The Blonde

Yeah.

Twin sprays of red.

Then a third.

Kowalski swung his body back and forth until he had enough momentum to hurl himself up and slip the chain from the hook.

He landed on his feet.

First thing he did was walk to a corner and take the most satisfying leak of his life.

Then he checked out the rest of the facility.

There was one guy still alive. He represented the freaky 1 percent who remained uninfected by Proximity.

That was okay.

Kowalski gutted him with the interrogator’s Pampered Chef knife. It really was pretty fucking sharp.

Everyone else was dead.

Fortunately, his brother-in-law wasn’t among them. They must have shipped him off to a different secret prison facility. Or maybe he was already in the field. Wouldn’t surprise him. CI-6 loved to rush things.

Kowalski kept a loose count as he walked through the facility. He was into the low fifties before he stopped. A lot of dead bodies. More than he thought he’d ever see.

And all of them redheads now.

The rest was routine. A burning of the last twelve hours of surveillance video. A gathering of research files. Some borrowed clothes. Weapons. Key cards. Water. Food. The interrogator’s little knife.

Kowalski left the facility. He pushed the trigger in his gum, turning off the killer nanite effect. There was no need anymore.

It was still early morning in Pennsylvania mountain country. The air was bitter cold. Not even the sun was enough to warm you up. A rainstorm had passed through recently, so Kowalski’s borrowed boots sunk into the chilly mud a bit with every step. It felt nice to stretch his muscles like this again. Too much time in planes, in cars, on rooftops. He liked that he had a walk ahead of him.

Kowalski walked and enjoyed the cool air and thought about Vanessa. Thought about how they parted ways.

For good.

I’m not like you, she’d told him. I’m no monster. You can do this. I can’t. I mean, I did for a while. But not anymore.

I want my life back.

That’s when Kowalski kissed her, deeply, giving her what he’d stolen from Lucia. A kiss from the monster Prince Charming.

You’ve got your life back, he said.

Don’t try to find me, she said.

I won’t, he said.

After a few hours of wandering he sat down by the side of a road and opened an oatmeal bar he’d taken from the snackroom.

Yes, even secret government prisons had snackrooms.

Kowalski enjoyed a brown sugar and cinnamon oatmeal bar. It was the first real food he’d eaten in a long while. But a chunk of oat got caught between a tooth and the trigger mechanism. He tried pushing it out with his tongue; nothing doing.

He thought about what he could do with the quarter-mile shield of death that surrounded him. He could find every secret CI-6 prison in the country. He could visit all of the front companies they had, scattered around the globe. He could stop into certain offices in the U.S. Capitol Building. He could kill them all with a flip of the switch. Death with a smile. They could throw everything in the world at him. The National Guard, even. Unless they had a sniper that could work with a quarter-mile accuracy, he was unstoppable.

And maybe he should. Because CI-6 wasn’t going to stop. This facility was just an interrogation room; there were others in the organization who knew. They wouldn’t give up a weapon like Proximity.

Maybe he should keep going until they were all dead.

Kowalski took another bite of the oatmeal bar. Another piece got stuck between his teeth. He pulled out the interrogator’s Pampered Chef knife then used it to dislodge the chunks.

He could still feel it, though. So he kept using the knife, digging at his jaw. There were no mirrors out here in the country. He had to go by feel. The blade against his tender gums. Scraping. Don’t mind me, he thought. I’m just a man sitting in the middle of the Pennsylvania countryside doing a little dental surgery. The brown sugar was gone; his mouth tasted of copper pennies now. But there was still oatmeal in there. So Kowalski kept working. Strangely, as the pain enlarged, his vision grew clearer. Maybe it was the film of tears in his eyes. There was no sound except the occasional chirping of a bird, and his own heavy breathing. It focused him on the task at hand.

Eventually he realized that his chin and stolen shirt were covered in blood.

But the trigger came out, and Kowalski stared at it for a few moments, feeling the cool morning air on his fevered face, before using a rock to smash it to pieces.

Yeah, I’m a monster, he thought.

But not that big of a monster.

He wondered where Vanessa was now.