by Alex Archer
The blade caught the chattering machine pistol and split it open. The gunman's screams went up an octave as the chamber opened up just as a cartridge went off, causing a bubble of blue-and-yellow fire to scorch his hands and scraggly beard. The powerful blade carried on downward, scarcely impeded by cutting the gun in two, slicing his left hand transversely across the palm.
She found herself sitting right in front of the man as his seared right forefinger continued to pump the trigger of his ruined weapon uselessly. With no better option in view, she jabbed the sword up, fast and short. The tip took him under the chin, cleaved his tongue, pierced the roof of his mouth and went straight into his brain.
His howls abruptly stopped. As he collapsed lifelessly, pithed like a lab frog, she tore the sword free with a desperate full-swing wrench of both hands. She was already looking right to where she heard thudding footsteps, glad not to have to see what that did to his face...
One of his comrades loomed up over the hedge. He was almost on top of her. This one had a full-on AK-47. He raised it to his shoulder.
She knocked the broken-nosed barrel up with the flat of her sword. The gun went off, a full-auto snarl, flame stabbing four feet into the night sky. The weapon's considerable recoil at such an unwieldy angle drove the gunner back, off balance.
Annja was over the hedge and on him like a leopard. She slashed at his winged-out right elbow. His arm parted to her blade. A final shot torqued the heavy rifle from the hand that still held the foregrip. He sat down shrieking horribly until Annja silenced him with a slash across the face.
A white-painted metal yard lamp exploded right in front of her. She screamed in surprise and terror, then dropped straight down as a second charge of buckshot moaned over her head to take out most of what the first blast had left of the front window of the house.
The assault rifle lay on the lawn right beside her. She sent the sword away and grabbed the rifle.
Blasting away from his hip, the shotgunner ran forward from the middle of the street. Annja yanked the Kalashnikov into firing position, pointed it at him and squeezed off a 4-round burst.
At least one shot struck home. The man reeled, stopped and went to one knee just on the other side of the short block wall at the front of the little yard. He raised the shotgun. Annja got the hooded front sight in front of her eyes. The first part of him it bore on was his head, with a ball cap turned sideways. She squeezed off a single shot. He fell.
She put the steel buttplate to her shoulder as she aimed back the way she had come. A pursuer came into view in a flying leap across the far fence of the yard she'd just escaped, a shotgun in his right hand. She fired a short burst across the hood of the shot-up Taurus. It caught him in the center of his chest. His legs flew up before him, and he landed heavily on his back.
The first car that had tried the drive-by peeled out after her. She fired an aimed burst into the driver's side of the windshield. To her gratification the car veered left and slammed into the front of a parked pickup.
Then she realized the Kalashnikov's charging handle was locked back. She'd fired the banana magazine dry.
A wild burst from somebody running up the street cracked against the stone front of the house beside her like hail. She threw down the empty AK-47 and ran for all she was worth.
****
Two blocks east of Broadway a green park opened up to the right, climbing a hill covered with turf grass that, well watered by the city, was still mostly green. Paths graveled in crushed pumice from the Jemez Mountains wound through it. Halfway up the hill sturdy playground equipment, a slide and swing set rose out of a little depression. At the hill's crest stood some kind of a statue. Gloom and the shine of the streetlight by the play set hid details from Annja's eyes.
Her pursuers had quit shooting to concentrate on running. There were at least half a dozen of them left. They were obviously out of shape for the chase but kept after her regardless of tongues hanging out – and regardless of the casualties she had already laid on them.
Why are they after me? she wondered. Matters had gone far past the point she could pretend this was some random act of violence against a chance victim. They wanted Annja Creed. And they wanted her badly enough to die.
As she came upon the park a pair of headlights appeared over the top of the long slope that continued a block past the park. They came fast. She knew that her tormentors had just received reinforcements.
She raced up the gravel path into the park's interior. The folds in the ground, the landscaping, the swing set bolted together from heavy railroad ties would provide some concealment and more importantly cover from bullets.
Gunfire ripped from the just-arrived car as it squealed to a stop. Bullets tore divots from the sod around her.
She reached the little hollow where the playground equipment stood. For all her fitness she was breathing hard, so winded by exertion and the stress of mortal danger that she had to put a hand on a splintery wood upright to brace herself as she gasped for air. She made herself take control of her breathing. She drew air through her nostrils deep into her lungs, using abdominal breathing from Asian martial arts and meditation practices, which would oxygenate her system far quicker than panting like a dog in a hot car.
She glanced up the hill. The statue seemed to portray a somewhat larger-than-life-size youth in what she took for not very accurate Aztec warrior garb. He knelt cradling a maiden in a long gown who was apparently expiring across his knee. The statue gleamed as if made of something shiny, possibly painted fiberglass.
From the other side of the hill she heard more voices – harsh, masculine, calling out in slangy and not very grammatical local Spanish. These were homegrown bad boys, not immigrants. They sounded like a pack of hunting dogs giving voice as they pursued a fox. Their evil intent was clear even though their words were not.
Where are they coming from? she wondered in desperation. She summoned the sword again. She wasn't sure what good it would do her against ten or a dozen foes armed with shotguns and automatic weapons, no matter how gangster-terrible their marksmanship was. But dying with it in my hand will let me feel as if I'm doing something, she told herself.
Feeling the weapon's heft and hardness in her right hand, she knew that what she was truly arming herself against was the sense of helplessness. She knew giving in to despair would rob her of the resourcefulness that was the only thing that could give her whatever sliver-thin chance of survival she had.
They were all around her now, laughing and bantering, approaching slowly. The predators were playing with their food. She grasped the sword in both hands and stood with legs slightly flexed, ready to dive in any direction – or lunge in counterattack, should a chance blessedly present itself in spite of the odds.
Their heads started to come into view over the lip of the little depression. Their attitude was almost relaxed. They were still twisted near the snapping point, she knew – but entirely confident now of the kill. They were ready for fun.
"Remember your buddies back there," she called to them in Spanish. "You can join them if you want."
They laughed at that. "Give it up, girly," called their apparent leader, a small, wiry, swaggering man with tattoo-covered shoulders and arms bared by an undershirt despite the chill and hair shaved within a millimeter of his scalp. He carried a Beretta autopistol in his hand. "We won't hurt you."
"Much," added a tall, lanky man with snag teeth and a head of wild black hair who walked beside the leader. He carried another AK-47. Like his buddies he held it at a careless angle, barrel down.
One of the men cursed in Spanish. "She's got a sword!"
"Who's afraid of her little knife?" the bandy-legged little leader said. "Miguelito, why don't you shoot her in the leg for me?"
The tall guy started to bring up his rifle. Annja coiled herself for a final futile spring. The gunman was twenty feet from her. She could cut him with her sword, but she would also take a burst of jacketed Russian 7.62 mm bullets, pulping muscle
, smashing bone.
The left side of Miguelito's head suddenly erupted red.
Chapter 13
Annja was already in motion, cocking the sword back to her right side, racing with all her speed at the leader. From her left she saw a man raise a shotgun. Then the leader lurched forward as if punched hard between the shoulder blades. His shirtfront blossomed blood. His head snapped back with blood starting from his mouth.
Eyes wild as a trapped animal's, the blood-soaked gang leader tried to shoot. He had no chance. Screaming in a release of terror and fury, Annja swung her blade savagely right to left.
Shots flashed and cracked all around her. She spun to her right, found herself confronting a gang member hammering futilely on the charging lever on top of an evidently jammed MAC-10 with the heel of his fist. He looked up and screamed as her blade flashed.
Ten feet beyond him another man pointed a shotgun at Annja's face. Before he could fire, a bellowing burst from an assault rifle took him and sent him spinning to the gravel.
The remaining gang members were fleeing, with the spraddling, loose-jointed panic of those who know death's gaping jaws are slavering an inch from the seats of their baggy pants. Attacks from at least two directions had finally shattered their morale.
Annja looked around to the south, from where the interloping shots had come. She had a feeling who her rescuer must be, improbable as it was.
"They will run until they literally drop now," Father Godin said as he tossed away a Kalashnikov and drew a bulky, short-barreled revolver with a black-gloved hand. "It will be weeks before they sleep through a night without waking screaming from the nightmares. If ever.
"No thanks are necessary," he added.
"Thank you," Annja panted. Her knees felt like overboiled pasta, and her stomach churned with exhaustion and after-action nausea. She staggered a few paces to brace herself against the swing set. "I can't believe they were that determined," she said.
"Evidently they were strongly motivated," Godin said. "One suspects both a large carrot and an equally large and heavy stick. You have made someone very powerful most unhappy, Annja Creed."
She lifted her head and looked at him through strands of loose chestnut hair. "Like the Pope?" she asked.
He laughed. "His Holiness doesn't find it necessary to operate through the agency of street gangs."
She watched him closely as he approached. He had opened the cylinder of his brushed-nickel gun, dropped six empties connected by a black spring-steel full-moon clip to his palm. He transferred them to a pocket, and came up with a fresh clip.
Despite the fact that he had come to her aid she felt uncomfortable at his proximity. Or even his presence.
"How is it," she said, still sucking in deep breaths, "that you happened by at such an opportune moment?"
"I was following you, of course," he said.
"Why?" she asked angrily.
He aligned the six cartridges gripped in the moon clip, slid them into the cylinder and snapped the revolver shut. Then he stretched out his arm, cocking it as he aimed it straight at Annja's head.
"Because I fear you have something that does not belong to you."
Deliberately she straightened. She forced her focus past weapon to meet his eyes with angry intent. "The sword?"
"Indeed."
Anger flashed inside her. "Why should you have the sword? Look what happened to the last sword bearer!" she shouted.
"Mistakes were made," Godin said. His voice was level, his eyes calm. They held hers. She realized he was trying to lull her. "Surely, they will be made again. Still, the church can be the only proper caretaker of such a holy artifact."
She held her hands out open to her sides. "Where is it?"
He shrugged. Somehow he managed to do so without the muzzle of his handgun wavering in the slightest. "An excellent question. Suppose you answer, and save us both a great deal of unpleasantness?"
She laughed. It had a frost-brittle sound in her ears. "If you kill me, how do you plan to find the sword? Using a Ouija board?"
"You frame a most astute objection," he said, and shot her in the leg.
Or tried to. As he dropped his arm, time seemed to slow for her. She'd anticipated his move and noticed the black-gloved finger as it tightened on the curving trigger with its longitudinal grooves.
She was moving, diving sideways to put a six-inch post of splintery gray-green pressure-treated wood between herself and her opponent. The handgun flashed. The bullet kicked up bits of porous white gravel behind the heel of her boot.
She put down a shoulder, rolled, came up crouching behind another upright. Godin stood placidly, regarding her with an odd smile on his face.
"Very good," he said, and snapped a shot for her face.
Again she read the intention in the ripple of the fine calfskin of the glove echoing the movement of muscle and bone in the finger beneath. Before he had completed triggering the shot, she had ducked back. The bullet sailed past her head and struck the grassy slope behind her with an audible thud even as the aftereffects of the painfully loud report rang in her ears.
As the ringing subsided she heard the crunch of his crepe-soled shoes on the pumice. He was walking clockwise, trying to flank her.
She sprinted right, straight out in front of him. She kept her eyes at soft focus so as to perceive the widest possible vision field. She saw his arm once again tense to fire.
She stiffened her left leg as she swung it out for the next step, dug her heel deep through the gravel to the soil below. She pivoted around her heel, away from him, as another shot cracked out – horribly loud, the noise like knitting needles driven into her eardrums. Wheeling through 270 degrees, she ran straight at him, trailing her right arm.
The sword appeared in her hand.
He was trying to shift aim to shoot her in the face. She ran fast. The sword sang through the air in a rising backhand cut.
Somehow the Jesuit managed to twitch his heavy revolver far enough that the mystic blade did not shear it in half. Instead it knocked the dull silver weapon from his grasp. It spun end over end, glittering in the light of the single streetlamp that illuminated the little depression beneath the hill with its curious gleaming statue.
It took her a moment to halt her disarming cut, which had passed over Godin's head as he recoiled. In that immobile instant he grasped her sword wrist with his own right hand and, using legs and hips, turned his body hard clockwise. His strength and mass were sufficient to complete the locking out of her already straightened elbow. He put his left palm on that elbow and applied pressure as his right hand yanked the trapped arm across his body and twisted the captive wrist cruelly counterclockwise. Annja was forced to bend double at the waist as pain shot up her arm.
"Ah, splendid," he said, puffing slightly. "I knew the sword would put in an appearance if I put your life properly in danger. Now, release it, please. I really don't want to hurt you."
"Is that why you shot at me?" she asked.
"I believed you would dodge. As indeed you did. I observed during your running fight with those young hooligans that you possess quite extraordinary physical abilities. But I'm afraid I have you at a decisive disadvantage."
"I guess so," she said. She relaxed her muscles in defeat. Her fingers opened. The sword fell from them.
It vanished halfway to the ground.
Not even the too clever Jesuit had anticipated that. In his astonishment he relaxed his own grip a fraction.
Annja threw her body forward and down, no longer resisting the pressure on her arm but literally rolling with it. She kicked her right leg out straight behind her, brought it up. Her long hair dragged across the pumice. Then she completed her walkover, freeing her arm from the terrible torsion.
Before she finished her rotation, Godin released her and danced back. He respected her strength and agility even if he didn't quite grasp the extent of them.
She planted her left leg as it descended, fired a right side-kick at him. He st
epped back with his left foot, pivoting backward out of the way. She continued her spin, putting her right leg down and whipping her left foot in a blinding spinning roundhouse kick for his face. He leaned aside. Her corrugated sole just grazed his ear.
"Ow," he said mildly.
She threw a furious punch at his face. He got the back of his hand up against her inner arm, deflecting the piledriver blow just enough that it missed his face as he ducked into her. She threw a left. He fouled it with his elbow. She launched a furious flurry of punches, faster than he could possibly move.
Yet he fouled or deflected and slipped them all. His muscles could not match up to her youthful power. But he never opposed his strength to hers. He applied deflecting force at ninety degrees to her angle of attack, or simply closed inside the blows so they lacked force when they did make contact.
After an interval of wild but fruitless activity she stepped back, breathing hard. Her cheeks felt hot as a forge. Incongruously she wondered what her body temperature was, given her unnatural exertion.
"How can you dodge me?" she shouted. "I'm faster than you could possibly be."
"The same way you dodged my bullets," he said. "By reading your intent from your eyes, your breathing, the play of your muscles. Most of all, your balance. I salute you, by the way. It has taken me years of practice and brutal experience to become so proficient."
With a cry of frustration she charged him.
She had some vague intention of grappling him and taking him to the ground.
It was a poor choice. Rather than trying to dance away, Godin stepped up to meet her and jabbed her in the face with his right hand. The blow did not break her nose but it stung and filled her eyes with a rush of hot tears. It did break her momentum. He followed with a left cross to her ribs that sent a white-hot stab of pain through her chest and clenched her lungs like a fist.
She gasped and staggered past him at a diverging angle. Momentum carried her out of range of any intended third shot to his combination.
But not out of range of her long legs. She halted herself, did a little stutter step and pistoned a side-thrust kick into his ribs just beneath his right arm. The impact jolted her teeth together and sent fresh spikes of pain through her torso.
