‘You killed Dillon, you son of a bitch.’ And Kaspar chopped his right hand down hard, crushing the man’s larynx.
He collapsed down onto his knees next to the dying terrorist, watching as the man tried to breathe with lungs rapidly filling with blood. A blurred movement only just visible out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. But before he could turn, he was knocked away from the man’s body and sent spinning into the dirt. Kaspar had no idea what move his new attacker had used on him, but he had been simultaneously flattened and lost the use of his right arm.
He tried to stand to face the new threat, but had no clue where his new assailant was. He spun round, then felt an agonizing pain shooting down his back and radiating into his legs. Kaspar hit the ground face down. He tried to move, but his body was no longer his to command. He tried to at least raise his head but his neck seemed incapable of supporting its weight. A wave of despair flooded through him. Kaspar had lost fights before. Master Tariq back at the Academy had regularly used him as a demonstration partner, flipping him all over the gym and generally owning him, but even then Kaspar had never felt quite so helpless. He was getting a kicking and he hadn’t even seen his assailant yet.
He knew then that he was finished.
The fight against the first guy had been brutal, but it’d been a fight between equals. This was something else entirely. He tried to look up again to at least get a glimpse of his tormentor, but he saw nothing. He tried to flip over, but his arms and legs were frozen. His hair was grabbed and his head was yanked up. He was tossed over onto his back and all the air driven from his lungs as his opponent jumped on his chest with both knees.
Now helpless, winded and paralysed, Kaspar looked up at the slight figure kneeling on his chest. Black-clad. Another ninja. There was absolutely nothing he could do but pray that his attacker would be reasonably merciful and kill him quickly. The ninja pulled off his right glove before his bare hand moved swiftly to Kaspar’s neck and gripped it firmly. Downward pressure on the windpipe and inward pressure on the carotid arteries.
Classic.
Kaspar feebly tried to swing his one semi-functioning limb, his left arm, but the ninja disdainfully paralysed that one too with a two-fingered jab.
Come on, you sadistic git, thought Kaspar. Get it over with. His peripheral vision started to fade and he knew his last moments had come. There was nothing left to do now but wait for death.
16
‘Please . . . oh, please . . . I’ll be good.’
Kaspar was running – fast. Just as fast as he possibly could. But it wasn’t fast enough.
Paws scrabbled on the rocks behind him.
‘I promise, I’ll never wander off again.’
Fifteen, maybe twenty paces, and then they would be on him. Even a full-grown person couldn’t out-run or out-fight a whole pack, and Kaspar was only six. He would never see seven. His life could now be measured in mere seconds. To his left and right, he saw some of his pursuers actually overtaking him and circling back. Overhauling their prey, encircling it, trapping it, tormenting it, howling and snapping at it as they slowly closed in before surging in together and ripping it apart was how they lived. Kaspar didn’t even know why he was still running. It was pointless, and yet he had to try. Try to reach the boat. Try to get to his mum. Try to survive. At that moment that was all he knew or wanted to know.
‘Mummy!’ he screamed as the circle closed and he was forced to stop. Yellow eyes and bared fangs were all around now.
‘Mummy . . .’
He could smell their hot fetid breath as they drew ever closer. The huge alpha male in front of him considered his quarry. Kaspar looked into the eyes of death. The alpha male sat back slightly on his haunches, then pounced. Kaspar closed his eyes and screamed. He was bowled over by the momentum and knocked to the ground. A crushing weight landed on his chest, pressing hot and hard against his skin. He couldn’t breathe. He opened his mouth but didn’t know if it was to scream or to suck air down into his starved lungs. Why hadn’t he been bitten yet?
He kicked and elbowed at the fur-covered muscles pinning him down, then forced himself to open his eyes to see what he was hitting. He was making no impression. The weight remained on him. Eventually, he managed to scramble out to the right and the beast rolled off to the left. Kaspar kicked out hard, catching it in the chest, but there was no reaction. He kicked again. Still nothing. Kaspar stared at the huge jaws – but they were still now, the lethal bite aborted in mid-leap. He didn’t understand what had happened, but as he whirled to see where the next threat was coming from, he became aware that the air was filled with blue flashes and the howls of animals in pain. All around, the pack were falling, and those that weren’t falling were sprinting for cover.
Kaspar looked up straight into the eyes of his saviour.
‘Mummy!’
The relief, the love Kaspar felt at that moment overwhelmed him. Tears flowed down his cheeks. He didn’t even dare blink in case she vanished the moment his eyes closed, never to return. His mum lowered her rifle and smiled at him.
‘Kas, love. Are you OK? Did they get you? Show me where it hurts.’
‘Mummy . . .’
The clouds parted and rays of sunshine fell across her face. Kaspar struggled to sit up. His chest hurt where the wolf had landed on him.
‘I’m sorry, Mummy. You told me not to wander off. I’m sorry.’
‘Never mind that now. Up you get, love.’ She held out her arms to him. ‘Come on, Kas.’
Kaspar stood up and reached out to her. She was so close he could smell her flowery perfume, the one she always wore because it had been his dad’s favourite.
‘Come on, Kas.’
He stretched further, but he couldn’t quite reach.
‘Kaspar, it’s OK. You can come to me now.’ His mum’s arms beckoned and her face was so beautiful in the sunlight, her smile so dazzling – but still he couldn’t grasp her. She was just beyond his fingertips. And then she started to move away.
‘Wait, Mum, wait for me.’
The light around her grew brighter.
‘Kaspar, love, come on.’
His mum was drifting away further and faster now.
‘Mummy . . .’ The muscles in his arms strained as he reached out towards her, desperate to hold onto her any way he could.
But she was gone.
17
Kaspar was confused. There were hands around his throat, though they weren’t exerting any pressure. He wasn’t in the forest, he was in a desert. And that figure wasn’t his mum, it was . . .
Reality came back in a rush.
Kaspar knew exactly where he was and what was happening. But the coup-de-grâce hadn’t come. Instead, the grip on his throat was abruptly released and the ninja got off him, leaving Kaspar gasping on the ground, still unable to move. The ninja walked over to the other terrorist and checked for a pulse. From the look the ninja directed at him, Kaspar knew that the man was dead. As dead as Dillon. The ninja carefully examined the injuries Kaspar had inflicted, particularly the fatal one to the throat, before returning to where the Guardian still lay helpless. The black-clad figure stood over him for a while, as if deciding what to do, and then he took off his mask.
Kaspar’s jaw dropped. It was a girl of about his age with short brown hair streaked with blonde highlights. She walked over to the burning car, squatted down and leaned inside the cockpit.
‘Get away from him,’ Kaspar shouted hoarsely.
Or what? He was in no fit state to even stand, far less anything else.
But she wasn’t gone long. She soon came back, carrying the standard Guardian emergency pack from the hovercar. She grabbed Kaspar by the tunic and pulled him up into a sitting position against a nearby rock. Kaspar watched, bewildered, as she opened the emergency pack, took out a bottle of water, popped the cap and leaned over to squirt some water into his mouth. He swallowed with difficulty, never taking his eyes off her. Close up, she was stunning. High cheekbone
s, luminous, intelligent green eyes, hair short enough to be practical but still feminine. And she wasn’t even out of breath. Kaspar couldn’t stop staring. This girl was a dangerous terrorist who had just kicked seven shades of crap out of him.
And yet . . .
She didn’t look like a terrorist.
The girl scrutinized him, a frown forming on her face and deepening with each passing second. She took out the Search and Rescue beacon, pressed the XMIT button and laid the device beside him before walking off. The Guardians would now receive a distress signal and would be there within the hour. Kaspar was going to survive.
He blinked after her in shocked amazement.
What on earth . . . ?
She had saved him, actually saved his life. Why had she done that?
‘What’s your name?’ he croaked.
She paused for a long time, before turning her head and speaking over her shoulder.
‘Rhea.’
And she was gone.
18
Kaspar still lay propped up against his rock, but things were improving. Rhea had put him on the shady side, so he wasn’t baking, and the paralysis was wearing off. He still felt like he’d been run over by a truck, but for the first time in a while he felt hopeful. The digital readout on the SaR beacon showed it had been eleven minutes since activation. In a couple of hours, he would be home, messed up but alive.
But Dillon . . .
Kaspar took another look at the SaR beacon, a chill trickling through him. Why had Rhea activated it? Could this be an attempt to draw more Guardians into an ambush? He considered it, but rapidly dismissed the idea.
They’ll be expecting that, he thought. They’ll survey from the air before they land.
He tried to relax, his eyes turning back to the wrecked car. It was burning fiercely now. An overwhelming sense of loss hit him, deeper than his anger, fiercer than his need to survive. At the end of a day like this, he would normally have shared a drink with Dillon. He’d have explained, very seriously, what had happened, and Dillon would’ve teased him mercilessly.
‘There’s a name for guys who get the hots for girls who beat the crap out of them.’ Kaspar could almost hear Dillon’s voice mocking him now.
They’d met on the first day at the Academy – and Dillon had teased him every single day since. Teased him about being a melon farmer, about being too short even though Dillon was only a couple of centimetres taller, and after his secret came out, about his famous parents. There was no facet of Kaspar’s life that Dillon hadn’t felt free to disparage or turn into a comedy routine. But through it all, Kaspar had never once doubted that Dillon had his back. He’d even had a go at Voss on Kaspar’s behalf, hence the reason he’d been stuck with Kaspar on Voss’s garbage assignments.
And now he was dead.
And it should’ve been Kaspar. He was the one who should’ve been driving. He should’ve insisted when Dillon had pushed him out the way and taken his place behind the wheel. But what would that have got him? He’d be the one with half his head missing.
Dillon was dead . . .
One day at the Academy, Dillon had shared his opinions of death.
‘First, I want it to be quick. Bang. Dead,’ he had said. ‘Second, no sodding autopsy. Those medics are weirdos. They do all kinds of sexual stuff to you once you’re dead that you wouldn’t let them do when you’re alive. And three, I don’t want to become compost, I wanna be cremated.’
‘Well done, mate,’ Kaspar whispered ruefully. ‘Three out of three.’
He was replaying yet another one of Dillon’s hilarious diatribes in his head when he suddenly became aware of a vibration in the ground. Here we go, he thought. Search and Rescue responding to my beacon.
But then he realized that the frequency was too low and the vibrations too powerful. The ground rumbled deep beneath his body. It couldn’t be a vehicle. This was more seismic. Hell! Most of the earthquake activity in the Badlands was centred along the DeVries Fault – about twenty-five clicks east – but quite bad shocks could happen anywhere; occasionally they were even felt in Capital City in spite of the geo-stabilizers deep beneath the ground all around the city walls and beneath the ground of the city itself. Kaspar waited for the shaking to die down, but it didn’t. It got worse. The amplitude built and now he could actually see ground waves, the floor of the gully undulating like choppy water.
‘Is there anything else that can go wrong today?’ he wondered as he tried to force his legs to move.
Rhea had placed him under a rock outcrop for shade, but now he was being peppered with falling stones. He needed to shift before twenty tonnes of rock shook itself loose and turned into an avalanche. Kaspar’s arms were working pretty well now, but his legs had all the strength of wet noodles. He crawled about fifteen metres using just his arms, but he was still in the gully. The vibrations were still building, and rocks the size of his head and larger were now crashing down all around him. Kaspar kept crawling but his luck couldn’t hold for ever.
It didn’t. A rock struck him a glancing blow on the right temple. Everything seemed to go quiet, and for the second time in less than an hour he had tunnel vision. The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was the rock that had hit him. It looked exactly like a melon. Dillon would have loved that.
Kaspar’s first impression of the afterlife was that it was confusing and uncomfortable. He was flying backwards, above a desert, and there wasn’t a single part of his body that didn’t hurt. He was swooping over sand and mountains, and he could hear the sounds of falling rocks over the roaring of the blood in his ears. From the distance came the voice of an old woman calling him to dinner. Kaspar didn’t recognize the voice but he did know that she was calling to him. The pounding in his head was terrible and surely all his ribs were broken? His legs probably were too, but somehow he flew on.
‘Grandma,’ he heard himself shout. ‘I’m coming.’
He hadn’t realized it before, but he was famished. He could see the woman in the distance and he waved to her as he raced down the grassy slope towards the little cottage by the bridge. The air was so warm, the sunlight so bright and in the cottage there would be fresh-baked bread and—
Another jolt of agony from his tortured ribs interrupted him and he opened his eyes. The grassy slope, the cottage, the bridge, they had all vanished. Now he saw sand and rocks again. Perplexed, he remembered that all four of his grandparents had died before he was born, and as for the cottage . . . He closed his eyes again, trying to place it.
There it was again. The smell of freshly baked bread. He could actually taste it, and it was so good. It brought back memories of his face buried in Grandma’s apron, and she smelled of baking and dried mellisse berries and . . .
Kaspar’s mind started to clear. Pain forced its way past his memories and his senses sharpened. The mountains were only rocks and pebbles; he wasn’t as high as he thought, only a metre or so above the ground – and he wasn’t flying; he was being carried. He was wedged in the beak of a black-backed hawk as it returned to its nest high in the mountains where . . .
No, that wasn’t right either.
He could see running feet below him, but not his . . .
He was slung across someone’s shoulders and they were running – fast – across the hot sand. Kaspar could smell sulphur and fresh bread, he could see pounding feet and pain ripped through his body and Grandma . . . he could hear his grandma singing to him. The memories of things never said, never done crowded in on him, simultaneously comforted and disturbed him as the pounding feet carried him off the sand and onto solid rock. Up and up, until the sounds of avalanche faded, and the feet stopped moving.
Kaspar was laid gently on a granite shelf – the most comfortable, warmest granite shelf – and his grandma pulled the blankets up to his chin and sang him to sleep.
19
When Kaspar woke up, he was surprised to find he wasn’t in the soft feather bed in the cottage by the bridge. He was lying on an out
crop of volcanic rock in the Badlands. From his position about twenty metres above the desert floor, he could see the gully, and there in the distance, the burned wreck of the hovercar where they had crashed and Dillon had—
Kaspar looked around. He was alone. His uniform was shredded and burned, he hurt like hell and he had a field dressing around his head, but he didn’t appear to be missing any vital parts. The medical kit, a half-full water bottle and his Search and Rescue beacon lay beside him. Where was the rescue team? Standard protocol for an emergency SaR beacon activation would have been for a Rapid Response unit to secure the area before the medics moved in to attend the wounded and pick up the bodies, but he was alone.
So who had bandaged his head? An unexpected movement caught his attention. About a kilometre away, running fast and skirting the rocks, was a slight, black-clad figure. She looked back briefly before disappearing, just as Kaspar heard the distinctive sound of help arriving. Two gunships cleared the ridge behind him. One stayed high as top-cover while the other swept low to check out the area around where he was lying.
‘Here! I’m up here,’ Kaspar shouted pointlessly. His voice was no more than a hoarse croak, and besides, nobody could have heard him over the racket of the gunships. The low scout swung by, and Kaspar saw a Guardian point to him through the open side door, then turn to say something to her colleagues. And even though he knew they’d seen him now, Kaspar still kept trying to shout, ‘I’m here. I’m here!’
Ten long, short minutes later, Kas was on his way home.
The speeding gunship was even noisier on the inside, so no one spoke much on the way back, except for the occasional word of sympathy or reassurance. Kaspar had plenty of time to think while his superficial wounds were patched and his broken ribs strapped up. He was missing Dillon already.