Nohar limped along the asphalt strip between buildings, listening, concentrating on odors, trying to sense how close he was to the Bad Guys.
He was heading toward the south end of the compound, toward the Bad Guys and away from Manuel and the others. He was hoping to harass the attackers enough that Manuel and the others might have time to escape.
All he needed to do was buy time. The next helicopters were going to be news crews. Then it would be over.
Nohar didn’t know how much time he had. His broken arm was clutched to his chest in a twisted parody of Maria’s arthritis. He had to strip off his jacket and shirt because of the heat. His new black coloring made things even worse. His breath would come only in coppery gasps, and the fifty-cal machine gun felt as if it was about to tear his good arm out of its socket with every step he took.
The Bad Guys were quiet. For a while it seemed as though he were the only living thing moving between the whitewashed buildings. The only things he heard were the dry wind and his own breath. The sense of isolation was so complete that he almost missed the first commando.
He was just about to turn a corner, heading toward the southern end of the compound, when he realized he smelled tension and exertion that wasn’t his own. He paused long enough to hear two sets of footsteps, running lightly. The sound would have been quiet enough to miss beneath the noise of his own breathing if not for the tearing sound of the soles adhering to the asphalt.
Nohar had just stopped at the corner of the building when one of the commandos sprang around at him. He was ducking around the corner to cover the intersection. Nohar was right there. The man’s submachine gun was up, but it was covering the street. It was a miscalculation, because the guy had to back up and turn to cover Nohar. Nohar didn’t give him that chance.
The fifty-cal had a barrel that was nearly half the length of the distance separating them. Nohar jumped from the wall, pivoted on his good leg as if he were throwing a shot put, and swung the gun up so the barrel slammed into the man’s chin.
The guy dropped like a sack of wet flour.
He had a partner.
As the weight of the fifty-cal still carried Nohar in a circle, the other one sprang up while Nohar’s back was to the corner. Nohar could feel the man’s presence, even before the first wild shot went off.
Nohar didn’t let the new guy get a second shot. He swung the fifty-cal back in an arc, slamming the stock into the new guy’s upper body. The impact shook Nohar’s shoulder, sending daggers of pain through the joint. He heard another wild shot, and he smelled gunsmoke and the char of something ricocheting off of cinder block.
He also heard the body strike the asphalt.
Nohar turned back toward the downed commandos, carried partway by the pull of the swinging machine gun. Both were out of it for the foreseeable future, unconscious. The lower part of Number One’s face, and Number Two’s neck, were both turning a violent shade of purple.
Nohar dropped the fifty-cal. The sound was like another helicopter crashing into the ground. He couldn’t carry the thing any farther.
He checked the intersection to be certain that there weren’t more Bad Guys about to drop on him, and then he bent and grabbed one commando’s gun. He had to fight a wave of nausea and vertigo as he bent over. The only reason he didn’t vomit from the pain was because his stomach was completely empty. He stayed bent over, vision blacking out, for a few long moments before he could retrieve a weapon.
When Nohar straightened, he looked at what he’d picked up. These guys weren’t prepped for stealth. Instead of the covert Black Widows, these submachine guns were matte-black Glock 23s, a common enough weapon for antiterrorist forces, as well as terrorists. The lightness of the weapon was a relief after the machine gun. It almost disappeared in his hand. The barrel on the thing barely extended beyond the trigger guard, just enough to prevent someone from accidentally shooting off a finger.
Nohar checked once more to assure himself that the two downed commandos weren’t getting up, then he started a quiet halting run in the direction from which they had come.
• • •
The next set of Bad Guys, he heard in time.
Nohar was padding next to one of the dull cinder-block buildings, his shoes lost somewhere with his shirt and jacket. He heard movement from the other side of one of the gray panels boarding over the windows. He could hear whispered voices, though the words were unintelligible. He had time to force his mind away from his injuries, time to steel himself for a confrontation.
Nohar circled around until he found the entrance to the building. It was another panel of gray, leaning loosely against a hole in the cinder block twice as high as the windows. Nohar pushed it aside for a moment with the Glock, listening. When he was sure the movement was deeper within the building, he slipped inside.
After the blinding-white desert exterior, the inside of the building was midnight black. Nohar had to stare into the darkness for a few moments before his eyes adjusted to the monochrome gloom.
The first detail that Nohar could make out was an IV drip bottle hanging from a stand in the corner. The sight was like a lump of ice in his gut. He turned slowly and saw a stretcher, a desk, a cart carrying a few items of monitoring equipment.
He had stumbled into the camp’s infirmary.
The sounds came from down a corridor to the rear of the room where he stood. Nohar walked across the linoleum floor, his steps stirring small clouds of dust that made his nose itch. Naked fluorescent tubes hung dead from a corrugated metal ceiling. The corridor was flanked by drywall, the whitewash not quite covering the joints.
He passed two open doorways and checked briefly into each one, making sure they were as empty as his other senses told him they were. One was an operating theater, the overhead light dangling like a spider about to feed on the table beneath. The other was a small ward with a half-dozen bedframes, mattresses gone.
Nohar moved down the corridor, hackles rising as he closed on the commandos. In his mind he was already picturing hospitals, like the one where his mother had died. He could imagine them filled with moreaus dying of an engineered plague. He could imagine the virus spreading through the hospital until the corridors were coated with infected blood and a stay there was a death sentence. He could imagine the pink doctors wading through the gore, unconcerned and uninfected, disposing of bodies. . . .
The copper taste of blood in his mouth wasn’t exertion or fatigue anymore; it was anger. The humans who had created Nohar’s kind would never accept them.
Man is dissatisfied until he can destroy what he has created.
At the end of the corridor hung a pair of swinging doors. There were two windows of dirty plastic that looked into the room beyond. Even before Nohar had reached it, he could hear that was where the Bad Guys were. He could make out two of them from their voices and the sound of their footsteps. One was about five meters from the door to the right, the other was two meters away and to the left.
Nohar swallowed and shouldered through the door and leveled the Glock at the nearest commando and fired high, above the body armor. The man took a slug in the back of the neck and fell face first into a pile of old boxes. Nohar swung the Glock over to where the other was and found himself facing a stack of more boxes—
Fuck!
Nohar ducked to the side just as the other one flung himself around the obstructing boxes and started firing. Nohar swung his Glock around to fire at the same time. Nohar was faster, but he was falling backward and his aim was off. He felt something slam into his thigh as his own shots slammed into the commando’s chest and neck.
The guy fell back through the swinging doors as Nohar hit the ground.
Nohar groaned. A bullet had torn into the meat of his left thigh, and it felt as if someone was drilling a hole in his leg with a dull bit. For a moment or two, the new insult flared greater in his awareness than his broken
arm. Somehow, though, the anger seemed to feed on the pain, growing stronger with it. He lay there, feeling blood spread beneath him and the rage ignite within him.
He shouldn’t have been able to move at all, he had been running so long on the verge of collapse.
But slowly, his broken body fought for each movement with a flare of pain. His breath shuddered and his limbs shook. He dropped the gun. But Nohar made it to his feet.
His leg wasn’t broken. It bore his weight, the wound burning with the fire of torn muscle. Nohar forced the leg to move despite the pain. He moved deliberately, as if a sudden motion might split his skin and send his insides spilling on the ground in front of him. He bent down, feeling waves of nausea again, and grabbed the Glock from the man who’d gotten shot in the back of the neck. It lay on top of a pile of boxes, easier to reach than the one he had dropped on the floor.
Limping, Nohar pushed his way out of the building. He stopped in the lobby to tear some remnants from his pants to tie around the leg wound with one shaking hand.
• • •
Nohar made it all the way back to the wreckage of Krisoijn’s helicopter. He stood at the edge of a debris field and stared. Unlike the one he’d flown in, this helicopter had been aimed straight down into a building. It looked as if the rotors had torn into its body and had ripped it apart. There were pieces of helicopter scattered for fifty meters in every direction.
Nohar could see two bodies. One was out on the asphalt, the rappelling cord wrapped around him, his head turned ninety degrees from the rest of his body. Nearer the wreckage was a victim of the helicopter’s rotor. The blades had torn him nearly in half.
But there wasn’t a sign of Krisoijn or any living Bad Guys.
Nohar didn’t believe he had taken out all of them, and that meant that they had slipped by each other as Nohar made his way south. As Nohar turned around to catch up with the enemy, he heard the rapid hammer of a Glock echo in the distance. He started a limping run toward the source of the gunfire.
In addition to the rattle of the Glocks, he could hear the cough of a forty-five automatic. Nohar felt a sinking feeling.
He had left Necron’s forty-five with Henderson.
He ran with a bobbing gait, pushing his burning leg harder than it wanted to go, his broken arm clutched to his chest as if it were fused to his body. He could feel tacky warmth seeping down his left leg, matting the fur beneath the makeshift bandage. The edges of his vision had turned black and every breath was an effort. He lost track of how many times he stumbled; his thoughts were losing any linear cohesion under the physical assault to his body.
Nohar ran down the center of the complex’s main roadway, focused only on moving toward the small cluster of buildings where he’d heard the gunfire. Nohar knew where the shots must be coming from. It was the only thought that seemed to remain clear and focused through the red haze of pain.
The sounds were from a low undistinguished structure that squatted at the northern end of the main strip of asphalt. The main administration building.
There was a period of time that seemed to black out from his memory, and the next thing Nohar was aware of, he was leaning against the nose of the INS van that Henderson had driven them all here in. He stood on the cracked apron surrounding the administration building.
The gunfire had ceased. The silence was a sickening hole in the pit of Nohar’s stomach.
The two swinging doors, metal and chicken-wire glass, showed two bullet holes near the top. Nohar could see lights in the hallway beyond the doors, and barely stopped to look through the glass. His consciousness had shrunk to a singularity that contained only the awareness of combat. His body was moving long after it should have stopped.
Nohar opened the door with his bad arm, unwilling to drop the Glock even for a moment. It felt as if a knife were slashing through his arm from the inside. He could feel bone grinding and muscle tearing. His jaw clenched shut, keeping him from crying out.
Even so, they must have heard him, because a pair of human forms turned the corner to face Nohar down the length of the hall. Nohar didn’t hesitate. He sprayed the Glock, firing through the window at the two men. Fragments of glass bit into his skin, through the fur. He emptied the clip, and when the Glock was finished firing, Nohar realized that the deafening sound was his own roar.
Both of the men lay heaped at the end of the corridor.
Nohar stepped into the building, tossing away the empty gun and pulling out the pilot’s sidearm. The air was rank with the smell of blood, human and feline.
Some of the feline blood wasn’t his own.
The sounds coming from Nohar’s throat had lost their resemblance to speech. He loped along the corridor, listening and trying to make out the scent of the enemy. There was no mistaking the smell of humans here. There had been five of them.
Three now.
Nohar stopped by the bodies, crouching, concentrating on where they had come from. His breaths were ragged and quick, and the pain in his arm and his leg had begun to tighten on his chest. Every sensation filtered through the pain, fragmenting everything into a series of disconnected moments. Through it only one thought managed to retain its focus, a hard kernel of anger that told him to kill the enemy.
Kill the men.
Kill the humans. . . .
Nohar moved through the building, the twists of the halls lost to him. He barely perceived the halls he passed through. What drew him was the scent of man, and the scent of blood.
Footsteps came toward him, and he faded into the shadow of a nearby doorway. The pilot’s gun fell to the ground, forgotten.
When the commando ran past Nohar, toward his downed fellows and the sound of gunfire, Nohar reached his intact arm out of the doorway, his claws fully extended. He caught the man in the midsection, and the man’s weapon went flying down the corridor. Nohar had time to see the man’s eyes widen, before he kicked out with his good leg, tearing from the groin down, and throwing him into the opposite wall. The effort dropped Nohar onto the ground as his left leg collapsed, but he rolled and pushed himself upright with his good hand. His hand slipped a few times in the man’s blood, but he managed to struggle upright.
Nohar left the man to slowly go into shock as he limped toward the last two enemies.
The scent of blood became stronger as he approached the heart of the building. Human and feline, and other scents merged into an all-encompassing odor of death. Nohar knew he smelled his own death, and his son’s, and especially that of the humans who had brought this down—
Nohar sprang through a doorway, and into the maw of death itself.
The first one was right beside the doorway, guarding it. Nohar knew exactly where he was from the sound of his breathing and the smell of his sweat. Nohar turned, his good hand reaching the man’s throat, the claws biting into the trachea. He was nowhere near quick enough. The man’s weapon fired once as Nohar pulled the man’s neck free. The shot slammed into Nohar’s abdomen, Nohar stumbled back into the room, feeling a fire in his gut worse than anything he felt in his arm or leg. He could feel blood sheeting across his stomach, and down his back.
His back hit the wall of the room, and fragmented images—pieces of the scene in front of him—began sinking into his consciousness.
The Necron Avenger, John Samson, lay on the floor unmoving.
Near the doorway, at Nohar’s feet, lay Sarah Henderson. Necron’s automatic had spilled from her hand, and her eyes stared upward, glassy and unmoving. She had taken a half-dozen shots, one right in the chest. Nohar was standing in a pool of her blood. Maria’s wheelchair was behind a large desk with an inset comm. Her face was swollen where someone had struck her, probably breaking the cheekbone. But she still breathed.
Standing behind that desk, facing him, was his son. “Manuel.” Nohar’s voice was a ragged whisper. He spoke as if the flesh had been scoured from his throat.
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Nohar tried to take a step forward, but an Afrikaans voice said, “Don’t move.”
Krisoijn stood behind Nohar’s son, holding a gun to his temple.
Chapter 29
Nohar froze, and that gave time for his brain to start working again. He had screwed up. He had let anger override everything else. Now here he was with his guts leaking out everywhere, his body racked by so many insults that he couldn’t distinguish separate sources for the pain. The pain was an omnipresent haze that he sucked in with each breath. Every few heartbeats his vision would black out for a moment as another wave of agony broke over him.
He shouldn’t have been able to stand, but, seeing Manuel, he managed to.
Seeing Manuel had an almost supernatural force. He could see everything that he had missed before. Maria’s bone structure, the shadows of his own coloring. Manuel’s eyes could have been born directly from Nohar’s mother.
“Nohar?” Manuel had the same husky voice as his mother. He tried to take a step forward, but Krisoijn held him back.
“No one moves,” Krisoijn said. “This is messy enough already.”
Nohar shook his head and forced the words out, “It’s over. Long Beach, the Clinic, it’s all exposed. . . .”
Krisoijn laughed.
Nohar stared. “He knows,” Manuel said. He reached onto the console and tossed a ramcard over at Nohar’s feet. “He doesn’t even care about this anymore.”
Nohar looked down at the card, glinting rainbows in Henderson’s blood.
“Why?” The question felt as if it tore the flesh from inside his stomach. He was beginning to feel dizzy and light-headed. “Why go through with this—” He felt his knees giving way. He dropped next to Henderson’s body. His good hand caught himself on her stomach. Her flesh was blood-soaked deadweight.