Omega (Alpha #3) (25 page)

“No offense, Layla, but I’m a highly trained combat veteran, and you’re—”

“I stabbed a guy in the eyeball with a pen I’d kept hidden in my cunt for over a week. I shoved it so far into his fucking brain that he died instantly. And that was after I broke his arm like a twig. I did this because he was in the process of raping me. I put on his blood-soaked clothes, his smelly boots—I had to wear his clothes because Vitaly had kept me naked the entire time—and I stole a car, stopped for supplies, drove to fucking Guarujá, walked several miles in the blazing heat, most of that distance either in the sand or uphill, without having any food or water. And then I stole a car right out from underneath the very men who were hunting me.” I was getting a little worked up at this point. “And then—and
then!
—then I was nearly shot several times just now by those
assholes
back there. So I think at this point, Nicholas, there isn’t much that’s going to faze me. Figure out how you want to ambush these fuckers, and I’ll help you kill every single goddamn one of those pussies.”

Harris’s jaw worked up and down, as if he was trying to respond but didn’t actually have any words. “Jesus, Layla.”

“If you were hoping for a damsel in distress, you’ve got the wrong bitch. I may be in distress, but I’m sure as shit not a fucking helpless damsel.”

A long, tense moment passed, in which Harris tried to figure out what to say. “You called me Nicholas again.”
 

“Yes I did, and you can either deal with it or shove me out of the car. I don’t care. I’ll figure this shit out, one way or another, with you or without you.”
 

“You’re fucking impossible,” he grumbled.
 

I laughed. “You’re just now figuring that out?”
 

He shook his head. “No, you’re just reaching an all-time-high impossibility factor.”
 

“Buddy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
 

“That’s a scary thought,” Harris said.

“I’m from Detroit. Don’t fuck with me.” I crossed my arms over my chest and kept an eye on the passenger-side mirror, watching as the black SUV closed the distance. “They’re getting closer. If you’ve got a plan, I’d start putting it into play if I were you.”
 

A body of water rippled pale blue in the distance; traffic was getting thicker and thicker by the moment.
 

Harris gestured at the water. “Once we’re past this causeway, we’ll be hitting Batistini. I’ll make my move there.”

“What’s in Batistini?” I asked.

“There isn’t shit in Batistini, it’s just the first suburb of São Paulo we’ll get to. It’s hard to ambush someone in the car on the freeway.”

“I guess that’s true. But I’ve never ambushed anyone, so I wouldn’t know.”
 

We were on the causeway that stretched out over the lake, and a sign over the road announced the exits for Batistini. It struck me as funny that despite the fact that I was in a totally different country and that I didn’t speak, read, or write the language in the slightest, the highway signs were totally understandable anyway. I mean, I didn’t understand the words, but based on the layout of the sign,
saída
was probably equivalent to “exit”, and
diadema
was close enough to “diadem” that it probably represented the ring of highways around the city of São Paulo.
 

Harris took the exit for Batistini, and sure enough, the SUV behind us followed, staying at least four or five car-lengths behind us. Obviously they had no intention of pushing the confrontation on the highway either. Too much risk of things going wrong in our favor, I guess. When we hit the residential area—which was a graffiti-tagged, run-down area—Harris gunned the engine and pulled away from our pursuers, twisted around a tight right turn, gunned it again so the tires spat gravel, pushing me back in my seat, the engine roaring. I heard tires squealing behind us, still several car-lengths back. I revised my estimate of the area as being poor, simply judging based on the number of well-kept cars parked on the street.
 

Another long straightaway, a left turn, and then we were on a narrow gravel road running parallel to the highway, the scrub-covered hillside leading up to the highway on our left, a cinderblock wall hiding a junk yard on the right, full of rusting semi trailers, ancient buses, and random bits of metal. Harris pulled into a driveway, the highway on our left, a ramshackle warehouse or factory on the right. There was a short, low awning under which Harris parked the Land Rover. The outside of the warehouse on our right had been roofed over to create a porch, and on this makeshift porch was a cluster of middle-aged men, all of them hard-bitten and hard-eyed, weathered faces lined with wrinkles, sweat dotting their foreheads, brown glass bottles of beer in their hands, cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. As Harris and I exited the Land Rover—which was older by a decade than I was, at least—the men on the porch stared at us, unblinking, mute. They were giving us the kind of stares a blond white girl would get if she were strolling down Cass Corridor at midnight. The kind of stares that say, “You are in the
wrong
neighborhood, and you’d best keep going if you know what’s good for you.”
 

Harris circled around to the back of the Defender, opened the trunk, and hauled out a huge black duffel bag. He hung the bag on his shoulder, and it gave a heavy, ominous
clank
as he did so. One of the men on the porch said something in Portuguese, and if I was any judge of tone of voice, it wasn’t polite. Harris reached behind his back and leveled the pistol at the man who’d spoken, stepping closer to the porch in that quick, careful, lithe movement men trained in combat all seem to use, keeping his torso swiveled to the side, presenting as small a target as possible. Harris spoke in fluent Portuguese, his voice low and smooth and even, but still somehow fairly snarling with threat. He gestured with the pistol, and the entire cluster of men stood up, gripping their beer and cigarettes, and vanished into the warehouse.

“Do I want to know what you told them?” I asked.

“No,” was all he said, and grabbed me by the hand and hauled me across the road, where a break in the wall had been hastily boarded over with lengths of two-by-fours and scraps of corrugated iron.
 

I climbed over the jury-rigged fence and then waited for Harris, who pulled me out of sight and used one hand to press me flat against the intact portion of the cinderblock wall.
 

He set the heavy bag down at his feet and wiped his brow with his palm, then wiped his palm on his khakis. “Please listen to me very carefully now, Layla, all right? If we’re going to have any chance of getting out of this alive, you have
got
to do as I say.”

I blinked sweat out of my eye and nodded at him. “Tell me what to do, Nicholas.”
 

He narrowed his eyes at me. “First, stop calling me that.”

“How about Nick?”

He shook his head, irritated. “This isn’t the time for this shit, Layla. Sure, Nick works. Now, are you done mouthing off?”

“I wasn’t mouthing off, actually, but if you want to see what that sounds like, I can—”

“Jesus, Layla. Shut the fuck up and listen, would you?” he snarled. I shut my mouth with an audible click of my teeth, and gestured for him to continue. “Thank you. There’s five of them, and two of us. You’re not trained in the use of assault rifles, I’m assuming—correct me if I’m wrong, as you have a knack for surprising me. Point is, that’s what they’re carrying. What that means for us is this is gonna get gnarly. Bullets will be flying hot and heavy. I’m gonna put you in a position, and you’re going to stay there, come hell or high water, until I tell you otherwise. You got it?”
 

I nodded. “Got it.”

“I mean it. You
stay
…
there
. I don’t care what you see or think you see, you stay fucking
put
. And keep your head down.” An engine roared somewhere, and tires squealed. Harris cocked his head, listening. “They’re close. We don’t have much time.”
 

He unzipped the duffel bag, and sure as shit, it was full of guns. “Well fuck me running, Harris, where the hell’d you get your hands on all that?”
 

“You forget I work for an ex-arms dealer,” he responded, digging a pair of black 9mm semiautomatics out of the bag and handing them to me.
 

“I didn’t actually know that,” I said. “Roth was an arms dealer? No shit.”
 

He glanced at me, digging four spare clips out of the bag and handing them to me as well. “Well, now you know.” He gestured at the guns in my hand. “You can reload those, right?”
 

I showed him I could by ejecting the clip, checking it, and sliding it back in place, tapping it home with the hell of my palm—gently, contrary to popular silver-screen mythology. “Where do you want me?”
 

He pulled a short, compact assault rifle out of the bag, unfolded the stock, stuffed extra magazines in his back pockets, and slung the weapon by the strap on his shoulder and let it hang, then grabbed another handgun, this one a monster silver thing straight out of
Dirty Harry
. Zipping the bag, he secured it on his back and then led me at a trot through the knee-high grass toward the row of rusting trailers. There were a good half a dozen metal drums lying scattered in the grass, the kind of thing you’d see hobos warming their hands over in movies. Harris rolled one to lay between two closely parked trailers, grabbed a second and righted it, hauled it over, and then tipped a third to lay against both of the others, creating a makeshift barricade. The wall behind me was fully intact and all of ten feet high, so I didn’t think anyone would be coming up from behind. I tucked the spare pistol into my waistband at my back—which is not as comfortable as TV would have you imagine—and the clips in my pockets.
 

Lying down prone, I glanced up at Harris. “Well? Don’t just stand there, doofus. Go find your own spot.”
 

He shook his head at me, a smirk quirking the corner of his mouth. When he was gone I closed my eyes and let myself feel the fear. I was fucking terrified, to put it frankly. None of this was normal, even for me. I’d been through some shit in my life, but lying in wait, preparing to ambush men who were trying to kill me? It was new. And not fun.

I do not recommend it.

But I’ve learned something important in going through all the crazy-ass bullshit life has thrown at me: if something heavy is about to go down, give yourself a moment to feel the emotions. Let them go, let them out, let them boil. And then shut it down—
hard
—and do what you gotta do.
 

A few moments of sweating balls in the blazing Brazilian heat, and then I heard tires on gravel and an engine lowering down to idle, doors opening and closing, men talking. Slides being pulled, footsteps crunching. Words were exchanged, voices were raised. A gun went off, making me jump, and then more shouts. Silence.

I couldn’t see Harris anywhere.
 

I was on my belly, a pistol in my hands, pointing it through the gap in the stacked barrels at the opening in the wall where the bad guys had to come through. I checked the weapon in my hands, made sure the safety was off—it was a Glock, apparently, since it didn’t have a safety. That was a little factoid I’d learned from Oliver, the guy who’d run the firing range: Glocks didn’t have safeties.

I pulled the slide, doing so as quietly as I could, and then set it in the grass at my right hand, took the spare from my waistband, checked it, racked the slide on that one, and arranged my extra clips where I could grab them easily.

My hands shook.

My pulse thundered in my ears.

I was
not
ready for this. Killing a guy in self-defense was one thing. But lying in wait to kill people in cold blood…that was another prospect.

I couldn’t do it.

Shit.

Shit.

What was I thinking?

A hand appeared in the fence break, holding onto the grip of some kind of compact machine gun. Harris would probably have a proper name for it, but I didn’t give a shit what it was called. A kill-Layla device. That was all that mattered. The body followed, a short, stocky man with sweaty hair and a stained T-shirt.
 

My finger twitched on the trigger, but I waited; I’d start shooting only after Harris had. I didn’t want to spoil the ambush by shooting too early.
 

Heh. I didn’t want to shoot too early; I wondered idly if Harris had that problem. Probably not.

Jesus, Layla. Now is not the time to be thinking about Harris’s sexual prowess.
 

Yes it was. It was always a good time to think about Harris’s sexual prowess. He probably had a lot of prowess.
 

A second man followed the first, and then a third, and a fourth. And a fifth. They were each armed with a machine gun. They all looked extremely unpleasant.
 

The first man was about ten steps into the field as the fifth and final man was stepping over the makeshift area of fence. And that was when Harris cut loose. It happened so fast I barely registered it: there was a loud chattering crash, and the fifth man collapsed, falling into and effectively blocking the open section of fence. This happened in an eye-blink.
 

Another loud detonation—
CRACKCRACKCRACK—
and the first man in line fell.

The other three scattered in three different directions, and I realized this was my cue. I adjusted my two-handed grip on the pistol, aimed at the torso of the left-most attacker, held my breath…squeezed the trigger.

BANG!
The gun jumped in my hands, and my target twisted, stumbled, a red circle spreading on his stomach. Shit. I’d have to shoot him again. I aimed more carefully this time, drawing bead on his face. Deep breath, hold it…
BANG!
…let it out. He dropped, gurgling. I’d missed his head, the round going through his throat.