The Way of Death

by James Von Ohlen

  “I might give you a run for your money, but I have no interest in finding out how long I’d last. Best to just get rid of you now, when I’ve got the opportunity.”

  Gavin shifted his weight and the point of his blade come to rest against Reiji’s abdomen. Just below the breastbone and angled to do some serious internal damage. All of the shit I’ve been through, Reiji thought, and this is how it’s going to end.

  Angered burned through him. Not at the betrayal, but at his failure to see it coming. Pathetic. The word flashed through his mind, but his thoughts became a clouded jumble of meaningless and incoherent babble. The result of Gavin’s poison.

  The blade sank into his chest, blood pouring out from the wound as his flesh parted beneath it and soaking his clothes. Gavin tightened his grip to keep Reiji upright until the tip of the blade had passed entirely through him. A half arm’s length of sword emerged from Reiji’s back before Gavin relented with the pressure. He reversed the direction of the stab then, slowly drawing it back out of Reiji’s body and twisting the blade as he did so.

  “I will thank you for one thing though, Reiji,” Gavin said. “Or actually two. Your matched blades are worth more than enough to cover the cost of this expedition and then some.” He smiled as Reiji’s vision blurred and pain burned through his chest. “Shit, I might sell one and keep the other for myself. That’ll be a story to tell my grandkids. How I defeated an actual fuckin’ samurai in a duel. Watched him commit seppuku in shame as he was drawing his last breath. And took his blades as a prize.”

  Something wet ran from Reiji’s mouth in a torrent, and in a moment of clarity, he hoped it was blood and not saliva. To die drooling like the farmer’s retard. That was just undignified.

  “Goodbye, Reiji,” Gavin said as she shifted his weight. Something airborne passed by Gavin’s head, whooshing as it cut the air before the man pushed Reiji backwards. Off of the rock face. The world tumbled end over end as pain tore at Reiji’s flesh from all angles. Something knocked his head off to one side and then all went black.

  “IT’S done then?” Gavin asked the twins. Varg and Virgil said nothing, just the way he liked it, but nodded their heads one time in unison. They had stood just inside the door, keeping watch in case they were needed.

  In retrospect, he supposed it would have been a better idea to send them to deal with Reiji. But there was the chance that the man might have broken some very expensive toys. And he’d convinced himself that he could handle the bounty hunter on his own. At least if he got the drop on him, and the poison had worked. Just as it had.

  When was the last time he’d actually felt excited about fighting someone? Two hundred years? Maybe more he concluded as he thought it over. And it had definitely been excitement. Genuine enthusiasm at the prospect of the fight, even though he had no intention of it becoming anything resembling that. More of an ambush than anything else.

  Reiji had marked himself in Gavin’s mind before the two had even met in person. There was a reason why Gavin had spent so much money to convince Cent-Sec to not accept Reiji’s payment on his own bounty. He knew of the man’s reputation and wanted him in his crew.

  A blade for hire, known for his intelligence and skill with a sword just as much as for his mean streak and foul temper. And Reiji hadn’t failed to disappoint. The way he’d cut down the two men near the exoskeletons while clearing the warehouse had been a thing of genius. Carnage pure and simple, beautiful in its execution. If Gavin had blinked at the wrong moment he’d have missed all of it.

  It was also when Gavin realized he was going to have to kill this man.

  Keeping him around would simply be too dangerous. It had taken decades to cultivate his contacts in Cent-Sec, and decades before that, stretching towards a century to accumulate the funds necessary. To work that long and hard, forever striving, and now with an incredible prize within his grasp, he would be a fool to keep a man like that around. A man who might figure everything out on his own and then turn on him. A man who could very well kill him and take everything from his grasp.

  And the prize he’d assembled this crew for and then lead them through the desert like some modern day Moses? It left him speechless to think about it. When he had realized what he held in his hands, after the data was decrypted, his mind raced like it never had before. Gavin had known before he set out that he was seeking a very specific data crystal that had been unearthed at this relay station, but had no idea what it might hold.

  Sifting through the collection of crystals and plugs he and the twins found seemingly strewn about the warehouse at random, he scrutinized each tiny bit of information intensely. After coming so far, spending so much of his personal fortune, and potentially putting his own name at the very top of Cent-Com’s kill list, there was no way he was going to miss even a tiny clue as to what they might have found.

  He’d paused then to wonder, even if only for a moment, if he was throwing his life away. No, he answered to himself. Life on Lexington was hardly worth living as it was. And he’d always enjoyed gambling. Especially with high stakes. The higher the better. And what higher stakes were there? Potentially becoming the undisputed master of this world, or dying, with very few possibilities in between.

  If it came down to it, he would take his fortune out into the wastelands. The sparsely populated area beyond Cent-Com control. There he would establish himself as a warlord among the misfits who dwelled there. One way or another, they would answer to him and become an army. And then he would turn them on Cent-Com. If he died in the attempt, well at least he had made the attempt.

  And there was the promise, the allure of what he might find here, driving him.

  In his dreams he sat down at a console somewhere in the high cities of Lexington, atop a spire packed with the luxurious homes of billionaires and their harems. There he entered a series of codes that gave him access to Overlord and its control systems. With the entire world as his hostage, he would replace Cent-Com and become the new king of this world. Permanently filling in the void left behind when the Coalition Colonies Government had just disappeared.

  Disappeared…that was one way to put it. It was like the cunts had just up and disappeared one day, taking almost everything of value with them. As if they’d planned on leaving all along and not telling anyone ahead of time. Leaving the throne of this world up for grabs.

  And what he actually found had completely blown that away. A simple description and coordinates on the global grid. But if it was true, and there was no indication that it wasn’t, he was onto something far bigger. Far grander. Something with real gravitas.

  It would take time. Weeks, potentially spreading into months. But it would be his. No one would be allowed to interfere with his attaining this prize. No one who even knew he had claimed this data could be allowed to live. There was just too much risk that they would open their mouths at the wrong time and the full remainder of Cent-Com and Cent-Sec would come crashing down on him. As many assets as he had accumulated, he still couldn’t fight them in the open. It had been a very easy decision for him.

  Two men, who could be counted on to obey whatever questionable order he might give, so long as there was the promise of pay, were selected from among the crew. They would be spared for now, but their time would come. Gavin had no intention of sharing.

  As Reiji had stood in his lonely watch, Gavin had gathered the remaining men of his crew to him and given them a celebratory feast after raiding the installations larder and liquor cabinets. And the liquor cabinets in Cent-Sec facilities were always well stocked. It was half the reason they even showed up for work. Before the festivity began, he made sure to poison almost all of it.

  His venom of choice, known to a few as Purple Haze, was fast acting and potent. It would do the trick. The only drawback was that it rapidly degraded once removed from its storage vessel. The men would need to ingest it in a narrow window of time for it to have an effect. If they took too long to eat after he dosed the food and drink, it might taste
a little funny or even make them sick, but it would most decidedly not kill a full grown man.

  With the twins providing a backup plan, and the two men he had selected to continue serving him, Ryan and Zhou, seated on either side of him, the feast had commenced. Gavin knew the twins could get the job done, but there was always the possibility that they would be damaged. And they were beyond being expensive. These days, they were irreplaceable.

  Men were happy and loud. They told jokes and drank their fill, stuffing their faces with food that couldn’t be taken on the march back out of the desert. It wouldn’t last through the first day.

  When the first man suddenly began choking and turning purple, no one suspected anything other than he’d been eating too fast. A Heimlich maneuver would sort him out. Of course the other men in the crew thought it hilarious that he was choking and instead of coming to his immediate aid, they began making bets on how long he would last before he passed out.

  Some might have suspected that something was going on when the man who finally rose to help the choking man started choking himself a few seconds later. There was a few laughs and then looks of confusion and then others began to choke as well.

  By that point, Gavin assumed the smarter ones had figured out what was happening. One even managed to start attempting to induce vomiting before he began twitching violently and fell away from the table. The strongest, not coincidentally the largest of the men in the crew as well, made it to his feet and drew his blade. He drove directly towards Gavin, who simply pushed his chair back and sent Ryan and Zhou after him.

  The huge man, a slab of muscle that went by the name of Paul, if Gavin recalled correctly, managed a wobbly attack before the two unpoisoned men cut him down. In a span of thirty seconds, all of Gavin’s problems lay dead.

  Cent-Sec might be incompetent and barely clinging to power on Lexington, but they weren’t stupid. Or at least a few of them weren’t, in his estimation. Eventually the soldiers sent to secure this place would arrive and find a slaughterhouse inside their installation. It might take them a few weeks to sort everything out, but they would eventually come to realize that the data they had been sent to secure and retrieve was missing and there were far more bodies here than there should be.

  But they wouldn’t know what the data was that was missing, and they wouldn’t know where to begin looking for it. Nothing remained that could tie Gavin to its disappearance. Save for the two men he allowed to live. But they would be sorted out in short order.

  He wondered for a moment how he would deal with them when the time came. His thoughts traveled back to the farmhouse and the torments he had inflicted on the farmer and his family. His cock began to grow hard at the memories. The flaying and fucking. Flensing and copulating. Simultaneously penetrating and cutting. Carving new holes in flesh to violate as he saw fit. That would be a good way to dispose of these two. If they hadn’t been so fucking ugly.

  To Gavin they looked as though their parents had respectively been lumps of shit and vomit. Spawning their foul brood in a sewer somewhere. If either man had ever gotten laid without having to pay for it, he would be shocked. He would have to reconsider. Perhaps a stiletto to the base of the skull instead.

  Gavin stood and looked around at the dead men littering the communal dining room, a slight frown on his face as he did so. He began ticking off the things he wanted to take with him from this installation when he left, in only a few hours as darkness descended and granted him the cloak of night.

  It would be a good deal for the remaining men to hump out of the desert and back to the transport. MREs, a few odds and ends of armor, the blades in the place that were worth taking, and some electronics. He would be carrying the coveted data crystal, the very thing that had brought him to this place, on his own person.

  Safely within the housing of the working exoskeleton he’d discovered earlier with Reiji. It might take a little while to get used to the interface, but something like that just couldn’t be left behind.

  He’d gone over himself a few times with various scanners, checking to make sure there was nothing on it that would give away its location. There appeared to be nothing of the sort. A fortuitous development. An armored exoskeleton far stronger than even Varg and Virgil might definitely come in handy. Especially in the near future when there stood the potential that he would have to seize his prize. Surely something that valuable, no matter how long it had been lost, would be heavily defended.

  Soldiers, perhaps. But more likely robots or electronic systems to contend with.

  Gavin had wanted to take both of the suits, but the other appeared to be damaged. His twins wouldn’t fit in it, and he didn’t trust either of the other two to pilot the war machine. He would just have to make do with the one pristine suit. Only one, he mused. How sad.

  It was too bad he couldn’t clone himself to have another competent, loyal partner to take the other. But then, he thought, if I cloned myself, one of us would likely kill the other. Not my best idea after all.

  When darkness had finally descended upon the remote Cent-Sec installation and the air temperature had fallen from ‘blast furnace’ on its way to ‘freezer’, Gavin assembled the remains of his crew and set out into the desert.

  The exoskeleton felt like a whole new body. And what was it, if not exactly that? Unfortunately, it moved like one as well. The unit had been designed to directly interface with a pilot’s nervous system through a neural interface implant. Gavin hadn’t ever seen the need for such a thing in the past. With technologies that required it being few and far between and failing by the day, there had been no purpose in having one.

  Now, as he commanded the suit, he wished that he had gone through with finding and implanting one. The suit moved fluidly, but there was an aggravating delay between his commands and the suit’s movements. Something that a direct link to his central nervous system would have eliminated, allowing the suit to move like a part of his body. Like a second layer of skin.

  Gavin took a few steps, covering twenty or so meters with as much effort as he would have put into a single step without the suit. Something hummed in the right shoulder of the suit as he raised his right arm in the air and swung it around a few times. It would be easy enough to get used to the action delay, he thought. He looked back to see the other four trudging along behind him, each man carrying his assigned load.

  His gaze shifted up a rocky slope to the spot where he had thrown Reiji’s corpse. The man hadn’t been dead yet when he had been cast down, but with the wound he suffered, the poison, and the climate, he was no doubt long dead. Of course, the poison was a slow acting one. It was extremely unlikely, but still possible that the man was still alive and suffering horribly from the toxins coursing through his body. Gavin smiled at that thought. Reiji suffering alone in the dark and the approaching cold, and no doubt attracting scavengers and predators from kilometers away.

  As Gavin looked he suddenly felt an intense need to sprint up the ragged hill and search among the rocks to see with his own eyes that Reiji was in fact dead.

  Irrational, he knew. But something gnawed at the back of his thoughts. He activated the suit’s enhance vision and zoomed in on the slope with full display night vision. He scanned back and forth for a moment, something akin to panic growing as he saw nothing but barren rocks. Gavin shifted his weight to begin ascending the slope when he saw it.

  A single booted foot poking out from behind a rock. Approximately where he had thrown Reiji after running him through. Dead, then. He should have made sure early. Should have stopped and cut his throat as well, but after dealing with the man all he’d wanted to do was get out of the heat.

  His thoughts turned back to the prospect of a sniper still lingering somewhere out there. Someone had killed Pedro. It may have been someone out there crawling around in the dust and rocks and heat, firing arrows at his servants. It was just as likely someone else in his crew that had killed the man. That was the risk you ran when you hired a bunch of human shit.


  But then when he had dealt with Reiji, Gavin could have sworn something not unlike an arrow in his mind, had passed very nearby to the back of his neck. When he’d looked to see where it could have come from, he saw nothing. And now? If there was someone out there waiting to put an arrowhead into his heart, let them try, he thought and laughed a little. No fucking arrow on all of Lexington was going to make it through this armor.

  The fact that it had found its way into his possession seemed a clear-cut sign. He had been ordained by the universe itself to claim his prize. And with this gift, nay this tribute granted to him by all of existence, he would have it that much quicker. His fists clenched and the hands of the exoskeleton closed with a strength that fascinated him.

  If this wasn’t destiny, then what could possibly be?

  An hour later, the mechanical horse that Gavin had ridden at the head of his column lay disassembled. It had stood motionless in the hiding place it had been left in, waiting for his return with mechanical patience. As if it had any other choice, Gavin thought looking at the bits and pieces. He calculated their value as he did so. A good deal of money lay there. But just the important pieces would be coming with him.

  It would be too much of a bother to take the whole thing. Let the desert claim it, he thought, as he turned to the open wastes before him. I’ll be able to buy as many more as I want in the very near future.

  DEAD.

  You’re fucking dead, you asshole. You got yourself killed. But if you’re dead, why are you still laying here thinking about it? Why aren’t you floating around with wings and a halo and shit like that? Or burning in flames with a pitchfork jammed up your ass, more likely.

  Searing pain shot through his thigh and cold air forced itself into his lungs as he sat up with a great gasp. A blurry form scurried away from him in the darkness and stopped. A man perhaps, but it was too dark and foggy to tell. Some type of scavenger come to make a meal out of him was more likely.