Soldiers of Fame and Fortune Full Series Omnibus: Nobody’s Fool, Nobody Lives Forever, Nobody Drinks That Much, Nobody Remembers But Us, Ghost Walking, 12 Book series...

by Michael Todd

  Hickok drew her short sword as she stepped forward. The man’s gaze was fixed on her as he yanked at another bolt which seemed to be stuck. She pushed into a run and he stepped back hastily as if to somehow avoid her direct attack. He still scrabbled in a useless attempt to get a bolt as she lunged to close the distance between them and tackled him to land solidly on top of him. She brought her sword to the unprotected area between his helmet and his chest and pressed down.

  The agent dropped his crossbow and raised his hands hastily above his head. “Wait. Wait…wait. I don’t want to die.” He panted around the words, his tone desperate and edged with real terror.

  She narrowed her eyes and pushed the sword more firmly against him. “Then you shouldn’t have fucking shot at me, you idiot.”

  He winced and his voice cracked. “I know but I panicked. I tried to stay at the back so that when everyone else had gone I could sneak out. In all honesty, I admire you for getting the fuck out of this business. I wish I had the balls to do it myself.”

  Billie looked wildly at him, caught off guard by a response she hadn’t expected at all. “Then why did you come here?”

  The agent shrugged. “Because the organization is fucking scary and I didn’t want to be hunted like you. Death is a scary fucking thing. But now I know it was wrong. You don’t deserve this. I surrender.”

  The old Hickok would have cut him in half right there and not given a shit about his words or his apparently genuine regret. But the new Billie wasn’t as bloodthirsty. After all, this was exactly why she’d taken the decision to step away from the organization. She regarded him for a long moment before she increased the pressure on her sword a little. “Okay, you have one chance. I’ll take that fucking bow and you will get up and run as fast as you can toward the desert. Don’t look back. Do you understand?”

  He nodded and fumbled frantically before he handed her his dagger as well. “Yes. Yes, run straight out. Keep running.”

  Billie took the blade with her free hand. “I can see you on my map and so help me God, if you stop or turn, I will hunt you down and skin you alive. That would be the perfect gift to send to the board to thank them for a lovely hunting spree out in the Zoo. Don’t you think?”

  A little startled, he nodded but quickly shook his head. “Not mine. But yes. No. I understand.”

  At that point, she was fairly certain that the man had pissed his suit. She sheathed her sword, leaned slowly to the side, and snatched the bow from the ground to break it quickly in half. As soon as she shoved off him, he stumbled to his feet and sprinted away. He didn’t look back and he didn’t say a word, he but simply ran for his life.

  She stood, brushed the dirt from her hands, and scanned her surroundings carefully. Marcus roared with real mirth. “You scared the ever-loving shit out of that guy. He will have nightmares for the rest of his life.”

  Billie strolled toward the edge of the clearing. “I don’t need to worry about killing anymore. I am the Ghost of the Zoo. But don’t test me because I’ll take your head right off your shoulders if I need to.”

  Her pace a little more leisurely now to conserve her strength, she pushed on. Her wound still throbbed and activity made it flare up in a new wave of pain. Irritated by the weakness, she refocused her attention on her HUD and searched for the signal of the next agent on her radar. Marcus chuckled. “It looks like you have one tracking you.”

  She moved the map up and smiled when she noticed the red blinking dot following slowly behind her. “Well, isn’t that fucking cute?”

  Before he could respond, the familiar growl of a duo-bear filtered through the jungle silence. “Troy, find me that duo. I have an idea.”

  “Locating duo-bear.”

  A green dot blinked almost immediately on her screen barely a few hundred feet to her right. She tracked the little red dot as the agent behind her drew closer and closer. With a broad grin, she turned and drew her pistol, fired in his general direction, and jogged away, certain that he would take the bait. She maintained a steady pace through the jungle and laughed as the red dot increased speed in determined pursuit.

  She thrust through the foliage and into a clearing where she stopped and paused for a moment as she stared at the bear and its two heads. As luck would have it, she was almost certain it was the same one she’d encountered a few times before. The creature seemed to recognize her as well and sniffed the air cautiously but made no move to attack. While she might, under less pressured circumstances, have lingered to confirm the odd sense of connection she always felt with this particular bear, this was not the moment.

  Billie gestured behind her and yelled, “Incoming!” before she raced past the creature. One of its heads looked a little startled and turned to follow her movement as she hurtled past but was too quick for it even try to stop her. The other head remained fixed in the direction in which she had pointed.

  The agent who had dogged her heels stepped into the clearing. His gaze shifted from the figure who rapidly disappeared into the trees to the duo-bear, which now rose on its hind legs and growled menacingly. Both heads now focused their attention on the intruder.

  The agent slowed and drew his pistol from his side holster. “Fuck me. What the fuck is that thing?”

  The creature, as if it registered the insult in his tone, lurched into the attack. The man tried to raise his pistol in time but the bear smacked it out of his hand with a massive paw and sliced his chest with its razor-edged claws. The agent recoiled instinctively, yanked a sword from his back, and brandished it in front of him. The two combatants circled one another in a deadly dance that was familiar to the mercs who knew the Zoo but not to the agent. This was his first trip into the jungle and he could tell, as he stared at the two-headed bear, that he had seriously underestimated the hell into which he had been sent.

  Through his comms, Billie laughed before she sighed with mock regret. “Oh, you poor thing. Those duo-bears are as mean as fuck and basically my spirit animal, too. You’ve pissed it off by hunting me and it’s out for blood.”

  He snarled contemptuously. “Get out of my comms, bitch. As soon as I am done with this beast I will come after you. And I promise you right now that I will be much harder on you than I will be on this fugly motherfucker.”

  She faked a gasp. “How dare you call my friend fugly? Seriously, you need to learn some fucking manners. Besides, if your dick was as big as your mouth, I might be worried. I’m not sure, though, how hard you can be on me with that tiny little dick you’ve tried to swing around.”

  The comms clicked off and he narrowed his eyes to focus on the creature that growled and swiped menacingly as it continued to circle. He stepped to the right in a deliberate feint and swung his sword across the bear’s left face. Both heads roared loudly and the monster scrambled backward slightly. The agent followed and pushed forward to swing again. The blade slashed the other head across the cheek and his adversary howled and lunged with its claws to narrowly miss its attacker. It flailed as the pain of the wounds surged and threw it off balance.

  The agent lurched forward to press his advantage and his blade opened a long gash in the creature’s stomach. It roared and folded instinctively. Blue blood dripped into the beast’s fur. It rubbed its paw across the wound as one of the heads looked slowly and angrily at its attacker. Even wounded, menace emanated from the embattled monster.

  Man and beast regarded one another for a brief moment before the agent clutched the duo’s right head in his hands and shoved the tip of his sword against the massive chest. The bear snapped at him with its other head but he was out of range. The head in his hand snarled and growled and its top lip raised to expose the row of lethal teeth. It stared directly into his eyes, the look almost malignant. The man was ready to end it, which was not what he had come out there to do. As if it had read his mind, the monster snarled with one head and whimpered with the other.

  The agent laughed loudly. “You look all big and bad but you aren’t anything but a pussy. A f
ucking alien hairy pussy. They talk this big game about the man-eating beasts in the dreaded alien Zoo. All I see here are weak pathetic freaks—and that includes your little human friend, Outlaw. Seriously, what is the big deal about this place? I could fucking beat my way through here with one fucking arm.”

  Hickok dropped lightly from the tree behind him. “I would love to see that!”

  She raised her weapon—already loaded with exploding rounds—and fired. He whirled to the right as it exploded and the blast severed his arm at the shoulder. He fell heavily and writhed in agony. “You fucking bitch! Fight fair!”

  Billie threw her head back and whooped loudly with contempt. “When you come to my territory and you try to kill me and my furry friends, there is no such thing as playing fucking fair. You either put up or shut up. And from the way it looks to me, you need to shut the fuck up. Men who are ten times better than you have died in this Zoo. You ain’t seen nothing yet, and I’m pretty sure the only thing you’ll see now is the inside of my friend’s belly here. But hey, at least you went down in the Zoo instead of having me—the old woman—slice your throat.”

  He hauled himself to his feet with his remaining arm and snatched his sword. His face contorted in pain, he tried to swing at the bear but it batted the weapon away. The blade spun from his stiff fingers and he tried to retrieve it but toppled to the side and leaned hard against a tree. Blood pumped steadily from his arm into a steadily growing puddle at his feet. The duo-bear glanced at Hickok, who winked and turned her attention to the now terrified agent. With that same unspoken connection, the creature knew that she had saved its life and it wouldn’t waste the opportunity.

  It turned its heads slowly toward the agent and growled its hatred as strings of saliva dripped from its large, sharp teeth. The man recoiled and began to backpedal. “Wait, Outlaw. Wait. Don’t leave me here with this thing. You know I didn’t have a choice in this. You knew I had to come out here and try to take you down. You took my arm. Can’t we call it even?”

  Hickok turned and waved dismissively. “If you had come to take my arm, sure. But you came to take my life. In my book, we won’t be even until my friend picks his teeth with your bones. See you in the next life, fucker.”

  She shoved through the brush and into the thick of the jungle. Not a single part of her felt bad for the man. It was one thing to surrender. It was another to wimp out when times got hard. She knew his kind. If she had saved him, he would have stabbed her in the back the first chance he had. He was a coward, and so were the rest of them out there who tried to kill her. She made up her mind to end this shit and to do it before she stepped foot out of the Zoo.

  “That was polite of you,” Marcus commented over the comm. “You know, to at least tell him there was no chance for survival. At least then, his hopes and dreams wouldn’t be crushed.”

  Billie chuckled. While she wouldn’t admit it—too often, at least—it was good to have him back. Even if she hadn’t quite found her way around this new persona that time, death, and danger seemed to have shaped out of the old. He was essentially the same, of course, but the differences were real. She simply had to learn to read them.

  “I know, right?” she responded, a little unsettled by her thoughts, and took refuge in flippancy. “Whoever said I was a heartless bitch? I look out for my fellow man. In all reality, he didn’t even deserve that. He deserved a good kick in the ʼnads and a video shot of him begging a large bear for mercy before it bit his head off.”

  Marcus laughed. “And you look out for your fellow duo-bear.”

  Billie clicked her tongue. “Precisely. They love me. I honestly think we have a bond. It started way back in the day and I could see that one actually recognized me. I knew being nice to them would one day come in handy. Maybe I can be their human so they always protect me.”

  He snorted. “It let you off the hook this time, but I wouldn’t plan any sweet cuddling sessions with them.”

  “Why not? They seem really sweet with their furry little heads.”

  The creature in question roared loudly and the ominous sound echoed through the woods, immediately followed by the agent’s screams. Billie wrinkled her nose. “Man, he screams like a girl. I did not expect that from him.”

  “Really? I saw him through your camera and I totally pegged him as high-pitched.”

  She shook her head and lowered her voice. “No, see, I pictured him like this. Like a low roarrrr.”

  Marcus sniffed derisively. “No, I think he had it right on cue. That blood curdling scream you hear from a teenage girl in a horror movie. You know, when she sees her boyfriend on the porch with his guts hanging out.”

  “I love that movie!” she responded with almost girlish excitement. “Only the first one though. I didn’t like the others.”

  “Please, when she finds out the real killer was her half-brother all along——that was some Jerry Springer shit mixed with a horror plot right there. Oscar material.”

  Billie shook her head. “Oh, boy, we need to get you to the movies more often. This is why you will never have a job rating films.”

  He groaned. “Not even porn?”

  She giggled. “Why? Do you want to make some and find out?”

  Amanda yelled from the background. “Ew. Keep your vagina in your suit, woman. You still have agents out there trying to kill you.”

  “What? 007 made time to stop for a little humpity hump. Every single movie.”

  Marcus sighed with exaggerated patience. “Yeah, but without a duo-bear ready to gnaw him in half.”

  Chapter Ten

  Billie stopped and looked around to ensure that there were no weird creatures or acid-spitting plants. She leaned against one of the trees, flipped her map up, and moved it right and left in search of the next agent to take down. It had gone from rage to hilarity for her in two seconds and she found she actually enjoyed being able to fuck with them. She was the Ghost, and with every moment that passed, her wound seemed to ease as if it actually had begun to heal. There wasn’t an agent whom she would allow to best her.

  She zoomed the map closer to where she was and smiled. About a quarter of a mile from her, another agent’s dot blinked on the screen. “Oh, Troy, look at that lovely little dot.”

  Troy replied. “There is also a battle raging a short distance away from your agent. It appears to be four mercenaries and several animals. I detect several jags, an orbiter, and some mantises. There may be some smaller creatures but my system fails to detect them from this distance.”

  Billie narrowed her eyes. “Really? A fight right there? Troy, can you connect me to their comms, listening only. Mute me out, though. I don’t want to distract them.”

  He flipped through the comm stations and finally opened a connection for her to listen in. “Here it is—a bit muffled from the gunfight but I can fix that.”

  She straightened and listened closely as Troy cleared the channel for her. A ton of gunfire erupted before a deep voice shouted to his team, “Come on, Heavy Metal. We do this shit the right way from the start. Kill these fuckers so we can get the hell out of this area.”

  As she clicked the comms off, Billie laughed maniacally. “This will be perfect.”

  She sprinted through the jungle and headed directly toward the agent. As she drew closer, she ducked in the tall grasses that swayed over her head. Her movements silent and stealthy, she crept to the edge, watched, and waited for the man to turn his back. As soon as he did, she snuck away from the plant cover and into the clearing and moved soundlessly up behind him. Without pause, she leapt forward, snaked her arm around his neck, and put him in a chokehold.

  The agent grunted as she twisted his body toward her and knocked the weapon from his hand. “If you promise not to draw another weapon, I have a deal for you.”

  He glared at her and she squeezed tighter. Finally, he raised his hand and tilted his head slightly forward in agreement. She released him and he jumped back as he rubbed his throat. “Why would I make a deal with
you?”

  Hickok smirked. “Because you want to be the one to take me down. To be the hero. Honestly, I’m tired of this game. I know when I’m beat. There is a fight beyond this ridge, friends of the town—mercenaries out doing their job like you. They are under attack.”

  The man spat disdainfully. “So?”

  She sighed and drew her gun. “So, if you help me help them, I’ll hand myself over to you, no resistance. You can kill me on video.”

  He scrutinized her with narrowed eyes, his expression suspicious. “No tricks?”

  Billie put one arm slowly behind her back and crossed her fingers. “No tricks.”

  The agent chuckled. “Fuck it, why not? If you’re dumb enough to hand yourself over, I’ll take the praise.”

  She faked a sad face before she whirled and gestured at him. “Good. Follow me.”

  As she walked, she held back a chuckle. Marcus jeered in her ear. “Oh, boy. He is a complete and total moron.”

  Hickok waited only a few moments before she opened a separate channel to the agent. “You know, this won’t only get you brownie points with the bosses, but it will hype your rep hard-core.”

  He still followed but at a deliberately safe distance. “Oh yeah? How so?”

  “Because you will save lives and not simply any lives, but merc lives. They will hail you as a fucking hero. You will be a legend in the Zoo. You rolled up with the Ghost and saved them from the beasts. Pffft. You might even be looking at a plaque in the town square.”

  Marcus spat a mouthful of his drink out if what she heard was anything to go by. “You are good. Except there is no town square.”