by Rachel Aukes
Sloan laughed. “No, you’ll pay.” He nodded to Bolt.
Bolt smiled, raised his blaster at Joe, and fired.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Gabriel Sloan remained in his heavily armored vehicle while his specialized squad of twelve murcs, all in exoshields, set fire to the derelict building that bore a faded sign reading Harry Haft’s. The people inside hadn’t expected a second attack, and they’d been woefully unprepared. They hadn’t even taken a single shot before the bomb went off.
Hunters who’d had their exoshields on ran through the flames, only to be gunned down by Sloan’s squad. One of the hunters had been carrying out a badly burned woman when he’d been shot, and she toppled out of his arms when he collapsed. The woman—likely a barmaid—tried to crawl away, but a single blaster shot finished her off.
Fire and soot showered down, pelting Gabriel’s windows. He grimaced. He didn’t understand why Roderick enjoyed being at the front of the battle. It was messy and chaotic, two things Gabriel thoroughly disliked.
A gunfight erupted in the alley behind the bar, and Gabriel leaned forward, craning to see, but all he could make out was flashes of blaster fire. He tapped his comm on his armlet. “What’s going on back there?”
“Two targets escaped through a hidden tunnel in Tally’s office. We’re pursuing them now.”
“Update me when you have them.”
Gabriel waited, impatiently tapping his foot. He found it incredibly tedious to sit and wait for an update that he didn’t receive for nearly an hour. When the squad leader approached empty-handed, Gabriel fumed. He opened the window. “You let them escape?”
“They lost us in the tunnels, sir. But everyone else that was inside is confirmed dead.”
“I don’t care about everyone else!” Gabriel glowered. “Find him and kill him.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Reuben and T-Rex had been having a drink in his office when an explosion blew in the door. Reuben was sent flying back off his chair. He couldn’t hear anything except for a terrible ringing in his ears, and the world spun all around him. All he could make out was dark blobs and bright orange movement.
He hazily felt like he was floating through the air. The colors changed, and all he saw was gray with periodic blinding light. His world came into focus slowly, like a Tilt-a-whirl coming to a stop, and he realized that Rex was carrying him through the escape tunnels.
As Reuben reconnected with his body, he felt himself jostling, as though Rex was running, and he looked around to see they were moving fast. Lights, set ten feet apart, blinded him, and he covered his eyes.
“What happened?” Reuben asked, or at least he thought he did. He still couldn’t hear anything.
Soon, the ringing began to subside somewhat, and he heard Rex speaking as he ran.
“Hang in there. I’ve got you, Reub,” Rex repeated over and over.
“What happened?” Reuben asked again, this time hearing himself.
“Shit hit the fan, that’s what,” Rex said.
Reuben took a deep breath, then patted Rex’s chest. “Put me down.”
Rex slowed, stopped, then helped Reuben to his feet. He wobbled at first, then found his footing.
“They’re going to break through. We need to run,” Rex explained.
Reuben nodded. “Okay.” He nearly tripped, but as he moved, he found a rhythm. Rex caught up to him easily, which meant Reuben was running slower than he realized. He pushed himself to pick up the pace, and soon he even recognized where he was in the tunnel system. When they reached a T-intersection, Reuben turned left.
“Far Town’s to the right,” Rex said.
“I have a place. This way,” Reuben said and kept running.
Chapter Thirty
Joe noticed two things as soon as he woke. First, every muscle ached. Second, someone was kicking him. He swung out with his hand and grabbed his attacker’s ankle and rolled, knocking the person off their feet and onto the floor with a resounding thud.
“Hey!” a man yelped.
Joe ignored his protesting muscles and pushed himself to his feet. Well, he tried. The room around him spun so badly, he had to settle on a knee. When his double-vision aligned into a single view of his world, he focused first on the man shoving away from him.
“You didn’t need to knock me down. I thought you were dead,” he said, rubbing his butt.
“Take a pulse next time,” Joe growled, and looked around. He was in a dark room, lit only by sunlight coming through small square holes positioned high in one wall. The other three walls were comprised of bars. He counted four other people in the cell with him, all watching him.
“Where am I?” Joe commanded with more vigor than he felt.
“You’re in the Devil’s Playground,” the man said.
The name was familiar, but it took a few seconds for his thoughts to bubble up through his mucky brain. “I’m in Shiprock.”
“Of course. Where else would you be?” the man said.
Joe took a deep breath and made a second attempt at standing. His legs wobbled, and he reached out for a bar to stabilize himself.
“Don’t touch—”
Electricity shot through Joe’s hand and through his body. He fell back, landing hard on the floor.
“—that,” the man finished. “The bars are electrified.”
Joe shot the prisoner a hard glance, and pushed himself to his feet once more. As he found his footing, he cracked his neck from side to side, remembering how he’d ended up here. After stunning him at Sara’s, they’d shot him again every time he’d awakened. He remembered they shot him in the arms and legs for fun. Blasters set on stun wouldn’t permanently maim, but it didn’t mean getting shot didn’t hurt like hell, and the entry wounds left nasty burns. If his captors had any sort of decency, they would’ve knocked him out with a sleeper’s patch, which would’ve kept him out until they removed it. Clearly, the Sloan brothers and their murcs didn’t know what “decency” was. They needed an introduction to Rex’s dictionary and Joe’s fists.
How long had Joe been out? Were Sara and the kids still okay? He knew Nick was as wiry as they came, which meant the kids should be safe as long as they stayed hidden. But Sara…there was no telling what Sloan would do to her because of her friendship with Joe. He had to get back to Cavil and break her free, assuming she was even still alive.
And then there were the Sloan brothers…he would see them both dead. He had a plan: save the Swintons, then kill the Sloans. He just needed to figure out how to get out of this cell and back to the Midlands first.
His first steps were small and shaky. The movement made his muscles burn, but the pain receded with each step, and soon he found his body responding to his commands. Joe eyed each of the other prisoners as he walked by them in the cell. These men were the dregs of society. One had gang tattoos on his neck. Another had the calloused knuckles of a professional brawler. One had the telltale needle marks of a druggie.
The man who’d kicked Joe awake walked alongside him. He was the scrawniest of the four but had shifty eyes. Likely, a card shark or professional thief, not that there was any real difference between the two professions. “I’m Terry. What’s your name?”
“Hav—” He remembered he wasn’t wearing his exoshield, and these men looked of the sort that Havoc often brought to face justice. “Call me Joe.”
“What’re you in for, Joe?” Terry asked.
“I ticked off the wrong person,” Joe replied.
“Yeah, me too,” Terry said.
“Me, too,” the druggie added.
“Same,” the other two prisoners chimed in.
Joe looked up at the small windows, which were placed about nine feet off the floor. He walked up to them and jumped. He fitted two fingers into one hole, reached out and placed two fingers into another, then pulled himself up so that he could look out. The sun was blinding, but when his eyes adjusted, he recognized the labor camps outside. He’d delivered more than a few
targets to the Devil’s Playground, an area so deep in the hot bowels of the Shiprock zone that the only folks who lived there were the murcs who managed the workers in the copper mines.
He dropped down and walked around the cell, searching for weak points in the bars. The Devil’s Playground was rumored to be the only prison with no successful escape attempts. It wasn’t because the camp was impossible to break out of—quite the contrary. They didn’t even put up fences around it. Rather, it was because the prison was surrounded by a dry desert that reached temperatures of one hundred and thirty degrees during the day. A person would die of thirst within ten hours in that kind of heat.
Joe turned to Terry. “How long have you been here?”
“Three days myself. I was the newbie until they dragged you in today.”
“How often do they send us into the mines?” Joe asked.
Terry frowned, confused. “I’ve never been in the mines.”
“We’re not going to the mines,” said the tattooed prisoner glumly. “We’re fodder for the mutants on the dance floor.” He nodded down the hallway.
Chills climbed Joe’s spine when he realized exactly where he was. He wasn’t just in the Devil’s Playground. Sloan had sent him to the Devil’s Dance Floor.
Chapter Thirty-One
Cat positively dreaded taking calls with Gabriel Sloan. The older of the two brothers, he was the planner and negotiator, so she’d never had to deal with Roderick, who she’d heard was even less rational. She accepted the call and forced a smile.
“Mr. Sloan, it’s a pleasure, as always.”
“I’m beginning to think you say that in jest,” Gabriel said, eyes narrowed.
She ignored his statement. She really didn’t care that he knew the truth, but she was too smart to verify it for him. “I have six new hunters who transferred in from the Haft Agency. They told me about the fire at their guild. Burned the entire building to the ground. No survivors.”
“There were survivors,” he said.
“How fortunate,” she said, knowing he wanted the opposite to be true.
He grunted. “The thing is, when I dismantle a company, like a bounty hunters guild, I need people to understand that I completely dismantle it. I can’t have survivors running around, discrediting me. I need you to verify that the Haft Agency is fully dismantled. If they still wear the Haft sigil, they should not still breathe.”
Her gaze narrowed. How did a person become as despicable a human being as Gabriel Sloan? She inhaled before speaking. “Do you know who the survivors are?”
He nodded. “Reuben Tally escaped, along with his personal bodyguard, who has the call sign T-Rex. All the rest are now under your employment, confirmed dead, or”—he sneered—“on his way to being confirmed dead.”
She watched him. “Consider the job as good as done. Tally will cost you the regular price, and T-Rex is on the house.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Devil’s Dance Floor.
Joe knew that the worst of the worst were sent to the Devil’s Dance Floor to fight for their lives in a cage pit while the wealthy gambled on who would win and who would die. He knew that a few prisoners volunteered to fight on the Dance Floor in hopes of winning their way out of a life sentence. That was the deal: Survive twenty fights and you went free. Joe had never heard of anyone going free, not since the mutants were introduced.
Yeah. Real mutants.
Abominations produced from mixing DNA strands that had no business being together, they included the Elephant Man, Wolf Man, and Rhino Man. Joe had once seen a picture of a mutant—a hybrid of human and crocodile DNA. It wasn’t pretty, and he never would’ve believed mutants existed if he hadn’t seen the picture. But he shouldn’t have been surprised. Humans thrived at pushing limits, and the urge to push often surpassed the logic of restraint and morality.
“Looks like you’ve heard of this place,” Terry said.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”
Terry motioned to the tattooed man. “I just learned about it when Bobo filled me in.” He leaned closer to whisper in Joe’s ear. “I think Bobo’s loco, though.”
Joe’s jaw was tight. “Whatever he told you about this place isn’t nearly as bad as what it’s really like.”
Terry stared at him for a moment, fear holding his eyes open wide.
Joe squeezed his shoulder. “Relax. You don’t need to worry about it.”
“I don’t?”
Joe forced a smile. “You don’t.” He didn’t tell Terry the reason why he didn’t need to worry: Because you’ll be dead in under a minute once you walk into that cage.
Joe glanced across at the other three faces in the cell. “Any of you see the dance floor yet?”
They shook their heads.
“I have.”
Joe turned to see a prisoner in the next cell over watching him. Joe stepped up to the bars so that they faced each other. The other prisoner was as beat up as Joe felt, with bruises and cuts covering his face and arms. The man stood a foot taller than Joe and weighed at least one hundred pounds more, which was saying a lot. Joe was pushing six feet tall and was in good shape.
“Those mutants aren’t human,” the prisoner said. “I barely won. And look at me.” He glanced down at his bulky muscles, then looked back at Joe. “Look at you. You don’t stand a chance in that cage. Sorry, pal.”
Joe took a step closer, within inches of the bars separating the two cells. “You see, friend, I have this mental condition that causes me to get these weird ideas, and there’s nothing I can do except to turn those ideas into reality. You know the condition I’m talking about?”
He shook his head.
“It’s called optimism, and I wouldn’t bet against me in the cage.”
He laughed. “Then you’re an idiot.”
Joe shrugged. “Half of all the people in the world are idiots.”
The other prisoner stepped closer to the bars and sneered. “At least you have plenty of company.”
Joe rammed his hand between the bars, careful to avoid being shocked, and chopped the man in the neck. The prisoner grabbed his throat and stepped back in a coughing fit.
“The other half of all people in the world know how to take advantage of those idiots,” Joe said and stepped back.
Terry gave him a dry look. “You’re off to a great start making friends here.”
Joe remained quiet. Terry didn’t need to know he wasn’t planning on sticking around long enough to make friends.
Several pairs of bootsteps echoed through the hallway, and Joe turned to see four armed murcs approach his cell.
“Back to the wall,” one murc ordered.
Terry skittered back to join the other three near the stone wall, and Joe joined them.
The murc who’d spoken stepped forward, waved a keycard, and the door unlocked. He clipped the keycard on his belt, grabbed a bar, and pulled the door open. Joe eyed this; likely, the lock was engaged purely by electrical current, meaning that all the locks would fail should the power grid fail.
“Bobo Neche and Joe Ballast, step forward.”
The tattooed man scowled, tossed a quick look at Joe, and walked to the front of the cell. Joe joined him. Trepidation throbbed in his sore muscles.
The murc smiled. “It’s your lucky day, boys. You’re next up for the Devil’s Dance Floor.”
“Wow,” Terry said. “Last in, first out. You must’ve really ticked off the wrong guy, Joe.”
Joe shot a wild grin at his cellmate. “I sure did.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
The murcs led Joe and Bobo down a long hallway before leaving them in another cell. This one had bars on only one side—the side they’d entered, though there was a metal door on the opposite wall as well. Through the cracks around that door came screams and yells. Both Joe and Bobo peered through. Only narrow slits of the action taking place on the other side were visible. What Joe saw scared him.
Yeah, he was scared and wasn’t afraid to adm
it it—at least, to himself.
A pair of men, who he assumed were prisoners like Bobo and him, were being chased by…something. The mutant was the size of an average man, but had the horns of a bull, an overly thick neck—likely to support the extra weight—and hooves for feet. He was covered in brown hair, so much that it was impossible to make out the color of his skin.
The cow-man—or bull-man, he supposed that was more fitting—was gaining on the shorter of the two prisoners. The man stopped, which surprised Joe, grabbed a wood pike from the dirt, and turned to face the mutant.
Joe’s features tightened. “Never go at a bull from the front,” he cautioned as he watched the man shake the stick. Sure enough, that was as effective as waving a red flag, only this mutant had arms to grab the stick and yank it from the prisoner. The short man shrieked and began running again. The bull-man lowered his head as he charged, and one of his horns skewered the prisoner through the back.
The crowd cheered. Joe looked beyond the cage, to where bystanders were shouting and waving credits. Large screens displayed points and spreads by name. If someone hadn’t seen the cage dome that sat over the arena, they would’ve assumed they were at a rodeo. The sight made Joe nauseous.
The mutant shook his victim off his horn and searched for the second prisoner, who’d made it to the far edge of the cage and was trying desperately to open a door. He threw furtive glances over his shoulder as he tried every crack in the frame. As the bull-man closed in, the prisoner sprinted to the next door—the one Joe and Bobo stood behind. Bloody fingertips squeezed into the cracks, and Joe could hear the man’s panting. Joe stepped back and analyzed the door. It had no handle, and there was no touchpad. Based on the vertical gaps, it opened into either the ceiling or the floor.
Joe scrambled against it and tried to push the door up. When that didn’t work, he tried to push it down. The door didn’t move, not even a millimeter. Frowning, he peered through the crack to see the prisoner run away. The mutant was catching up, and the man began to hedge right and left like a jackrabbit trying to flee a faster predator. It worked for a time. Then the prisoner jumped right when he should’ve jumped left, and the bull-man’s left horn caught his leg. He was lifted up and over the mutant’s back, to land on the ground in a daze. The bull-man reared up, then dove head-first onto his prey.
