by Matt Rogers
Even through the church walls, Alexis heard the rally cry of the disciples as they tore from slumber.
‘Shit,’ she said.
Addison said, ‘Maeve has private quarters. Behind the altar.’
The girl could barely get the words out. Her face was aghast. Alexis could see she wanted to run. Addison was torn between the familiar comforts of the group, and doing the right thing.
She was brave enough to make the hard choice.
She said, ‘Come on. We can hide there. I’ll show you.’
Brandon clambered shakily to his feet and took a step toward Alexis. Alexis lifted the Beretta and aimed it at his face. He stopped in his tracks.
He said, ‘All I need to do is scream.’
‘Then you’ll be dead.’
‘And so will you.’
His eyes were glassy and his nose was swollen and misshapen, but she saw the processing going on in his head.
Am I ready to die for the cause? he was asking himself.
‘You know you’re not,’ Alexis said, answering a question that hadn’t been vocalised.
Brandon didn’t scream.
He said, ‘What do you want?’
The question came out muffled, distorted by the blood in his mouth. It was pouring from both his nostrils, running over his upper lip, staining his teeth.
She jerked the gun toward the altar. ‘Walk.’
Addison shuffled past them, leading the way, refusing to even look at her brother.
Brandon said, ‘Hey…’
Addison wheeled around. ‘Shut up, Brandon. Shut up.’
She started for the altar. Alexis made Brandon go next so she could keep the gun trained on his back.
The church doors slammed open.
She jumped in her skin, looked over her shoulder, and saw her worst nightmare come true.
A search party filed into the nave of the church. Five men, all well-built. They spotted her at once, and cheers of elation rippled through the church.
Alexis knew she couldn’t shoot them. So far there were five, but if she fired an unsuppressed weapon in a space like this, there’d be two hundred surrounding the church.
Those were impossible odds.
She turned back and kept her aim on Brandon, who was giddy with joy at the sight of his friends.
‘Help me, brothers!’ he shouted.
The five men broke into a sprint.
Alexis said, ‘If you’re not in the sacristy in ten seconds I’ll blow your brains out.’
Brandon grimaced.
Then he turned and reluctantly ran after his sister, leaping onto the altar and down the other side, heading for the closed door up the back of the church.
Alexis followed with her heart in her throat, rapid footsteps closing in behind her.
92
Everything was surreal.
Like walking through an alternate reality.
Slater made it to the edge of the commune and came face to face with two disciples out the back of one of the bunkhouses. A man and a woman, both Caucasian, in their forties. They looked like a couple, standing too close together to be mere acquaintances. They were the oldest people Slater had seen in Mother Libertas. Despite the chaos going on around them, their faces were kind, and Slater pitied them for allowing Maeve to prey on their weaknesses.
They looked at him, both dumbfounded.
The man said, ‘You’re supposed to be dead, son.’
Slater said, ‘Those are old plans. You’re misinformed.’
‘Where’s Elias?’
‘Not here right now. He put me in charge.’
‘He did?’
‘Maeve told him to. She had a revelation. Apparently I was chosen by Gaia.’
‘Wow,’ the woman said, genuine awe on her face. ‘Where are you headed now?’
‘To find a friend. Are you two going to stop me?’
They shook their heads.
The man said, ‘Do what you need to do.’
Slater walked straight past them, through the empty bunkhouse, and out the other side. Now he was in the open, but strangely he felt no fear. He was in touch with his own mind, so he recognised it was still affected by the Bodhi. His fear was gone, replaced by channelled confidence, and he remembered why he’d become addicted to substances — both legal and illegal — in the first place. The good ones strip you of your inhibitions, and if you use that to channel positivity and forward movement it can be incredible for—
No. He cut himself off from the thought. Not again. Don’t go down that road.
He felt his demons rising, and he battled them down.
Out in the open now, members of the commune stared at him, but there was no instant animosity. In the strange dawn light there was still confusion rippling through the ranks. The disciples had been roused out of bed by the panic alarm, but someone else must have been labelled as the enemy, because they were unsure about Slater. And there was no sign of Dane to direct them, to highlight their enemies.
These people couldn’t think for themselves.
That’s how they’d bought into the cult in the first place.
The Riordans’ screening process, victimising the easily influenced.
Where is Dane? Slater thought. And, more importantly, where’s King?
The mess hall and the church loomed ahead.
He chose the church.
He wasn’t sure why.
93
One down.
Ten up.
King understood he was dealing with men who wouldn’t use common sense. No matter how many of them he beat down, they’d keep coming. They wouldn’t retreat, wouldn’t waver, wouldn’t falter. Not when Maeve’s creed was charging them with inhuman energy, fixing onto the chemical compound of Bodhi to make them savage.
King didn’t need drugs to become a savage.
He leapfrogged one of the tables, coming down on top of one of the disciples who’d broken into a sprint to try and flank King from the rear. King shouldered him into the bench behind him, which took his legs out from underneath him. The disciple sprawled onto the opposite table and King dropped an elbow into his unprotected face, sandwiching his head against the metal tabletop. The guy rolled to the side, lost in semiconsciousness.
King heard footsteps behind him, so he spun and lashed out with a body kick that was guaranteed to hit the centre mass of a target he couldn’t yet see. The toe of his boot slammed home against the new arrival’s solar plexus, crumpling him, and King slammed a left hook into the side of his forehead as he bent over. He grabbed the collapsing body and drove it down into the bench, breaking a couple of limbs with the downward pressure.
Three down.
Eight up.
He left the two crippled followers there and dived back over the same table. The frantic move isolated two new disciples who’d tried the same flanking measure, to no avail. But they weren’t deterred in the slightest, and they charged. No matter how talented, he couldn’t defend two strikes at once. He didn’t exist in the Matrix.
He rolled away from one punch and caught another on the side of his neck.
It was a hard hit, rattling his skull. He felt no pain, but that’s a bad indicator of punishment absorbed in the heat of a fistfight. Adrenaline makes you largely immune to pain unless an injury impedes your movement, so a better test of whether you’ve got your wits about you is a quick equation, computed in milliseconds.
Seven times eight.
The answer came immediately: Fifty-six.
He was all there.
No need for a tactical retreat.
Retaliate.
He grabbed the guy who’d hit him by the collar with one hand and returned the favour with the other. Drilled a big right fist into his Adam’s apple, holding back so he didn’t destroy the guy’s windpipe and suffocate him. A breath exploded from the man’s lips and he dropped, but King had already let go of him and spun and swung an elbow with reckless abandon. The second guy had jerked sideways, though, so the p
oint of King’s elbow hit him on the shoulder.
It still knocked him off his feet, sending him spilling onto one of the benches. He scrabbled upright and King kicked him in the face and sent his unconscious body sprawling under the accompanying table.
Five down.
Six up.
This was the part where everything usually changed. Realising they were dealing with a man far stronger, faster, and more precise than any adversary they’d faced before, most people would sense the tide shifting and run away.
Most people weren’t dosed with Bodhi, though.
All six of the remaining disciples came at him, practically frothing at the mouth.
Then two of them peeled off, ran down a parallel aisle, intent on cornering Violetta.
King saw flaming red.
Dived back across the table, abandoning all concern of differentiating between strikes to incapacitate and strikes to kill. That no longer mattered. Protecting his family was everything.
Family.
The word struck him.
Something he’d never considered.
He came down in a heap behind the two guys who’d peeled off, but they didn’t turn around or slow down. They were zoned in, their tunnel vision focused on Violetta hunched in the corner of the mess hall. She was trying to minimise her presence, make them focus on King, but it wasn’t working.
King sprinted after them, closed the distance with relentless athleticism, and seized one of the men around the waist from behind.
He weighed about one-sixty.
He might as well have weighed ten pounds.
King unleashed all his fast-twitch muscle fibres and picked the guy up and hurled him down into the closest bench. The guy landed on his upper back, taking most of the impact across his rear deltoids, stunning him into submission. The other guy finally wheeled around and King fired an uppercut into his stomach, tearing muscles, then grabbed him by the collar and jerked and brought him down on top of his comrade.
The pair clashed heads, stunning them both.
King grabbed the head of the man on top, lifted it up, and smashed it down like a bowling ball on the forehead of the guy underneath.
Two more immobilised.
Four up.
The last four had their sights set purely on King, the biggest threat, which was fine by him.
In fact, he relished it.
They scrabbled over tables, all four of them coming down in his aisle.
He went statuesque, planting his feet down, forming a human barricade between them and Violetta.
He lifted a hand and beckoned them toward him. ‘Have a go.’
They all came forward.
They had a go.
King’s muscles were flooded with lactic acid from dishing out so many devastating shots, but he gave thanks for all those gruelling combat simulations in training as his conditioning kicked in.
He figured he could go at this pace all day.
The most athletic of the four remaining disciples charged, all pent-up aggression fuelled by the substances in Bodhi. King diligently recognised the threat and brought his guard up, bringing a forearm vertical alongside each ear. He absorbed the guy’s first full-power punch on his forearms, dissipating the power through his muscle chain. The guy’s energy fizzled out as King nullified his first attack and he hovered in place for half a second, sucking up momentum for another swinging punch.
Half a second was all King needed.
His hands were already up in a boxing-style guard, so he lashed out with a one-two combination. His first punch was a jab, half-power, that landed square on the man’s unprotected face and broke his nose, which stunned him and froze him in place for just enough time. King followed through with the “two,” a brutal right hook, looping around his flabby arm and slamming his knuckles into the side of the guy’s skull.
Out.
King felt his heart pounding now, at his maximum heart rate, and he knew he was in the red zone. Fighting at this pace for much longer would gas him out, riddle him with fatigue, so he sped things up. You can use maximum effort or maximum time. If he slowed down and brought his heart rate down, he could dance with the final three disciples all day, but he didn’t want to do that.
He wanted this over.
The last three came in all at once and actually fared well.
Two of them shot for takedowns in unison, each going for a separate leg, like they were connected cognitively. King wondered if they were the only pair who’d planned their avenue of attack in advance before stepping into the hall. If one of them went for his legs he could have thrown a knee toward the ceiling, catching him on the jaw, but not when both went for it. They actually got hold of his thighs — two arms wrapped around each leg — and drove him down to the concrete.
Shit.
Sprawling on his back, King grabbed a handful of one guy’s hair and wrenched his head up from where it was burrowed into King’s hip. Then, with his adversary’s face exposed, King sliced an elbow off his back, opening a horizontal cut all the way along the guy’s forehead. Drops of blood rained down on his face but he ignored it, threw the guy off, and made to deal with the second man.
Who dropped a fist into King’s face, crushing his jaw, and King felt a tooth rattle in his gums. It didn’t break off, but it was close.
You’ll pay for that.
He grabbed the guy and rolled over so he was on top. It didn’t take much effort — King outweighed him by fifty pounds. A third-degree black belt on the ground, he slipped into mount position and dropped a fist twice consecutively into the guy’s face, slamming his head back against the concrete, separating him from lucidity.
The very last disciple came up from behind and seized King in a rear naked choke.
Again, it was well executed. The guy had some sort of jiu-jitsu training, because his squeeze was good and his technique was crisp. But again, he weighed a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet, so King simply stood up and bent over, and the guy was forced to leap onto King’s back to maintain the choke.
King turned around, carrying the guy’s whole weight, lined up his aim, and leapt backwards off his feet, dropping the man’s spine into the closest bench.
The choke came loose and the guy spilled off, hurt bad.
King spun in place and punched him once, twice, three times in the face, then finished the combination with a staggering elbow to the forehead.
He stood up, chest heaving, lungs burning, muscles screaming.
Eleven down.
None up.
94
They only made it to the sacristy entranceway.
Addison got the door open and spilled through, but Brandon was moving deliberately slowly, and it took him a few more seconds to reach the door. By then Alexis could sense the pack of rabid disciples right on her heels.
If she pressed forward, all she’d achieve was taking the standoff to an enclosed hallway with no chance of slipping out an exit.
So she overtook Brandon, grabbed him by the collar, spun him around and shoved the Beretta into his skull.
‘Stop!’ she shouted.
The disciples skidded to a halt. Most of them were up on the altar. One man had leapt down, closing in on them, now only six feet away. Brandon could almost reach out and touch him. His hair was tousled from sleep. He was heavyset, with pale skin and freckles covering his bare arms. He was wearing a wife-beater.
Alexis said, ‘I’ll kill him.’
She pressed the gun harder into Brandon’s head.
The disciple up front smiled. It was sickening.
‘He’s not the priority,’ the man said. ‘You are.’
She felt Brandon tense up, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
She understood.
He’d thought Mother Libertas was everything. He thought he was special. Now he realised he was just a pawn. No one was more important than the Riordans and their demands.
Alexis had faced close to a dozen life-or-death situations
now. They were becoming bearable, allowing her to think coherently even at the height of fear.
But now she couldn’t.
Now she just felt sick.
Because Addison was behind her, cowering in the doorway, and if they captured Alexis they’d know that Addison had helped her. The young girl would be tortured and killed, made an example of.
Alexis wanted to vomit.
Then she blinked, refocusing on the altar. She’d taken her eyes off the raised platform to speak to the disciple who’d leapt down, but something had changed in the interim.
There was a sixth disciple in the party.
95
Slater hovered in the back for only a moment, long enough to identify that Alexis was in trouble.
Then he exploded.
Dropped the first man with a massive right hook. Pivoted to the second and kicked him in the chest, sending him careening back off the altar. The guy fell hard, dropping from the platform, and bounced his head off the stone floor. Slater seized the third by the collar and smashed his own forehead into the guy’s nose, snapping it clean, then used the double-handed grip to heave him off his feet and throw him into the fourth man. The fourth guy stumbled back, thrown off but not incapacitated.
Slater only needed a moment of hesitation, though.
He shoved the third guy aside, who was busy cupping his brutalised nose in his hands. He closed the gap and kicked the fourth guy in the calf, making the muscle seize up, and the guy went down on one knee. Slater grabbed a handful of his hair and brought the guy’s face down onto his own knee.
The man who’d leapt down to confront Alexis was the only one left standing.
He was frozen in hesitation, now thoroughly outnumbered.
‘Allow me,’ Brandon growled.
