by Tom Wood
But it had a single downside.
Relying on another meant an inevitable reduction in individual awareness. When another was tasked with watching your back, you didn’t watch your own.
Victor, who relied only on himself, never lowered his guard. He watched his own back.
He crept up behind the second man until less than a metre remained between them. He matched his gait, step for step.
When he had timed the man’s movements to perfection, Victor used that noise to close the two steps he needed to wrap his left palm over the man’s nose and mouth, simultaneously muffling any cry while yanking the head back to expose the neck.
Victor drove the point of the knife into the flesh to the left of the bounty hunter’s Adam’s apple until he felt the hard resistance of the spine, then dragged the blade in a fast arc through to the right, severing the windpipe, carotids and jugulars, and withdrawing the blade in one swift, efficient motion.
He released the man and stepped back as a torrent of blood spattered the bracken in a sudden bright-red rainstorm, and the bounty hunter collapsed to his knees.
With so many severed muscle fibres at the front of the neck, the man’s head lolled all the way back, gaze straight up and skyward. With no link between lungs and mouth, his screams were silent.
Victor was back down prone in the undergrowth before the man tipped forward in front of him and went into convulsions for the few seconds it took to lose consciousness.
Steam rose from the bracken in many places.
Victor waited for a reaction, for the lead bounty hunter to respond to the quiet but unavoidable noise, but the only sound Victor heard was the gentle patter of blood dripping from sodden leaves.
It made for a pleasant melody with which to finish his symphony.
By the time the first man realised his buddy wasn’t following, Victor had circled around to his flank.
Blade against his throat, the bounty hunter froze.
‘Don’t worry,’ Victor told the man as he dragged him down into the undergrowth. ‘It’s not me who’s going to kill you.’
SEVENTY-EIGHT
Moisture saturated the cold air. No wind blew through the forest but the canopy above swayed and rippled. Mist filled the gaps between the trees, darkening the afternoon to a thick gloom of grey.
They found their man within a few minutes because of the screams echoing through the trees, drawing them irresistibly to the area where they saw the erratic sway of bracken and undergrowth. Until they were close, they could not see what was causing the plants to move.
‘Shit,’ Garrett said when they were close enough.
The man was alive and writhing in obvious agony on the forest floor. He lay on his back, hands pressed over his abdomen. Blood soaked his shirt and covered his hands. It was smeared all over his face and neck too, leaking out of his mouth.
‘That’s grim,’ one of the three bounty hunters with him said.
Garrett frowned. ‘Show some respect. He’s one of us.’
The wounded man on the ground saw them and moaned louder. He had already been moaning, but upon seeing his comrades the pitch of the moan changed from one of suffering to one of communication.
‘What’s he trying to say?’
The moans were incomprehensible. No words. Not even a syllable.
But the man was raising his head up to gesture down at his body.
Garrett said, ‘Do what you can.’
The bounty hunter alongside him whispered, ‘When someone’s lost that much blood … ’
‘I know,’ Garrett interrupted. ‘But do what you can.’ To the other two, he said, ‘Guard the perimeter.’
They did, spreading out, angry faces displaying their need to even the score.
The bounty hunter with Garrett knelt down next to the wounded man and reached out to the man’s abdomen and the two hands pressed over some kind of wound. It was hard to tell exactly what had happened to him with all the blood.
‘I think he’s been gutted.’
When the bounty hunter went to take a look, the wounded man moaned louder and shook his head. Blood bubbled from his mouth.
‘Easy,’ Garrett said. ‘We’re just going to take a look.’
The man continued to shake his head.
He resisted when the bounty hunter tried to prise his hands away from the wound.
‘We’re trying to help you, okay? Just let us take a look. Maybe we can staple you back together.’
The wounded man did not cease shaking his head. He resisted when the bounty hunter again tried to move his hands away.
He turned to Garrett, exasperated.
Garrett squatted down low.
He looked his wounded man in the eye.
‘Listen,’ he told him, ‘you have to let us look. Let us help you.’
More moaning. More head shaking.
Garrett wiped some of the blood from the man’s face, finding no wound.
‘You’re cut inside your mouth?’ Garrett asked him.
The man nodded. Moaned.
‘Let me see.’
The man hesitated, then parted his lips, opening a dam that released a flood of blood that spilled over his face, neck, shoulders.
‘Jesus,’ Garrett hissed.
‘What is it?’ the bounty hunter asked him.
Garrett winced. ‘His tongue’s missing.’
‘What—’
‘It’s been sawn off.’
‘What the … ?’
Garrett opened up a pouch on his harness, removed a pressurised injector, flipped off the cap and stabbed the needle hard into the wounded man’s shoulder.
He shook his head in desperation, moaning and moaning until the morphine was carried by his blood into his brain, and he became sluggish and sedate.
He still shook his head, although it was in slow, heavy movements.
‘See?’ Garrett said. ‘We can help.’
The bounty hunter said, ‘Why did the fisherman hack off his tongue?’
‘Because he’s crazy,’ Garrett said, then pointed to the wounded man’s abdomen. ‘What’s the deal there?’
The bounty hunter could now prise away the wounded man’s hands. He still tried to resist but had no strength thanks to the morphine’s influence.
With the hands out of the way, it was still hard to see through the blood-sodden clothes what was going on, but the bounty hunter moved the clothes out of the way until the bare abdomen was visible.
He hadn’t been gutted. At least, not in the way they expected.
The hands had covered a grievous wound: a cut that split the flesh of the abdomen across the belly button. Grievous, but not fatal because the wound was not deep and had severed no arteries.
A deliberate, strange wound.
Made stranger because it was wide, the skin distended and stretched from within.
Despite the width of the wound, no innards were visible. Instead, there was something smooth and dark. Thin. Curved.
‘What the hell?’
The bounty hunter didn’t understand. Not at first.
Garrett did. His mouth opened and his eyes widened. The wounded man’s missing tongue made perfect sense now.
No tongue. No warning.
Garrett stumbled backwards a step, then spun around and sprinted away as fast as he could while the bounty hunter on one knee took another second to understand that the thin, curved object was a lever.
And another second to realise there was a grenade beneath it, yet without the pressure of the wounded man’s hands on the lever, it was now detached.
After that, there was no time left to come to any further revelations.
‘Oh … shit.’
SEVENTY-NINE
The sound of the explosion was muffled by flesh and organs, skin and bone into a dull thudding pop. An Mk67 fragmentation grenade threw out shrapnel in every direction up to over two hundred metres, given clear terrain. Few pieces reached a fraction of that distance after they had shredded the bou
nty hunter. Some were dragged to the earth by blood and chunks of skin and muscle. Others hit trees. A few didn’t make it through the ribcage. Others still embedded in the skull.
The overpressure wave took viscera in a blooming sphere that painted foliage and undergrowth and left a cloud of atomised blood mixing with smoke and dust to colour the air.
Garrett didn’t need to look to know his man was dead.
He could smell him.
Hell, he could taste him.
Garrett lay on his stomach, having thrown himself down after a short sprint. The overpressure wave caught him just before he hit the ground. Hot shrapnel hissed in his body armour. A piece had caught in his fatigues. Another had sliced his shoulder. He’d been in the kill radius – fifteen metres – when he hit the deck, but far enough away and low enough for the blast wave and shrapnel – which rose as it expanded – to go over him for the most part.
He lay winded for a moment, his ears ringing, but there were no injuries he could detect. Tomorrow he would be covered in bruises, he was sure.
Tomorrow could wait.
Tomorrow was far from certain.
Tomorrow had to be earned.
Garrett fought through the pain and willed himself to move. Murdoch was nearby. He had to be close and moving closer.
He had set the trap. He had picked the location for a reason. Here, the hillside was jagged and jutted with outcrops and narrow gorges and all sorts of places to hide and launch ambushes.
On the ground, buried by undergrowth, Garrett was invisible. A temporary cloak, however. A decent tracker would see the trail easy enough and Garrett had a feeling Murdoch was far more than a decent tracker. He had proved far more in every other regard.
Garrett, not prone to intense emotion, hated this particular adversary.
He told himself to control that hatred because there was no benefit to it. Emotion in combat never helped. Only in the removal of all humanity could the perfect soldier be realised.
Garrett waited.
Murdoch did not appear.
But the forest came alive in a ripple of movement and violence. A form blurred through the undergrowth, coloured as the forest but separate from it, almost a wind of death disturbing vegetation. Malevolence made whole.
The first of the two bounty hunters Garrett had set to guard the perimeter didn’t see the forest take form, nor hear that malevolence behind him.
Garrett could only watch as the blur swept over his man and then was gone again, and there his man still stood, only now he trembled and raised hands to a gaping neck that spilled blood as a ferocious, red waterfall.
The second bounty hunter heard the gurgling rush of spilling blood and spun to face the threat, yet instead faced only the mist-shrouded forest.
Garrett groaned. He tried to move.
He tried to call a warning to his man when the forest manifested itself once more, darkness melting out of the mist behind the bounty hunter.
This time his man heard, or felt, the danger and turned to kill it.
But the forest could not be killed.
It sprang at Garrett’s man, dark limbs wrapping around in a sudden, deathly embrace, and dragging him down beneath the undergrowth amid a chorus of screams and gunfire.
Garrett rolled on to his stomach and crawled.
Away.
Crawled anywhere.
Anywhere but here.
The gunfire ceased behind him. The cries of suffering continued a little longer.
The forest could not be killed and its bloodlust was far from sated.
Garrett could feel that bloodlust, that unquenchable thirst, and knew he could not escape it. He tried anyway. He dragged himself through the undergrowth, fingers digging into the soft earth and carving trenches of dread. He saw bugs and worms in those trenches, waiting to feast on what the forest left behind. He pictured many mandibles stripping away his skin in countless tiny bites. He imagined fat, satiated worms wriggling inside his hollow eyeballs.
Such horror energised him to crawl faster and reminded him he was still alive.
Dazed, disorientated, but alive.
Each second of life was one more second of recovery. Each second made his vision a little clearer, his hearing a little sharper, his chance of remaining alive a little better.
‘Ten seconds,’ a voice said through Garrett’s headset.
Reinforcements were coming.
The forest had not yet won.
EIGHTY
Rain fell. At first, a fine patter, light and cold. Then, within seconds the fine drops fattened, falling harder and faster. They pelted Victor’s head and shoulders, plastering his hair to his skull and sluicing away the mud that covered him into a feral pattern of streaks and blotches.
Visibility worsened in the downpour. His own footsteps became undetectable. The rustling his movements made through the undergrowth fell silent.
He had killed two in the aftermath of the explosion yet in doing so had lost sight of the third – Garrett. Nearby but hidden in the forest and the mist. He could be mere metres away, yet he would not be heard through the rain.
Maybe Garrett was dead too.
Or maybe not.
Victor slipped the knife away and unslung the carbine from his back.
The remaining bounty hunters were all here or close – or would be in mere moments. The explosion, the gunfire, had drawn them in. No more chances for stealth.
No more clean kills.
But Victor had picked the terrain of his choosing. To the east, the hill fell away to the lake, and to the north narrow gorges cut into the hillside. The bounty hunters would come from the west or south.
Victor pulled back the receiver to check the chamber contained a round. It did. It always did. He had checked the chamber maybe a thousand times and without fail saw the brass case of a bullet. But he would keep checking because only in the acknowledgement of his own capacity for imperfection could he hope to overcome it.
He had killed many killers who had believed themselves to be perfect.
He waited.
He rocked his head to the right, then left, to crack his neck.
Silence.
Calm.
There was always this moment.
Violence rarely commenced without an introduction. Even a sudden, surprise attack had cues.
Thunder only clapped after lightning struck. That lightning was always there but not always seen. Thunder was always heard.
He used that moment to take a deep breath into the bottom of his lungs and held it there to override the body’s instinctual responses to danger. He didn’t want excess adrenalin and cortisol in his system, meant to help primitive man run or fight, to interfere with the small motor units needed to aim with accuracy and to swap a magazine at speed.
The breathing slowed his heart rate and forced his body to relax when countless physiological processes wanted the opposite.
Before he fought, he fought himself.
Practice makes perfect, as they said. Victor understood why. He knew that through repetition the brain insulated neural pathways with fatty acids to increase the speed of the electrical pulses required to perform a given task. In this way he knew that his brain was quite literally wired to kill.
Some people were master musicians.
Others were incomparable artists.
To each his own, he thought.
Victor took in one last deep breath and felt his heart rate slow almost to resting, adjusted the way the stock sat against his upper chest, and swivelled out of cover.
He shot as he moved, stalking forward with the carbine’s stock firm against him and his head positioned so his gaze was a straight line through the iron sights.
At the limits of his vision through the rain and mist and foliage, a shape rippled to the west.
The bounty hunter was already moving too – maybe having seen Victor take cover behind the tree in the first place – and was dashing into cover as the rounds came his way.
The
y shredded leaves and exploded bark from the tree trunk he got behind, if only for a moment.
They exchanged fire. Close range, but each a fast-moving target obscured by the rain, shielded by trees.
Victor moved laterally to a new position an instant before the bounty hunter returned fire, shooting blind from behind the tree and spraying rounds into the area where Victor had been.
He saw no others but they had to be close. He had to make every second count before he was outgunned.
Thumbing the selector to single shot, Victor aimed for the exposed rifle, missing by millimetres, and the bounty hunter withdrew the weapon before Victor could adjust his aim.
He changed positions again, seeking to get an angle on the far side of the tree where the bounty hunter was hiding and knowing that any kind of competent gunman wouldn’t stay in that same spot for long. Either he would move directly back or he would rotate around the tree, away from the line of fire.
If he was good, he would back off, creating distance and opening up his field of view so whichever way Victor circled around, to his left or to his right, the bounty hunter would see him.
So Victor didn’t circle.
He approached the tree in a straight line.
On one knee, he waited for a long moment. He wanted the bounty hunter fixated on the forest in his peripheries. He wanted him to begin to doubt. He wanted him to grow concerned that Victor was flanking him from so far out that he couldn’t see him.
Then, when Victor peered out around the tree trunk he had an extra few seconds to locate the bounty hunter where he was crouched low in the undergrowth, head rotating back and forth, focused on his flanks and not on what was right in front of him.
Selector still on single shot, Victor triple-tapped him in the upper chest above the body armour’s protection.
It was too far to see individual wounds, but Victor knew at least one of the rounds had severed the spinal column because the guy flopped straight down with almost no reaction.
Not an instant kill, but the bounty hunter was paralysed from the neck down, and the three holes in his chest would make breathing increasingly difficult as essential pressure leaked out from the thoracic cavity and his lungs filled with blood.