Hunters

by Matt Rogers

  But he could at least try.

  That, he knew, was the key to survival, and life itself.

  To try.

  24

  Several of the modern rectangular light fixtures suspended from the kitchen ceiling were shattered, plunging the vast space into ethereal shadow.

  Violetta moved tensely across the space, checking her peripherals, sweeping King’s SIG across the dark corners. They were empty. At least the assault was stymied. The first wave had failed. Knowing the likely origins of their attackers, there would be more waves to come, but for now there was a lull in the carnage.

  Alexis followed close behind her, sweeping opposing sides of the space to Violetta. Violetta hustled across the entranceway and into the corridor leading to the command centre.

  Alexis caught something in her peripheral vision, and hung back.

  ‘Do you need me?’ she said softly.

  ‘No,’ Violetta said without turning around. ‘Cover me from here.’

  Then she vanished into the gloom.

  Alexis doubled back to take a second look.

  The ugly man who’d almost bested Slater wasn’t where he’d been minutes previously. They’d left him on his side, face pressed to the cabinets. Now he was sitting upright, one hand pressed to the bloody mess that used to be his throat. It wouldn’t keep him alive, and he probably knew that, but if he’d nearly killed Slater then he was a relentless human being, and those who are relentless keep fighting long after it makes sense to do so.

  He’d try to stay alive until his dying breath, which would come soon.

  Alexis didn’t look down as she moved to him and took a kneeling position. She covered the front door and the window with her rifle. A horrid ringing beat at her ears.

  Finally, when she was sure she’d bought herself a minute, she glanced down at him.

  He looked up at her. He was in that surreal state of hyperreality right before death. His eyes were glassy, but they managed to focus on her. His face was an inhuman colour, whiter than she thought possible. Sweat and blood matted his scalp.

  She fixed her green eyes on him and whispered, ‘What’s your name?’

  He must have thought she was a mirage.

  ‘Spinel,’ he said with a strange smile.

  ‘Like the gemstone?’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered, and multiple trickles of blood running from his mouth turned into a torrent that came off his chin.

  She didn’t look away. ‘Do you know the men you came to kill?’

  ‘Not—’ he started, then the life drained from his eyes.

  Alexis turned her attention to the window, then heard him spluttering. She’d misinterpreted. He was fighting for every second of consciousness before the eternal slumber. He wasn’t gone yet.

  She looked back down. He was wincing in an attempt to form words. Blood streamed through the fingers he’d clamped on the neck wound.

  Finally he managed, ‘Not personally.’

  ‘You know of them?’

  He nodded with delight in his eyes, and she realised if she wanted answers she’d have to lean completely into the act.

  She made her voice monotonic, trance-like, mimicking a cult leader she’d met in Wyoming. ‘You’ve done your duty, Spinel. You’ve proven yourself in the arena. You’ll be rewarded.’

  He smiled.

  He didn’t have long left.

  She said, ‘Tell me who you work for and you’ll be released.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘To Valhalla.’

  You are a warrior, Spinel, and in death you will go where warriors go.

  If he had any sanity left he’d see through the ruse, but he didn’t. Near-death experiences are psychedelic in nature. Slater had told her as much.

  And Spinel was as near to death as it was possible to be.

  He summoned his final reserves of energy and whispered, ‘I’m a hunter. There are … many of us. Some used to work alongside … King and Slater. Their … untimely departure … gutted the backbone of the old system. We had to pivot into a new one. Now … Onyx tells us what to do. Where to go. Who to exterminate.’

  ‘Onyx? Another gemstone?’

  ‘We’re all gemstones. Gives us … anonymity. And look what two of us did … to the fabled King and Slater. They won’t survive the hunt. That’s … something, at least.’

  ‘What was your name before all this?’

  ‘Jordan.’

  Just like that, he died.

  Eyes went cold like stone, hand came away from his neck, the final lifeblood flowed out, and he pitched over and crumpled, splaying across the kitchen floor. The suddenness of it shocked her, then she realised the “Spinel” moniker had kept him going minutes after he should have been dead. As a character, he could be invincible. As Jordan, he was flesh and blood.

  She thought, At least he died as Jordan.

  Alexis left him there and covered the entry points, forcing the strange interaction from her mind.

  25

  Out the front of the estate, behind the front perimeter fence, the SAC team leader looked up at the mansion.

  It had been eviscerated.

  They’d poured rounds upon rounds into the facade, shattering every window, tearing chunks out of every wall. There were distant screams from neighbours, and faint sirens far away. Way off.

  That was deliberate.

  A call had been placed to higher-ups in the LVMPD. The cops would be unusually slow to respond to automatic gunfire in the gated community. It’d be chalked up to a departmental mishap.

  But they had to be out of here soon.

  The team leader turned to his underling. ‘Citrine and Spinel?’

  ‘They’re in there,’ the man grunted.

  ‘I know that. Any word?’

  ‘None.’

  Ominous enough. The team leader had received the two men without protest, as an attachment to his strike force, because he knew where they’d come from. They were hunters. From the very top, from the world far above his, the world he couldn’t even imagine.

  Veritable super-soldiers.

  What Jason King and Will Slater had once been, many years ago.

  Now they were relics.

  Or not.

  The SAC team leader said, ‘I’ll give them two more minutes. Then we all go in.’

  26

  Violetta entered the command centre and felt a pang of regret as she observed the technological setup she’d built from scratch.

  Server towers fed monitors arranged in a grid. It was her intelligence hub, what she’d planned to use for years to conduct deep research on their operations. And now it was dangerous, vulnerable to exploitation. It all had to go.

  Thankfully she’d planned for the contingency.

  She fired one of the monitors to life with the touch of a key and entered a line of code into the run program that was up on the screen. She executed the command with another key touch, and the virtual gears started whirring.

  Within seconds it was all gone, eradicated from the cloud, beyond salvation.

  Every last scrap of data.

  Anyone trying to dig to find what they’d been up to here in Las Vegas would be met with an empty husk of hardware.

  She breathed out, turned and went back the way she came.

  Alexis was kneeling beside the kitchen island next to a body.

  Violetta glanced at the dead man and said, ‘He wasn’t there when we left.’

  ‘I know.’

  Violetta beckoned her away from the body. ‘I’m sure you’ll tell me all about it later.’

  Just before they fled the shadowy space, she glanced sideways, her line of sight offering a straight shot out the broken window and down the lawn.

  At least a dozen silhouettes advanced up the broad driveway.

  Silent, ruthless, methodical.

  ‘Shit,’ Violetta breathed.

  She pushed Alexis forward, encouraging haste, and they ran for the garage.

  27

  Slater saw them coming f
irst.

  Like the worst version of a desert mirage.

  Silhouettes streaming in through the front gate that he only now realised lay wide open, the controls evidently hacked before the first assault.

  In the dark of the garage, King said, ‘You see them?’

  Slater said, ‘Yeah. You’ll need to apply your own pressure.’

  ‘If I have to.’

  With an inhuman hiss of pain, King lifted his bad arm and clamped it down on the bullet wound as Slater took his hand away. His palm and fingers were coated in a thin layer of blood, black in the lowlight.

  He clambered over King, spilled out of the car, and crept as silently as he could toward the vehicle resting alongside it. It was their second-hand Toyota Yaris hatchback they’d owned since first establishing themselves in Vegas. The most common, nondescript car money could buy. It had served them well.

  Slater thanked his lucky stars that they always kept the keys in the ignition for contingencies.

  He squatted on the concrete floor beside the driver’s door in the night gloom. His head spun. If the advancing mercenaries saw him, it was a clear shot into the open garage.

  You have two seconds, he told himself.

  He drilled it in, knowing this was the calm before the storm.

  Two seconds.

  That’s it.

  He threw the door open, then twisted the keys in the ignition, and the interior lights lit up like a beacon as the engine sputtered to life. Before the mercenaries had even registered the sight, he yanked the handbrake off and dove away from the car, scrambling back into the Mercedes with no regard for his own wellbeing. In his haste he scraped his leg on the corner of the door and bumped his forehead on the frame. But then he was in, spilling over King, just as the night came alive with automatic gunfire and the Yaris’ windscreen blew out.

  Then the small Toyota rolled forward, carried by gravity and the slope of the garage floor.

  It picked up momentum and trundled down the long straight driveway toward the front gate.

  The mercenaries unloaded on it. It didn’t deter them that they couldn’t see anyone behind the wheel. Any self-respecting target would have their head down, pressed into the footwell so they could escape.

  Violetta and Alexis spilled into the garage from the side passage, sensing an opportunity.

  They kept low and ran to the Mercedes. Violetta got behind the wheel and Alexis dived into the passenger seat. Slater reached forward from the rear seats and shut her door for her.

  Violetta fired the engine to life, burrowed herself down almost all the way into the footwell, and stamped on the accelerator.

  Slater and King were already down.

  Slater peered over the centre console and saw Alexis’s hunched back peeking over the edge of the window sill. She wasn’t low enough. If a shot came through the glass and sunk into her spine, she’d be paralysed or dead.

  He reached across and shoved her down lower, practically wedging her into the passenger footwell.

  The hailstorm of gunfire began.

  But Slater could feel the pull in the pit of his stomach, the purring acceleration of the German engine, and they were already halfway to the front gate by the time the mercenaries tore their aim away from the decoy Yaris and sent rounds at the big Mercedes.

  Violetta held the wheel steady, but drove blind. She’d lined the trajectory up with the front gate beforehand, and now it was guesswork.

  She kept her foot on the gas.

  They sped through the open gate, evident from the sound of the front bumper grinding violently on the asphalt as the driveway levelled out onto the street. The whole car jolted, and King slid off his seat, crushing his bad arm against the back of the passenger seat, pinning it to his side. He let out an involuntary yell just as Violetta wrenched herself upright and spun the wheel hard, all the way to the left, so they didn’t barrel full speed into the perimeter fence of the mansion opposite theirs.

  ‘Shit!’ she screamed.

  Slater sat up to see what the problem was.

  There was a roadblock.

  But it was rudimentary. It hadn’t been designed to enclose the front gate. It was simply the unintentional way the convoy of SUVs had pulled up at the kerb, nose-to-bumper. Silhouettes loomed around the cars, but there was minimal street light to identify them. A couple of the silhouettes sparked with bright flares, which Slater identified as muzzle flashes, but by then the Mercedes was doing fifty miles an hour and Violetta plunged it into the broadest gap between SUVs.

  There wasn’t exactly ample room to work with, but it was the best of several bad options.

  The impact smashed King harder against the seat in front, and he shouted again. Alexis was all the way in the footwell now, like an amateur contortionist, and Slater threw himself back down below the line of sight as the crash took most of the momentum out of their escape.

  Violetta followed suit.

  But she kept the accelerator depressed the whole time, and after a terrifying moment of stillness the Mercedes shoved one of the SUVs out of the way and barged through. As soon as she felt the makeshift barricade give way she wrenched the wheel all the way to the right, so when they made it through, their vehicle slid round the back of the SUV they’d knocked aside.

  It saved them.

  Bullets intended to shred the Merc’s tyres to pieces instead thudded into the SUV she was using as a de facto shield. Then she gave the engine everything it had and they tore away from the quiet cul-de-sac.

  The gunfire faded to faint pops, replaced by tinnitus whining in each of their ears.

  Mainlining adrenaline, Slater whooped. ‘Violetta, you genius!’

  King groaned in protest.

  Slater helped him out of the footwell and sat him up on the seat. King was pale, but he’d kept his hand pressed to his shoulder the whole time despite the price of horrific agony. He knew it was either pain or succumbing to blood loss, and he’d choose pain every time.

  Ghost-white, King managed to chuckle.

  Violetta looked over her shoulder, eyes wide, surprised by the joviality. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m interested to see how the cops explain that away.’

  Slater said, ‘Lots of illegal fireworks.’

  ‘Uh-huh. With dozens of wealthy neighbour eyewitnesses to say otherwise.’

  ‘Their problem,’ Violetta said. ‘Not ours.’

  Alexis had been mute until now, but she said, ‘I’d say our problems are worse.’

  Slater collapsed back in his seat as the adrenaline wore off, replaced by overwhelming fatigue. The pain started to creep in, beginning with a dull throbbing behind his eyeballs.

  But he mustered the energy to ask, ‘What problems?’

  There was a long silence from the front seats.

  Then King chuckled beside him, his nose swollen like a pumpkin.

  Violetta and Alexis exchanged a look.

  Alexis said, ‘Boys, right?’

  Violetta nodded.

  They were out of “The Ridges” before any of the soldiers could pursue.

  28

  Deep in the bowels of a nameless, soulless Manhattan skyscraper, Alonzo Romero hunched over the phone his employers didn’t know he owned.

  It was encrypted with his own code, so there was no chance of unwanted eyes prying through what came up on its screen. He’d developed half the security measures his country used in the first place, so he had faith in his ability to hide what he wanted from his superiors.

  And my coworkers, he thought. In this era, everything and everyone has a price. Loyalty is an outdated concept, a nostalgic throwback.

  His eyes throbbing from the strain of staring at pixels on a screen for fifteen hours a day, he scrolled through transcripts of calls made and received by a certain faction of the CIA currently carrying out an operation on the outskirts of Las Vegas. He speed-read, identifying key words and scrolling rapidly past the rest, a concept he’d mastered. It was something he’d been forced to maste
r. Often he had to read north of two hundred thousand words a day.

  Being a tech wizard wasn’t as sexy as it seemed in the movies.

  Now he read the transcript of a voice call made two minutes earlier, transcribed by an artificial intelligence that was accurate enough to get the gist of the conversation.

  A: What happened?

  B: They’re gone.

  A: Who?

  B: All four of them.

  A: You sure?

  B: A car made it out. And we just swept the house. There’s no bodies.

  A: None at all?

  B: Only ours.

  A: Of course. Tell Citrine and Spinel to report back immediately … Hello? … Fucking answer me, you useless bastard.

  B: The two men you sent … they’re in our body count.

  A: What?

  B: They’re both dead.

  The transcript went no further.

  Alonzo knew who the caller was, and what he would have done after he’d hung up.

  There was no transcript of Onyx’s rage.

  29

  Violetta drove them eighty miles north-east to the small rural city of Mesquite.

  She followed the speed limits when she deemed it prudent to keep a low profile, but as soon as the traffic dispersed she gunned it, chewing up the dark asphalt of I-15.

  Alexis had dozed off early into the trip, beat down by the almighty hangover that came after sensory overload. As soon as Violetta reassured her that the coast was clear for the foreseeable future, she was out. King and Slater were equally quiet, but both awake, sitting statuesque in the back. Having both taken hard punches to their heads, they knew falling asleep wouldn’t be on the agenda for at least the next six hours. Slater without a doubt had a concussion, and King suspected he had one too. If they slackened and closed their eyes, their brains might bleed. They might never wake up.

  So they stayed conscious and silent. Slater had patched King’s shoulder up as soon as they’d had the opportunity. Thankfully the bleeding had looked worse than it was, and he’d used the medkit they kept in the Mercedes to clean the wound, stitch it up and bandage it. The bullet hadn’t gone all the way in, only carving a thin chunk of meat out of his deltoid, so he still had full range of motion in his right arm, which something told him he’d need. There was pain, obviously, but when wasn’t there?