Mercenary

by Dave Barsby

  “Where…where is she?” he asks. His silent lackeys look at him quizzically. “The woman!” Westcott shouts at them. “Where is the woman?!?”

  He takes a few steps forward. According to my calculations, another two steps and he’ll tread on Larisa’s ankles. I silently will him not to move any further.

  “She can’t have gone!” Westcott says, mainly to himself. “They didn’t have time.” He turns to his goons. “She’s around here somewhere. Find her!”

  The men (and women and non-humanoids, let’s not forget) spread out more, looking blankly at the canyon walls. It is true, there is nowhere she could have gone – no nearby outcropping to hide behind, no crevice or crack or hole within sprinting distance in such a short time. They are all completely lost. It is time for Rogdo to make his move.

  Appearing from the safety of the crevice, his Cloak-cloak turned off and mask in hands, Rogdo grins at the chaotic search.

  “Give me back my coat, Westcott!” he calls, referencing the jacket Larisa was wearing when she was taken. It catches everyone’s attention.

  “There! He’s there!” Westcott shouts, pointing desperately at his nemesis. Before anyone has a chance to raise their gun, Rogdo has slipped back into the safety of the crevice. Westcott and his men give chase, the two quads clearly in the lead. One stumbles over the invisible Larisa, but as he picks himself off the floor he evidently considers it as clumsiness on his part and continues the hunt. The tips of the Princess’s boots are poking through the bottom of the dislodged fabric. I will cover them as soon as the human traffic has stormed past.

  In the meantime I mentally count to myself the steps of Rogdo’s progression. Mask on, Cloak-cloak activated. Running, running down the crevice’s alleyway to the arena. He’ll have to be quick. He may be invisible, but there isn’t enough room to avoid a blindly charging quad bike down that path.

  “Here we go!” he calls, having reached the arena. I can almost feel Dirk and Hiaelia tense as they ready to unleash the first volley of suppressing fire. It is time for Drift and I to make our move.

  I dash across to the Princess and quickly cover her boots with the invisible cloth. “Back soon,” I say to her before jogging across to the crevice entrance.

  I can hear the constant chatter of staccato gunfire a hundred yards down the winding path. I’d be best to stay here, await the outcome, surely. Wait in safety. There’s no real need to risk my life, is there? So there’s twenty five of the enemy and they’re all heavily armed. So what? We’re invisible and covering them from an elevated position. Do they really need a journalist blindly stumbling over everyone and randomly waving a laser pistol around?

  I see slight flicks of dust approaching my position at the crevice entrance. They stop.

  “What are you waiting for?” Drift asks me.

  “How do you know I’m here?” I answer with my own panicked question. Has my Cloak-cloak failed?

  “Footprints,” Drift states the obvious. “Small, aren’t they. Are you coming?”

  I see flurries of dirt as Drift pelts down the path. I take a moment to compose myself, to quell the deepening rumble of nerves in my stomach. Now or never. I jog after Drift’s dust.

  As I near the arena entrance I catch my first glimpse of chaos. Three enemy bodies lie at the opening, two more further in. A quad bike is overturned and burning quietly. Many more of the black-clad enemy (no camouflage for them) are secreted behind crops of rock, firing randomly at wherever they think their foes may be hiding. The cacophony of gunfire numbs the ears.

  As I step into the arena, the other quad bike rushes past me under heavy fire. Attempting to flee the barrage, its rider directs it at a fake exit to the valley floor. The quad slams into the wall behind the cloaking sheet, bursting into flames. The sheet catches fire, quickly disintegrates. I can see a couple of henchmen look surprised at the sudden unveiling of the canyon wall.

  “Watch out, they’re getting suspicious,” I call into the comms.

  “Where are you?” Rogdo asks back. Another mortally wounded man spins past my position, crashing lifeless to the floor. “Get over here.”

  “Here where?” I ask. Fruitlessly, I look around in the hope of spying his position.

  “Never mind,” he answers. “Just see if you can shoot someone in the back.”

  Deafening bang follows deafening bang as Dirk, out of ammunition, resorts to dropping grenades on the enemy’s cover. Flakes of razor-sharp rock whiz through the air. One shard catches me in the leg and I wince as I feel it cut my flesh.

  “My cloak’s ripped,” I whine. “Leg too.”

  I can’t make sense of what I am seeing. Men in black charging around, falling over, being shot from all angles and randomly firing into the air. Laser blasts ripping through the smoky, dust-filled air from unknown locations. The bangs, the blasts, the rat-a-tats. I don’t want to move. Moving is too dangerous. More and more bodies are littering the arena, only a few of the enemy remains now. I can see through the dust that Westcott and his female warrior are untouched, as is the Gronk-sized goon.

  But the mammoth man has just been hit, a laser blast tearing into his chest. He grunts, clutches his chest and starts lumbering in the direction of the shot. More shots rip out of thin air, puncturing his shoulder, his leg, his stomach. But still he continues until he is atop the invisible source of the blasts. He lashes out randomly and catches something.

  A flickering body sails through the air. I can hear Hiaelia grunting in pain through the comms.

  “My cloak,” she splutters after she has crashed awkwardly to the floor. The Cloak-cloak is failing, flickering hastily between on and off, making Hiaelia look like a silver, strobing monk. She turns and fires one final shot at the huge goon, vaporising his head.

  I can see Westcott pointing at her and shouting. He can see her now, he has figured it all out. “They’re invisible!” he bellows. He downs Hiaelia with two shots in the back. She falls to the floor, but I can see her moving. Slowly she is crawling to safety.

  Seeing one of my own hit spurs me into action. No longer am I frightened of dying, of being wounded. No longer will the grenade detonations or spurting gunshots make me cower and cringe. I can see Tima now, dying in my arms, her eyes pleading with me to help her.

  I take out my pistol, circumnavigate the arena to the left, go up to the nearest bad guy and fire ten shots at the nape of his neck, burning his head clean off his torso.

  I have killed.

  It doesn’t make me feel any different. I half expected a crushing horror, or maybe the opposite: a surge of power. Instead it invokes the same emotion in me as watching footage of a frolicking piglet while tucking into some bacon.

  Another grenade blast, too close for comfort, knocks me to the floor. My ears ring, dust fills my lungs and my head feels like it has been squeezed by the blast wave.

  “Christ, Dirk,” I call. “You nearly got me.”

  “Sorry,” he says. “Can’t see you.”

  “This is getting too dangerous,” Rogdo calls. “Bolland, give me an update on where everyone is located.”

  I start curving further round to the left, deeper into the arena. There are only a few of the enemy left now, half a dozen discounting Westcott and the deadly woman. One man trips over a hidden rock and lands on his back near the cliff base, under a low overhang. He looks up, little realising we have secreted the Cloak-cloak material to the underside and top of the overhang. Spying only blue sky above him, he quickly stands. I can hear the sickening crunch from across the arena. He will be moving no more.

  “Bolland!” Rogdo calls again. “Come in, damn it!”

  There is no answer.

  “Captain, I’m empty,” I hear Drift say.

  “I’m low too,” Rogdo confesses.

  I look across at the enemy. Some of them look despondent. I am guessing they too have failed to carry enough ammunition for this firefight. It may be up to me, in the end, to use the energy left in my laser pistol to take out the remai
ning bad guys. That is when I realise I no longer have my gun. It must have been ripped from my hands when I was hit by the grenade blast.

  “Ah, crap,” I call.

  Worse still, I am about to head back to pick it up when I see Westcott himself near the area. He is bound to spy it before I can sneak in there.

  There is a brief lull in the fighting. A wary calm settles on the area.

  “Had enough yet, Westcott?” Rogdo shouts. “Seven shots,” he mutters so only we can hear him.

  “I got three grenades left,” Dirk whispers back. “Together, that’s enough.”

  “You’re running out of ammunition, Flavian,” Westcott shouts back. “I can tell.”

  “You don’t look so armed to the teeth yourself these days!”

  “Time to surrender, pirate?”

  “You tell me, Westcott! You’re fast running out of cannon fodder to hide behind, and we’ve only had one injury.”

  “So far,” Westcott responds. I see him pluck my weapon from the sand. It only has another ten or so shots in it, but that will be enough in the right hands. “There will be plenty more to come,” he adds. He takes careful aim at Dirk’s hidden position, waiting for the caterpillar to show himself.

  “Dirk!” I call rather foolishly. I want to warn him of the danger, but instead he takes it as a signal to renew his bombardment.

  He stands into view, grenade in hand. Westcott unleashes five careful shots. One glances across Dirk’s torso, the other punctures him in the lower body. Grunting, he falls from sight.

  “Oh, shit, where is it?” he whispers in panic. I am about to ask where what is, when the explosion atop the cliff answers me. Having taken the brunt of the blast, Dirk is catapulted from his vantage point and falls sixty yards to the arena floor. By a stroke of luck he manages to land full force on one of Westcott’s goons. Dirk’s body may be gelatinous, but his weight is enough to ensure the man underneath is pressed like a flower.

  Breathing heavily, Dirk slowly raises himself off the ground. A thick, gloopy substance is oozing from his sides where several limbs used to wiggle. He roars, a deep, terrifying, inhuman roar that crashes to a crescendo off the walls. The last four goons, standing close by, look up at him with abject fear. They belatedly attempt to fire their useless, spent pistols at the caterpillar, but to no avail. Dirk grabs the nearest man, smashes him to a literal pulp and throws the carcass to one side. He growls at the remaining men. They start running.

  While this is happening, Rogdo is keeping Westcott pinned down with snapshots as the fallen minister attempts again and again to aim at Dirk.

  Westcott’s men are in a state of chaos, desperately trying to find a way out of the arena. So far all the ‘exits’ they have tried have proven to be false, while none of the cliff face has yet revealed itself to be cloth draped over a real exit. When Dirk roars again in anger and pain, the men cleverly realise their best bet would be to head for the one exit they know to exist – the way they came in. With Dirk in hot pursuit, they have all soon disappeared, only the caterpillar’s roars and humans’ screams echo down the narrow winding path.

  I have been closely watching the progress of Rogdo’s pinning down of Westcott and his female companion, and have now concluded decisively where the Captain has secreted himself. I skip over to a large rock face and crouch down behind it.

  “You here?” I ask, feeling about.

  “Yeah,” Rogdo answers before my grasping hands locate him. “Deactivate, will you?”

  I switch off my Cloak-cloak. Rogdo does the same.

  “You okay?” he asks, ripping off his hood. I nod. “Take your cloak off if you want,” he tells me. “You won’t need it anymore.” Confused, I begin to shed my cloak.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Your job is done here. Someone needs to tell people what happened here. I’d rather you stay hidden. Drift and I can take care of the rest. By the way, do you know how many there are?”

  “There’s two of them left,” I tell him. “Westcott’s got five shots left, the shiny woman’s run out. How about you?”

  Rogdo holds up his weapon. It has just one shot left. He shrugs. “Ah well.”

  “What’s all this about not needing me, then?” I demand. “They’ve got shots left, you more or less haven’t.” I quickly glance around the rock to see if I can spy Westcott. A laser blasts rips out a sizeable chunk of rock next to my eye. “Shit!” I say, rubbing my eye. There doesn’t seem to be any grit or debris in it, but the heat alone has caused it to sting and water.

  “Stay…down!” Rogdo insists. “We’ll think of something. Do you have your gun?”

  “Umm, no, Westcott does. Sorry.”

  “Okay, okay. Drift? Where are you?”

  “To your right,” he answers. We glance across. He is covered behind another large rock outcropping, a silver hooded figure that waves cheerily at us.

  “How are you doing?” Rogdo asks.

  “Well,” Drift begins over the comms. “I’ve run out of shots and my cloak is on the blink. Still have my fists, though. By the way, which one shot Tima?”

  “The woman,” I answer.

  “Thanks,” he says. He stands, removes his mask and gloves, and starts walking towards the enemy.

  “Oh, crap, he always does this,” Rogdo complains. As Drift strides without thought of his own safety, tearing off the rest of his Cloak-cloak, Rogdo too breaks cover and aims at the rock Westcott is secreted behind. Before he pulls the trigger, Westcott fires first, a volley of his last four blasts. One strikes Rogdo in the right shoulder, throwing him to the ground. His gun scuttles into the distance, while Rogdo grips his wound. He is injured but not mortally wounded. I return my attention to Drift.

  “Bitch!” he shouts. “Out here! Now!”

  The shiny, catsuited woman emerges from her own rock cover, her snub-nosed machine gun pointing at Drift’s chest. The pilot spreads his arms wide. “Go ahead!” he jeers.

  They both know the gun is empty. The woman casually presses the trigger, grins when it clicks onto an empty chamber. She throws the gun to one side, then jerks her arms forward. Glinting, silvered blades two feet long extend from their moorings on her forearms. She crosses the swords in front of her chest, grins again.

  “Fuck it,” Drift says to himself. “Why not?” He runs at her.

  It is like watching meat fed through a grinder as the woman twirls round Drift, hacking and slashing at his body and face. It is all over in two seconds and she finishes by ramming one sword all the way through his chest. But Drift isn’t dead yet. He has a will for revenge so strong it keeps the Grim Reaper at bay. A mass of torn flesh and blood, he grabs the woman’s wrists with all the power he can muster. Holding one sword steady through his chest, he uses his superior strength to bend the woman’s other arm backwards. Panicking, she kicks him in the shins, knees him in the groin. But Drift is beyond feeling pain now. Slowly, he folds her arm back on itself until her sword is at her own throat.

  “I…loved…her…” he growls in her face. With one swift jerk, the sword slices the woman’s neck open.

  The woman quickly gurgles her last, collapsing to the floor and taking Drift with her. With a heroic power of will, Drift holds on just long enough to watch her die before life too escapes his body.

  Westcott peers over the rock in fright. He is alone now. Just him versus myself and a wounded Rogdo. But we have an advantage in more than just numbers. While Drift nobly fought to the death, Rogdo has retrieved his gun with that one remaining shot. He moves out from cover, aiming the gun at Westcott. I join him.

  “It’s over, Westcott,” he says. “You lose. I’ve got one shot left, and it is going right through your skull.”

  “I’ll be back,” Westcott calls in a fear-tinged voice. “Watch me, I’ll be back and I’ll kill you!”

  Westcott breaks his cover and sprints as fast as he can over the open ground towards the crevice entrance. I wait for the fizz of the laser pistol’s final shot, to see Westcott pir
ouette through the air as the blast knocks breath and life from his body. But Rogdo doesn’t shoot. He keeps his gun trained, following Westcott’s progress, but he doesn’t shoot. I realise why just in time – the ground Westcott is sprinting across isn’t technically devoid of obstacles.

  It is as though I watch it in slow motion. Westcott’s right leg is the first to hit the invisible rock. As momentum carries him forward, his foot snaps back. His kneecap is next, shattering with the impact, while his outstretched left arm is folded back into his chest. With arm and ribs splintering, it is finally the turn of his face to mash itself bloodily into the stone.

  The force of the impact bounces Westcott back some four yards. Dislodged by the crash, the draped Cloak-cloak material slides lazily off the ten-foot boulder, revealing it in all its jagged glory.

  Rogdo lowers his gun, pants. Slowly he lowers himself to the ground, drops the gun and clutches at his injured shoulder. He glances up at me, but neither of us know what to say.

  Out of morbid curiosity, I slowly wander over to Westcott. As I draw close I can hear his ragged breaths as he desperately tries to draw oxygen through his shattered nose and broken jaw into his punctured lungs. His still operational left leg is lazily kicking the ground, his right arm stretched out to me. I stand over him and stare at the bloodied ruin of his face without remorse, without pity. He knows the help he seeks will not be found here. He lowers his arm despondently and snakes it round his back. If I was paying more attention I would find this move curious to say the least, but I am not. I turn to Rogdo and call out to him.

  “He’s not dead,” I shout. “Not yet, at least.”

  I look back at Westcott. I catch a brief glint of something in his hand, something he has drawn out from under him. Being untrained in the ways of the professional fighter, I react not by pouncing on the man or leaping out of the way, but by staring curiously at the glint. Too late I realise it is a six-inch serrated knife.

  Using his last remaining strength, Westcott twists his body towards me and plunges the knife all the way through my left foot. I scream before the pain hits me largely because I know it is coming.