The female’s eyes followed his actions and he was sure she understood what he meant, but she slowly shook her head. Fresh tears filled her eyes and she closed her lids and would not look at him again.

Eighty-two watched the female shiver and he wanted to do something, but he made himself move away. He felt ashamed for scaring her and furious that she would not fight for herself, not even when Carteret was helpless. There was a sound like cloth tearing behind Eighty-two’s eyes and the shadows dissolved into a fiery red around him as rage drove him suddenly to his feet and he raised the rock high above his head, muscles tensed to hurl it at the guard’s unprotected head.

Eighty-two had never wanted to kill anyone or anything before. Not truly.

Until now.

But he didn’t. His whole body trembled with the effort of not killing this man. It took more strength than Eighty-two thought he possessed to lower his arm.

Not yet, he told himself. Not yet.

There was other work to be done.

He forced himself to move away, but as he did he saw the female watch him. She didn’t plead with her stare; there was no flicker of hope that he would rescue her. All Eighty-two saw was a bleak, bottomless resignation that came close to breaking his heart.

Anger was a burning coal in his mind. He cut a final glance at Carteret’s sleeping, drunken, naked body sprawled on the bed, and Eighty-two forced himself to put the stone back in his pocket.

Not yet, he told himself again. But soon.

He made it all the way to the end of the guardhouse and undid the lock and slipped into the House of Screams. Eighty-two had a plan, but it was a dreadful risk. He had tried once by sending the hunt video.

There was one more thing he could try. But if he got caught…

He did not worry as much about his own skin-he never expected to grow up anyway. Most of the other boys were already dead by the time they were his age. He had to be careful so that he could do something about Carteret.

Eighty-two made it to the House of Screams and slipped inside, evading all of the cameras, and found what he was looking for. A laptop sitting on a technician’s desk. Eighty-two had seen it yesterday and hoped it would still be here.

Eighty-two opened it and hit the power button. It seemed to take a thousand years for the thing to boot up, but when it did there was a clear Internet connection. He licked his dry lips and tried not to hear the deafening pounding of his beating heart. He pulled up a browser page, typed in the address of Yahoo, logged into the same e-mail account, and set to work. He was halfway finished composing his note when he saw that the laptop had a built-in webcam.

For the first time in weeks, Eighty-two smiled.

Chapter Fifty-One

In flight

Sunday, August 29, 12:44 A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 83 hours, 16 minutes E.S.T.

I’m a damaged person. I know that about myself, and it’s part of the reason that my best friend was also a shrink. We met because of Helen.

Helen had been my girlfriend when I was in junior high. One September afternoon a bunch of older teenagers who were high on whiskey and black bombers cornered us in a field near where we lived. The boys stomped me nearly to death, rupturing my internal organs and breaking my bones, and while I lay there bleeding I could do absolutely nothing while the sons of bitches raped and sodomized Helen. Physically we’d both healed from the assault. Psychologically… well, what do you think? I got lost in frustration and impotent rage, and Helen just went inside her own head and got lost somewhere in the dark.

For the rest of her life Helen was under regular medical and psychiatric care. Rudy took over her case when Helen and I were twenty-one, and over the years it seemed like Helen was making some progress. Then one day I went to her apartment to check on her and she was gone. Her body was there, but she was already cold.

What can you do when they turn out all your lights?

Well, for my part, I learned to use the darkness. I’d joined a jujutsu dojo a few months after the assault and over the years learned every vicious and dirty trick I could. I made myself get tough. I never competed in tournaments; I just learned how to fight. When I was old enough I enlisted in the Army and after that I joined the Baltimore cops. Rudy knew what the attack had done to Helen and me. It had destroyed both of the people we had been. I lost a lot of my humanity that day and lost more of it after she killed herself. The process fragmented me into at least three different and occasionally compatible inner selves: the civilized man, the cop, and the warrior. The civilized part of me was, despite everything, still struggling to be an idealist. The cop was more cynical and less naïve-and luckily for all of us he’s usually in the driver’s seat. But when things got nasty, the warrior wanted to come out and play. As I sat in the noisy darkness of the C-130 I could feel the cop sorting through the available data, but the warrior wanted to slip into the shadows and take it to the bad guys in very messy ways.

I knew that I should probably talk to Rudy about what I was feeling. About Big Bob, about the firefight in Deep Iron, and about the things we’d found in Haeckel’s bin. I could feel my self-control slipping notch by notch. I know I’m a professional soldier and a former police detective and a martial arts instructor-all roles that require a great deal of personal discipline and control-but I was also damaged goods. Guys like me can never assume that self-control is a constant.

Rudy was working as a police psychiatrist before he got hijacked into the DMS. It’s his job to keep his eye on a whole bunch of front liners-men and women who have to pull the trigger over and over again. As Rudy is so fond of pointing out, violence, no matter how justified, always leaves a mark. I’d killed people today, and I wanted to find more people to kill. The urge, the need, the ache, to find the people responsible for this and punish them boiled inside of me, and that is not the best head space to be in before a fight.

Not that I wanted to lose my edge, either, because the damage I owned also made me the kind of fighter that had brought me to the attention of Church. It left me with a useful kind of scar tissue, a quality that gives me an edge in a fight, especially when the fight comes out of nowhere.

You see, we don’t always get to pick our battles. We don’t often get to choose the rules of engagement. Sometimes a nasty bit of violence comes at us out of the blue, and it’s not always of our making. We neither ask for it nor subscribe to it, but life won’t ask you if it’s fair or if you’re ready. If you can’t roll with it, if you aren’t programmed to react when the hits come in on your blind side, then you go down in the first round. Or you can cover up and try to ride it out, but getting beaten into a corner is no way to win a fight. The sad truth is they won’t tire when they’re winning and so you’ll still lose, and you’ll get hurt more in the process.

Then there are those types who thrive on this sort of thing. If someone lands a sucker punch they dance out of the way of the follow-up swing, they take a little taste of the blood in their mouths, and then they go after the bad guys with a wicked little punk rocker grin as they lunge for the throat. It’s hard to beat these guys. Real hard. Hurting them never seems to work out, and threats aren’t cards worth playing. They’re wired differently; it’s hard to predict how they’ll jump. You just know they will.

The bad guys have to kill them right away or they’ll turn the whole thing around and suddenly “hunter” and “prey” take on new meanings. These types don’t bother with sucker punches-they go for the kill. They’re addicted to the sweet spot.