Tim picked it up and read.
Amanda and Christopher waited.
Finally, after fifteen minutes, Tim Anderson lifted his eyes from the slide. The characters flashed out of existence as the helix imprint faded to nothing.
"You've done what they've done, you're no better than them," Anderson said, sending the slide skidding back across the desk.
Christopher carefully picked it up and slipped it into one of the pockets of his black pants. "You may think that now, but when these young adults find that not all is lost, there will be hope," Christopher reasoned.
Anderson shook his head. "Maybe they didn't want this?" he said, raising his voice.
"Not all, just some," Amanda said, then added, "we were very deliberate."
"Like the myth of Noah's Ark," Anderson breathed out.
Amanda nodded. "Yeah, but without that pesky flood."
"Who?" Anderson demanded, eyeing them critically, acute accusation hanging in his eyes like a coat on a hanger..
Christopher and Amanda looked at each other. "I think you know."
Anderson did a forehead slap. "Wow... this is going to be..."
... groundbreaking?" Amanda guessed.
Anderson gave a single, tense nod. "Yeah," he answered with only the barest tremble.
Christopher pulled the slide out again.
"Do your job," Amanda instructed. She didn't give a ripe hairy rat's ass if Anderson thought they were dogshit on the bottom of his shoes. He was a means to an end.
"And if I don't?" he asked, looking from one to the other.
"You will," Christopher replied with dead calm certainty.
They left the way they had come, in stealth. Very much like Graysheets... but not.
Anderson stood there for an undetermined amount of time, thinking as a far-off water faucet dripped into the sudden silence.
Finally, decision made, Tim pulsed his hacker contact.
Initializing
I have a job for you- Tim Anderson
Yeah?- BadJuJu
Not here-BadJuJu
Let's meet at the usual location- BadJuJu
Okay, this is very sensitive- Tim Anderson
K, what color?- BadJuJu
Black- Tim Anderson
pause in pulse communication
*whistles* It'll cost ya- BadJuJu
I'll pay- Tim Anderson
I know, cya-BadJuJu
2am tonight- Tim Anderson
Copy that- BadJuJu
disconnecting
*
Nevaeh & Parker
Parker came to, punch drunk with grogginess which left his thought process in a fog of mental stew. He reached out blind and palmed something soft beside him.
His eyelids sprung open and he turned his head.
His palm was cupping Nevaeh's tit.
"Get your hand off my boob or I'll kick your teeth in, Parker," she said casually.
He could tell she meant every word.
He snatched it back like he'd been burnt. Hell, he hadn't meant to touch her there. Parker had been half out of the bag.
Hadn't he?
Or was it some weird-ass Freudian slip? In. The. Physical.
Shit-damn-shit.
Nevaeh sat up and stared down at him. "Listen, sleeping beauty, the asshat brigade is here so let's get a move on if you're done feeling me up?"
Heat washed up into his face and he had to remind himself he was a hardened assassin for one of the most covert government groups on the globe.
Twice.
Her unnerving ice chip eyes gazed down into his face without blinking, unflinchingly open and cavernous... he found himself falling.
What was wrong with him?
"What's wrong with you, stud muffin?" she asked.
Parker blinked.
She bounced up, her lean frame unfolding gracefully to standing.
Nevaeh was tall. Parker stood and looked down on her. He towered over her but he was tall himself, six feet three.
He felt the world stop spinning then asked, "What happened earlier between us?"
She smirked, one brow arched above her glacial gaze. "Listen, philosophy later. Check it," she said, kicking a thumb in the direction of who was fast closing in.
Parker whipped his face toward his fellow assassins.
But he'd jumped ship; he knew it... and so did they.
Parker didn't even flinch, he did what any self-respecting five-point AFTD would do: he called in the undead troops. The ones that he and Nevaeh had inadvertently called when their energy had come together like a bomb of death.
They poured out from behind every building that was standing, every tree trunk, shed, garage and separator receptacle. They came to his call.
The Graysheets or, as they were formally known, the Helix Complex assassins, surged forward, the civilians backing away in confusion and various stages of consciousness.
The operatives saw what waited for them and switched out their guns for handheld flamethrowers.
If Jonesy had been here he could have deactivated their weaponry as it was pulse operated.
Unfortunately, he was not and the zombies began to burn. They lost the battle as they won the war through sheer numbers, pushing the front fiery line of the Helix Complex operatives back as the horde surrounded them. A few fell on the assassins as they burned, catching them on fire as well.
The smell of burning flesh, both living and dead, singed the nose hairs of the gathered, gagging and retching beginning in earnest as the firebomb of combined zombies and operatives roared unabated.
Zombies were zealots in their rotting hearts. They believed in The Directive.
It was a very handy attack. And unlike Caleb, Parker was pragmatic with his zombies. They were for his use, if they became charred husks... well- there were always more dead.
He grabbed Nevaeh and took off after Caleb.
He was more advanced than any other AFTD and followed Caleb's signal of death like a beacon in the deepest part of night, that single sweeping light swinging to pierce Nevaeh and him like a well-timed strobe.
They left the smell of burning flesh behind them.
Both living and dead.
*
Nevaeh leaned over, putting her hands on her knees, breathing in high, whistling breaths. "Parker," she called out softly.
He turned and looked at Nevaeh. Really looked at her, she was pale as a ghost. Parker walked back.
"What?"
"I can't," she pleaded with him for what was the first time in her life. If she didn't get some fuel she was gonna die.
"Hungry," she whispered.
Parker felt that strange emotion again. It was the second time she'd brought it forward inside him.
Guilt.
He tried to shake it off. They needed to find Caleb, but he had to take care of her. The woman he had been tasked with murdering. Who might be crazy, though she didn't seem insane to him. Lonely, scared, defensive... smart. But not a freak. Certainly the Zondoraes wouldn't be up front with any fact or detail, saying only what suited them.
She made Jeffrey Parker buzz with life. It was like an electric current with her around. Nevaeh energized him.
He looked at her face, pinched and pale from strain, thin and angular, a soft triangle surrounded by black hair and striking eyes that were so light they appeared gray, translucent.
He swallowed again and dropped his gaze, busying himself with opening his small backpack. Parker noticed the fine tremble in his hands when he found the water bottle and two energy bars.
Parker hoped she didn't.
Nevaeh slid down the trunk of a nearby tree, landing on her ass and silently took the water bottle from Parker, along with the bar and tore off a chunk, taking a swig of water that was still cool because of the ambient outdoor temperature.
After some chewing and swallowing, devouring the first bar, Nevaeh worked on the second. As she did, she looked around and saw that they had paused in a small valley of cedar trees, the cold snow layering all the areas around them with a drippy white canopy, her breath pluming in front of her in icy puffs. But the seven meter diameter area they rested in was so thick with the intersecting ceiling of treetops that it lay bare and dry, evergreen needles littering the ground in a fragrant blanket.
"Nice here, Parker," she said absently, feeling better, trying desperately to distract herself from the magnetic connection between herself and Parker.
Resisting it.
When he didn't respond, Nevaeh looked up from her last bite and what she saw there made her drop the water, the remnants gurgling out.
Unmistakable heat.
She'd never noticed until that moment that the green of his eyes flickered like banked coals of emerald fire.
Her own desire answered his and before she could stand he was on her, wrapping her in such a tight embrace she didn't know whether to escape or succumb. She couldn't think, move or decide.
Parker kissed her like he would eat her soul through her mouth.
She tasted like oatmeal, cinnamon and female. He breathed her in, sucking at her lips in a tasting contest of time and frantic consumption to which she responded instinctively, her body and soul deciding for her.
They slid to the ground in a tangle of limbs, hands and seeking mouths and parts.
Their clothes became tossed and strewn about them in seconds, bright swaths of color against the forest floor.
Parker held her against him, finding Nevaeh's heat easily. He stayed suspended above her for a moment, her bare thighs pressed against the outside of his hips in a silken grip of flesh. He slowed above her, his eyes asking a question.
"Do it, Parker... I want you," Nevaeh said with vulnerable surprise in her voice, just as desperate to connect with him as he was with her.
Parker entered her and she drove her hips up to meet him in a unity more perfect than death, eclipsing their past in a single sweeping moment of contact that neither anticipated.
That neither wished to have end.
*
Parker held her afterward, their heated flesh married from head to hip, her body fitting against his as if by unique design.
He kissed the back of her head and felt like crying for the first time in a decade; from joy, which he felt was a shade away from agony in his experience.
He'd just complicated shit six ways to Sunday.
Parker was in lust.
With love hovering overhead like a vulture over the dead.
Eventually, it would find the carrion and when it did, it would devastate them both.
But for now, with the forest their only witness, they clung to each other in hope.
When none was there to cleave to.
*
Caleb
It was too much of a coincidence. That Hamilton or Frazier would be anywhere near any place I would have gone, it was too much.
Clyde looked around, knowing the past, seeing it through my eyes. It was what he was good at, beyond fighting, speaking and doing, Clyde could vicariously be the other person.
He hunted, his senses online. He turned to me. "I do not sense anything."
Why would he? Why would I?
Shit, we weren't Empaths, I was AFTD with a dash of Precog. It simply wasn't enough. I slammed my fist onto the top of a headstone and the granite crumbled, biting into my hand.
"Don't be a dumbass, Hart," Jonesy said.
I rolled my eyes at that, I needed to find Jade, I couldn't find her and I knew time was running out. A clock of doom was ticking backwards and I heard every click.
That's when something began to tingle, like the old tales of static electricity, my hair felt like it was actually rising off my nape.
Caleb!
Jade! My back went ramrod straight like I was goosed in the ass as my mind answered her tortured summons.
Clyde was there, shaking me as I'd fallen to my knees.
"What is it?" he asked, his eyes wide, Jonesy behind him like the clown he was.
"Anytime, Hart," Jonesy prodded me for my delay.
"It's Jade, I heard her," I said, getting up, shoving off Clyde's hands frantically and moving toward where I'd heard it.
"I didn't," Jonesy said shrugging. "I think you need to stop wishing and start searching." Then Jonesy asked the worst question in the world, formed without any thought of discreet delivery, "Hey!" he said, popping up a finger, "maybe because you guys are doing the nasty, you have a special connection. You feel me?" Then he actually did a hip thrust.
Clyde cuffed him.
I looked at Clyde. "Can you do that again?"
Jonesy was howling. "Fuck me, that hurts! He used his zombie strength!" he accused.
"Shut up!" I yelled.
I let everything fall away and stood in the middle of the graveyard where most of the Graysheet action had started. The caretaker's cottage had been razed and a memorial for the lost children put in its place close by. I let my eyes close in concentration.
I allowed the small little psychic tap Jade had tried to give me find me again.
Nothing.
Not a whisper.
Then: Caleb!
It was a tunnel of echoed noise, like I was receiving it through static on the pulsevision after it tuned off for the night. The worms of black and white fuzz fought one another endlessly.