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He could have been exposed.

Could have.

But he wasn’t.

There was no-one waiting.

Buzzcut seemed just as surprised as King was to have happened upon the factory.

King sensed an opportunity and broke into a sprint. He gained ground fast. His quadriceps strained under the exertion.

Then Buzzcut spun, raised his Glock 17 and fired.

A muzzle flash lit up the clearing and King recoiled, shocked by a white hot burning sensation in his left arm. He reeled away. The shot had taken him completely by surprise, and now he was hit. Because Buzzcut had held off on firing for so long, King had assumed he was out of ammo. He’d paid the price for such a foolish mistake. He wouldn’t make the same error again.

Instantly he could tell it was just a graze. His nerve endings screamed and his skin bled, but his arm was fully functional. It moved without obstruction. He took nothing more than a quick glance down, glimpsing a thin trail of crimson running down his bare arm. The wound was difficult to make out in the soft moonlight. There was no time to focus on it. He was still on open ground, with no idea whether Buzzcut still had a round in the chamber.

As if on cue, a hollow click echoed across the clearing.

King recognised the sound all too well.

An empty magazine.

He charged forward with a newfound energy. He saw on Buzzcut’s face the same expression that he’d seen on countless men in the past. Eyes widening, arms shaking, skin paling. The look of a man who had wasted his one opportunity to remain in control and would now pay the price for blowing it.

Buzzcut took off into the darkness. King watched him run into the bowels of the metal work factory, vanishing from sight.

The night became absolute as the moon dipped behind a low cloud. The structure loomed ahead, nothing more than a black outline against a black sky. King slowed his pace and stopped to listen. Crickets in the grass. The occasional creak of a rusty pipe. No sound of the man he was chasing. Buzzcut had done well to disappear.

There was no point in giving up now. King decided he would take a look inside the factory before calling it off. He knew that by now Buzzcut could be on the other side of the clearing. If it was his goal was to escape, then King would never find him. But he had a sneaking suspicion that there was something else on his mind. The guy had just witnessed his partner’s gruesome death.

King wondered if Buzzcut wanted revenge.

He hoped so. Revenge meant it was personal, and making it personal led to making mistakes.

He jogged lightly through an enormous set of double doors and into the ground floor of the factory. The space was cavernous, once home to enormous industrial machines. He could feel the grooves in the concrete floor under his feet, where they’d used to rest. It was silent in here. There was no moonlight. He couldn’t see anything. He relied on touch and sound alone. His footsteps echoed off the walls. Every now and then, he splashed through a small puddle in the cracked concrete.

He made just enough noise to be heard.

Thirty seconds after he entered the factory, he picked up a sound. Behind him. Not an effect of his movements. Something else.

He smiled.

Buzzcut was still here.

King was quietly impressed. The man had been almost completely silent in his movements. He had tracked King across the factory floor without making a sound, avoiding all the puddles, all the obstacles. Then he had made a fatal mistake.

King heard a soft thunk that to any other man would have been inaudible. But he was paying attention. Twenty feet back, he’d sensed something next to him and softly ran his hand over a hollow metal tank, fixing its position in his mind. Buzzcut had just scraped against it. King recognised the noise.

He turned and exploded back in the other direction.

Buzzcut would hear him coming.

But it was too late.

In the darkness they crashed into each other. King stuck his shoulder out, bent his knees and drove the bulk of his weight into the other man’s chest. He heard a surprised gasp and a wince of pain. He could sense Buzzcut’s horrid surprise. One second he had been stalking his prey, and the next he was on the ground, winded.

King still couldn’t see. But he didn’t need to. He clamped both of his huge hands around Buzzcut’s head, one on either side. Before the man could regain control of the situation King slammed the back of his skull against the concrete. A crack echoed off the factory walls.

It was a formidable, crushing blow. King was two-hundred-and-twenty pounds of muscle, yet even stronger than he appeared. His strength had been something of legend in his former life. Now, he used it to devastating effect.

Buzzcut went instantly limp. There was every chance he was dead, but King made sure by winding up and slamming a closed fist down against his windpipe. He put his entire bodyweight behind it. Bone and cartilage gave under the strike. Buzzcut gave a final pathetic wheeze before joining his partner in death.

CHAPTER 4

King rolled off the body, panting with exertion. His blood boiled and his skin tingled. An unavoidable reaction after killing with his bare hands. This kind of adrenalin was impossible to control. No amount of discipline would reduce its effect. There was nothing to do but ride it out.

He let the stillness wash over him. The silence was oddly calming. Slowly, his heartbeat began to return to a normal rate.

As soon as he stopped shaking, he set to work.

It seemed he would never know what David Lee and Miles Price had done to deserve a pair of bullets in their skulls. But now both their killers were dead. What occurred had entered all kinds of muddled grey areas, both morally and legally. King had four dead bodies on his hands, and it was his job to hide the evidence. He certainly didn’t care for a murder trial, and if it came to that he would probably be found guilty of something. Chasing an attacker through thick woods to cave their throat in would certainly tarnish his reputation in a courtroom.

He much preferred natural law in situations such as these.

It took him twenty minutes to make his way back to the main road. A tough trek through steep, rugged terrain. He stepped out of the woods with sweat dripping off his brow. The pickup truck’s murky headlights lit up a section of the asphalt, carving twin paths of soft yellow light through the darkness. Insects buzzed in the glow. An eerie silence lay over everything, something that often occurred in the aftermath of sudden violent conflict.

Everyone in earshot of this place was dead.

As he passed across the road in front of the truck he saw blood splattered across its windscreen. The contents of the cabin were blocked from sight. No signs of tampering. If any traffic had passed by, no-one had stopped.

He crossed to the opposite side of the woods and headed deep into the scrub. It didn’t take long to find the other man’s body. He lay face down, slumped into the undergrowth. Despite the dim light, the gunshot wound through the top of the guy’s head was clearly visible. A fat gaping hole. King hefted the body onto his shoulders and carried it back to the ute. He threw it in the rear tray alongside the workers’ corpses.

'I wonder who you two pissed off,' he muttered under his breath.

King went round to the driver’s door and climbed inside the cabin. The interior smelled like alcohol and death. A half-empty packet of cigarettes lay in the centre console alongside a small satchel of marijuana. There was a helmet in the passenger’s footwell, coated in flecks of concrete. The glove box held receipts dating back eight days, each for meals at the bar down the road. These men had lived simplistic urban lives. Work hard, eat a full meal, rest, repeat.

Sometimes King wished his own life had been so straightforward.