Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern Read Free Page B

a split second before his powerful legs catapulted his body through it. The eerily heightened senses he now possessed notified the soldier that one set of heartbeats in the darkened room he landed in had been silenced by the gunfire.
    Shit, thought Mal as he planted one titanium-steel hand onto a desk and vaulted behind a bank of electronic equipment, they’re killing their own people!
    Only half acknowledging the body of a poor lab technician slumped over a computer terminal and missing the rear half of his skull, Mal headed for the door on the opposite side of the room, drawn by the bright light pouring in from the outer hallway. Bullets continued to pepper the room in increasingly uncontrolled bursts of fire.
    Somehow, through the staccato drumbeat of the semi-automatic weapons’ fire, Mal’s ears picked up the sound of a woman whimpering just to the right of the door, hidden under a desk. His eyes found the young blond woman without much effort, curled up into a fetal position. She was dressed in a dark blue blouse, borderline inappropriately short black skirt and a standard-issue white lab coat. Most of her face and chest were covered in the steaming gore from her co-worker’s death, and she was missing a black high-heeled Oxford that, amusingly enough, the silent voice in Mal’s head had already located under an over-turned faux-leather office chair four feet to his left.
    Normally Mal would have left the attractive woman behind—she had, after all, been part of whatever group had brought him here and did whatever it was they had done to him—but the soft pop and whoosh of a grenade being fired from the other side of the fractured and fragmented wall caused his Ranger training to kick in and the world seemed to slam into slow motion.
    Perception kicking into high gear, Mal could see the motion trails and air disruption of hot projectiles flying through the air around him, easily dodgeable. A quick look over his left shoulder showed the fast approaching grenade round, spinning fiercely even in the hour it seemed to take for a second to tick off the clock.
    A clawed hand grasped the cowering woman’s shoulder and yanked her to her feet, forcibly dragging her along behind the soldier who was now moving at nearly an imperceptible speed. The living metal of Mal’s shoulder caused the wooden and glass door to vaporize under its weight, slowing his momentum not one iota and allowing him to bounce out of the workroom’s doorway even as the grenade exploded.
    Flames licked out into the hall, followed by oily gray smoke and the smell of scorched plastic, quickly filling the corridor from floor to ceiling.
    His powerful body shielding the woman from explosion and raining debris, Mal used one hand to turn her face toward his, leaving a grisly, clawlike handprint across her cheek, and demanded, “Who are you people? Where the hell am I?”
    “Don’t kill me!” was all she responded; mascara and tears ran down her now soot covered face. All that followed was incoherent blubbering.
    The grating sound of stone being ground to dust spat from Mal’s mouth as teeth ground themselves against each other in anger and frustration. He didn’t have time for this. Those “GMR” guys were going to realize he survived the room’s obliteration and come for him, guns blazing any second. Mal hauled the woman to her feet with an ease that surprised him: the arms, whatever they were, increased his strength dramatically. As long as his feet were planted, the super-soldier guessed he could probably lift a few thousand pounds without much trouble.
    A quick once-over of the woman, whose nametag Mal saw was “Grace Talborg,” helped him decide “good cop” was probably the best interrogation technique to use. She was fragile and looked like she’d shatter if he breathed too hard on her.
    “Look, Ms. Talborg,” voice shifting into comfort-mode as years of polite Southern upbringing took over, Mal held his hands up, palms out, to show