by Matt Rogers
Through blurred vision, he watched the ghost-like apparition of his attacker float over him. The guy lost concentration on King, focusing instead on the other significant threat — Beth, standing a few feet back with the M45 pistol in her hand. Something deep inside King’s head had plunged him into semi-consciousness, so he couldn’t turn his head in time to watch the commotion unfold.
There were two gunshots — each from a different weapon.
They sent twin bolts of fear through his chest.
Like a nightmarish dream where all his limbs were weighed down, he found himself slow to react. Like moving through quicksand. He laboriously rolled his head around to soak in the sights behind him, terrified of what he might see.
His heart dropped as he made out what had happened.
Beth had been hit.
The attacker hadn’t.
Now that King had time to get a better look at the man, he noticed certain features. The heavy physique. The full beard. The hard, narrow eyes. Definitely ex-military. A man who had learnt when to compartmentalise all emotions for the sake of the task at hand.
King realised the guy was about to make use of that talent.
He willed himself forward with every ounce of conscious energy he had, but it was no use. He had only made it to his knees by the time the man strode across the deck to Beth, where she stood rigid, motionless, completely pale. She’d been struck in the shoulder — King had no clue as to the extent of the injury.
It was significant enough to send blood pouring down her uniform, and the M45 sidearm clattering to the deck. Whether he’d intended it or not, the bearded man’s bullet had rendered her right arm useless, the arm she used to fire a weapon.
She was helpless to resist as the man closed the space between them and thundered an elbow into the side of her head.
She reared off-balance, her equilibrium shattered by the blow. The guy had put all his weight behind the strike, sending her reeling. King grunted, seeing flaming red, and got a foot underneath his body. He levered himself upright, wobbly, but functioning.
Too late.
The bearded man snatched two handfuls of Beth’s uniform and hauled her effortlessly over the railing. King watched it unfold in a state of paralysis, horrified. Beth tumbled head-first over the side of the deck, limbs flailing. She disappeared from sight instantaneously, and King’s stomach heaved at the thought of what came next.
A fifty-foot drop, minimum.
Into churning waters. Into open ocean.
With a crippling bullet wound in her upper body.
If the impact didn’t kill her, she didn’t stand a chance regardless.
King caught a final glimpse of Beth disappearing over the side of the ship, and a switch flipped somewhere deep in his mind. An audible click sounded in his ears — with a rushing flood of anger, he lost focus on any of the damage the bearded man had wreaked on his torso with the wrench. Everything from the neck down went numb, and he laser-focused on the guy, his brain steaming and his veins racing with raw fury.
But he kept completely still.
He allowed himself to slump back to the floor, staying on his feet for less than a second before seemingly succumbing to the build-up of pain.
In truth, he barely noticed any of it.
He had his mind and soul set on the bearded man — nothing else mattered.
He hoped his acting abilities were in shape. He’d need them to stay alive.
He knew, deep down, that he was badly, horrifically hurt. The adrenalin and emotion that came from seeing a woman he barely knew but cared deeply about fall to certain death couldn’t stay in his system forever. Eventually it would give way to the agony and the unconsciousness. When that time came, he would welcome it.
Just not right now.
Sure enough, the bearded man now sported a smug grin, satisfied that he’d effortlessly seized the upper hand. He strode slowly toward King, his boots ringing off the steel floor. He was a heavy man — King could tell by his footfalls. Out of the corner of King’s eye he watched the blurry shape draw closer and closer. The guy had a wrench in one hand and a Browning 9mm in the other.
King realised he could have taken a bullet between the eyes instead of the beatdown with the wrench.
This man wanted to prolong King’s suffering.
Draw it out, assert his own dominance, get some semblance of revenge for his three dead allies.
King felt a twinge of hope.
The bearded man wanted control, but this was a game of inches. In the movies, the guy would have been free to circle around King’s motionless form, delivering a speech revealing his grand intentions and relishing over how he’d gained the upper hand.
In reality, the man reached down to seize a handful of King’s hair — and King swung an uppercut with such ferocity into the guy’s unprotected groin that he audibly yelped in abject horror.
Jason King surged to his feet, his concentration absolute, his mind hungry for vengeance.
48
The bearded guy slumped to his knees, unable to help himself, battling to control his limbs but giving way to the natural bodily reaction — just as King had moments earlier.
The man was still armed with two weapons, and highly dangerous.
King scrambled to get his feet underneath himself in the space of a second and smashed the heel of his boot into the hand clutching the Browning 9mm. A collection of bones in the man’s fingers shattered under the force of the strike, and King spotted several of the digits twisting grotesquely at awkward angles, jammed between his combat boot and the trigger guard of the sidearm.
The gun cascaded to the floor.
By that point the bearded man sensed that he was metaphorically clawing for air and swung the wrench as hard as he possibly could at King’s exposed chin.
If it connected, King’s jaw would have shattered.
Thankfully, the groin shot compounded with the shock from his broken hand took the wind out of the guy’s sails, resulting in a half-hearted flailing instead of a furious swing.
King simply caught the wrench by its fat steel head and tore it free from the bearded man’s grasp, invigorated by the shifting tide of momentum. He thrust the thick jaws on either side of the head into the guy’s throat, plunging each pointed section deep into the skin.
Blood spilt.
The man reached pathetically for his neck.
King broke all the fingers in his other hand with a single downward slicing motion, smashing the wrench head home with an accompanying noise akin to popping a large sheet of bubble wrap.
The guy howled and went down on his rear, a sorry mess of a man. The confidence and glee and control were long gone. King had never seen someone pale at such an unbelievable speed. All the blood drained from his cheeks, leaving him white as a ghost as he realised the extent of his incapacitation.
He knew what was coming next, and he was helpless to stop it.
King sized up the distance between them — the guy seated on the floor a couple of feet away, King standing upright clutching the wrench. He assessed trajectories and momentum and technique.
Then he let all the stifling emotion swell in his chest, drawing energy from the sickening mental image of Beth tumbling helplessly over the railing. He used a single bounding step as a run-up, charging his two-hundred pound frame with momentum, and lifted the wrench high above his head — double-handed — as he leapt into the air. He brought it down harder than he’d ever followed through with an attack, a single devastating swing that connected right on the crown of the bearded man’s skull, omitting a noise that King realised he would never forget.
The man keeled over and lay still.
The wrench stayed embedded in his head.
He was unquestionably dead.
King turned away from the corpse, not interested in lingering on what he’d done. The guy had deserved worse than a bullet and a quick death, but he felt no personal satisfaction from the killing. It had been brutal in nature, but he
couldn’t help but feel like he’d set things right.
At least, in this tiny unimportant corner of the globe.
The Browning 9mm had come to rest at his feet. Out of instinct, he bent down and picked up the weapon, ejecting its magazine to check it had enough ammunition before slotting it back into place. He briefly turned his attention to the AK-47 lying dormant a few feet away, but shook his head immediately at the notion.
Everything from this point on would take place in close quarters. He preferred a compact weapon to the fearsome assault rifle.
Still reeling from everything that had unfolded, sensing the dull pain of inevitable collapse dawning on him, aware that his time in the realm of the conscious was limited, he stumbled around to face the darkness of the ship’s interior and lurched straight into the belly of the beast.
Reed.
He hadn’t come this far for nothing.
49
The nightmarish hallucinations started almost immediately.
He knew exactly what was causing the sensation, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying. The injuries to his torso — he made an off-handed guess that he had at least three broken ribs and possibly a handful of tears in the muscles around his stomach — were adding up, pushing against the mental barrier he’d temporarily erected. As they fought to break through, his mind faltered as he plunged into the darkness.
Disgusting, haemorrhaging wraiths roared into his vision, cackling with glee and mocking his gait. He limped on, determined, trying not to let them faze him. He understood they weren’t real, nothing but demons in his mind warping and pulsing on the edge of his peripheral vision.
He continued onward.
A figure in military uniform came sprinting out from behind one of the nearest columns, nothing but a silhouette in the dim lighting. King raised the Browning and fired once, deafeningly loud in the empty space, the muzzle flare blinding to anyone in the vicinity.
The shot passed straight through the figure.
In the light of the flashing barrel he saw the uniform-clad apparition in full detail. It was Beth. Half the skin on her face was missing, chewed away by fish. She stopped directly in front of him and stared, her single functioning eye boring into him.
You could have done something, her face said.
Then she vanished.
King stayed motionless for a beat, his breath sinking into rattling gasps, his heart pounding hard. He’d never experienced anything like that.
You’re losing your mind.
You don’t have much time.
Spurred on by the grievous nature of his wounds, he hurried toward a pinprick of light far in the distance. At this point he couldn’t ascertain if the faint orange glow was also a hallucination. He didn’t care either way. Some part of him had detached back near the railing, allowing him the energy to avenge Beth but leaving a hollow broken shell in its place.
He’d sacrificed his sanity to stay alive for another moment longer.
He found himself empty of thoughts entirely.
The tiny singularity of light was the only thing that mattered. Something told him it would lead to the end of the road. He hurried forward, as fast as his broken body would allow.
As he reached the outer limits of the glowing aura, he realised that it wasn’t an apparition, or a hallucination, or a vision of any importance whatsoever.
It was the reversing lights of a giant forklift heading straight into a vehicle bay. The structure had been erected somewhere deep within the ship’s bowels, a hangar-sized room inside a vast disused stretch of deck. Everything about the warehouse-like structure and its surroundings reeked of abandonment, as if no-one had visited this section of the ship in years. King imagined the container ship was understaffed.
Budget cuts, perhaps.
A strange thought to have in the middle of a confrontation.
As he watched, the forklift reversed straight underneath an open roller door, dipping into the vehicle bay. Soft LED lights dotted the ceiling within — that was the faint blue glow King was picking up on the edge of his vision. He turned his attention to the massive object resting on the two steel forks, propped up in the air to make it easier to transport.
The RHIB.
King squinted in the gloom and spotted the sides of the craft literally overflowing with cash. The money trickled down across the floor like a waterfall — whoever sat in the forklift’s cabin had become increasingly careless with the payload, hurrying to hide it as best as they could.
King knew exactly who it was.
He kept low, praying he still had the element of surprise on his side. It hadn’t worked at the compound in Afgooye, but Reed would be panicking here, struggling to shield the RHIB and its massive fortune from sight while his ex-military buddies dealt with the threat at hand.
King paused. Maybe the Browning round he’d fired earlier had added to the effect. Perhaps it had convinced Reed that the conflict was still raging.
He wondered if a resolution was still possible…
He’d abandoned all hope of making it off the container ship alive, considering a stalemate with Reed the best-case scenario. Now he willed himself forward, trying to bring old combat tactics to the forefront of his mind but failing spectacularly. He couldn’t focus on anything — a blistering headache had sprouted to life deep behind his eyeballs.
The forklift’s hydraulic lift cylinder whined as Reed lowered the RHIB to the floor. King slunk into the shadows of the vehicle bay’s entrance, watching the proceedings with blurry vision. The boat slumped against the metal and pitched over, emptying its contents across the bay floor.
King’s eyes boggled.
He’d been right.
Hundreds of millions of dollars — no, billions. The money poured in avalanches out of the RHIB, more cash than King could possibly fathom. The kind of money that could start a country. The kind of money that could support an entire town for generations.
The kind of money that bought unparalleled power.
There was something toxic about the scale of it. This entire time King had been pondering just what kind of motivation someone needed to murder their brothers-in-arms and take off in search of dirty profits. Now, in his suggestible state, with the power leeching from the mountains of cash washing over him, he could see how a sick mind might be lured by the prospect.
Reed stepped down out of the forklift’s cabin and slammed to the floor, landing with both boots simultaneously. Just from the noise of the impact King ascertained that the man outweighed him. Maybe two hundred and ten pounds. Maybe more.
In the end, it didn’t matter.
Reed’s attention had been seized whole-heartedly by the piles of U.S. dollars. He crossed to the mountains and stood before them, enraptured, pausing in the heat of a war zone to admire his haul.
King took the opportunity to raise the Browning level with the back of the man’s skull and pump the trigger once, with finality.
50
Nothing.
The gun lay dormant in his hand. He had instinctively leant forward with the expectation of firing a shot, hoping to blast Reed’s head to pulp in a spray of gore. Instead he scuffed the sole of his boot along the bay’s floor, barely audible but noticeable enough to seize the attention of Bryson Reed.
The man wheeled on the spot, reaching automatically for his waist.
Reed found nothing there to comfort him.
He paused, sizing up the situation, staring across the vehicle bay at the weapon in King’s palm. It posed an odd sight — King glanced briefly past Reed to the backdrop of a billion dollars cash. It lent an eerie aura to the setting.
‘Well,’ Reed said, his voice hollow. ‘Seems like I lost my gun in all this confusion. I was in a bit of a rush to get the haul out of sight. Impressive, isn’t it?’
He motioned over his shoulder, imploring King to gaze at the mounds of hundred dollar bills.
‘It’s yours if you want it,’ Reed said. ‘As much of it as you can bother to ta
ke.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Suit yourself.’
Despite the cloud of confusion descending over King’s senses, he kept his mind racing, assessing possibilities. What if Reed didn’t know the gun was empty? Had it made a sound? Had it jammed — a freak accident at the worst possible time — or was there something else at play?
Reed answered all those questions a second later.
He motioned to the Browning. ‘That’s ours, isn’t it?’
King said, ‘Might be.’
‘No, it definitely is. Because you tried to shoot me before. I heard it. We fit all our firearms with a secondary safety, just beside the trigger guard. You don’t thumb it down before firing and the slide locks up. Complicated work, but it pays off. Saved my life just then, didn’t it?’
King imperceptibly shifted one of his fingers, searching for the additional safety catch in as subtle a fashion as possible.
Reed noticed immediately.
‘Don’t bother,’ he said with a smirk. ‘Miss it once and the gun’s fucked. You’ll need to disassemble it and put it back together to get it working again. Little trick-of-the-trade my friends taught me to stop hostiles making use of the weapons they take off their dead bodies. Like you just tried to do.’
King stood motionless for far longer than he was comfortable with. In truth, his equilibrium had faltered — instead of hastily devising a fresh scheme to eliminate Reed he was simply trying to focus on staying conscious and preventing his legs from wobbling under the loss of balance.
Reed noticed that, too.
‘You’re in bad shape,’ he said.
His voice had turned cold, as had the surroundings. Unnatural shivers ran down King’s spine as he tuned into the words. He was losing it, slowly but surely. He grimaced, righted himself, and maintained a sweaty grip on the useless Browning.
