by Adam Smith
Kate picked off a few men until her pistol clicked empty as well. She drew the last handgun from her chest harness and shrugged out of the restrictive leather contraption.
Max and Nick sprang from the sunken pit and stood back-to-back on the center walkway.
A dozen gangsters in black suits approached from both sides of the room. Several of the criminals held telescoping metal batons, and as they closed in, a few more men snapped theirs open with a flick of the wrist.
Max clenched his fists and snarled at the goons, “Come on! What are you waiting for?”
As if the cry had been their signal to attack, the crowd of black-suited men stalked toward the two men in the center of the room.
Fists flew, knives slashed, and batons sliced the air. Men cried out in agony as bones splintered and blood splashed across the floorboards.
Max dodged a baton swing, grabbed the attacker’s wrist, and snatched the baton. He spun, lodged his hip against the gangster’s, and used the momentum to hurl him into one of the pits. The gangster landed skull-first and bounced twice before settling to the floor, unmoving. Max whirled the baton as three more men advanced on him.
Nick bobbed and struck like a whirlwind, slashing arms and torsos with each strike. None of the gangsters could touch him as his knives slid across their flesh and sprayed gouts of blood into the air.
Kate hung back in the pit and aimed her gun at any gangster who came near. Whenever enemies tried to club Max or Nick from behind, she fired off a careful shot and drilled the criminals between the eyes before they could hurt her companions.
Between them, the three friends managed to kill or disable most of the enemies. However, more men kept pouring through the door leading in from Papa Sal’s office. Max, Nick, and Kate were slowly driven across the room and through the door at the far end.
The next door opened onto a long hallway where fresh thugs awaited them. Blue light shimmered through a glass floor, walls, and ceiling. Max was hammering a gangster’s face against the thick glass wall when he saw a bulbous black eye ogling him through the glass. A hideous ocean sunfish six feet long stared back at the ex-cop. More fish swam just behind the walls in forests of waving kelp.
“The entire hallway’s an aquarium,” Max said in disbelief as he dropped the unconscious thug. “Who the hell designed this house?”
Blunt pain flared across Max’s shoulders. The blow hurled him into the glass wall. His forehead bounced off the glass, and he fell to the floor, where the baton-wielding thug who’d cracked him leaped on top of him. The bald gangster got his baton up under Max’s chin and leaned down on it, trying to crush his windpipe.
With frantic energy, Max shoved on the baton with both hands as he kicked his legs up into the air and wrapped them around his attacker’s head. With a twist of his torso, he hurled the gangster sideways into the aquarium wall. Max jumped on top of the thug and pummeled his face with both fists. Below them, brightly colored fish darted about merrily. Max obscured the view when he shattered the gangster’s nose and splashed blood across the floor.
The narrow tunnel made it easier to defend against the dozen men boiling up from behind so long as the friends worked together to keep the battle united on one front. One gangster drew a pistol, but one of his allies knocked the gun from his hand. “Are you crazy?” the second thug shouted. “You’ll drown us all!”
Kate stayed ahead of her two friends, taking careful shots only when absolutely necessary so as to prevent being swept away in a torrent of seawater.
Max lost his baton and resorted to using every part of his body as a weapon.
Nick lost both knives and drew the spare from his belt.
Nick and Max fought like demons on the front line, but the sheer weight of numbers pressed the three friends along the glass tube and through the door at the end of the aquarium hall.
The next room opened up wide and offered the small group less control of the battlefield than the narrow tunnel. Sand covered the spacious room’s entire floor. Large standing rocks formed islands in the sand.
It’s an enormous Japanese rock garden, Max realized.
A glass staircase led up to a second floor which covered the back half of the room. Through the glass underside Max could see sand up above as well. The vaulted glass ceiling overhead was likewise covered in sand.
Twenty gangsters in black suits filled the bottom level of the room, stood on the glass stairs, and leaned down to stare over the railings at the three intruders.
Papa Sal and Johnny Legion stood on the second floor and glanced down at their pursuers. Legion raised his massive pistol to fire at Max, but Papa Sal slapped the hired killer’s hand and snarled at him. “No, you idiot! Do you want to entomb us all under a thousand metric tons of sand?”
Looking like he was chafing under the order, Legion lowered the pistol and glared at Max. His eyes promised death.
Carved oak stands holding various martial arts weapons lined the room. Max and his friends hurried to the righthand wall and snatched up weapons.
All of the gangsters followed suit until every person in the room held some sort of bladed weapon.
Max unsheathed a long, curved katana. He held the sword up at his side like a baseball bat.
Nick scooped up two Viking axes and whirled them around his body in a cloud of death.
Kate held a thin rapier in her left hand and her pistol in her right.
Papa Sal leaned over the railing and shouted down to a thug on the lower level, “Marco, I’m trusting you to take care of this nuisance.”
Marco, a man with a firm widow’s peak in his slicked-back dark hair, straightened his black suit and nodded up at the old man. “You got it, boss.” As his boss and hired guard scurried away through another door on the top level, Marco braced his feet in the sand and raised a double-sided European longsword into attack position with the tip pointed at Max’s heart.
The multi-story rock garden room, designed for tranquility, crackled with tension. Knuckles popped as combatants tightened their grip on weapons.
Sand shuffled under Max’s feet as he widened his stance. He tightened his grip on the katana’s hilt, and the leather wrapping squealed softly. As the swarm of enemies loomed over him from all sides, Max grinned and said, “Well, yippee ki yay.”
At the words, the swarm attacked. Marco led the pack, pushing off with his back foot and hurling himself at Max with a vicious thrust.
With a flash of light, Max spun the katana to block. The two blades clashed. Max deflected Marco’s sword to the right. Max slashed at the gangster’s chest, but Marco stepped backward only to lunge in again with his longsword slashing.
The attack forced Max back a step. His boots shuffled through shifting sand as he backstepped and brought the katana around in a parry. The blades locked, and each man strained to overpower his foe.
Across the room, Nick whirled his axes amid a cloud of black-suited men. A spear user rushed in and stabbed at the cop’s back. Nick stepped aside and batted the spear tip down into the sand. With his other axe, Nick cut the criminal’s throat.
A gangster wielding a scimitar swung at Nick’s head. Nick ducked the blow and thumped his axe into the thug’s stomach even as he brought the second axe around to knock aside a longsword thrust. The first axe was stuck in the dead gangster’s spine, so Nick released the handle, pivoted inside the longsword user’s guard, and slammed his forehead into the man’s nose. Blood sprayed across Nick’s face as the gangster fell screaming into the sand. The cop plucked up the longsword and danced into another circle of enemies, axe and sword whistling as they cut the air.
Kate did her best to block attacks using her thin rapier. Knowing the pistol was the only thing keeping the pack of criminals from carving into her, the blonde baker didn’t dare waste her shots. Only the boldest attackers prompted her to fire. Corpses began to pile up around her in a rin
g. Men backed away as she aimed at their faces.
Dead gangsters littered the floor, their blood soaking into the sand and creating a wet swamp for the combatants to slosh through.
Max and Marco’s blades rang like funeral bells. Marco hurled Max’s katana aside and kicked the ex-cop in the stomach, throwing him backward.
As Max pushed himself to his feet, another gangster lunged at him with a spear. Max batted the sharp tip aside and thrust his katana into the man’s chest, killing him instantly. He yanked the blade free and spun around just in time to block another slash from Marco. The slick gangster grinned as they locked blades and entered the pushing contest again.
As Marco pressed down, Max backstepped and let the lock fall. With surprise etched across his face, Marco fell forward for just a moment before he recovered, but the moment was all Max needed.
Max lunged forward and drove the point of his katana through Marco’s throat. With a twist and a yank, he tore the blade out through the side of Marco’s neck. A shower of blood exploded from the mobster’s carotid artery and sprayed across the sand as he fell to his knees clutching at his throat.
As Marco gurgled and died, his jacket flared open and exposed a pistol hanging from a shoulder harness. However, with so many enemies pressing in, Max had no time to grab the gun.
There were now so many dead gangsters sprawled across the rock garden that footing became treacherous. As Max stepped into another swing, he tripped on a dead goon’s jacket. The ex-cop sprawled into the sand and rolled frantically to avoid being hacked by a machete.
A thrown spear stabbed into the thug’s heart. He dropped the machete from nerveless fingers as he stared down at the shaft jutting from his chest in shock. Max looked across the room along the spear’s flightpath and saw Kate standing with her arm still extended. She plucked her rapier up from the sand where she’d stuck it and blocked another attack from a man with a straight jian sword.
Max killed until his enemies stopped coming. He turned to survey the room and saw only Kate and Nick staring wearily back at him.
The slide of Kate’s pistol was locked back, but she clutched it in her hand as if afraid to let it go. In her other hand she held the gleaming silver rapier. The rocket launcher still swung from its strap on her back.
Nick looked exhausted and was covered in an ocean of blood, and who knew how much of it was his? The black-haired cop had somehow acquired a naginata polearm. Blood dripped from the long blade and splashed into puddles on the sandy floor.
“No time to rest,” Max panted. With a few steps he was at Marco’s side, where he pulled the pistol from its holster under the dead man’s armpit. Now armed with his weapon of choice, Max dropped the katana and lurched through the bloody mud toward the glass staircase. Sand ground under his boots as he left a trail of bloody footprints leading up the clear glass stairs.
Max heard a cry and a splash. He looked back and saw Nick lying on the ground clutching his thigh. Kate knelt down next to him and checked the wound.
“It’s bad,” she announced. She looked up at Max as she tore off a strip from a nearby goon’s button-up shirt. “I’ll get the bleeding stopped and follow as soon as I can.”
“Sorry, man,” Nick said. He winced as Kate wrapped the cloth around his leg and drew it tight. “Go get those bastards for me.”
Max pressed on. The door on the top level led to a narrow hallway with one blue door at the far end. He hurried down the corridor and burst into the next room.
Once through the blue doorway, Max’s eyes immediately met the gaze of Johnny Legion. The two men stood face-to-face as the hulking killer in the crisp white suit barred the path to his boss. Golden plating gleamed along the massive .50 caliber pistol clenched tight in Legion’s meaty fist. The barrel of the golden gun hovered inches from Max’s left eye.
Max held his own pistol aimed straight at Johnny Legion’s face.
Behind his hired killer, Papa Sal stood halfway up a flight of steps leading to a trap door in the ceiling. The small metal room was only ten feet on each side, so the crime boss was in plain sight, but Max couldn’t shoot the old man without being shot in the face by Johnny Legion.
The crime lord scurried up the last few steps and burst through the trap door, disappearing into the darkness on the other side. A cool breeze blew into the room through the open door, and Max guessed Papa Sal was on the rooftop.
Max stared down his sights into Johnny Legion’s burning gray eyes. “How we gonna do this? Just shoot each other and die?”
Legion’s voice rumbled as he replied, “Sure. Why not?”
“You willing to die for your boss?”
“This ain’t for Sal. It’s a matter of personal honor.”
“Any chance we could buy you off?”
“You got twenty million in cash?”
Max whistled. “Twenty million? Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work.”
“And anyway,” Legion rumbled, “I couldn’t take the bribe even if you did have it to give. Reputation’s everything in this business. If I ran from some washed-up cop, I’d never live it down.”
“Sure,” Max said. “Gotta have integrity when you’re protecting scum from justice, never mind the atrocities they inflict on innocent folks.”
The ex-cop and the hired killer sprang into action at the same time. Both men ducked their heads aside and fired with eerie synchronicity. Bullets rang against the metal walls as the two men surged forward into a grapple, twisting and yanking as they fought to bring their pistols to each other’s heads.
With Johnny Legion’s meaty paw clamped on his gun wrist, Max struggled to get his weapon in line for a kill shot. His other hand clasped Legion’s wrist and prevented the hulking killer from pressing his gold-plated barrel to Max’s temple and painting the wall with his brains.
Max fired his pistol to stun the gangster. Legion’s gray eyes didn’t even flinch at the echoing crack as he continued to strain against Max’s restraining hand.
To Max’s horror, the killer’s gold-plated pistol inched through the air toward his skull.
Desperation mounting, Max lashed out with his foot and kicked Legion in the leg. The big man grunted and returned the kick. The two men entered a dancing grapple of kicks, headbutts, and snarling rage.
Max bared his teeth as he twisted to avoid Legion’s pistol, which brushed the top of his stubbly scalp. Thunder crashed through the bare room as the killer fired. The bullet tore a shallow groove in Max’s shaved head, and blood dribbled into his ringing ear.
Max yanked his pistol in line and fired just as Legion ducked his head. The bullet mussed the brute’s hair, but Legion turned the duck into a headbutt and smashed Max’s forehead with his own. The two men wobbled in the doorway, and Max felt his strength giving out against the avalanche of muscle pressing down on him.
In a last-ditch effort, Max pointed his gun at the ceiling. The surprise move briefly freed him of Legion’s grip. A moment later, Max smashed the magazine release button. The spring-assisted pistol ejected the metal magazine and shot the pointy edge straight into Legion’s bulging right eye. The huge killer flinched, and Max shoved the barrel of his pistol to Johnny Legion’s temple, squeezed the trigger, and sent the last chambered bullet crashing through his brain.
Blood fountained out the back of Legion’s head. The big man stiffened, and the hand which had been driving the gold-plated pistol toward Max’s head dropped to his side.
Max shoved the brute backward, and Johnny Legion’s corpse thudded to the floor. Pooling blood soaked into his crisp white suit.
Max snatched up the golden pistol and rushed to the metal steps. He took the stairs two at a time.
The rooftop opened onto a long narrow platform with red lights flickering on the far edge. As soon as Max hit the opening, a stiff wind tried to shove him back down through the door. The familiar whine of helicopter blades
filled the night as Max looked up and saw Papa Sal through the cockpit windows. The old man yanked back on the stick and the craft rose into the air.
Max raised the enormous gold-plated pistol and fired off three shots at the cockpit window, but they bounced harmlessly off the reinforced glass. Papa Sal leaned close to the window and grinned as he shot Max another middle finger.
Kate stepped up beside Max and watched the chopper rise.
“Kate,” Max said calmly, “hand me that rocket launcher.”
The baker yanked the metal tube off her back and slapped it into Max’s waiting hands. Papa Sal’s olive face paled. The old crime lord fought to steer the craft away.
Max strode forward, raised the launcher to his shoulder, and flicked off the safety. He took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. With a loud whoosh, the rocket leaped from the mouth of the tube and streaked through the air toward the helicopter.
Papa Sal opened his mouth in a scream.
Max grinned.
The projectile punched through the helicopter’s fuselage and detonated, and the craft erupted into flames. The rotors continued to spin as the craft seesawed out over the property.
Max turned his back on the burning chopper to give Kate a big thumbs-up. “Mission accomplished.”
Even as the helicopter smashed through the roof of the large detached garage behind the house and a second explosion ripped through the night, Max didn’t look back. The flames rose high into the sky and splashed shadows across his grinning face.
The rooftop door thumped open again, and Nick pushed his way through. The cop walked tenderly on his injured leg and used the long shaft of a spear as a makeshift cane.
“Think there’s a fire escape down from here?” Nick asked.
The three friends looked until Kate found the release for the ladder at the edge of the roof, and they climbed down the outside of the palace together. The ladder deposited them in a hidden alcove on the side of the house.
The grounds were a mess of running men and retreating vehicles. Word had spread that Papa Sal and Johnny Legion were dead, and the criminal underlings fled the property like rats abandoning a sinking ship. None of the suited gangsters showed the slightest interest in them as the three friends strode across the front of the house toward their SUV.
