Santoro turned toward us. Slow. Without hurry, without much surprise. His expression was on the amused side of bland, his body language calm. He gave us the kind of look you’d expect to see on someone like… well, on someone like me. But only when I was being fronted by a pack of cranky Cub Scouts. He looked at us as if we were expected though unwanted.
“Let me see if I can guess,” he said, his voice a soft and cultured baritone. “Not FBI. Not NSA, either. So who are you? Definitely not SEALs.” He nodded toward Top. “You’re too old.” At Bunny. “You’re too big.”
“And I’m too charming,” I said. “Put your hands on your head, asshole, and get down on your fucking knees.”
His eyes clicked toward me. “Ah,” he murmured, “now I know who you are. Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger. The Deacon’s pet scorpion. I believe you knew my brother. What a pleasure.” He glanced again at my guys. “Top Sims and Bunny Rabbit. Your right and left hands. The two cornerstones of Echo Team. I’ve heard some interesting reports about you fellows.”
“You read anywhere that we’re known for taking bullshit? No? Then get down on your knees and keep your hands where I can see them or I will kill you.”
The rest of Santoro’s team was still frozen where they were, and right then they looked more like confused bystanders than a crack team of henchmen. There was a glazed look in their eyes. Not exactly blank, but off somehow. Like nobody was home. That sent a chill up my spine.
Santoro looked at me. His eyes were sharper than the others’, more intense. On the docks and in some of the boats people were watching. Scared, surprised, and fascinated despite the presence of big men with guns.
“You can’t kill us all,” he said.
I shifted my aim downward, confident that I could put one through his thigh without endangering the onlookers. We had them dead to rights. We were holding every card.
It was perfect.
Absolutely perfect.
Which is when it all went wrong.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
Bunny yelled, “On your six!”
I spun and had a millionth of a second’s peripheral vision warning as someone swung a boat paddle at me. It was light aluminum with a plastic blade, but it hit like a Louisville Slugger. My gun went flying, hit the deck, bounced once and hit our borrowed XSR, and then dropped like a stone into the salt water. I spun and blocked a second swing, caught the oar with my other hand, snapped out a low kick, and as my heel smashed his knee to junk I saw with mingled shock and horror that my attacker was the sixty-year-old dockmaster. He screamed and collapsed against one of the pumps, clawing at the ruin of his knee.
I whirled toward Santoro, who had spun around and was running flat out for one of the boats moored to the dock. A slate-gray Picuda that was two slips down from the big XSR that we’d come in. Santoro tossed the briefcase into the boat and jumped after it.
His crew was still standing where they’d been, hands half-raised, eyes blank as zombies’.
“He’s mine,” I snapped, and pelted after him. But I got maybe six steps before another figure rushed out of nowhere and attacked me.
Wasn’t one of Santoro’s goons. Wasn’t the crippled dockmaster, either.
It was a teenage girl. Fifteen, maybe sixteen, dressed in flowered shorts and a bikini top, sunglasses, and a cute straw sun hat. She had no gun, no oar, no weapon except a cell phone, but she did her level best to brain me with it.
Yeah. A kid. With a cell phone. The day had already tilted sideways and now it was sliding down the rabbit hole.
I slap-parried the swing, which was surprisingly fast and skillful for a kid, and I backhanded her across the mouth. Blood flew from her mashed lips and the force spun her halfway around, but instead of falling down dazed and weeping, she used the momentum of her turn to fire off one hell of a kick. A short, chopping side snap with the blade of her right foot. I bent my knee and took it on the big muscles of my thigh, then when she tried to rechamber for a second attack I swept her standing leg. She went down hard enough for her head to bonk on the hard surface of the dock. That turned her lights off for a moment and she fell over on her back.
I spun toward my quarry.
That’s when Santoro’s crew joined the fight. One moment they were statues with Top and Bunny holding guns on them, the next they swarmed at me. It was crazy. They didn’t go for my men. Just me. Three of them tackled me with all the force and aggression of defensive tackles at their own five-yard line. As we crashed down I heard the roar of Bunny’s shotgun. One of the men still standing was plucked off the ground as buckshot tore him to red rags. Almost in the same instant Top opened up with the HK416 and I heard the distinctive sound of hot rounds punching through living flesh.
No screams, though. Not a one. It was the same with the guys who’d piled on me. There were grunts of effort, but not a yell, not a curse. Nothing. All three of them were swinging wild, full-power punches, just like the surfer boys had done. Like Rudy had done. I wrapped my arms around my head and let them break their knuckles on my elbows and forearms. They went totally batshit, hitting each other as much as they were hitting me. Their eyes may have been dead but they fought with a frenzy that bordered on mania.
It’s nearly impossible to defend against that kind of assault. Even by defending I was getting hurt, and several times those wild punches had slipped through my defensive cage of bones. One shot caught me on the side of the head hard enough to fill the air around me with fireworks. I had to get out before they beat me to death. I roared and shoved upward with my hips, then twisted hard to one side like a bucking bronco. That tilted them and their combined weight dragged them sideways, and I helped by looping four fast, tight overhand lefts into shoulder and ear and side of neck. They crashed down and I kicked my way out, pivoted on my knees and started to come up, but the closest guy lunged at me, flopping forward like a dolphin trying to beach himself. He grabbed my ankle, hugged my whole foot to his chest, and tried to bite me.
Bite me.
So, yeah, I guess I lost it. You see, I’ve had people try to bite me before. Some living, some dead. It’s how I got into the DMS in the first place. I’ve fought infected walkers, I’ve fought genetically engineered Berserkers and Red Knights. I am not a fan of things that bite. My brain went into a different gear and I fell onto my hip so I could use both feet. My gun was long gone, lost during the ambush, but I didn’t need it for this. I drove my heel into the man’s face, flattening his nose, breaking teeth, smashing the jaw out of shape. The pain and damage I inflicted in under two seconds should have been enough to turn him into a dazed and screaming wreck.
That’s not what happened, though. Instead it seemed to galvanize him. He kept trying to bite my leg, and for one terrible moment those broken teeth clamped shut around my calf. The pain was immense. Absolutely fucking immense.
I sat up and drove my thumbs into his eyes, bursting them. His mouth opened. Not in pain, but to try for a better bite.
Jesus Christ.
I screamed at him as I clawed the rapid-release folding knife from its holster inside my right pocket. The short, wicked blade snapped into place with a flick of my wrist and then cut a red line across his throat. Blood sprayed me and the dock.