
“Operative, should we terminate?” the pilot asked.
“Negative,” the Preacher said. “All y’all, hold fire unless I spit an express kill order. This warrant is priority one. Board certified, you read me?”
“Roger that. Holding.”
The bounty hunter pulled off his gas mask, reached into the tattered remnants of his coat. Ana could see that his chest had been shredded by her shotgun blast, but she could make out metal beneath the flesh she’d minced. He fished around inside his pocket, stuffed a lump of synth tobacco into his cheek. Raised his flamethrower in Ezekiel’s direction.