Hunters, Matt Rogers [pdf ebook reader .txt] 📗

wasn’t where he’d been minutes previously. They’d left him on his side, face pressed to the cabinets. Now he was sitting upright, one hand pressed to the bloody mess that used to be his throat. It wouldn’t keep him alive, and he probably knew that, but if he’d nearly killed Slater then he was a relentless human being, and those who are relentless keep fighting long after it makes sense to do so.

He’d try to stay alive until his dying breath, which would come soon.

Alexis didn’t look down as she moved to him and took a kneeling position. She covered the front door and the window with her rifle. A horrid ringing beat at her ears.

Finally, when she was sure she’d bought herself a minute, she glanced down at him.

He looked up at her. He was in that surreal state of hyperreality right before death. His eyes were glassy, but they managed to focus on her. His face was an inhuman colour, whiter than she thought possible. Sweat and blood matted his scalp.

She fixed her green eyes on him and whispered, ‘What’s your name?’

He must have thought she was a mirage.

‘Spinel,’ he said with a strange smile.

‘Like the gemstone?’

‘Yes,’ he whispered, and multiple trickles of blood running from his mouth turned into a torrent that came off his chin.

She didn’t look away. ‘Do you know the men you came to kill?’

‘Not—’ he started, then the life drained from his eyes.

Alexis turned her attention to the window, then heard him spluttering. She’d misinterpreted. He was fighting for every second of consciousness before the eternal slumber. He wasn’t gone yet.

She looked back down. He was wincing in an attempt to form words. Blood streamed through the fingers he’d clamped on the neck wound.

Finally he managed, ‘Not personally.’

‘You know of them?’

He nodded with delight in his eyes, and she realised if she wanted answers she’d have to lean completely into the act.

She made her voice monotonic, trance-like, mimicking a cult leader she’d met in Wyoming. ‘You’ve done your duty, Spinel. You’ve proven yourself in the arena. You’ll be rewarded.’

He smiled.

He didn’t have long left.

She said, ‘Tell me who you work for and you’ll be released.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘To Valhalla.’

You are a warrior, Spinel, and in death you will go where warriors go.

If he had any sanity left he’d see through the ruse, but he didn’t. Near-death experiences are psychedelic in nature. Slater had told her as much.

And Spinel was as near to death as it was possible to be.

He summoned his final reserves of energy and whispered, ‘I’m a hunter. There are … many of us. Some used to work alongside … King and Slater. Their … untimely departure … gutted the backbone of the old system. We had to pivot into a new one. Now … Onyx tells us what to do. Where to go. Who to exterminate.’

‘Onyx? Another gemstone?’

‘We’re all gemstones. Gives us … anonymity. And look what two of us did … to the fabled King and Slater. They won’t survive the hunt. That’s … something, at least.’

‘What was your name before all this?’

‘Jordan.’

Just like that, he died.

Eyes went cold like stone, hand came away from his neck, the final lifeblood flowed out, and he pitched over and crumpled, splaying across the kitchen floor. The suddenness of it shocked her, then she realised the “Spinel” moniker had kept him going minutes after he should have been dead. As a character, he could be invincible. As Jordan, he was flesh and blood.

She thought, At least he died as Jordan.

Alexis left him there and covered the entry points, forcing the strange interaction from her mind.

25

Out the front of the estate, behind the front perimeter fence, the SAC team leader looked up at the mansion.

It had been eviscerated.

They’d poured rounds upon rounds into the facade, shattering every window, tearing chunks out of every wall. There were distant screams from neighbours, and faint sirens far away. Way off.

That was deliberate.

A call had been placed to higher-ups in the LVMPD. The cops would be unusually slow to respond to automatic gunfire in the gated community. It’d be chalked up to a departmental mishap.

But they had to be out of here soon.

The team leader turned to his underling. ‘Citrine and Spinel?’

‘They’re in there,’ the man grunted.

‘I know that. Any word?’

‘None.’

Ominous enough. The team leader had received the two men without protest, as an attachment to his strike force, because he knew where they’d come from. They were hunters. From the very top, from the world far above his, the world he couldn’t even imagine.

Veritable super-soldiers.

What Jason King and Will Slater had once been, many years ago.

Now they were relics.

Or not.

The SAC team leader said, ‘I’ll give them two more minutes. Then we all go in.’

26

Violetta entered the command centre and felt a pang of regret as she observed the technological setup she’d built from scratch.

Server towers fed monitors arranged in a grid. It was her intelligence hub, what she’d planned to use for years to conduct deep research on their operations. And now it was dangerous, vulnerable to exploitation. It all had to go.

Thankfully she’d planned for the contingency.

She fired one of the monitors to life with the touch of a key and entered a line of code into the run program that was up on the screen. She executed the command with another key touch, and the virtual gears started whirring.

Within seconds it was all gone, eradicated from the cloud, beyond salvation.

Every last scrap of data.

Anyone trying to dig to find what they’d been up to here in Las Vegas would be met with an empty husk of hardware.

She breathed out, turned and went back the way she came.

Alexis was kneeling beside the kitchen island next to a body.

Violetta glanced at the dead man and said, ‘He wasn’t there when we left.’

‘I know.’

Violetta beckoned her away from the body. ‘I’m sure you’ll tell me all about it later.’

Just before they fled the shadowy space, she glanced sideways, her line of sight