Not today.
Grey had a new policy when handed situations such as this. When an opponent had their back to them like she did, none the wiser, they were to go for the Bludgeon Blackout. Auldborne had decreed that anytime any of them was offered the chance to bludgeon, they were to take it. They were to practice in the hopes that they would match up with Blue again. Draden had the feeling that when Auldborne eventually got a hold of Johnnie Northern he wouldn’t stop at a gun butt to the head. And Draden, for one, didn’t blame him.
So it was time to practice.
He breathed very slowly and watched her look for him. She was so small. Slamming his gun into her face might break her, or kill her. He didn’t want to kill her, really, just hurt her. Maybe he’d use his fists—not that they were much better. But what could he do? Blue had forced them into this. Lilia had only the Americans to blame for the fate of her face.
She would see him coming at the last minute. He would make sure of that. What fun was a kill if the poor sap never even saw who brought down the wrath? It was like pulling off a robbery and never being able to take credit. Draden never understood criminals who wore masks. There was no glory in that.
And so he lumbered out of the dark corner like a bear, and she did see him, and it was too late for her.
He went for her gun arm first. He brought his fist down on her shoulder like a mallet. He could actually feel the bone underneath slip its muscle holding, like shifting a marble around in a sack. She barked out a brief scream and swung her other hand around right into Tate’s face. She wanted to tear his eyes out, but he closed them and she could only rake him, shaving small slivers of skin. She grabbed at his mouth and managed to tear his lip before collapsing into the wall. He roared and reared his head back. She fought against the numb, wrong feeling in her shoulder and used the time to try to switch her gun to her good arm. Then he kicked her knee in.
She was just able to shift and move with the momentum of his boot enough to prevent total cartilage rip, but something tore. She felt fluid rushing into her knee seconds before she lost all purchase on the ground and collapsed in a heap at Tate’s feet. But he was still feeling about his face. She had but a moment. She grabbed her gun and fired.
The diode hammered into his forearm. He let out a low “Oh,” and slapped the gun away with his other hand, swinging it like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. It flew across the room. Her knee was puffing with pain. Even the barest touch of the wall grated against her shoulder. She looked at her knee; she looked at her shoulder. Then she looked up at Tate in silence and in pain and shook her head as if sorry for the man.
“Don’ be blamin’ me for this, yeah?” he said.
He popped up the middle knuckle on his right fist and batted it into Lilia’s temple. She collapsed.
After ten or fifteen seconds of silence, Alex Auldborne chimed in from the front room.
“Are you quite done in there?”
“Bitch tore up my face.”
“But is she out?”
“Bludgeon. Special present for you.”
“Wonderful! Let’s report it to our heroic captain Diego Vega just outside, shall we? See how he reacts?”
Draden cast one last look over Lilia’s prone, barely breathing body before walking into the front room, his hand over his left eye. He tongued his flap of lip.
“Look here man. Look what she did.”
Auldborne glanced at him, angled his gaze, and sniffed. “You’ll live. Do you think Christina is anywhere near that sweeper on the hill?”
“How long she been out there?”
“Five minutes.”
“Maybe.”
“Thanks. Wonderful help.”
“So sorry. I been actually doin’ things. Not just lookin’ and runnin’ aroun’. Maybe you should call her,” Draden said, voice flat.
Auldborne looked back at him once more and cocked an eyebrow. He smiled. “See now? You’re just fine.”
Draden grunted.
“No, I won’t call her. I’m sure she’s where she needs to be.” As if that had decided everything, he opened the door again.
————
Diego Vega heard the shot from inside the house as he sat under cover in the dusty park’s playground. He prayed it was Lilia and that she had hit someone. Preferably Auldborne.
Seconds later, the door to his house opened. No one stepped into the slanted square of light cast inside the house, but Diego heard the nasally, drawn out voice of Auldborne. He sighed. He didn’t have to understand English to pick up on the triumphant tone.
“She put up a fight, Diego! She really did! Or so I hear. I was too busy keeping an eye on your shifty family and I thought it lasted all of about five seconds, but my striker tells me she scratched at him like a little Mexican cat!” Auldborne laughed. “But she’s gone now!”
Diego’s phone started buzzing: Ortiz was calling from the hill. He dismissed the call as he continued to stare into the sunlit patch of the inside of his house and the darkness beyond. His family was in that darkness, and now Lilia was too, lying unconscious, or worse. The doorway called to him. Auldborne’s voice called to him. He felt sick. He felt cramped from his crouching there, under the slide, hiding like a boy.
Diego stood. He chambered a diode.
Up on the hill, Felix Ortiz pocketed his phone and swore softly. He peered up from around the mound of earth he had positioned himself behind and tried to get a bead on his captain. He could see the playground; it was about twenty meters below and off to the left. The house was another thirty meters beyond that. He’d be lucky to hit the house itself at 50 meters, much less anybody in it or near it. There was nothing for it; he’d have to move in with Diego. The man was walking to his death if he went alone. This business with his family had thrown his brain off. He wasn’t being rational. Ortiz shook his head and cocked his gun. He’d have to swing wide and come in from the side of the house.
He scampered around the mound of earth and walked right into Christina Stoke. She stuck the snub nosed end of her revolver into his gut and fired three times before he could even think to say or do anything. She blew him a kiss as he staggered back and fell onto the dirt, out in a matter of seconds.
She wiped dust from her hands off on his shirt and saw Diego running for the house. She was amused. He must have mistaken her shooting for Felix Ortiz trying to cover his run. She might as well give him a few more. She lazily raised her revolver and laughed as she fired haphazardly. He was running to his doom. The idiocy of it struck her as particularly funny, how by plucking one string a man could become so unhinged. He’d been debased. Auldborne had been right. Everyone had a string like that; the key was to find it and to pluck it. The Mexicans had made a mistake when they hired a family man for this job. This was no job for a family man.
Diego Vega ran for the door like a man afire, leaning forward, tearing with his hands at the air in front of him as if he could grab hold of it and use it to propel himself. His face was contorted in an emasculated rage that was more sorrow than anger, and as he ran forward Alex Auldborne sauntered out of the door frame. Diego tried to hitch up and take a stance to fire, but he couldn’t stop himself in time.
Auldborne fired at the shoulder of Diego’s gun arm. The diode went exactly where he wanted it to, slamming into Diego’s arm and flinging his body around. For a moment, he was a puppet jerked hard by one string. Then he tripped over his own feet and crashed face first in the dirt not ten feet from the porch of his house.
Auldborne watched Diego as he spat out grit and moaned in the dirt, trying first to will his gun arm to work, and when that proved too much, to switch hands. It was like watching a fish out of water.
Diego looked behind him for Felix to back him up but he saw only the girl, Christina Stoke, strolling towards him with exaggerated slowness.
“Felix is gone, Diego,” Auldborne said.
Diego flopped himself around and grabbed his gun. He squinted up at Auldborne through a yellow h
aze of dust.
Auldborne shrugged. “Go on then. Raise your arm and take aim. I’ve been told I’m the best shot in this humble outfit, but I enjoy proving it to myself. Let’s all see who gets shot first then, shall we?”
Diego raised his arm. Auldborne allowed him to get very close to a full-on sight before shooting his gun directly from his hand, as sure as if he was right next to him and had plucked it from his grasp. Diego’s fingers went numb as his gun skittered in the dust behind him. He didn’t follow it with his eyes. He dropped his head onto the dirt. It felt very cool on his forehead.
“You don’t even want to look at me, Diego?”
Diego shifted the coolness of the dirt to his cheek. He said nothing. He didn’t understand Alex Auldborne, and he figured that even if he could, the man was saying nothing that he wanted to hear. Let him have his fun.
“Look at me, Diego.”
Diego’s breathing burrowed a tiny divot in the soft dirt next to his nose. Auldborne walked to where he lay, kicked Diego’s hat away, and pulled his head up by the hair.
“Look at me!”
But Diego looked past Auldborne to the marred white front door of his house. He saw the blood handprint, lurid and obscene, like a jagged scar cut through the canvas of a piece of art. Kicking with his legs, he struggled to crawl forward. Auldborne let go and stepped back, smiling.
“Look at you then! Bravo! Crawl my friend!”
Diego focused on the door. His face burned.
Auldborne got down next to him on one knee. “How about this? If you can crawl your way up to the door, I’ll let you see your family before I shoot you. How does that sound?”
Diego was able to worm his way forward for almost thirty seconds before he was too exhausted to continue. Only then did he look up at Auldborne, directly into his slate gray eyes. They were a void, like glass globes of swirling fog, punctured black in the middle. Diego worked moisture into his mouth and ran his tongue over his teeth to gather the grit, then he spat directly into Alex Auldborne’s face.
Auldborne recoiled and stood, wiping his face repeatedly on his sleeve long after all of the saliva was gone, and then switching to the other arm to wipe more. He turned away from Diego while he did this. Then he placed his hands on his hips and shook his head at the horizon. After a moment, he turned back around. Diego said nothing, neither smiled nor frowned. He set his cheek back down on the cool dirt.
“Pitiful, really, your efforts here. You call yourself a family man?”
Diego lay still.
“Disgusting.” Auldborne pulled the hammer back with his thumb, paused for a moment, and when he saw that Diego wasn’t going to move, he fired directly down on the top of his head. Diego’s body hitched a fraction of an inch in the dirt and then lay as before, eyes closed.
Auldborne glanced at Christina and blew out a long breath.
Team White was out.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
IAN WAITED FOR FIVE seconds and prepped to run, but he didn’t hear Kayla start to shoot. He waited for ten. Then fifteen. Nothing. And then he knew that she was gone, and that he was now all alone in the fore of the airplane not even ten rows from two members of Gold. Worse, if he moved even two meters forward he would be at the perfect angle for the third member to stand up from across the airplane and drop him as he stood. He was trapped.
He pushed himself farther back into the row of terrified passengers, thanking God that they were old and cowered instead of fought. He wiped his brow and looked backward for his captain. The old woman whose legs he was crammed up against began to sob.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he hissed. The last thing he needed was to realize how guilty he felt about this disaster he had created. A bawling grandmother would do just that. Then he heard movement up ahead. He froze. He popped his head out and looked back towards the front of the cabin and saw the metal drink cart slowly rolling back down the aisle towards him. He brought himself back around and looked again for Pyper. She was out of sight in the galley. He had to get back there. He needed direction. Pyper always knew what to do.
He chanced another look around the seat and saw that the drink cart had rolled to a stop perhaps ten rows up, near where Andizzi scrambled to safety after he’d shot him. In fact, exactly where Andizzi had scrambled.
Ian went cold.
The drink cart wasn’t rolling of its own accord. Someone was behind it, and that someone was Tessa Crocifissa. She’d stopped at Andizzi’s row to gather her wounded. He could hear them now. Andizzi was groaning, cursing in a spit heavy, guttural Italian. It struck Ian as odd that there were others witnessing this small war. Andizzi hadn’t actually fired his gun yet; those seated nearby probably mistook him for some poor passenger that the rowdy Irishman had shot for no good reason. The lack of blood likely confounded them, but they only had to look at Andizzi to see that the pain was real. They probably thought that he, Ian Finn, was the bad guy. And were they so wrong? He’d started all of this.
Ian’s head hurt. The whisky was wearing off. He badly needed a cigarette.
Suddenly the cart started moving again. Ian furrowed his brow.
A small voice inside of his head said, They’re coming for you. What are you going to do now? Are you going to start this thing only to lose it and get shot to pieces high in the sky?
Ian shook his head. He had to get back to see Pyper.
He crouched and moved to the aisle and was immediately fired upon from across the airplane, a heavy cracking sound eerily devoid of echo that set the whole plane screaming again. Ian shoved himself back in the row and let out a gasping breath. He patted his back and his arms. Nothing. No numbness. He wasn’t hit. Thank the Good Lord. He struggled to slow his breathing. He closed his mouth and tried to breathe through his nose but the air wasn’t coming fast enough. He opened his mouth again, panting like a dog.
He should have figured that Lorenzo would pin him back from across the airplane. He’d shot Kayla, and was going to shoot him if he moved out into the isle. He was keeping him there, allowing his teammates to creep their way up and shoot him from behind the cart like a fish in a barrel.
He knew Pyper wasn’t a big shooter, more of a field commander, but he could sure use some fire right now. He knew she was watching, waiting for the right time to act. Lorenzo was standing now, so he was vulnerable. He was probably switching his sight back and forth from Ian to the galley at the back of the plane where he knew Pyper was. He couldn’t focus on one or the other for too long.
“Pyper!” he screamed. “Pyper! They’re behind the cart!”
And then he saw her. She appeared on his side of the airplane, still in the galley and well out of sight of Lorenzo’s cross fire, and she shushed him.
“Pyper!”
She shushed him again. He chanced a glance back at the cart. It was less than a meter away from him. He looked for any angle at all to shoot behind it. Nothing. It was flush to the seats. He turned back to Pyper again, eyes wide.
“Stick out your foot, Ian,” she said with extraordinary calm.
Of course. What an idiot he’d been! If the cart was coming, stop the cart. You don’t run away from a drink cart. You stop a drink cart. The stupid things were always slamming into his elbows and knees anyway. Why not just stick a leg out?
He flattened himself against the seat in front of him and slowly extended his leg into the aisle.
Ian closed his eyes and waited. He heard the cart squeak its way forward. He heard heavy breathing behind it and the metallic rustle of a gun. He didn’t dare breathe.
He felt a little bump, like a polite tap on the side of his leg. The cart stopped. It tapped again and stopped once more. It was right next to him; he saw scuffs and dents on its dull gray side. Whispering rose from behind it. The voices sounded confused. Could it be that they thought he was farther back and that the cart had jammed itself on a seat?
There was another tap, more forceful. His leg held. Then came a prolonged push in which Ian had to use al
l of the muscles in his groin to keep his knee upright and holding. He gritted his teeth. There was a scraping sound of shoes on carpet and then a sharp, whispered string of Italian. Someone, probably Andizzi, began breathing very hard and groaning. He was hurt badly, and exerting himself was making it worse. Suddenly the groaning stopped— then the whispering.
Ian braced himself for a sudden slamming of force. He told himself he’d pop a hernia before he allowed that cart to roll forward another inch, but he knew that if Tessa slammed against it she’d make it move. He looked back at Pyper, who had taken out her gun and was now sighting it at the cart. She seemed nonplussed. Ian gestured wildly at his groin and at his knee and shook his head violently. She shushed him gently and nodded encouragement. Ian furrowed his brow and tried awkwardly to use his hand to brace his knee while positioning his gun to shoot through the small gap under the cart. Even if he managed to fire his gun sideways, the kickback might fling it out of reach, but he was desperate.
There was no big push. Instead he felt a mild pressure and heard a sliding sound: someone bracing against the cart and slowly rising.
Then Pyper fired three times in quick succession and the cart went slack on his leg. He heard a body crash on the far side.
“Ian! To me!” she yelled.
He ran low and with his hands over his head, like a soldier through a trench, expecting at any moment to feel the punching force of a shot from Lorenzo’s gun, but it never came. Pyper picked Ian up off of his knees and brushed him off. She patted him on his shoulder. She told him to be quiet.
On the other side of the airplane, he heard Lorenzo calling for his captain, the normal calm in his voice strained, barely holding.
“Tessa?” he asked.
“Tessa? Ignazio? Hey, Ignazio! Ignazio?”
There was no answer.
“Ignazio!”
Pyper grabbed the intercom phone.
The Tournament Trilogy Page 29