The killer jerked slightly, whirled on Henry, and returned the favor several times over. Henry ran up the aisle, vaulted over the wreckage of another set of shelves; his feet came down on some plastic fragments and skidded out from under him. As he fell forward, Henry tucked and rolled head over heels in a series of rapid tumbles while bullets kicked up chips of concrete under the floor covering.
The weapons fire cut off and Henry heard him drop the rifle. In the brief pause before the shooter switched to a sidearm, Henry bounced to his feet and found himself in varnishes and paints. He grabbed up some small cans and hurled them at the guy as he ran. Despite the accuracy of Henry’s aim, however, it seemed as if his attacker barely noticed them bouncing off his shoulders, his chest, even his head.
Henry tried sweeping a whole lot of cans off a shelf hoping to trip him but the guy just tromped over them, kicking them aside.
I’m gonna need a bigger can, Henry thought as he reached a shelf of gallon containers. But they were a lot harder to throw and the guy kept firing as he batted them away. Abruptly, there was a different burst of machine-gun fire, coming from behind the shooter. He broke stride, staggered a bit, then turned to fire at Junior, trading bursts with him until they both ran out.
Okay, buddy, Henry thought, let’s see if your only talent is firing a weapon you don’t even have to aim.
He ran back to varnishes in time to see the guy had found Junior and was using his head to make a dent in a five-gallon can of weatherproofing. Henry took a running jump and launched himself at the guy feet first, the same move he’d used to steal the motorcycle in Cartagena. Except the guy bent his knees and leaned back at an angle that should have been impossible for anyone to maintain without falling over. But somehow he did. Henry sailed past him and landed on Junior.
Henry rolled away from him but not quickly enough. A hard kick missed his head but caught his shoulder blade; Henry winced, feeling something crack as he went sprawling on his belly. He scrambled up, rotated his shoulders to see if anything major was broken. Mobility wasn’t impaired but it hurt like hell. Everything hurt like hell hurt right now, but at least it all hurt the same, nothing worse than anything else. The good news was, it would all hurt a hell of a lot more tomorrow.
If he lasted that long.
Henry drew his knife, and in the corner of his eye he saw Junior do the same. The masked soldier made a quick motion and produced knives in both hands. That goddam mask; when you couldn’t see your opponent’s face, you were fighting half-blind. He had to get close enough to tear the fucker’s mask off. It looked like a more compact version of Junior’s night-vision gas mask. The night vision he could understand but had the guy really expected to get tear-gassed?
He feinted to one side, then the other, making little slashes in the air. Junior feigned a lunge, stamped his foot in an old fencing move meant to distract an opponent; their masked opponent didn’t fall for it. Facing two guys with knives didn’t seem to faze him at all—his posture showed no defensive tension, no stiffness. It was as if he were sure Henry and Junior were holding rubber knives. Henry decided to disabuse him of that notion.
He backed up, then took a few running steps forward. He could see the masked guy steady himself, still holding Junior off while he prepared to bury his knife in Henry’s throat. At the last moment, however, Henry dropped to his knees and slid under his arm. It was something he’d secretly wanted to try ever since he’d seen someone do it in a movie.
There was no tiling on the floor here, just cement treated with some kind of sealant—not an ideal surface for a flashy slide. Henry felt the cement scrape through his trousers and sand off some skin. But then, it wasn’t exactly classic fighting technique—a Krav Maga instructor probably wouldn’t have approved—but he managed to slash the masked killer’s thigh without getting slashed himself.
To Henry’s surprise, the guy didn’t make a sound as he looked down at the gash in his leg—no cry of pain, not so much as a gasp or a grunt; the injury could have been on someone else’s leg for all that it affected him. A chill ran down Henry’s spine, more intense than a mere goose walking over his grave. Who the hell had trained this guy, the Manchurian Candidate? The Terminator?
Junior took advantage of the attacker’s momentary lapse of attention to circle around behind him. Realizing what Junior was going to do, Henry pushed himself to a standing position and tried to keep the guy focused on himself while Junior vaulted the ruins of a shelf for a flying kick with both feet. But unbelievably, half a second before Junior would have hit him, the guy ducked. As Junior sailed over him, the guy’s leg shot out—his wounded leg—and kicked Junior hard in the lower back.
Henry shook his head slightly, unsure if he had really just seen that. Junior rolled over as the masked fighter came towards him, and somehow heaved himself into a backwards roll, barely escaping a driving punch to his crotch.
Oh, so it’s that kind of fight, Henry thought; as if there were any other kind. That slash to the thigh still wasn’t slowing the guy down. He’d also lost one of his knives, but Henry didn’t count on that giving him or Junior any sort of advantage. Junior sprang to his feet and immediately charged the guy with his tackling move. The guy raised one leg and instead of taking him down, Junior hit his knee face first.
Henry launched himself forward to slide again, this time baseball-style, intending to sweep the guy’s legs out from under him. But before Henry reached him, the guy flipped over his head, tumbling in midair in a way that somehow managed to be more casual than showy. He came down behind Henry and kicked his shoulder blade again.
For a few seconds, the world turned blinding white while the nerve in his upper back shrieked in a way that sounded a lot like a human voice. Shut the hell up, Henry ordered it and struggled to his feet. So much for paints, varnish, and weatherproofing, he thought; maybe he’d have better luck in power tools. If he could find them.
He pushed himself into a stumbling run. Up ahead, he saw a rack of circular saw blades. Let’s see if he can catch a Frisbee, Henry thought, as a nasty grin spread over his face.
Then something large and hard glanced off the top of his head and he was sprawling on the cement, scraping his palms and knees. What the fuck—
Henry twisted around to see the guy heaving another gallon of paint at him and rolled out of the way before it could smash his face in. And still the guy kept on coming at him, like killing Henry Brogan was the one and only thing he had been put on this earth to do.
Junior’s words came back to him: My orders are to kill you.
Did Clay Verris have a whole platoon of guys dedicated—no, programmed—to kill him? Then, as if things had to be even more absurd, he looked up and saw Danny almost directly above him on a mezzanine. He hadn’t even noticed there was an upstairs—and how the hell had she made it up there with her leg? Her face was shiny and paler than he’d ever seen. Was she crazy from blood loss? What the hell did she think she was doing?
As if on cue, she heaved a gas canister over the railing, straight at the killer. Just as it hit him, she fired. The canister exploded, engulfing the killer in flames.
That’s for Baron, you bastard, Henry thought as the sprinkler system went off.
But instead of falling down and dying like a normal assassin, the masked guy actually walked out of the flames, still hell-bent on killing anyone and everyone.