The Suns of Liberty (Book 2): Revolution

by Michael Ivan Lowell

  “I have fought a thousand battles just to kiss these lips,” he purrs. “Finally we can be together.”

  “I love you,” is all she can manage.

  Of course he knows this. All women love him. The point is, he loves her too.

  He kisses her. His tongue plunges deep and torrid; he holds her tight to his own muscular body as she swoons completely. Again and again they kiss. He begins to trail his hot, wet mouth down her neck, her chest, back to her breasts...

  She hears soft, romantic music soar in the background. What could be more perfect, as if the heavens had opened just for them.

  Suddenly they’re dancing. Slow and gentle.

  And then Revolution spins her away, and Fiona twirls with the skill and precision of a professional. Revolution marvels at her grace. She dips low and stretches like a magnificent swan, barely keeping hold of his hand. Then she twirls again and spirals back into his arms in one rapid, majestic motion. As she wraps herself around him, their lips close on one another, her legs lock around the humming heat of his armor. He takes her fully into his arms.

  She can feel her arousal building when...

  Reality hit hard.

  Her cell phone blared music across the now empty room. Only she and her clearly irritated English teacher remained.

  “Fiona!” the teacher yelled again, openly frustrated she had ignored him the first time.

  She swiftly killed the phone’s ring.

  “Sorry.”

  “Yes, well. You have five minutes left.”

  CHAPTER 13

  FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF BOSTON

  MORNING

  Paul Ward had crammed himself into the most uncomfortable spot in all of Boston. He was sardined into an air conditioner vent just above the vault area of the bank. He was pretty sure this was how you stopped a bank heist. Had he wanted to, he could have robbed this bank blind overnight.

  “I'd make a hell of a crook,” he'd said to himself as he'd waited there for hours.

  But now morning had come, and more importantly, the very event The Source had predicted was taking place. For more than a year now, Ward had been monitoring the bank robberies committed by one highly successful gang of criminals: the Brown Recluse.

  Mostly they robbed banks, but they weren't like other organized crime outfits. Sure, they staked out territory and they sold drugs, guns, anything else that was hot on the black market, just like any other crime syndicate. But they also committed big, flashy, brazen crimes out in the open and dared the authorities to come after them.

  No one was sure why the authorities didn't. The rumor was the gang was on the Council’s payroll. Others said they were just too mean to mess with.

  Ward was there to trap them in their own web, so to speak. For him it was personal...

  He had worked long and hard to figure out how they picked their targets. They had taken the extraordinary step of publically announcing there was a pattern to their crimes. They sent encrypted codes to the newspapers. Daring anyone with the smarts to figure out how they did it. In the end, the former Harvard professor had cracked their code.

  Ward knew that the job ahead of him was going to require a cold, steady, passion-free hand and head. He’d been mentally going through the plan all night, thinking of every scenario.

  Carefully, he removed the vent cover and slid it silently into the vent beside him. Below him, the bank vault lay wide open. A group of men were hauling out the cash in bags. There was nothing but open air between him and the thieves.

  He lifted both arms and drew a bead on them. Large cuffs on his sleeves whirred to life as they rotated like the canister of a machine gun. All he had to do was think about it—neural transmitter and all.

  Thwap! Thwap! Thwap!

  Small darts zipped out, striking the gangsters. In only seconds, the entire line had been hit. A few reached for weapons, but before they could grasp them—in the span of a single heartbeat—they collapsed.

  Paralyzed and unconscious.

  Ward's darts were the basis of his new mission. The reason he was willing to get his hands dirty. Not just be an aerial lookout for the authorities. His paralysis serum was the key. He had no interest is killing anyone—didn't believe in it (another issue he had with the Revolution). Just wanted to bring the people ruining this city to justice. He had developed a blood accelerator that sent the serum from the capillaries to the heart in a single beat. The darts only needed to pierce the skin to be effective.

  Ward leapt from the vent. Around him, men in brown jumpsuits and brown ski masks lay sprawled across the floor. Area secured.

  Then he heard a familiar voice.

  Ward spun around. Fifty feet in front of him, in the main lobby of the bank, where terrified patrons and employees had been forced to sit in a circle around the oblong-shaped room, he spied his real target. The man he had come to find.

  His cool demeanor vanished. The blood in his temples surged; his plans evaporated in the heat of his adrenaline. He felt himself lunge forward. His body moved before his mind, his emotions screaming. He felt cold sweat bead on his forehead.

  The man they called Fiddler, midthirties, athletic build, a violin on his shirt, stood in the lobby, henchmen all around him. A hideous spider face adorned his ski mask. The leader of the Brown Recluse gang was grasping the shirt of an obviously petrified customer. Absolute, transfixing terror shown in the man’s moon-wide eyes. Fiddler reached into his shoulder holster and pulled out the strangest gun Ward had ever seen. The large weapon resembled a small crossbow and housed what looked like a miniature harpoon with eight ghastly prongs on its topside assembly.

  Everyone in Boston knew what was coming next. The Brown Recluse always left a macabre calling card in the form of a dead and/or disfigured victim. The acid-filled harpoons were pointed dead between the trembling man’s eyes. Fiddler dropped the poor wretch to the floor. He thudded hard, and Fiddler cackled at the man and told him not to move.

  “I haven’t decided if you’re our lottery winner or not,” Fiddler said to the prone man. “Someone younger, perhaps. More innocent.”

  His voice was crisply British, but with an odd Boston flair. He’d been born into the meanest streets of London and raised in crime-filled South Boston. He’d grown up around Boston’s long tradition of gangsters and bank robbers and had made it his own legacy. Created his own legend.

  Ward charged him, bloodlust pounding in his head. “Fiddler!” he screamed, and the gang leader spun. Fiddler cocked his head, unsure of what he was looking at, irritated he’d been interrupted from his favorite part of the heist.

  Ward's face scrunched with anger. His mouth curled into a snarl. He rapid-fired the darts at the gang leader.

  Fiddler, thinking fast, grabbed the henchmen beside him and shoved them in front of himself as two unwitting human shields. The darts stabbed into them, and the henchmen fell. This gave Fiddler just enough time to take aim with the harpoon gun, and he fired it directly at the sprinting Ward.

  The “harpoon” whisked past Ward's face in a blur of speed. Consumed by his rage, he was oblivious to the danger. He didn’t dodge; he didn’t flinch. He just kept running. Fiddler had simply panicked—and missed.

  Behind Ward, the eight-pronged stake of the harpoon lodged into the plaster with a shoop! Burning acid instantly smoked out of the wall, and the concrete melted like an oil painting on a burning canvas. The harpoon clanged to the floor amidst the goo that had been part of the wall only seconds before. A large, yawning gap was left, exposing a storage room on the other side.

  Ward was unfazed. He raised his arms again and aimed as he strode. The cuff darts clicked.

  Empty.

  “Shit!” Ward breathed, and for the first time since he’d leapt from the air vent, he felt fear.

  CHAPTER 14

  Ward’s thoughts turned to reloading the darts, and instantly a new barrage of ammo slithered across his armor and reloaded into his cuffs. He reacquired Fiddler dead ahead, still charging him. Fiddl
er was trapped. Ward prepared to fire and...

  Whack!

  All Ward could see was the ceiling, getting farther away. He slammed into the floor as the air gushed out of his lungs.

  He looked up and saw a mountain holding a large metal pipe looking down on him.

  “Homerun, slugger!” Fiddler chuckled to the huge man standing over Ward. Then his face turned serious again. “Take care of that, would you, Fang. We’re on a schedule.”

  Fang, early thirties, a huge, muscle-bound brute, loomed over Ward, sneering. Ward wondered how they’d found a ski mask large enough for his enormous head. The giant man seized Ward by his wrists—the metal of the cuff-turrets actually caved under his powerful grip—and hoisted him off the ground.

  “You piss me off!” the big man roared through his brown ski mask in a thick Boston accent. Fang hurled Ward through the air, and he smashed through the fancy waiting room furniture, sending splinters of wood lancing across the room.

  Ward scrambled to his feet, his head—and the room—spinning. Pain shooting like lightning though his body.

  Fang ripped a desk out of its floor bolts and hurled the whole thing at Ward. It smashed over him and cracked in two, slamming him back to the ground. Fang wasn't done. He spun and grabbed a large wooden chair, flinging it.

  Ward dove across the floor as the chair missed his head by inches. But just as he regained his footing an entire filing cabinet smacked him back to the ground.

  Fang kept pelting him until he ran out of projectiles. The waiting room looked like a war zone. Debris was everywhere. Terrified customers clung to the outside edges of the lobby, hiding anywhere they could.

  Ward’s forehead throbbed; the room was spinning again. Something dripped into eyes and clouded his swimming vision. Blood. He wiped it away. Tried to focus. Fang leered at him, but the big man was done, out of stuff to throw. Thank Christ for that.

  It was now or never. Fight back or be roadkill. Ward stepped out and aimed at Fang. He closed his fist, and the cuff darts hummed, they started to turn, and...

  They just whined.

  Fang's bombardment and tight grip had taken their toll. The cuffs were good and jammed. Fang didn't need an invitation. He glared at the trickle of blood running down Ward's face and grinned. He charged. The room almost shook.

  Ward stood there, a deer in headlights—of a tank—while half his brain was cursing the cuff darts, trying to get them to fire, the other half diagnosing what had gone wrong. Neither half told him to look up...

  The big man clutched Ward's throat in his powerful claw and lifted him off his feet with ease. Ward could feel his windpipe collapsing. He made a mental note to look into ways of reinforcing the neck area between his chest plate and helmet. As it was, Fang had unfettered access to his throat.

  Through his peripheral vision Ward saw Fiddler escaping out the back of the bank. The bastard! Nothing he could do about that now. He'd be lucky to make it out of here still breathing. Fang shot him an evil smirk and tightened his crushing grip around Ward’s larynx.

  Just as Ward felt his windpipe giving in, a dart finally shot out of his whirling cuffs directly into Fang's beefy chest. Ward hadn’t even been trying to shoot. The mechanism had simply gotten jammed open and was waiting for the dart to fire before it could close again.

  The big brute's eyes saucered with surprise as his breath stuck in his throat.

  A heartbeat.

  The two men crashed to the ground with a loud thud as Fang’s three hundred plus pounds slammed onto Ward. Thankfully, the armored flight suit took most of the impact. But now he had a new problem. He was stuck.

  As he frantically tried to pull himself out from under the dead weight of the human boulder, Ward spied the last of the gang members making for the back exit, uttering a long stream of expletives to himself the whole way. His foul mouth echoed across the room. What an obnoxious little loudmouth!

  Ward freed himself with a final push just in time to take aim at Mr. Loudmouth. He was short and stocky and Ward guessed him to be in his midthirties. Wrinkles were starting around his mouth. He wore a signature brown Mohawk ski mask. Even under his mask Ward could tell he had a pug-nosed face. An obvious underling saddled with the shit jobs. It had been left to him to get the last of the cash, and he was trying his best to get it all in one trip.

  Despite the pain wracking his head, Ward chuckled at the sight. Loudmouth was giving it all he had, but he clearly had bitten off more than he could chew. Money bags fell from his arms as he fought for the exit. If Loudmouth got to the getaway vehicle, all of Ward’s efforts would have been in vain.

  He tried the cuff darts again, but they had fired their last it seemed. The turrets wouldn’t even spin. He changed tactics. He pressed his fingers down onto the canisters and the end of a dart popped up. He pried it out and flung it like a knife. It stabbed into Loudmouth's back, and he yelped, dropping the money bags onto his toes.

  Loudmouth spun, gun in hand. He was a surprisingly quick draw. He shook his head at Ward. Pissed off. He cursed a long list of profanity, some of which Ward was not sure he’d even heard before, and stalked toward him.

  “C'mon! Circulate! Circulate!” Ward grunted to himself.

  Loud Mouth blinked. Tried to aim. Something was wrong. He scrunched his masked face, obviously wondering why the world was starting to spin. He dropped the gun back down to his side. For a millisecond Ward was hopeful, but the serum was taking hold too slowly. The accelerators weren’t working. Ward, defenseless without his darts, kept his eyes on the gun in the little man’s hand.

  Loudmouth swung the pistol back up toward Ward but then blinked and swooned. The gun fell back to his side again, this time in a wide arc as he nearly lost his balance, and people around Ward let out little screams of panic, afraid the thug would shoot them instead.

  Ward looked around him. People were everywhere. He couldn't run or he would endanger all the bystanders if Loudmouth opened fire. He was stuck. A sitting duck.

  Ward aimed the cuffs at Loudmouth again and tried to fire them. They just whined. The thug set his jaw, raised the gun with both hands, planted his feet, fixed his eyes on Ward, and aimed right at his heart. This was it. Nowhere to run, no way to stop him. Ward closed his eyes tight...

  BANG!

  Ward waited for the pain, but it didn’t come. What the hell? Was he already dead? He knew that sometimes in massive traumas the body just kind of shuts down. That would explain the lack of pain. He didn’t want to look. He could also be having an out-of-body experience, except he was still clearly in his body.

  Had the armor held? Ward was no expert, but Loudmouth’s pistol had looked to him like a .50 caliber. A far larger bullet than Ward’s suit was rated to stop—according to his own calculations. Calculations he had never tested...

  He opened one eye. Peeked down, grimacing. No blood. No bullet hole. No nothing. He was unhurt. Then he realized.

  The bang was not a gunshot.

  He looked across the lobby. Loudmouth had collapsed to the floor with a bang. “Thank God,” Ward said, realizing what the noise had been. He cackled an overly nerdy-sounding laugh before he could stop himself. Then he stiffened up, tried to act tough again.

  The manager looked at him with wide eyes.

  Just then, something grabbed his wrist. Ward spun and nearly swung at it—when he realized it was just one of the cuff-turrets which had finally started to spin. Great timing! Thank God he hadn’t screamed.

  And then he started to giggle again. It was probably just the nerves. But he couldn’t stop. A sharp pain in his forehead helped him focus, and he took a deep breath and swallowed the giggles down. He was surprised to hear a few customers snicker too. Hopefully that was nerves on their part as well. Or they were just laughing at him. Either way, he was alive. That’s what was important.

  The bank manager was still eyeing him suspiciously.

  Ward saw him and regained his composure, though adrenaline was still pounding through him. “You i
n charge?”

  “Uh, yeah,” the Manager said tentatively, as if he didn’t want to hear the next question Ward might have for him. Did he think Ward was another robber?

  Ward forced himself to calm down further. He took a few deep breaths, thought about being Zen, and then spoke gently.

  “Call the authorities.”

  “Already on their way.” He said it like a warning.

  Ward couldn’t blame the guy for not trusting him. He had hid in his air conditioner vents, after all. “Good.”

  Ward channeled his inner police officer, assuming he had one, and surveyed the area one last time. All around the room, gang members were immobilized. Paralysis darts stuck out of them like well-used voodoo dolls. Ward tried to sound relieved and in charge as he turned back to the manager. “Tell them this will wear off in about two hours. There's no permanent damage.”

  Ward turned to leave, and the now rising customers gave him a thunderous cheer. The Brown Recluse was the most notorious gang in the city. Every Bostonian knew their MO, and he had saved them from their terror. Turns out he wasn’t the only one who wanted these creeps taken out. Ward couldn't help but beam a wide smile.

  The manager softened. “Who are you?”

  Ward paused. Thought of what to say. “Haven't come up with a name yet.”

  At that very moment, Ward noticed, to his horror, that Loudmouth was awake again and reaching as stealthily as he could for the Glock he had tucked into his belt. Somehow the serum had not had its full effect. Ward hadn’t even thought to check him for a second weapon. Damn, there was a lot to think of in these situations! Live and learn.

  “How 'bout Dead Man!” Loudmouth spit, grabbing the handle of his handgun. “See you in hell, you mother—”