by Michael Todd
One of the intruders, dressed all in black, stepped out of cover and Anderson raised his shotgun. The explosive charge leaving the barrel accompanied by the heavy kick of the shotgun knocked him back a step. His target catapulted back with a soft grunt of pain, but he was able to drag himself behind a couch and out of sight.
The ex-colonel realized his mistake barely in time. A volley erupted and sprayed across the bottles of respectable beverages behind him. He ducked instinctively as glass and alcohol showered his back as he fell. Thankfully, they hadn’t used the advantage of him caught out in the open to good effect.
That wouldn’t happen again, he realized as he checked the number of rounds left in his shotgun. Seven. He hadn’t thought that he’d fired three already, but you lost track in heated situations like that. It was so well-known that it was almost a cliché, by this point. He retrieved the sub-machine gun from where he’d tucked it under the ice bucket. It wasn’t his preferred weapon, but when it came time to deliver as many bullets in as little time as possible, there weren’t many others that could beat it.
A thump preceded an explosion that snapped him out of his reverie. It had come from the front and he knew immediately that someone knew about the super-fortified door. These people were very knowledgeable about the work he’d put into his country house.
The realization seeped in below his calm and triggered the paranoia that walked hand in hand with his condition. He acknowledged the truth that he’d already been invaded at a purely information level. Now, however, they broke into his house and tried to hurt his family. He told himself to snap out of the panic attack that loomed insidiously again and dug deep for the anger. It flared, white-hot and invincible, and empowered his roar of defiance.
“Semper fi, motherfuckers!” he bellowed as he cleared the bar and his finger worked the trigger as quickly as possible. His shoulder absorbed the repeated kicks without complaint. A couple of the men whom Savage had delayed in the front entered cautiously and looked around as if they were a little uncertain what they would find. He wondered why the team didn’t use a comm system to stay in touch with each other but decided not to ask questions about that now. He pulled the sub out from under the bar, aimed it at the door as he cradled the stock against his shoulder, and fired.
The three-round burst pounded him like a mule’s kick, and he staggered but managed to gather himself and gripped the sub with both hands. The invaders who were caught in the doorway tried to fall back. Two made it to safety but two others collapsed with almost simultaneous thuds. He grimaced as their blood stained the hardwood floor.
Anderson felt a moment of elation when his attackers backed away from him, but he regretted the impulse a second later. He’d been away from the game too long, and combat wasn’t like riding a bike. Not by a long shot. He’d performed better against a team of killers than most, maybe, but that would be cold comfort if he were dead.
His mistake was to focus too long on the new intruders in his living room. For a brief instant, he’d forgotten those who’d entered from the back who simply waited for him to come out of cover. Something like a sting from the world’s biggest wasp seared his shoulder. A second strike felt very different—like someone had gut-punched him with a fist the size of the average brick. He lurched back into the bar and glass shattered before he collapsed.
He couldn’t breathe and this time, it wasn’t a work of his tortured psyche. The armor had reacted to protect his chest and now clamped around his torso and prevented him from sucking oxygen in. He looked around and realized that when he fell, his weapons had slipped away from his numb fingers and clattered away. They lay only barely out of reach beyond the mess of broken glass and spilled bourbon.
“Fuck!” he finally managed to gasp. He scowled at the armor, touched his shoulder, and winced at the explosion of pain when his fingers found the bleeding hole beyond the protective area the vest. It seemed entirely logical to promise himself that he would invest in a suit that would protect his whole body when he got out of there. The kind that they used in the Zoo, he decided. It wasn’t always effective against the creatures found in there, but against regular humans with guns, it was a lot more useful.
When he got out of there. When, not if. Anderson rolled those words around his brain as he focused on one of the black-clad men who circled the back of the bar that he had used as cover. The assassin held a carbine in his hands, and he looked briefly at Anderson before his gaze searched for a weapon. Satisfied that his quarry was helpless, he took a step forward and aimed his weapon at the ex-colonel’s head.
When. Not if, Anderson reminded himself as he stared at the black barrel of the carbine aimed directly at the center of his forehead from not even two yards away. The man clearly didn’t intend to miss.
The killer’s attention was yanked away, and Anderson realized that he’d been about to lose his nerve. The reality of that scared him a little because he knew he needed to believe and follow it through. Distracted, it took a second before he focused on what had diverted the man’s attention. A shotgun fired two shots in quick succession. The familiar whoosh was hard to miss, and he grinned with both relief and pleasure.
Savage was still around, that old bastard. Hope flared to drown out his momentary weakness. He had to make use of the advantage and the unexpected reprieve.
It was very clear that his would-be executioner had lost his focus. He swung his carbine to attack the new threat, which gave his erstwhile victim the opening he needed. Anderson lashed out with his right leg and caught his attacker on the knee hard enough that it overextended and with a painful pop, snapped out of joint. The man screamed in pain and stumbled onto the support of his remaining functional knee. He looked up and into the pistol that Anderson had kept in his underarm holster.
“When,” Anderson gasped. “Not if.”
“What the fu—” The question was cut off when the ex-colonel decided that he wasn’t in the mood to explain and simply pulled the trigger. His adversary’s head snapped back, and his body followed to slump in a motionless heap.
“Inside joke,” he grumbled as he heaved himself to his feet and tried to hold onto his weapon while doing so. “You wouldn’t get it.”
He finally cleared the bar and paused to take stock of the five men who were still alive and had their hands full dealing with Savage. The man looked…monstrous. Anderson recalled the first time he’d met him while he’d still been in the hospital, recovering from his fight. He’d seemed a little off but nothing out of the ordinary. If the truth be told, he wasn’t even that impressive a specimen. While he’d seen video of the man since, nothing was really quite like seeing it live and in the flesh.
The one thing that struck him was how calm Savage looked. His face revealed no expression at all, which was odd considering that it was splattered with blood. A pair of bodies sprawled outside on his porch. Those were the shotgun victims, he assumed. A third man could be seen inside, clutching at his slashed throat.
Savage still held the shotgun in his hand, but the target directly ahead of him was too close to bring it to bear on his head. Buckshot wouldn’t penetrate the armor these men wore, and logic said the operative had to know that.
Whether he knew or not, he didn’t care. He pulled the trigger anyway. The ear-splitting blast made Anderson flinch and the enemy backed away, looking like he’d had the breath knocked out of his lungs. Hell, he looked like his lungs had been punched out of his chest as he fell and landed hard on the couch. Savage raised the shotgun to his opponent’s head and fired. Both Anderson and the man in question flinched, equally surprised when all they heard was the click of an empty firearm.
The man’s relief was short-lived, of course, as his attacker quickly gripped the shotgun with both hands and lurched forward. He pushed his shoulder into the blow and shoved the butt of the shotgun into his adversary’s face. Death was instantaneous and the body slid off the cushions without so much as a grunt of pain.
Another man approached from b
ehind but in a smooth, controlled swing, Savage gripped the barrel of his shortened, sawed-off shotgun and used the firearm viciously as a club. The gunman fell and tried to rise, but another blow was delivered with a resounding thwack, followed almost immediately by a third. He tried to push up off the ground, but his assailant already had a knife in his hand and quickly put it to use. The blade sank into the back of the unfortunate attacker’s neck.
The fleshy sound of steel as it carved through meat and bone punctuated the end of the fight.
Savage grunted, straightened slowly, and scanned the room.
“Are you all right there, sir?” he asked and directed a concerned look at Anderson, who struggled to stay on his feet.
“I’m doing just fine, dog face,” he replied with a chuckle. He immediately regretted it, though, when his bruised ribs pressed painfully into the hardened ceramic plates. Savage hurried around the bar to support him and held him upright as they moved to the dining room, where he put the injured former colonel down on one of the seats.
“You have a through and through on your shoulder here,” he noted as he snatched one of the cloth napkins from the table and pressed it firmly against the injury. “And a hard hit to your vest. It looks like it kept you from getting turned into a kebab, though, so it was worth it.”
“It doesn’t…feel like it right now,” Anderson hissed through clenched teeth as the other man worked to undo the straps on his vest. “My wife will kill me if she sees you using the napkins she chose to treat a wound. I appreciate the effort, though. And…saving my life and all that.”
Savage smirked. “Well, it wasn’t the first time that I had to drag a man’s ass out of the fire that he jumped into his own damned self, and I doubt it’ll be the last.”
“Come on, man, I just got shot,” his boss retorted. “Twice.”
“And I just saved your damn life,” he replied with a smarmy grin. “And that of your family. So I get to take some shots too.”
His family. Right. “Oh, shit, Anja, are you there?”
“I am here, yes,” she replied through the house’s speakers.
“Well, that’s creepy.” The operative looked around and actually shuddered.
She didn’t answer him. “It’s good to know that the two of you are alive and well, Anderson. You should know that the cops and paramedics are already on the way. It seemed like the kind of situation that you might like to have on record.”
“Good call.” He shook his head when he remembered why he’d contacted her in the first place. “Could you let my wife know that it’s safe to come out again? It…is safe to come out again, right?”
“As far as I can tell,” Savage confirmed.
“Will do, Anderson,” she replied, and the speakers went quiet.
“Look,” he said as he helped the older man out of his vest.” I have someplace I need to be and some business I need to take care of in a very small and rapidly thinning window of opportunity. One that I’ll miss if I have to make statements and possibly get written up for shooting a bunch of people on your property. Not to mention that technically, I’m supposed to be well and truly off the radar. Will you cover for me?”
Anderson nodded. “Get out of here. I’ll handle the paperwork.”
“Appreciate it.” He almost patted the man on the shoulder but thought better of it. “Heal up, Colonel.”
Jeremiah left the dining room and walked slowly toward the door. It had been tough to go through this fight with all his previous injuries still fresh and definitely tender. He would have to see a doctor about it soon and maybe have a nice long nap and a couple of days of rest and relaxation after this. Before that, though, he had to hike through the afternoon heat back to his car and start driving. Anja had given him a timeline. While he had time, he wanted to be prepared for what he hoped was the last confrontation of this little corporate civil war.
He froze when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. There weren’t any men left, he reminded himself. And this wasn’t a man he now faced.
She was a taller woman, lean and beautiful in a modern and elegant kind of way. At the same time, she looked as hard as her husband, and her hands held the Glock in a perfect stance.
Well, almost perfect. He noted a young boy hiding behind her, his face pressed into her back to hold whimpers back.
Jeremiah’s hands came up slowly. “I’m not here to hurt you. I helped your husband eliminate the home invaders, and now, I’m leaving. He’s alive and well in the dining room. Alive, anyway.”
“It’s okay, Ivy,” Anderson shouted from the window. “He needs to get out of here.”
The woman hesitated. It was a good instinct, but her gun lowered slowly. The boy relaxed when she did so and immediately broke away from her to race toward his father’s voice.
“Thank you,” Ivy said softly. He responded with a nod and turned away to continue his retreat out the door.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Carlson took a large swallow of his drink and his lip snarled in displeasure. This hasn’t been one of my best weeks.
There were moments in his life that he considered to be victories. Finally taking over the company after his father’s death and after most of the board members had made it clear that they didn’t believe in him enough to give him the top spot was one of those. Proving them wrong had been how he’d earned his laurels in the business world and had been the foundation that brought him the respect of the people he had worked with and against. He’d shown them that he had the kind of ruthlessness and political skill that was called for in the upper echelons of company control.
Earning the first non-government contract for the goop that had come from the sky in what felt like forever ago was another. The board hadn’t wanted to share their finds and were determined to ensure that all the profits were strictly for the military. It had been him, though, who had strong-armed those assholes into sharing. Of course, that had eventually ended with the goop being sent to the Sahara and the whole clusterfuck it subsequently turned into. But he stood by his actions, especially in light of everything that they were learning and extracting from that place.
It had proven to be a tough gamble to stand by, but he had. He’d believed that what happened over there was the future of mankind and the little blue marble they called their home planet—and even the way humanity would actually reach beyond it. So much of the research he promoted went into keeping his company solvent despite massive expansions over recent years.
Of course, money was only there to keep the investors happy. Cash certainly helped to keep him in a relatively comfortable position, but what he really did all this for—his justification for using extreme measures to keep his place in the company—was the future of mankind.
Megalomania aside, he knew what he did was for his fellow man. He knew that if he actually told anyone about his plans, he would have to launch into a tirade like every other person who thought they could save the world with phrases like “greater good” and “bigger picture.” In reality, that was exactly the kind of conversation that nobody liked to have. It sounded too grandiose to be true, and when people actually counted the cost of what he did, they would back away.
Well, he assumed so, anyway. He hadn’t actually told anyone about his attempts to turn the goop extracted from the Zoo into fuel that could sustain the world’s needs once the oil wells ran dry. Or, for that matter, about the scientists involved in the research who told him that the byproducts from the goop’s usage went from negligible to beneficial to the environment. There were even tests that showed potential for fuel for rockets that could be sent into space which would weigh a quarter of what traditional fuel did and provide up to three times the burn rate. Everything was on the table with this stuff.
But now, he had to put a halt to it all because two people were small-minded regarding the sacrifices made. They would do their best to steal it all from him and use the equally small-minded policies of the men and women in government and thei
r power against him. It wasn’t fair, but it was life. He hadn’t expected to change the world single-handedly without a couple of obstacles along the way.
Carlson leaned back in his seat and toyed with the glass of apple juice in his hand. He had told himself that he would stop drinking so much and he had done precisely that. Of course, he would have preferred tomato juice since it would have served as a replacement for the Bloody Mary he usually had in the morning when he did this kind of cold-turkey quitting. But, with Linus gone, he’d had to find a replacement who wasn’t quite up to snuff.
He scowled at the glass as his limo pulled into the airport. Of course, he would have to put all his plans on hold as he would leave the country before the warrants and subpoenas started flooding in. Everything would have to wait until he finished his vacation. He would start in Switzerland, he decided—collect his resources and bring everyone up to speed on his situation. Maybe a couple of months in the Caymans would be beneficial too. That might make Monroe and Anderson think they had won before he returned with all the considerable might of his foreign allies behind him.
Since targeting them directly had failed so miserably, it was all he could do, really. In retrospect, his campaign had been a mistake, but he had reacted to their very aggressive business style that forced him into a situation he simply wasn’t comfortable with. It was annoying to have to work around people like that.
As they moved onto the tarmac, Carlson smiled at the sight of the corporate jet all ready and set for takeoff. There had been a hint of petty revenge on his mind when he’d made sure that the plane that would spirit him away from all his troubles was a company plane. His sense of satisfaction had marginally improved when he’d secured his current position in Pegasus and filed all the paperwork that would keep him on the payroll. In essence, he remained untouchable until he returned from his time abroad. He didn’t like having to accept small rewards like this, but they deserved it. That and much, much worse.