Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Read online

  Van Sciver’s head was protected by the armored door, but his body, made bulkier by a Kevlar vest, sprawled in full view. Night was coming on, but Evan was close enough that visibility was not a problem.

  He had one shot left.

  He lined the sights on the gap in the body armor where the arms usually hung. Van Sciver’s tumble had twisted the vest around his torso, the vulnerable strip pulled toward his belly.

  Evan fired his last round.

  The fabric frayed as the bullet entered Van Sciver’s abdomen.

  A clod of air left him.

  Blood poured from the hole.

  Evan kept the pistol raised, images spinning through his mind.

  Jack leaning back in his armchair and closing his eyes, letting the opera music move right through him. Young Evan at his feet, soaking it in by osmosis, these strange and beautiful sounds from another life that was now somehow his as well.

  Van Sciver fought himself up to a sitting position against the Tahoe.

  Evan cast his empty gun aside and advanced on him. The fallen rifle lay between them. He could pick it up, stave in Van Sciver’s skull with the butt.

  Firelight playing across Jack’s face in the study as he read Greek mythology out loud to Evan, his excitement contagious, the stories coming to life, winged horses and impossible labors, Gorgons and demigods, underworlds and Elysian fields.

  Van Sciver pressed his hands to his stomach. He’d been gut-shot, the bullet entering the mid-abdominal area north of the belly button and beneath the zyphoid, where the ribs came together. Judging from the rush of bright red seeping through Van Sciver’s hands, the bullet had severed the superior mesenteric artery. He was held together by the Kevlar vest and little else. The vest just might prove sufficient to hold him together long enough to get to a surgical suite.

  Which was why Evan would beat him to death with his bare hands.

  Jack stepping off into the black hereafter, not a trace of fear in his eyes. What could have filled him with such peace as he’d spun to his impact?

  Van Sciver’s permanently dilated pupil stared out, glossy with hidden depths, a bull’s-eye waiting for a round. Evan pictured his thumb sinking through it, scrambling the frontal lobe.

  Evan closed to within ten yards of him when something stopped him in his tracks.

  Van Sciver was smiling.

  With some effort he raised his arm and pointed behind Evan.

  As Evan turned, Joey stumbled off the lowered platform lift onto the dirt, both hands locked around her thigh just above the knee.

  She wobbled on her feet.

  Bleeding out.

  74

  Brightness Off Her Skin

  Evan froze between Van Sciver and Joey, his body tugged in opposite directions. A few strides ahead was the man who had killed Jack. And fifteen yards behind, Joey stood doubled over, the life draining from her body.

  A feeling overtook Evan, that of free-falling through the night sky just as Jack had. There were no bearings, just a spin of sensation and the pinpoint light of distant stars.

  He stared at the butt of the fallen rifle ahead, the dilated pupil beckoning his thumb.

  Van Sciver was breathing hard. “Looks like I clipped her superficial femoral artery.”

  Evan glanced back at Joey. She gasped, her legs nearly buckling.

  Evan tore his gaze away, took another step for Van Sciver.

  “She’s gonna die,” Van Sciver said. “You wanna be with her when she does.”

  Evan halted again, teeth locked in a grimace.

  He thought about Jack plummeting through a void, his willingness to step off a helicopter to protect Evan.

  The best part of me.

  Evan took an uneven step backward. And then another. Then he spun and ran to Joey.

  Behind him he heard Van Sciver’s laugh, the rasp of sandpaper. “That’s the difference between me and you.”

  Evan reached Joey as her legs gave out, catching her as she collapsed.

  He flicked out his Strider knife and sheared her jeans to the thigh, exposing the bullet hole. There was blood, so much blood.

  The femoral artery, just as Van Sciver had said.

  Evan initiated the bone phone. “Tommy, get here. Now. Get here now.”

  He did not recognize his own voice.

  He clamped his hand over Joey’s thigh.

  “Copy that,” Tommy said. “En route.”

  “Now. We have to get her to medical.”

  Across the stretch of dirt, Evan watched Van Sciver wriggle his shoulders up the side of the Tahoe, shoving himself to a standing position. He fell into the driver’s seat.

  The SUV drove off, its momentum kicking the door shut.

  “You let Van Sciver … go,” Joey said weakly.

  Evan pictured again the serene expression on Jack’s face as he’d stepped from the Black Hawk, and he understood at last what had filled him with such peace.

  Joey blinked languidly. “Why’d … come back for me?”

  Evan drew in a breath that felt like broken glass. He said, “That’s what my father taught me.”

  He bent over Joey, his hand still sealed on her leg. The sound of the Tahoe faded, leaving the valley desolate, overtaken by late-twilight gloom. They were a stone’s throw from the busiest freeway intersection in the world and yet not another human was in sight.

  She looked up at him, her emerald eyes glazed.

  “You were supposed to jump,” he said. “Across the freeway. Away from all this.” His eyes were wet. “Goddamn it. What did I teach you?”

  She said, “Everything.”

  Her dark hair was thrown back, exposing the bristle of that shaved strip, the faraway city lights turning a few strands golden, and he realized that at some point over their days and nights he’d come to know the scent of her, a citrus brightness off her skin.

  “You’re okay,” he said.

  “You’re gonna be fine,” he said.

  “You’re worth it,” he said.

  Her lips pressed together. A weak smile.

  He tightened his clamp on her leg.

  Headlights swept the valley, a vehicle approaching. It parked, the glare making him squint.

  The door slammed shut. A figure stepped forward, cut from the brilliance of the headlights.

  Not Tommy.

  Candy.

  Evan’s last ray of hope left him.

  Candy approached, appraising them.

  “Find what they love,” she said. “And make them pay for it.”

  Evan would have to let go of Joey’s leg to reach for his knife on the ground.

  He did not.

  He stayed where he was, his palm covering her wound.

  He closed his eyes, saw his tiny feet filling Jack’s footsteps in the woods. This was the path he was born to follow. A path into life, no matter the cost.

  When he opened his eyes, Candy was standing right over him, the barrel of her pistol inches from his forehead. In his arms he could feel Joey’s breaths, each more fragile than the last.

  Evan stared up the barrel at Candy. “After you kill me, clamp this artery.”

  Candy said nothing.

  He said, “Please.”

  The end of Candy’s pistol trembled ever so slightly. Her face contorted.

  Evan looked back down at Joey. After a moment he sensed the pistol lower. Candy eased back from view. He barely registered the sound of the SUV driving away.

  Joey jerked in a few shallow breaths. She raised a hand to his cheek, left a smudge of blood under his eye. He sensed it there, a weighted shadow.

  “I see you,” she said. “You’re still real.”

  As he heard Tommy’s truck shudder to a stop behind him, her eyes rolled up and closed, and her head nodded back in his arms.

  75

  The Blackness to Come

  Evan’s hands rested in his lap, covered with blood.

  Crimson gloves.

  Tommy drove through darkest night. Los Ang
eles was well behind them, Las Vegas well ahead.

  They had handled what they’d needed to handle.

  “I know you’re emotional,” Tommy said, “but we gotta think straight.”

  Evan said, “I’m not emotional.” His voice shook.

  “This is next-level shit,” Tommy said. “We gotta go to ground. A few weeks, minimum. See what shakes out. I got a ranch in Victorville, completely off the grid.”

  Evan stared out the window. The blackness sweeping by looked like the blackness before and the blackness to come.

  Tommy kept talking, but Evan didn’t hear him.

  * * *

  Candy McClure sat on the carpet of her empty safe house, knees drawn to her chest. Past the tips of her bare feet, her phone rested on the floor. It was after midnight, and yet she’d felt no need to turn on the lights.

  She had no idea how long she’d been sitting like this. Her hamstrings and calves ached. Even her Achilles tendons throbbed.

  She was having what more poetic types might call a crisis of conscience.

  The Samsung might ring.

  Or it might never ring again.

  If it did, she had no idea what she’d do.

  It was one of those wait-and-see things, and she wasn’t really a wait-and-see girl. Or at least she didn’t used to be.

  What was she now?

  The phone vibrated against the carpet, uplighting her face with a bluish glow. The Signal application, presenting her with a two-word code.

  It was Van Sciver.

  Somehow alive.

  She found herself not answering.

  An unanswered phone seems to ring forever.

  At last it stopped rattling against the floorboards.

  She picked it up.

  She keyed in a different phone number.

  1-855-2-NOWHERE.

  She stared at the phone, the empty house seeming to curl around her like the rib cage of some long-dead beast.

  She hung up before the call could ring through.

  She pressed the Samsung to her lips and thought for a time. Then she set it on the floor, rose, and walked out.

  She took nothing. She didn’t bother to lock the door behind her.

  She wouldn’t be coming back.

  76

  Something Flat and Unchanging

  Van Sciver reclined on his bed in the ICU, his face washed of color. A gray sweat layered his flesh as he dozed, his eyelids flickering. A urinary catheter threaded between his legs. A monitor read his heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and half a dozen other vitals. A central line on the left side of his chest fed in nutrition and vitamins from a bright yellow bag of TPN.

  It was a private room, the curtains pulled around to shield his bed from the glass walls and door.

  In one hand he clutched his Samsung.

  It chimed, awakening him.

  The Signal application. Was it Candy, finally back in contact?

  Weakly, he raised the phone to his unshaven cheek. “Code,” he said.

  Orphan X’s voice said, “Behind you.”

  The words came at Van Sciver in stereo. Through the phone, yes. But also from inside the room.

  Evan stepped into view, let the Samsung slide from his hand onto the sheets. Van Sciver stared at him, mouth open, jaw slightly askew.

  Evan lifted Van Sciver’s personal Samsung from his frail clutch.

  Finding him hadn’t been easy. But it hadn’t been hard either.

  Without immediate surgical intervention and repair, an injury to the superior mesenteric artery compromised blood flow, which in turn meant that the patient usually lost most of the small bowel to necrosis.

  Small-bowel transplants were rare and donors rarer yet, but given Van Sciver’s resources, he’d know how to get himself to the top of the list. Due to the severity of the injury, he would not have been able to travel far. The UCLA Medical Center was the only adult small-bowel transplant center in the Greater Los Angeles Area.

  Without Joey around to help, it had taken some doing for Evan to hack into UCLA’s Epic medical-records system, but when he had, he’d found an anonymous patient admitted on December 4, two weeks back, who showed no health-care history.

  Evan eased forward so Van Sciver could see him without straining.

  “I did go back for Joey,” Evan said. “And that does make us different. You know what else makes us different? You’re in that bed now. And I’m standing.” He held up an empty syringe. “With this.”

  Van Sciver peered up helplessly. His hand fished in the rumpled sheets and emerged with the call button. His thumb clicked it a few times.

  “I disconnected it,” Evan told him. “Then I watched you sleep for a while.”

  Through gaps in the curtain, they could see doctors and nurses passing by, their faces lowered to charts. Evan knew that Van Sciver wouldn’t cry out for help. Help would come too late, and he had too much pride for that anyway.

  Van Sciver’s features grew lax, defeated. A milky starburst showed in that blown pupil, floating like a distant galaxy.

  Evan reached over and crimped the tube feeding the central line, stopping the flow of fluorescent yellow nutrition into Van Sciver’s chest.

  “You killed Jack to get to me,” Evan said. “Congratulations. You got your wish.”

  He slid the needle into the tube above the crimp, closer to Van Sciver’s body.

  Together they watched the air bubble creep along the line, nearing Van Sciver’s chest. It would ride his central vein into his heart, causing an embolism. The dot of air inched along, ever closer.

  Van Sciver’s face settled with resignation. He said, “It is what it is and that’s all that it is.”

  “No,” Evan said, “it’s more than that.”

  The air bubble slipped through the line into Van Sciver’s chest.

  A moment later he shuddered.

  His left eye dilated, at last matching the right.

  The symphony of beeps and hums from the monitor changed their melody into something flat and unchanging.

  When doctors and nurses crashed into the room, they found the motionless body and no one else.

  77

  Original S.W.A.T.

  She remembered two rough men minding her in the darkness, one scented of soap and sweat, the other moving through a haze of cigarette smoke and wintergreen tobacco. And there was a hospital room that was not in a hospital and a doctor or two drifting through the miasma of her drugged thoughts.

  Now she looked out her dorm window onto the stunning view beyond—Lake Lugano and the snowcapped Alps. It was an English-speaking school filled with affluent kids, a demographic to which she supposed she now belonged. Seven hundred ninety-three students from sixty-two countries speaking forty different languages.

  A good pot to melt into and disappear.

  Her passport and papers had her at eighteen years old, a legal adult, so she could oversee her own affairs. Her cover was thorough and backstopped. She’d been recently orphaned, set up with a trust fund that released like a widening faucet, a little more money every year. She was repeating coursework here after some understandable emotional difficulties given the fresh loss of her parents. She’d pick up courses at the second semester, which began in a few weeks.

  The campus was spectacular, the resources seemingly unlimited. There was a downhill-ski team and horseback riding and kickboxing, though she’d have to be careful if she chose to indulge in the last.

  She was due to matriculate today, a simple ceremony. Her roommate, an unreasonably lovely Dutch teenager, was coming to fetch her at any minute.

  She set her foot on her bed and leaned over it, stretching the scar tissue. The last thing she’d remembered before going out was looking up at Evan, his hand over her leg, holding her blood in her veins.

  Holding her tight enough to keep her alive.

  They could never see each other again. Given who he was, it was too risky, and he was unwilling to put her in harm
’s way.

  But he had given her this.

  He had given her the world.

  She pulled open the window and breathed in the air, fresher than any she’d ever tasted.

  There was a knock at her door.

  She opened it, expecting Sara, but instead it was the school porter, a kindly man with chapped cheeks. He handed her a rectangular box wrapped in plain brown paper and said, in gently accented English, “This came for you, Ms. Vera.”

  “Thank you, Calvin.”

  She took it over to the bed and sat. The package bore no return address. Postage imprints indicated that it had traveled through various mail-forwarding services.

  She tore back the brown wrapping and saw that it was a wide shoe box. Lettered on the lid: ORIGINAL S.W.A.T. BOOTS.

  Her heart changed its movement inside her chest.

  She opened the shoe box’s lid.

  Inside, dozens and dozens of sealed envelopes formed razor-neat rows.

  With a trembling hand, she lifted the first one.

  On the front, written in precise block lettering: OPEN NOW.

  She ran a finger beneath the envelope flap and slid out an undecorated card. She opened it.

  Inside, the same block lettering.

  IT’S YOUR FIRST DAY. TRY NOT TO SCREW IT UP TOO BAD.

  X

  Her hand had moved to her mouth. She stared at the words and then over at the box of envelopes. The next one up said CHRISTMAS.

  As she slipped the card back into the envelope, she noticed some lettering on the back.

  Y.A.S.

  Y.A.L.

  It took a moment for the meaning to drop. These were the words she’d overheard that young father speak to his newborn in the park the day she’d wandered by, bleeding from one ear.

  You are safe.

  You are loved.

  Another knock sounded, and she wiped at her eyes.

  Sara’s gentle voice carried through the door. “Are you ready?”

  Joey slid the shoe box beneath her bed and rose.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I am.”