by Matt Rogers
It was futile to try moving.
Of course it had all gone to hell. What was the government thinking, entrusting the demolition of a mercenary force spread throughout San Francisco and its outer limits to a trio of solo operatives?
Regret flooded him.
He pictured the twin sicarios murdering him here in the wildlands, then peeling off to commandeer a civilian vehicle. That was all it would take. They could drive right up to the outskirts of the parade in total anonymity and park mere feet from the crowds. Then they would only have to get out, point, aim, and fire. There’d be bedlam, which would give them the opportunity to reload and empty fresh magazines, so they could probably kill fifty people by the time everyone scattered, even if there were armed police right there. It would take them mere seconds.
The wonders of modern weaponry, Slater thought.
That hypothetical scenario played out in his head, and synchronised with one of the sicarios stomping through the brush right by his head, looming over him with a sneer.
He drew a sidearm and aimed the barrel down at Slater’s exposed head.
A Mexican-style execution.
Up close and personal.
Poetic revenge for all his dead comrades.
But, Slater thought, you don’t play those fucking games with me. You shoot me from a distance.
So he shot a hand out and grabbed the sicario’s ankle and yanked it towards him and rolled into the guy at the same time, and the gun went off but the bullet smashed into the dirt inches away from Slater’s skull, which deafened him, but he ended up alive. And from there the momentum shifted as the guy tumbled off-balance and sat down on his rear on the forest floor, landing on his coccyx, which stunned him for the half-second it took for Slater to grab hold of his wrist and angle it upward and shove the barrel under the guy’s chin and crush his palm down on the guy’s trigger finger.
So the gun went off in his face and his brains came out the top of his head and Slater wrestled the USP .45 off him and sat up and traded a single bullet with the last sicario, like a classic Western.
The sicario’s bullet hit Slater at the top of his Kevlar vest, embedding half in, half out, crumpling him where he sat, tipping him over the edge, knocking him unconscious from the sheer dull force. His brain, overloaded with pain, simply gave up and retreated to murky darkness to recuperate. He sprawled out in the undergrowth, and a bystander would have assumed he’d dropped dead.
Slater’s bullet hit the sicario in the mouth.
It ripped through the back of his skull and came out the other side in a grisly exit wound.
The clearing went quiet.
94
Ruby turned the panic into motivation.
Something clicked inside her, and the reality that maybe hundreds would die if she didn’t get through this hit her like another punch from a two hundred pound man, and it changed the dynamic in an instant. She slipped the next punch, even though she couldn’t feel her nose or her jaw, and the guy’s fist crashed into the plasterboard behind her head, caving a hole in it.
He grimaced, and hesitated because he wasn’t used to having the tables turned on him by a slim woman, so when she delivered an uppercut elbow into the bridge of his nose and broke it so hard his eyes started to water, he froze up.
Like, Is this happening?
It most definitely was happening, because Ruby followed it up by lurching out of his grasp, utilising the power of leverage and angles to slide right out of his grip. Then she had space, and she ended up right on top of the Glock, so she picked it up and shot him in the head before he had the chance to realise that he’d lost.
Then the chaos faded, replaced by horrid silence.
Because silence only meant one thing.
Ruby ran for the front door.
She kicked it open and took cover in the entranceway, even though it left her vulnerable to return fire — right now, that was the least of her concerns. She saw the giant garage next to the clubhouse with its roller doors open. Vehicles spilled forth — pick-up trucks, ordinary sedans, even a couple of unassuming hatchbacks. True to their word, the mercs were scattering. There was no sign of Scachi’s cordon — no Army humvees flooding the street, no resistance whatsoever.
‘Where the fuck is he?’ Ruby snarled under her breath.
The first of the vehicles reached the road. It bounced and jolted across the sidewalk and came down on the asphalt. Then it was free of the driveway’s constraints. The driveway was narrow and congested and only allowed two cars to drive side by side, so there was a rudimentary bottleneck.
Ruby eyed a handful of mercs in each of the pick-up trucks’ rear trays, all armed to the teeth, and the hatchbacks were full, and the sedans had three or four men apiece.
There were at least twenty hostiles that she’d missed.
She raised her Glock to fire at them, but she knew she’d get killed as soon as they decided to return fire.
She was signing her own death warrant.
But if she took a couple of these bastards out of existence, then that was good enough for her.
Her finger tightened around the trigger.
Then a civilian truck — a big Ford Raptor — surged into view on the street. It came in at an angle and instead of slowing down to avoid a collision, it sped up. Its bull bar demolished the front of the first mercenary vehicle — an old pick-up truck designed to blend in. The pick-up spun and groaned and Ruby saw the occupants thrown around the inside like dolls tossed by a giant child.
They hadn’t been wearing seatbelts, obviously.
Before anyone could comprehend what was happening, the passenger window of the Raptor rolled down and someone hurled flash grenades like fastballs at the convoy clogged up in the driveway. Some skittered under cars, some went through open windows, some landed on hoods. They went off in a roaring cacophony, and Ruby had the good sense to dive back into the clubhouse so she didn’t get blinded and deafened by the destruction.
When she stuck her head back out, she half-expected to see a couple of Scachi’s best and brightest grunts pouring out of the Raptor, dressed in their military fatigues, guns blazing.
What she didn’t expect was a half-dead Jason King, bleeding from multiple cuts, his face blackened by dirt and dust and soot, leap out of the truck and charge like a demon at the neutralised vehicles.
95
Slater didn’t know how long he’d been out.
He cracked one eyelid open, then the other.
Everything hurt.
His life was pain, his world was pain.
He was on his back, in the undergrowth, surrounded by bodies.
He heard sirens in the distance.
They might as well have been coming from another planet.
He didn’t know if he’d make it.
He didn’t know how King was doing, or Ruby. Whether they’d succeeded or not. Whether, as he lay there, helpless and useless, innocent men, women and children were being massacred by automatic weapons on the streets of San Francisco.
There was no way to tell any of that.
So he lay there, hurting and throbbing, and when he realised unconsciousness wouldn’t come and rescue him again, he used all his effort to roll onto his side. He stared the corpse of the last sicario in the eyes, and realised it had taken some time for the man to die. Because there was a smartphone in his hand, clutched between cold bloody fingers, and the screen was on. He’d half-dialled a number before succumbing to his fatal wounds.
Slater reached out and plied the phone from the man’s death grip with shaking fingers.
He didn’t know why.
He figured, if he couldn’t move, at least he could check what he might have prevented.
Might was the crucial word.
He scrolled aimlessly, barely lucid, unsure what he was trying to do. The language was set to Spanish, and he only had a rudimentary grasp of the language.
So he opened the camera roll.
And he found a sinister phot
o album.
They were surveillance photos, taken live from the parade, timestamped to show they’d been taken only half an hour earlier and sent through for the sicario’s viewing pleasure. Like a macabre layout of the battleground. Showing the scores of pedestrians in position to be slaughtered.
Some were taken from CCTV cameras, and Slater wondered how deep the corruption ran.
Some were taken at street level.
He swiped, and swiped, and swiped, and stared at endless photos of happy, smiling families under a cloudless sky. They were oblivious to what could have happened.
To what might still happen.
Slater swiped again…
…and his heart stopped in his chest.
He nearly passed out.
He hunched over the screen, and zoomed in, aware that he was dripping blood over the smartphone.
But he had to know for sure.
And as he zoomed, his terror grew, until it almost overwhelmed him.
In the crowd, he saw the face of a child he’d sacrificed everything to protect. A child he’d considered his own, and treated as such. Shien had been through the worst a kid could imagine, and then some. She deserved the whole world, and everything in it, and he’d learned most of what he knew about mental resilience in later life from her. She was an eleven-year-old kid, but she was the best person he’d ever met, and he’d sacrifice himself a thousand times over to make sure she was okay. She was the family he’d never be able to have. She was the shred of humanity he’d held onto when his own life devolved into chaos again and again. She was the reason he couldn’t stay in one place, because if he did he’d end up settling down with someone, and he didn’t have the stomach to have a family that would be put in danger by the nature of his existence.
She’d taught him that, inadvertently, over the last couple of years. He hadn’t seen her in a long time, but that was the way it had to be.
Sometimes, you had to let go of the things that mattered most, so they could be allowed to grow.
And now here she was, standing in a crowd in downtown San Francisco with a smile on her face.
If there was even the slightest chance…
The pain overwhelmed Slater and he passed out, and his last wish before he slipped into a turbulent unconsciousness was that, above all else, she would be safe.
96
Ruby took a step forward.
She wobbled and fell.
When she righted herself, she was still on the front porch, but her vision was all over the place, and her temples throbbed and pulsated and hurt like hell. She realised the concussive blasts of the flash grenades had been too close for comfort. She’d put a wall between herself and the detonations, but the sheer volume of the noise had thrown her equilibrium off and deafened her. It was like moving through an old-school silent film — she saw King firing, she saw the muzzle flashes, she saw him sprinting and punching and kicking and brawling, but she heard none of it. And there were missing frames — he jolted from one place to the next, moving too fast for her disrupted vision to handle. Like freeze frames, inching forward.
She tried to aim the Glock but she could barely lift it to shoulder height.
She vomited on the porch, letting it splatter between her feet.
She straightened up, and wiped her mouth, and fought the urge to pass out.
It all opened up before her, in beautiful simplicity. Through the carnage, she saw everything moving like chess pieces on a board. King was in the driveway, fighting his heart out, cutting down mercenaries left and right who couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even stand up. But he was maximally preoccupied with that endeavour, and to the side of the convoy, Ruby spotted one of the pick-up trucks fire up its engine. She peered through the tinted window and made out a merc in the driver’s seat with a balaclava over his face, his eyes shielded by sunglasses. He seemed disoriented, but he wasn’t out for the count. There was a guy in the passenger’s seat, and three more in the back of the cabin.
They all had weapons.
Rifles, sidearms, even a shotgun.
But they didn’t use them on King, or Ruby.
Instead the driver floored the accelerator and the truck twisted out of the vehicular wasteland and sliced through a gap at the front of the driveway. Paint chipped off the chassis as it forced its way past the Raptor. Then it was out on the street, free of the logjam.
King didn’t notice.
He was locked in a rabid brawl with three blind mercenaries, smashing fists into faces, kneeing them in the head, scrabbling for his own weapon.
Ruby saw it all.
It was straightforward.
It was clear.
It was inevitable.
She started running before she was stable, but it didn’t matter. She somehow stayed on her feet and focused in on the idle Raptor, chugging throatily as it rested nose-first in the demolished pick-up truck. She leapt over the hood of the pick-up, skirted around to the driver’s side, got in, threw the car into reverse, and stamped on the accelerator.
With an almighty groan the Raptor peeled out into the street.
Ruby spotted the pick-up loaded with juiced-up mercenaries in her rear view mirror.
She spun the Raptor in a tight arc, held on for dear life, and surged forward.
She knew what was at stake.
She wouldn’t fail.
She couldn’t.
Then the worst-case scenario unfolded.
One of those awful, ill-timed coincidences that nature seemed oblivious to.
No-one was favoured in the heat of combat — bad luck fell to either party in equal measure, regardless of innocence — and she learned that the hard way.
She noticed her door was hanging open, and as the Raptor accelerated, she reached over to snatch the handle out of thin air and heard a dull, muted clattering noise at her waist.
A perfectly innocuous gesture.
She looked down, and watched the Glock slide off the seat by her hip and disappear out the open door.
Fuck.
97
Turn around to retrieve it, and she’d lose the pick-up forever. She had no chance of finding the vehicle with a twenty-second delay. The streets were narrow, and the corners were tight, and suburbia would swallow it into its gaping jaws and spit it out unharmed at the outskirts of the parade.
Because wherever the hell General Scachi was, he wasn’t making any effort to get involved.
Ruby had her suspicions.
She swore and pulled the door closed and accelerated. Then she tapped her earpiece and said, ‘Violetta.’
‘Yes?’
‘Where the fuck is Scachi?’
‘I’m trying to get in touch with him.’
‘What?’
‘He’s not responding.’
‘Of course he isn’t.’
‘I’ll keep trying—’
‘Tell me something,’ Ruby said. ‘Do you have any reason to believe he wouldn’t be susceptible to bribes?’
‘He’s a General in the—’
‘That’s not an answer.’
Silence.
Then, ‘No, nothing concrete.’
Ruby said, ‘Start thinking along those lines.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘You can see me?’
‘We’re tracking the earpiece.’
Ruby swerved through an intersection in pursuit of the pick-up truck, narrowly avoiding a collision with a semi-trailer. The truck horn blared, startling her, and she corrected course in time to shoot between the rest of the traffic. Cars swerved, more horns shrieked, and the pick-up raced away from her, gaining ground as she had to slow to navigate through the chaos.
But she kept her hands on the wheel and said, ‘Get anything you can to intercept me right now. I’m on the tail of one pick-up truck. It got away.’
‘Are there any others?’
‘King’s dealing with them.’
‘King?!’
‘H
e’s alive. He must have handled his business in Dogpatch, because he came straight to the clubhouse.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Still there.’
‘Okay — so it’s just the one truck?’
‘There’s five of them in it, and they’ve all got rifles. They could kill fifty people before I get my hands on them.’
‘Okay, okay… we’re tracking you. We’ll do what we can. Christ, you’re moving fast.’
‘If I crash, it’s all over.’
‘I have to go. I need to coordinate this.’
‘Go.’
Ruby surged forward, urging the Raptor faster, risking death at every sharp turn. There was no consideration for the rules of the road — the pick-up she was chasing barrelled through intersection after intersection, missing oncoming traffic by a hair’s breadth each time. They roared through Bernal Heights, then the Mission District, and Ruby knew exactly where they were headed.
Market Street.
Where the festivities began, early in the morning.
The pick-up charged through another intersection and Ruby clenched her teeth and followed. She saw a civilian sedan racing in from the left-hand side in her peripheral vision, but she’d already racked up nearly a dozen near-misses in the row, which gave her some semblance of confidence, so she—
Smash.
The sedan crunched into the Raptor’s rear tray and threw the whole truck off-course. The Ford was a big beast and Ruby barely felt the impact amidst the adrenaline, but the tyres screeched on the asphalt and the whole thing threatened to careen onto the sidewalk and wrap itself around a tree.
She fought for control.
She got it.
But it put her even further behind, and now the reality was truly drilling in.
You don’t have a gun.
She had her knife, slotted neatly into the holster at her waist, but that wouldn’t cut it against five armed mercenaries, probably stimulated to the eyeballs, almost certainly sporting a collective half-century of experience under their belts. These weren’t idiots — they were trained killers, and they’d get rid of her in a heartbeat if she let them.