Alliance of Shadows (Dead Six Series Book 3)

by Larry Correia

  It was Valentine’s .44 Magnum.

  Valentine leapt up, not heading for Anders, but rather sprinting for the next car. I went for the shotgun.

  Anders reacted and pulled both triggers, firing his pistol at Valentine and his shotgun at me. I barely knocked the muzzle aside as it blasted a dozen holes in the floor next to my head.

  Glass shattered between Anders and Valentine. Blood spatter decorated the walls, but Valentine just put his head down and kept running.

  With one hand pushing the shotgun’s muzzle away from my face, I desperately reached for Valentine’s revolver with my other. Only to discover that the .44 had stopped just out of range. Damn it, Valentine. Good idea, shitty execution.

  Anders was still trying to shoot both of us, only the instant he wasn’t busy aiming at Valentine’s moving target, I was dead meat. I gave up on trying to grab the .44 and went after the suppressed shotgun with both hands, this time trying to pull Anders down toward me to twist it from his grip. That was even harder than it sounded considering he was stepping on my chest and was twice my size. I managed to pull him off balance, and his next few shots at Valentine went wide. Snarling, Anders turned his pistol on me.

  Only Anders didn’t realize I hadn’t been trying to take his shotgun away. I’d been trying to aim it. I shoved my thumb inside the trigger guard on top of his finger and fired the shotgun directly into the closest interior window. The buckshot hit the already damaged safety glass—

  FOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

  And a three hundred mile an hour wind came ripping through the cabin. It was like stepping into a tornado.

  Everything that wasn’t bolted down was hurled around the car. Anders instinctively raised his arms to cover his face as he was pelted with debris. He stumbled aside, trying to protect his eyes. I rolled over and went for Valentine’s gun, only to discover that it had been blown away. I scrambled and rolled behind a couch before Anders could get his bearings.

  I had to hand it to Anders, he was one committed son of a bitch. He fired wildly toward where he thought I was, then still managed to try and kill Valentine again one last time. Anders dropped his pistol and pulled out a radio detonator. I could only hope that Valentine had made it through the gasket before Anders mashed the button. There was a bright flash at the front of the car, but I couldn’t hear the little explosive over the rushing wind.

  The cars separated. Within seconds the engine was leaving us behind. Kat was getting away.

  I’d failed. Valentine was now London’s only hope.

  As for me? I was still on a train car with the bastard who had shot Jill. I was determined to find that .44 and kill this fucker once and for all. Only my search was interrupted by an incredibly loud noise, and I suddenly found myself flying through the air.

  One thing I hadn’t known about high speed maglev trains: when a car gets decoupled, it has some serious emergency brakes.

  VALENTINE

  I had barely made it through the gasket before the explosion, but Anders had clipped me on the way. There was a shallow tear through the skin and muscle along my hip. It burned. I could feel sticky wet blood under my shirt from where I’d been hit earlier. I was dizzy and weakening. Gotta keep moving. I was only down for a few seconds, but by the time I looked back, the rest of the train cars were a shrinking dot in the distance. Lorenzo hadn’t made it across. I was on my own.

  Anders had used an explosive device to separate the coupling. It had cracked the safety glass of the next door, but hadn’t blown it out. The next car only had one big floor with a tall ceiling, but it appeared clear. I went through. When I slid the door closed behind me, it was all at once eerily quiet. Out the window, we were passing through what appeared to be a seaside town. Then suddenly everything out there was black. At first I thought we were going through a tunnel, but then I realized this was the Chunnel. We were travelling beneath the ocean. Outside, safety lights flew past at a frightening speed. I didn’t know how long we had until we emerged on the English side of the channel, but certainly not long aboard this thing.

  Sweating, breathing hard, and bleeding, I limped down the stairs. This was a luxury car, and it was decked out in sleek, ultramodern décor. There were even potted plants and a crystal chandelier. The car was divided into several alcoves, providing privacy to passengers as they sat on plush couches. There was an information screen mounted on the wall but now it was just flashing an error message. There was no bomb on this car.

  You can’t just stand here and bleed. As if to drive the point home, the doors at the front of the train car slid open. I took cover in an alcove, then risked a peek down the aisle. Two men entered, pistols drawn, and they moved down the stairs cautiously. I pulled back. I’d lost the carbine in the last car. I’d given my .44 to Lorenzo. All I had left was the hideous, plastic Taurus .357 snubby that I’d been carrying since the Crossroads. It only held five shots.

  Unlike the guys in tac gear we’d faced when we first boarded the train, these guys looked like Kat’s regular bodyguards. What the hell are you people still fighting for? Maybe she told them they’d have time to escape before the bomb detonated. Maybe they were just that fanatically loyal to the woman. Maybe they didn’t know what Kat was doing and thought they were just protecting her.

  I shouted at them. “Do you know what this train is carrying? Do you have any idea what you’re doing? You’re protecting a nuclear fucking bomb, and when this train gets to London you, me, your lunatic boss, and a million innocent people are gonna die! Whatever she offered you, whatever she pays you, it isn’t going to matter when we’re all dead!”

  One of the men said something to the other in a language I didn’t understand. The other answered him harshly, and my plea was answered with a hail of gunfire. Bullets tore up the seat, the floor, and punched holes in my cover. One of them fired shot after shot, not letting up, but the other held his fire, waiting for me to make a move. I scrunched down lower, trying to merge with the floor. The gunfire ceased as suddenly as it had started. All that shooting and he hadn’t hit a damned thing. But they knew where I was, so all they had to do was wait for me to pop out. I wasn’t playing that game.

  Only they were moving up on me, leapfrogging forward. One covering my position while the other moved to the next alcove. Next time they opened up, my bullet riddled cover would be insufficient. Except they stopped when the door to the last car slid open again. Kat was staying behind cover, but I could hear her clearly as she asked her men something. One of them answered. Then she raised her voice. “So there’s only one of you left? Which one is it?”

  “Give it up, Katarina. This is insane.”

  “Valentine? Disappointing. After everything we’ve been through together I thought Lorenzo would come through for me at the end.”

  “He’s busy murdering your boyfriend.”

  “Anders is a strong man, but he does not share my level of commitment. Very few do.”

  “So you’re going to ride this nuke to London and go out in a blaze of glory.” I still hoped that her men were in the dark, and they would balk when they realized what was happening.

  “I would rather not. The train is programmed to slow when it enters the metro area. I’ll be getting off there with plenty of time to get out of the blast radius and seek shelter.”

  “I hope you like radioactive fallout.”

  “I’m not entirely happy about how this is working out, but that is your fault. I should be on my way home right now to enjoy some wine and a relaxing bath while I watch news reports of how my rivals perished in cleansing fire.”

  One of the guards said something then. He must have caught enough of our exchange to realize what was going on. That’s right, morons. Your boss is insane.

  “So tell me, Valentine. Have you met Mr. Perkins yet?”

  I was bleeding out, so the name didn’t immediately ring any bells. I risked a peek, only to see Kat aiming a cut-down M79 grenade launcher at us.

  One of Kat’s men began shouting something
in French. I didn’t need to speak the language to understand that he was begging her not to use that thing in here. A panicked you’re going to kill us all sounds the same everywhere.

  “But, if you die, I don’t have to pay you,” Katarina told him. Then she blew up the train.

  LORENZO

  The sudden stop had been hell on the furniture. Whatever hadn’t been bolted down ended up in a pile at one end of the car, including me. Unlike a regular train coming to a surprise stop, there weren’t any sparks or screeching noises followed by a violent derailment. This was more of a whoosh, like when an airplane lands, but a whole lot more abrupt. I ended up pressed against a broken table, up to my eyeballs in broken glass, and as the G forces subsided, the table toppled over and fell on top of me.

  I was having one hell of a night.

  As we came to a shuddering halt, I heard Anders coughing. He’d landed ten feet away, only he wasn’t crushed beneath a bunch of debris. I struggled to get out from under the table, and of course, it weighed a ton. I tried to do a push up, but the stupid table was somehow wedged on top of me. It was stuck. I started clawing my way through the glass, grabbing handfuls of carpet, trying to wiggle out from beneath it.

  “Damn, Lorenzo, you’re one obnoxiously hard-to-kill son of a bitch. No wonder you screwed up so many of our operations in Zubara.” Anders must have lost hold of his guns, because if he still had one, he’d be shooting rather than talking. Not that a monster like Anders needed a gun to kill me, and he proved that when he stomped the table and knocked the ever living shit out of me beneath it.

  I was screwed. He kicked the table several times, but it was enough of a shield that he grew frustrated.

  “I told Kat I should have just murdered you when I had the chance at the Crossroads, but oh no, she said you had to suffer first! She loved the idea of Sala Jihan catching you.” Anders was like two hundred and seventy pounds of solid muscle, so when he reached down and grabbed the wreckage, he flipped it off of me like it was a card table.

  I sprung up. The instant my Benchmade knife snapped open in my hand, I slashed for his guts. But he’d been waiting for that, and his open palm hit my forearm so hard that it felt like I’d bashed my bones on a pipe. Anders caught the back of my knife hand and twisted, trying to snap my wrist. Once he had me off balance he swung me against a window. I tried to twist out of it, but his grip was as hard as the Pale Man’s shackles. I lost my knife as I dropped all my weight on his thumb, but I broke free. Luckily I accomplished that the microsecond before his fist put a dent in the wall where my head had been.

  I launched myself at his legs. I got an arm around one ankle and threw my shoulder against his knee, trying to lever him down. It would have worked against most people, but Anders just kicked his back leg out to steady himself. I couldn’t topple him. He dropped a hammer blow on my back, then encircled my torso in his massive arms, hoisted me off the floor, and flung me against the wall.

  Damn, he was strong, but I’d fought a lot of men a lot bigger than I was, and no matter how tough they were, anybody could be crippled. I came off the wall, swinging. Anders blocked my arm, but he’d known that was just a feint and easily dodged the snap kick I’d aimed at his knee. I ducked beneath his jab and then danced back.

  “Slippery little bastard,” Anders growled as he went after me.

  I met him in the middle of the train car, doing everything I could to hurt him. We collided, knees and elbows flying. I’m a damned good fighter, but physics were unforgiving, and he was one big, powerful motherfucker. The only advantage I had was speed.

  And it turned out I didn’t have nearly enough of that when he swatted my arms out of the way, slugged me in the side of the head, kneed me in stomach hard enough to lift me off the ground, and spun me around into a couch. I went over the top, rolled across the floor, and only stopped my momentum by carpet burning my face.

  “You know all that fucked-up shit Silvers did to Valentine? I wasn’t interested in her mental games, but I volunteered for the physical part.”

  I got up, far slower that time, remembering Valentine telling me about how Anders had singlehandedly beaten the hell out of an entire Dead Six chalk. That story didn’t seem very far-fetched right now. My chest was on fire. It was like I couldn’t breathe fast enough. My head was swimming, but he was already charging me again.

  There was no finesse this time. Anders just tackled me, swept me off the floor, and drove us back into the wall. Another window broke out of its frame. Then we were sliding down as he got on top of me, slamming his fists into my face. His knuckles dented bone and split skin. Each impact put a lightning bolt through my skull. I tried to get my hands up to stop him, but he had me, and just kept punching down through my defenses. I tried to lift my body to close the gap, but he just kept on striking.

  With perfect rational clarity, I knew that he was going to render me unconscious, and then cave my skull in, and I had no idea how to stop him.

  The better question is, Lorenzo, why won’t you die?

  It was like the Pale Man’s voice awakened all the savagery I’d learned in the dark. The son of murder doesn’t die. He kills.

  I caught one of Anders’ hands before he could retract it, pulled it close, and bit down on his wrist as hard as I could. Blood filled my mouth. Anders screamed in my ear and tried to pull away, but I wouldn’t let go. I jerked my knee into his crotch. Anders shouted as he clubbed me with his other hand, but he didn’t have as good an angle now, and I’d gnaw his damned hand off before I’d give up.

  Anders flung himself backwards to escape. I think I might have left one of my teeth embedded in his wrist, but I was too dazed to tell. Anders was waving his bloody hand, spasmodically clenching and unclenching his fingers as I pulled myself up the wall. I must have bit through a tendon. Good.

  I spit out a mouthful of blood. This time I charged him. He hadn’t been expecting that. He was so much taller than I was that I practically had to jump to strike him in the face, but I still sunk my knuckles deep into one eye socket. Anders reeled back. I kept on hitting him, trying to tear him down. I don’t think I’ve ever hit anybody that hard, that many times, and it still didn’t seem to do shit.

  Anders clocked me again. The only reason his fist didn’t break any ribs was that my bulletproof vest spread out the impact. He struck me with a shockingly quick jab that split my lips open, then he got a handful of my shirt, rolled me over his hip, and tossed me hard on the floor.

  I landed in a pile of broken glass and debris. The back of my head struck something round and metallic. I rolled off it, only to discover that it was Valentine’s Smith & Wesson.

  Anders was on his way over to finish me off, blood and snot leaking down his chin. His face was contorted with rage, but he froze when he saw what I was reaching for. Realizing he was unable to close the distance between us in time, he lurched desperately toward the broken window as my hand fell on the grip.

  My eyes were nearly swollen shut. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t even find the front sight. Anders was a blurry mass climbing through the window. I jerked the double action trigger. My first round punched a useless hole in the wall next to him. My second shot, I think I missed again, as Anders fell out the window and disappeared.

  It took me a few seconds to get up, and a few more to wobble to the window. I was so dizzy that I tripped over my own feet, fell down, and then had to catch my breath before trying again. I probably had a concussion.

  When I pulled myself up I saw the orange vapor lights of an industrial park. It was nearly dawn. The train cars had come to a stop on a small rise. Squinting, I looked down, hoping to see Anders lying next to the tracks in a pool of blood, but there was nothing but gravel and litter. There was a gentle slope of dried grass down to a chain link fence fifty yards away . . . Which was shaking back and forth because Anders was climbing over it. I’d only grazed him.

  The front sight was wobbling badly as I pulled the heavy trigger.

  I missed.
“Fuck this thing!” I snarled, and fired again. Another miss.

  Anders landed on the ground on the other side, glaring at me, and then he took off running across a parking lot.

  I hate revolvers. I always have. Even back when Gideon Lorenzo had tried to teach me how to use one of the old-fashioned things, I had sucked with them. It didn’t help that this particular gun had offed my business associates, wrecked my hearing in one ear, and shot me in the chest, twice. Valentine’s gun really had it in for me.

  But this time I slowed down, braced my arms against the window to steady myself, and thumb cocked the hammer. That took the trigger pull weight down to nothing. Blood was running into my eyes, but I just squinted through it and kept tracking Anders through the red haze. He was running between parked cars. I led him a tiny bit, and exhaled as I squeezed the trigger.

  BOOM!

  Anders spun around and crashed against a parked car. He slid down the hood and fell from view.

  That was more like it.

  Then I realized there had been multiple witnesses to my shooting an unarmed, fleeing man in the back. A few men and women, most of them in coveralls and work clothes, had come out of the nearby buildings to see why a train had stopped here. Some of them had gotten close enough to hear our fight, which certainly explained why they’d been hesitant to cross the fence. When they saw me, ragged and bloodsoaked, with a big stainless cannon dangling from one hand, hopping down from the train, the smart ones fled back inside, while the dumb ones pulled out their phones to call the police.

  Well, shit.

  My survival instinct told me to get the hell out of there, but I was too damned angry and started limping down the hill anyway. I’d just survived a knock-down, drag-out, literal tooth and nail fight, and I wasn’t leaving until I was one hundred percent sure Anders was dead. It took my rattled brain a moment to remember that this fucker still had two more bombs out there unaccounted for, and suddenly I found myself in the weird position of hoping that I hadn’t actually killed Anders. If I could find out what the other targets were, the authorities might still be able to stop them.