Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands

by Meredith, Peter

  Having already given the order for his torture and execution, she gazed at him with a bored expression. “And have you lie to me some more? No. And do you think you mean anything to Ashley? The only man she’s ever cared about is her father and he can’t save her now. No. This is better. This is how you send a message.”

  The flippant hand again and before Cole knew it, he was being dragged from the room. He fought back but it was like fighting against two draft horses that weren’t in the mood. One balled a fist the size of Cole’s head and slammed him in the gut, sending the air shooting out of him. His knees buckled and he crumpled. They didn’t wait for him to recover. One simply bent and took him by the ankle and dragged him to the stairs. The giant paused a second and Cole had a good view of the office floor. He could see a hundred empty desks—there was no one to help him, not even Corrina.

  “Hold on,” he said in a ghostly whisper just before the giant dragged him down the stairs, chuckling as Cole grunted as he hit every step. It was like getting hit with a dozen baseball bats. He didn’t think he could stand and decided that maybe getting dragged for a bit, though ignominious, was the best option. He needed to recover his strength as best he could since he was going to have only one shot at escape.

  That one shot came up very fast. “Alright, I can walk. Lemme up.” The giant dropped his foot and then they both stood back a step as if expecting Cole was going to try to run. Which he was. He was two desks from where he had left the little Crown.

  “You guys suck. You know that?” he wheezed; it hurt to talk. “She could kill you with a flip of a switch. Or with a word, it can be voice activated. Did you know that?” This wiped the smile off their faces. They glanced at each other, neither having ever thought of that before.

  That one glance lasted all of a second and Cole used it to break away from the two. He thought it was all the time he would need; he was faster than most men. But the two behemoths were faster than Cole thought was physically possible. They were on him before he took five steps. They were also overconfident and instead of grabbing him by both arms and frog-marching him to the fifth floor where the blast furnaces ran night and day, one smashed him in the back and sent him headlong at the desk.

  He hit with a crash, wobbled slightly and grabbed for the folders that had the gun beneath them. Again, he was too slow as one of the giants whipped him around and grabbed him by the throat with one hand. Before Cole knew it, he was being lifted into the air. He thought his head was going to pop off and he grabbed the man’s wrists with both his hands.

  Compared to the giant, he was like a toddler and, as every man who had ever picked up a toddler knew, he was perfectly positioned and at the exact right height to kick the giant in the sack without having to even aim. His foot lashed out and connected squarely. The giant’s eyes bulged and he let out a long gasp before he collapsed.

  Cole was on his feet in a flash and diving for the desk, grabbing the Crown just as the second giant was on him. He was spun around before he could get a real grip on the gun and for some reason his finger couldn’t find the trigger. As Cole brought the gun up to see the problem, a meaty fist swung down like a hammer. It struck the desktop as Cole twisted violently to the side and tried to aim the…the… “Fuck!” He hadn’t picked up the Crown. He was holding a stapler and had only managed to swing it to the open position.

  Without taking a moment to think how stupid a weapon it was, he smacked it down on the back of the giant’s hand. The staple sank as deep as it could and it must’ve hurt, however the giant only glared and reached for Cole.

  With no other option, Cole smacked him with the stapler, again in the hand, then the face twice and the top of his bald head once. Then there was a moment of weightlessness as Cole flew through the air. It was a slow-motion moment and Cole cried out, “Fuuuuck!” just before he landed half on another desk and crashed to the floor.

  For the moment, he was too woozy to stand. He crawled like a rat beneath the desk which was lifted off of him a second later and flung away. Cole was scooting away before it landed. The desk was right there and under the scattered papers was the gun—and just beyond the desk was the giant Cole had kicked in the nuts. He was red-faced and furious. Seeing that Cole was trapped, his partner didn’t rush Cole from behind, but instead took three long strides and came up on him just as Cole turned, gun in hand.

  It was so small that at first, the giant didn’t even see it. It wasn’t until Cole fired twice into his heart that he even knew it was there at all.

  The shots thudded home and didn’t slow the giant in any way. Just by the sound the bullets made, Cole knew right away what was wrong. The giant was wearing a bulletproof vest. The .32 wouldn’t scratch it. Of course, he wasn’t wearing anything on his head. Cole jerked the gun up just as the giant reached out. His hand was the size of a catcher’s mitt, making it difficult to shoot around. Cole jerked the gun to the side and fired. The giant was just as quick and the bullet hit him in the palm. He grimaced. That was it, a grimace.

  He also jerked his hand slightly giving Cole the tiniest window to shoot through. Lacking faith in the gun, he did not aim for the huge head, instead he aimed for the man’s watery brown eye. The bullet went right through the pupil and sunk deep, causing the giant to stagger and fall—right on Cole. This actually saved him as the other giant, still screwed up from the pain, had whipped his gun from the holster beneath his coat. There was no question that he’d be an expert shot. It was a given.

  Still, he was dealing with a gut-wrenching pain and Cole offered very little in the way of a target. He was on his back with a bear of a man on top of him. As fast as they dared, they both lined up their shots and fired. The giant’s bullet screamed past Cole’s ear and went six-inches deep into the flooring. Cole’s tiny bullet hit the man in the cheek and he did more than wince. He half spun and leapt, jerking inward as if he’d been gored by a bull rather than shot by a tiny bullet.

  Too late he tried to aim his gun once more. By then Cole had a perfect bead on him and fired off his remaining bullets, dropping him with a hole in the temple.

  By then the door at the top of the stairs had banged open and two more giants were there. One stopped and fired, while the other raced down the stairs. The shooter was good and Cole knew better than to try to run across the open floor with him taking leisurely shots from a superior position. Cole hunkered down behind the dead guard he’d killed first and used him as an improvised berm. As the heavy bullets struck home with meaty thuds, he dug for the holstered gun beneath the man’s jacket and ripped out a weapon that was not fit for a normal man to use.

  It was a .70 caliber semiautomatic custom-made Crown that used the same bullets as the Riker Mega. Fully loaded it weighed eight pounds and the space between the grip and the trigger was such a stretch that Cole had to fire it two handed. He felt more like a child than a man as he hefted it over the corpse and aimed at the giant barreling down on him at a sprint. After firing the Mega, he expected the kick to be brutal, however it turned out to be less violent than expected. Crown did things right, even with these hand cannons.

  The gun was also surprisingly accurate, though it was difficult to miss such a large target that was not bothering to juke or jive. He aimed center mass, knowing that no vest could stand up against a .70 caliber, copper-jacketed round. The giant absorbed the shot, wobbled and came on. The second shot fired from fifteen feet, toppled him.

  And all the while, huge hunks of lead were thumping into the corpse, kicking up blood and chunks of flesh. Cole hunkered down and slithered back, pausing only to grab what now looked like something of a toy: the .32 Crown. Keeping desks and pillars between him and the giant, Cole dashed for the exit and was nearly there when a loudspeaker blared: “Security breach Admin section. Security breach Admin section ZZ.”

  Cole cursed as he leapt up and ran, throwing caution to the wind. A smidge of luck was on his side as the guard on the stairs had taken that moment to change out his magazine. He was at the doo
r when the man fired again, shattering the glass. Then Cole was out in the hall running pell-mell without direction, looking for the stairs or anything that would indicate an exit.

  He found one and was steps away when it opened and out burst two uniformed guards—of normal human size. Cole didn’t slow and plowed into both at full speed. All three of them went down. The two guards scrambled for their pistols, while Cole already had his out. He wasn’t about to kill these men if he could help it. On the other hand, he didn’t have time for niceties and he swung the huge Crown around like a hammer. Three blows leveled the men. Before jumping up he grabbed one of their pistols. It was a Maltese, which made him groan. It was a showy hunk of metal that was one of the worst guns on the market.

  Still, it was easier to hide than the giant Crown and he ditched it in favor of the Maltese.

  He also saw that they all carried radios and quickly snatched one. He turned the channel to the one that Corrina was using and barked her name into it three times, with no response.

  “Pick up, damn it! Son of a…” A door slammed open somewhere on the stairs below him. “Up it is,” he muttered taking the stairs upward two at a time. He was in deep shit and yet he felt calmer than he had any right to. This was how he was in a fight, especially against normal humans. Compared to Dead-eyes, and now giants, the guards seemed weak and easily beaten.

  Confident, he went up to the fifth floor and dashed down the long open center of the building where the different metals were melted down and refined in immense furnaces.

  “Security breach. Alert Red. Level Five.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Cole snapped and turned on the spot and ran back for the stairs. Too late. The door crashed open and five guards ran through. Cole ducked beneath a hand truck that was loaded with a jumble of scraps. He heaved it at them and used it as cover as he ran toward one of the few furnaces that were in operation at the moment. Was there a chance to blend in with the other workers? He looked down at himself and didn’t even bother to curse this time. His stolen uniform was in tatters and was covered in blood both old and new, and with his tats, his bruises and the blood, he looked more like a wild beast than a man.

  No, he couldn’t hide among the workers and any hiding spot on the floor would soon be discovered. Clearly there were cameras watching every inch of the factory. But was that true of the outside of the building? Each of the furnaces had a smokestack rising from it that went up fifty or sixty feet before they breached the ceiling and roof and carried up into the dark sky.

  Cole couldn’t see why anyone would bother watching the roof of a building. He ran for the closest chimney and circled halfway around it before he found the rungs that trailed up and up.

  Fighting he could handle. Dead-eyes he could as well. Trusting his life to little bits of metal that had been installed generations ago and could break at any time, was something of a problem. Had he been given any time to dwell on it, he might have stalled ten feet off the ground. Necessity drove him up. Faster and faster he went, knowing that when he was discovered, he’d be a sitting duck.

  He was finally spotted when he was thirty feet from the roof. “There he is!” he heard coming from below. By then his hands were beginning to cramp. Regardless he drove himself on, even as the first gunshot rang out. Strangely, on the ground, hitting a man-sized target from ninety feet wasn’t that difficult. Putting that same target up in the air seemed to cause the shooter all sorts of problems. Three shots resulted in three misses.

  “Let me have a go!” someone cried. They all had guns, but bullets were expensive and the ranking guard had taken the shots.

  “Yeah, well, don’t miss,” the top guard snapped.

  The man did not miss. Cole felt the burn on the side of his right thigh. His curses were louder than the gunshot. And so was the laughter from below. The shooter was thumped on the back, but Cole was only nicked and although it hurt like hell, he went on again, pushing hard. The shooter pushed his friends back and took aim. He missed high and he knew the cause. He’d been whooping it up with everyone else and was breathing heavier than he should to make an accurate shot.

  He steadied the gun, took a long slow breath, held it and… “Shoot damn it!” the ranking man cried, nudging the shooter just as he pulled the trigger. The bullet skipped off the chimney with a little spark and a puff of brick dust that settled in Cole’s hair.

  “You screwed me up!” the shooter bitched, pushing his superior away and lining up another shot, except now his target had slipped up through a trap door. “He’s on the roof!”

  Seconds later, the sound system was blaring: “Security breach. Alert Red. Roof level. Secure all access points!”

  The fifth level was even then being flooded by security guards. After a moment’s hesitation they began mounting the chimneys going up the rungs with two of them discovering that the rungs were indeed brittle and prone to breaking. One caught himself while the other plunged forty feet to his death—no one cared.

  Cole found himself trapped. He had been hoping to find an air-duct or a ventilation shaft. Instead there were simply caged off and hooded openings that allowed the fifth level to “breathe.” There were only two directions left to him: he could keep going up one of the chimneys or down, over the side of the building. As it was a sheer drop, down would’ve been a hell of a lot faster. Driven by a survival instinct that made little sense, he went up the rungs studding one of the cold chimneys.

  After climbing for a minute, he chanced a look back over his shoulder and had a perfect view of the dark city. He couldn’t miss the flashing lights of the police cars racing towards the factory.

  Had it been only one, he might have had a hope it was Hamilton coming to his rescue, but there were seventeen squad cars racing in, the screams of their sirens echoing up to him. Only a vamp like Monica Turner could command that much of a police presence. The police would do her dirty work for her and when he died, the fact that there were Dead-eyes at Krupp would die with him.

  Chapter 20

  But that wasn’t exactly true. There was at least one other person who knew. He pulled out the bulky radio he had taken off the security guard and practically screamed into the radio: “Corrina! Hey! Pick up if you’re there.”

  No answer. He tried twice more before he was forced to move. Guards were coming from the base of a dozen chimneys and were spreading out like ants, searching everywhere.

  Cole stashed the radio and began climbing again and as he did, a storm broke out a quarter mile away. With every lightning strike, he could see the rain advancing at an angle. Half the factory was hit by the deluge before even a sprinkle swept across him.

  He was already growing stiff from the beating he’d received at the hands of Monica Turner’s guards, and he felt torn up from his fight with the Dead-eyes, and his leg ached where he’d been shot. And now he was going to freeze hundreds of feet in the air. “Fuuu…”

  “Hello?”

  He jumped in surprise, thinking that someone had snuck up beneath him. But it was Corrina speaking through the radio. “Corrina!”

  “Cole?”

  “Yes, it’s me. I need you to do me a favor.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you.”

  Cole balled a fist to keep from smashing the radio. “It’s the static. I need you to do something for me as fast as you can. Find a phone and call my office. Talk to Shamus McGuigan.”

  “Miss Weegan?”

  “Mic-weegan,” Cole corrected. “Tell him I’m at Krupp and that I bagged four specials. Tell him that I need his help because they’re trying to cover it up. Now repeat all that.” When she had, he made her memorize a telephone number. And lastly, he told her to deny knowing anything about anything. Then she was gone, searching for a phone and he was stuck with nothing better to do than to keep climbing. Every once in a while, he would stop and look down and with each glance his head went dizzy.

  He was so high up that no one wanted to waste their ammo trying to shoot him down and no one volun
teered to go up and get him. The security guards gathered beneath him and went back and forth arguing. They were on a strict budget and it was thought that if they could induce Cole to jump, it would be deemed less wasteful. The only way they could think to do that was to light the furnace. The floor manager would have nothing to do with that since he had his own books to balance.

  Finally, they decided to leave it up to the police and everyone stood back, not wanting a falling body to land on them.

  They were disappointed when only a single police officer mounted the rungs. It was Hamilton. Cole didn’t know whether to be relieved or not, and he slipped the Maltese from his pocket.

  Hamilton stopped when he was twenty rungs down. “So.” This was his opening statement.

  “I got the Dead-eyes. Five. It’s a record by the way.”

  “Too bad you don’t got a mom. She might’ve given two-shits. Where are they? They were supposed to be in a pit of some kind and yet you’re here, treed like a fuckin’ cat.”

  Cole was itching to shoot the man in the face. If ever there was a justifiable homicide, this was it. “They’re safe. Parts are here and other parts are there. I need to see the paperwork on my case before I tell you where.”

  “Or what? You’ll jump?” Hamilton laughed. “You best get jumpin’ then, because I don’t got any paperwork. Do I look like a fuckin’ lawyer? That’s on Fantucci, and I guess you just gotta trust him.” He looked out as if there was a view worth seeing and grinned. “I’ll see you at the bottom one way or the other.”

  The implication that Cole would be shot down if he didn’t climb down was obvious. Cole waited until Hamilton was halfway down before he radioed Corrina. “Where’s the head? Please tell me it’s somewhere safe.”