I jumped, leading with a front kick, my leg extending as I caught him perfectly in the back of the skull. He staggered and caught himself on a rusty Honda, knocking the car out of its parking place at a ninety-degree angle. I landed on the sidewalk and felt the impact run through my legs; I had hit him at a height of nearly seven feet off the ground and the drop was not small after that. I landed and regained my balance, wobbling only slightly.
The gargantuan beast in front of me turned, placing his hand on the car that he had knocked out of the way. I grimaced. “Hi. Still thinking over which cookies you’d like?” I kicked him in the knee as hard as I could, causing him to grunt and me to bounce back a step. “May I recommend some Samoas?” It wasn’t exactly like kicking a rock as I could see I was causing him pain, but there was no doubt he was tough. I followed up with another hard kick to the thigh, hoping I could at least give him a dead leg to stagger him.
“How about a Thanks-A-Lot?” he grunted and swung at me in a backhanded slap that connected and caused a ringing in my ears as it lifted me off the ground and hurled me into the concrete terrace. I heard the retaining wall crack, possibly along with my skull, as I tried to blink the dots and colors out of my eyes.
When my eyes refocused, I saw him take a limping step forward, dragging the other leg behind him. He was still in the street, at a perfect right angle to the Honda he had hit. “I know you,” he said in a gruff, scratchy voice. “Sienna Nealon. I’ll make you my prize, take you back to the boss; Operation Stanchion will be over even before it starts—”
He stopped speaking when a squeal of tires came from his left. The van slammed into the parked Honda next to him, spinning its front end around. The front of the car hit him from behind, catapulting him into the air. He flew to my right and struck the terrace wall about ten feet from where I lay, shattering the block and causing the first level to collapse on him. His legs stuck out onto the sidewalk, his dark gray trousers and beat-up tennis shoes the only thing remaining that weren’t covered by concrete and dirt. The broken blocks had buried him to the waist.
“Are you okay?” Reed jumped out of the van and was making his way toward me. I shook my head, feeling as though my brain were rattling inside it.
“I think so,” I said. “Took a little bump to the noggin on that one. Glad you guys came back to join the fight.”
“Hold still,” Kat said, appearing out of my peripheral vision. I felt her touch against my skin, short contact that only lasted a few seconds, and I felt better. “I can’t do any more than that,” she said with a low gasp as she pulled her hands away. “Not without…you know. Losing my soul, or whatever, and I don’t think I’d want to spend my life in your head. I have a feeling it’s a creepy place.”
“What are you trying to say about me?” I stood with Reed’s assistance, his hand on my arm, helping me up.
Kat’s face went agape, and I saw her jaw move up and down as she started to stammer. “Nothing. No, nothing at all.”
“You could at least try and lie better,” I said, and pulled my arm from Reed. “Did anyone check on that Omega operative to make sure he’s good and down? That man hits like a frigging asteroid—”
As if to punctuate my point, a concrete block hit Reed in the face. I saw the whole thing as if it were in slow motion, the impact, the concrete shattering, blood geysering from my brother’s nose and his bone structure deforming from the impact. His body dropped to the sidewalk, his eyes invisible beneath puddles of blood already forming in the sockets. His jaw was hanging at an odd angle; he was almost unrecognizable.
“Kat!” I screamed. “Fix him!” I positioned myself between her and the next concrete block that came winging at us. I hit it with my fist, knocking it to the side, shattering the window of a nearby car. Another one came from the Omega monster as he wound up and pitched it, and I slapped it out of the way. I felt the pain in my hand and hoped I could keep up. My meta reflexes allowed me some leeway, but not much; it was all I could do to keep the bricks from hitting Kat.
The next I caught too late and it exhausted most of its force against my forearm. The face of the man from Omega was a wreck from his trip through the wall, off-axis from the impact and swollen. I knew it would heal, but for now his lips had shifted several inches to the right and blood was flowing down his shirt, which had a rip halfway down his abdomen, revealing a muscular stomach that I might have found appealing on a less violently disagreeable man.
He winged another block at me and I knocked it aside with my good hand as I closed on him. He paused and his hands went to his face, feeling it, fingers tracing the lines around his jaw and nose. I couldn’t see much reaction because I presumed his facial nerves had suffered some damage, but there was a pronounced twitch and more eye motion as he touched himself. “You…” he said, and his words were slurred by the movement of his jaw, which bounced up and down as though it were a garage door off its track. “You…did…this…”
“I didn’t,” I said, as he grabbed another block and came at me with it like a club. “But I must say, it’s quite the improvement. Before you were just an ugly son of a bitch; now, you’re ugly and you can’t speak worth a damn.” I caught his forearm with my good hand as he brought the weapon down hard enough to cleave my skull from my body with it. I slammed a heel onto the instep of his foot, and he did more than grunt this time, he let out a little yell. I dodged the retaliatory backhand and let go of him as he pulled the concrete block above his head again. I ducked out of the way as he brought it down and shattered it onto the sidewalk, sending fragments in all directions. I kicked him in the knee as I sidestepped and it buckled with the force of my attack.
I hit him behind the ear with a punch that caused him to falter, his eyes crossing slightly. He whipped another fist around but I stepped out of the way, keeping light on my feet and using my speed to outmaneuver him. “Come on, Shortbread,” I said lightly, glad that Kat had healed me, “you’re getting your ass kicked by a Thin Mint.” I hit him in the face with a roundhouse kick as he turned; I heard snapping sounds from his jaw after the impact and his face realigned. He stared at me through a droopy eye and I didn’t hesitate before kicking him squarely in the groin. He doubled over, his knees finally hitting the ground and I kicked him in the head, which ricocheted off the concrete, sending a spiderweb of cracks down the terrace wall as he fell over. “You might have to call your boss and tell him Operation Stanchion is still on, since you failed—”
He scissored out with a kick that took my legs from under me before I even realized what had happened. My back hit the sidewalk and my head bounced against the grass. I lay there for about half a second while my brain assessed what he had done. “Or not.” I rolled my weight to my shoulders and bucked, vaulting back to my feet in a martial arts move that Mother had taught me to master when I was eight. I raised my fists as the hulk got back to his feet, menace in his eyes. “Busting through the door when someone knocks? That’s taking the get-off-my-lawn attitude a step too far, old man.”
“Do you…ever…shut up?” His accent dragged the words, even through his broken jaw. I had caught a hint of it before, on the porch—Eastern Europe, I would have guessed, though I couldn’t be certain now.
I didn’t answer, instead doing a backflip onto the higher terrace as he came at me in a shoulder-down charge. I kicked him in the side of the head and backflipped again to the topmost level, landing on his two-foot stretch of “lawn.” “You should criticize; you’re pretty chatty for a guy whose face is hanging off. Maybe you want to explain this Operation Stanchion to me now, so we can get on with our lives—me to mine, you to a cell in the Directorate prison in Arizona for the rest of yours?”
He stared up at me from the sidewalk, his jaw clacking together as though he were trying to speak; I didn’t even want to think about how much pain it was causing him to talk. I wanted to inflict more of it.
From my elevated position I saw Scott on the street below next to Clary, who was sitting up. The car next t
o Clary was destroyed, oil leaking all over the pavement, coating him in black liquid that it took me a moment to realize wasn’t blood. Reed was bleeding next to Kat, though he was looking better than he had when last I saw him. Kat was paler than I could ever remember, her wool coat looking like black granite next to her complexion, which was drained of all color.
“You sure you don’t want to come with me?” I asked him. “We could give you all the things your heart desires—three square meals a day, reconstructive surgery for that face—you know, for after it heals, and you go back to looking the way you did before?” He took a leap up the terrace in one bounding jump and I veered sideways and up, clearing the porch steps and landing back at the open hole where his front door had been. “We could give you a nice, quiet place where you’d never have to worry about some annoying strangers knocking on your front door again—you know, because that sort of thing seems to stress you out…”
With a bellow of fury he jumped up to the porch and charged again, tearing through the rail as he raged ahead. I turned and sprinted into the house and up the staircase inside the door as he crashed through the wall behind me. The foyer was sparse, old dark wood faded to a light brown, aging plaster and wallpaper that wouldn’t have looked out of place fifty years ago.
I paused at the landing as I heard his feet hit the first steps behind me. “You seem to have some anger management problems, too,” I said from above him, and launched off the stairs in another kick that hit him in the face. “Unless you think it’s healthy to act like a bull in a china shop all the time.” I heard more bones break, he let out a howl of pain, and I flipped myself by pushing off his head with my foot. I came to a landing on my feet in the middle of the square foyer. “Like a cat,” I whispered to myself. “Always landing on my feet.”
My foe let out a roar of rage and I watched him double at the midsection; he brought both hands down and hit the floorboards, causing the whole room to shake. There was a calm, a quiet, and then a cracking noise as my enemy disappeared through a hole in the floor. Just a second later, the splitting of wood reached my ears and I jumped, a moment too late, as the floor crashed down around me and I fell to the basement.
The shock of the landing snapped my head back, my head hitting the boards that I had fallen with. A dazed sensation overwhelmed me, as though everything in my vision had taken a mighty sway, like it was all jerking around me. “Apparently, I don’t always land on my feet,” I said, and felt a sharp pain in my back. “And more’s the pity for it…”
The dust was thick in the air, choking me with the smell of the wreckage. Particles of wood, plaster and concrete, oppressive and thick, coated my tongue and nasal passages. I coughed, trying to expel it, even as I tried to sit up. The floorboards of the house were all around me, at odd angles from the landing, and the dust was so thick I couldn’t see much of anything, even if I’d had my eyes open for more than a few seconds at a stretch without them filling with tears. I could taste the foul stuff that hung in the air, a dry, awful flavor like the oldest bread on the face of the earth coupled with paint.
I stood and finally got my head above the dust in time to see the beast of a man roar at me again and charge. I threw myself to the side, smashing into an old piece of wooden furniture as he went by. “If I ever get out of here,” I said over the noise of my enemy hitting the far wall with shattering force, “I will personally beat Clyde Clary to death with nothing but an old shoe.”
There was a sharp increase of moisture in the air, I could feel it, as though it were about to rain, the cool, clammy sense that I was sweating and chilled. “Why a shoe?” I heard from above me as the sound of someone dropping to the floor of the basement and hitting the broken lumberyard that lay across it reached my ears. “Why not something really good, like a hammer or a mallet?”
“Because I won’t be emotionally satisfied by the sound of a hammer hitting him over and over,” I said, keeping my eyes trained on the dust in front of me, even as the moisture began to pull it from the air, clearing my vision. “I think it might take a while to work out my rage on him, and I’d like to have the enjoyment of the sole of it slapping him in the face over and over again.”
“Yeah, well,” Scott said, and I saw a thin aura of moisture around his hands as he pulled it from the air and then dispersed it in front of us, “tell him yourself in a second; Kat’s getting him ready to fight again right now. Hopefully he’ll be down here in a minute.”
“Reed?” I asked, and caught a twinge of pain in Scott’s expression. “That bad, eh? I should have known.”
“He’ll be fine,” Scott said. “But Kat can’t fix him and Clary without draining herself dry, so…”
“So you’d rather have an idiot at our backs than a guy with a brain? How very thoughtful of you. It’s almost like you want the enemy to kill me.”
“Hey,” he said, looking vaguely offended. “I’m down here with you, aren’t I? Besides, in this fight, brawn seemed to be the needed thing, more than brains, at least.”
“Oh, that’s well thought out,” I said, watching the last of the mist clear to reveal a shattered, dark hole where my enemy had charged into the foundation wall of the house, now empty, “I’d be more upset with you, but I’m too busy wondering where this Omega jackass went—”
“GERONIMO!” I heard from above, then the sound of something impacting on the stairs, followed by the breaking of all manner of wood as the stairs collapsed.
“Wow,” Scott said. “Maybe you were right about that idiot bit.”
I rolled my eyes at him in the barest control of my fury. “Ya think?!” I adjusted my footing and stared into the black, gaping hole in the foundation; it was so dark in the basement I couldn’t see into the depths of it. It could be a foot deep or twelve, and I wouldn’t be able to tell. “Clary, you just destroyed our escape route, you moron.”
“What do you need to escape for?” Clary’s voice came along with the shifting of boards as he prised himself free of the wreckage of the stairs, which had dissolved about six steps down. “We got him right where we want him, now!”
“Oh, do you?” A voice came from the darkness next to the staircase, and I heard something massive shift, stone moving against skin, and then something flew through the air. I was slow in my reflexes and I felt Scott slam into me, knocking me to the floor as Clary’s rock-skinned body passed over me and hit the support beam behind us, causing the ceiling to cave in again. Panic threatened to overwhelm me as the remains of the upstairs collapsed on us. Scott took the brunt of the impact, shielding me with his body. He lay across me, trapping me in place, confined, unable to move more than a few inches.
After a moment of pause for everything to settle, I coughed and tried to move. The pressure of Scott’s body lying across me made it difficult, and I felt warm liquid run down onto my clothing, seeping through against my skin. I pushed against him, but he was limp and silent, offering no suggestion that he might be conscious. I thought about crying out for help, but I didn’t know if Clary was even in a fit state to assist me. If he was down, then Kat was the last one standing, and she wouldn’t be much use in this fight, assuming she could even hear me outside. I tested moving Scott and felt the wreckage shift a little as I pushed up on him. I paused and tried to listen for movement, but my ears were still ringing. I pushed again and worked my left hand free.
I batted a few stray pieces of floorboard off Scott, then pushed three medium sized slabs of the subfloor off him before rolling him to the side and off me. He was still breathing, but it was shallow, slow, and there was blood soaking his clothing, a piece of rebar jutting out of his back. “Dammit,” I breathed, still unable to hear myself talk. The only light in the basement came from above us, and most of that from the hole where the front door had been, the gray soft light of the overcast day visiting what it had upon us. Scott’s eyelids fluttered as I slapped him lightly, and he coughed blood that ran down his cheek and chin. “Dammit all to hell.”
The crunch of a
foot behind me signaled the presence of someone else and I launched myself back, the only direction I was conveniently poised to spring—and right into a pair of tree-trunk like legs. I knocked my enemy off balance as I saw a shattered face, split with rage. I caught the flash of a crow in my mind’s eye as he fell upon me, his upper body landing on my lower, and I brought a knee up to “cushion” his landing, and it caught him full in the face. He tried to return the favor, jerking his legs as though to kick me with them but I knocked one of them aside and punched him in the groin. Twice. For luck. And possibly spite.
I kicked him in the face and rolled him off me as I pulled a glove off my left hand with my teeth, spinning around and lunging to land on top of him, bringing a knee into his groin again. There weren’t going to be any points awarded for the cleanliness of this fight, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to survive it. I got astride his abdomen even as I wrestled to get the glove off my fingers; the moment they were free I jammed my bare hand against the skin of his neck, choking him as hard as I could. With the other, I slammed him with punch after punch, driving his already broken nose into his face. “What…” I said, forcing my words out even as I evaded his hands, which were reaching for me, “…is…Operation…Stanchion…?”
I counted the seconds as he writhed after every hammer blow I landed. “What…is…Operation…Stanchion?” I felt my knuckles crack but I hit again, ignoring the pain, smashing him down with one hand while draining his life with the other. “Answer me!” I felt him go limp in my grasp, his body slack underneath me, and I held on for just a few seconds longer before I let my ungloved hand release him. I hit him in the face a few more times, just to be safe. Maybe more than a few.
I let out a long breath, a sigh, and slid from him, laying my head against the ground. All my strength was gone, completely and utterly, as though it had disappeared with nothing more than a dozen pains to mark its passage. “You son of a bitch,” I said, and kicked at him, hitting him in the arm. I took another breath and forced myself to my feet. “What the hell is Operation Stanchion?”
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