Spiral (32 page)

‘Behind…’
came Kade’s warning.

Carter rolled, fast, faster than any human had a right to move. A line of bullets tore a strip of smashed tiles into the air in a cloud of brittle dust. Carter’s eyes fixed on the swaying figure of a Nex, chest torn open, a slick glossy organ visible through the scorched cloth, blood soaking the grey clothing and falling in heavy slow drips to the remaining tiles. The Nex’s cheek hung as a loose flap of skin.

Carter spun to his feet, and leaped.

The SMG barked once - and was silenced.

Carter took the bullet; it sliced across his side just below his ribs, a twisted trajectory tearing a path through flesh and leaving a line of red that spewed blood to soak Carter’s clothing. The force of the blow punched and slammed him around, spinning him and sending his face crashing forward to hit the ground.

There was no pain.

That’s fucking bad, he thought.

No pain is bad.

Enemy...

Got to kill
—

Where are you, Kade? Where the fuck are you when I need you?

Don ‘t want to die ...

Pain ...

Don’t want to die ...

He tried to rise, but only managed to turn his head as he slumped forward. He lifted his hand in front of his face and saw that it was coated in a deep red that looked the wrong colour. It looked bad. It looked dangerous; the colour of something that shouldn’t see the light of day.

Fuck, mused his brain, suddenly calm.

His hand lowered. The torn bleeding
holed
Nex, in slow motion, fitted a fresh mag to the SMG and he watched it carrying out the action, swaying in its own world of pain but with nothing showing in those cold copper eyes. Carter could do nothing. The Nex stepped lightly forward, intense stare boring down into him and he recognised that gaze, from back in Scotland, from back at his house when it had been so rudely invaded—

‘Nice to see you again,’ he croaked.

‘Mr Carter. It has been a pleasure.’

The soft asexual voice held no pain. No fucking pain? screeched Carter’s confusion-riddled mind.

The finger squeezed the trigger—

And the Nex’s masked face exploded.

Carter watched, dumbstruck, as a huge hole appeared in a jagged shower to the tune of metallic screaming. Brain, skull, blood rained down on him with gentle
pattering
sounds. The figure folded slowly and neatly to the floor and was still.

Carter’s focus switched: from the corpse in the foreground to
behind
the corpse where Natasha stood, an SMG in her hands, a faint horrified smile on her lips.

‘You owe me one,’ she whispered weakly.

Carter coughed, and rolled onto his back. ‘I need a pad of cloth, or something,’ he wheezed, forcing himself into a sitting position. Warmth had spread across his torso and down to his crotch.

Natasha knelt by his side and dipped her hands into his lifeblood. Her gaze met his. She swiftly tore part of her shirt free and applied the pad and suddenly a world of pain fired into Carter’s brain and screamed at him in the huge echoing operatic hall of his skull—

And the headache pain in his skull, in his brain: it returned to burn.

Returned to burn bad.

‘It’s not my fucking day,’ he croaked.

Carter struggled to his feet, the pad of cloth clamped to his side. Natasha bent, retrieved his Browning and helped him to reload the weapon with blood-slippery bullets. They both took SMGs from the dead bodies of the Nex, slinging the weapons over their shoulders and then taking deep, deep breaths.

‘What now?’ hissed Natasha.

‘We need to find Gol.’

‘He could be anywhere ... it was so crazy...’

They moved slowly through the house, up the stairs, to Gol’s study. There had been a battle in the room and there were several blood trails but no bodies. Blood was splattered up the walls as if some mad artist with a loaded paintbrush had been let loose and told to inflict contemporary art; Gol was not there.

‘What were the emergency coordinates?’ asked Natasha softly, her shaking hands keeping the door to the
study covered with the SMG.

‘551.222.222.340,’ came the pain-filled response from Carter, whose face had gone grey, eyes purple-ringed, nose crusted with blood. He gripped his Browning, but
held the weapon as if he didn’t really understand what it
was
... he had lost blood, was weak, was fading fast... losing the will to play the game.

Natasha gritted her teeth. Pulled free her ECube. Patched in the coordinates ...

‘Come on,’ she said, finding a new level of strength,
feeling adrenalin surge through her battered weary blood-speckled frame once more. She sprinted to the window: outside, the world still raged ... black smoke drifted on the horizon from a myriad of destroyed and wounded Pigs. She saw a tank, a Russian Black Eagle, squat among the trees, its huge camouflaged turret pointing their way, the muzzle of the mammoth gun a truly awe- and terror-inspiring sight. Machine guns rattled, a savage exchange between two groups.

‘Shit. We have to get out of here.’ Natasha allowed Carter to rest some of his weight on her, and they moved slowly - painfully slowly - back through the house.

‘This is madness,’ she said.

‘Madness,’ agreed Carter, coughing.

‘I hope it will be worth it,’ she muttered bitterly.

‘It never is,’ said Carter, drooling blood.

They stopped just behind the doorway, Carter leaning heavily against the wall bathed in sunlight. The fragrance from the orchards smelled good, even mingled with a wave of cordite. Natasha found it hard to believe that a battle was taking place here - in this paradise ... and that her life hung in the balance, suspended by a delicate thread of Fate.

Her gaze roved, searching for the Nex—

Searching for the fast-moving deadly killers... they were in the trees, behind the tanks, and as she watched a group sprinted towards a Pig, which mowed them down in a spray of blood, its heavy machine-gun barrels smoking.

How many are left? she thought.

Many of the Pigs had gone; Nats could see another two tanks, which had eased down from the canyon mouth after the battle had begun. Gunfire echoed in the distance, followed by more explosive rattles echoing within the shadow-haunted depths of the trees.

Her gaze snapped left and came to settle on a Jeep Cherokee. 4.0 litre. Big and sturdy; dented and bullet-pocked, but it was deliciously—

Near.

A hundred paces.

Only a hundred paces.

Under the heavy-calibre eyes of the Black Eagles and the machine-gun muzzles of the Nex.

Can we run faster than their bullets? she thought.

Our lives depend on it...

‘Come on, Carter,’ Natasha said. ‘The jeep. You see it?’

Carter lifted his head. ‘Yes,’ he croaked.

‘I need you to run. Can you do that?’

‘Yes.’

She took a final look at the tanks; huge squat metal machines, painted roughly, their torsos dented and showing signs of abuse. They were silent, engines dead.

And the Nex ...

She could see five groups, all with their attention diverted by groups of Spiral_F, or Pigs. Another group were setting up some equipment at the edge of the trees. Natasha and Carter stepped away from the sanctuary.

They ran.

It took an eternity ...

Ten paces. Each step saw a splash of red erupt from Carter’s side as a flap of flesh opened with a jolt, blood marking his passage against the sand.

Twenty paces.

Natasha spotted the five emerging Nex at the edge of the orchard, spotted their positions and their glinting weapons. ‘Fu—’ she managed as they opened fire. Natasha screamed, her head ducking low, Carter suddenly an incredibly heavy and cumbersome weight chained around her neck and dragging her down down down into the black depths of death and oblivion - bullets kicked up dirt around her feet, some whizzed past and ricocheted off the stone of the house in tiny spurts of dust.

Natasha pushed on.

The Nex ceased their firing.

They charged, moving swiftly and silently over the ground towards the staggering couple. Natasha, teeth gritted, urged herself to greater efforts, almost dragging the semi-conscious Carter with her.

Seventy paces. Eighty paces...

Ninety—

She could pick out the copper eyes of the Nex—

And realised.

They look the same, she thought.

They all look the fucking same ...

She reached the Cherokee, wrenched open the door and pushed Carter into the cabin. The lead Nex leaped, boots slapping the bonnet of the Cherokee and sliding towards her. With a yelp, Natasha dived in and slammed the door - which jammed open, three inches from closing—

She saw the fingers, then the masked face appear. The door was pulled away from her blood-slippery grip—

Natasha’s boot slammed into the Nex’s face, three, four times - the Nex fell back and she pulled at the Cherokee’s door with all her might. It slammed shut with a heavy final
click.
She looked down in horror at the three severed fingers in the footwell.

It didn’t scream, she realised.

It didn’t make a fucking sound...

The other Nex arrived - leaping at the vehicle—

Natasha slammed down the central locking. All doors locked - a Nex started beating at the door, then hammered a fist through the side window, shattering its glass and scattering it over the inside of the cab. Natasha brought the stolen SMG around and held the trigger down hard; bullets spat out through the smashed window and into the Nex’s body and already she was turning the ignition. The huge 4.0-litre engine roared into life as her boot stomped down and a Nex was caught suddenly against the grille and bonnet, buckled, tossed beneath the vehicle and wrapped around the spinning prop-shaft... The SMG, still screaming, suddenly clicked on an empty mag and Natasha dropped the weapon on the seat next to the crumpled, wheezing body of Carter and dragged on the steering wheel. The Cherokee roared towards the orange trees with three Nex sprinting after it—

It sped beneath the fruit-laden branches, straight down the dirt track. Natasha laughed out loud as a fresh breeze came blowing through the smashed window and cooled the sweat of desperation on her face. ‘Carter?’ she screamed. ‘You OK, Carter? You still alive?’

There was a distant sound. A
crump.

As if obeying some unconscious reflex, Carter reached over and dragged hard on the steering wheel. The Cherokee slewed from the trail; there was a painful metal scream, and the trail just behind them erupted in a shower of dirt. Stones and shrapnel pounded and howled - round the Cherokee, which rocked on the concussion of the blast.

Carter looked up, smiled weakly at Natasha, then closed his eyes as sunlight played through the windscreen and illuminated his face and he could think of nothing except—

Pain.

All-consuming pain.

“Get me to a doctor and I just might live,’ he wheezed.

‘We’re not out of the woods yet,’ snapped Natasha.

Carter grinned - his blood-splashed face a caked mask of horror and destruction.

Natasha increased the speed - roaring in a burst of screaming engine noise out of the orange-tree orchards, bursting free of their heady fragrance and cool shade and into the reality of the sun-baked African landscape. The end of the canyon rushed towards them and there, ahead of them, stood a small group of Nex. The Cherokee, now touching a hundred m.p.h., hit the ridge and bullets thumped along its flanks and the wheels disengaged from the ground and it soared—

Natasha ducked.

All she could see was sky.

‘Fuuu-ck...’ she hissed as the Cherokee hurtled glinting through the air. A glance in the rear-view mirror showed nothing behind ...

The vehicle came down like a plane coming in to land—

The suspension compressed, bottoming out with terrifyingly loud
bangs,
and Natasha was smashed upwards, hands slipping from the wheel, head hammering the roof of the cab so hard that her teeth slammed together, leaving her mouth swilling with blood and shards of tooth ... The Cherokee kangarooed for a few moments, obeying the laws of physics as it slewed around in the scrub, tyres eating dirt and sand and bushes until Natasha gripped the wheel once more and dragged it onto course, foot stamping hard against the accelerator and dragging the roaring vehicle around in a broad arc, heading up towards the red rocky hills to the right of Gol’s devastated blasted routed Spiral_F Operations Centre—

‘What the fuck hit me?’ groaned Carter.

Natasha spat a mouthful of blood out of the window. She blinked rapidly, quelling the spinning sensation in her head. ‘Just stay down, my love,’ she managed. ‘You really don’t want to know.’

Natasha accelerated, tyres thumping over bushes and scrub.