She managed a loping hobble. Every fall of her right foot produced a sword stab of agony. I wish I could watch you burn, asshole! She had to settle for listening to his ululating wail as the fire consumed him, melting the skin and fat from his body.
A minor explosion echoed down from the second level. The fire raged behind her as she navigated the warehouse obstacles.
“Margaret!” Shai called from beneath the forklift.
“Go…” It amazed her how raspy she sounded. “Hide outside. The fire…” She smiled at him, pointed toward the archway as if in a dream, then made for the conveyor belt to the second level, a gentler climb than the stairs.
Fuck, I’m going to die.
She’d scrabbled nearly to the summit of the rubber conveyor, practically on hands and knees, when she heard a familiar laugh.
Then the drums began to explode.
***
“I wonder where old Swift is…” Max said it aloud, hoping the creep’s big mouth would betray him.
Max lay in cover behind three skids and a busted crate, listening to the fight downstairs. Swift had to be on the upper deck.
Swift spoke in a loud whisper, only possible by amplifying his voice. “Pretty slick, Max, loading that case with—”
I know what you’re doing, you fucking ox. A speaker must have been placed somewhere on the upper level, probably wireless and synched with a cell phone. Max was supposed to believe that was Swift’s actual location. Amateur. Tech just wasn’t Swift’s thing; vintage guns and killer reptiles occupied all of the limited space in his brain compartment. Aside from Leet shooting it out downstairs and Shai being unaccounted for, Max couldn’t have been more pleased; only an idiot staked his life on tactics he obviously hadn’t practiced.
Gunfire—semi-auto shots from downstairs followed by a shout of masculine pain—drowned out the rest. Max used it to hide the sound of his movements as he crawled a few feet to new cover.
“Didn’t take us long to figure it out,” Swift followed up with a grunted chortle. “Can’t trust anybody anymore; somebody’s always got it in for me. I mean, here I am, just a normal guy, mindin’ his own business, and you come along, shoot my gator, kill my old lady, burn my house to the ground, steal all my money. I guess you could say that makes us about even, but you know I don’t play by the rules.”
Max had a better view from his current vantage point. Fading sunlight still somewhat lit the place through the broken windows, but it grew dimmer by the moment. Soon they’d be playing cat and mouse in the dark. Max wanted to finish Swift before it came to that.
Find his fat ass already!
Though he didn’t locate Swift, he saw the next best thing: a faint blue glow emanating from a light on the speaker, positioned against a wall about twenty feet away. Max needed nothing more.
“Too bad about the Marines,” Swift whispered on. “You fuckers are supposed to be thick as—”
More gunfire drowned out his words, not that Max had really been listening; he was busy scanning the room, estimating Swift’s position by examining the optimum trajectories to kill a man who approached the speaker. Two hiding spots stood out, though Max would have chosen neither. Swift would either be in the rafters behind a massive motor built to power an exhaust fan or behind some crates in the far corner. Crates that Swift had to have maneuvered into position. The second location offered a wide field of fire over and through the junk choking the floorspace, leading Max to believe he’d found him.
Fuck it, only one way to find out.
Max pulled out a fresh magazine for the Saint, set it down next to him for a quick reload after shooting up the crates. He sighted in, confident the 5.56 rounds would easily punch through the rotten wood.
Something landed with a metal clank not three feet away from him. Fuck! Max rolled to his left, straight into some junk that stopped his progress.
The grenade exploded. Had it been a frag grenade, he likely would have died, but it was merely a flash-bang, most of its concussive impact blocked by an upset metal shelf. The blast initiated a keening wail in his ears nevertheless, which gave him an instant migraine headache and left him disoriented. He rolled onto his back. When he tried to raise the Saint, he found it had fallen from his grasp.
A gargantuan figure charged at him, hippo legs and sasquatch soles traversing the junk with surprising deftness. Swift liked reptiles for a reason; they burst from dormant to deadly fast at the least provocation with nobody the wiser. He charged from the rear, had been hiding near the catwalk to monitor the approach to those crates as it turned out. If nothing else, Swift was living proof that animal cunning outweighed actual intelligence when it came to combat; he would have died years before otherwise.
But Max didn’t have time to feel foolish over falling into his trap. He felt around with his right hand, couldn’t locate the Saint. Nearly upon Max, Swift launched his great weight through the air, bowie knife in hand, mouth agape as he emitted a war whoop of victory Max could barely hear.
Max’s groping hand found something thin, metallic, and gritty with rust. He raised the two-foot section of threaded rod and jabbed at Swift’s face as his nemesis crashed down upon him, shaking the floor and knocking the wind from Max. Even over the wailing in his ears, Max heard Swift’s cry of shocked agony when the rod found his left eye. Swift instinctively dropped the knife and covered his injured eye with his hands.
Though Swift writhed atop him in pain, neither man had the advantage. Max could barely breathe, every inhalation a struggle as Swift’s oppressive bulk constricted his lungs. Swift’s partial blindness was only temporary, for Max had failed to jab the rod through his eyeball.
Max smashed him in the temple with the rod, opening a nasty laceration, then followed up by jabbing the rod into his throat. That did the trick. Swift rolled partway off him. Max shoved him the rest of the way, freeing himself. He sat up, cracked Swift across the bridge of his nose with the rod as further insult and injury.
With Swift incapacitated, Max fought to catch his breath. He didn’t have time to find the Saint, however. Swift would recover quickly; for all Max knew he might be playing possum. The only way to predict his next move was to rob him of it before it happened. Max drew his Glock, put an immobilizing knee on Swift’s chest. With his left hand, Max grabbed Swift’s injured throat and held the gun to his head with the right.
“What were you saying, Carter?” Max said. “I didn’t catch that part about the Marines.” But I think I got the gist of it.
“Go ahead, kill me,” Swift rasped. “Won’t save any of you. We win again. We always win.”
Leet’s voice reached him through the dusty air, though he couldn’t make out her words. Past the catwalk, the final rays of sunshine illuminated swirling clouds of smoke building at the ceiling. The gunfire had ceased.
“I love your optimism, Swift.” Max stared into his unblinking blue eye. “But otherwise you’re a piece of shit. When you get to hell, give that cow you married my regards.”
Blood spattered Max’s face before he even heard the gunshot. The pain hit him in the next instant, an intense, dizzying pulse from his right forearm. The bullet had passed right through. Max still held his pistol, but the new shooter had him covered.
Ben stepped forward from the shadows. He’d likely accessed the building via the second-floor entrance, a rickety flight of stairs on the building’s exterior. Too many fucking entrances to this place.
“Cavalry’s here!” Ben announced, his winning smile winking in near darkness. If not for the body armor bulging out of his pinpoint Oxford dress shirt and the pistol he trained on Max’s head, he would have looked like a model in the L.L. Bean catalog. “Can you believe this, Max? Never send a merc to do a Marine’s job.”
“Semper fi? You’re not faithful to anyone. You’re no Marine in my book,” Max growled through clenched teeth, his pain excruciating.
Ben laughed. “Well, you don’t get to write this book, Max. Wi
nners write history, while pawns like you wind up in shallow graves. Now drop the weapon.”
“You mind if I kill this fat sack of snake shit before you waste me? What good is he to you? He’ll shoot you in the back to take your cut the moment he gets the chance.”
Ben shrugged. “Eh, he has his uses. Hell, he’s living proof that the Agency and the Bureau can work together! Swift and I are about to be very rich men, once we take this kid apart and figure out what makes him tick. But don’t worry, I’ll whistle taps in your honor after we bury you.” He laughed again, the hearty guffaw of a nabob sipping a martini after a successful afternoon on the golf course. “Now toss the—”
An explosion rocked the warehouse, quickly followed by another. The blasts shook the floor, clouding the air with dust that rained down from the rafters.
Swift wasted no time seizing the moment, as well as Max’s bleeding right forearm. Pain burned white-hot behind Max’s eyelids for an instant, and the pistol dropped from his hand. Swift pulled Max’s arm, simultaneously raising both knees and rolling in a reverse tumble that propelled Max off him.
Bullets cracked through the air past Max as Ben tried to finish him. Everything had become a hazy target at best in the swirling dust and falling darkness. Max heard Ben shout in surprise and perhaps pain, followed by a tongue lashing from Leet.
Then Swift was on him, knife in hand once again, foregoing his guns, nice and personal. Max had no problem with that. He rolled to the side, avoiding the first knife thrust, and sprang to his feet. Swift, deceivingly quick as always, jumped to his feet and slashed at him, the blade passing just shy of Max’s throat.
“Fail!” Max said.
He chortled as he drove the toe of his boot into Swift’s knee. He followed with a solid left hammer blow that landed just ahead of his ear, buying Max enough breathing room to draw his Ka-Bar. Backpedaling would be impossible for either of them without some piece of junk snagging a foot. Max preferred it that way. Try to run this time!
The back of his mind acknowledged the gun battle in progress between Leet and Ben, but none of it truly registered with him. Swift had his undivided attention. The pain in his arm even deserted him, yielding beneath numbing shots of adrenaline.
They squared off, each man conscious of the chance he might trip in the debris. Max angled to Swift’s left to stay on his blind side. He would have preferred to take the defensive and wait on the fat sack of shit to make the first move, but he didn’t have that luxury. Swift still had a pistol, might say fuck it and decide to use it at any moment. Max moved in, led with a left-handed punch that missed, followed by a knife slash for the neck that wound up grazing Swift’s plate carrier, slashing through to the ceramic plate. Swift responded with a quick step forward, closing to within grappling distance. Spinning to the side, Max evaded his knife attack and likewise avoided tying up with him. The last thing he wanted was the knife fight turning into a wrestling match, one he was certain to lose.
They turned, slashed, stabbed, feinted. Max scored first blood, burying the Ka-Bar deep into Swift’s right shoulder before ripping it out hard with a rending slash. Despite his high pain threshold, the gushing wound left Swift growling. He lashed out like the wounded animal he’d become, slashing with his right arm, trying to grab Max’s knife wrist with his left hand. But Max had put a true hurting on his knife arm. A profuse amount of blood pulsed from the wound to trickle down in erratic red rivers, slowing Swift down, making him more frantic to save his life.
And then, like the coward he was deep at heart, Swift exited the fight by leaping over some toppled shelving, miraculously planting his feet on two tiny sections of clear floor. The knife in his hand prevented him from pulling the Model 1911 .45 holstered at his belt on the right side, so he wouldn’t be able to get a shot in but he could improvise. With his free left hand, he yanked his last flash-bang from his plate carrier, pulled the pin with the thumb of his knife hand, and tossed.
Max dove into the clutter, extended his left arm and smacked the grenade back at him before it hit the floor. Pain returned when he landed hard on his right arm atop a section of filthy fiberglass insulation, some bum’s bedding, that somewhat cushioned his fall. The grenade popped somewhere over Max’s head, its brief flash of fire singing his clothing and the back of his head, the concussion deafening and disorienting.
Max lay on his stomach for several seconds in a hazy daze of pain and ringing ears. Though he could hear nothing, he saw Swift clearly enough, lying a few feet away. His clothing smoldered; his face bore third-degree burns, and his tolerance for pain had folded. If the grenade blast hadn’t temporarily deafened Max, the agonized cries from Swift’s gaping maw likely would have.
But even wounded and broken down, Swift remained a threat. Max spotted him reaching for the .45 on his belt, ready to take Max down with him. Stepping over a rotted cardboard box of moldering documents, Max brought down his heel on Swift’s forearm, stomping three times until he retracted his hand from the vicinity of his pistol.
Max knelt next to him, put the Ka-Bar’s cold steel against his fat, wrinkled throat, hoping he could feel it.
“Do it,” Swift rasped. “And I will see you in Hell.”
Even if Swift could have heard him, Max had no final farewell for the overgrown, feeble-minded murderer who had failed at both herpetology and mercenary work. That Swift knew he’d met his maker at Max’s hand was consolation enough. He stabbed him in the throat as opposed to a clean slash, content to let his old nemesis and occasional partner bleed out slowly. Though it could never happen slowly enough to match the suffering Max still lived with.
With his other weapons lost in the jumble of wreckage, Max drew Swift’s .45 and turned to survey the situation. Ben knelt atop Leet, her back pinned to the deck on the catwalk, the two silhouetted by the raging fire behind them. Leet barely managed to keep his weapon turned away from her. Max aimed for Ben, trying to get a clear shot over the iron sights on Swift’s pistol.
Shai appeared at Ben’s back, and Max staid his trigger finger. He charged through the wreckage to save Shai, who grabbed Ben by the collar of his body armor and flung him off Leet, sending him tumbling a few feet down the catwalk.
Max fell forward when his toe caught on something, his wound announcing itself again when he landed. When he again looked up, Shai knelt over Ben, who lay with his pistol raised between them.
“No!” Max shouted an instant before Ben fired.
The bullet struck Shai high in the chest. The impact spun him around and propelled him into the catwalk railing. But Shai didn’t fall. Ben fired again, his shot throwing up sparks when it rang off the railing next to Shai’s head. Unable to get a good bead on Ben from this angle, Max held his fire and advanced. He could take no chances with Shai standing downrange.
Ben tried to roll to his feet, only to be stopped when Shai descended on him with outstretched arms. He fired once at Shai’s head, missing, before pistol whipping the boy above his ear. Shai didn’t bleed of course, but the synthetic skin below his cropped hair parted to expose the composite metal beneath.
Shai barely flinched at the blow. Showing no sign of rage, no sign of pain, he reached down and seized Ben by the throat. Ben fired again, hitting nothing. He then cried out once, very faintly, before Shai ripped out his trachea with bare hands.
Max stood dumbfounded by what he’d just witnessed. His hearing had returned, though his head still ached as though he’d recently awoken from an all-night bender.
He should have moved faster, for another man then appeared on the catwalk and tried to attack Shai with a stun baton. Shai dodged the thrust with a dancer’s grace as Max opened fire. His first shot grazed the baton wielder across the side of his head; the second cleanly missed when the man turned and fled for the stairs. Max reached the catwalk just in time to glimpse the man’s bald head and flapping shirttail as he fled through the archway to the railroad loading dock. The fire had spread over most of the floor, feeding on
the trash and clutter. The bald man had barely escaped past the flames.
“Dammit!” Max then realized he had bigger problems to worry about: Shai’s damaged covering; the roaring fire, producing toxic smoke that completely obscured the rafters, the gray cloud slowly descending; and Leet, who lay a few feet away bleeding heavily from a shot she’d taken just below her body armor. Max ran to her.
“I got him!” She gasped for air. “That piece of shit killed Don.” Ben must have pistol whipped her at some point, for she also bled from a laceration on her scalp.
Max offered her a forced smile. “So did I, but we’ll celebrate later. We need to go.”
Shai and Max got Leet upright, only to find she could no longer walk after losing so much blood. She’d already turned pale. Soon she’d assume that familiar shade of purplish blue that Max had no desire to see.
Max picked her up as gently as he could, his forearm burning in pain as he slung her over his shoulder. He made for the second-floor exit as the toxic cloud finally descended upon them. Gagging on the smoke pouring out of the doorway, Max didn’t pause to wonder whether the rusting stairway would hold the combined weight of himself and Leet. The journey down the steel risers was slow and perilous, yet nothing gave way before they made it to the ground.
Shai took the lead, and Max didn’t have a problem with that. Could I have ripped out Ben’s throat with my bare hands? He highly doubted it. Shai could obviously protect himself. Any thugs stalking the back alleys in search of easy prey would get far more than they’d bargained for if they fucked with him. Too bad Daniel had to keep his strength a secret.
Several explosions resembling an artillery barrage rumbled. With a tremendous flashover, the warehouse collapsed in their wake. Max glanced backward. A hazy, warm light resembling a new dawn rose above the rooftops. The column of smoke could be seen for miles. He heard distant sirens wailing as firetrucks raced to the scene.
Fortunately, no one had located and stripped the Suburban in their absence. Max and Shai loaded Leet, now unconscious, into the back seat. The boy stayed with her, applying pressure to her wound with the combat dressing Max provided.
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