“Da.” Alekseev drew a walkie-talkie from his belt and yelled back at Obruch, waving him up.
If Freedman kills us, at least Medrano and Obruch can try again, Deborah thought. That was the extent of her plan. Everything hinged on Cam’s tenuous link to the woman… and if it was someone else, someone who didn’t even speak English…
We have to take that chance.
The three of them ran into the choking wreckage beneath the helicopter. Deborah only had one hand to grab at the debris. She slipped and banged through a heap of bricks and mortar, bent pipes, a cracked porcelain toilet. Soot burst up from every footstep. She heard Alekseev barking for directions from Obruch, but she was too busy fending her way through a soft, rotting skin of cloth to look back. Then she was startled by two sounds in front of her. Metal banged on wood and Deborah was confronted by the witch, surprisingly close.
She ran toward me! Deborah thought, stunned. Her throat was too dry to get out more than a rasp: “Wait—”
The witch stood above her. She’d climbed over a heap of wooden slats propped up on a fallen street sign. Ash streaked the two bent white panels set in a crisscross on the pole, and yet the black lettering was legible: CRESTVIEW AVE. and EAST I6TH ST. The military officer in Deborah thought that was important. This was ground zero. They’d found their woman.
It had to be Freedman, didn’t it? But the witch was faceless. Bodiless. She might have been a walking silhouette. The dark oval where her face should be blended perfectly into her straggly black hair, and her clothes were powdered with ash. The only definition in her thin, hunchbacked frame was her eyes. The white eyes smoldered with power and torment and then her arms spasmed, too.
Deborah stared at those dark hands for one jagged heartbeat, transfixed by the other woman. She wore a knapsack. That was the odd bump on her back. Deborah also saw a thick welt up her left forearm, a failed suicide’s mark. At some point she’d cut herself.
“Wait. My name is Major Reece—”
The witch raised both fists.
She’ll kill me, Deborah thought, but then Cam shouted, “Kendra! Kendra Freedman!”
The witch turned her head.
“U.S. Army Rangers!” he shouted. “United States Army Rangers! We’re here to rescue you!”
24
Every muscle in Freedman’s body tensed like a hair trigger. Whatever she was holding, Cam didn’t want her hands to snap forward and throw it. “I knew Albert Sawyer!” he shouted. “I’m your friend!”
One problem was that they wore Russian uniforms. Another was that Freedman’s face was a wild mask. Her eyes rolled and popped with fear.
“I’ll kill you!” she barked. “Stay back!”
“I knew Albert Sawyer,” he said.
This time his words seemed to register. Her head ducked and lifted again, not in a gesture like a nod but like a woman double-checking her thoughts. For an instant, Freedman seemed unaware of them. But she didn’t lower her arms.
Cam slid into the shallow pit where Deborah stood below Freedman, putting himself at the same disadvantage. He thought it might calm her.
“Sawyer’s dead now,” he said gently. He hoped this news was something they could share.
Instead, when Freedman’s eyes rose, her expression was filled with new terror. “They’re all dead,” she said, and yet her voice seemed disconnected from the rest of her. It was flat and distant. Was she even talking to them?
Kendra Freedman was insane. At some point, she’d experienced a psychotic break.
Deborah repressed a low sound like a moan, but she didn’t try to run. She stood her ground, entrusting her life to him. He wanted to take her hand. He wanted to say We’re going to be a// right, but Freedman needed to be the sole focus of his attention. Her sleeve had shot back from her hand and Cam stared at the scar on her wrist. He had known would-be suicides. Sometimes they were beyond reach.
“We’re here to rescue you,” he said. “My name is Cam.”
She ignored him. The chopper was still hammering over the ruins behind him to his right. Her gaze flickered in that direction, then shifted to his left. At what? Alekseev? Cam would have yelled at the Russian to keep away if he hadn’t been afraid to raise his voice.
“I’m your friend,” he said.
“Stay back!”
“We’re here to—”
“I’ll kill you!” Freedman nearly fell when the pile beneath her shifted, her left hand slashing outward for balance. But she stayed up, and they didn’t die.
It was the second time she’d reacted violently to that word. Friend. Why? The Chinese must have promised her the same thing, and Cam struggled to find a different way to connect with her. Sawyer. She’d stopped when he mentioned Sawyer, so he said, “I knew Al. He told me everything. We know it wasn’t your fault.”
“What was his first patent number?”
“I, uh—”
Freedman’s left hand rose away from her body again, threatening. “He loved that number like it was a million dollars,” she said. All at once she was in total possession of herself and this change was uniquely frightening, because now Cam saw her true presence and her intellect. Could she really be smarter than Ruth?
If he tried to fool her, she would know.
He said, “Al told me how your sister gave you all of those old ABBA records on CD for Christmas. You brought them into the lab and played them there. It made him crazy.” Don’t say that word! he warned himself. Crazy. Friend. Watch your mouth. His head was racing but he was careful to speak slowly. “Al liked hip-hop, and you made him listen to ancient rock like ABBA and Duran Duran. He laughed about it.”
Sawyer had cursed her for a stupid bitch. Sawyer’s guilt had turned him cold and mean. He denied that he was even slightly to blame for the end of the world, yet he’d been an integral part of the archos tech’s design team.
These people were unique. Their rare education set them apart. Ruth had always felt responsible because she could do something, just never enough. How much worse would that self-loathing be for the woman who’d been the main force in the creation of the machine plague? A planet had died because of her.
If this doesn’t work…
Freedman’s gaze turned to track the helicopter again, denying Cam the chance to make eye contact. That only increased his nervousness. We can’t shoot her, he thought, but we can’t leave her here, either. The Chinese have already sent troops to recapture her. They’ll send more. Another chopper is probably already on its way.
“Al,” Freedman said, like a robot.
“We’re here to rescue you,” Cam repeated. “The helicopter is ours. We’re American soldiers.”
She looked down at her fists. Fear had widened her eyes again, and Cam realized that a lot of her terror was for herself — for the things she’d done to escape. She didn’t want to cause any more death.
“Take me to the lab,” she said.
“We’ll go anywhere you want.”
But he’d rattled the words out too quickly, as if speaking to a child. His tone brought her face up again and he saw that she was there, inside herself, listening and coherent. Her eyes gleamed with triumph.
“They built a sister lab nearby,” she said. “I know it’s there.”
“You mean in the Saint Bernadine hospital?”
“They built a sister lab nearby. They said no, but they used the same couriers and I saw the same man on the same day. I know it’s there.”
Couriers, he thought, doubting her. Could she really have discerned the existence of a second lab within walking distance of Saint Bernadine from such a small clue? She keeps repeating herself exactly, he thought. She clung to some phrases like a drowning woman tightening her grip on a life ring, as if she questioned or even forgot herself.