One rushed the man in black, one rushed me. Both screamed nonsensical words of hate, or revenge.
Ten meters from me. Broken ribs. A bulletproof foe, or at least one that bullets didn’t bother. I’d already stabbed his brother in the heart, to no effect.
Seven meters.
Stick it where it counts, leave it in.
Five.
I gave Ghost a hand signaclass="underline" hamstring.
Ghost sprinted wide of the oncoming enemy, then turned sharply and bit at the back of his ankle. Canine fangs punctured cloth and leather.
At two meters, the Orc Brother turned to swipe at Ghost, but his forward momentum brought him stumbling straight at me.
Putting the KA-BAR in his throat was almost too easy.
I felt the blade scrape cervical vertebrae, and then the huge man — what, maybe 140 kilos? — fell past me. I let the knife go.
The Orc Brother hit the pavement. Blood sprayed everywhere, blackish red in the single light, but unlike when I’d stabbed his brother’s heart this blood didn’t stop spurting.
Not for another ten or fifteen seconds. Not until there wasn’t enough blood left to spurt.
I heard the sound of fists smashing into flesh, the cracking of bone. I turned to see the man in black straddling a prone Orc Brother, raining down blow after blow. Each time he pulled back a fist, it trailed an arc of blood.
I thought of the movie Rocky, of Sly Stallone hitting that side of beef over and over again. Finally, Bryan/Erickson stood. Emma ran to him, tail wagging, tongue lolling as if this were nothing more than a walk at the beach.
The man in black looked at me. “Ledger, you all right?”
I nodded toward my fallen foe. “Better than him.”
Bryan/Erickson pulled a rag — black, of course — from an inside pocket. He wiped blood, bits of bone, and, probably, chunks of brain from his leather gloves.
“Why didn’t my bullets kill the first one?” I asked. “Or my knife? Why did your knife work?”
“Ancient Chinese secret.”
He came closer.
“You owe me,” he said. “Let me hear you say it.”
I glanced around at the carnage, but didn’t need to — he was right. If he hadn’t shown up, I’d be dead. Probably Ghost as well.
“I owe you,” I said.
“Give me your word,” he said. “You don’t talk about this, to anyone. Do that and we’re even.”
I thought about what he’d told me at the big Victorian house: “This is San Francisco — things are different here.” A quiet little war, but this guy, this man in a psycho mask… we were on the same side.
“You have my word,” I said. “You look like the kind of guy who doesn’t appreciate publicity. Want me to make these bodies go away?”
He shook his head. The skull smile mask swayed slightly.
“The bodies are mine,” he said.
He moved quickly, carrying each Orc Brother body into the dark woods. The way he picked them up, as though they weighed little more than a bag of flour… this guy had serious strength.
Inhuman strength.
Enough to make me wonder if he had that Z chromosome, and what it meant.
He walked back to me.
“What, exactly, are you doing with those bodies?”
“Bringing a truck, taking them to my basement.”
His basement. Of course. I wanted the hell out of San Francisco.
“Need a ride?” he asked. “Hospital, maybe?”
“I’ve got it covered. Did you walk here?”
I’d almost said, Did you fly here, as if he were some kind of X-Men mutant, but caught myself at the last second.
He pointed to the edge of the parking lot, close to the winding road. There sat what looked like a sci-fi version of a Harley.
“That an electric motorcycle?”
The masked man nodded. “Yup.”
“With a sidecar, for your dog?”
“Yup.”
“Might have to get me one of those.”
“You owe Pookie a car first.”
True enough.
His eyes narrowed with anger, but not directed at me.
“Emma! Stop sniffing that poor dog’s ass!”
Sure enough, the dog had her nose jammed into Ghost’s butt. Ghost had that worried look on his face again.
“Emma!”
The pointer reluctantly ran to the sidecar and hopped in.
“Listen,” I said, “I have resources. Whatever is happening here, if it gets out of hand, you can call me.”
He thought about it for a moment, then nodded.
“Fair enough. And if you have targets in SF again, I’m your huckleberry.”
I offered my hand. He shook, and that was that. Two warriors, blindly trusting each other based on nothing more than a two-minute skirmish that had left three enemy combatants dead.
In my world? Sometimes, that’s enough.
He drove off in his motorcycle, which didn’t make a sound. No wonder I hadn’t heard him come in. I watched the man in black, whoever he was, fade into the night.
A wet nose nudged my hand. Ghost, asking to be petted. As I scratched his big head, I called Mr. Church.
“Joe, you okay?”
“Call off Kraken Team,” I said. “The Orc Brothers are neutralized.”
“Excellent news.”
“Get an ambulance to my location, stat. Keep it quiet.”
“You going to tell me what happened?”
“Can’t,” I said. “I gave my word. And don’t call me until I return — I’m on fucking vacation.”
This time, I got to hang up on him.
Ghost and I walked to the edge of the overlook. Together, just a man and his dog, we stared out at the foggy night and waited for the ambulance.
Number one New York Times bestselling author Scott Sigler is the creator of fifteen novels, six novellas, and dozens of short stories. His works are available from Crown Publishing and Del Rey Books. In 2005, Scott built a large online following by releasing his audiobooks as serialized podcasts. A decade later, he still gives his stories away — for free — every Sunday at www.scottsigler.com. His loyal fans, who named themselves “Junkies,” have downloaded more than forty million individual episodes. He has been covered in Time, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, Io9, Wired, the Huffington Post, BusinessWeek, and Fangoria. Scott is the co-founder of Empty Set Entertainment, which publishes his Galactic Football League YA series. He lives in San Diego, California, with his wee little dog, Reesie.
BANSHEE
BY JAMES A. MOORE
Bug and MindReader did all the heavy lifting. I can’t clarify that enough. Without their work we would have never even had a case. The situations might have come across as natural circumstances or death by misadventure. Hell, there wasn’t even going to be an autopsy on a couple of the victims until MindReader suggested it.
I was catching up on paperwork, which is to say, wishing I could find a way to blind myself or at least shatter all of my fingers so someone else could do the boring stuff, when Bug told me what was going on.
“So, there are three confirmed cases and two maybes here, Joe, but MindReader thinks we’ve got an assassin on the loose.”
“Bug?” I thought long and hard about a beer, but decided water would do the job. The weather was hot and it was only getting hotter. Summer in D.C. is like a special kind of roulette wheel where sometimes you win a perfect day and other times you win clouds, humidity, disgusting heat, and more of the same. Now and then, though, you get a quick rain that drops the temperature down by thirty degrees and makes you feel human again.