The grenades flew toward the window, trailing the first hint of grey smoke behind them. A cloud of smoke burst from the window as they flew through it, bounced off the walls, and landed inside. A second later, one of the grenades flew back out, as the shooter grabbed it and tossed it through the window into the street.
But the other two were still billowing out smoke inside the house. Without a mask, the shooter wouldn't last long in there.
Logan slung the launcher over his left shoulder, and grabbed his gaussrifle with his right. It wouldn’t be very accurate if he had to shoot from the hip, but it wouldn’t need to be at this range. He just needed a clear target in front of him, and the rate of fire would do the rest.
“Moving,” he yelled. Then slammed his foot onto the dirt, and pushed himself up from his knees.
The smoke cloud was spreading into the street through the smashed window as he rushed around the corner of the house, toward the metal door between the windows.
His heart pounded as he raised the suit’s power-assisted right foot and slammed it into the door.
The metal clanged as his foot smacked into it. Then the lock and hinges gave way under the force of his kick, and the door flew backwards into the house, scattering wooden chairs across the room as it slammed into the table behind it.
Logan swung the rifle as he leaned into the doorway.
Thick smoke filled the interior of the house. If he wasn’t wearing the suit with its air conditioning, he’d be coughing and spluttering by now. A red square appeared on his HUD. Alice’s sensors had spotted someone in the rear of the house, moving away from him.
“Runner,” Logan yelled, and crouched as he strode through the room, as fast as he could move without smacking his head or arms into the ceiling or walls.
If anyone else had been in there with the shooter, they’d have been running out of the door to get away from the smoke well before now. The wooden table crunched beneath his feet as he stomped down on it.
Something else crunched beneath the wood. The rifle. The shooter must have dropped it there as they ran.
Of course.
No-one got a clear view of his face while he was shooting. Without the rifle, he could just mingle among the villagers, and the Legion would never find him unless those villagers were willing to give him up.
Logan ignored the rifle, and charged onward. He had to catch the man before it was too late. Logan’s metal arms smashed against the frame of the doorway between the living room and the kitchen as he barged through it to get to the back of the house. The back door was open, out onto the brightly-lit dirt yard behind the house.
A man wearing a leather jacket and long brown pants above mud-smeared leather boots was hobbling away from the house, coughing. Logan pushed the kitchen table aside, scattering pots and pans across the floor in a cacophony of clangs and clatters, then charged out through back door. The shoulders of his suit hit the metal door frame, but it tore loose from the wooden frame of the house, and clattered to the ground behind him.
“Halt,” Logan yelled.
The man jogged toward the field of corn behind the house, still coughing from the smoke, and leaving a thin brown cloud behind him as his boots kicked up loose dirt from the surface of the yard. The chickens squawked and scattered as he stomped between them, and the pig stared out through the wooden fence around its pen, swinging its head from side to side to watch the action, and snorting at the men.
Without the rifle, there was no way to prove the man in the leather jacket was the one who’d been shooting at them.
But he’d been inside the house, or he wouldn’t be coughing from the smoke. And who else would start running away, when a Legionnaire told him to stop?
Maybe that didn’t count as a positive ID to the officers, but it seemed positive enough right now. Logan could argue the technicalities with Bairamov later. He took a long step toward the fields, following the man.
Then something exploded behind Logan.
The blast shook his suit as it reached him, then a shower of dirt poured down from the sky, tapping on his metal skin.
A thick brown cloud of dirt filled the air in the gap between the houses, beside the corner where he’d been taking cover only a moment before. Beyond it, green squares moved on the HUD, showing where the other members of the section were moving toward them.
“Man down,” Bairamov yelled.
Gallo’s status showed red on the HUD, right in the middle of that dirt cloud. Suit damaged. Man inside... not good. But there was no time to worry about what might have happened to him.
The asshole who’d attacked them was heading into the fields. As Logan turned back toward him, the man ran headlong into the rows of corn, which twisted around him as he pushed through it, then bent back as he passed, leaving little sign of where he’d been. As Logan leaned forward and pushed his suit into a run, the shooter vanished into the corn.
Logan raced into the field, faster than an unassisted human could move, leaving a cloud of dirt in the air behind him as the claws kicked up the loose ground. Then he slammed into the corn, crushing the stalks that fell beneath his feet, and flattening more as his arms and legs slammed into the stalks to his sides.
He couldn’t see the shooter any more, but he could see the top of the corn bending up ahead where they were running. Did the guy really think he could outrun a Legionnaire in his nuclear-powered suit?
Logan raced on, making up about a metre of the gap with every one of the suit’s long steps.
A red circle appeared on the HUD, down on the ground somewhere just ahead. Then a patch of half a dozen more. Mines. The asshole was leading him through a minefield. Or, at least, a field of something round and metallic that was buried where Alice’s sensors could spot them.
Logan slowed, crouched, then leaped over the whole patch of them in one bound.
His head and chest rose above the top of the corn at the peak of his jump, and he could see the man again for a split second. Logan’s suit was rapidly gaining on his prey. But the shooter was almost at the edge of the field.
Logan raced on, stomping down the corn, until the last row bent aside as his suit forced its way through the plants, before he broke out of the field onto the plain beyond. Yellowing grass stretched from the edge of the corn down toward the river, and the grass was now bent and twisted where the shooter had forced his way through it.
The shooter was running flat out now, his arms swinging hard beside him, heading toward something grey that stood out against the brown dirt.
A concrete pipe about a metre across protruded from the hillside. A stream of brown liquid dripped from the end of the pipe, down into the river where it formed a dark swirl in the water until it was carried away by the current.
If the shooter was trying to escape through the pipe, there was no way Logan’s suit could fit into it to follow. If they got inside, and followed it back to wherever it came from in the mines, there wasn’t much chance of catching the man.
He’d probably already scouted every drain under the hills, and know exactly where he could get out.
“Halt, or I fire,” Logan yelled, and the suit amplified his voice into a booming roar that echoed back from the hillside.
The shooter ran on. Just metres from the pipe now.
The clawed feet of Logan’s suit tore up the dirt as he slowed and dropped to a crouch. He raised his rifle, and aimed at the running man.
The crosshairs on his visor lined up with the man’s back for a split second, then he dodged aside, trying to follow a zigzag path toward the pipe. Logan held the rifle steady, and waited a second until the man zigzagged back. As the crosshairs lined up on the man, he squeezed the trigger.
The rifle kicked, firing a single hypersonic gauss round that impacted a millisecond after it left the barrel, leaving no time for the man to dodge. A shower of bright red blood exploded from his chest, and sprayed across the dirt around him.
His body tumbled as it fell forward, and slid across
the ground, before finally coming to a stop against a rock beside the pipe. The dirt around him slowly darkened as the last of the blood pumping through his veins oozed out onto the ground.
CHAPTER 8
Paris, France
The cops came sooner than Logan expected, racing into the ZUS in a swarm of black vans with sirens blaring. They stormed up the stairs into the apartment Jacques had found for Logan, and dragged him out into the street, then back to his old, familiar cell.
Finally, he discovered why they’d let him go.
They’d been following him ever since they dumped him in the ZUS, sure there must be more to him than what he’d told them, and expecting him to meet English contacts in France.
Now they seemed unhappy that the best he'd been able to offer them were drug dealers, pimps, and thieves. And, in return for that useless information, they’d let him out of prison to murder an aristo.
As Logan looked into their faces as they yelled at him in the dark prison cell, they seemed more scared than he was.
He knew what was coming for him. They had no idea what the aristos might do to punish them. But, if the stories Logan heard in the ZUS were anything to go by, it would be worse.
The usual beatings followed. More dunking in cold water. More long nights without sleep, with the flics banging on his cell door and yelling in at him whenever he closed his eyes.
Anything, it seemed, that might help to make him confess to something. Anything that could justify their actions to the dead aristo’s family.
And then it stopped.
In many ways, the silence and inattention was almost worse than the constant racket and beatings. He’d grown used to the predictable routine of the cell door opening as soon as the dawn light shone through the barred window in the stone wall of the corridor outside his cell, being half-dragged along the cold floor to the interrogation room because his legs couldn’t carry his weight any more, then beaten and yelled at all day until they dragged him back to his cell.
In a way, knowing what each new day would bring was peaceful and reassuring.
Now there was nothing. Just a silent, staring cop bringing a tray of gooey ration mush for Logan to eat every lunchtime. Feeding him enough nutrition to keep him alive, but not enough to restore his health, or his muscles.
No matter how much he tried to get the cop to talk to him, the man just ignored everything Logan said, and walked away along the corridor outside the cell as silently as he came in. And he kept up the silence for weeks.
Then they moved him to his new cell. And his last.
This one had a window of its own. A narrow window, high in the wall, sealed with thick metal bars. Low enough that he could see out of the cell by standing on the bed, but too small for a man to clamber through, even if he could find a way to remove the bars.
A window which overlooked the gravel courtyard in the centre of the building.
A vertical, rectangular, wooden frame taller than he was filled the centre of the courtyard. What little sunlight that reached the courtyard past the roofs of the multilevel cell blocks surrounding it glinted from a thick metal blade at the top of the frame. At the bottom was a hole in a wooden plank, about the size of his neck. In front, a bucket.
A guillotine.
The history teachers had spoken about the French Revolution at school. The government had killed thousands of aristos and peasants with those things. Chopped their heads off in front of cheering crowds.
Back then, it was just history. And now...
It could be him.
The next morning, he woke to the sound of men yelling in the courtyard. He blinked his tired and bleary eyes after a night of twisting and turning in the cold air on the hard mattress of his wooden bed while men screamed in the distance.
Then he stared out through the window.
A cop stood beside the guillotine. A tall, thin man wearing an ill-fitting uniform, scratching the back of his neck.
He grasped the wooden frame with his other hand, placing his fingers beside a short lever that protruded from the side of the frame below the blade. His fingers tapped against the wood, as though he had better things to do that morning, then he leaned against the frame, and whistled quietly to himself.
The rusty, riveted iron door in the grey stone wall on the far side of the courtyard creaked open. A male face moved out of the doorway into the yellow morning light. A sullen and scrawny face, with the skin pulled close to the bones. The man’s scraggly brown hair fluttered in the wind as another cop pushed him out into the courtyard.
The grey prison uniform flapped around the man’s arms and legs as he crossed the courtyard on his bare feet, wincing as the gravel dug into his flesh. He looked even thinner than Logan had become in his time in jail. How long had he been there?
The cop following the prisoner grabbed his wrists, and pulled them behind his back. Then twisted his arms against their sockets until he grimaced with the pain.
“No,” the man gasped.
The cop leaned close to his ear. “Don’t fight it, man. Do what you’re told, and the pain will be over in a minute. If you struggle, it’ll only hurt more.”
He pushed the prisoner across the courtyard to the rear of the guillotine, then down to his knees.
The wooden necklace at the base of the guillotine clacked together as the cop pushed the top half down hard against the prisoner’s neck, then it clunked as the cop locked it shut. The man pushed up with his arms, pressing his neck against the wood, and trying to push it open. But the lock held it firmly closed. It didn’t even rattle as the prisoner struggled.
The cop stepped in front of the guillotine, raised his right arm high in the air, and glared down at the prisoner.
“Any last words?”
The man spat into the bucket. “Fuck you, flics.”
The cop lowered his arm. The other pulled the lever at the side of the guillotine. Wood creaked and clunked.
The blade flashed in the sunlight as it fell, reaching the base in a split second. As it clunked to a stop, the prisoner’s head tumbled down into the bucket. Blood sprayed from his neck as his body fell to the ground.
Logan looked away.
They were just messing with him again. Making him watch them executing other men, to scare him. To try to make him talk, and tell them things they thought he knew, but didn’t.
Assholes.
He slumped down on the bed, and leaned against the corner of the cell wall, barely moving.
If they really were going to execute him if he couldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, what was the point in doing anything else? He would die, either way.
He didn’t even bother eating the meal the guard left, and fell asleep to the sound of the cops yelling at the prisoners in the other cells. Now he knew his life was about to end, it was the best sleep he’d had in months.
They came for him in the morning.
“Is it my turn?” he said.
The cop spat through the bars, onto the concrete floor of the cell. “Someone wants to see you.”
They unlocked the thick barred door, then nodded for him to come out. Should be believe them? Who would want to see him? Who even knew he was there?
Jacques? Angelique?
No-one he’d met in Section 19 was likely to be allowed in, even if they wanted to visit. If they weren’t already in the cells themselves, being tortured to find out what they might know.
His thumping heartbeat seemed to echo back from the hard walls as he took what could be has last look around the stone and concrete of the cell, then stepped out into the corridor.
What else was he going to do?
They took him from the cell, one cop in front, one behind. He might be able to fight one of them, but not two. Not in his condition, Probably not even at his best.
His face felt like it was glowing in the cold air, and sweat oozed from his forehead. His body shook. He struggled to keep one foot moving in front of the other, but the cop behind nudged him and t
old him to hurry up every time he slowed.
Their footsteps, his bare feet and the guards’ boots, echoed from the stone walls of the prison as they led him downstairs, through metal gates with bars as thick as his thumb. Then on toward a dark, metal door. The cop in front of Logan opened it, and motioned him to go in.
He stepped through the doorway, and the door clanged shut behind him.
A man sat at a small wooden table in the centre of the room, in the striped glow of the sunlight shining through a barred window behind him that opened onto the courtyard. He was staring at a tablet screen on the table, but looked up at Logan as he entered the room. The man’s eyes studied Logan from a middle-aged face with a long, thick scar across the right cheek, on a head topped with black hair shaved almost to the scalp.
“Logan McCoy?”
Logan nodded. “That’s me.”
The man pointed at the simple wooden chair on the far side of the table. “Sit,” he said, in English.
Logan glanced around the room. The two of them were alone, as far as he could tell. The walls were bare, aside from the window opening on the execution yard. If they planned to kill him, this was a strange way to do it.
He pulled the chair back from his side of the table, then slumped down in it, and crossed his arms over his chest.
The man tapped his fingers together as his hard eyes stared into Logan’s face in silence. Logan wanted to look away, but he stared back for what seemed like an hour, until the man finally spoke again.
“Do you know who I am?”
Logan shook his head. All he knew was that the man could speak English with only a hint of a French accent. He looked like a toff, but how was Logan supposed to know any more about him than that?
They’d never met before, unless it was during some kind of torture session that his mind had blanked out. He’d never even seen the man before, that he knew of.
The man lowered his hands, and flipped through pictures of the dead aristo on his tablet. Logan couldn’t help glancing that way as the pictures slid across the screen. The last time he’d seen that dead face was back in the heat of the moment, with his mind filled by the lust for blood.
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