by Mat Nastos
“The woman is safe for now, Mr. Weir,” said Grail over the connection. Mal could hear the amusement in the knight’s voice.
“Where are you?”
“We had wished to face you well-rested and fresh for battle, but there was still a previous debt you owed to another,” said Grail, genuine disappointment tinged his voice. “Should you survive, we will be awaiting you at Fort Tryon in the shadow of our Lord. Goodbye, Mr. Weir.”
“Previous debt?” wondered Mal as he started to hand the phone back to Senator McGuinness. He was interrupted as the sound of a high-caliber round chambering into a weapon registered to Mal’s hyper-sensitive hearing.
Mal’s head snapped up at the same time the warning alarms began sounding in the computerized portion of his brain. “Ah, shit,” was all the cyborg could manage as he stared up directly into the high-powered scope of a sniper’s rife held by the familiar black-clad form of ‘Chuck.’
Scorch marks covered the lithe man’s uniform, and most of the grinning white skull painted onto his helmet had been burned away.
“Bang, mother-fucker,” the last remaining member of the government’s Beta-Unit strike team cursed Mal just loud enough for the super-soldier’s enhanced hearing to pick up and then began squeezing the trigger to his mammoth Barrett M82A3 semiautomatic rifle.
There was no time for Mal to react as the first fifty caliber armor-piercing round took him in the shoulder at more than nineteen hundred miles per hour.
CHAPTER 21
The impact from the high-velocity round traveling at nearly three times the speed of sound spun Mal completely around and threw him off his feet and into the air, which was the only thing that kept Silva’s next attack from blowing him in half. Aimed at where the cyborg’s head had been, the second bullet instead blasted through the thick meat of Mal’s left leg, leaving behind tattered flesh and a mist of crimson hanging in the air.
In spite of the pain, and his lungs filling with blood, Mal was aware enough to block a third round with the living metal of his forearm, deflecting it with the precision, if not grace, of a certain Amazon Princess.
One of the larger-than-life-sized statues of a lion guarding the entrance to the library gave Mal enough cover from the unrelenting fire from the building’s roof to take stock of his situation. Looking around, he confirmed that the Senator and his entourage had beat a hasty retreat once the first shot had been fired.
“Good,” thought Mal. “One less casualty for me to have to explain to Zuz and Amy when this is all over. Nothing worse than getting a Congressman killed to mess up your day.”
With McGuinness safely out of the way, Mal focused on the problem at hand. The cyborg didn’t have time for the games his enemies had been playing with him. Amy was in danger and it was his fault. He needed to make fast work of the sniper if he was going to get to the top of Manhattan Island and save the woman.
Of course, with a bullet wound in his torso the size of a grapefruit and most of his left thigh missing, the mechanics of actually taking his hunter out were going to be difficult at best. Normally Mal’s preferred choice of attack would be to lure an opponent into hand-to-hand combat range and finishing him off with twelve-inch talons formed of his unbreakable living metal arms. However, based on his earlier experience fighting ‘Chuck’ in the subways system, Mal wasn’t sure he’d survive another such encounter in his current condition.
He’d have to improvise and adapt to the situation: something the former US Army Ranger had been quite good at during his time in the service of his country.
Leaving a dark red swath of blood behind him, Mal limped around the rear edge of the stone-walled main public library building. He left the open sidewalk behind for the cover of Bryant Park’s thick trees. The space on the ground was still open enough to be trouble for the cyborg, but the government assassin would have to leave his vantage point on the building’s roof to regain line of sight. With a massive lunchtime crowd packing the shaded area beneath the leaf-covered foliage canopy, Mal hoped Chuck would forgo opening up wantonly with the Barrett in fear of hitting civilians.
The crowd of New Yorkers pushed and shoved at Mal as he slammed into them at full speed. Citizens in almost any other US city would have scrambled away or parted in terror at the sight of a man covered in blood running towards them, but the native New Yorkers were more annoyed by the occurrence than anything else. Mal was jostled and knocked about for thirty seconds before the crowd thinned enough for him to begin to make some headway on his planned escape. If his luck held up, the mob of people would slow down his hunter long enough for Mal to disappear into the concrete jungle on the other side of the park.
Four bullets whizzed past Mal’s head—close enough for him to feel the heat on his face. Panic hit the crowd an instant later as the teeming mass of humanity realized someone had opened fire. Elbowing his way through the stampede, Mal was stunned. He couldn’t believe Chuck had been desperate enough to start firing into an area flooded with the public like that. It had to go against every rule the government had in place, regardless of their pursuit of a renegade cyborg super-soldier.
What was the man thinking?
A quick survey of the area revealed the real direness of the cyborg’s situation. The short bursts of fire from Chuck’s weapon hadn’t been directed at Mal, or anyone else, at all. Instead, the angry assassin was using the act to encourage the crowds to scatter to the four winds, leaving a wide-open lane between them and the limping cybernetic warrior. Without hundreds of innocents blocking his adversary’s aim, the wounded Mal stood little chance in fleeing the scene unchallenged. Even worse, the mercenary had dropped down from his perch high atop the museum and was already rapidly approaching Mal’s position with his gun at the ready.
The pitter-patter of fully automatic machinegun fire began to eat up the gravel path behind Mal, nipping at his heels like a hungry dog.
Under the hail of gunfire, the cyborg used his still functioning cybernetic arms to pull himself quickly over the five-foot high wall at the park’s rear. Chuck’s weapon would be nearly useless to the assassin once Mal made it out into the heavily traffic Manhattan street on the opposite side. The sight of the black-clad sniper running at him full-bore at less than ten yards distance and closing encouraged Mal to hurl himself down onto the sidewalk below. His landing surprised a group of tourists from Berlin who had been posing for photos of the New York City skyline, splattering them with a rain of blood that continued to pump freely from the gaping wound in Mal’s chest.
Startled shrieks in German gave the fleeing Mal enough warning that something was up, allowing the cyborg to duck out of the way as a pair of radioactive nunchucks were sent spinning in his direction. The devastating damage to Mal’s leg had slowed him down enough to let Chuck finally get within spitting distance. The weapons twisted in a tight arc over Mal’s head, barely missing him as he dropped down onto his good hip and bounced out into oncoming traffic.
The baseball slide took Mal rocketing across Avenue of the Americas, which was flooded with an unending swarm of automobiles. The cyborg flattened himself as his body tumbled under an uptown bound MTA bus loaded with passengers, and barely missed being crushed beneath its wheels. Coming out on the opposite side of the public transit vehicle he leapt over a silver late model Ford Taurus, driven by a teenage girl on her cellphone, only to slam into the hood of a black-and-white driven by one of New York City’s finest.
Mal swore for the hundredth time as he stared down at the rather started police officer through the shattered windshield that had broken his fall. The momentum from his impact allowed Mal to continue his flight across the busy intersection.
Risking a peek over his shoulder, the image of his pursuer closing the distance spurred him to push his wounded leg as hard as he could. Every second he delayed gave his nanites time to finish healing his wounds. They had already knitted most of the muscles of his leg back into working order and even managed to stitch enough of his pectorals together to r
eturn movement to his arm.
A rumble in his stomach reminded Mal of the high price for healing he’d be paying. The nanotechnology could heal him from almost any injury as long as the nanobots had raw material to work with—mainly the protein and calcium contained in the rest of his body. He’d have to eat soon—and a lot—or his cybernetics would begin to cannibalize his own body in an attempt to make itself better and wind up killing him slowly.
“Hey, you…STOP!” Mal was shocked out of his self-examination by the sound of a voice yelling from a few feet behind him.
Mal spun on his heel to see the police officer he’d startled a moment before climbing out of his car, hand resting just over the bulge of the gun on his hip. “I do not have time for this,” groaned Mal, turning to run. As he turned, the cyborg glimpsed Chuck’s silhouette pop up just behind the cop. The NYPD employee dropped like a rock, felled by a blow to the back of his head from the government killer. With only a few feet between them, Chuck hurled himself across the empty space separating the two combatants.
“Shit!’ bellowed Mal, trying unsuccessful to dodge the attack.
Chuck’s leap slammed his body into Mal’s and took them both through the glass and steel door leading into the Japanese bookstore’s interior. The government agent used the momentum to roll himself on top of the prone cyborg, and in the process unholstered one of the radioactive nunchucks contained in sheaths located in the small of his back. Gripping both sticks of the weapon in one hand, Chuck used it like a club to rain down a series of hard blows into Mal’s chest and abdomen.
Realizing his foe would never give up, Mal decided to end things once and for all: there was going to be no walking away and leaving Chuck alive. The man would never give up in his pursuit of the rogue super-soldier. One of them had to die and Mal wasn’t about to volunteer.
Looking up at the man who had twice nearly killed him, Mal whispered, “I’m sorry.”
With a quick blow to the man’s chest that shattered his sternum and knocked the wind from Chuck’s lungs, Mal grimaced at what he had to do next. Forming a twenty-two inch blade on the outside of his forearm, Mal grabbed the back of Chuck’s neck and struck with every remaining ounce of strength he possessed, slicing the man’s head in half, just above his jawline.
Kyrun Silva died instantly at the hands of the man he hunted, the top portion of his head flopping to the cold ground with a sickening thud, eyes still opened and blinking.
Shaking violently from the adrenaline surging uncontrolled through his system, Mal made his way outside to the abandoned cop car. Jumping into the opened driver’s side door he slammed on the gas. He had taken out the last obstacle between him and his showdown with Grail. All he had to do now was make it to the Fort Tryon Park without the NYPD catching up to him, keep himself from losing control to the unstoppable killing machine that was waiting just below the surface of his mind, and take out one of the deadliest warriors in the world in order to save a woman whose only crime had been to try and help him.
“Piece of cake,” thought Mal.
He reached over and turned the cruiser’s sirens on and made a beeline for Fort Tryon Park at the northern point of the island of Manhattan.
*****
The journey from the upper west side of Manhattan to the very tip of the island took Mal seventy-one excruciatingly painful minutes to make. New York City traffic was legendary and it seemed to be going above and beyond as the veteran soldier fought his way through it to reach his goal. On more than one occasion, Mal was tempted to ditch the car completely and make the trek on foot. He was sure he could have done it faster.
Situated in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, Fort Tyron was an oasis of green in the otherwise gray of Manhattan. The park was home to gardens, bird walks, and a series of medieval buildings brought over from Europe called the Cloisters. Upon receiving an information brief on the location from his internal computers, Mal knew the last was where his enemy would be holed up: Grail and his Templars would be keeping Amy in one of the smaller chapels.
“In the shadow of our Lord,” the knight had said. If Mal was correct, she would be held just under the hanging Christ in the Apse from San Martin at Fuentidueña.
Mal maneuvered his stolen cruiser up along the road that wound into the park and through the giant stone arch leading to the main site. A part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cloisters, with their ancient hand-shaped stones imported from several medieval abbeys, appeared more like the fortress of a Middle Ages castle than a museum.
From the moss-covered wall surrounding it, to the high gray pillars and the six-story tower dominating it, the building gazed out over Manhattan Island from its hilltop location. Due to its position, there was absolutely no need to try and hide the police cruiser or to attempt sneaking into the buildings. They’d already know he was there, of that Mal was certain. The cyborg knew enough about his hunters to realize they more than likely had the grounds of the entire park wired with video surveillance. Lookouts had probably tagged Mal’s approach a mile away from the entrance gates.
With stealth and surprise out of the question, at least to start, Mal decided to fall back on the one thing he did better than anyone else: solving problems by hitting them…hard…and adapting to whatever variables might arise in the heat of combat. Adjust, adapt, overcome. Those were the words that had been drilled into him since his first day at boot camp. They were what had made him a great soldier and Ranger…That and the hitting.
Titanium-alloy claws capable of cleaving through iron like butter dug into the course rock surface of the wall on the outer edge of the main Cloister building. With a grunt, Mal began a hurried climb up the rough facade, using the enhanced strength of his cybernetics to pull him up with ease.
Reaching the top of the outer wall, Mal frowned. A machine-gun nest manned by two green-liveried soldiers opened fire from one of the tower’s windows that lay even with the flat roof he found himself striding onto.
“They couldn’t make it easy on me, could they?” Mal spat and turned directly into the stream of fire being directed at him.
Instead of dodging to one side or the other and risking being knocked off the building’s apex, Mal surprised his attackers by charging full bore at them with living metal arms bulking up to Sasquatch-like size as he did. He’d had enough of running away or dodging. If these men were moronic enough to face him, then they deserved whatever happened to them. Keeping his head and vital organs protected with the armor of his triple-sized appendages, Mal reached the gunners with little more than a few flesh wounds to his powerful legs—not enough to slow him down in the least.
A hand ending in twelve-inch claws grasped the white-hot barrel of the tripod-mounted Kord 12.7mm 6P50-2 heavy machine-gun and tore it from its mounting. With a grunt as the sixty-pound weapon came free, Mal smashed the Kord into the dumbstruck Templars, batting them from the building to their deaths forty feet below. The mangled mass of the machine-gun tumbled down after the pair, smashing to pieces next to their broken bodies.
Mal felt his heart race as adrenaline began to flow through his body. He ground his teeth with enough force to rattle his head as he struggled to hold back the sudden encroachment by the tendrils of the Cestus programming he felt push out from the base of his skull.
“Not now,” he thought to himself desperately. He couldn’t let the bloodthirsty computer personality take over…not now. Not if he wanted to make sure Amy got out of the Cloisters alive. The battle between man and machine raged silently for five long minutes, the only sound came from Mal’s ragged breathing as he fought to retain control of his mind and soul. The effort covered the cyborg in a fine sheen of perspiration from head to toe. Sweat ran down through his hair and into his eyes, down the length of his back and across his chest. Mal’s breath became shallow and his body shook with the toll it all took on him psychologically.
Finally, with a primal scream, Mal shoved Cestus back down into the mental box he had built for its prison
there in the back of his mind.
“It’s gone,” thought Mal as he climbed down from the roof and pushed his way into the front lobby of the main Cloisters building. “For now, at least.”
Having spent the long drive from midtown Manhattan to Fort Tryon Park familiarizing himself with the blueprints of the museum’s grounds and buildings, the cyborg knew precisely where he needed to go and how to get there. The tiny chapel containing the Apse was located in the center of the complex, along its back wall and past an enormous rectory room. Mal made his way towards his target, praying for Amy’s safety the entire way. He couldn’t stand the thought she had been put in danger because he had asked her for help. He swore he’d get her out alive. He wouldn’t have the blood of another innocent woman staining his hands. There was enough of that for him to deal with already.
Easing down the long, half-opened hallway that ran the length of the rectory, Mal reached out with his senses. He knew Grail and his Templars were lying in wait somewhere, but the only heartbeat his sensor array could detect was that of a single human. The heart was beating at an increased rate—a fact that showed fear or stress. Whoever the heartbeat belonged to was just beyond the end of a closed door at the end of the hall. The interior map Mal’s computer flashed across his mental display revealed that the door opened up to the chapel he was looking for.
Mal stood outside the closed doorway, placing his hand in the middle of its thick oaken wood face. As far as his enhanced hearing revealed, the only sound emanating from within was that of a woman’s rapid breathing. The cyborg knew he was standing at the only exit in and out of the room.
“Amy!” thought Mal. If she were in there, the only choice the cyborg had was to charge in and be ready to take on whatever Grail and his men threw at him. Sighing, Mal took a deep breath before ramming his shoulder into the sealed barrier, shattering the wood and metal of the door and catapulting himself inside. The force of his charge allowed Mal to clear the entry and roll up into a defensive stance, using the nigh-invulnerable titanium alloy of his arms as a guard.