After blowing away the two men to my right, each with one shot, One Shot whirled seaward searching for targets. He staggered backward a step as several slugs impacted his torso, apparently stopped by his own body armor. He returned fire and crouched low, making himself as small as possible. While he covered me, I dove over my chair and came up on one knee, facing the pool. Danger came from that direction, but for the first time, my mind’s warning gave me a direction, left and up. Shifting fast, I spotted a Slivveron on a wall beyond the pool area, bringing up a sniper rifle. The distance was probably 40 yards, a long way for an average person to hit their target but point blank for me even without EXACTO ammunition. I squeezed off two shots just to be sure and watched him stiffen, then crumple head-first into the grass.
That’s when a sledgehammer to my stomach knocked me over. Lost amid the people scrambling out of the pool, another Slivveron popped up out of the water close enough for me to see his Red Nail marking and shot me before I could react. As I lay on my back, gasping for air and watching gulls wheeling into the sky, I was helpless to defend myself. Seconds later, he stood at my feet, water running off his scales onto my shoes. He could easily have killed me but didn’t.
Why doesn’t he finish me? I thought. And then he couldn’t, because Nathan again jumped to my rescue in a flash of sharp, white teeth.
He leapt six feet in the air and clamped down on the lizard’s neck and tore into the tough hide. Violet blood gushed out of the wound. Raging in pain, it brought the pistol around to shoot Nathan in the head.
I didn’t have breath to say what came to mind, but I could think it, Not on my watch, asshole. I had just enough strength to raise the P320 and fire two rounds at the creature’s torso. They detonated like small grenades just under its sternum, blowing guts all over me to go with the brains and blood already coating my coat and pants. Lost in the madness of the moment, I giggled at what my dry cleaner was going to say. Meanwhile, the Slivveron fell, its chest cavity hollowed out, like it had gone swimming with a school of piranha.
Nathan barked at me to get up, and that brought me back to the present. I rolled over, which hurt like hell. Sharp pain radiated up my chest and under both armpits. Hidden by the line of chairs, I took a few seconds to get breath back into my lungs. Peering under the outdoor furniture I got some sense of the scene.
I couldn’t keep track of the various auras; the action was too fast for me to distinguish individuals, but I didn’t need to. Quickened response times between thoughts and actions contrasted with how my brain processed events. Time seemed to slow down.
One Shot had fallen where he stood a moment before, blocking my view of the beach. I couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. To my right and ten yards closer to the surf, Dawn stood with Carlos close by, pistol gripped in both hands as he put round after round downrange. Bodies lay scattered all around them. Barely five seconds had passed since I rolled onto my stomach, but in that time, Carlos put down two Slivverons and engaged a third. Then, to my left, I heard the distinct, high-pitched stitching sound of a sub-machine gun I knew very, very well—a Heckler & Koch MP7. Carlos staggered under the impact of at least a dozen hits, collapsed to one knee and tried to return fire, before being struck in the head by no less than four rounds coming from different directions. Even as his body jerked from all those hits funneling their kinetic energy into his body, he managed to get off a shot at the Slivveron holding the H&K, hitting him in the leg. I regretted giving him shit; Carlos died well.
Rage flooded through me at seeing two brave comrades fall. I clenched my teeth and started to rise but stopped. The air around me shimmered like it was filled with crushed pearls swirling in the offshore breeze. I knew I was seeing the physical manifestation of me attracting so much kaval. I felt power flow into my body, and the ache that prevented me from taking deep breaths faded. Blinking, I stood, feeling stronger than ever, and began picking out targets, dropping them with rapid precision.
I didn’t need to take out the sub-machine gunner, though. Even as I lined up the shot, the tall, muscular blonde I’d admired earlier ran into view wielding knives in each hand. Bullets kicked up sand around her, none hit, and as the lizard with the H&K tried to get her in his sights, she did something I would have thought impossible had I not seen it. She threw herself forward on her left hand, somersaulted, landed on her feet in front of him, and slammed both knives under his jaws, up to their hilts. Without waiting for him to fall, she grabbed the MP7 and stitched a screaming naked woman across her ample chest with a line of bullets. Horrified, I drew aim at the blonde, until I saw the woman she’d shot transform into a Slivveron as her body shut down.
Venus.
The name came to me like I’d finally recognized a familiar face. Venus, if that’s who she was, ran toward Dawn, who was now surrounded by a tornado of the same glittering stuff that enveloped me seconds earlier. Previously I couldn’t see such a concentration of kaval, but now I could. Then I had other problems.
Like Ripper Valley, bodies were piling up. Some tourists flopped around, wounded, but most were gone now. Sirens echoed in the far distance. There were maybe ten Red Nails still standing, but only two of us, assuming the blonde turned out to be the mysterious Venus. Dawn didn’t count.
I sprinted toward the two women, kicking up sand. As the Slivverons fired at me, I stuck the gun under my left arm and emptied the magazine, hoping to distract them. I did more than that. EXACTO rounds don’t miss, and two more dropped, riddled by multiple hits.
But so did I. One second I was running upright, the next I was falling face first into the sand. Multiple hits on my left leg and arm knocked me off balance, and a grazing shot off my forehead might as well have been a mule kick.
The pistol flew into the sand, the slide open, empty. My backup already had a magazine of conventional rounds loaded, with one in the chamber. My vision swirled with colors as I lay in the sand trying to focus on a target. Blood leaked into my eyes. With my left arm useless I could only try to clear my eyes with the back of my right hand, but incoming bullets kept throwing up sand. I’d practiced reloading one-handed thousands of times for just such a moment, so I kept up a high volume of fire, burning through all of the regular ammo because I could reach it easier, but even with my innate abilities I couldn’t hit what I couldn’t see.
Gasping for breath and fighting against the pain, something I was getting all too used to, I glanced Dawn’s way. Sparks on the whirling mass around her came from bullets, and I pulled up knowledge I didn’t know that I possessed to explain it. Someone had created a vortex of sand and rock to deflect the rounds and protect her, although whether it was Dawn or someone else, I didn’t know. It didn’t matter, because sooner or later something would get through. I was there to protect her—that was my job—and so far I was failing.
I slid my left leg into position to push myself upward, and where moments before my leg had buckled under me, now it moved and took my weight. So did my arm. Both still hurt, but they responded. My forehead had also stopped bleeding. What the hell? One talent that had never manifested itself was an ability to heal quickly, as the weeks I’d missed with a broken foot after a blindside sack in high school made clear. My biggest problem now was fatigue; I was worn out. Ignoring all of that, now that I had two hands again, I slammed a magazine of EXACTO rounds into the gun, got to one knee, and emptied the whole thing, one after another in rapid succession.
Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam chink.
Lizards jumped and jerked and spun under the fusillade of bullets that didn’t miss. Two had spread out on my left flank and survived by fleeing toward the resort, and another dove into the surf as I moved down the line toward him. He never came up again; maybe they could breathe underwater or something. But the other seven had seen their last sunset.
The tornado vanished as I limped over to Dawn. Instead of the deadly gatandi I assumed to be at the center of the mini-storm, I saw a naked, terrifi
ed girl who didn’t have a clue about what just happened. I stood there for a brief moment, blinking and wondering if I loved her, pitied her or resented the fuck out of being manipulated by her, and shook it off. Saving her was my mission, I’d lost two comrades already, and I was determined they wouldn’t die for nothing.
Still sucking deep breaths, I grabbed her arm. “We’ve gotta get outta here,” I said, without having any real idea where to go.
Chapter 20
Dawn was tougher than I gave her credit for. We’d only gone a few steps before she grabbed a T-shirt, women’s running shorts, and sandals off a beach towel. I covered her while she dressed, searching for threats, but saw nothing except the dead. The only sound came from the surf.
Dawn took a black pistol from the dead hand of a Slivveron, and it was obvious to me that she’d never used a handgun.
“Just don’t shoot yourself,” I said, not sure who posed a bigger threat, her or the lizards. I considered giving her a quick lesson, but that seemed pointless. She only needed one rule for now: “Don’t point that thing at me.”
The distant sirens had grown ever closer, and their nearness now meant the constables had reached the resort. I didn’t kid myself that they would be on our side, though. The expression and aura I’d seen on the inspector disabused me of that notion. Where had Venus gone? Time was running out to call for reinforcements, so I tapped the microphone to turn it on.
“Zipper Girl, this is New Guy,” I said, using our code names. Mine was embarrassing, but my fellow Trashmen hadn’t yet picked my code name. Isra had explained that the zipper in hers referred to those on body bags. “Shit sandwich for lunch, Carlos and One Shot filled up on metal and are taking a dirt nap to sleep it off. HVT and I are heading inside. Po-po on scene but status of their attitude uncertain. Blondie took a powder. We’d love to see you for drinks.”
“FAD, New Guy,” came the instant reply. FAD? Somehow, I knew that meant fuck a duck, synonymous with “oh shit.” “Speak English, Steed, you’re not a merc anymore. I get the gist of it though, stay alive until I get there, got it? ETA is thirty minutes. Do not trust constables. I repeat, do not trust Jamaican police. Capisce?”
So much for the radio protocols from the Al Qaeda War, and I hadn’t had time to learn SAD’s, assuming they had any.
“Capisce,” I said, feeling weird about sending an uncoded message over an open channel. “I hope you’re enough.”
“I’m more than just enough, I’m all you need.”
We limped toward the closest cover, a pump house near the pool. My left arm and leg worked again but hurt like hell and felt stiff. How I was able to use them again didn’t seem like my biggest concern, though. I kept the gun up in firing position because I had no doubt the fight wasn’t over yet.
“Who were those people?” Dawn said, holding the gun out like actors do on TV. “Is this about us?”
I didn’t really hear the last part, but was fixated on the first…people? I stopped and swept the area ahead for targets. There was a lot of landscaping, perfect for an ambush.
“You saw people?” I said.
“Of course, I saw people, what did you see?”
“Lizards.”
“What?”
She couldn’t see through it. Dawn saw the lizards as men, not reptiles. I could see through their cloak of disguise now, but she couldn’t.
“Never mind. This isn’t about us, Dawn. This about you. You’re their target.”
Up to that point, she’d done a good job of hiding her fear, but that mask dropped. She stopped moving and stared at me, mouth open in a very non-sexual way.
“They want to kill me?”
“They’d rather kidnap you, but they’ll kill you if they have to.”
“That wasn’t part of—”
“Wasn’t part of what?”
Genuine fear tinted her aura with yellow, and yet the reds deepened, too. I had no idea what that meant.
“They wanted to talk to you, not me.”
“Aw shit, Dawn, what did you do?”
“Jeff said he wanted to hire you for something, but it was private.”
“Jeff tried to kidnap me, just like they’re now trying to kidnap you. He didn’t know I still had a few friends.”
Loud voices echoed off the four-story room blocks, which told me the constables would arrive at any second. The pump house was still 50 feet away. I ignored pain down the back of my thigh and moved faster.
“Why do they want me? I’m just a kid.”
“So’s a baby cobra. Haven’t they already approached you?”
“I don’t even know who they are!”
The red glow around her head grew brighter, which I guessed indicated a lie, but time for talk was over. To our right, no more than twenty feet away, a Slivveron stood behind a manicured bush covered in pink flowers aiming an MP7. By chance, my sweep with the Sig had been to the left. I twisted at the waist, but it was too late. The lizard’s finger squeezed the trigger, and by sheer bad luck I was staring straight down the barrel. Armored shirt or no, we should have been cut in half by a stream of 4.6mm steel-wrapped lead.
Sunlight flashed in a blur of downward arcing steel that sliced through both the Slivveron’s arms and sent them tumbling, its finger still closed on the trigger so that bullets ripped a long trail down the beach into the ocean. Gouts of violet blood spurted from the stumps. Throwing back its head, the lizard keened a wailing hiss that sounded like a tea kettle. But only for a second, as a sword decapitated it with a single, sideways stroke. Few blades could do that, and even fewer swordsmen. Standing behind the dead creature, panting, was the blonde, still naked.
“Venus!” Dawn shouted.
There she was.
“Are you Steed?” she yelled with a strong European accent. Before I could answer she half-turned toward the lobby, then muttered “Scheisse!” She was German.
“I’m Steed!” I called back, but she’d moved on to new dangers.
“More coming…eidechsenmänner! Take the girl, flee north; the next resort is close. I will gain you as much time as I can!”
I moved toward the greenery, faster than earlier but still hampered. “I’m hurt and can’t run. You get her out of here, I’ll be the rear guard.”
Hesitating a few seconds, she nodded, seeing the logic in my suggestion. This was about completing the mission, not egos. “I am sorry,” Venus said, with an apologetic smile I didn’t understand. “I did what I could, but there is not enough kaval to fully heal you. There is a powerful gatandi near at hand; I could feel him. I am sorry.”
“You did that?” I said, taking laconic to a new level.
“We are Trashmen,” she said, like that answered everything. Maybe it did.
Venus stopped to grab clothes off a table and turned back to me.
“Don’t die, Steed,” she said.
“I’ll make you a deal. If I live, you have dinner with me.”
“What about me?” Dawn said, but Venus and I both ignored her.
“Drinks first,” Venus said. “But first you must stay alive.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said, already damned worried about myself.
“You’re staying behind?” Dawn said, finally catching up with the conversation.
“Go on, get out of here! I’ll be fine!”
For a split second I thought Dawn might actually have been concerned, but then she followed Venus north along the beach, running in the hard-packed sand near the water. I had to admit I’d seen worse views than the two of them hurrying away.
I heard a bark. I’d forgotten Nathan in all of the action, but there he was beside me, his muzzle stained a reddish-purple and ears up.
“Remember the Alamo,” I said. I could have sworn he understood.
Once Venus and Dawn had a good start, I picked up the MP7, riffled the dead Slivveron’s body for ammo, and lifted three magazines. I could faintly hear somebody talking, not coming from the resort but closer. I tracked the source to
the Slivveron’s head, which had rolled under a mango tree right off the path. Trying not to get gore all over my hand I plucked out an ear bud and the voice grew louder. I couldn’t make out the language, maybe Portuguese or Italian, and could only spare a second to listen.
“The overgrown iguana’s not feeling so hot,” I said, interrupting the speaker. “But on the bright side, there’s enough lizard skin here to make one helluva pair of boots.”
I crushed the ear bud under my heel, hoping they’d be so mad at me they would forget about chasing Dawn and Venus. Like standard bad guys in a movie, more than a dozen figures in dark suits carrying automatic weapons filtered toward me through the now-deserted central plaza. Their auras glowed bright red. I hadn’t noticed before but the Slivverons moved with an odd gait, as if their joints weren’t designed to imitate the actions of a human body, and I only realized it now because of the fluidity of my new enemies. They were true humans. I guess I’d gotten the Dona’s attention, because I knew without asking that they were the starters not the scrubs.
Once I made it behind the pump house, I realized how narrow it was, far too small to defend for long. My current position was to one side of a low retaining wall, where I could cover the five 20-foot wide steps leading from the central plaza to the pool and beach areas. A washed gravel path to my left led to half the hotel complex, while on the opposite side of the steps an identical path led to the other half. My flank was open with only the pump house and some flimsy poolside cabanas offering cover. As tactical positions went, I might as well have been hiding behind a tree in otherwise open ground.
Knowing I only had seconds to find a more defensible position, I scanned the immediate area and spotted one right away; the swim-up bar at the far side of the pool. Action followed decision without a second’s delay. I limped around the pool, shoving aside deck chairs, recliners, and a giant blow-up duck and got around the bar. A door on the far side led to the bartender’s area below the water line.
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