Shalia's Diary Book 12

by Tracy St. John

  “Nang, can you hear me?” No tremor in my voice. I was glad of that.

  He didn’t respond to my call. Which was good. How awful would it be to have your head blown off just by answering to your name?

  “If you’re fucking with me by playing possum, listen up. I’ve got your blaster. I’m holding it on you. If I even imagine you move, I’m taking you out. I will kill you, Nang. Right here and now. Don’t give me a reason. Stay there, stay still, and you can stay alive.”

  He laid there, a big lump of beaten man. Realizing I should shut the fuck up and get the fuck out, I backed towards the shuttle. And kept moving, watching him the whole while, even when he was a tiny molehill in the distance. I was an idiot to leave him breathing. I wasn’t idiot enough to turn my back on him.

  As soon as I climbed into the shuttle, I closed and locked the hatch. Not that it really mattered, since Nang was who the vessel was keyed to, but I’d take every tiny delay I could manage. I was inside, safe from Nang for an instant. I could crank the craft up and fly off.

  The adrenaline I’d been running on didn’t have a chance to ebb before I got to the cockpit and found the mangled mess of the control panel. I stood in the opening between cockpit and cabin, staring in shock at the cracked covering, at the computer processors that had been yanked out, broken, and strewn all over.

  That was the lowest moment for me. Lower than waking to find Nang had knocked me out and tied me up, lower than when I thought I’d turned into a heartless murderer. Maybe it was because I’d hoped I’d won the day, and discovering I hadn’t was too much to handle. Or maybe it was the blatant evidence that at some point, probably after the second time he’d knocked me cold, Nang had decided we weren’t going to run off a happy couple together. That he’d destroy any chance of me escaping if I was lucky enough to overcome him, claim a last fuck, and then kill us both.

  Either way, the bottom dropped out. I sank to the floor and cried. I’d hit rock bottom and there was nothing left but to shatter. Which I did.

  But only for a little while. The storm passed after a few minutes, thank the ancestors. I guess I’d worked too hard to survive to stay down. Utter devastation came and went with all the alacrity of a polite guest who knew not to overstay their welcome.

  I’d gained my freedom, and I needed to ensure it stayed that way. Keeping the blaster at the ready in case Nang charged through the hatch, I set to work pulling those ties off my wrists. It took only a minute before I was shaking my hands, making certain my circulation was okay.

  I considered my next move. A com would be great. The shuttle’s was trashed along with all the other controls, but I’d been wearing my personal unit when Nang took me. With any luck, it was somewhere within the craft.

  I found it after rooting through half the cubbies and storage bins in the vessel. Miracle of miracles, Nang hadn’t destroyed it. I keyed it on, hoping for a decent signal as I tried my best to connect with Seot’s frequency.

  No such luck. Same story for Cifa and Larten, my bodyguards, and Clan Denkar. Ugh. The residents of the area prefer their isolation and privacy, but for an emergency situation, it was downright unacceptable.

  I noted the time and determined I would make regular attempts to raise someone. At some point, Seot’s company would pinpoint my location, sending help anyway. They didn’t rely on the frequency net, needing only a receiver to catch my transmitter’s signal. Seot had that short-distance receiver. If Nang hadn’t flown me out of range, they’d find me sooner or later. I had to hope we were within the portable receiver’s radius. To the best of my knowledge, Nang wasn’t aware of my implanted tag. It was my best hope that we hadn’t flown far while I was unconscious.

  That left my next concern: what was I supposed to do about Nang?

  I could try to barricade myself in the shuttle until help arrived. I could go out and finish killing Nang—if he wasn’t dead. I could try to tie him up.

  All my options sucked for some reason or another. Barricading myself held no guarantee that Nang wouldn’t force his way in. That he wouldn’t get the upper hand once more. No, I didn’t want to chance him catching me, not for a single second.

  Option two: I could go out and kill him. I would have earlier, but I’d thought I could escape in the shuttle. I’d planned to leave him for the authorities to mop up. As hurt as he’d looked, he wouldn’t have gotten far before law enforcement caught him.

  I hated that I’d been merciful only to turn around and end his life anyway. It seemed incredibly brutal. But then again, his injuries might have overcome him already. Maybe there was nothing more to do. Maybe I’d finished the deed, an idea that sickened me. Thank goodness. No sociopathic tendencies here. I had a conscience.

  Final option: if Nang lived, tie him up and guarantee he couldn’t do any harm to me or escape. That meant getting close to him. Close enough for him to grab me, kill me. Big no on that option. That was automatically out of the question.

  Hunker down or murder a fellow being, then. Take a chance to keep blood off my hands, or guarantee my safety. Not the kind of choice anyone wants. Yet it was what I was stuck with.

  I’m won’t record the next ten minutes of hemming and hawing as I tried to decide. I weighed and reweighed my alternatives. I imagined my daughter growing up without a mother. I imagined the day Anrel asked questions about the men who were potentially her biological father, and having to explain that one was dead by my hand. I paced up and down that shuttle cabin, listening the whole while for the hatch to open.

  When I tired of the various creaks that made me jump, I committed to the choice I was guaranteed to have to live with. Even with how it all turned out, it was the right decision. The one I should have gone with the first instant I’d had the chance.

  I reflected on that as I readied to open the hatch and start that walk to kill Nang. It would have been so much better to end the fight in the heat of battle. Cold-bloodedly marching up to him where he laid outside, of standing a safe distance from him, of blasting him into the hereafter like a dog that had been hit by a car—yeah, it was a pretty heinous thing I was about to do. And who knows how the law would have judged my actions? Walking up and murdering a man who was potentially no longer a threat—I wasn’t sure how that would play in the courts.

  It didn’t matter. The feeling that someone was squeezing my heart in his fist didn’t matter either. I was going to take Nang’s life so that I didn’t have to worry about mine, Anrel’s, or my unborn child’s. The situation had gone too far. I had to end it. That meant ending Nang.

  I pointed the blaster I’d taken from him at the hatch as I called for it to unlock and open. I had a dreadful certainty he would be standing on the other side, waiting for me to venture out. My finger was squeezing the trigger as the door slid open, ready to do what had to be done.

  Outside, there was only blue sky, a distant stand of trees, and the clearing I’d barely registered when I’d run out before. I eased off the blaster in time to keep it from going off and shooting nothing.

  He wasn’t there. Wasn’t on the other side of the door, waiting to attack. I was so stunned by this turn of events, that I stood there for long seconds, blinking to clear my eyes of whatever kept them from seeing Nang.

  Nope. Not there. Okay then.

  I approached the open hatch by the inch, certain he would lunge into the cabin. Yet as moments passed and the worst didn’t happen, I took heart. I moved a little faster, but continued to be cautious. My ears strained to hear anything but the pounding of my heart and the soft breeze outside. I searched the landscape, easy to do considering Nang had landed us in a place that had been cleared of trees. A harvesting area for the area’s chief export, apparently.

  At last, I stood three feet from the hatch. No sign of trouble. The blaster, manufactured for the bigger Kalquorian hands, had grown heavy in my sweaty grip, but I held it steady as I made my final approach. As I stepped to the open doorway and swung the barrel in one direction and then the other.

/>   And saw only the clearing, sky, and distant forest.

  No Nang waiting to spring at me.

  My pulse slowed. I was able to draw a deep breath. Good night, I’d been hyperventilating. That plus relief left me dizzy.

  I firmly told myself not to relax. I’d read the books and watched the movies, after all. I hadn’t been smart enough to kill Nang when I’d first had the chance…or the second opportunity, for that matter…but I wouldn’t be stupid again. With that in mind, I knelt down in the hatchway. Blaster at the ready, I leaned over to look under the shuttle. He could be hiding under there. Or maybe I’d see his feet on the other side of the craft.

  No sign of him. I was alone there.

  I finally gave myself permission to not be so gonzo-vigilant. Not that I wasn’t watchful. Not that I wasn’t primed to blast the first thing half the size of a thamom. But at least I didn’t have to be hyperalert.

  No, I had to bolster my resolve to finish the job ahead of me. I’d dared to open the hatch to do it, so I would.

  I took a moment. I would not recognize the object in the middle of the path as Nang, a man I’d once cared for. Not the man who had been a friend. Who had fought to save me, my mother, and hundreds of others on Earth. Who might be the biological father of Anrel.

  That had been another Nang. This one, this stranger who wore Nang’s face, was a rabid animal, a fiend who would harm my child, not dote on her as her real fathers did. As such, I had to terminate him. For the benefit of all. Especially his maybe-daughter’s. There was no other way.

  I stepped out of the shuttle. Just a rabid animal. A mad dog. I moved around the shuttle, chanting it in my brain. Rabid animal. Mad dog. Rabid animal. Mad dog.

  It kept my feet moving until I came to the rear of the shuttle and searched the distance for the huddled shape I’d left bleeding in the lane. A shape that wasn’t there.

  I stopped. For a crazy instant, I told myself I was too far off to glimpse him, that he laid where I’d left him. But I’d backed to the shuttle, keeping him in the blaster’s sights until I’d gained its relative safety. I should have been able to see him right away.

  Not there. Like the horror movie monster, he’d disappeared. He could be anywhere, including nearby.

  I didn’t hesitate long. Shock gave way to training, and I pivoted without consciously telling my feet to do so. Then I was in the shuttle again, ordering the hatch closed and locked again.

  I can curse myself forever for letting him live. I can rant and rail at the humanity that insisted I spare his life at the threat of my own. What’s the point? I fucked up. I couldn’t take it back. I have to live with my dumb-assery.

  At least once I was committed to surviving at all costs, I set about barricading that hatch with furious energy. He’d come for me. My defenses would slow him down. Then I would kill him.

  A lot of large pieces of a shuttle are bolted down. There’s no hope of yanking a seat or table free of its moorings and dragging it into another position…say in front of an entrance. However, there were sizeable panel pieces from the wreckage of the craft’s control board. They weren’t heavy, but they were big enough that Nang would have to pause to move them aside. A second was all I needed. Two seconds. Three, at the max. It would be adequate. It would have to be adequate.

  I had grabbed two of these big components, positioning them about waist-high in front of the hatch, when my name was spoken out of nowhere. No, not out of nowhere. In the cabin. Right fucking next to me.

  “Shalia? Can you hear me?”

  I shrieked and yanked the blaster from the nearby table where I’d laid it while I set up my barricade. Within quick reach, but not if an enemy stood at my side.

  But when I swept around, ready to blast the bastard to kingdom come, only the empty cabin greeted me. Nobody else was there. Fuck, was I hearing voices in this massive fuck-up of a situation now?

  “Shalia, come in.” Again, at my side…and in Seot’s voice.

  Seot?

  My com!

  I shrieked with joy. “Mother of All, thank you!” I scrabbled to grab the com off my belt, staggering towards the rear of the cabin as I did so. I didn’t so much sit down as fall into a seat.

  “Seot! It’s me! I’m alive!”

  “Shalia! Shalia! Are you all right?”

  “More or less.” My head was thudding to beat the band, but it wasn’t important at that moment. “Nang’s badly hurt, but I’m not sure where he is. Have you locked onto my tracker?”

  “We’re no more than a couple of minutes away. Enforcement is en route as well, probably another minute behind us.”

  My glad cry froze on my lips as the hatch beeped.

  The lock clicked, releasing.

  “Hurry, Seot. Nang’s here.” I dropped the com. As I picked up the blaster, the hatch slid open.

  I didn’t have the blaster settled well in my hands when Nang’s bloody form erupted into sight. He shrieked at me, fangs distended. I shrieked back and fired. My aim was nowhere near sighted on him. I missed him by a mile and widened the passage between the cockpit and cabin by a foot, vaporizing quite a bit of the control panel in the process.

  Nang didn’t slow. Though his voice was garbled between growls and fangs, I distinctly heard him say, “You won’t kill me. You don’t want to. You love me.” He shoved the debris I’d blocked the entrance with out of the way and leapt into the shuttle.

  I gripped the blaster. I pointed. As he started towards me, that tiny twitch that warned he was about to come at me full speed, I shot.

  He’d already started moving, and that was what saved him. Instead of killing him, I blasted his arm off. He reeled backward, barely keeping his feet from the force of the hit.

  For an instant, we both stared at the shredded bits below his shoulder where his arm had once been. I was as much in disbelief as he was.

  However, the well-trained fighter’s mind that so many had honed at my request shouted so loud in my skull that I was almost certain it echoed through the shuttle. Kill him! Finish it while you can!

  The blaster came up again. As I started to aim, Nang’s wide eyes lifted to gaze into my face. Whatever he saw there, it got through to the warped mind that had convinced him of so many delusions.

  At last he understood that I did not love him. That I would kill him.

  He jumped through the hatch as I fired. Fuck, even beaten to a bloody pulp and missing an arm, he was fast. I missed.

  It was then that both cold-blooded Shalia and normal Shalia disappeared from sight. A third Shalia took over. She was raging and bloodthirsty, cursing the fact that she hadn’t murdered her ex-lover, that he remained alive. A Shalia who carried such a pure hatred that she only wanted to bathe in oceans of her enemy’s blood.

  With an animal’s howl, I raced through the cabin, flinging myself outside to hunt down my prey. He’d been moving fast enough that his blood hadn’t left a trail right away, but the first gory splash was in sight. Two more splashes past the tail of the shuttle kept me on track until the splashes became a crimson line, arrowing through the hardpacked dirt with Nang staggering at its end.

  He was trying to escape me. Still running, a slow, drunken weaving that I had no problem gaining on.

  He heard me coming. He turned, though he kept retreating, my quarry run to ground. “Don’t, Shalia. Don’t. I love you.”

  His expression was filled with fear. Remorse, maybe. I can hardly believe he’d found that kind of lucidity, however. I was so far past caring or feeling anything but the need to destroy, it left no impression on me whatsoever.

  No, every fiber of my being was dedicated to a single purpose: ending the nightmare, once and for all.

  The dark shadow that passed over us elicited little more than momentary hesitation on my part. Nang lifted his gaze to the arriving shuttle, an older model not quite as decrepit as Clan Denkar’s had been. “Help me! Help me!” he screamed as it banked to land a few yards distant.

  I sighted. I shot.

>   Nang must have been a favorite of the gods, whomever they are. I swear, that man got more than his fair share of lucky breaks that day. Or maybe not. I guess that all depends on the point of view.

  He was gesturing wildly as I pulled the trigger, his wobbling legs jerking haphazardly as he attempted to run to the arriving shuttle. He fell as I shot. Blood sprayed and he went down, but his shriek confirmed it hadn’t been a lethal hit.

  More sounds of arriving vessels, these behind me. Some voice on high called, “This is Lobam Security Force. All persons on the ground, drop your weapons!”

  “Fuck you,” I snarled. I trotted, attempting to catch up to Nang, who was still trying to reach the first shuttle. He’d climb to his feet, stagger it a couple of steps, and then fall.

  I would not miss again. I was determined to get pointblank close to him.