by Hondo Jinx
Brawley’s back slammed into the wall with an explosion of fresh pain and everything went black.
A second later, he came to on the ground.
Outside, Colton Finn was still hammering on the door.
Nearer, to Brawley’s right, he heard a weird coughing sound.
Struggling to all fours, he saw the Carnal, who had peeled away the broken hockey mask and was now staring down at him from his one remaining eye.
As Brawley shook his head, trying to clear it, he saw the red-haired Carnal’s missing jaw regenerate, blooming out of the twisted red mess to give full voice to the sound he’d been making.
Not coughing.
Laughter. Booming laughter that filled the room. “Where’s your power now, power mage?”
Brawley’s head cleared. He considered drawing force but knew the pistol would be faster. He went for the draw.
But then the world exploded.
He was down again, slapped from his feet by the laughing Carnal.
Brawley crab-walked backward on his hands and feet, head ringing. His nose was smashed flat to his face, and he felt a fan of hot blood dripping down his split lip.
He reached for the pistol again, but the Carnal stomped down twice with lightning speed, snapping both of Brawley’s legs, then grabbed hold of him and threw him across the room.
Brawley crashed into the wall but tucked his head and didn’t lose consciousness.
Again, he reached for the XDS.
Again, the Carnal was too fast. He drove a punch into Brawley’s jaw.
There was a loud crunch, and everything went black again.
When Brawley came to, he was up against the wall, pinned there by the laughing Carnal.
Behind them, Colton Finn continued to hammer on the door.
Brawley drew himself together, trying to regain control over his shattered body, and started pawing awkwardly for the pistol.
“Gonna poke holes in you, asshole,” the red-haired Carnal said, and what felt like a steel rod pushed through Brawley’s chest muscle, hung up for second on a rib, and cracked through. For a terrible second, the Carnal’s finger burrowed inside Brawley’s chest. Then it popped free with a whistle.
“Fucker,” Brawley growled, and felt his lung go flat. Suddenly, he was drowning.
“Yeah,” the Carnal sneered, driving his finger into Brawley’s gut, pushing through the abdominal wall and poking into the viscera.
Brawley threw his head forward, closed his teeth around the Carnal’s freckled nose, and yanked, tearing it clean off.
“Fucker!” the Carnal shouted, and spinning from the wall, threw Brawley across the room.
Brawley hit the floor hard, snapping his wrist on impact and banging his face off the cement before sliding to a stop against the far wall.
“Let me in there,” Colton Finn shouted, “and you’ll be my number two.”
That stopped the red-haired Carnal the way half a dozen blasts from the 12 gauge hadn’t.
“Promise?” he called through the door.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Colton responded. “Let me in.”
Brawley rolled onto his side.
The red-haired Carnal laughed, “You got a deal,” and swaggered toward the door.
If that fucker opened the door, Brawley was dead. Period.
Brawley went for his pistol. His broken wrist got hung up, and then he was out of time.
The red-haired Carnal had reached the door.
If he used his left hand to pull the XDS now, it wouldn’t do any good.
Instead, he called out to the big bastard. “What? You afraid to fight me one on one? You need your friends to help?” He spat blood. “Pussy.”
“What did you call me, you little fuck?” the Carnal said, marching toward him. “Want me to poke some more holes in you, huh?”
Brawley didn’t have time to visit his cave of consciousness. He concentrated on drawing telekinetic force and filled his mind like a man taking a deep breath. Then, when the Carnal reached for him, Brawley exhaled everything.
With a loud snap, the Carnal’s upper body folded backward. Then the force hit the back wall with a tremendous boom.
For a second, the hammering at the door stopped. Then it started back up again, harder than ever.
Brawley fell back and gasped for air but found only pain.
He told the pain to fuck off and rolled onto his side.
Brawley’s attack hadn’t just snapped the fucker in half. It had torn him in two at the belt line. The two halves lay several feet apart, connected only by the ropy cabling of his distended viscera and a broad, dark smear on the cement.
The Carnal’s legs sputtered like strips of bacon on a griddle. His upper body flailed awkwardly back and forth, the torso split crossways from shoulder to hip, the face nothing but a flattened pan of bubbling crimson.
And yet the fucker lived on.
“Shit,” Brawley groaned, watching as the guts started sucking back into the torso, dragging the twitching legs with them.
Brawley’s right arm was good and truly fucked. He reached across his body and pulled the XDS with his left hand, which shook, thanks to the severe trauma he’d suffered. This wasn’t a matter of nerve. It was a matter of biology. And his body was shutting down.
Hold still, you son of a bitch, he told his hand, and summoned every bit of his willpower.
The Carnal sat up, his grinning face painted bright crimson.
“Fuck you, Humpty Dumpty,” Brawley said, and shot the bastard right between the eyes.
25
Get up, Brawley told himself. He struggled into a sitting position but couldn’t get to his feet.
A juice boost whispered through him, barely perceptible beneath the pain and exhaustion.
The hammering outside was rhythmic now. Boom-boom-boom. The door shook with each smashing blow.
Brawley swung his face toward Remi, who sat with her head bowed forward, dead or unconscious.
She needed him. And he needed her.
He struggled to his feet on broken legs, took a wonky step toward her, and staggered into the side wall.
The rhythmic thudding against the door beat doggedly on.
Brawley slid to the ground, leaving a heavy smear of blood on the wall behind him, and sat there with his legs splayed.
Blood ran from cuts over his eyes, clouding his vision. His sinuses were a balloon of snot and blood inflated just behind his shattered nose. He tried to breathe through his mouth, which canted open at a strange angle, thanks to the baseball of swelling spreading the shattered hinge of his broken jaw from his battered skull. More troubling, his neck was throbbing where the doctors had fused the vertebrae.
But none of this damage mattered. Nor did his pulverized hand, snapped wrist, or shattered ribs. His fractured collarbone didn’t matter. Neither did his broken legs or the damage the Carnal had done to Brawley’s foot, which felt like a gallon of bone soup sloshing around in his boot.
What mattered was the holes the bastard had poked in Brawley’s chest and gut. One had punctured a lung. The other had opened some major blood vessel, judging by the steady flow of blood draining into his lap.
His head danced, deprived of oxygen. A doily of false light spun overhead. He felt cold and stiff and tired. So, so tired.
It would be so easy to go to sleep. Just go to sleep and never wake up.
Get up, you son of a bitch, he told himself. Don’t you sit there and die. Get up.
Grandma Hayes’s voice echoed in his mind. You’re a Hayes. And that means you keep riding. No matter what.
Brawley nodded, fighting against unconsciousness.
And his Grandmother’s final words returned to him then, only they came to him not in the papery whisper she had managed on her death bed but with the full fire-and-whiskey venom with which she had accosted the world her whole, long, tough-as-leather life.
Brawley, you hold on tight and ride hard, boy, her voice commanded. Never quit. Never,
ever, ever.
I won’t quit, Grandma, Brawley growled in his mind, repeating the promise he’d made all those years ago. Not ever.
Once more, he dragged himself to his feet, the pain a blessing in disguise as it roused him up out of the lethargy which had been dragging him down like a millstone tied to the waist of a drowning man.
The sounds of his struggles roused Remi, who lifted her bloody head. A jack-o’-lantern grin split her ruined face. “You look like shit, handsome.”
“Right back atcha,” he growled, limping in her direction.
“You came back for me, you sweet fool.”
He caught himself on the arm of her chair. “I knew you’d tell them my name. And the girls’.”
“You think that, you don’t know me very well,” Remi said. “I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.”
Blows continued to smash against the door. The sound was changing now, the blows deepening as the door began to lose its shape.
Brawley tucked the pistol in his waistband, hoping to hell it didn’t discharge in there, and popped the restraint clamping Remi’s left forearm to the chair. Then he dug in his right hip pocket with his left hand, the fingers of which were cold and numb now and growing clumsier with every passing second. “How long will that door hold?”
“Fuck if I know. Not long enough. What you got in your pocket, handsome?”
He pulled the key and shoved it in her direction.
“I think I love you,” she said, and unlocked the hobble collar.
Brawley fell onto his ass again and just sat there, trying to breathe. He watched her unfasten herself from the chair restraints. But it seemed to him that she was shrinking, that the whole room was shrinking. Even the booming sound behind him was growing fainter, echoing from down a long corridor. Darkness played at the edges of his vision.
“Wake up,” Remi said, standing from the bloody chair. She was naked, save for the dog ear headband, and covered in gore but whole again. “That took most of my juice. I’m just hoping I have enough to get us out of here. Let’s see where this door leads. With a little luck, it’s a secret exit. Hey, wake up. Don’t you die on me. You have to stay alive at least until I turn you over and get my payday.”
“I ain’t gonna make it, darlin,” Brawley said, and handed her the XDS. “Get out of here while you still can.”
“No chance, handsome. You came back for me. We’re stuck with each other now.”
She hoisted him onto her shoulder and started back toward the shotgun, but the door squealed, the reinforced steel crumpling. A hinge popped free and ricocheted off the wall, a roar of triumphant laughter flooded into the room.
“You’re mine!” Colton Finn bellowed.
Remi cursed and sprinted away, leaving the AA-12 and heading for the door in the back wall.
Behind them there was a loud thump, a screech of metal, and the door crashed to the floor.
Remi carried Brawley into the hallway, slammed the door, and threw the bolt.
A second later, the door shuddered. Rhythmic booming started up again like the soundtrack to a recurring nightmare.
“It’s reinforced,” Remi said. “Not as strong as the first door but reinforced. Thank goodness for Jasmine Travain’s paranoia.”
The long corridor was dark save for a swath of light spilling from a room halfway to the end. Perhaps a dozen doors lined the right-hand side. The left side was nothing but wall. No doors, no windows. Brawley squinted against the gloom, staring at the end of the hall, hoping for an exit but seeing only the impassive face of a dead end.
Remi moved quickly, dipping into each room. They were mostly storerooms, save for a few empty spaces and the illuminated chamber where several folding chairs surrounded a table covered in playing cards, liquor bottles, and a mountain of white powder.
There was no way out.
The hammering beat on.
Any minute now, Colton Finn and his pack of Carnals would beat down that door.
Remi carried Brawley into a darkened storeroom stacked with dry goods. Sacks of flour and rice, palettes of canned food, towering stacks of warehouse club items in bulk. She laid him on the floor against the back wall.
“Can you cloak us?” Remi asked.
“I think so,” he said, and took stock of his psi energy. He didn’t have enough telekinetic force to knock over a fat man on stilts, but half his yellow energy still crackled within him. He slipped inside himself and dragged a sparking yellow strand from within his mind.
Under different circumstances, he might’ve had enough force to lie their way out of this. Disguise themselves as Carnals or present themselves as friends. But given Colton’s single-mindedness, he knew that the Carnal’s mind would reject any attempts at direct deception.
So he did as Remi asked and cloaked them, knowing it would buy minutes at best.
Meanwhile, the loud banging beat rhythmically on—boom, boom, boom—filling the hallway like the footsteps of an approaching monster.
“If I have to die,” Remi said, “I’m going out with my tats on.” She closed her eyes for a second, and her tattoos returned, blossoming like a spray of lurid flowers across her perfect curves.
Brawley managed a growling chuckle. “I like your style, darlin.”
“I like yours, too, handsome,” Remi said, staring down at him with her hands on her hips. “And that’s good, because I only see one way out of this clusterfuck. You’re really a power mage, huh?”
He nodded. “Not that it’s doing me much good now. I’m not worth spit right now. Worthless as buttons on a dish rag.”
“Here goes nothing,” she said, and crouched down beside him. She undid his belt, opened his jeans, and pulled him free of his jockeys.
26
Remi pumped at his dormant manhood, her hands sticky with blood.
Brawley laughed bitterly. “You’re about twenty minutes late, darlin. I been harder than Chinese calculus all night. But dying appears to take the shine off things. No way I’m rising to the occasion now.”
Remi rolled her eyes. “You’ve obviously never been with a sex goddess. Just lay there and look handsome, ye of little faith.” She glanced at the wall and tore a pipe from its brackets. She bent the pipe, closed her teeth over it, and bit straight through the metal.
“Watching you do that didn’t help,” he said.
“Here.” She bent the gently hissing pipe toward him, and a steady stream of sweet fog misted over his face. He breathed in as best he could with broken ribs and one lung.
Remi’s head dipped into his lap, and her mouth closed around him. She licked and sucked, squeezing his balls like she was working a pump that might inflate his dick.
Down the hall, Colton Finn hammered on.
What Remi was doing felt good in a distant sort of way, a soft whisper of pleasure that was difficult to hear beneath the death metal concert of the pain raging within his body.
Remi purred, “Mmm, that’s it, handsome.”
“Huh?” He took another breath of sweet mist and looked down. Against all odds, his old buddy was coming to life, standing up for one last fight.
Remi popped his mostly erect manhood from her mouth and gave it a light shake. “That’ll do the trick.” With no further ado, she straddled him, wiggled into position, and lowered herself, engulfing his full length in her hot, wet channel.
Then she was riding him, barely moving up and down. Her breasts wobbled in what would have been an amazing sight if he weren’t hanging by a single finger over the chasm of oblivion. She was working some kind of Carnal magic down below. The walls of her sex tightened and loosened softly around him, milking his manhood and bringing him to full hardness despite the explosions of pain caused by even her light bouncing.
Come on, he told himself. Cowboy up.
In the past, he’d climbed into the chute with his leg already broken and ridden a rank bull to the buzzer. He damn well wasn’t going to quit this ride.
The urgent throbbing that had pla
gued his balls all night returned, pulsing in time with Remi’s ministrations and the heavy boom-boom-boom of Colton Finn hammering at the door down the hall.
But it wasn’t just the same old throbbing he was feeling down there. At first, the pain had masked the rest, but now he recognized a familiar sensation glowing at the union of their sexes.
“Hold on, darlin,” he said. “You’re in for the ride of your life now.”
Remi snorted laughter. “Really, you cocky bastard? You just lay there and don’t die, and that’ll be good enough for—oh!”
Brawley felt a rush of powerful affection for this gorgeous badass Carnal. Their past conflicts crumbled away, smashed to pieces by his deep appreciation for Remi’s bravery, beauty, and bravado. She could have abandoned him. Could have cut and run. But she’d put it all on the line to save him.
Sure, she’d been planning to turn him over to Jamaal, but what did that matter now?
It didn’t.
Because he loved this wild woman, and she loved him. Fiercely. She would fight to the death to protect him now, just as he would fight to the death to protect her.
“What the fuck is that?” Remi warbled. “Holy shit. It feels so good.”
His dick was a steel rod now, bigger than ever and glowing with the force of their union. The familiar sensation of warmth and vigor filled his manhood, his balls, his entire pelvic region. Pain fled before this glowing vitality like darkness before the rising sun.
Remi felt it, too.
He could feel that fact in the hastening urgency of her contracting sex and the surprise and excitement he heard in her panting breath. Furthermore, he could flat-out feel the energy spreading within her. He could feel the warmth inside her magnificent body, feel it spreading euphorically through her loins just as he had experienced energy suffusing Nina and Sage’s bodies when they had bonded.
“Holy shit,” Remi panted. “Holy fucking shit.”
He grabbed her firm ass with his good hand and smiled as the energy of their coupling burst like a seedpod, filling their bodies with sizzling warmth that whisked away the pain and weakness, pumping them full of strength and elation and deep fondness.
