Bathed in Blood

by Alex Archer

  He squeezed tighter, forcing the air out of her lungs, and grinned down at her as if to say, I’ve got you now.

  She reared her head back and then snapped it forward, smashing her forehead into the guard’s nose with all the force she could muster.

  There was an audible crack as his nose broke.

  He let go, his hands going to his face, and Annja took advantage of the opportunity to drive a knee up toward his groin.

  That blow never landed, however, for he brought his own leg up, blocking the strike and taking the knee against his thigh. It still hurt, she knew that, but it wasn’t the debilitating blow she’d hoped for.

  He made that clear seconds later when he began hammering her with his fists, throwing face strikes and body shots with remarkable alacrity, moving at a speed that was unexpected given his large size.

  Annja blocked the majority of them, her forearms and hands moving as fast as her opponent’s, but the few that got through told her she wouldn’t be able to keep this up forever. Her blows were doing less damage than his, and that differential would eventually hand the confrontation to him. She needed to end this quickly if she wanted anything left in the tank for what was to come.

  No sooner had the notion occurred to her than he managed to slip a punch past her defenses and she took a fist high on the right side of her face, snapping her head around and sending her to the floor.

  Dazed by the blow, Annja was just pushing herself up off the cement floor, trying to get back to her feet, when the first kick caught her on the left side of her rib cage. She felt one of her ribs snap beneath the force of the blow. The kick lifted her up and bounced her off the SUV’s tire before she dropped back on the floor.

  If she stayed there she was going to get kicked to death.

  Move, girl, move!

  She scrambled back to her hands and knees, only to take another kick to the stomach. Her breath left her in a great rush, and when she tried to inhale again, she found she couldn’t; he’d hit her solar plexus dead-on with the toe of his boot, temporarily paralyzing her diaphragm.

  She fought to inhale, her entire being focused on getting that next breath and filling her lungs with air. Distantly she was aware of the guard continuing to kick away, but with all her attention focused on not suffocating she could barely summon the strength to defend herself.

  Breathe! Come on, breathe!

  Another kick slammed into her, and then all of a sudden her lungs were inflating as her body finally decided to listen to her brain. She sucked life-giving air into her system.

  She could sense her opponent pulling back his leg, getting ready to deliver another blow.

  Not this time.

  As the kick came in, she spun around and grabbed his leg, trapping it against her torso, and pulled backward, yanking him off his feet.

  He hit the floor hard, and she threw herself atop his body, pinning him to the ground with her knees. As he reached for her neck, Annja reared up over him, her hands held together over her head.

  When she thrust her hands downward a second later, they were no longer empty.

  The sword plunged into the middle of his chest, only stopping when it struck the cement floor on the other side. The guard stared up at her with surprised eyes and then died, alive one minute and gone the next.

  32

  Annja let her sword vanish back into the otherwhere and then climbed slowly off the dead man. She was bruised and battered but alive.

  The sound of running feet caught her attention and she stumbled around to the back of the SUV to see that Owens had abandoned Csilla’s wheelchair and was now making a run for the elevator.

  Oh, no, you don’t!

  She started after him, only to catch sight of Radecki coming out of a door she hadn’t noticed earlier, a few feet from the elevator. He was pointing something in her direction.

  Annja threw herself behind the SUV just as the rear window exploded, sending glass flying.

  “You’re not getting out of here, Creed,” Radecki yelled, “so why make this difficult?”

  His voice echoed in the confined space of the garage. If she hadn’t seen him, Annja would have been hard-pressed to know where the sound was coming from.

  “You should have just gone home when Tamás told you to, you know? That would have saved a number of people, yourself included, a lot of trouble. But that would have been too easy, huh?”

  Annja rose to a crouch and cautiously tried to look through the SUV’s window, but the tint was so dark she couldn’t see anything.

  “No, you had to stick your nose where it didn’t belong, and so here we are.”

  Yeah, and you sound all broken up over it, too, she thought as she got down on her hands and knees to look underneath the car.

  She couldn’t see much of Radecki, just his shoes, but that was enough to pinpoint his location. As she looked on, he began slowly walking toward the SUVs.

  Annja didn’t think he was coming to wish her well.

  As he approached, she slowly backed away from him, moving around the side of the vehicle to keep herself out of his sight. When he stopped near the side of the vehicle, Annja got the sense he was about to stoop and look under it, so she moved to crouch behind the tire.

  Annja needed to act quickly. She couldn’t stay where she was—Radecki was coming around the front of the vehicle, headed in her direction. She couldn’t circle around the back, because that would expose her to Owens. With nowhere else to go, she slid beneath the SUV next to her, pushing herself sideways with hands and feet until she came out again on the opposite side.

  That put her behind the very last vehicle in the row, out of sight of both men for the moment. She crouched there below the window, her feet hidden from view by the rear tire.

  She heard Radecki call out to Owens. “Where did she go?”

  “She’s around the other side. Between the first two vehicles!”

  Wrong.

  But that was fine with her. She listened closely, heard Radecki moving between the first and second vehicles, heading for the rear. She waited until he reached the SUV’s bumper and then moved to the far front corner of her own.

  A glance beneath the cars showed Radecki moving toward her, and she knew it was time. Her heart was racing and her hands itched for her sword, but she didn’t draw it out. She wanted to get the gun away from him and take control of the situation, but she didn’t want to kill him.

  She was going to have to do this the hard way.

  Radecki slowed as he got close to the front of the SUV, raised his gun and then spun quickly around the corner, expecting to see Annja hiding in front of the second vehicle.

  Except she wasn’t there.

  Annja was already surging toward him. As he turned and brought his gun up, her foot lashed out in a perfectly timed crescent kick that struck the inside of his wrist, knocking the gun aside even as he pulled the trigger.

  The shot went wide, ricocheting off the Suburban beside her, but Annja barely noticed as the bullet swept past. She planted her foot as it came down, using it as a fulcrum to spin her body the rest of the way through the arc and delivering a smashing elbow strike to Radecki’s jaw.

  The blow drove Radecki against the front of the SUV, and Annja moved in on him, pinning him in place. She grabbed his right hand and slammed it against the grille of the car—once, twice, three times—until his fingers went numb and he had no choice but to drop the gun.

  Annja kicked it under the SUV.

  Radecki was disarmed, but not out of the fight. He reversed Annja’s grip on his wrist and caught hers instead, spinning her around and locking his other arm around her throat, pulling her back against his chest in the process.

  “I’m going to make you pay for that,” he said in her ear as he pulled his arm tighter, choking her.


  Annja’s lungs started to burn seconds after he grabbed hold of her. She was already exhausted from her fight with the guard, and she couldn’t take much more of this abuse. She needed to get out of his grip and she needed to do it quickly, or she’d be unconscious and completely at his mercy.

  She couldn’t pry his arm free, not with the way he had it locked up against his other one, so she didn’t even bother trying. Instead, she reached into the otherwhere, wrapped her hands around the hilt of her sword and dragged it into the real world.

  The blade flashed into existence, the hilt clasped tightly between her two hands, and Annja drove it backward, running the flat of the blade against the edge of her body as a guide, hoping to skewer her assailant where he stood.

  Fortunately for Radecki, Annja’s aim was a little off. The position of her body and the growing dimness in front of her eyes as the air was choked out of her caused the blade to shift to the left. Instead of running through the center of his gut, the blade simply slashed through the fatty tissue on the outside of his torso.

  It hurt—hurt a lot, no doubt—but it wasn’t fatal.

  The strike did accomplish her objective, though. Radecki loosened his chokehold, and that was enough to allow her to break his grip entirely.

  She spun away from him, bringing the sword up and around in a whistling arc, then slashing downward in the kind of blow designed to split a man in two.

  Except the man in question was no longer where he’d been a moment before. Radecki had dived to the right, and instead of cleaving him in half, her sword slashed into the hood of the vehicle with the shriek of tearing steel.

  Radecki turned his dive into a rolling somersault and came up on his feet, facing Annja. He was bleeding from the wound in his side, but it didn’t look bad enough to take him out, an observation he proved when he charged her as soon as he was back on his feet.

  Her sword was embedded in the SUV’s hood, and she tried to tug it free.

  It wouldn’t move.

  It was stuck, good and fast.

  Radecki had already closed half the distance between them. She had only seconds to act.

  Annja was about to order the sword to vanish, thereby freeing it from its metal trap, but decided against it. She had a better idea.

  As Radecki charged toward her, arms ready to grab her again, Annja waited until the very last second and then leaped up into the air, using the sword as a fulcrum to support her weight. At the top of her arc, she kicked outward with one foot.

  The toe of her boot struck Radecki right on the temple.

  He crashed into the front of the vehicle and went down without a sound as Annja landed.

  Radecki lay there on the floor of the garage, unmoving.

  Finish him now before he can do more harm.

  For a moment, Annja considered doing just that. She let go of the sword, and as she did it flashed out of existence and then popped back into her hand, ready to deliver the fatal blow.

  Radecki had helped kidnap and murder dozens of women. He had shown no remorse and would certainly continue doing so if Annja couldn’t stop him.

  In Annja’s view, Radecki certainly deserved to die for his actions.

  But Annja was not judge, jury and especially not executioner.

  As near as she could tell, she’d been called to bear the sword as a representative of justice, truth and righteousness. Killing Radecki—no, murdering him—would be a violation of all the sword and its original bearer stood for and of her own tacit agreement to continue that tradition.

  However much she might want to do so, killing him now while he lay defenseless would be wrong.

  She turned away, and in doing so caught sight of Owens frantically pushing the elevator call button while looking back at her with frightened eyes.

  Annja knew Owens would sound the alarm, but it would take time to coordinate a response. She intended to be long gone by that point.

  It was time to get out of here.

  She ran over to Csilla’s wheelchair, grabbed the handles and began pushing it as fast as it would go as she ran for the gate and the ramp to freedom that lay just beyond.

  Thirty feet...

  Twenty feet...

  Ten feet...

  Almost there.

  Something punched her hard in the leg, knocking her feet out from under her. She fell forward, unbalancing the wheelchair in the process and sending it crashing to the floor. Annja could only watch in dismay as Csilla toppled to the ground.

  After a moment, Annja was finally able to identify the sound echoing in her ears—a gunshot.

  33

  Radecki found his gun, Annja thought absently as she looked down at her leg in a semidaze. The outside of her thigh was bleeding freely, but she didn’t feel much pain.

  Then again, she couldn’t feel most of her leg.

  You’re in shock, a voice said in the back of her head. You’re in shock because you’ve been shot. That’s why you don’t feel anything.

  As fuzzy as her thinking was, she knew that if she’d been shot, someone must have done the shooting.

  Looking back, she saw Radecki leaning against one of the Suburbans, one hand holding the gun pointed in her direction and the other clamped over the bleeding wound in his side. She was wondering why he hadn’t just killed her with the first shot when he fired again.

  The shot went wide, the bullet hitting the concrete more than a yard to her right.

  It took her a moment to put two and two together; Radecki was shooting with his off hand!

  Thankfully he wasn’t that good with his left.

  Frustrated he tried again, but when that bullet, too, missed, he threw the gun away in disgust. Pulling something out of the inside pocket of his coat, he began walking purposefully in Annja’s direction, calling over his shoulder to Owens as he went.

  Annja clamped a hand over her own wound and tried to stand, only to collapse back on the floor, her leg too numb to support her weight.

  As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, a sudden rattling sound from close by caught her attention, and when she looked up in the direction of the ramp she discovered the source.

  The gate over the exit ramp was slowly descending!

  Another glance behind her showed Radecki walking inexorably closer and, over his shoulder, the figure of Owens standing near the gate controls, a triumphant smile on his face.

  It was the smile that did it.

  There was no way she was letting these two beat her. Not today, not ever.

  She could feel the blood trickling out between her fingers. It was going to get worse if she exerted herself, but staying here was not an option. She’d bleed to death if they didn’t kill her first. She had to get on the other side of that gate.

  Pushing herself up onto her hands and knees and letting her injured leg drag behind her, Annja began crawling forward.

  “She’s getting away!” Owens shrieked.

  Thank you, Captain Obvious, Annja thought. And damn right I am!

  Behind her, Radecki started a kind of limping run in an effort to catch her.

  Annja crawled past Csilla’s wheelchair, and the sight of it caused an ache to well up from her heart. She’d tried to help, and in the process she’d dragged the woman into even greater danger. Now she was abandoning Csilla where she lay. The fact that she had no choice, that if she didn’t get away she couldn’t help Csilla or any of the women back in that medical ward, didn’t help remove the sting and shame leaving her behind.

  She kept going anyway.

  The gate was less than a foot above the ground by the time she reached it.

  She knew if she hesitated, all would be lost, so she went for it.

  Annja dropped to her stomach and crawled forward as fast as she could, doing her best not to
think about either the homicidal maniac running up behind her or the steel gate lowering itself toward her unprotected body.

  Radecki was shouting at her, but Annja couldn’t understand what he was saying over the clank and clatter of the gate. Nor did she care. All of her attention was focused on getting clear of the several hundred pounds of steel descending toward her. She’d worry about Radecki later.

  She reached out with her arms, braced them against the floor and dragged herself forward until her head and shoulders cleared the gate.

  Clank.

  The gate dropped an inch.

  She did it again—reach, grab, drag—pulling her torso through.

  Clank.

  Another inch.

  The steel edge was less than four inches off the ground at this point. Annja’s heart was beating wildly, the pounding rhythm filling her ears.

  Hurry up!

  Clank.

  A mere three inches or so left.

  She bent her left leg, pulling it clear, but couldn’t do the same to her right thanks to the bullet wound in her thigh.

  Come on! One more time! she screamed at herself.

  Annja pulled and her leg slid forward beneath the gate’s edge just as it dropped the rest of the way to the floor...

  ...and caught the sole of her boot beneath it.

  Sensors built into the bottom of the gate kept her foot from being crushed as the machinery controlling it shut down the moment the gate encountered an obstruction.

  That was the good news.

  The bad news was that she was stuck.

  Annja reached back, grabbed her lower leg and, ignoring the pain, tried to tug her leg free.

  Nothing.

  Come on, you can do this.

  She braced her good leg against the gate, gritted her teeth and pulled on her other leg a second time.

  Still nothing.

  She was stuck hard and fast.