Hissing, she bared her fangs and moved toward the Bêtes, causing them to back up in a brutal dance with the beating drums providing the soundtrack. The dance continued back and forth. A couple of purposely slow feints gave Livi a feel for their speed and style. They also probed her defense, fighting in perfect unison as if there was some sort of mental connection. Compared to her, they moved in slow motion, but it was almost as if a reflex kept them away from her blades when their speed wasn’t enough.
The alley was too narrow for them to split up and get on either side of her, so they were forced to fight side-by-side. She lunged at their heads a couple of times, then ducked low, under the katana to connect with the front of the woman’s shin. The dagger sliced cleanly, and it took the Bête a few seconds to realize she’d been cut. Changing stances, she placed her other foot forward.
Two more feints drove them further into the alley. Usually street criminals went on the offensive when they realized how fast she was, but apparently this pair knew that when fighting a quicker opponent, solid defense was the most effective strategy. Especially with long weapons and Holy Water. One or two glancing blows would change the face of this fight.
As before, she feinted high and ducked under the sword, landing an even deeper gash along the inside of the woman’s ankle. Staying low to avoid the sword, she pulled away, but Henri-Marie’s spear snagged her forearm. Leather and flesh ripped, elbow to wrist.
To take her mind off the pain, she focused on the bloody tracks at the swordswoman’s feet. Every step meant more blood loss for the Bête. The sticky squelch of every footstep made Livi’s mouth water like Pavlov’s dogs. She wouldn’t bleed out, but might weaken enough to match the effects of Holy Water on Livi.
The air seemed to thicken around her as it worked in her bloodstream, and she felt as slow as a plebe. Could unmodified people really live so ploddingly? The odds in the fight were probably even now; much worse than she was used to.
Satisfaction showed on Henri-Marie’s face. He urged the woman into the offensive and both took a wary step forward. Then another.
On the third step, the injured woman’s ankle buckled and she fell forward, landing only a couple feet from Livi. She struck with the precision of a surgeon, puncturing the Ninja’s spine through the back of her neck before either Bête could react. Henri-Marie took a stab, but Livi narrowly avoided it.
Livi and Henri-Marie faced each other over the body of the fallen Ninja.
“En tête á tête, non?” Livi still remembered a few French phrases from school. She smiled and licked her fangs. “One on one.”
The leader’s confidence was gone. He scanned for an escape, but Livi’s alley was tight—high walls, no handholds, no doors. And her offer to let them walk away had expired.
“I propose a cessation of hostilities, mademoiselle,” said Henri-Marie with a fluid bow. “Eet would be a shame to keel such a beautiful creature.”
“Which one of us are you talking about?”
Henri-Marie relaxed, switched tactics from violence to seduction. “Sink of what we could be together, mon amour. Sink of what we could make together.”
The offer was tempting enough to make Livi wonder if he’d been engineered to cause weak knees and a weak will. With every word, she could practically feel the zipper of her bodysuit sliding down a notch. She lowered her daggers, struck a pose of her own as they stared at each other and tried to find her self-control. Sweat gathered on Henri-Marie’s forehead, dripping down his face and beautiful neck. It made him even sexier, and also more appetizing. The salty sweat would be a superb seasoning for his blood.
“The black beast and the black-clad beauty,” she mused.
“Oui.”
“It’s tempting,” she said. Blood perfumed the air, clouding the parts of her brain that usually made decisions. For five years on Hollow Island she’d been a loner, and happy that way. Maybe it was time to think about—
Henri-Marie made the choice easy. With an underhand heave he launched the javelin. Her muscles as heavy as sand, Livi dropped to her belly as the spear flew toward her, barely passing over. Henri-Marie ran past, trying to escape. She sprang to her feet and gave chase. Under the influence of Holy Water, she would have put her money on a Bête Noire in a footrace. Running felt like swimming upstream. But just past the mouth of the alley she caught him with her arms around his neck.
“We all have a beast inside,” she whispered in his ear before sinking her fangs and tearing open his throat.
Unlike the movies she grew up watching, there was nothing clean or glamorous about sucking blood. A ruby fountain spurted out, pacing his dying heart as he fell forward. A hollow crack echoed through the street as his face hit the street. With anxious hands, Livi jerked him onto his back.
Blood burbled out of Henri-Marie’s torn neck, glistening on his black coat and filling the air with a superb, metallic odor.
Livi slurped and lapped like a starved kitten. The other Bêtes would have already stopped bleeding, but it didn’t matter. One healthy man was enough for her, and Henri-Marie was as healthy as she had ever tasted.
When his pump finally stopped running, Livi leaned against the wall and breathed. Liquid euphoria pulsed through her veins as she perched at the peak of ecstasy.
Why don’t I do this every night?
The cut on her arm reminded her why. It was the closest she had come to losing a fight in quite a while. The ratings she would earn from the encounter briefly crossed her mind, but adrenaline and the lingering taste of the exquisite Bête drove the thoughts away. She couldn’t remember a more rewarding experience in the five years since immigrating.
Unzipping her leather top to loosen her cleavage, Livi extracted a small cross from between her breasts and notched it four times with a dagger. A new record for one day. Four more pieces of trash picked up off the streets. And luckily for her, Hollow Island Projections would just keep sending more and more suckers her way.
She sheathed her daggers in specially sewn pockets at her thighs, and wiped her face with a clean towel she’d hidden in the barrel. There was a sack hidden there as well and into it she placed coin pouches, and a few other trinkets from the bodies, as well as the nunchucks. Carefully she emptied the Holy Water flasks into a gutter drain, then added them to the sack. The tainted blades remained where they lay. It wasn’t worth risking a scratch or cut to carry them out.
Livi set the sack on the ground at the alley’s entrance. Using handholds she’d scraped out of the grout, she climbed a few feet and faced the mounted eyes. After licking her lips to freshen the blood, she placed her trademark kiss in the center of each wide lens.
With the sack over her shoulder, Livi walked away. She practically floated. A few blocks away she dropped the sack on the steps of an orphanage, pounded on the door, then skipped around the corner. Hopefully whoever ran the place would sell what they couldn’t use, though the image of toddlers running around with nunchucks and flasks brought a smile to her lips.
The spring in her saunter was in rhythm with the drums as she walked back to the new city.
5
Pass or Fail
< The Fig – A gesture made by inserting the thumb between the knuckles of the index and middle fingers of a fist and raising the hand toward the target. The fig is the equivalent of flipping the bird on the outside.
- hollowisland.com/wiki >
Nash woke up on the floor.
Light streamed in through the metal slats of a window and illuminated a sparsely decorated front room that wasn’t familiar in the slightest. There was a couch close enough to touch, which made Nash wonder why he was on the floor. On the wall above the couch hung a painting of an old cowboy. The original John Wayne.
It all came back to him—Hollow Island, the Wizard and Snake, his missing pinky. The weight of a mountain settled on him as realization landed that his perception of life as a Ranger on Hollow Island was vastly different than reality.
The events of the day before ha
dn’t all been a dream then. Nash hadn’t just stepped into a sticky situation, he had stripped naked and jumped in with both feet.
He didn’t move, scared to ignite the many injuries he’d collected yesterday. Physically, he felt as good as new, despite the beating and sleeping on the floor.
“A man’s gotta earn the couch,” John Wayne had told him the night before.
Nash had thought it stupid then, and hadn’t changed his opinion overnight. He accepted it as a new Ranger hazing tradition and would suck it up for another thirteen days, or until he earned it. Thirteen days still didn’t seem long enough to learn everything he needed here.
“Can’t lay here all day,” said Nash, and on the count of three, he pushed himself carefully up to sitting.
Nothing hurt.
Nash waited for it, braced himself against the wave of pain he expected, but it never came. Other than the hunger of an animal waking from hibernation, he felt perfect. Better than ever. He checked his pinky. Still gone, but the wound had healed over. It was as if he’d lost the pinky years ago. When he tapped the tiny bump that was all that was left of the finger, it was as pain free as the rest of his hand. No rib pain, no leg pain, and his vision was perfect.
Over the years he’d seen a lot of futuristic modifications, some of which seemed like pure science and others that were pure magic. Nash’s quick healing endowment was better than anything he’d ever seen. When Hollow Image Projections accepted his Ranger application and offered this brand new endowment, Nash hadn’t expected anything this amazing. He wasn’t healing at two or three times the normal rate, it was more like a hundred times.
Staring at his pinky stump, contemplating the gift he’d been given, he couldn’t help but feel like a lucky inmate—he was trapped in this new life, but had been giving a shiny toy better than any toys the other inmates had.
“That’s right, look at the positive,” he told himself, rising to his feet. It was a new day, and it was a perfect time to turn around all the bad juju from his first day on the island.
There was a kitchen area to one side of the living room. Nash opened cupboards, scrounging for anything edible to put in his mouth. He found a ceramic container labeled sugar and a plastic food container stamped “Tupperware” with rice in it. That was it. His trainer was living the life of a bachelor to the fullest.
The kitchen had a sink, but no appliances. Running water was a basic human right in the second half of the twenty-first century, even in this fantasy society. Hollow Image Projections provided water free for everyone on the island, but they drew the line at electricity.
A bunch of baby bananas sat on the counter so Nash helped himself. This building was probably a small shop before the clean nukes of the Hour War blew away every living person, but left the vast majority of buildings still standing. Like many things on Hollow Island, such as the Tupperware container, it had been salvaged and, in this case, repurposed to serve as a home. John Wayne’s bedroom would have been the supply room back in the day.
As Nash worked on his third banana, he scanned the room for cameras. From what he understood, the entire island was covered, including private residences. It took a few minutes, but he finally spotted a tiny pair of lenses in the grout of a tiled wall. Eyes, as they were called here. Each lens was the size of a thick lead pencil tip. There could be a dozen eyes in this room alone and he wouldn’t find them all.
A door opened behind him. “Trying to get famous already?” drawled John Wayne. “Consider doing something worth watching instead of shoving your mug into the eyes.”
Nash pulled himself away from the eyes and looked over his trainer’s garish outfit. He wore the same red cowboy shirt as yesterday, but he’d traded the vest for suspenders. The bandana tied around his neck was bright yellow.
“You should consider charging royalties to McDonalds,” Nash shot back. “If anyone is watching right now, I guarantee they’re craving an Egg McMuffin.”
The smile fell from John Wayne’s face and his eyes focused in anger. “That’s not how this works, piker.” His words were sharp and slow. He stormed toward Nash and got in his face, looking up from a few centimeters below Nash. “Don’t talk about people watching because it ruins the scene, and don’t think that just because you survived one fight you can act all tough with me.”
John Wayne had talked about being famous before Nash had. “Double standard much?” demanded Nash, not backing down.
“You’re scutting right it’s a double standard. You get on the wrong side of me and I’ll drop you faster’n a handful of scorpions.”
Nash didn’t believe for a minute that John Wayne would abandon him. Of course, drop you could mean knock him out, and Nash didn’t want to give him a reason to try that. Either way, pissing off his trainer would do him no good.
“If you say so,” said Nash, spreading his hands and stepping back.
“I say so,” insisted John Wayne. He looked Nash up and down. “You’re one to talk about fashion.”
The word flamboyant had never been used to describe Nash. He didn’t need some dramatic costume to speak for him, so he’d chosen simple pants and plain t-shirt with two accessories—his gun and his flatpack. He waited for a comment about the pee pants hanging in the rack in the bathroom, but John Wayne ended the stare down and pulled a banana off the bunch.
“What’s the plan today?” asked Nash. He wanted to start looking for Karolina, but he had no idea where to look or how to find someone here, especially without a brass mil to his name.
John Wayne bit off half his banana in one bite. “Try to get you to loosen up. People immigrate to have fun, enjoy life. No sense in coming in here as Mr. Serious, Fun Police Special Agent. Unless that’s a new Caste I haven’t heard about yet.”
Nash chuckled. “Now that you said it, you know someone will be gunning for the job.”
“That’s better,” agreed John Wayne. “Don’t go expectin’ every day here to be as exciting as yesterday. You wouldn’t last a week like that. Sooner or later you’ll meet someone bigger and badder than you.”
Nash kind of wondered if he’d already met them and just gotten lucky to have such a useful endowment.
John Wayne came close again and studied Nash’s face. “I don’t know how your pretty skin got all better.” He patted his cheek, but Nash pulled away. “You really did luck out on that one. I’ll eat my horse if that Snake is so nice to you next time.”
Nice enough to spray acid in Nash’s eyes and bite him with his knock-out venom?
“Anyway,” said John Wayne, unlocking the front door, “today we take it easy. See what we see.”
A block over they stopped in a small restaurant and John Wayne ordered a ham and egg sandwich, then told the woman at the counter, “My young pard there is gonna have to go hungry. Spent all his money buying drinks for a Sprite last night. Not even a pretty one. She had buck teeth, only one leg, and breath so bad people at the next table over went temporarily blind.”
Nash resisted the urge to tell John Wayne that he’d just choke him out and take his sandwich, and said, “You know I’m good for it.” He still didn’t know how he’d make money here, other than bounties for bringing in criminals.
After considering it for an annoying amount of time, John Wayne said, “Make it two, little lady.”
Three sandwiches sounded like a good start to Nash, just for him, but whatever. Little victories, he reminded himself. Right now, breakfast was the best little victory he could imagine.
The rich smell of cooking ham and egg only made him hungrier and by the time he had the sandwich in hand, he would have traded his spare shirt for a single bite.
They walked as they ate, and all of Nash’s attention was on the food in his hand. The bread was hearty with visible grains. The ham and egg was hot and juicy. The flavors were deep in a way Nash couldn’t put his finger on, but had rarely tasted on the outside. This sandwich definitely wasn’t printed or rehydrated. Unfortunately, it was gone before he knew it.
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Licking his finger, Nash looked up and saw that John Wayne had led them to a plain, cinder-block building with a line of a dozen people outside. Most of them were dressed in the plain clothes people wore back in the 1800s when they weren’t wearing suits and dresses.
“How much of the depos did you see on the hollows?” asked John Wayne.
“Depos? Never heard of them.”
“If you would have pulled the trigger, metaphorically speaking, we’d be collecting fifty kilos today. And by we, I mean me, because trainees don’t get bounties.”
That was a lot of information. “I thought we picked up bounties at the bounty office.”
“That’s one way to get them. I’d rather sleep in a bed of fire ants than fill out paperwork though. You can call a bounty official to take ‘em in for you, then give it a few days and show up here, quick and easy.”
All of the bounties Nash had ever seen collected were done with Rangers or bounty hunters dragging people into the bounty office. They didn’t show the paperwork, obviously, but Nash wondered if John Wayne would show up on more of the hollows if he played the game Hollow Image Projections wanted him to play. And that meant dragging a criminal into the bounty office and slapping his hand down on the counter to get some quick service. Nash wasn’t about to offer a way John Wayne could up his game, though.
“So what are the rest of the people doing here?” asked Nash. “There can’t be this many bounties out there.”
“Ratings,” said John Wayne.
“What are they rating?”
John Wayne gave him a longsuffering look. When Nash didn’t respond, he said, “Wait, you’re serious? How fresh are you?”
A Route of Wares: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure: Hollow Island Book One Page 5