by Ben Zackheim
The perfect time to strike would be before he revealed his big, bad secret. He thought he had my full attention. He thought the most important thing in the world to me was finding out what he was getting at.
But I wanted him dead more than anything else.
I reached for my gun just as he said, “You have Excalibur.”
I had the weapon in his face by the time I said, “Tell me something I don’t know and I let you live.”
Chapter 37
The barrel of my gun was three inches from his forehead.
Meanwhile, a couple dozen armed men and women had their beads on my head. Turned out everyone in the joint was on his payroll.
So how does it feel to know you’re dead meat? That depends. If you want to live, then it’s terrifying. If you don’t care what the result is, then let me tell you something — you are still in complete control. No one there wanted to be on the team that lost the big, bad Cannon. But I bet every last one of them wouldn’t mind seeing him dead. The trigger pressed against my fingertip. Any flinch would set the gun off.
I held my breath.
His move.
He should have been terrified. He knew I was ready to die. His upturned lip and cocked eyebrow made me think he had a spell or two beyond my comprehension. Then again, his best spell may just be the merely-mortal bluff.
“So Skyler told you, then,” Cannon whispered. “Surprising. He likes to keep secrets. I didn’t think he’d share a flu.”
Did he just speak fondly of the old man? It was a backward compliment, sure, but coming from someone who cherished secrets above all else, it sounded a lot like affection.
I had to learn more.
I twirled the gun on my finger and stuck it back in my back holster.
The rest of the room kept their guns aimed at me.
So I pulled the pistol out again and stuck it to Cannon’s forehead. I made eye contact with the closest targets. I’d be able to take three or four down, not including Cannon, before they hit their mark. Their mark being me.
Cannon belted out a laugh and waved his hand at them. They put their guns down instantly.
“You know Skyler well?” I asked.
“We’ve been… disagreeing for a long time now. Please, Kane. Have a seat.” He gestured to my stool. I sent the Glock home for a second time. Cannon’s snakes slithered back into their hidey-holes. He nodded at the bartender who smacked a bottle of real whiskey on the bar between us.
Jameson Black.
All of this started to feel like a setup. I half expected to see Skyler appear in the door and laugh at how dense I was.
“When you first held the sword, what did you see?” he asked.
“99 Virgins.”
“Wrong religion.”
“Sounds like the right religion to me.”
“Tell me. Did you feel anything when you held the hilt of Excalibur?”
“No,” I lied. I remembered the blade’s edge. Its beckoning beauty. Its crushing weight on my will.
“Do you believe in God, Kane?”
“Do you believe in sticking to one subject for more than four seconds?”
“No, actually.” He raised his glass in a toast. “To the power of God, and all of the heavenly treasure He’s rained upon the Earth.”
I knew that he was trying to offer me an opening. He wanted me to start interpreting his puzzles.
I’m not sure why, but I obliged him. “So you’re saying God is leaving us holy objects.” Cannon waited, his face angled up as if he knew the lines to this play and wanted me to say them. I continued. “And that God’s leaving these holy objects all over the place with a plan.”
He slammed his glass down on the table and it shattered into a thousand pieces. “YES! I knew it! I knew you were special. With almost no prompting, you figured out the truth.”
“I figured out what you think is the truth. But you’re easy to read.” I noticed his hand was bleeding from the shattered glass. He didn’t care.
“Am I? That’s the first time anyone has ever told me that.” He shooed away the bartender who tried to bandage his hand. “But yes, Excalibur is here for a reason. Anything with power is here for a reason. Its purpose must be studied, interpreted and eventually used for certain ends.”
“Free ice cream for everyone?”
From the look on his face, he didn’t appreciate my humor. “Not quite.”
“Free ice cream for everyone forever?”
“I ask you again, Kane. Did you feel anything when you first touched the sword?”
“No,” I lied again.
“We have ways of getting this kind of infor…” he said before I had the barrel of my gun in his face again. He flinched this time. I smiled. He sighed and rolled his eyes. Again, the room’s weapons were trained on me. “Really?” Cannon said, annoyed.
“You’re the one making threats, jackass. Tell me what you know about Excalibur and I’ll stop showing you the wrong side of the barrel.”
“That’s not how this is going to happen, Kane.” Now he looked pissed off. Cannon was ugly when he smiled.
He was twice as ugly when he had his rage on.
He backed away from me and turned around to face his small army. “What’s going to happen is that you’ll walk out of here with nothing, I’ll follow you to every dark corner of the planet until I get the sword out of your little portable vault by killing every last person you love right in front of you. You can’t hide. You must know that by now.”
“Yup, I know,” I said, pocketing the Glock again. “But you also know something.” He turned around. “I’ll be ready for you.”
I walked toward the exit. I had a lot of useful info.
Cannon knew I had Excalibur in my lock box. And I knew he was obsessed with getting it. My best guess is that he wanted to raise an army with the sword and use it to get more power.
Also, I’d discovered that he had a history with Skyler.
As I got ready to leave that bar, I was cocky. I admit it. I should have known better. You don’t play with the Devil without paying scalper prices.
“Kane!” Cannon yelled.
I glanced over my shoulder, muscles ready to go for the Glocks. Maybe he was ready to go out in a blaze of glory after all.
His goons flanked him. He smirked. Like an asshole. “Don’t make me do to the twins what I did to your partner.”
I had more than a dozen guns aimed at my head.
I would find the right time.
Cannon just signed his death warrant.
I left the bar with a mix of rage and focus and grief that I hope I never experience again.
Chapter 38
I’d left Scarlett at the safehouse to deal with the carnage.
Rebel had told me point-blank on the Santa Fe job that if she was killed first then I shouldn’t stick around and mourn. I should just end her killer. She hated funerals. She wanted her body to be dealt with in the most convenient way. Burial, fish food, whatever.
I could have let her burn to a crisp but, no, I couldn’t.
So I’d told Scarlett to bury Rebel somewhere with a view.
“Scarlett,” I said into the long-range walkie. I was doing 60 on a country road.
“Yeah,” her voice came back.
“What vehicle do you have, besides the motorcycle?”
“That’s it.”
Dammit. I was hoping we could find a better way to travel the last leg of the trip. A good truck would have been perfect. I figured it was Rebel’s last joke on me. I’d have to wrap up this job on a bike.
“Fine,” I yelled at no one. “Then I’m riding your bike, Rebel!” I felt her near me then. If yelling at her would give me moment or two like that, well, she was in for a lot of flack from me.
“Uh, Kane?”
“What Scarlett?”
“Fox is gone.”
“What do you mean he’s gone?”
“He’s not here. His bike is gone. His bag, too.”
It d
idn’t make any sense. We’d left him in a dark room that Scarlett had prepared just for him. The plan was to hit the road that night and make it to the mountains before sunrise. Maybe he’d gone ahead. Maybe he was scoping things out. But without leaving a note?
Fox had bailed on us. I didn’t have much time to think about it, though.
It was time to say goodbye.
Scarlett had scoped out a spot for my partner. It was on the west side of a hill with a narrow slope. It looked comfortable and the view of the sunset would be something else.
“I’m off,” I said to the pile of dirt in front of me. I almost left it at that. Short and bitter. She would have liked that. But I rarely did stuff she liked. “It was Cannon. Best I can tell he set the bomb off remotely. Fucking coward. I think he has the twins. Don’t worry I’ll get them back in one piece.” Lying to a dead person is tougher than lying to a living one. I got the sense she was in my head, like she could see every nook and cranny.
So I confessed.
I sat next to the mound of dirt and watched the horizon. The smell of damp earth almost covered the smell of burned flesh. “I could have taken Cannon out tonight, partner. But he got the advantage by making me think I had the advantage.” I half-expected a hand to dart from the dirt and strangle me. “Rookie mistake. Sorry. So I’m going to finish this fucking mission and then I’m going to think about what’s next. It’s…” I stopped. She was dead but I still found it hard to say what I felt out loud. “It’s tough to think about doing this without you.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Scarlett stood at the top of the hill, waiting for me.
“Okay, so, bye, Rebel. I’ll come back and say hi when this is all over. Or, hey, maybe I’ll see you in Hell.” Didn’t sound half-bad right then.
I trudged up the hill. I felt weak. Tired. Revenge grabbed my legs and forced me forward, but it was the longest walk of my life.
Chapter 39
Scarlett and I worked out the plan for the last leg of the trip. There was danger ahead and it would have Cannon all over it.
I was betting that he’d stay out of the way because he didn’t want to interfere with my progress. My theory was that he wanted me to get to the end so he could snag the sword as soon as I pulled it out of the portal.
As if I’d let him do that.
“You know Cannon?” I asked Scarlett. My voice cracked from the fury I had to shove back down my throat.
“I met him a few times. He likes it around here for some reason. Why? Have you?”
“Just did.”
“Shit. He’s in town.”
“Yeah. So what?”
“You know the rumor about the army that follows him everywhere? It’s not a rumor.”
“Yeah, I met them too.”
“I doubt it. You probably saw his bodyguards. They’re human.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. I’d heard about Cannon’s army of ghosts. I’d seen a lot of weird crap in my life but I never saw a ghost. I sure as hell never saw a ghost who could hit me or shoot me.
“I saw them once,” Scarlett said. “Right over the ridge there, actually. Cannon was staying at some mansion in Luomanzhen and passed through here with a caravan of black cars. A local kid threw a firecracker at one of the cars and I saw them.”
“Did they go boo?”
“They killed him. Hundreds of them came out of the ground and swarmed over the poor kid like a flood of bugs. I ran to help but when I got there the corpse didn’t even look like he was human. He was just…”
“He was just what?”
“Stripped. Melted. I don’t know how to explain it. The army faded away. The cars just kept going.”
“It could have been a weapon of some kind, Scarlett.”
“The shapes that trampled him were human.
“Never heard anything like it.”
“I know what I saw. You need to be careful if you want to make it to Nyingchi.”
“How do you get ready for ghosts that can melt you?”
“Practice running like hell?”
“I’m not running anywhere.”
That shut the conversation down fast. We rode in silence for a long time. I didn’t want to talk about murdering spirits with my new companion. In fact, I didn’t want to talk about anything. I rode Rebel’s bike. Scarlett rode her own. We were one night’s drive away from our destination in Tibet. My focus was on the road ahead.
If we didn’t run into any trouble.
Which we would if past was prologue.
The sun broke the horizon and the peaceful silence was broken. “Where’s the sword anyway?” Scarlett asked over the mic.
“None of your business.”
“Fine. But if you die then I can’t finish the mission for you.”
“The less you know, the better.”
“Why?”
“Because the less you know, the faster they’ll kill you. The more you know, the longer they’ll pick your brain and the slower you’ll die.”
“Oh, that’s pleasant, Kane.”
“That’s reality, Scarlett.”
It was a long ride for me, but it probably felt a hell of a lot longer to poor Scarlett. I was in no mood make friends. We got the nice view. China always has the nice views. But the wide vistas felt duller now. I couldn’t enjoy them.
Our bikes reached the top of a hill with a straightaway that ran for a dozen miles ahead. Straight as a bullet. I spotted some moving lights on the horizon. I thought it was a truck at first but it was no truck. In fact, there were no cars at all.
That should have been the first sign that there was trouble.
As we got closer to the light, it got closer to us. It was on both sides of the highway and it was getting taller. At first it was blue, then orange, then white.
“What is it?” Scarlett asked.
“I don’t know. It looks like something is coming up out of the ground.”
“We should get off the road.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right. Follow me.” I slowed down enough to pull onto the shoulder and made my own path through the rocky terrain. There was a patch of field about a hundred yards downhill. We could cover a few miles if we rode through it. Probably piss off some farmers but you can’t save the world without breaking some rice paddies.
We almost made it to the field when we got a good view of what was happening on the highway.
A wall of flame, fifty feet up, rose from the edge of the concrete on both sides of the highway. The road was encased in fire.
The flame was laced with fiery symbols.
Runes, was my guess.
I didn’t get a chance to react before the wall veered off the highway and whipped toward us. I took the hill full throttle. It didn’t do me any good, though. The walls shot past us on both sides and then folded in on each other about twenty yards ahead. We were trapped in a tunnel of fire, and we’d reached the end.
“Well, this sucks,” Scarlett said.
We didn’t really have a choice. I turned around and drove back to the highway. Whatever this thing was it wanted us to go in a specific direction.
The wall didn’t give off any heat when we were in the middle of the road. But when we got close it started to burn hot.
“What are all those runes for?” Scarlett asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t speak Runish.”
“I didn’t know Runish was a …”
“It’s a joke. Stay behind me. Let me know if you see anything unusual. Anything. Understand?”
“Yeah, understood. You’re speaking to me. That’s unusual.”
“Really? You’ve decided to crack jokes as hellfire licks at our asses?”
“Well, someone needs to.”
“Let’s go back to the part where you follow me and shut up.”
“You got it, boss.”
Boss. That reminded me of Cassidy and Rose. I wasn’t sure how I was going to keep my vow to kill Cannon and my promise to save the twins. I liked a good challenge
, but it didn’t look likely as I rode the Road to Hell.
The feeling of riding down a highway with two massive fire walls looming over us, guiding us, was not one I enjoyed. I didn’t know if it was coming from a friend or a foe. Was it a Skyler spell of protection? We were reaching the end, so he may have triggered the wall as a defense against sabotage.
But the actual answer came when ten motorcycles appeared a half-mile ahead of us, blocking the road with a straight line of black leather and sunshined chrome.
“We have company,” Scarlett said, stating the obvious.
I slowed to a full stop and unlatched my Glocks. “Get ready.”
Scarlett whipped her helmet off and looked at me, eyes packed with worry. “I’ve never been in a fight.”
I took my helmet off and strapped it to the back of my seat.
“Hope you’re a fast learner then.”
Chapter 40
The line of bikes ahead of us revved their engines, sending the noise down the fiery tunnel. The thundering din echoed around us, making the kind of racket you’d expect a fifty foot high, three-mile long flame to make. But the hellish thing was actually eerily silent as it bore witness to the massacre about to occur.
The massacre that I was about to lay down at its feet, to be clear.
I revved my engine back at them.
“Join in,” I said to Scarlett. “It’s fun.”
“Really? You’ve decided now is a good time to joke around, while a bike gang is looking at us like we’re a bag of Doritos?”
The din died down and we went into standoff mode. They were gauging my threat level and I was doing the same. Anyone else would look at our situation, compare, contrast and run screaming in the other direction.
But I saw an opportunity or two to end this quickly.
All ten of the bikers were armed. Rifles, handguns and machetes, from the looks of it. They gave no sign of taking their helmets off. I hoped they would keep them on.
“Keep your helmet off and get ready to ride,” I told Scarlett. “Fast.”
“Keep my helmet off?”