by Titan Books
Rubbing his eyes frantically, Junior kicked out with both feet at where he thought Verris was and connected only with air. Ignoring another bolt of pain in his shoulder, he rolled away and started to get up, only to have Verris horse-collar him again. His head hit the gravel, which broke the skin in several different places. Junior sat up, blood running down the back of his neck. Verris elbowed him in the face and everything went black as his jaw slid sideways.
When his vision cleared he was flat on his back and his dedicated, loving father was present on his chest, punching his face into mincemeat. “—trying—” punch “—to make you—” punch “—a man—”
Father of the year, Junior thought, and dug deep for the strength he needed to show Verris he’d already done that himself.
Junior brought his legs up, twisted the right one around Verris’s neck and torqued him away. Scrambling to his feet, Junior saw the assault rifle he’d dropped earlier. In one continuous motion, he swept it up, pivoted on the ball of his foot and met Verris’s lunge by planting the butt end squarely in the middle of his grinning face.
Verris staggered back, wobbled, but stayed upright. Junior flipped the rifle and pointed the business end at him.
“Well?” Verris said. “Go ahead. You’ve got your target in your crosshairs! Do it!”
He deserved it, Junior thought. Hell, Verris was literally asking for it—and yet he couldn’t.
Why the hell not? What the hell was stopping him?
Screw it. Junior flipped the rifle and slammed the butt into Verris’s face again. Verris crumpled to the gravel without a sound. Junior slung the rifle, sprinted for the edge of the roof and parkoured down to street level.
* * *
As soon as the kid was gone, Verris pushed himself to his feet. That last blow had stunned him a little but it hadn’t been full force. Right before impact, Junior pulled his punch. The kid couldn’t even hit him with all his strength, let alone shoot him. Obviously his duties as a father weren’t finished.
Verris turned to his left. Another Gemini soldier stood alone on a neighboring roof. He was dressed in a full-body suit made of next-generation Kevlar, his face covered by a more compact version of Junior’s night-vision gas mask. Here was the soldier that military commanders dreamed of but never imagined could actually exist—the perfect fighter. And this was the perfect time to turn him loose. Verris nodded, then jerked his head toward the street.
The masked soldier hopped over the edge of the roof and bounded down the wall as easily as an athlete might have sprinted along a road. He hit the street and kept going, his strides so long that he hardly seemed to touch the ground. When he came to the hardware store, he ran up the outside to the roof without breaking stride.
Verris smiled. Everybody was going to learn—or, in Junior’s case, relearn—a lesson tonight. It remained to be seen who would live through it.
* * *
For a small town, Glennville had one hell of a big hardware store, Henry thought as he finished Danny’s tourniquet. It was makeshift—a ripped-up apron with a screwdriver for a windlass, secured with a piece of rope. A store of this size probably had a first-aid kit with a commercially made tourniquet but there was no time to look for it.
He got Danny on her feet and helped her limp away from the exit and farther into the store. There was at least one more rear exit as well as a loading dock—more than the two of them could defend. They had to find a place to hole up until he could get Danny to a hospital. That was assuming they got out of here alive, of course, something Henry had categorized as extremely difficult but still possible. Then Danny had been shot in the thigh and that changed everything.
Henry sneaked a look at her; he knew from experience that a tourniquet hurt like hell but she didn’t make a sound except for an occasional short intake of breath.
At the end of a long shelf of flowerpots and bags of soil, Henry spotted a step stool on wheels. “Take a break,” Henry said. He eased her down onto it, then crouched low to peer left and right along the wide aisle running crosswise in front of them. The store seemed empty—he didn’t see or hear anything to indicate otherwise—but Henry was sure they weren’t alone. If he’d been in command, he’d have stationed a couple of guys here. He and Danny hadn’t exactly sneaked in without a sound so whoever was in here probably had a fairly good idea of their locations. Dammit.
Could he and Danny get to the firearms department before the Gemini guys caught up with them? There wouldn’t be any sophisticated military weapons but kneecapping someone with a shotgun was an effective defense, if rather messy. He might make it alone—
No. A much better idea was getting them both out of here. Danny was more likely to survive escaping than last stand at the Remington counter.
“We should keep moving,” Danny said and started to get up.
“Stay there,” Henry told her. “I walk, you roll.” He held her shoulders to steer her across the aisle.
“Maybe we should find a shopping cart,” she said with a small, trembly laugh.
“No way,” Henry replied. “I always get the one with the wobbly wheel. Drives me nuts.”
She gave another shaky laugh as they came to another cross-aisle and stopped again while Henry checked it out. Still nothing. They crossed the aisle into wiring and electricals. A plastic sign on the shelf showed a smiling cartoon light bulb with a word balloon that said: Always Stay Grounded!
“How zen,” Danny said between clenched teeth.
“If you say so.” Henry brought her to a stop in the middle of the row when they both heard a very faint squeak, the sound of a rubber sole on clean floor tiles.
Henry pushed Danny’s head down so she was bent double and fired through the shelf beside them. Plastic and rubber fragments flew in all directions as the shelving collapsed and he heard two bodies hit the floor. He peered through the wreckage of the shelves; they were gone. He’d gotten them before they could even fire a shot—that was the good news. The bad news: he had just let everyone in the immediate vicinity know where he and Danny were.
Danny tried to stand up but Henry pushed her down again, this time more gently. “Did you hear them come in?” she asked. He shook his head. “Maybe they were already here, waiting.”
“Then why didn’t they take us out sooner?” Henry said.
Danny shrugged. “Not enough of a challenge?”
Henry’s blood turned to ice water. That might not have been as absurd as Danny had meant it to sound. Nobody outside Gemini knew what Verris was really up to, what he was doing with the soldiers under his command. Making a better soldier was a lot different than making a better mousetrap, and how Verris was going to accomplish that wouldn’t be pretty.
“Henry?” Danny’s eyes were wide and worried, more concerned for him than the wound in her thigh. Her face was paler and she was sagging on the step stool. If she didn’t get medical attention soon, he was going to lose her, and she knew it as well as he did. She had to be pretty scared but she was still toughing it out, playing the badass.
He could have used a partner like her, Henry thought. Monroe was good—had been good, he corrected himself with a pang—but Danny Zakarewski was a WMD.
“How many rounds have you got left?” Henry asked her.
She looked apologetic. “Five or six.”
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” Henry said briskly, and rolled her to the end of the shelf, where she had a view of the next cross-aisle through a rack of fuses. “You hold here and watch the choke point. I’m going to find a way out for us—”
Danny caught his arm in a grip that was unexpectedly strong. “Sorry, but you’re not going anywhere unless I go, too.” She unslung her rifle, put it down on the floor, and drew her sidearm. “I’m not letting you die out there alone.”
Henry felt a rush of affection for her. She was really something—a fucking lion.
“But you can check my tourniquet again. That would be okay,” she added.
He did so.
It was still secure. She wasn’t losing any more blood but it wouldn’t be getting any less painful. They had to get out of here before the pain became too much for her.
“Danny, I’m sorry,” he said suddenly.
“For what?” she asked him, surprised.
“For dragging you into all this.”
“I was the one surveilling you,” she said with a small shaky laugh.
If she hadn’t been injured, he would have pulled her into a bear hug. “Anyway, sorry,” he said, looking down at her wound.
“I don’t regret it,” she told him.
Now it was Henry’s turn to be surprised. “Seriously? Come on, if you had to do it over again and we were back on that dock, and I asked you to meet me at Pelican Point, you’d still say yes?”
“Hell no,” Danny said with another shaky laugh. “I’m not an idiot. I’m just not sorry that I did, that’s all.” She laughed again. “Now let’s shoot our way out of this so we can go get a drink.”
Henry’s grin was fleeting—he heard a door open at the rear of the store, although he wasn’t sure whether it was the one they’d come in through or another one, the one he might have found if Danny had let him go. He gave her hand a squeeze and she squeezed back. He listened closely and heard the very faint noise of four or five soldiers fanning out. Danny yanked hard on his arm and mouthed, Down, then rolled off the stool onto the floor just as they opened fire from three separate positions.
Merchandise exploded, shelves burst into fragments, collapsed, toppled over, caved in—today was definitely a bad day for retail in Glennville. Henry rolled Danny backwards with him; she was having trouble keeping her bad leg from dragging on the floor. There were five shooters and they kept coming, spraying everything in front of them with automatic weapons fire. The noise itself was punishing, beating his ears, his head, his whole body as the three shooters converged on him and Danny. He had to get her out of this, he thought desperately as they returned fire; he had to get her to a hospital before she passed out, before the goddam tourniquet wrecked her leg so bad they had to amputate.
Unfortunately, he had just fired his next-to-last bullet.
Suddenly one of the Gemini soldiers went down, blood spurting from his neck. Good one, Danny, he thought, and shifted to line up two of the remaining shooters in front of him. If he only had one bullet left, he was going to make it count double. Henry took aim; his last bullet went through the eye of one Gemini soldier and kept going through the eye of the one behind him. And now both his and Danny’s weapons were going click-click-click.
Henry took a breath. “You were a great partner, Danny.”
She nodded, then her face twisted in pain. Her hand found his and they held onto each other, watching the remaining two soldiers advancing on them. They had stopped firing for the moment but their rifles were up and ready. Were they just saving ammo now that he and Danny were out? Or were they supposed to hold them until Verris got there?
Danny deserved a lot better than this, Henry thought. If there was any justice in the world at all, her life wouldn’t be ending before it had even really begun—
Abruptly, there were two new bursts of machine-gun fire from behind the Gemini guys. Henry’s jaw fell open as they dropped to the ground so fast they probably didn’t know they were dead yet. But it was another couple of seconds before it registered on him that it was Junior who had taken the Gemini soldiers out, Junior coming over to him and Danny where they had just been waiting to die amidst hardware wreckage, handing them fresh ammunition.
Henry’s hands automatically reloaded his weapon with no help from his brain; good thing—he was too boggled to think. He’d watched his own death come at him and then veer away more than once, and it always left him shaken.
“Uh… thank you,” he told Junior after a bit.
“What he said,” Danny added, sounding equally blown out.
Junior grimaced. “Sorry I ran.”
“It’s been a tough night.” Henry laughed weakly. “Where’s—”
“You okay?” Junior asked Danny, looking at her leg.
“Still kickin’,” she said. “With my other foot.”
Henry felt his heart rate come down and his breathing slow. He had a job to do and someone to protect. “How many more are out there?”
“I don’t know,” Junior said.
“What about Verris?”
“Out of commission.”
“But alive?” Henry asked.
Junior nodded, looking ashamed.
“Okay,” Henry said. “There’ll be more coming. Help me get her up—”
Danny put up both hands and shook her head emphatically. “No. I can’t run any more. Can you?” She drew her combat knife from its ankle sheath.
Henry looked at Junior, who nodded. They picked up their rifles and got down on their bellies, Henry facing the back of the store, Junior watching their six, and Danny keeping an eye on their three and nine. In the brief moment of quiet, Henry tapped his rifle stock twice just as Junior tapped his own three times. Then they looked at each other, surprised.
Danny smacked both their backs and gestured at the store around them: Pay attention. Henry smiled briefly, bracing himself for whatever was coming up next.
As it turned out, the attack came down.
* * *
There was a crash followed by a shower of broken glass. Shielding his face with one hand, Henry looked up to see a dark figure descending on a line, firing as he did. Henry, Danny, and Junior scattered in three different directions; Henry glimpsed the soles of Danny’s boots as she dived behind a rack of tools but Junior had disappeared completely. Junior was most likely to come out of this alive, Henry thought. Danny might make it out with Junior’s help, but even if she did, the hole in her leg might kill her anyway.
Meanwhile, the new attacker was only going after him.
Bullets chased him up one aisle and around the end of a long set of shelves, where he stopped short, watching as the guy shot through the shelves in case Henry was panicky-stupid enough to run down the other side. Then the killer stomped over the wreckage, firing in a wide arc around himself. Henry took advantage of the noise to get behind him unnoticed and fired a short burst at his back.
The killer jerked slightly, whirled on Henry, and returned the favor several times over. Henry ran up the aisle, vaulted over the wreckage of another set of shelves; his feet came down on some plastic fragments and skidded out from under him. As he fell forward, Henry tucked and rolled head over heels in a series of rapid tumbles while bullets kicked up chips of concrete under the floor covering.
The weapons fire cut off and Henry heard him drop the rifle. In the brief pause before the shooter switched to a sidearm, Henry bounced to his feet and found himself in varnishes and paints. He grabbed up some small cans and hurled them at the guy as he ran. Despite the accuracy of Henry’s aim, however, it seemed as if his attacker barely noticed them bouncing off his shoulders, his chest, even his head.
Henry tried sweeping a whole lot of cans off a shelf hoping to trip him but the guy just tromped over them, kicking them aside.
I’m gonna need a bigger can, Henry thought as he reached a shelf of gallon containers. But they were a lot harder to throw and the guy kept firing as he batted them away. Abruptly, there was a different burst of machine-gun fire, coming from behind the shooter. He broke stride, staggered a bit, then turned to fire at Junior, trading bursts with him until they both ran out.
Okay, buddy, Henry thought, let’s see if your only talent is firing a weapon you don’t even have to aim.
He ran back to varnishes in time to see the guy had found Junior and was using his head to make a dent in a five-gallon can of weatherproofing. Henry took a running jump and launched himself at the guy feet first, the same move he’d used to steal the motorcycle in Cartagena. Except the guy bent his knees and leaned back at an angle that should have been impossible for anyone to maintain without falling over. But somehow he did. Henry sailed past
him and landed on Junior.
Henry rolled away from him but not quickly enough. A hard kick missed his head but caught his shoulder blade; Henry winced, feeling something crack as he went sprawling on his belly. He scrambled up, rotated his shoulders to see if anything major was broken. Mobility wasn’t impaired but it hurt like hell. Everything hurt like hell hurt right now, but at least it all hurt the same, nothing worse than anything else. The good news was, it would all hurt a hell of a lot more tomorrow.
If he lasted that long.
Henry drew his knife, and in the corner of his eye he saw Junior do the same. The masked soldier made a quick motion and produced knives in both hands. That goddam mask; when you couldn’t see your opponent’s face, you were fighting half-blind. He had to get close enough to tear the fucker’s mask off. It looked like a more compact version of Junior’s night-vision gas mask. The night vision he could understand but had the guy really expected to get tear-gassed?
He feinted to one side, then the other, making little slashes in the air. Junior feigned a lunge, stamped his foot in an old fencing move meant to distract an opponent; their masked opponent didn’t fall for it. Facing two guys with knives didn’t seem to faze him at all—his posture showed no defensive tension, no stiffness. It was as if he were sure Henry and Junior were holding rubber knives. Henry decided to disabuse him of that notion.
He backed up, then took a few running steps forward. He could see the masked guy steady himself, still holding Junior off while he prepared to bury his knife in Henry’s throat. At the last moment, however, Henry dropped to his knees and slid under his arm. It was something he’d secretly wanted to try ever since he’d seen someone do it in a movie.
There was no tiling on the floor here, just cement treated with some kind of sealant—not an ideal surface for a flashy slide. Henry felt the cement scrape through his trousers and sand off some skin. But then, it wasn’t exactly classic fighting technique—a Krav Maga instructor probably wouldn’t have approved—but he managed to slash the masked killer’s thigh without getting slashed himself.