by S A Gardner
I retrieved our specially designed spring-piston, multi-dart air guns components. I reassembled two with scopes, the procedure melting to completion in my hands in under a minute.
Ammo was my patented ballistic syringes. I’d gone through extensive redesigns to optimize spin and drag and maximize accuracy for my projectiles. On impact with the target—at just outside transonic speed for stability—the momentum of a steel ball at the rear of the dart pushed the plunger. It pumped my designer concoction of choice even through body armor.
Not that I favored that option, but it was good to have it. A major muscle group, and better still a major blood vessel were the targets of choice for our tranq/lethal injection guns. Those got the desired, almost instantaneous effects.
The only drawback was we only had five darts at a time. That was usually plenty, allowing for a variety of cocktails, according to the situation. In this one, we’d need dozens. Good news was, we’d contracted reloading time under duress to less than five seconds.
I assembled blowguns as a second line of offense. Those fired the same darts at a two thousand feet distance, with the same speed of almost a thousand feet per second.
Ayesha donned the trauma holsters, filled them with preloaded syringes, and everything else she might need, her movements possessing the fluency of instinct. We’d had enough practice that it had become second nature, grabbing our gear, setting and psyching up on the fly in emergencies and raids alike. She caught the weapons I tossed her, her face a mask of eerie calmness.
Among us, we had enough poisons to kill ten herds of elephants. Not that we’d hurt an elephant. Ayesha wouldn’t even if it were about to trample her into a sticky mess. She wouldn’t bat an eyelid with our attackers.
Neither would I. This wasn’t only for us. This was for all those they victimized.
I snapped on the chest harness with the radio and extra supplies, jumped out after Ayesha, my heart bounding to the prodding of healthy tension. And not-so-healthy exhilaration.
Boy, I was a weird one.
I caught Damian’s eyes over the heads of our crouching teammates as soon as I took my position in the slot between my trailer and Matt’s. A ray of declining sun caught the side of Damian’s face. Amber fire shot off one implacable eye.
I know what I’m doing this time, I tried to tell him.
I’d lay good money his answer was: We’ll see. If we survive whatever you have in mind.
We disengaged each other’s focus at the same moment, turned to our teams with final orders and instructions.
Everyone knew everything about this plan, but I had a little amendment for my team.
“Stick with strychnine. Go for curare and cyanide only if you deplete it. Wait until they are at a maximum of two hundred feet. They’re moving targets and we can’t afford to miss. Neck shots if possible. If your target isn’t smothered in layers of clothes, the heart is your second best choice.”
I knew what they were all thinking. Curare and cyanide acted faster. No time to elaborate why I’d chosen strychnine as the poison of choice. Whether my team agreed or not, they’d all implement my order.
My senses left them, left everything, converged on our attackers. My heart slowed, each beat a thunderclap, pumping those honing hormones through my system.
The enemy was about five hundred feet away now, and closing in. No doubt now. If there ever was one.
This was to the death.
Thirteen
It was clear from our attackers’ hurtling confidence they agreed.
They were just confused about whose death.
Couldn’t blame them. They’d grown to expect others to accommodate them. Play good, cowering targets, and die.
They were even vociferously furious at our show of so-far passive resistance, roaring as they shot up a storm. In the air. Mustn’t scratch the paint job, huh?
They finally stopped about three hundred feet away and came pouring out of their vehicles, their roars unbroken, a veritable army. Their demonstration was designed to terrorize, to paralyze.
Had to make sure De Luna played by the rules. “Hold your fire. We go first. Now…”
Anna, from Damian’s team, yelped and fell back.
God. A stray bullet. Or a marksman, after all.
I heard Damian shout for everyone to stay out of sight. His eyes slammed me with his fury against my restraining order in the split second before mine darted to check out Anna. I was in time to see the side of Pierro’s head exploding in a shower of blood.
Compulsion burst hot and wet inside my own head. Run to them, examine them, save them.
No time. I’d seen him. The marksman. Not charging with the others, standing aside, taking leisurely shots.
He was mine.
I fired. My dart tore through the air, silent, treacherous, found his neck, lodged deep, pumped its lethal load. De Luna had trained me well. I never missed. At least, so far.
I knew I got the marksman’s external carotid artery. At worst his internal jugular vein. The dart’s load was now pumping directly into his blood stream. The poison would take effect with his very next heartbeat.
A certain lethal dose for a big, strong, adult male was 350 mg. 500 mg of our special strychnine was overkill. Overkill was good. I loved overkill. Not only because he’d be dead before he could do more damage, but because it would serve my plan.
I knew my team each got their target, to one degree of efficiency or another. Counting to ten, I waited for the show.
It came. My victim fell first, followed by seven more. Eight men going into sudden, violent seizures, writhing at their comrades’ feet as if with a phantom possession. In seconds they were bowed upward, only the top of their head and heels on the ground, as if trying to break their own backs to exorcise the demon that rode them.
It was a hellish way to go. A merciless hyper-transmission of nervous signals, a bonfire exploding in every nerve ending. The tiniest stimulus led to exponential overstimulation, the resulting convulsions beyond excruciating. They wouldn’t even be able to scream their agony as their respiratory muscles locked. They’d suffocate one cell at a time. And their minds would remain clear all through the atrocious expiration.
But my objective, the best thing about death by strychnine, was what it did to the ones still alive. I relished that part.
All monsters were deadened to the sight of bodies bursting in a hail of blood. That was why I’d counted on our strike being more effective than De Luna’s team. Witnessing the demonic possession-like contortions of a strychnine victim scared the most hardened villain shitless.
But it was the face of a strychnine victim that I bet gave them wetting-themselves nightmares. A fixed, bloodcurdling grin in the tradition of the spine-wrenching Joker. Risus sardonicus induced indelible, manic terror. It was what I was after. The manic part.
It worked. Criminals really were a superstitious, cowardly lot. Their retreat was as mindless and haphazard as if they were poorly paid extras in a cheap horror-movie set.
Their gunfire didn’t stop during their retreat, but now more joined it. Damian and his team, following up our strike. The exact amount of bullets from our side corresponded to our attackers’ heads bursting in fountains of crimson. Sixteen, twenty-one—no, thirty-two down. How many left?
“Over a hundred left.” Ayesha’s shout carried over the exploding gunfire and howling wind. It never ceased to startle me, that detail-processing power of hers. And that she always seemed to read my mind. “Plus twenty five drivers and whatever higher ranks staying safe in their vehicles.”
Damian and his men got two dozen more in half as many seconds.
God, how easy slaughter was.
And we had to make sure it was total.
Now our attackers knew we weren’t just another medical convoy, if even one was left alive to report us to any side, we’d be exposed. It would be all over.
That wasn’t even an option.
Though I knew our teams realized that, I still s
houted on the common channel, “No one escapes. Everyone dies.”
At least two dozen more fell by the time the rest were back in or behind the protection of their vehicles. We were down to half of them now.
Ayesha pounced for a real emergency kit, threw it in the air at Ishmael, the one near both Anna and Pierro.
“Ed, Suz, José, Shad,” Damian shouted. Damian shouted. “Hop into the front and rear vehicles, turn our barricade into a circle.” His people exploded to do his bidding even before he finished talking. “They’ll try to get us in a pincer. They’re now willing to do anything to get us. No more counting on their desire to preserve their booty.”
Next moment proved how right he was.
A marrow-liquefying shriek speared through my ears.
Antitank rocket.
Next second, the midpoint of our barricade exploded.
The compression wave swatted everyone on both sides down. I’d only had time to jam my fingers into my ears and bate my breath. I hoped the others had done the same. Apart from shrapnel, the most damaging thing about an explosion was the shockwave that could blow out eardrums and burst lungs. We’d all trained in guarding against such injuries.
I still felt like I’d sustained a whole-body punch. The trailer launched in the air before crashing back on one side of wheels for a second, then toppled on its side with a bone-splitting thud.
There had been four people on both sides of it. I could see three. Apart from being knocked down, they seemed fine. Only one was missing.
Damian.
The frenzied shout for him backlashed in my throat. Couldn’t distract the others. They were scrambling back to their positions, getting ready for the second wave of attack now our attackers considered us breached, softened.
I didn’t get back to mine. Couldn’t. Had to find him. Save him.
Wrong move, an angry voice inside me shouted, drowning out the cacophony of the escalating mini war. If he’s dead, your teams can’t afford to lose their remaining leader.
I yelled it silent. I can’t afford to lose him. As my co-leader, and on every other level. And they no longer need a leader. This is now self-perpetuating. To the grisly end.
My recklessness demon shrieked for me to take the shortest cut to the other side of the fallen behemoth. I resisted her, didn’t streak over its smoldering carcass in full sight of our now-rabid attackers, daring fate and teasing their bullets with my tender flesh. I must have learned some real restraint since Sudan.
Instead, I ran behind the trailer’s cover as more rockets pounded it, shearing it in two, widening the gap in our defenses.
Two voices inside my head drowned out the mayhem.
One wailed, Stop. Damian is under this thing. The other, cold, logical, observed: Hmm. Not blowing up more vehicles, eh? Still trying to preserve as much of their booty as possible then. Must also think there’s more spoils per person with their numbers drastically reduced. Good. For us.
Then everything went silent as the compression wave buffeted me. Even with the trailer taking most of the brunt, the blast felt like a giant’s foot battering me. It spun me around my axis, slamming me flat on my back, headfirst.
Always headfirst. Had to be the heaviest part of me. Good thing it was also the toughest. Not tough enough though to ward off the avalanche of pain and terror. I crushed down on the debilitating sensations.
Get to Damian.
I flipped around, crawling lizard-like on the craggy ground, my awareness splitting wide open, bombarded by everything, processing it all. My team, Damian’s, even Anna and Pierro partially patched up, fighting back. Dropping so many. Too many still coming. Then I found a body.
Damian.
Flat on his face. Clear of the trailer twisted husk by an inch. I lunged for him, reached for his carotid.
Thick pulsations pushed hard against my fingertips. My forehead touched the ground in a nanosecond prayer of thanks.
His pulse quickened against my fingers as I poked him, accelerating his revival. His eyes snapped open, bore into me, instantly alert. The sweep of his eyelids seamlessly segued into a lightning-quick succession of movements. Rolling on his back, finding his rifle, readying it, lunging for me, covering me with his massive bulk as another explosion knocked us flat on the ground again. Coming from the opposite direction.
They’d circled us as he’d predicted, were blasting an access through our vehicular fortress, pouring at us from both sides now.
Weird details invaded my awareness. The clash of multilingual roars, a profound world statement. Ayesha with a gun now, stony-eyed as she blasted away attackers. Matt snapped someone’s neck, splattered three more, predatory growls issuing from him. Ed blew away another, an elated radiance to his cruelly handsome face. And Damian…
How fierce and beautiful he was. How damned heavy. His mass impacted me, stopped my attempt to rise. Then his roar resounded in my head as he pushed me down harder, firing.
Hot viscosity spattered my face just as I registered the bodies falling a foot from us. Everything stretched as I twisted, fired my dart above Damian’s shoulder, returning the favor, getting his attacker in the thigh. My victim still had time to shoot Damian. It took a second to pull a trigger.
It was how long it took me to yank Damian’s arm around, impulses arcing through my nerves to his, his inhuman reflexes completing the circuit, getting his would-be killer between the eyes. Doing him the favor of instant death, really.
I lunged for the dead man’s gun. Damian got it first, shoved it into my hands, hauled me up. Then I was braced against his back’s immovable support.
Through the pandemonium, focus and serenity flooded my mind, wrapping around one thought.
This was how it should be.
Us. St. James and De Luna. Back to back.
Making our final stand together.
Fourteen
Our final stand didn’t come to pass.
We’d all live to massacre another day.
The whole thing took less than fifteen minutes. We were twenty-one and we’d taken out over two hundred highly trained and experienced killers. Injuries on our side were minimal.
Talk about destructive power.
And that wasn’t even half as bad as Sudan.
That night, we’d been ten, and we’d killed over five hundred. It had been estimated that I alone had killed seventy-four. Hard to even imagine that. The number. The enormity. Impossible to grasp the concept. Seventy-four lives. Snuffed by me in a few explosive seconds.
But the murdering scum I’d killed, in the past and today, had chosen to exploit, terrorize and kill innocents for a living. They’d irrevocably relinquished any rights or mercy.
Still, killing them, killing period, was ugly and damaging. Most people who killed reduced the act to something abstract, like slaying virtual monsters in video games. That even gave it an element of excitement, of achievement. Of supremacy. Having power over life and death messed with a person on fundamental, irretrievable levels, even if the victims were real-life monsters. The hunger for more vengeance and termination became an addiction. Killing had become that for Dad, until it had almost consumed a hefty chunk of his mind and soul.
It could consume me whole far more easily. For I didn’t possess the sheer gravity and density of his being. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I was more volatile, my basic nature far closer to the surface, my motives far more personal.
I couldn’t afford to let that happen. Couldn’t get used to killing. Or take satisfaction in it. In relieving victims, saving lives, stopping brutality, yes. In the act itself, never.
It didn’t mean I wasn’t good at it, though. I was. Extremely so.
Today I’d killed thirteen. I would have killed more if I hadn’t stopped to get to Damian. Lifetime body count was now ninety-seven. I should be numb to it all by now.
But I couldn’t afford numbness. Monsters or no, I had to let it—to make it—hurt like hell.
Shaking myself out of my untimely musings, I reached
for the thoracostomy tube, introducing it into Pierro’s chest through the incision I’d just made.
This was another way this was better than Sudan. Our fallen three were just injured, not dead. Only Pierro had a significant injury. But it wouldn’t be fatal.
If I did my job right.
But this was also far worse than Sudan. We’d taken no prisoners then. Now we were about to…
“…kill me, Doc?”
The strident gasp jogged me back to Pierro.
Concentrate, Doc.
I smiled down at him. Big and powerful like the rest of his team, his narrow face was inlaid with slashed Roman features, each one proud and denying his suffering. His naturally bronzed skin obscured the blood loss and shock. But his lips betrayed him, blue with oxygen deprivation, cracking with dehydration. His eyes did, too, their translucent blue turning murky with depletion.
Megumi caught my eye, nodding toward the sliding control of the giving set. Asking if she should increase the rate of his fluid delivery, to compensate for his blood volume loss.
I shook my head. Not yet.
“No, Pierro,” I quipped. “I’m just skewering you to see how much blood is left inside you after that dramatic scalp fountain.”
Thankfully, it had only been that and not his brain being blown out. As I’d thought at first.
A chuckle wheezed out of him, even with his chest filling with blood, with him knowing it.
Figured he’d appreciate the morbid joke. We doctors had ghoulish humor in common with soldiers. When we’d finally been able to tend to our injured, his teammates had all teased him that it was no fair turning on his bullet magnet. He’d gotten shot three times while most hadn’t even been shot once.
It said everything about his stamina and training and commitment to his team that he’d fought right alongside us to the very end even while his chest filled with blood.
One of the bullets had penetrated his right lung, had shattered the tip of his scapula coming out of his back. The resulting hemopneumothorax, an accumulation of blood and air in the pleural space, had collapsed the right lung, and the mediastinal shift was leaving the left one and the heart less and less space to expand. That was why I wasn’t correcting his hypotension. It would increase the bleeding and the cascade of complications.