by Sam Jones
In the corner, Kaplan’s radio crackled to life—
“Roenick,” Prophet’s voice said over the speaker. “We’ve got company.”
“That would be me and Palizzers,” Black said to Roenick over the phone. “Tell me,” he continued on. “You’ve seen Terminator 2, right?”
Roenick heard the phone shuffling hands as the familiar and frantic sounds of Matt Sorum’s high-adrenaline drumming came to life over the speaker, accompanied by the infamous and tactful guitar shredding of Saul Hudson, aka ‘Slash.’ The two of them rocked back and forth, playing a boozed-fueled, high-energy intro to one of Guns N’ Roses most electric and well-known hits.
Roenick smiled. “Excellent choice in music, Mister Black,” he said just before he smashed his phone to pieces across the floor of the semi.
Roenick shoved Gibson and snatched Kaplan’s radio from his hand. Kaplan, ever the professional, didn’t flinch.
“Kill them,” Roenick said into the radio’s receiver to Prophet. “Kill them both.”
Axl Rose screamed at the top of his lungs as the Mustang closed in on Prophet. Black prepared to lean out of the window when he saw a muzzle flash out of the driver’s side of the Land Rover.
“Duck!” he yelled.
BANG!
A fresh hole was produced in the windshield and buried itself into the back seat of the Mustang. The round was close enough that Black and Cassie could hear the hiss of it as it passed through.
Black leaned out of the window, the rush of air slapped his face as he lined up his shot and squeezed the trigger of the MK 18 twice.
POP! POP!
He saw the spark of a round impacting as it shattered the right rear brake light of the Land Rover. Prophet swerved the car left in response.
“Hit it!” Black yelled to Cassie from outside the vehicle.
Cassie put the pedal to the metal as Slash’s guitar sorcery continued to shred over the speakers and out of the car windows like a war cry.
Just as the Mustang came within twenty feet of the Land Rover, Cassie spotted something in her rear-view mirror.
“Marty.”
Black looked into his side mirror and saw a motorcycle coming in hot on their asses.
“Who’s this wiggler?” he asked.
Prophet fired twice more out of the Land Rover. Another round went through the Mustang’s windshield.
Cassie cocked her head left as a round tore a hole into her headrest. “Hey, Marty,” she said through her teeth. “You mind saying hello to this bitch for me?”
Black obliged and fired six shots into the Land Rover, the rounds disintegrating the back window as Prophet turned left off of the highway and began driving along the desert road that was adjacent to it. Dirt kicked up in thick red clouds from the rear of her vehicle.
Prophet’s move off the road had also exposed the semi-truck, which was less than a hundred yards away from the Mustang.
Son of a bitch.
“He is going to do the operation on the highway,” Black said as he pulled himself back into the car.
Cassie threw the car into fifth. “Thanks for the heads up, Marty.”
Black looked in the rear view mirror and saw the motorcycle inching up closer behind them and made it out to be a yellow Harley.
Is that Greg’s motorcycle?
Huh…
The driver, clad in leather along with a sinister, black helmet on top of his head, produced what looked like a silenced pistol from his lap and aimed it at the rear of the Mustang.
“Now it’s a party!” Black exclaimed.
The driver fired three suppressed rounds. One round clipped the mirror on Black’s side and demolished it. Pieces of wire and plastic now hung from the side of the car.
A second round shattered the window on Black’s side and caused him to duck below the headrest as the round buried itself into the dashboard.
“Now I’m mad,” said Black. He could hear the motorcycle accelerating on the right. “Cas,” he said. “Swerve right when I tell you.”
She waited for the signal.
3… 2… 1...
“Now!”
Cassie turned hard right just as the motorcycle came up along the passenger’s side door. If not for the driver’s quick reflexes, he would have been a red and pink smear on the pavement. Instead, he accelerated and turned wide around the front end of the Mustang, his ass nearly clipped by the muscle car as he pulled around in front of it.
Cassie corrected and steadied the Mustang as Black leaned back out of the window and raised his rifle. Ahead of them, the driver of the motorcycle steadied himself and spun around, his silenced weapon pointed in their direction.
He fired.
Black fired.
Black won the contest.
Two rounds hit the motorcycle driver in the chest. His body slumped. The bike then toppled over itself. The driver’s pants caught in the wheel as it crashed into smithereens along the highway. Nothing was left of the driver but a red and pink stain smeared along the gravel.
“That’s why I don’t like motorcycles,” Black stated. Flat.
Just as the Mustang veered around the wreckage, Prophet turned the Land Rover back onto the highway and overtook the Mustang. Inside her car, she took her radio from the center console and spoke into it—
“Roenick, we have a man down. Units B and C, what is your location?”
A female voice came over the intercom. Dez’s. “This is Unit B. We are running parallel to you on Route 93. We should cross paths with you soon. ETA, two minutes.”
Roenick’s voice came over the airwaves—
“Hold them off until then, Miss Prophet.”
Prophet put down the radio and reloaded her gun.
In the Mustang, Black was placing his MK 18 in the backseat.
“What are you doing?” Cassie asked him.
“Pull up behind the Land Rover. Try to keep it below sixty,” Black said as he moved out of his window.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” Cassie yelled after him.
“Trying to get lucky!” he said as he gave her the thumbs up and started scaling the windshield, Axl Rose screaming something from the radio that sounded like “Yaowwwwwww!’ as Black gripped onto the glass.
Inside the semi, Doctor Gibson had just removed Amanda’s gown. Her breasts were exposed, and Kaplan had lacquered her chest with brown disinfectant that turned more of a yellow color as it was smeared.
Kaplan then handed Gibson a scalpel.
“Begin,” Roenick said to him.
Gibson, petrified within a situation he was half certain was a bad dream, wanted to stall, so he used the facts that were available to him. “I can’t,” he said. “I… I’ve just woken up from a drugged state. I can’t perform major surge—”
“We both know the extent of your skills, doctor. You’ve performed under much more complicated and testing conditions. We’ve provided you with everything necessary and more for this operation. The setting you’re in should make no difference. I’ve made sure of it. Now… remove her heart.”
Gibson’s hand shook as he looked at the exposed and innocent stranger on the slab in front of him. “I… I can’t!” he exclaimed.
Roenick’s face began to boil and the muscles in his chest tightened from some sort of psycho/physiological reaction. He lifted up Gibson by his neck, slammed him against the side of the truck, and squeezed, Gibson’s eyes bulging out as he gargled and choked under Roenick’s grip.
“If she doesn’t die, you will die. Understand?”
Gibson nodded.
Roenick released his grip and the doctor fell to the floor.
Black hugged onto the windshield for dear life. He braced himself between the glass and the hood, his fingers gripped around the windshield wipers.
Up ahead, Prophet fired four times out of the Land Rover, the rounds missing Black by inches as Cassie closed the distance between both cars.
Prophet swerved right.
Cassie swerve
d right.
Prophet swerved left.
Cassie swerved left.
“Don’t do that!” Black screamed out as he swayed from one side of the hood to the other.
POP! POP!
Two more rounds from Prophet, this time one grazed Black in his left shoulder. Blood mist hit the window in front of Cassie.
She slowed the Mustang; there was now twenty feet of distance between both of the cars.
“Marty!” Cassie shouted. “Get back in here!”
Black slowly crawled his way back inside the Mustang. “That was a bad idea,” he said as he rested back into his seat.
“No,” replied Cassie. “You’re not as flexible as I am. Take the wheel.”
Black snickered and shook his head.
“I liked you better as a red head,” he said as he switched positions with Amanda, their feet trading places on the accelerator. She climbed out of the driver’s side window and onto the windshield.
Black, now in the driver’s seat, waited as Amanda worked her way onto the hood and had a solid enough grip on it before he gassed the Mustang and crept up behind the Land Rover, which was now fifteen feet away.
POP!
Another round courtesy of Prophet.
“Punch it!” Cassie yelled to Black.
Black slammed the petal to the floor and came up right on the ass end of the Land Rover. Just before the front end of the Mustang slammed into it, Cassie had jumped off of the hood and gripped onto the back of the Land Rover like a spider monkey.
Holy shit, she made it!
She really is more flexible than me.
Cassie worked her way through the broken back window and into the back seats. Just as Prophet went to fire her gun, the Mustang tapped the rear bumper of the Land Rover and jolted it forward about ten feet.
Cassie moved behind the driver’s seat and planted a fist into Prophet’s jaw, Prophet’s gun knocked out of the window and onto the highway as her head made contact with the doorframe. Cassie went to plant another right hook, but Prophet caught her punch, pulled her in, and head-butted her on her already broken nose.
Prophet knocked Cassie back into her seat, unsheathed a knife from her jacket pocket, and raised it over Cassie’s head.
Gibson had the scalpel above Amanda’s chest. He double-checked her blood pressure on the monitor.
A drop of condensation gathered in the center of his brow as he leaned over her. He dabbed at it with the back of his plastic-gloved right hand, breathed, and re-positioned the knife.
“Begin,” Roenick said to him, more weight in his tone now.
Gibson then pressed the sharpened steel against her skin, dug in, and started to cut.
That’s when the semi-truck jerked forward and made everyone go slightly off balance.
Gibson removed and dropped the scalpel, raised his hands in surrender, and stepped back from the table. “I can’t do it if the truck is moving!” he said, his words saturated with relief.
Another jolt. This time Gibson fell down.
Roenick spoke into the radio—
“Prophet, what’s going on?”
Static.
“Prophet?!”
Another jolt.
Roenick pointed to the three mercenaries with submachine guns. “You shoot anyone you see. I don’t care who it is.”
They disengaged the safety switches on their weapons with a synchronized metallic click. Roenick opened the side door. The metal gate slid open with a serpentine hiss and daylight flooded inside.
Martin Black tapped the rear end of the semi with the front bumper of the Mustang. He heard a faint hiss followed by the door on the side of the semi slowly sliding open.
He crept the Mustang alongside it.
Black then removed the Beretta from his waistband and aimed it out the window with his left hand. It was at that moment that he finally noticed the graze in his shoulder from the bullet that Prophet had fired at him, the wound not yet trickling blood due to the adrenaline rush.
He rested the Beretta on the left side mirror and cocked it at a right angle towards the side door of the semi.
Right as it opened, Black unleashed hell—
BAM! BAM! BAM!
He emptied all of his fifteen rounds through the opening of the semi and managed to riddle two of the three mercenaries that had been standing there issuing an ungodly amount of gunfire.
I’m still a better shot than you are, Palizzers.
The third mercenary unloaded the entire payload of his submachine magazine into the Mustang as the bloody and bullet-ridden bodies of his cohorts fell to the floor of the truck.
RATATATATATAT!
The hood of the muscle car was torn to shreds and smoke began pouring out of the bullet holes. One round managed to sneak inside and shoot out the radio right in the middle of Axl’s singing.
Multiple, unhealthy clinking and clunking noise rang out from underneath the hood of the Mustang.
That can’t be good…
Black swerved right and ducked behind the rear of the semi for cover just as the mercenary fired off the last of his shots.
The Mustang slowed, the last of its life puttering out through the exhaust as the semi sped away up the highway.
Black looked into his rear-view mirror.
Where are you, Cas?
Cassie Palizzi was fighting for her life. Prophet, who had raised a knife over Cassie’s head after head butting the woman in the nose, brought it down in a stabbing motion that Cassie caught with both hands right before it was about to go into the crown of her skull.
Cassie then slunk further down into her seat, raised and wrapped her right leg like a vine around the arm Prophet was gripping onto the knife with, and proceeded to kick her repeatedly in the face.
WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!
Prophet went into a dazed state as Cassie unhooked her leg, pulled her into the passenger’s seat, and jammed her foot on the brake. The Land Rover screeched to a halt on the highway, the rear end nearly picking up as the thing came to a hard stop on the road.
As the car settled, Cassie opened the driver’s side door, kicked Prophet out onto the pavement with a hard and thick smack, and removed her SIG from her holster.
As Prophet sat up—
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Cassie let her have it.
And just like that, the tale of the mysterious woman with the exotic accent had come to an end.
Cassie spit on the pavement near her corpse before slamming the door shut and gunning it up the highway, tires burning into a smoke cloud that was twice the size of the car itself.
I win.
Bitch.
Martin Black stepped out of the now dead Mustang. As his feet hit the pavement, the Land Rover came to a violent stop alongside him. Black quickly reloaded his Beretta and aimed it at the passenger’s side door as the driver of the Land Rover kicked it open—
Cassie was in the driver’s seat, her nose once again bloody.
Black lowered the Beretta upon seeing her face.
He pointed to his own nose.
“Nosebleed, huh?” he said. “I get him all the time. Must be the dry air out here.”
“Get in!” she yelled as Black scooped up the MK 18 and Cassie’s shotgun from the Mustang and hopped inside the Land Rover, his butt barely touching the seat before Cassie peeled away.
Gibson was dabbing the small trail of blood from the partial incision on Amanda’s chest. Kaplan and the mercenary left standing had pulled the bodies of their dead comrades off to the side, followed by loading fresh magazines into their submachine guns.
Roenick kicked one of the dead bodies with his heel; his shoe becoming soaked with blood as he screamed out—
“Take care of this. Now!”
Kaplan grabbed the last remaining mercenary and moved with vigilance back to the side door. They posted up at opposite angles, the barrel of Kaplan’s submachine gun trained onto the road as he scanned the highway behind the semi.
“Th
ey’re coming back!” he shouted to Roenick. “Land Rover on our six o’ clock!”
A voice came over Roenick’s radio—
“This is Dez. Units B and C are moving onto your position.”
Roenick grabbed Gibson by the collar and leaned into his ear. “Finish it!” he spit into the doctor’s ear like a ravenous demon.
Gibson swallowed, his throat dry and choked up as he picked the scalpel back up.
The road opened up and Black spotted two black SUV’s on the right. They were cruising along Highway 93, a road that ran adjacent to the 318 route that the Land Rover was traveling on. Against the canvas of the mountains in the background, and the three-mile distance currently separating the roads, the SUV’s looked like a couple of black blurs.
Cassie saw a fork ahead in the road two miles out where 93 and 318 would soon merge into Highway 15.
“Those your people?” asked Black as he nodded towards the SUV’s.
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Cassie replied as she shifted the stick of the Land Rover, the semi now a mile out and closing.
The SUV’s were coming into a fuller view as Highway 93 cozied up next to Route 318.
Black raised his rifle and looked through the scope, his sights set on the driver in the rear SUV.
“He’s too far out,” Cassie said.
Black switched the MK 18 to full auto.
“Maybe…” he said
He unleashed two short bursts of fire.
The driver’s side window in the rear SUV, now a mile away from the Land Rover, had suddenly turned a shade of white. It then began to sway back and forth on the highway before making a hard right and completely disappearing off the road, a little plume of dust and fire shooting up into the air where it had vanished.
“…maybe not,” Black finished.
Kaplan turned to Roenick.
“Unit C is down,” he said.
Roenick, though on the edge of shooting everyone in the room, focused his attention on Doctor Gibson, who still had not begun the procedure.
“Roenick,” Kaplan said.
Roenick ignored him and approached Doctor Gibson.
“This is the last the time I’ll say it,” he said in a low tone. “Take out her heart.”