“Stay the fuck out of my business. I crashed the goddamned bike and had to hitch a ride home and Sheila is somehow offline. Offline! You motherfucker!”
“Calm down,” Case says. “She’s not gonna miss anything being offline for a few minutes. In fact, if I were you I’d be asking how it’s possible she got knocked off so easy. Doesn’t that strike you as weird?” It comes from a giant face on a wall-sized flat screen mounted on the side of a… cave? What the fuck? “And you lost your right to work alone months ago, so don’t get all self-righteous about me being around today.”
“What’s that supposed to—“
“Hey, asshole,” the guy on the screen says over bike boy’s tantrum, cutting him off.
“I didn’t need this complication—” Bike boy stops talking. Because the guy on the screen is waggling his eyebrows at me. “What the fuck are you doing?” bike boy asks. “Stop making stupid faces—”
“We have com-pan-eee.” The guy on the giant screen nods his head at me.
Bike boy whirls around, shoots me a dirty look, and then growls, “I’ll call you back,” as the giant screen goes black.
We stare at each other for a few moments, our eyes locked. “Oh, my—”
“You’re still here,” he says over me.
“—God.” I look around one more time.
Cave filled with…
Super bike.
Souped-up muscle car.
Giant flatscreen phone chat.
Computers everywhere.
Robot?
Some kind of science lab.
A few loud beeps interrupt my list. “Online,” a female voice says from the ceiling. A pause, and then, “There has been a breach and we have a visitor.” A hologram in the form of a woman appears in the middle of the cave and I can only assume this is…
Sheila, apparently back online.
I look around a little more and spy… not a cape, thank God, but a… a…
Helicopter, parked at the far end of the enormous cavern.
And then I get the perfect list after all, because I see…
Guns.
No, they are more than mere guns. I know my way around a gun and these are—
“What the fuck are you doing here, gun girl? I thought we parted back in the forest.”
“Oh, my God,” I repeat. “You’re Batman.”
Chapter Four - Lincoln
I force a smile as I set my protein shake down, but inside I’m pissed as hell. She is not supposed to be here. “How the fuck did you get in?”
She’s shaking her head, gun in hand, and backing up the way she came. But I can’t just let her walk out. Not after she’s seen all this. Not after she’s seen me. Jesus Christ, she might be able to identify me. I really need to do something.
“The gate in front of the tunnel was open and I just followed your cave running lights.”
“That’s what happens when Sheila goes down.” I curse under my breath at Case.
“And I can tell by your reaction”—gun girl is still backing up—“that you’re not one of the good guys, are you?”
“Good guys?” This actually makes me laugh. “There’s such a thing?” I lunge at her, trying to cut her off before she backs herself into the entrance, but she dodges me and skirts to the right, kicking over an oilcan as she moves. “Why are you running, gun girl?”
“Why are you chasing me, bike boy?”
“Not Batman then, huh?”
She shakes her head, her eyes are darting around like she’s looking for an escape route.
“Sheila,” I call out. When I look over, Sheila’s got a little smirk on her face. Like she’s feeling vindicated about this whole fuckup.
“How can I help—”
“Uh…” I cut Sheila off before she says my name out loud. “Secure the perimeter and the tunnel.”
“Perimeter and tunnel secure,” she says as soon as I’m done.
“That’s clever,” gun girl says. “What are you, some diabolical mad scientist?”
“Something like that.”
“I’m gonna get out of here. You can’t keep me here. And if you think I’ll surrender and let you—”
“Hey,” I say, putting my hands up, palms out in front of me. “Take it easy, OK? I’m not keeping you here. I just need to make sure the place is buttoned up. I have a lot of expensive stuff happening in this room.”
She stops backing up, and that’s enough for me at the moment. “Who are you?”
I shake my head. “You don’t need to know that.”
“I’m afraid I do. I brought you here. You made me bring you here. And now I see those wheels turning in your head. You can’t let me go. Not after I’ve seen all this stuff you have. Do you have permits for this place? Hell, do you even own this land?”
I scrub my gloved hand down my unshaven face and sigh. Think, Lincoln. Think. How the fuck do I get out of this? There’s probably six different ways I can handle this, but most of them would be difficult, involve a lot of talking and explaining, and I’m not in the mood for that shit right now.