Hunt You Down

by Christopher Farnsworth

  Zhang appears a moment later. He does not look good. He’s bloodied, and half his body is porcupined with wooden splinters from a beam that exploded. His rifle is still slung over his shoulder, however, and he’s able to stand. He limps to my side.

  “You might have been right,” he says. He reaches into one pocket of his fatigues and pulls out a knife. “You know the solution to the prisoner’s dilemma?” he asks.

  For a second, there’s every chance he’s going to slit my throat. I don’t speak.

  Instead, he slices the straps, freeing me.

  “Trust,” I say as I sit up. “If the prisoners choose to act against their own interests, they both win. It makes no sense, but it produces better results.”

  He shoves the table aside and the rubble slides off, crumbling into a new pile among all the other wreckage. He drags me free before helping me to my feet.

  “Let’s find out if that’s true,” he says.

  As fast as we can, we check the other men still in the room. Anyone who was standing by the door is ground meat. They went so quickly I didn’t even feel them slip out of their lives.

  There are a couple of Zhang’s soldiers left, both carrying more shrapnel than he is, and one Romanian. The other gangsters—the ones who aren’t dead—must have gone out the back with Godwin. The Romanian has a piece of rebar jutting through his leg, keeping him in place as effectively as a bear trap. His thoughts are a long, sustained note of pain and obscenity. I can feel the thing scraping around inside him, near bone. Ordinarily, I’d never try to move him. But the next drone strike could come at any second.

  There are definitely going to be more. They took out the Dongfeng first because it was an easy target, and because it was transportation. They don’t want anyone getting away.

  So I put my hands under the Romanian’s leg and yank as hard as I can. And feel his agony go from blinding to unbearable.

  He screams as the meat around the rebar squelches and moves a few inches. Not enough to pull free, however.

  I sense the punch coming before he throws it, and duck. He’s screaming at me now. I don’t speak Romanian, but my talent translates.

  I’d like to tell him it’s not much fun for me either, but I doubt he’d understand.

  I take a deep breath and reach for his leg again and he finds his gun from someplace and points it at me.

  The meaning of that would probably be pretty clear even if I couldn’t read his mind.

  “Leave him,” Zhang says, hauling one of his men up in a shoulder carry.

  “We can use him,” I say. “He knows where Godwin is, where he’s going.”

  And he might know where Sara is.

  Zhang looks at what’s left of the ceiling, which is open to the blue sky now. It would almost be comical if we weren’t currently targets. The Chinese CH-4 drone can cruise at five thousand meters, which is almost twice as far as the unaided human eye can see. Even if we could spot it, as far as I know neither of us has heat vision to knock it out of the sky. The drones usually carry at least two AR-1 missiles, which travel at a top speed of 950 miles per hour to their targets. They can obliterate tanks, buildings, and every living thing within fifteen meters.

  But I know what he means. We’re visible. The drone’s next pass could come any second. And if we’re still in here, we might as well hold up umbrellas to protect ourselves.

  “Look, you fucking moron,” I scream at the Romanian. “You can’t stay here. Another big boom, coming fast. You understand?”

  I boost the words right into his mind and point at the sky, just in case that might help.

  The gun wavers a little, but he still looks suspicious.

  Zhang is struggling to get his soldier out the back. The other Chinese soldier is on what’s left of the floor, groaning.

  Screw it.

  “I’ll be back,” I tell the Romanian, and hoist the Chinese soldier up. He feels like a sack of broken glass in my arms. I hobble across the ruins to get out the back door, just behind Zhang.

  We rush into the jungle. It’s not far from the backs of the buildings that line Golden Boten City’s main street. The thick canopy should give us some cover from the drone’s cameras or any satellite coverage.

  We run as far and as fast as we can, trying to get outside the blast radius. I have a brief, stupid fear of snakes or picking up some kind of disease from some unknown species of frog, but that’s probably curable. Being turned into a red mist by an AR-1 is not.

  We’re a hundred yards into the jungle when Zhang finally collapses and drops his soldier. They both gasp for breath on the ground. I deposit my soldier next to Zhang. He lands harder than I intend, and I feel all the damage he’s sustained inside, the pain sloshing around my chest and gut as well as his.

  I turn back toward the building.

  Zhang says, “Don’t be an—”

  That’s as much as he gets out before the next AR-1 hits, and the little gambling room is reduced to dust and slag.

  The temperature rises to five thousand degrees at the center of the blast, and the shock wave throws me back a good six feet. I collide with Zhang and we’re driven down into the soft undergrowth. What’s left of my hearing blanks out completely, and my head feels as if it’s been hit with a sledgehammer.

  For a long time, nobody moves. We’re simply not capable of it. The fires from the blast begin to catch and ignite the closest buildings. When I feel like I can turn my head without it falling off, I look over at Zhang. Talking is pointless; we’re both still deaf from the strike.

  He’s still, his face composed. He looks up at the small bits of sky and sunlight that make it through the trees and leaves overhead.

  They’re not done yet. They can’t be. It’s just a matter of how many drones they’ve got, and how many missiles they’re carrying. They’ve got to be searching for us, ready to drop another payload the second they see movement.

  But Sara is still in there.

  I heave myself to my feet and begin walking toward the main drag again.

  My hearing is gone, so it’s a surprise when Zhang grabs me from behind and yanks me backward.

  I try to pull away. Shouting is pointless, so I try to make my point with gestures.

  Whatever message I manage to convey, his answer is the same. He shakes his head. No.

  I shove him back and head for the edge of the jungle again.

  Zhang doesn’t stop me this time. He goes to tend to his men.

  I make my way carefully. Godwin and at least some of his people are still around. I don’t sense them, but my head’s a little scrambled, and they could still be close enough to fire a shot.

  I’m almost at the place where the dirt gives way to pavement again. There are vines and runners and roots cracking the surface already—the jungle anxious to take the whole city back.

  I circle around the location of the last drone strikes, trying my best to stay under cover. The trees reach almost to the side of what used to be a convenience store, which is decorated with huge movie posters. George Clooney, his head the size of a satellite dish, watches me with a look of firm resolve on his features.

  Through the gaps in the buildings, I can see the Kings Roman Casino, the building where Godwin’s men dragged Sara.

  I’m wondering if I can sprint across the road fast enough to outrun a missile when I feel the change in the air. I don’t hear anything, because I am still deaf. But there is something like a high gust of wind that cuts through the stillness and humidity.

  This time I have enough sense to dive for the ground.

  The strike takes out the convenience store, and Clooney disappears in a fireball, his piercing eyes looking at me until the wall vanishes.

  I scurry back into the jungle as far as I can, until the canopy above is thick again.

  But it doesn’t matter much. Whoever is operating the drones has decided against surgical strikes. Suddenly missi
les begin to rain down on Golden Boten City, one after another. The buildings are hit almost in sequence, like a kid working through a line of alien invaders in a video game.

  By the time they reach the Kings Roman, Zhang has found me. A missile hits the east side of the building first, which seems to dissolve like a sugar cube in hot tea. The center collapses, and it’s pounded again by another strike, and even the bricks seem to be on fire now.

  Then they go back and hit every place again.

  Zhang sits beside me, and we watch, in awe and horror, as the entire town vanishes before our eyes in clouds of flame and debris, struck down by thunderbolts from some unseen and angry god.

  I don’t know how long it takes. Probably only a few minutes. It was not a very big place, after all.

  It seems to last for hours.

  When it is over, my skin feels cooked from the heat of the flames and my body feels pulped from the blast waves. There are pools of melted glass, and burning lumber, and places in the rubble where walls are still standing.

  But nothing alive.

  There is nothing left alive at all.

  *

  I am not even sure how to begin mourning Sara. We were too far away for me to feel her go, and I am almost sorry about that. Touching her mind would have been torture in the last moments. Feeling her fear, her desperation, as the missiles hit.

  But it would have been contact. It would have been more than this.

  As it is, I feel empty. I don’t even have my old familiar cushion of rage to fall back on. I came here to kill Godwin for what he unleashed.

  And now I’m looking at burning rubble, and wondering how much responsibility I bear myself.

  At moments like this, I am actually glad when the shooting starts, because it keeps me from thinking anymore.

  The first bullet goes high, snipping a branch off a tree right above me and Zhang. We both snap to attention and flatten ourselves to the ground at the same time.

  I scan outward. I assume Zhang does the same, and finds what I do. Two of Godwin’s Romanians. Moving toward us through the trees, about twenty meters out. We were so busy watching Golden Boten burn that we didn’t even notice their thoughts.

  They’re not particularly quiet. They’re pumped on adrenaline and anger. Teeth clenched, hands tight on their guns.

 

  Somehow they’ve decided that this was all Zhang’s idea, despite the fact that he was almost killed in the strikes too. It doesn’t make sense, but you don’t get a lot of rational thinking from men who have just endured a rain of hellfire from the sky.

  There’s another burst of gunfire overhead and to the left. I dip into their heads and see that they’ve lost sight of us. One stretch of jungle looks pretty much like another. It’s easy to get confused.

  Then I realize something. I heard the shots. My hearing is coming back. Everything still sounds muffled, but the noise of the outside world is beginning to leak back into my brain.

  So I try to talk to Zhang.

  “You going to do something about this?” I ask.

  He looks at me like I’m an idiot. Another burst of gunfire over our heads, but closer. Homing in on my voice. I must be yelling.

  Another burst.

  Zhang scowls and pops up, gun in hand. He aims and fires just like I would, using not his eyes but his talent. He barely looks awake, he seems so bored.

  But then, behind a plant I can’t name, two men die. Their bodies drop, and I feel their thoughts end, cut off like a light switch being flicked. I pull away from them. I don’t need to get sucked into their deaths on top of everything else.

  Zhang lies back for a moment and seems to rest. I realize something: I can no longer sense the minds of the two remaining Chinese soldiers. They’re gone. Their bodies are right where we left them, but they’re gone.

  I know what he must be feeling. The black hole of loss, amplified by whatever connection he had to the two men. Maybe they were friends. Maybe they were just soldiers. But there was a string connecting them to Zhang, and I know it takes everything inside to resist its pull as another mind dies.

  I wait for him to recover. At this point, it is a decision. He has to make it himself.

  “This really has become a legendarily bad day,” Zhang says after a long moment. It’s almost a joke. I figure he’s convinced himself to keep breathing. Keep surviving.

  “What now?” I ask.

  “They’re not going to let us just walk out of here. Are you armed?”

  “No. You have a spare?”

  Despite what he said about trust, Zhang still hesitates before he hands over one of the dead men’s sidearms. It’s a QSZ-92, the Chinese version of the 9mm. I check it, then put a round in the chamber.

  “Did you see how many Godwin had with him?”

  “At least a dozen. He had men all around, waiting for you.”

  “Probably not many left. If there were, they would group up, try for a mass assault. Confuse us with numbers. One by one, they’re only going to get picked off—”

  Then we both sense it. A stray thought, at the edge of our range. There. About a hundred yards away. The outer limit of my reach. One of Godwin’s thugs. I recognize the particular tang of Romanian on the surface of his consciousness before my talent automatically turns his words into something I can understand.

 

  And then .

  I see it come flying through the air a second later, and I’m already moving. So is Zhang.

  The blast seems almost quiet compared to the missile strikes. Still blows an appreciable hole in the ground, though.

  But we’re not there anymore. I am moving back around behind Godwin’s remaining thugs, using my talent like radar bouncing off them, stepping between the trees, keeping them at a distance.

  I emerge from the foliage and see the thug about to pitch another fastball at the place where he thinks we are. I can feel the windup in his muscles, hear the countdown in his mind. He pulls the pin.

 

  Which is when I break in and cramp his hand.

  It feels like white-hot fire shooting up his arm as the muscles seize up. He’s barely able to drop the grenade from his fingers. It bounces and rolls only a couple of feet away from the toes of his boots.

  I feel the spike of panic shoot through him as he turns and runs as fast as he can.

  It’s not fast enough.

  The explosion picks him up and hurls him a dozen yards, and his body becomes a pincushion full of metal fragments.

  I feel it all. The pain takes me to the ground and blots out everything for a moment.

  The jerk doesn’t even have the good grace to die quickly. He lands hard after his body bounces off a tree, still bleeding and suffering. I’m stuck with every second of it.

  I try to pull my mind away from his agony but it’s like being rolled in barbed wire; it’s going to take time to disentangle myself, even as he drops into the hole at the end of his life.

  I am so busy with that I don’t notice the other thug moving from the bushes behind, circling around toward me with his gun drawn. I sense him only when he is right on top of me, looking over the sights of an assault rifle.

  He aims carefully. No expression on his face. His mind is equally blank. He’s a professional, doing a job.

  I raise my gun and try desperately to think of something that will stop him or slow him down, but I’m snarled in the mind of the man dying out a few yards away.

  Then blood fountains from the thug’s throat as it bursts open. I remember that I’m still pretty much deaf, and realize I didn’t hear the gunshot that tore through the back of his neck and out the other side.

  He collapses to the jungle floor, and I see Zhang behind him.

  He’s saying something, but I’m still too deaf to hear clearly. And anyway, I’m busy.

  I line up the shot. Point the gun i
n his direction.

  He looks surprised.

  I fire several times, and he looks even more surprised when he doesn’t drop dead.

  But the Romanian thug behind Zhang does. He was bringing his rifle up to his shoulder when I shot him in the head and chest.

  This one goes mercifully quickly. There is the usual hole in the world that opens when someone drops out of it. But I am ready for it this time. I pull away from the darkness there, and focus on Zhang, who is still staring.

  I move closer to him. I try to speak, but my voice still sounds like it’s being muffled by cotton. So I have to shout.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. Gives me that amused look again. “Trust,” he yells.

  “Makes no sense,” I yell back at him. “But it works.”

  “Godwin,” he says.

  He must still be out there, but I can’t pick up his thoughts anywhere. Neither can Zhang, apparently.

  “We can’t shoot him,” I remind Zhang. “The vest.”

  He rolls his eyes, a gesture I associate more with teenage girls than badass Chinese psychic soldiers. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Then we cover each other as we move deeper into the jungle and begin to hunt.

  *

  We don’t get very far before I start dragging. I have been shot and stabbed and drugged and beaten and blown up in the past week. I haven’t eaten since Hong Kong, and I am shaky from too much adrenaline. I also haven’t had my pills, and that always puts a crimp in my sense of humor.

  Zhang is hiding his pain better than I am, I think, but he’s still walking around with fragments of the building in him. He cannot lift one leg as high as the other when he walks, and he’s holding on to his rifle with both hands like he’s afraid he will drop it.

  We are still more than a match for what remains of Godwin’s thugs.

  Their thoughts are lights and sirens against the backdrop of the jungle. We point and shoot like we’re in a video game.

  I pick up a man hiding, preparing to ambush us once we get about ten feet closer to his position.

  “Over there—”

  Zhang has already lifted his rifle. “I know,” he says. He fires half a clip through the trees, and I feel the bullets stitch into a man who drops to the ground. He lives only a few seconds after that.