by Chuck Dixon
Claude drove the hilt of the saber into the face of one man and felt the crackle of breaking bone through the steel. He booted another in the knee, hearing the joint snap with a report that could be heard over the grunts of his assailants and the shouts of the dark man. The attackers renewed their efforts, emboldened by rage, and carried Claude backward through the door and into the house by the weight of their numbers.
Caroline was still awake thanks to Stephen.
He was fussing. Perhaps it was the silence of the night after so many days of constant rumblings from outside. She had the baby back to sleep after rocking him in her arms and pacing for what seemed like hours. The hammering on the front door reached her as she was laying the infant back in the crib. She stepped to the hall to see Claude shouting for the chef, surprised to see a sword in his fist. The front door was shuddering in its frame under steady impacts striking it from the other side. Mme. Villeneuve joined Caroline, a candelabra held aloft in her hand. Jeannot brushed past them and charged down the steps to help Anatole and the maids haul a large chest and then a spinet piano from the drawing room and against the door.
“Who is it? Have they identified themselves?” the widow called down the stairs.
“Looters, Mother!” Jeannot shouted back. “Come to rob the house!”
“Why have they chosen us?” Mme. Villeneuve said with more irritation than apprehension.
Caroline did not know who they were, but she knew they were not robbers. She knew why they were here and why they chose this house.
“Where has Claude gone?” Mme. Villeneuve called down.
The sharp crack of an explosion sounded from below, followed by another and another.
Caroline backed toward her room where her child was now crying, startled by the sudden noise rising even above the rhythmic hammering. She swept up the squalling, wriggling bundle and held it close to her with one arm. Her hand searched beneath the mattress. There were shouts and then screams from below. After a crash of furniture, heavy footfalls pounded up the stairs. Caroline backed into the far corner of the room, which seemed to grow smaller with each step.
A man in clothes made filthy with soot and ash threw the door wide and strode for her and Stephen with a leer on his face. A younger man with a gaunt face and hungry yellow eyes came in behind and spoke a warning.
“It is the child. He said the child must not be harmed.”
A chill rose up Caroline’s neck like an icy fist encircling her throat.
She raised the LeMat and squeezed the trigger as her child’s father had shown her.
The slug struck the sooty man dead center in the chest. He barked a cough and collapsed, lifeless. The gaunt man’s ochre eyes opened wide as he backed for the door. He held up a hand in a gesture of surrender or pleading.
Caroline thumbed the hammer and squeezed again. Three of the gaunt man’s fingers vanished in a spray of bone and blood. The bullet continued on to take the man just above the eye. His body was lifted and thrown spinning against the doorframe. Bits of his skull and scalp stuck to the flocked wallpaper.
The baby screamed in the dying din as her hearing returned. Stephen was red-faced, his little chin furrowed and quivering with unreasoning fear. She renewed her grip on the infant, holding him tight to her side and held the smoking pistol trained on the empty doorway. Her aim and her arm were steady and unwavering.
“Mademoiselle Tauber? Or is it Rivard here?” came a cultured and maddeningly calm voice speaking impeccable French from somewhere out in the dark of the hallway.
“Speak English, motherfucker,” she snapped.
“We only want the child. I suppose you know why.”
Caroline remained silent. She would not engage this man on his level.
“He is very special. Very unique. A gift to science and mankind. You must appreciate that. You must know he would be treated as a treasure by—”
She squeezed the trigger and put a hole through the wall by the door where she supposed the speaker was standing on the other side.
“I see. A mother’s love, then,” the voice resumed after a moment. “I fully appreciate your position. You could come along if you wished. You could be the boy’s guardian. You could see that we mean him no harm.”
Another shot. This one farther left. It drilled through a cameo portrait hanging on the wall. She fired again, lower and to the left. A cry went up in the hallway and something heavy struck the floor hard enough to make the boards beneath her feet quake. More cries from without, and feet retreating down the stairs.
“Ah,” came the voice, still irritatingly serene and reasonable. “You have disposed of one of my hired men, with the added benefit of the rest fleeing.”
She said nothing. Stephen’s face was frozen in a silent shriek of terror. The voice from the hallway resumed.
“I suppose that is what comes of paying in advance, eh?” The voice had a patrician English accent with a touch of something foreign. He was baiting her into speaking. She would not rise to his taunts.
“You know who I come from. You know who sent me. The man is like a father to you. He would be the same to your son.”
“He’s a lying bastard,” she said, then slid to her right on bare feet. Dwayne always told her to shoot and move, shoot and move.
“Sir Neal wishes only to welcome you back, to share his confidences with you and the rewards of all your research. Your brother as well.”
She squeezed again. This time through the doorjamb, splitting it top to bottom.
The silence was long this time, and she watched over the smoking barrel of the revolver, quivering now under its weight and from the effort to hold her arm straight for such an extended time. The door swung slowly inward. A dark man with ivory hair stepped into the doorway holding Mme. Villeneuve in a chokehold before him. In his other hand was a handgun of flat back metal—a modern automatic of some kind. He held it easily, pointed from his hip at her midriff.
“Neither one of us can miss, Caroline,” he said with an easy smile, showing teeth that gleamed in the haze of gun smoke that hung in the air. The widow clutched at his arm in a feeble effort to release the grip that was asphyxiating her. Mme. Villeneuve’s face was turning crimson, her lips parted to draw in air that would not come. Caroline kept the pistol trained on the man, who continued speaking in measured tones.
“Spare the child any more of this. Think of what is best for Stephen’s interests,” he said, stepping into the room over the bodies of the two hired men. The toes of Mme. Villeneuve’s slippers brushed the floorboards in involuntary spasms.
She thumbed the hammer back and trained it once again on the stranger. She squeezed the trigger. Only a metallic click rewarded her effort.
The ivory-haired man dropped the widow choking and gasping to the floor. He reached out a hand to Caroline. His smile beamed wider even as his eyes turned to glittering black stones.
“And so we are done,” he said. She drew back the hammer again.
“Mademoiselle, please,” he said, the fixed smile collapsing a bit at the corners.
Her thumb pushed forward a lever recessed into the curve of the hammer and she applied steady pressure to the trigger.
At this close range, the buckshot from the underslung shotgun barrel had no air time to spread into a wider pattern. The buckshot took the man from the future like an iron fist traveling at ballistic velocity high in the chest and neck. He was flung from his feet and through the open doorway. A fountain of blood sprang from his torn gullet. His body struck the far wall and dropped in a heap to the floor. His legs pumped in some instinctual animal response from his dying brain telling him that he must flee. Too late, too late. He lay still.
Setting the gasping Stephen on the blood-sticky floor by her, Caroline knelt by Mme. Villeneuve. She loosened the widow’s collar and supported her neck. Natural color began to return to the older woman’s face. Her eyes searched Caroline’s. Her lips formed words but no sound. Caroline leaned close to hear the woman over
her child’s panicked shrieks.
“Jeannot,” the woman whispered through the pain in her throat.
42
Eye to Eye
From atop the hill, Lee Hammond saw the figures appear from the grass as if by magic. They converged on the loose gathering of men down at the camp on the slope below his position. He was sighting on one of the attackers when he heard a whisper of movement in the grass behind him. Spinning around, he saw three naked men, smeared head to toe with mud, racing toward him with raised swords.
The men rushed in from the dark all around the camp. They were among the escaped slaves and their liberators inside of a heartbeat. The attackers were naked but for skirts and singlets. They made Bat think of the cheap Hercules movies her dad still liked from when he was a kid. The men wore short-cropped hair that identified them as Romans. Within seconds half of their party was on the ground dead or wounded and the rest fighting for their lives. Gunfire exploded close. Chaz was in the fight somewhere behind her.
Bat drew her Sig Sauer and brought down a man who thrust at her with a spear point gleaming with fresh blood. She turned and sighted on another man hacking at a fallen slave with a short sword. A double-tap lifted that man off his feet.
A hammer blow between her shoulder blades drove her stumbling. She turned, dropping to one knee and sent a three-round burst into a swordsman rearing back for a second strike. A dull ache turned to lancing agony as she fought to regain her feet. The armor caught the sword blow. She wasn’t cut but she took all the blunt force between the shoulder blades. Gasping, she dropped to her knee again. A wet gasp sounded close behind her. She threw herself on her side and swung the Sig’s foresights toward the source. Byrus was there, drawing the blade of his gladius from the back of a Roman’s head. The man buckled to the dirt, his blood streaming from a mortal wound to shower over Byrus.
The Macedonian wore a face of pure feral menace. Gone was the genial grin she’d grown accustomed to over the course of the march. This was the pit fighter she was seeing; an animal spirit that had survived God alone knew what horrors to survive to this day.
He rushed to stand astride her, catching the blade of a new attacker on his. She rolled on her back and fired two rounds point blank into the attacker’s crotch. The man fell back howling, with Byrus riding him to the ground, chopping furiously. Bat struggled to her feet and made for where Boats lay unprotected. Her feet tangled in something. She fell hard. A Roman had used the pole of his spear to trip her. He stood over her, chuckling darkly.
Bat whipped the Sig to line up on him, but the man was fast and struck her wrist with the butt of the spear. Her fingers went numb. The automatic spun from her hand. The man bent to grip the bodice of her armor. She drove the heel of her hand into his face with all her force. The blow smeared his nose across his face with a liquid crunching sound. Blood jetted from his nostrils.
He kept his hold on her and drove her back down on the ground. The back of her head struck the hard earth. She saw white speckles at the edges of her vision. The Roman spat a gobbet of hot blood in her face before setting to tearing the armor from her. The buckles frustrated his efforts. He sat hard atop her to draw a knife from his girdle to begin sawing at the straps.
One hand feebly slapped at her attacker while the other sought the Colt snubby from the concealed carry holster on her belt. His weight was bearing down on her midriff and she couldn’t get her fingers to it.
The man took a handful of her hair and banged her head off the ground once again. The speckles covered her narrowing field of vision for an instant. She fought back the darkness long enough to drive fingers up toward the man’s ruined nose. She got two fingers into the mess of fractured gristle and hooked them both hard. The man roared in pain and swatted at her blindly, his hands striking glancing blows off her face and shoulders. He shifted his weight, trying to release himself from her two-fingered grip buried deep in the soft flesh of his septum. She rose up with him, fingers locked into twin hooks.
Her other hand dove under her pinned thigh and found the rubber grip of the .38. He was shrieking now and clasping her arm in both his hands, trying to force her to release her hold. Bat twisted her wrist upward and jerked the trigger of the holstered Colt.
A searing heat washed down her leg. The weight of the man came off her waist. Her fingers were jerked free of his face in a gush of blood. She freed the snubby and fired three more rounds center mass, spilling the man back. Rising to a sitting position against a crushing tide of nausea she could see Jimmy Smalls swinging his Winchester like a club against a pair of brawny Romans with short swords.
From behind her, she heard a heavy chopping sound. A man’s body fell beside her, spasming as the blood left it, gushing, around the blade of a gladius stuck to the hilt through his chest. She put the last round from the Colt through the man’s skull and watched it come apart like a melon. A high keening shriek reached her, and she realized that it was coming from her.
It only stopped when she felt a hand grip her arm. She whirled to aim the revolver up into the face of Boats crouching over her. The hammer dropped again and again on a spent round until the SEAL gently plucked the weapon from her fingers and tossed it aside.
“That’s goddamned unfriendly, girl,” Boats said with a sloppy grin before sagging to his knees.
She crawled to him gasping as he collapsed on his back. He was spattered with blood, but there were no fresh wounds. The blood was not his own. It ran off him in rivulets carried on a lather of greasy sweat. The big sailor was breathing regularly. His fever was broken.
Bat reached over him and took the revolver from his limp fingers and reloaded it. She turned then, training it around the camp. The slope was lit intermittently by flashes of gunfire. Chaz was firing three-round bursts into the dark at targets she couldn’t see. Jimmy was walking across the camp, putting rounds from a handgun into writhing figures on the ground. The action was over for now. This was the mop up.
Byrus strode up to her, smiling like a shy child; his joy ghastly in contrast with his gore-smeared face and body. He dropped a severed head in the dirt by her. It reminded Bat of a cat her mom had back in Cleveland—always leaving dead mice and birds on the bathroom floor.
She laughed at the memory, and Byrus nodded at what he thought was her approval.
“Good kitty,” she said and gave in at last to a blizzard of speckles that joined in a wall of white to wash away the world.
Bat came around to someone speaking her name. It was the tail end of a senseless dream, and her name was being called again and again in an endless loop.
Lee was over her, and she squinted to see him clearly. The sky was alight with the watery glow of a gray dawn. She’d either slept or been passed out for hours.
“Sit up, baby,” he said and supported her to a seated position. He undid a leather bota and held the spout to her lips.
“Take a sip. A small one.”
She did as she was told. Her mouth filled with a bitter draught. She spat it out in a spray and sat forward coughing.
“It’s watered vinegar,” Lee said. “Our visitors left it. Good for you. Electrolytes.”
“Shit,” she said and shoved him away. He made a grunting sound, and she saw for the first time that his shoulder was wrapped in a stained dressing.
“Oh my God, Lee.”
“It’s all right. Asshole got a piece of me. We’re all hurting, including you,” he said and offered her the bota again. “But we need to move now and bitch later.”
He helped her to her feet. She felt last night’s fight over every inch of her body. Each muscle was stiff in its own way, and her headache was fierce. Her fingers explored a tender spot on the back of her head. There was a burn down her leg where the skin was scorched by the muzzle blast from the snubby.
The worst was the pain between her shoulder blades where the sword had struck her at the beginning of the exchange. It hurt to lift her arms. The soreness pulsed with her heartbeat and radiated to the back
of her neck, making it agony to turn her head. She was ambulatory, and it wasn’t going to get any better laying here. She’d pop some Tylenol and soldier on.
Jimbo stood further up the hill toward the crest, glassing toward the east with binoculars. He stood with the Winchester rifle cradled in his arm. Bat never really thought of him as a Native American. But right now he looked every inch the warrior brave. He would be at home in Apacheria or the Black Hills. The streaks of dried blood on his face even mimicked war paint.
The slope of the hill was a slaughterhouse. The grass was greasy with drying offal, and the flies were challenging the morning chill to begin gathering over the bodies scattered all around. There were a lot fewer of the tagalongs than there’d been the day before. Some already lay under hummocks of fresh dirt; graves dug and filled by a burial party directed by Byrus. The stocky Macedonian was caked with blood not his own. He noticed her and smiled broadly, his few teeth showing white against the mask of carnage that painted his face.
She counted six graves. There were eight in the burial party, excluding Byrus. Two more of their volunteers sat by where Boats lay on the stretcher. Chaz was treating them for what looked like serious wounds. One man hummed to himself while holding an arm fractured in two places. The other was having his leg bound by the Ranger and was biting down on a twig, eyes wide, pellets of sweat standing on his skin.
There should be more of their militia members. They probably ran off during or shortly after the fight. They still had enough to act as bearers for the SEAL. But the two additional wounded would hold them up further. The equation was getting worse. Bat found her Sig and Colt had both been returned to their holsters while she was out. Her Winchester lay next to her pack. She picked up both and walked over to where Boats lay.
The SEAL raised himself on one elbow and smiled at her. He looked better than he had the day before, but that wasn’t saying much. There was color back in his skin, but his eyes were still red-rimmed. She crouched by him and touched his forehead with her wrist. He wasn’t warm anymore, but his skin was paper dry.
