by Alex Archer
The ringleader grunted and howled, leveling the knife dead between the center of Annja’s eyes.
The whole get-involved-or-don’t decision had just been taken out of her hands.
She could charge in amongst them or turn and run.
It didn’t matter which; what she couldn’t do was stay where she was. Her cover was blown. This wasn’t about a story. Right now it was about getting out of there alive.
“Can you hear me?” Doug said again. “Annja? It’s great news. They’ve had a change of heart upstairs. At least for now. I’ve argued and fought for us, and you’re going to love me.”
Annja shook her head, trying to focus on the mass of bodies rushing towards her. Only one had a weapon that she could see, but the madness in the eyes of the horde was more than a match of any brain-hungry frenzy. With one hand she reached into the otherwhere, feeling the familiar grip of her sword begin to solidify in her hand as her fingers closed around it. She savored the adrenaline rush as her blood pumped hard through her veins. This was what she lived for. Not the show. The show was her identity out in the real world, but this was who she really was.
In a single fluid movement she drew Saint Joan’s blade into existence and held it at the ready to fend off the charge of blood-crazy fanatics racing toward her.
It wasn’t Joan’s blade, she thought to herself, not anymore. It was hers. All hers.
“They picked up the back six, so we’ve had a reprieve, Annja. Now we’ve just got to come up with six shows that knock their socks off. Think you can come up with a killer concept or six?”
Annja barely took the news in.
She had more important things to deal with, like getting out of this mess without harming twelve people.
She gripped the sword with both hands.
There was an undeniable madness in the eyes of the people running at her, but there was something else beyond that, something more powerful: fear.
Beyond them the painted man still stood over the victim or sacrifice.
The body lay motionless on the bier.
“What’s going on, Annja? I thought you’d be happy?”
“I am happy,” Annja said as she swung at the first of the men to reach her. “I’m delirious with joy.” The flat of the blade slammed into his upper arm hard enough to have him crying out and spinning away in pain as he clutched at the numb and useless limb. “This is what I sound like when I’m happy, Doug.” The next attacker fared no better. She was laughing as she drove the third to his knees with a hammering blow from the sword’s pommel crunching against the side of his head.
“Are you at the gym? It sounds like you’re working out.”
“Something like that,” Annja said as a third man crumpled to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut. She had no wish to kill any of these unarmed people, just neutralize them, and as long as they only had their fists to fight with she was happy to put them out of action as opposed to out of their misery.
“Oh, okay, well, look, when you’re done doing whatever it is you’re doing, swing by the office, would you? I think this calls for a celebration.”
“I can do that,” she said, “but it might be a while. I’m not exactly in the neighborhood.”
“Where are you?”
“Haiti.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line. “Chasing a story?”
“Something like that,” Annja said, deciding against elaborating. The less Doug knew, the better when it came to her other life. “It’s not as glamorous as it sounds, believe me.”
The man with the knife gave a cry of ecstasy.
“Oh, it sounds…pretty interesting whatever it is,” Doug said, having obviously heard the cry.
The man raised the blade again, gritting his teeth, poised to plunge it downwards.
The crowd of bodies stopped surging around her, the seven still on their feet turned back toward him, seemingly no longer interested in their uninvited guest.
For the first time Annja got a good look at the man lying on the bier.
He turned his face toward her and offered Annja a rueful smile.
“Garin!”
The painted man’s knife moved inexorably downwards.
“What’s going on?” Doug asked. “Annja? What’s happening?”
There was no way Annja was going to get to Garin in time, even if the crowd parted like the Red Sea to let her through.
Instead of fighting against them, Annja launched herself into the air, planting herself on the back of the man in front of her before she kicked off, higher, her sword sweeping through the air in a silver arc of moonlight as she hurled it at the chanting man.
Her aim was true.
The blade turned through the air in slow motion.
For a heartbeat the world stood still.
Annja felt herself falling back to the ground. She held out her hand for the sword, not trying to break her fall. She landed on one knee, looking up in time to see the point of the blade pierce the chanting man’s throat and open a second bloody mouth for him in the instant before he would have plunged his own blade between Garin’s ribs.
A moment later the sword was back in her hand, slick with the dead fanatic’s blood.
The silence in the clearing was eerier than the chanting before it had been.
“Okay, look, I can tell you’re not paying attention, so I’ll let you get on with it.”
“It is good news, Doug. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me down the years, you do know that, don’t you?”
“Careful, it almost sounds like you like me.”
“You know that of all the men I know called Doug you’re my favorite one,” Annja said, pushing her way through the last of the confused onlookers. Now that the head priest or whatever he was had been silenced, none of them seemed to know what was going on around them.
“Sarcasm. That’s more like it. If you kept being nice to me it’d only go to my head.”
Somehow, impossibly, the painted man reared up in front of her. He’d been dead, she was absolutely sure of it, but even as she slashed out instinctively with her sword and took his head clean from his shoulders, she knew that there was absolutely nothing behind his eyes. The painted man’s head hit the grass and rolled toward the flames.
“Wouldn’t want you losing your head or anything,” Annja said, bleakly.
She reached Garin.
The knife lay on his chest. There was a pool of blood around it, but no sign of any wound. But there was so much blood. So much.
One eye opened and looked up at her before a smile crept across his lips.
“You know, I’d begun to think for a minute you weren’t going to turn up,” Garin said.
“And miss out on all this fun in the sun? Never.”
* * * * *
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ISBN-13: 9781460385500
The Mortality Principle
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Steven Savile for his contribution to this work.
Copyright © 2015 by Worldwide Library
First edition September 2015
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.
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