“Pretty sure,” she said, and nodded. “The driver walks with a limp, one of his legs is shorter than the other. I think it’s a birth defect. He must come from some part of the continent where those still happen.”

“Good eye!” Roland was genuinely impressed. The girl had potential.

“So what do we do now?” she asked.

“You rouse Manny. I’ll keep an eye on things. When they depart I’ll carjack them into unconsciousness and bring back the uniforms.”

And that’s more or less how it went. The guard and driver departed in a jeep five minutes later. Roland bounded down from one of the rear windows and landed on the hood as they took a right hand turn out of view of the vehicle depot. The “guard” did not do his job title proud. Roland slammed his face into the dashboard and knocked him out. He also knocked out most of the man’s teeth, but his hindbrain told him the guy’s odds of a fatal brain hemorrhage were only about 6 percent. Acceptable. He broke the driver’s jaw with a right cross, took the wheel, and steered the vehicle to a stop while he was still hanging outside it.

Roland tossed both men in the back of the jeep and pulled into the office building’s underground parking lot. He stripped them both and cursed when he realized the guard’s bleeding face had stained the neck of his uniform shirt. He found some bottled water in the trunk and managed to wash out the worst of it, but the stain would still be visible to anyone who really took the time to look. Still, it’d probably be enough to get them through the door of the jail.

He stashed both men in a janitorial closet and dragged an old metal dumpster in front of it to wedge the door shut. Someone would probably find them before they starved to death. He felt a pang of guilt for how little he cared about what happened to those men. I should feel worse about this. Roland knew the battle drugs had suppressed his conscience. He knew that the longer they stayed in this dangerous place, and the more fighting he did, the more tempted he’d be to kill outright.

Roland leaned against the dumpster and closed his eyes. He tried to force himself to take long, slow breaths and meditate on the flow of air in and out of his lungs. He hoped taking a breather would prompt his system to reduce the drip. Instead, he found himself flashing back to more violence–

Red siren lights screeched and blinked on walls of institutional white. Men and women in lab coats ran and screamed and died, died, died as he squeezed the trigger of his Sig Sauer. Roland kicked at a locked door and the metal buckled inwards, revealing a room filled with giant glass organ-filled vats–