Usher and his team lay foetal in the booth at the back of the pub, luckily shielded from the worst of the blast by a jutting old stone partition. Nothing had been chosen by accident, and the pub they had found was housed in a two hundred and fifty year old solid stone building. They had selected the booth at the back as it offered the hardest cover from small arms fire. It didn’t offer much cover from whatever had just hit them, but it probably saved their lives.
They struggled to find their bearings. Stunned by the shockwave and partially deafened by the blast, their balance was shot. As they struggled to their feet and tried to clear their vision through the settling dust, they drew their pistols and fired a volley of suppressive fire at what used to be the doorway.
Through the dust they saw figures pouring in, taking cover, moving tactically. Usher wiped the dust out of his eyes, tried to control his coughing. He took cover against the wall and stole a quick glance.
Their attackers looked human, they were the right size and shape anyway. Well-equipped and well-armed, the uniforms were dark and paramilitary carrying a clear symbol he had seen before. He knew it to be the distinctive schematic pattern of the atomic structure of chromium.
They looked like the Chromium Project’s resident Bleak Team, their fanatical religious clean up squad for dealing with errant experiments, or from what he had read, more often annihilating some poor Siberian villagers who had happened to have seen some escaped creation they weren’t supposed to. The Unseelie and their corrupt human allies were clearly tying up some loose ends. There was something strange about their faces but it was hard to tell through the smoke and dust. Then Usher saw one clearly and had a horrible moment when he thought that they were actually some horrific monsters from the Other Side. On his second glance he had realized why their silhouettes had looked so strange.
Wolf masks.
Their intention was obviously to put the fear of god into their enemies before they killed them. Usher decided to put a few stray dogs out of their misery.
He leaned out and fired off two rounds at the first Merc who stepped into the room. His 9mm rounds caught the operative centre mass, cracking the heavy ceramic plates in his body armour and sending him wheezing to his knees, down but not out. As soon as the two Mercs on either side of him saw Usher’s muzzle flash they opened fire with automatic weapons, sending chunks of masonry flying off the walls. Usher ducked and covered his head with an arm. Their hard cover was not nearly hard enough for this kind of firepower. Usher had always laughed when watching television and films when heroes hid behind car doors, sofas or even other people to avoid being shot. Whenever he saw some 80’s action hero using a henchman as a bullet shield, he always wondered why the audience didn’t realize that they were basically holding a steak up to stop a bullet. He leopard crawled away from the shattered wall towards his team.
Isaac was bleeding from a cut above his eye caught from some flying shrapnel. He wiped it with his sleeve and blinked out the blood.
“How many?”
“Can’t tell, more than us, we’re way outgunned.”
“Can we make the exit?”
“Well I’m bloody well not waiting round here to see what they do next.”
As a single unit they readied themselves, struggling to regain their senses. They looked over to the fire exit in the wall behind them. Usher nodded at the team.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
Usher led the way through the smoke. Visibility was poor but although it burned their lungs it also gave them some limited cover. They moved tight, down low and steady paced, pistols up and covering any areas of threat.
Ahead Usher suddenly saw a shape prowling through the smoke, carbine raised, moving towards their only exit. He knew if that door was blocked they were trapped.
He was the first obstacle in Usher’s way.
The wolf-faced Merc saw him and tried to spin around raising his carbine. In one sweep of bullets it could have taken them all out of the picture in an instant.
Before he had time to point it fully, Usher had grabbed the man’s wrist and locked it, delivering a brutal distraction kick to the shin, then disarming him in a fluid motion and taking the gun for himself. Then Usher delivered a swift muzzle strike to the solar plexus. Beneath the mask the attacker let out a grunt of surprise and doubled over onto the barrel of the carbine as Usher fired three rapid muffled rounds into his sternum. Before the first Merc fell Usher had already aimed over his back and sent two more rounds into the back of another one’s head, spattering the white plastered faux Tudor wall with blood.
For a moment there was silence except for the tinkling music of the fruit machine in the background.
Two down but they had given away their position.
Then the shadows appeared in the smoke and rounds started flying in both directions. The Mercs laid down a frightening rate of automatic fire that tore strips from the building and whistled terrifyingly close to the heads of Empire One. Other than Usher’s procured carbine they responded with the only weapons they had, 9mm pistols that were fine for close combat but woefully inadequate against this force.
Wood and plaster shards exploded around them, cutting into their exposed skin. The air was filled with the smell of spent cartridges and the snarl of firearms.
They tactically retreated towards the exit, desperately kicking it open and ducking out into the alleyway at the back of the pub.
They darted out, temporarily dazzled by the daylight outside, and then ran for the cover of a heavy metal skip.
Usher felt a sudden sharp pain in his trapezium muscle. His hand reflexively rose to the side of his neck and pulled out what looked like a small ballistic syringe.
His heart sank.
Tranquilizer dart.
Usher spun to see three more Mercs in wolf masks, rapidly exiting from a Land Rover Freelander with tinted windows, and closing in on them.
Looking to his team, he saw tiny streaks whizz towards them. Brock’s huge hand quickly reached up and slapped his neck as if swatting away a mosquito.
“Brock, it’s tranq!”
He could see the fear and anger in his team’s faces.
More darts hit the rest of them. One Merc moved in towards Brock with a set of plasticuffs in one hand and an extendable baton in the other. He gave the huge Nordic soldier a skilled strike in the quadriceps that would have taken most men to the ground. Brock reached out and grabbed the baton from the Merc and then with one hand round his throat beat the man to death with it in several hard brutal strikes to the skull. The man’s corpse dropped to the ground like a bag of bones.
Charlie had emptied an entire magazine at a second blacked out Range Rover as the mercs were getting out, dropping two of them and causing the driver to reverse back while the other two hung onto the door frame for grim death. As the vehicle misjudged and backed into a concrete bollard, Charlie conducted a three second tactical reload and continued firing.
Isaac and Stromberg had taken up hard cover at the corner of the skip and were trying to create an escape route through a team of Mercs in the alley to the left of them. This latest crew were utilizing heavy ballistic shields that easily took the brunt of their 9mm rounds, which went ricocheting dangerously in all directions.
Usher scanned their options. They were hemmed in, stunned, injured, outgunned, and drugged.
They were in serious trouble.
Usher felt the sky whirl above him, he was nauseous and his legs were starting to shake. He didn’t have much time and he knew it. Whatever drugs they have given them were extremely fast acting.
Through blurring vision he saw that the Mercs each carried what looked like a bright yellow plastic gun made of Lego. X-26 Tasers, each delivering fifty thousand volts of shock. Just one of these was a less lethal option powerful enough to utterly incapacitate the most determined attacker. Clearly they meant to take them alive. That scared Usher more than death.
He heard the party-popper crack then felt t
he first barbs hook into the skin of his chest. In that same instant he grabbed the thin wires trailing from the barbs to the Taser and yanked them free. The shock threw his hand away like a force field. The Merc was trying to conduct a tactical reload, throwing off the spent cartridge and replacing it with the one housed in the handle, but he had only managed half of this drill before Usher was on him. Usher locked the man’s wrist and drive stunned the Taser directly under the Merc’s chin. The tiny arc of bluish electricity crackled like a rattlesnake through the man’s skull, and the sound he made was a strangled scream through current-locked jaw. Usher threw him back against the Land Rover with all his strength, enough that the wolf mask face went straight through the tinted rear window and cracked the man’s skull. Then Usher felt another sharp pain in his lower back, and one in his leg, as two more Tasers were discharged.
His entire body spasmed and contracted, the world’s worst cramp in every single muscle. He lost motor control, his legs buckling beneath him as each Taser sent fifty thousand volts of pure pain into him. The tranquilizer was also taking over now, and his strength was fading fast. Again and again they delivered five second bursts into Usher, sapping him of energy and focus. After the third one his legs went and he fell back onto concrete.
Finally they stopped.
Usher looked up, his consciousness fading. He heard a gruff voice commanding the gang to get him cuffed and into the boot of their vehicle.
He looked around him and saw the rest of Empire one on the dirty cobbles of the pub courtyard, spasming in pain as Tasers were discharged into their bodies. They were all down.
As he watched his friends defeated and broken, he knew that instead of feeling sorry for themselves, they were all just thinking the same thing as him.
How could we let ourselves get caught like this? Like rank fucking amateurs. We need to live through this just to correct that mistake. Just keep breathing.
Then, as he felt his blood begin to turn to warm treacle and the pain fade into darkness, Usher saw a man standing over him.
He was tall, well over six feet, and thin but not weak looking. A build like Charlton Heston or Daniel Day Lewis. A bony face framed by a huge black moustache. The man held a specially made compressed air pistol that let Usher know he was the one who tranq darted him. When he spoke the voice had a South African twang and a sandpaper quality.
“I’ve seen lots of cornered animals fight, tooth and nail. But you lot take the fucking biscuit, bru.”
Usher should have known there was only one man could fire an airgun that fast and accurate. The great white hunter. The Lying King.
He whispered up.
“Kruger. You dirty fucking traitor. It’s us, it’s your friends you’re hurting. What are you thinking?”
Usher heard Brock’s deep voice, racked with pain and delirium, groan across the tarmac.
“Kruger do you know what you’ve done? I am going to feed you that fucking Ghostcoin you’ve taken. Mark that.”
Kruger nodded slowly, and for an instant Usher thought he saw the ghost of a memory flash across the man’s steely eyes. Then it was gone and just the heartless hunter remained.
“Ja ja Bru, talk about that later yeah? Right now someone wants a word with you lot. Looks like you boys pissed off some Russians. ”
22
Usher was dragged down into the guts of London.
He left a red smear of blood all the way down the stone steps. The two bruisers gripping him on either side had forearms and hands resplendent with Russian prison ink. Curriculum vitae of their dark backgrounds that led to undiscovered atrocities documented beneath rolled up shirtsleeves.
Through swollen left eye Usher saw a fire exit approaching fast, then his guides used his face to smash it open and his nose exploded like a tomato hit with a rock.
He saw flashes of white and spat a gobbet of blood onto the cold concrete, tried to catch his breath, was sure he felt the grind of crepitus in his ribs as he inhaled, then was dropped like a raw steak onto the floor with a damp slap.
The cold hard concrete of the underground car park was oddly refreshing, took some of the heat out of his pulped cheek and he lay there, wheezing and shaking, as his new friends spoke above him. Thick and wet Russian accented English.
“He’s not talking. He tells us nonsense and lies.”
Usher tried to roll over but the strength had not yet returned to his arms. They had been flexi cuffed together for who knows how long and the blood was not flowing the way it should. Most of it seemed to be pooling on the grey floor beneath him. He grinned, his teeth pink with foam. He could vaguely see above him fluorescent strip lighting.
Ahead of him through the doors in a much larger chamber, a crowd had gathered. Bizarrely, they were all dressed in glamorous evening wear, strange in so gloomy a place. One woman in particular caught his good eye, tall and curvaceous, in a shimmering gold dress that would have looked cheap on a less elegant woman.
He was in an annexe of the Secret Arena. So it seemed they weren’t planning to take him across to the Unseelie Court, not yet anyway. They still had plans for him here.
Looking behind him, Usher saw something extraordinary. On the wall at the far end of the long room he was in grew a tree. It was snaking and twisting outwards in all directions and glowed with phosphorescent moss. In its centre was a deep dark hollow.
One of the World Trees Ursula had described. Mr Styx was trying to create his own portal to the Unseelie realm.
Usher tried to struggle but felt himself losing consciousness again.
Usher blinked as the beer was poured over him, washing the blood from his eyes and face, stinging the deep cuts on his cheeks from his Russian friend’s gold rings. He thought for a moment he had passed out, lost in the comfort of the cold concrete and the reverie of his wife and son. Times of comfort long gone. The coughing fit that hit him assured him that he was now awake.Usher couldn’t recall a time when everything didn’t hurt.
He felt strong tattooed arms hook beneath his own and drag him upwards. He felt his cracked ribs grind together. He was fairly sure the animal bellow that echoed off the walls was his own but it was involuntary and may have been inside his head.
As far as he knew, and his concussed memory was far from reliable, he had told them nothing of value. When they smashed his cheekbone with a sock full of snooker balls, he had cried out that he was a Jehovah’s Witness, and asked if he could come in and speak to them for a few moments. When they had pulled out the fingernail of his index finger with pliers (a strange feeling of relief when it finally slid free of the finger, like when a milk-tooth finally gives), he had blurted out something about being Santa Claus. Anything to distract himself from the excruciating pain.
He didn’t even truly know why they were questioning him. They obviously knew he was Special Threats Group, Kruger would have told them whatever they asked as long as they paid him.
Kruger. He had always joked about how he would sell them all down the river at a moment’s notice. It should have been obvious to the team the second their meeting place had been compromised. No one outside their little group knew of that place, that was the entire point of it.
In Dante’s Inferno, the ninth circle of hell is reserved for treachery. Not just oath breakers and common fraudsters but for those that had betrayed a special relationship of a deeper kind. Kruger had taken Ghostcoin and sold honour, friendship, camaraderie and an ethos he had sworn to protect.
In the eyes of soldiers like Empire One, he was the very worst kind of traitor, lower even than the Unseelie themselves. They at least were loyal to one another and their cause.
Usher hoped that the ninth circle of hell was reserving a very special place for that bastard.
His worry now was Christi. He hoped to god she had got clear of that safehouse. For the life of him Usher could not remember if Kruger had known about that location.
Usher had not seen the rest of Empire One since they had been captured (Hours? Days? Weeks a
go?) but he assumed they were receiving the same treatment as him.
With great effort he strained his neck and looked up at the assembling crowd at the far side of the makeshift arena. He wondered if he was to be publicly executed in front of them all, a warm up act as an example to all. Obviously they didn’t expect him to fight.
Right now, he couldn’t have won a fight with a ten year old girl. Fractured jaw, dented cheekbone, cracked ribs, broken fibula, a hiatus hernia, missing fingernails, a shattered nose, more cuts and bruises than he could count, concussion, nerve damage, internal bleeding. The pain made his entire body shake. He knew what the next port of call was, wherever it took place. Either an open razor dragged across his throat with slow, gleeful malice, or a knife pushed through the back of his neck between C-1 and C-2 vertebrae. Then it would be a short funeral where he would be either dumped in a skip in East London or sucked down into the dark hungry waters of the Thames. What he really didn’t expect to hear was what was said next, by the Russian boss standing above him.
“Can he fight?”
Usher almost laughed, but the pain that wracked his ribs made it come out as a choked, shivering moan.
Fight? I can’t even stand. He was dying and he knew it.
His head was jerked back, and that was when Usher knew he also had spinal damage. He screamed as what felt like mains electricity shot up his neck into his skull. When the stars in his vision cleared, he was looking into the face of Dmitri Sarkhov, the boss he had spent these last few weeks gaining the trust of. He didn’t, if Usher was being honest, look like he trusted him very much at the moment.
“So, Mr whatever-your-fucking-name-is. Are you ready for your big fight? Or are you starting to regret your choice of profession?”
Usher peered past him to the underworld glitterati that had gathered to get turned on watching violent men brutalize each other for sport and money. When he spoke, his voice was cracked and dry, like chalk dust blown over paper.
The Last Line Series One Page 17