Weapons

by Matt Rogers

  But the second guy thought she was, and he reached for her with outstretched arms, probably to pull her down to the ground and subdue her there so he could have his way with her.

  What he should have done was throw a punch into her chin, using the considerable size advantage to smash her unconscious.

  Instead she slashed four of his fingers off in one go, and he screamed and she slid the whole blade into his stomach and wrenched it out, and he collapsed too.

  The third guy muscled his dying friend out of the way, sending him spilling to the floor, recognising how important it was that he didn’t hesitate. So he came in fast, and Ruby wasn’t prepared, and he wrapped his beefy arms around her in a crushing bear hug, nearly breaking her ribs in the process.

  He started to squeeze.

  At that point the fourth guy barrelled in and swung a massive haymaker right at Ruby’s unprotected face, which would have destroyed her if it connected. She was possibly the most dangerous female on the planet, but that did little to help defy the laws of physics. If an angry two-hundred pound ball of muscle hit her in the nose with a giant wind-up punch, she’d be dead or unconscious on impact.

  But it didn’t connect, because she turned her wrist inward and sliced the Ka-Bar blade along the wrist of the guy holding her, who howled as his skin peeled apart and blood ran down over his fingers. Which loosened his grip, allowing her to shoot downward into a half-squat, and the fourth guy’s punch came over her head and hit the third guy square in the chest, probably cracking his sternum, definitely freezing him up.

  He loosened his grip even more, so she spun around and took advantage of it by cutting his throat.

  Then she turned back and intercepted another giant looping haymaker punch with her knife blade.

  The guy ended up punching the knife.

  It was a horrific result.

  Ruby didn’t concentrate on how badly she’d mangled the guy’s hand — she never focused on anything that didn’t matter in the heat of combat. Instead she stepped forward and wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and punctured his ribcage once, twice, three times, driving the knife upward into his heart with each stabbing motion.

  He was dead before he hit the floor.

  She wiped the blade on one of their corpses, stepped over the bodies, and left the room.

  There’d been grunts.

  There’d been shouts.

  There’d been screams.

  She heard movement all through the clubhouse — frantic energy being released as mercenaries rocketed out of bed and snatched up their weapons.

  She stood at the end of the corridor, covered in blood, panting with exertion, and swore under her breath.

  She touched her earpiece and said, ‘Violetta.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell Scachi to try the cordon. I think some of them are going to escape.’

  ‘How many have you killed?’

  ‘Not enough.’

  ‘If we do this, we’ll be understaffed for King and Slater. We won’t be able to help them.’

  Ruby hesitated, but the commotion was increasing — there was sounds of banging and jumping and footsteps from seemingly everywhere at once.

  ‘I need it,’ she said. ‘There’s more here than I thought.’

  ‘Christ — okay.’

  The line went dead.

  Ruby was alone, surrounded by mercenaries.

  Alone in a hostile world.

  90

  King stood still as a statue with the vest and detonator clutched between his fingers.

  He said, ‘Cody, listen to me. Are you one hundred percent certain there’s no hope of helping them?’

  Cody stared at him skeptically. ‘You think you’re going to repeat that performance another twelve times?’

  King said, ‘Fuck.’

  Cody said, ‘Take a look, man. They’re down there.’

  King froze. ‘What?’

  Cody gestured through the door he’d come from. ‘You can see them. Step inside, but be quiet about it. They’re all down on the ground floor.’

  ‘Why are you up here, then?’

  ‘I needed space. They didn’t care, once they had the vest on me. They knew it wasn’t going anywhere. Even if I could find a knife, I couldn’t reach the cable ties.’

  King imagined what would have happened had he arrived a few minutes later — he let the gravity of it sink in.

  He said, ‘Wait here.’

  He crept forward over the threshold, and that was all it took. He could see right down through the interior metal walkway, through the grille flooring, to the bottom of the warehouse. This section of the building was arranged like a hollowed-out arena, with room for all sorts of multi-storey machinery. Right now it was a gargantuan cavern, entirely empty, with the walkways on each floor arranged like viewing platforms in a colosseum.

  King looked straight down, and saw a vision of hell.

  There were twelve men in various states of distress, most of them similar in appearance to Cody, sitting bolt upright on portable camping chairs arranged in the centre of the concrete wasteland. They were all sweating and shaking, but they weren’t protesting. Basic human instinct was kicking in, but psychosis was overriding it. They were all wearing vests with plastic explosive strapped to the front, and two Middle-Eastern men were conducting last-minute checks, hunched over the vests, moving from man to man and whispering muted reassurances in their ears. Around this macabre display, four or five mercenary types patrolled the ground floor, rifles in their hands, searching for any hint of a threat.

  None of them looked up.

  The whole place, despite its size, had the stench of fear and desperation.

  King backed out onto the fire stairs, and said, ‘Why’d they let you go first?’

  ‘I’m the most lucid,’ Cody said. ‘They thought if I was around the others, I’d have too much time to second guess myself, and they didn’t want me convincing them to change their minds. Which is a dumb idea, because I know the others won’t.’

  ‘Cody,’ King said, and the pale man stared at him.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I need to ask you something again.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I need you to take it very, very seriously.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Are you sure they’re beyond saving?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay.’

  King hardened his heart.

  You can’t protect everyone.

  War is made of impossible choices. King had been determined, no matter what, to neutralise the active hostiles — the mercenaries, the ISIS guns-for-hire — and subdue the suicide bombers as best he could. Because they weren’t suicide bombers — they were psychotically ill, and they’d been preyed upon and taken advantage of. Then again, he guessed that was the case for most bombers. Everyone is the same after radicalisation.

  And, in any case, they already had the vests on.

  The situation was irredeemable.

  So King had a decision to make.

  And he made it quickly.

  Because what other choice did he have?

  He sized up the gap between the fire stairs and the neighbouring warehouse. There was an old grimy window one floor below, across the alleyway. It looked set to shatter at the slightest provocation. He lined up the angles, but they weren’t favourable. It didn’t matter. This was the only way. In seconds, the bombers would be on their feet, and who knows how long it’d take them to scatter out of all the exits?

  Then they’d be en route to the festival.

  King said, ‘Cody.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Brace yourself.’

  He stepped back into the shadows of the warehouse’s upper levels, and with two fingers he gently peeled a layer of tape off the detonator. Now the button was half-exposed, and the slightest disturbance might break the rest of the tape free and set off the explosives.

  King let a cloud of focus descend over him.


  He muttered, ‘I’m sorry.’

  He threw the vest, and the detonator, over the railing.

  Then he sprinted back outside and bent down and heaved Cody off the walkway like he weighed nothing, and he hurled the man over one shoulder and put one foot on the low railing and pushed off it, and he was airborne, with nothing but a plummeting drop to the concrete below but he cleared the width of the alleyway and crashed down through the glass window of the neighbouring building, which cut him to pieces, but he kept falling and they landed on a metal flight of stairs somewhere inside the darkened interior, and he let go of Cody and they fell and bounced and spun down the staircase until…

  Thirteen suicide vests detonated in the building next door.

  91

  Slater had the Galil at shoulder height as he burst into the clearing’s outer limits.

  And his stomach fell.

  It was bedlam. There were three camper vans — all in motion — and another RV, the same size as the first two.

  He stayed low, underneath some scrub, and tapped his earpiece again. ‘Violetta.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is bad.’

  ‘We don’t have the resources, Will. Seems that King just blew up half of Dogpatch. It’s chaos.’

  ‘Holy shit. Is he alive?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Got to go.’

  He noticed the three vans were turning in half-circles, powering for the trail leading out of the clearing, back onto the main road. Thankfully, that rested only a few dozen feet to Slater’s right — their trajectory lined up with where he lay.

  He stood up and shot out the tyres of the first van.

  It veered off-track and shuddered to a halt, cutting off the path of the other two. One of the other vans powered around it, and a Mexican sicario with an AK-47 leant out the passenger window.

  Slater shot him in the chest, then shot each of that van’s tyres in turn.

  It ground to a halt in the gravel.

  The third van roared toward the trail, and Slater shot at the tyres and missed. Everything went to hell — the vehicle kept speeding and Slater saw glimpses of five or six men through the windows and he knew, if he let it get through, there’d be blood on the streets. Because their closeness to death would invigorate them, flood their brain with stress chemicals before they’d even started shooting, so they’d charge toward the festival — or any civilians they could get their hands on — with rabid intensity.

  So Slater emptied the entire magazine at the van.

  A couple of rounds grazed the front tyres and they both popped, and the speed at which the van was travelling made it plunge forward on its nose, grinding to a standstill in the earth.

  Sicarios piled out of all three vans at once, spilling out the doors with automatic weapons in their hands, and at the same time the RV pulled up from behind and more men piled out of that, too. Thankfully the vans had formed a rudimentary cordon around the mouth of the trail, preventing the RV from skirting around. So Slater had funnelled them into a bottleneck, but that was the least of his concerns as close to fifteen men emptied out of the vehicles.

  He crouched lower in the brush and realised the Galil was dry.

  Pulse racing, he reloaded, using a spare magazine he’d slotted into his belt. But he was intensely aware that this was his second-last clip, and if he expended these two he’d be wielding a sidearm in an open gunfight with a dozen cartel sicarios.

  He didn’t like his chances.

  He fired, and fired, and fired — picking his targets based on a predetermined threat list. He killed three of the closest men who’d spilled out of the first van — they all had Kalashnikovs in their hands, and they had the highest likelihood of spraying bullets into the scrub and gunning him down in the initial barrage.

  They dropped and spun and pirouetted, and Slater turned to fire on the others and—

  Bang.

  Thwack.

  Bang.

  Thwack.

  He took two bullets to the chest.

  Both smashed into him with ferocity, knocking him off his feet. The Kevlar stopped them in their tracks but the blunt force trauma resonated through his core, rattling him deeply. He figured he’d cracked his sternum, or a couple of ribs, as he sat up in the woods and white-hot pain creased through him. He grunted and snarled and quashed it down, but there was little he could do. It was overriding his system, threatening to neutralise him on the spot.

  But he battled his way back to his feet and hefted the Galil back onto his shoulder and killed the two men who’d shot him with twin headshots.

  The pain was making him alert, and the alertness gave him clarity. Maybe it was a second wind before he collapsed for good, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to take advantage of it.

  So he fired, again and again and again, picking targets off like they were cardboard cutouts. The insanity blurred together into a never-ending stream of bloody consciousness, and he continued popping targets in the face, neck and chest until the Galil ran dry once more.

  With a pang of sudden understanding, he realised there were only two sicarios left. Out of the entire force sent over the border — the best hitmen of the multi-billion dollar Sinaloa cartel — Slater had decimated all but two of them. He couldn’t comprehend it. Sure, it came down to a simple equation — talent, plus genetic reflexes, plus a decade of experience, plus the advantage of cover, plus the element of surprise, plus the capacity to remain deadly calm in conflict, equalled an unparalleled killing machine.

  But it surprised him all the same.

  He lowered himself into cover, reached down to extract the final magazine from his belt…

  And a hail of bullets smacked through the brush into him.

  It was a perfectly placed volley, a display of marksmanship so precise that it had to have been a fluke. But luck was impartial in a firefight. It fell to whoever ended up with it, often by chance, and it didn’t discriminate. Now it meant that three or four rounds passed over Slater’s head and on either side of his shoulders, missing his brain, keeping him alive … but three rounds hit him in the chest again, one after the other — thwack-thwack-thwack.

  They destroyed his insides.

  He felt his bones break.

  He felt his insides bleed.

  He collapsed to the forest floor for the final time.

  And the two remaining sicarios advanced on their crippled enemy.

  92

  Ruby pulled her Glock, because stealth was no longer a factor.

  And lucky she did, because two mercenaries stormed into the corridor — atypical guns-for-hire, with big bushy beards and big muscles and big guns in their hands. Ruby shot one in the forehead and the other in the throat, but she was rattled, and she knew the unease would compound if she allowed it to. Her heart would beat faster and her blood would run colder and her head would pound with hypertension.

  She took a deep breath.

  Then she ran flat out down the corridor, understanding she’d be trapped in a bottleneck if she stayed put. She sprinted past Phil’s room and leapfrogged the two dead mercenaries and chanced a look into the communal area of the clubhouse.

  A hail of bullets assaulted her.

  She threw herself back in the blink of an eye, capitalising on reflexes honed over years of combat, and nearly lost her footing in the process. Shredded wood splintered off the door frame and lashed her face and chest and arms, but she turned her head away to preserve her eyes.

  She stumbled, righted herself, and took a knee inside the entranceway.

  She raised the gun to shoulder height.

  The mercenary with the rifle came charging in, probably thinking he’d hit her in the barrage, but he hadn’t come close. She figured there was some sort of gender bias there — this little bitch isn’t any type of threat — but he paid for his hubris with a 9mm round planted squarely between his eyes. His head snapped back on his shoulders and he dropped the gun — an M4A1 carbine — and splayed
to the floor under the archway.

  Ruby snatched it up and swept the room and found no resistance. Bullets came through the front windows and dotted the communal area at random. One whisked past her — so close she could feel it — and she fell back out of necessity.

  From outside?

  There must have been multiple ways out of the clubhouse, which meant some of the mercenaries were already on the front lawn, which meant they had access to vehicles, which meant…

  Ruby touched her earpiece as she heard someone outside roar, ‘Scatter! The job needs doing! Let’s get it done!’

  She swore and hissed, ‘Violetta.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Where’s Scachi?’

  ‘En route.’

  ‘How close?’

  ‘They’re trying to approach from multiple directions but the logistics are a nightmare. There’s so many streets they can flee down. Do you know which direction they’re headed?’

  ‘No. I’m inside.’

  ‘Have they found vehicles?’

  ‘I’m not sure if—’

  ‘Find out!’ Violetta barked. ‘We need license plates if you can get them.’

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘Hurry.’

  She could hear the panic leaching through Violetta’s tone. She wondered how King and Slater were faring, but there was no time to think about—

  A closed door only a couple of feet to her right was hurled open from the inside and a thick muscular body crash-tackled her into the opposite wall, smashing the breath from her lungs, nearly immobilising her. She dropped the gun as a fist smashed her face and she realised one of the mercs had been lying in wait, preparing for an opportunity to charge. He’d been sitting there in his bedroom, unarmed, and now he’d pounced.

  She took another punch to the jaw, and saw stars, and realised the mercs outside were getting away.

  She panicked.

  93

  Slater couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t think.

  He clutched his chest, but that didn’t help. Then he saw silhouettes advancing toward him through the woods and patted the dirt around him feebly, searching for his weapon. It had ended up somewhere nearby when he’d dropped it, but if it was out of reach, it might as well have been a hundred miles away.