by Hondo Jinx
“I strike first,” he reminded his soldiers.
Nods all around.
Junior was going to put all his juice into this. Blow the fucking RV to bits while the dashboard cam recorded everything. He’d have a blast later, watching his handiwork. Send a copy to Valdez, maybe. Hell, send that shit to America’s Funniest Home Videos.
“I can’t connect with their engine,” Rick whined. He’d been twitchy as fuck for an hour. Now he seemed to be breaking down.
Junior couldn’t deal with that now. It crossed his mind briefly to put a bullet through the Gearhead’s brain and show the world how Junior Dutchman dealt with incompetence, but Rick was still of value to him, and besides, firing a weapon inside the Hummer would be loud as fuck and might compromise the mission.
So instead, he laid a hand on Rick’s shoulder and said, “Man up, pussy. You need to hack that engine.”
“I told you,” Rick whined, sounding like a little bitch, “I can’t. It has nothing to do with manning up. I just can’t connect. It’s like the RV doesn’t even have an engine. It’s like—”
“Shut up,” Junior said, but he did his best to muzzle his rage. If you’re going to lead, you have to control your emotions, even when someone deserves to die.
He turned in his seat to face the quartet of killers awaiting his orders. “All right. Fuck the engine. We’re going to hit them now. Let’s go.”
He popped his door, grabbed the AA-12 and got out of the Hummer. With its light recoil and a drum magazine holding twenty rounds of 12 gauge ammunition, the assault shotgun was so sweet Junior almost wanted to use buckshot instead of psionics.
But that would be stupid. This wasn’t just about killing his enemies. It was also about making a statement.
Once he became capo, he’d have plenty of opportunities to test the AA-12 on live targets.
His soldiers poured out of the Hummer, each carrying one of the AK-47s Junior had acquired from his Jamaican connection. As directed, the killers paired up and moved out in opposite directions without so much as a whisper.
One pair took up position twenty yards from the front of the RV and crouched down behind a compact car. The other pair jogged to the closest garbage truck and trained their weapons on the rear of the camper. At that range, the armor-piercing rounds would punch through the ass end of the RV, blow through the center, and blast out the headlights.
Junior drew his strand, build energy for several seconds before shaping a tight bolt of sizzling force that would blow the camper wide open. He grinned, loving the boost he’d received from killing the Cat Wizard. This was sweet.
Shit, now he wished he had killed Marco himself, since the guy was slated for death anyway. Oh well. Too late now. He had the rest of his life to kill psi mages.
Starting with Nina Mack and her asshole boyfriend.
Catching the attention of his men, Junior raised three fingers in the air, folding them as he counted down silently.
3… 2… 1…
Junior struck.
The force of the attack snapped his head back as the bolt whipped from his mind, shot straight as a rocket, and hit the RV broadside. There was a loud clang and an explosion of fiery sparks. Twisted, flaming wreckage tumbled loudly away as the AKs lit up, muzzle flashes strobing to techno beat of high-caliber weapons firing full auto.
The demolished RV rolled to a stop twenty feet away and lay on its side, sparking as the 7.62 rounds panged loudly, punching holes in the undercarriage.
Only that wasn’t an undercarriage, Junior realized three seconds into the attack.
No, not an undercarriage. And not an RV. Not at all.
As the men swapped out mags and advanced on the thing, firing, Junior saw the truth.
Lying on its side, blasted into a smoking twist of metal pocked with dozens of bullet holes, was not an RV but a dumpster.
There was no RV, no moped, no Nina, no boyfriend.
It had all been an illusion. Some kind of Seeker illusion cloaking the dumpster.
Not just an illusion, but…
A roar sounded from the other side of the garbage trucks, and a dark shape lurched from the shadows where it had been hiding.
A fucking trap.
The onrushing RV’s lights clicked on like the eyes of some great monster, blinding the nearest pair of shooters, who had just enough time to shout before the RV slammed into them. There was a loud thump, and the two mercs skipped and skittered across the lot in tumbling bundles of dead meat.
Their deaths bought the other two men a second of reaction time. One threw down his empty AK, drew a sidearm, and fired two rounds at the driver, shattering the windshield before a wall of invisible force slammed into him and punted him forty feet across the lot. The man struck the pavement and bounced, his entire body flopping in too many directions at once, having apparently developed two or three hinges along his broken spine.
The last soldier dove for cover behind the car, which the RV struck with a loud thump and another spray of sparks. Then a moped whined out of the darkness, cutting across the dim lot at an angle. Whipping past the remaining soldier, Nina raised her arm. A fireworks display of muzzle flashes blossomed in the gloom, and Nina filled the night with a sound Junior recognized as the buzz saw of Miguel’s Mac-10.
His only remaining soldier cried out sharply, and the man’s silhouette did a gruesome moonwalk across the pavement, jerking and lurching and stumbling backwards as a barrage of heavy rounds punched him full of holes. A second later, he was down, dead as a spent casing, and Junior was alone.
No. Not alone. Rick was still…
But Junior heard the squeal of tires and roar of the Hummer’s engine, and understood that no, he had been right. He was alone. Rick, being the fucking coward he was, had bolted like a frightened rabbit.
Should’ve killed the son of a bitch when I had the chance, Junior thought. Oh well. He’d just have to kill the cowardly fuck later.
Right now, he had to finish this shit and seize his destiny. Tonight, the power shifted.
He wished he had psi power left, but he’d wasted it on the fucking dumpster.
Even as he had these thoughts, even as he registered Rick’s betrayal, Junior raised the shotgun to his shoulder, tracking the pink moped.
Unfortunately, Nina never slowed. She just blasted his merc and kept flying away. In a second, she would be long gone.
Junior found her with his sights and pulled the trigger. But even as the shotgun boomed, kicking him in the shoulder, Junior registered the metal wall appearing between his muzzle flash and the disappearing girl.
The RV had lurched backwards, giving the escaping moped cover and blocking his shot. Son of a bitch!
And now…
His heart lurched.
What the fuck?
The RV door swung open. The crazy bastard was sprinting straight at him.
And not just any crazy bastard, Junior realized, his mind racing with adrenaline. It was that dumb ass who’d saved the cat at Mallory Square.
Junior swung the barrel in that direction, but twin blossoms of fire bloomed before the charging silhouette. Two gunshots sounded, one atop the other, and son of a bitch!
Something punched Junior in the hip so hard that his legs kicked out from beneath him. His upper body slammed to the ground hard, the shotgun smacking into the pavement and discharging at a weird angle. Adding insult to injury, the accidental discharge hurt like a bastard, yanking his unprepared wrist at an awkward angle even as his face smashed into the jerking barrel.
Holy fuck, he thought as a volcano of pain exploded in his hip, radiating across his pelvis and pulsing down his thighs and up into his gut. I’m shot. That crazy fucker shot me.
He realized then that two more shots had rung out as he dropped, the rounds cutting the air over his head.
Lucky, that.
Clutching the shotgun to his chest, Junior rolled to his right behind the trash truck where he lay on his belly, sighting down the barrel, scanning the
lot.
There!
He fired just as the asshole dove behind a car. Then fired again, holding the trigger for an instant, firing three-four-five times, peppering the car with buckshot, smashing out its windows, and hopefully killing the son of a bitch who’d shot him.
Goddamn, getting shot hurt!
He tried to stand, but his hip and leg were all fucked up. His back, too. There wasn’t much pain there, strangely enough. More in his gut and nuts and upper leg, but it felt like his hip and pelvis and lower back had all come undone.
So be it. So fucking be it. He would deal with that soon enough. But first he had to lay here and wait for this crazy son of a bitch to pop up and give him another shot.
At this range, lying prone, he couldn’t miss.
21
Brawley hunkered down behind the car, weighing his options. When he’d leapt from the RV, he’d planned to finish it there and then, but Junior—and his gut told him that yes, it was Junior—had opened up with a scattergun.
Brawley had taken a pellet or two to the upper arm before diving behind the car. His shoulder throbbed, and warm blood was running down his arm, but he believed the pellets had passed clean through the meat, and he had full motion in the arm, so he wasn’t going to worry about that. Pain was just pain. As he had countless times over his life, Brawley told the pain to go fuck itself and kept on riding.
He had hit Junior at least once and put him down, but he hadn’t killed the prick, a fact that became crystal clear when the shotgun started blasting away. The car shuddered, and glass rained down on Brawley, who was, luckily enough, crouched down on the other side of a cement divider. Otherwise, Junior’s buckshot might’ve punched a mess of holes through Brawley’s boots and feet.
If only the son of a bitch had been carrying one of those big ass AKs instead of a shotgun.
As is, Brawley couldn’t rush him. Buckshot was indiscriminate. It didn’t care if a target was a psychotic asshole or a good dude just trying to protect his women. At twenty-some yards, one blast would blow Brawley in half.
So he couldn’t rush Junior. What choice did that leave him?
Maybe the son of a bitch was bleeding out over there.
It wasn’t a thing to take for granted.
Brawley popped up quickly, saw the flash, and dropped back down without even trying to take a shot. He heard the heavy whump of the shotgun, and buckshot slammed into the car, which lurched and sighed, a rear tire going flat.
In the distance, sirens were wailing.
No matter how long I live, I will never again think of Key West without remembering the sound of wailing sirens. In his mind, the cry of approaching sirens were as much a part of this place as the whine of windmills was part of his life back on the ranch.
Only windmills whining, unlike these sirens, didn’t mean people were coming to either shoot your ass or throw you in jail.
And yet those distant sirens didn’t really concern Brawley.
The noise that concerned him was coming from the other direction. A soft whine, buzzing closer.
Nina was coming back. She was flying this way. He had told her to stay away, explaining that he would pick her up with Sage later, but she was coming back to stand beside him.
Which meant he had to finish this now.
He still had a little bit of telekinetic juice left, enough to bloody Junior’s nose or maybe even to knock him out, but he would need a clear line of sight to do that. He’d be faster and better off with a pistol.
But he was pinned down.
What could he do?
Think!
What about his Seeker juice? According to the girls, power mages of old learned to splice their powers. The strongest among them could lend psi power from one strand to another, creating emergency fuel or even supercharging an action by doubling the energy behind it.
But Brawley had no clue how to even try that.
For now, his Seeker energy remained just that, Seeker energy, not a flexible reserve of force he could weaponize.
The only thing he’d managed, under Sage’s direction, to do with Seeker force was to create the illusory carbon copy of Nina’s moped.
What he needed now from his Seeker energy was information. He needed to know what to do.
He reached out with his mind. He didn’t even know how to connect with the Latticework, let alone what to do if he actually managed to connect. So instead he just reached out with his mind, focusing his thoughts on Junior and the problem at hand.
He felt a dull warmth at the center of his mind and suddenly knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Junior was lying behind the last garbage truck, hidden behind the far side, just the other side of the tire. Junior was hurt bad, shot through the hip and bleeding pretty good, but he was still fully conscious. In a minute or two, Brawley’s intuition told him, Junior would likely slide into shock or pass out from blood loss.
But Brawley didn’t have that much time, because the buzzing whine of Nina’s moped was coming closer, cutting through the lot and hurrying this way. She’d be here in twenty seconds.
And Junior was just lying there, waiting to pull the trigger. It didn’t matter to him whether he blasted Brawley or Nina.
Brawley had to finish this shit right now.
If only Nina wasn’t really Nina. If only she was an illusion, approaching on an illusory moped like the one Brawley had made earlier.
What if…
The whine of Nina’s moped drew closer. She was fifteen seconds from shotgun range.
Brawley had to try.
Remembering Sage’s instruction, he focused his mind and drew the buzzing yellow Seeker energy together, shaping it as quickly as he could, infusing it with false truth, and setting his construction in motion.
He felt the whoosh of force leave his mind, but he wasn’t sure the action had worked and wasn’t sure how long it had taken, but the buzz of Nina’s moped was much closer now, and he heard her sweet voice calling out his name.
At the same second, he jumped to his feet, going for broke, and sprinted out from behind the car, raising his XDS.
Junior’s shotgun roared—boom-boom-boom-boom-boom—flashing brightly in the gathering gloom, blasting the long, tall Texan sprinting in his direction.
Brawley’s mirror image wavered and faded as the buckshot punched straight through the empty air into which it was disappearing.
Brawley’s illusory twin had lasted only two seconds, but it was enough.
Meanwhile, the real Brawley, having come around the other side of the car, angled around the garbage truck, spotted Junior firing away on the ground, and fired his XDS.
Junior’s body jerked with impact.
Brawley stopped running, steadied his aim, and took four measured shots before holstering his XDS and pulling the Sigma 9.
All of his shots had struck Junior. He’d seen the son of a bitch jerk and roll and jerk again like a jig at the end of a fishing line.
Brawley advanced slowly, training the 9mm on the twitching silhouette, and reached out with his mind to see what he could see.
Junior was dead, his Seeker brain told him. All gone save for a few last death twitches.
From five yards away, Brawley still pulled the trigger. Junior’s body jerked again. This time, the shadowy knob of his skull went to pieces, spraying across the shadowy ground in a dark smear.
Sure, his Seeker force had told him Junior was dead. But Brawley still approached from behind. He wasn’t ready to bet his survival on Seeker info, not when he had a simpler option.
Better safe than sorry, he thought, stepping close and pulling the trigger one more time. And there’s no wiggle room in a headshot.
22
Brawley drove slowly, leaning at an awkward angle to see through the small section of windshield not spiderwebbed by bullet holes.
“Focus on the road,” Sage suggested from the passenger seat, “and you will be able to feel the truth of it without needing to see.”
“May
be next time,” Brawley said. “For right now, I’ll just play it safe and go old school.”
“Keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes upon the road,” Nina sang from where she stood just behind them, one hand resting on each of their head rests.
“Hey,” Brawley said. “You have a pretty voice.”
“You’re just trying to sweet-talk me so you can get me into your Murphy bed back there.”
“I mean what I say and say what I mean. You really do have a nice voice.” Brawley squinted as a set of headlights passed on the other side of Route 1. “But yeah, once we get up the road a ways, I am going to pull this thing over and fuck both of you.”
Nina snorted dubiously. “Don’t make any promises you can’t keep.”
“I always keep my promises, darlin.”
When Brawley was six or seven years old, his grandmother had told him that all cowboys wanted to do two things before they died: kill a bad man and love a good woman.
Today, Brawley had killed nine and loved two. More killing lay ahead. But first, he’d enjoy the loving, which he planned to make the most of.
“And I do mean both of you,” he clarified, “at the same time.”
The girls looked at each other.
Sage twitched her glasses up the bridge of her nose and smiled.
Nina, on the other hand, blushed. Glancing at her blond friend, she squirmed. Maybe nervous, maybe eager. Maybe both.
“If we bond, we bond,” Brawley said. “Shit’s about to get real.”
“Um, we’re on the run after killing a bunch of people,” Nina said, “including Junior Dutchman. I think it’s safe to say shit already got real.”
“I am eager to feel your penis inside me again, Master,” Sage said.
“Oh brother,” Nina said. “Don’t encourage him, or his head will get so big, we’ll need another RV just to carry it.”
Brawley laughed.
“It is only natural the we feel submissive to our psi-husband,” Sage explained. “After all, he is a—”
“I know, I know,” Nina interrupted. “He’s a power mage. Please stop reminding him. And chill on the husband stuff. Can’t he just be our psi-guy or power dude or something?”
