Queen of Hearts

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “They are actually already behind us,” she said as she leaned out the corner and made a quick burst with her weapon. “They are coming from the direction of the hallway we just ran down.”

  As Sivaha spoke, bullets sprayed from our left side and peppered the wall where she stood. I half expected her to jump out of the way, but she just calmly took a step back out of the spray of lead, and all of the bullets missed her.

  “Alright,” I said. “I’ve got another idea. Hold here, and as soon as I shout out, you are going to sprint to the elevator.”

  “Understood,” she said as she poked her shoulder out to where the men on the left could fire at her. They did shoot, and she slid out of the way as the bullets hit the wall again. I heard her return fire as I spun, and then there were more screams from the yakuza.

  I darted down the ten-meter hallway and pressed the button to call the elevator. I expected the door to open immediately, but the indicator showed the car was coming up from the parking floor.

  Shit. Either Bosu had already gone down there, or the elevator had been left on that level for reasons I couldn’t fathom.

  I guessed it was the former.

  The doors began to open a moment before I pulled the trigger on my shotgun. The shards tore through the metal doors as if they were made out of soft cheese, and the sound of men choking on their intestines filled the hallway as the door finished opening. There had been three of them in the elevator, and now they were in twelve pieces.

  “Sivaha!” I shouted as I stepped into the bloody elevator.

  The armor encased woman held her submachine gun around the corner and fired blindly. I was a bit surprised to hear someone scream, but the other side of the hallway returned fire. She sprinted toward me through another shower of bullets, but somehow they all missed her.

  “This is a good first date,” she said as soon as the doors closed behind her.

  “Glad you are having fun.” I couldn’t help but chuckle, and she let out a musical laugh when she reloaded her weapon.

  “What is the plan if he is not down here?” she asked.

  “We trash all the cars except for one, drive it out of the garage, plow it back into the house, and then go searching for him again.”

  “Good,” she said as she reached down to grab a few more submachine gun magazines.

  “Let me use my cloak again,” I said as the elevator stopped. “Stand to the side.”

  She followed my instructions, and I pressed the button on the wrist of my suit. The camo pattern shifted again to match the blood splattered wall, and I took a deep breath to steady my nerves.

  The doors peeled open, and four guards were waiting. They saw the dead bodies of their friends, they saw the blood splattered wall, and they saw the shrapnel sprayer and ammo belts floating in the air, but they didn’t seem to see the two-and-a-half meter tall cloaked tiger-man standing right infront of them.

  The view gave them pause, which allowed me to squeeze the trigger of my weapon twice and turn them into minced Yakuza.

  Then I saw a black sedan peel out of the parking garage.

  “Fuck!” I growled as I killed my cloak and stepped out of the elevator. The parking structure was about fifty meters long and thirty meters wide. It was filled with a dozen expensive automobiles of various age, engine design, and paint color. Another eight hovercraft were located on the far side of the garage, and a fleet of sixteen motorcycles were packed in four neat rows in the corner.

  Two more guards popped their arms up over the front portion of a sedan parked closest to the elevator. I was a bit distracted by what I guessed was Bosu escaping, but luckily the first fucker missed, and the other burst of submachine gun fire was laughed off by my armor.

  Sivaha was at my side in an instant, and her submachine gun retort placed bullets through the face of one and the shoulder of the other. The one who took the bullet to the shoulder spun around to the ground, and Sivaha and I slid across the hood of the sedan so that we stood over him.

  “Was that Bosu-Sama?” I asked the man as I pushed my shotgun into the wound on his shoulder.

  “Fuck. You. Bake-- Ahhh!” His curse turned into a scream when I leaned on the grip of my weapon and pushed the barrel into his shoulder.

  “I will handle this, Husband,” Sivaha said as she leaned down to the man.

  “Fucking devil whore!” the man screeched as he tried to wiggle away from her.

  “Shhhh,” Sivaha whispered as her helmet dripped away from her face. The claws slid away from the tips of her fingers, and her hands brushed across his chin. “Don’t be like that. We just started talking. Don’t you want to be nice to me? I’ll be nice to you. I’d love to be really nice to you.”

  I actually saw the tension leave the man’s face, and the glare in his eyes softened.

  “Yessss,” he sighed lovingly. “Whatever you want.”

  “Did Bosu-sama leave in that car?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said with a nod.

  “Where was he going?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he replied. “Probably to one of the safe houses.

  “We have to catch him,” I said, but then I heard the elevator door beep and yanked my shotgun away from the man’s shoulder so I could paint the door with a few hundred armor piercing razor blades. Whoever decided to come down had made the worst decision of their life.

  “We’ll take one of the cars,” I said as I sprinted over to the key fob box. I grabbed one of the keys, clicked on the alarm button, and turned around to see which one made the beep. It was a two-seater red convertible sports car that I remembered Bosu buying for Yuri on his twentieth birthday.

  It was a fitting vehicle to chase the fucker down in.

  “Ohhh,” Sivaha said as she pulled the trigger on her submachine gun and blew the brains out of the man she had just questioned. “I love red. May I drive, Husband?”

  “Sure,” I said as I tossed her the key fob. Her hand shot out like a rattlesnake to catch it, and then we both jumped into the seats.

  Sivaha seemed to know how to drive the thing, and she threw it into reverse half a second before the tires peeled out. Then we were shooting out of the parking garage like a bullet and speeding down the private driveway at what I guessed was a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour.

  “The gate will be a problem!” she shouted as the wind whipped her long silver hair behind her.

  “I’ll figure it out!” I shouted back as I stood on my seat and aimed my shrapnel sprayer toward the vermillion painted wood. The twin gates were starting to swing, so I figured that we were fifteen or twenty seconds behind Bosu’s car.

  I sprayed the corners of the doors with my shrapnel and prayed that the razors would sever the door from the wall and stop it from swinging closed. Unfortunately, we were too far away for me to put the shots right where I needed, and they just sprayed the doors and stone wall.

  “Faster!” I shouted as one of the guards leaned out of his stone booth to shoot at our speeding convertible. The glass windshield between Sivaha and I cracked with the bullet hole, and I twisted my shotgun sight around so that I could expel the rest of my magazine at him.

  Then I slammed my ass into the seat a moment before Sivaha really put the fucking hammer down.

  The little red sports car went from fast to insane almost instantly, and it felt like my stomach got left back in the garage. The engine was electric, but it still sounded like it was choking on itself as we arrowed toward the slowly closing gate.

  For a good second, I thought we weren’t going to make it. I wasn’t too worried about our impact for myself since I was a weretiger who could heal through most wounds, but I didn’t know if Sivaha’s aegis would protect her from slamming face first into the gate. Fortunately, we managed to squeak out with only the rear part of the car getting clipped.

  Unfortunately, the gate shot us right out into a narrow street, and it looked like we were about to plow off the road and into a thick brick wall of another est
ate.

  “Shiiiitttttt!” I growled as Sivaha twisted the wheel hard to her right.

  The sports car lost its grip with all four wheels and started to slide sideways with its rear end leading. The Nordar woman twisted her wheel back to the left with a quick jerk, and then the car’s front twisted to aim back at the wall before she twisted it back around. Somehow, the maneuver worked, and the convertible missed the wall by what felt like centimeters as it bent around the road.

  “Is this the right way?” she shouted over the wind as she wiggled the wheel again to flick the car around a sharp turn.

  “Yeah! It’s the only way to the major streets.” I reloaded my shrapnel sprayer as quickly as I could and then stuck my head out the side of the car in an attempt to spot our prey.

  This part of the city was on a bit of a hill. It wasn’t exactly a mountain, but it was reserved for the elite of City Four, and the yakuza castle was at the top, some two hundred meters above the rest of the city. There was a break in the artificial tree line, and I was able to catch a glimpse of the sedan about halfway down the hill.

  “Make this right!” I shouted as we reached a four-way intersection. Sivaha followed my instructions, and the car floated around the turn while she maintained a stomach-churning speed.

  “Next left!” I yelled after she’d traveled past another turn. Sivaha had only been driving the car for thirty, maybe forty seconds, but each turn increased her confidence, and the tires didn’t even squeak when she took this turn.

  “I see him!” she shouted after we made another turn and set on the relatively straight two-lane road that took us out of the wealthy area of City Four.

  “We need to disable the car, kill all the fuckers guarding Bosu, and then get him alive.”

  “Tell me what you want me to do,” she said.

  “Just catch up and then keep it steady.” I jumped up to stand on my seat again and leaned forward on the windshield with my shotgun ready. I knew the car would be armored, and the tires would run without air, but I also knew that my shrapnel sprayer didn’t give a fuck about armor, or tires. It pretty much wanted to eat everything.

  The sedan’s rear tires broke loose of the asphalt as it made a sharp right through an intersection. Traffic was light, but a trio of other cars skidded to a halt and squawked angry honks. Sivaha had to slow down to take the corner and weave through the stopped traffic, so when we pulled out of the turn, the sedan had put a bit of distance on us.

  Then a bullet smacked into the back of my armor, and I slammed forward into the top of the windshield. The glass creaked beneath me, and the single bullet hole from the guard’s shot cracked across the entire length of the glass.

  “Shit!” I growled as I spun around. A group of four motorcycle riders had turned a corner right behind us. The men all carried machine pistols slung over their chests, and the closest fucker cradled his weapon with his left hand.

  The other three riders reached their left hands towards their weapons, and I knew we were about to have a problem.

  Or maybe not. I did have a shotgun that could eat motorcycles.

  I lifted my weapon’s sight to the first rider and sent a shower of razor blades at him. His helmet, suit, gun, and motorcycle came apart like one of those mechanic’s diagrams. Then the battery caught fire, sprayed goop all over the road, and covered another rider in flames when he plowed through it.

  The other two riders swung around the flaming wreckage, but the dodge made them lose their grips on their weapons. The guy on fire didn’t seem to mind the flames covering his black motorcycle suit, and he managed to get his machine pistol up and pointed in my general direction.

  But I just shot him with the shrapnel sprayer, and he turned into barbecued meat.

  The other two riders slammed on the brakes of their bikes, but I had already aimed at them. They were too far apart to handle with one shot, so I used two. As soon as they became sliced up roadkill, another black sedan took a corner from an adjacent street, fishtailed, and then wiggled behind us. It was obviously a Yakuza vehicle, but a single shot from my weapon chopped up whoever was driving, and the car made a right turn into an office building.

  “I fucking love this gun!” I growled as I turned back around to see how Sivaha was doing. We were closing the distance between Bosu’s sedan, but we still had about a hundred meters to go, and using my shrapnel sprayer would injure innocent people.

  The sedan twisted around another corner and then plowed through a red light. They were lucky and didn’t get hit, but the cars skidded to a halt like a barrier, and Sivaha let out a moan of frustration when she had to slow, honk, and weave around them.

  Now the sedan looked to be three hundred meters ahead of us.

  “Husband, I can drive faster if you sit down!” she shouted, and I plopped my ass back in the seat. The glass of the windshield was half cracked now, but her side was relatively clear of obscurement.

  We were already going pretty fucking fast, but Sivaha increased the speed as soon as I sat down, and she threaded the sports car through the traffic like a ballerina dancer spinning across the stage.

  “He’s going to be heading to the freeway,” I said. “The on-ramp is two kilometers ahead.”

  “I’ll catch him before,” she said as she twisted the car around a van. She cut the maneuver close enough to knock the side mirror off our vehicle, but we gained some distance on the sedan.

  I glanced up to the sky to make sure no police drones were in the air above us. I didn’t see any, but I knew that we only had a few minutes before they were on to us.

  Then shit would get really complicated.

  The sedan got stuck behind two trucks, and Sivaha let off the acceleration a bit so that we wouldn’t fly past them. They ended up throwing their car on the shoulder of the road in an attempt to get by, and one of the trucks slowed down to let them pass safely.

  The one truck that slowed down created a gap in the lanes Sivaha could split, and she pushed the small convertible through it nimbly.

  Then we were right behind the sedan.

  “Get us next to it!” I shouted as I stood up on my seat.

  Sivaha shifted our car to the right so that she could try and come up next to the sedan, but the driver guessed our intent and swerved to keep his ass in our face. The silver-haired woman leaned her wheel left a bit to try the other side, but the sedan was ready and jerked that way to keep us from passing.

  “I just need a shot at the wheels!” I shouted as I tried to aim at them. I knew about where the tires were, but I didn’t want to fuck up and accidentally kill Bosu with one of the armored blades. I needed to shred the wheels from the side.

  “Hold on!” Sivaha shouted, and then she pulled left with a sudden jerk that probably would have sent me flying out of the convertible if she hadn’t warned me.

  The sedan moved left to block us, but the movement had been a feint, and Sivaha twisted the wheel right as she punched on the acceleration. The convertible sprang forward next to the black car, and I punched a hundred pieces of armor-piercing shrapnel into the front right wheel.

  The tire, wheel hub, and hood of the car seemed to disintegrate, and the sedan folded over on itself as the axle broke on the road. The car’s rear came up, and the momentum caused it to flip through the air like a toy. My heart caught in my throat as it spun, and I prayed that it wouldn’t land on its top and kill Bosu.

  Not only did I need to know where to find my mother, but I wanted to kill him slowly with my claws.

  The sedan did one flip and actually landed tire-side down. Then it bounced on its side, skidded across the road, and slammed into a light pole. The battery at the rear started to smoke, and I knew we only had a few minutes to get Bosu out before the thing was engulfed in flames.

  Sivaha had already slammed on the brakes of the convertible, and we both jumped out before it had come to a complete stop. As I ran toward the sedan, I threw my shotgun back over my shoulder on its strap and reached for one of my pistols sinc
e I didn’t want to accidently put a piece of shrapnel through Bosu on accident.

  The side door on the top of the sedan popped open, but Sivaha’s submachine gun bullets cut the top of the fucker’s head off before he could aim his weapon at us, and the man collapsed on the side.

  I thought about jumping up to the top side of the car and then shooting down into the passengers, but that seemed dangerous, and I was a giant fucking weretiger. Instead, I just shoulder checked the sedan’s roof right where I guessed the driver sat, and the vehicle rolled off its side and collapsed on its remaining wheels.

  I punched my left fist through the driver’s window, cut the man’s seatbelt off with my claws, grabbed his suit at the chest, and then ripped him out of the glass. He was trying to both fight me off and pull out his gun, but then I punched my pistol into his eye socket and put a bullet through his brain, as soon as I was sure it wasn’t Bosu.

  Sivaha jumped on the roof of the sedan, sprinted two steps across the surface, and then flipped off the side as bullets tore through the metal behind her. She landed near the opened door where she’d killed the first man, and she spun around to fire into the back seat.

  I yanked open the back door on my side, saw that Sivaha had somehow killed the man on my side but missed Bosu sitting in the middle seat, and then reached in to grab the gang lord. The old man had his gun out, but he was pointing it toward Sivaha and didn’t realize I was about to grab him from the other side.

  My hand closed over his wrist, and I twisted inward to break his hand. Bosu let out a gasp of surprise when the limb snapped, but he screamed when I grabbed his neck and yanked him out of the seat.

  “Let’s go,” I growled to Sivaha as I dragged the kicking man back to our convertible. “I want to take him somewhere private.”

  “Of course,” she said, and then she sprinted back to the convertible and jumped in the driver’s seat.

  There really wasn’t room for all three of us to sit, so I held Bosu outside of the car by his throat and he gasped around my choke when Sivaha began to drive. The old man’s legs were scraping against the street as we gained speed, and he frantically kicked his feet up in an attempt to hook them on the side of the convertible's door.