Read Traitor, Book 1 of The Turner Chronicles Page 40

  Chapter 21

  The Gaines bus station lost its tranquility in a heartbeat.

  People, and boards, and furniture along with a partial wall exploded into being, smashed into two people waiting for a bus and decapitated the ticket agent. Several station chairs splintered and an abandoned whiskey bottle shattered.

  Eric and the Gargoyle immediately staggered erect. Throwing panicked looks at each other they shot for the open door. A policeman, escorting a prisoner, stepped out of the bathroom and raised his gun.

  "HALT!"

  Eric spun and pointed. The policeman blew open like an overripe melon slammed into hard cement. The prisoner stood still, horrified as a dripping sheet of blood and gore covered him. Eric's face fell into shock, and then a smile of pure joy spread across it. Quickly spinning back to Melissa, he grabbed her arm and jerked her out the door.

  Samuel Aybarra, undercover agent for Jefferson Central Intelligence, watched them as he struggled to pull himself erect. He looked down at his body to see a knife stuck in him.

  "Intelligence," he shouted to the former prisoner, the only other conscious and free person left in the station. "Don't call the police. Call Intelligence." Blood flowed down his bare arm, staining his dark skin, and dripped off his fingers. Suddenly feeling weary, he sat down on a broken chair and looked at his fellow transportees. The naked and sorely abused redhead was not moving, either dead or still unconscious. The other woman struggled to free herself from the broken chair she was tied to, and Turner was apparently not all there. His eyes were rolled up into his head. Blood glistened on his bare skin, and his body twisted to take on the same convoluted contortion he had held when Aybarra had first seen him at Field's Militia while posing as a captain under General Mays, so that, at least, had not been a ruse.

  Not far away lay half the upper body of the third man. Not all of him had transported over since his legs seemed to be missing. Two men lay near him, twisted bodies broken by the fallen section of wall. Debris piled on top of them, but that did not matter. Neither of them breathed.

  "What a hell of a job," Aybarra muttered to himself. This was not the life he had planned for himself when the recruiter had knocked on his dorm room door more than twenty years earlier and invited him to join Intelligence. He had pictured himself sitting in a nice clean office while he studied satellite photos and drank bad coffee.

  "Tell them we need medical," he shouted to the prisoner as the man grabbed up the phone. "Major medical, but they have to keep it quiet, so tell them no sirens."

  The gore-covered man jerked his head up from the phone, gave Aybarra the finger, and went back to talking.

  Lucky guy, Aybarra thought. They would probably relocate him to one of the high security villages. Those were little more than prisons with privileges, but hell, the fellow had apparently been going to jail anyway. Now he was going to be in a prison where he got to play golf with former agents and two fallen governors. Aybarra felt happy for the man. It was good to know something positive would come out of this fiasco. He looked down to study the blood draining from his body.

  "A lot of ambulances!" he shouted.

  Appearing exasperated, the caller pulled the phone away from his ear. "Would you shut up and let me get on with this?"

  Samuel Aybarra shut up and let a convicted felon handle matters.