“I’m fine now,” I said as I very slowly got to my feet. I was shaky, but I could feel more strength had returned. I was maybe at 20 percent now — if we’re being generous. As I stood, I scanned the room again. My eyes were still having trouble focusing, but the mercenaries in black standing around the edges of the room stood out well against the hostages all forced to crouch in the center.
“Let’s get you out of here,” the blonde said, motioning two soldiers toward me.
“Wait!” I shouted, as loudly as my hoarse voice would allow. “There’s something important you need to know.”
“Maybe it’s best you tell us in private,” the woman suggested, gently helping steady me.
“No. You need to know about this now,” I said, ignoring her and focusing on Collazo and his violent grin. “It’s about Nar Valdum. About the man who did the attack there.” The Rubicon was crossed. Ready or not, this was happening. More adrenaline.
Collazo raised an eyebrow. “You mean the Angel of Death? What about him?”
“You aware of what he did?” I asked, taking a step toward Collazo. Some pillars in the room were blocking things. So were the mercenaries near me. “How he locked himself in a room with hundreds of armed people? And how he killed absolutely every last one of them?”
Collazo laughed. “Everyone is aware. Everyone in the universe saw that.”
I took another step toward him. I could see everyone now. The perfect spot. “So you saw what that man did? Good.” Sure, I was barely standing, aching all over, and not able to make out more than a few feet in front of me, but what is all that except a handicap to try to make this fair?
But life isn’t fair.
I took a deep breath, and then I stood as tall and as straight as I could, looking Collazo right in the eyes. “Then what’s about to happen should be familiar.” And I smiled that smile where I give people a glimpse into my soul, and as that smile grew, Collazo’s finally faded away.
My name is Rico, and I am going to be the universe’s greatest hero.
CHAPTER 2
Let me tell you a little about myself. I was created, so to speak, in an experiment using the modified genes of —
On second thought, you don’t care about all that. Let’s get back to how I was unarmed in a hospital gown surrounded by armed mercenaries, yet about to kill everyone. So just briefly, I’m a psychopath, and I’m really good at killing, but recent events had made me decide to make a change in my life. I’ll fill you in on the specifics when they’re relevant.
Now, as has been established, I was not in great shape. But really, how in shape do you have to be to gun down a dozen people? Here: I want you to hold up your hand and extend only your index finger. Now flex it twelve times as fast you can. There — you just gunned down a dozen people.
Still, that might not be fast enough when other people have guns in hand and will quickly fire back. So now hold up both hands and extend your index fingers. Now flex both of them six times as fast as you can. There — killed every mercenary in that room. And I don’t know a thing about you, but I can say with great certainty that you didn’t do that as fast as I can. I’ve had a lot of practice. Practice that doesn’t just dissipate because I had a couple-months-long nap.
Well, yes, it’s slightly more complicated than that. You need to be pointing your finger at a different person in the room with each flex — something my muscle memory will very much help me with. Plus — and here is one of those specifics I was saving until it was relevant — there’s actually a split portion of my brain that can act independently and handle simple tasks such as aiming, which allows me to easily take on a target with each hand at the same time.
Of course, beyond quickly aiming and flexing my two index fingers, I need two triggers for those fingers to press against. That’s the final key to gunning down a room full of people: guns. There were no guns on me — there was probably some hospital policy against arming coma patients because of insurance or something — but luckily there were lots of guns near me. Like the two sidearms holstered on the mercenaries right behind me. So all I needed was to take one step back, and then my hands were resting on the grips of two firearms. And that was the end of everyone in the room whom I didn’t care to let live.
The two I had taken the guns from were the first to go, as that didn’t take much aim and got me warmed up after being out of it for so long. I then backhanded the blonde to get her out of the way and opened fire on the rest. Yes, my vision still wasn’t great, but all I needed to do was aim at center mass on all the black blurs around the room — though it was certainly possible I murdered a coat rack in the process.
Last I turned to Collazo — the only remaining threat — who had finally gotten over the initial shock and was moving to action. He was close enough for me to see clearly, and both guns fired his way. The rifle shattered in his hands and his sidearm was burned off his hip, causing him to fall to the floor. I took a couple quick steps toward him, which made me a little dizzy (I was still not in the best of shape), and pointed one gun down at him. “So what exactly is Mountain Fall? I have to say, you people have piqued my curiosity.”
I heard murmuring around me and finally remembered the hundreds of people I was saving. “There should be some guns lying around,” I shouted. “If anyone knows how to use them, grab them and watch the doors. You’ll all be fine if you listen to me and keep cool heads.” That last part had no basis in fact. I was completely winging it and still coming up with step two, which quite possibly might have been “Get gunned down by reinforcements.” Except I was the hero and needed to reassure people. Plus I’ve found that if you talk with an authoritative voice, everyone just assumes you know what you’re doing.
I saw a few people scramble for the blasters, and I had to fight that ingrained urge to shoot all potential threats that had kept me alive for so long. One of the people was Sylvia, and I did keep an eye on her. Her focus was on the blonde woman, though, and as soon as Sylvia had a gun, she pointed it at the pretty young thing sitting on the floor clutching a bloody face. “Mission has changed, Wade,” she said, I assumed into her still active radio. “We have captured a Messenger. We need a plan to extract her. We’re in the cafeteria. All hostiles down, but I don’t know how many are out there or whether they know what’s happened.”
“Any rescue plan probably involves handling the gunship that’s in orbit,” Dip told me. “No ships are getting near here or taking off from here while it’s active.”
“I’ll just take down a gunship then,” I mumbled. It wasn’t entirely rational, but I really wanted some pants just then. I turned to Collazo. “Hey, buddy, you want to call off your gunship? There’s no Laurence Dunn here, so your whole mission is null and void — you’re definitely not getting paid. And if you look deep into my eyes, you’ll realize there is no limit to what I will do to you.”
Collazo was scared. But not just of me. “We’re all dead now! Don’t you understand? You’ve killed us all!”
“No. Not yet.” I looked at the dead bodies of the mercenaries around me that I could still barely make out. “I’ve killed most of you. So far. If you want a limit on that, tell the gunship to leave.”
“I ... I can’t call it off.” He was absolutely terrified. His eyes were on the blonde woman who had now gotten to her feet — the Messenger, as Sylvia called her.
“You’re not Laurence Dunn,” the blonde woman said, still clutching her face.
“No, not an accountant,” I answered. “Not really a math guy. I’m only good at subtraction. So, sunshine, you’re in charge here?”
She took her hand down from her bloody face and met my eyes. What struck me was that she was the only one in the room other than me who didn’t look scared. “No, I am a Messenger for the Fathom. They are in charge, and they have seen what has happened here against the rightful Galactic Alliance. There will be consequences for this.”
There were gasps, and I could see a panic spread through the room. Everyone se
emed to know what she meant, and they were terrified. I apparently had missed a lot in the past couple months.
Collazo was on his feet. “Our people are still here!” he yelled at the blonde woman.
“You’ve failed,” she said. “And now all that is left is to set an example of what happens when people try to sow the seeds of chaos.”
“No! Tell them to give us a chance!” Collazo yelled, rushing toward her, but as soon as his hands grabbed her white dress, a bolt ripped through him and he fell dead.
“We need her alive,” Sylvia said, the barrel of her gun steaming.
“No one is leaving this planet alive,” the Messenger answered. She regarded me with a crooked smirk on her face that I instantly wanted to wipe off. She stood there like she was still in charge of the situation and that I and my guns were inconsequential. “Unless you come with me. The Fathom are interested in who you are, and they will not obliterate this area if you surrender now.”
I raised an eyebrow. “So you’re in contact with these ‘Fathom’? Can I talk to them?”
“You talk to me, they hear you. And I will tell you what they say.”
I chuckled. “So you’re just a cute little phone? So why are the Fathom so secret? Why are they hiding? What are they afraid of?”
“I assure you, they are not afraid of anything in this universe.”
I smiled my special smile, and the woman’s expression finally cracked slightly with fear. “We’ll see about that. My only other question for the Fathom is what color do they bleed, but don’t tell me. I like to be surprised.”
“Do you not understand what’s going on here?” she yelled at me, suddenly boiling with indignant anger. “You’re in no position to threaten them. No one is. They will —”
“Okay, I’m done talking to them,” I interrupted. “How do I hang you up?”
“You think this is funny?!” the blonde woman shouted. “What happens next is —”
I picked up a napkin dispenser from a nearby table and hurled it, pegging her in the head and dropping her.
“I need her alive!” Sylvia screamed at me.
I shrugged. “She’s alive.” Probably.
“Do you understand what having a Messenger could mean for us?” Sylvia asked.
“Obviously not. I’ve been in a coma for the past two months. People need to stop shouting at me.”
“It was a little excessive hitting an unarmed woman like that,” Dip chided me.
No, it wasn’t. Lay off me. I have lives to save.
I turned to all the people in the room. Most were still terrified, but many were looking at me with something other than fear, something that I was quite unaccustomed to ever have had aimed in my direction: hope. “You’re all going to be okay,” I assured, fueling that fire. “I know how scary the threat out there must seem, but now something much scarier is about to go after it.”
“Are you really the Angel of Death?” a middle-aged man asked. He was in a patient’s gown like me, and a woman in regular clothes stood next to him — wife, maybe. Two smaller humans were also with him. Their kids, I guessed. Just regular, boring, uninteresting people like I’ve seen countless times. Once again, logic intruded on how pointless and stupid this all was. But cold reason had been pushed to the back seat; otherwise I’d already have been off this planet.
I motioned to the mercenaries who lay dead in the room. “That proof enough I am who I say I am? Or do you want more?” I smiled. I tried to make it a little less scary. Don’t think I succeeded. “Let’s give you more proof.” I turned to Sylvia. “You have access to a vehicle, right?”
“Yes,” she answered curtly, still keeping an eye on the Messenger, who wasn’t moving. “My partner is about to come through the door,” she announced to the newly armed people in the room. “Let him through.”
The door opened, and in walked a tall, fit man with his hands up who looked a bit more the government agent type than Sylvia did. “Wade. I’m with the Galactic Alliance,” he said to the civilians with guns, who seemed more than a little nervous. Wade cautiously assessed the room, soon zeroing in on me and heading toward me and Sylvia.
“What happens now?” asked a woman in scrubs.
“We’re figuring that out,” Wade said with a reassuring smile, very much pretending this was all under control. The smile faded when he looked at Sylvia and down at the Messenger. “What happened here?”
Sylvia motioned to me. “Not Laurence Dunn. The Angel of Death, apparently.”
Wade looked at the dead mercenaries. “Apparently.”
“Call me Rico,” I said. “You guys have a ship?”
Sylvia crept closer to me and whispered. “I’m not sure exactly who you are, but I think you are someone of interest to the Galactic Alliance. Wade can get us and our prisoner out of here. But we have to move fast. I just received word that this planet’s defense shield is failing. Something is taking it out.”
“We’re going to be hit with an aerial attack?” I asked, matching her whisper. Some of the other people in the room were looking at us suspiciously, and for good reason.
She took a deep breath. “Think bigger. Think weaponry we haven’t seen on such a scale since the Galactic War. You’ve missed a lot these past couple months, Mr. Angel of Death — you haven’t seen what the Fathom do. As soon as the planetary shield is down, everyone for miles and miles is going to be obliterated.”
“The gunship is going to do that?”
“No. Something else is coming,” Wade told me. “And we need to be gone before it arrives.”
That put into context all the frightened stares my way. They did know exactly what was about to happen, as they’d seen whatever it was happen before. I said the obvious hero thing. “We have to save all these people.”
“I don’t think we can,” Wade explained. “The Fathom are coming, and the only thing to do now is get off planet. There is a transport docked nearby that’s large enough for everyone here, but it will get shot out of the sky by the gunship as soon it gets altitude. We have a stealth craft that should be able to get by the gunship, but ... we’re about all that will be able to fit on it.”
Sylvia lowered her voice even more. “There’s nothing we can do to save all these people. But this woman ...” She pointed to the unconscious Messenger girl. “She could give us information on the Fathom that could help save billions from death or brutal dictatorship. You have to try to understand the stakes here.”
She’s giving me the pragmatic argument. Usually I’d be the pragmatist.
“You can’t really be sure what she’s telling you is true,” Dip said. “I don’t have the information to verify the extent of what’s going on.”
I can’t heroically sneak away to save myself, for sure. And I’d be doing it to help her government — and I hate governments.
Heroic stupid thing it was. “What sort of gunship is up there?” I asked Wade.
“It’s a giant Sentinel-class ship. There’s not really anything —”
“Oh! I know that one! Does your stealth ship have basic safety features — like an emergency spacesuit?”
Wade raised an eyebrow. “Yes, but —”
I stepped by Wade and Sylvia and looked at the frightened group of people watching us. “This nurse and this guy here are secret government agents,” I said, pointing at Sylvia and Wade. “From a good government — presumably. At least better than whatever government the space boogeymen with their killer squads are claiming to head. Anyway, they are going to make sure you all get to safety. They’re going to take you to a transport nearby to get you off planet.”
Sylvia glared at me with exasperation for my second betrayal of her, but at least no one was going to hit her this time. I ignored her and looked at Wade. “So where’s your ship?”
Wade appeared baffled. “What are you planning?”
“Heroics.” I heard a noise. There was a radio on Collazo’s corpse. I picked it up.
“Come in, Collazo. This is the Burk
holder. We’re waiting for a report.”
“Are you the gunship?” I asked.
“Who is this?”
“This is the Angel of Death. I’ve killed everyone here, and now I’m coming for you.” I dropped the radio on the floor and shot it.
I noticed Sylvia was glaring at me again. “What the hell was that for?” she screamed. “Now everyone out there knows something is wrong in here!”
That was a good point. “Sorry, force of habit. I like letting them know I’m coming. Anticipation is part of the fun.”
Dip chimed in. “You might need to use different tactics for saving people than you used as a hitman.”
I gave it a second’s thought. Nah.
All the civilians looked quite scared again. I tried an expression of calm confidence to assure them — not one of my more well-practiced expressions. “It’s going to be all right. I’m about to give them something much bigger be concerned about than you.” I turned to Wade. “Where’s the ship?”
“We’re not giving some random crazy our ship,” Sylvia growled at me.
I waved my hand at all the dead bodies. “Do I really need to threaten you? Now, nurse, do you want to live, get your prize ...” I nudged the Messenger with my foot, “and save all these people, or not?”
“You’re going to take down the gunship?” Wade asked as he cautiously looked at the people around us who were also following this conversation. “Didn’t you just wake from a coma?”
“Yeah, I’ll probably want a follow-up doctor’s appointment on that,” I said. “Your ship.”
“We have a Messenger!” Sylvia pleaded with Wade. “We have to leave with her now!”
“To do that,” I told her, “you’d have to fight your way through me and all the innocent people in this room.” Most people don’t like killing innocents; I was assuming Wade and Sylvia were in that category.
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