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

King was pale, but he’d kept his hand pressed to his shoulder the whole time despite the price of horrific agony. He knew it was either pain or succumbing to blood loss, and he’d choose pain every time.

Ghost-white, King managed to chuckle.

Violetta looked over her shoulder, eyes wide, surprised by the joviality. ‘What?’

‘I’m interested to see how the cops explain that away.’

Slater said, ‘Lots of illegal fireworks.’

‘Uh-huh. With dozens of wealthy neighbour eyewitnesses to say otherwise.’

‘Their problem,’ Violetta said. ‘Not ours.’

Alexis had been mute until now, but she said, ‘I’d say our problems are worse.’

Slater collapsed back in his seat as the adrenaline wore off, replaced by overwhelming fatigue. The pain started to creep in, beginning with a dull throbbing behind his eyeballs.

But he mustered the energy to ask, ‘What problems?’

There was a long silence from the front seats.

Then King chuckled beside him, his nose swollen like a pumpkin.

Violetta and Alexis exchanged a look.

Alexis said, ‘Boys, right?’

Violetta nodded.

They were out of “The Ridges” before any of the soldiers could pursue.

28

Deep in the bowels of a nameless, soulless Manhattan skyscraper, Alonzo Romero hunched over the phone his employers didn’t know he owned.

It was encrypted with his own code, so there was no chance of unwanted eyes prying through what came up on its screen. He’d developed half the security measures his country used in the first place, so he had faith in his ability to hide what he wanted from his superiors.

And my coworkers, he thought. In this era, everything and everyone has a price. Loyalty is an outdated concept, a nostalgic throwback.

His eyes throbbing from the strain of staring at pixels on a screen for fifteen hours a day, he scrolled through transcripts of calls made and received by a certain faction of the CIA currently carrying out an operation on the outskirts of Las Vegas. He speed-read, identifying key words and scrolling rapidly past the rest, a concept he’d mastered. It was something he’d been forced to master. Often he had to read north of two hundred thousand words a day.

Being a tech wizard wasn’t as sexy as it seemed in the movies.

Now he read the transcript of a voice call made two minutes earlier, transcribed by an artificial intelligence that was accurate enough to get the gist of the conversation.

A: What happened?

B: They’re gone.

A: Who?

B: All four of them.

A: You sure?

B: A car made it out. And we just swept the house. There’s no bodies.

A: None at all?

B: Only ours.

A: Of course. Tell Citrine and Spinel to report back immediately … Hello? … Fucking answer me, you useless bastard.

B: The two men you sent … they’re in our body count.

A: What?

B: They’re both dead.

The transcript went no further.

Alonzo knew who the caller was, and what he would have done after he’d hung up.

There was no transcript of Onyx’s rage.

29

Violetta drove them eighty miles north-east to the small rural city of Mesquite.

She followed the speed limits when she deemed it prudent to keep a low profile, but as soon as the traffic dispersed she gunned it, chewing up the dark asphalt of I-15.

Alexis had dozed off early into the trip, beat down by the almighty hangover that came after sensory overload. As soon as Violetta reassured her that the coast was clear for the foreseeable future, she was out. King and Slater were equally quiet, but both awake, sitting statuesque in the back. Having both taken hard punches to their heads, they knew falling asleep wouldn’t be on the agenda for at least the next six hours. Slater without a doubt had a concussion, and King suspected he had one too. If they slackened and closed their eyes, their brains might bleed. They might never wake up.

So they stayed conscious and silent. Slater had patched King’s shoulder up as soon as they’d had the opportunity. Thankfully the bleeding had looked worse than it was, and he’d used the medkit they kept in the Mercedes to clean the wound, stitch it up and bandage it. The bullet hadn’t gone all the way in, only carving a thin chunk of meat out of his deltoid, so he still had full range of motion in his right arm, which something told him he’d need. There was pain, obviously, but when wasn’t there?

Now, Slater massaged his temples as he came slowly back to reality. The escape from the estate had been a bad dream, flashes of still images burning bright in his memory. He hadn’t imagined it. Their home really had been destroyed, their old life razed to the ground.

What’s new? he thought.

King didn’t utter a word of complaint the whole trip. Slater and Violetta knew he was hurting, but he’d never admit it. By his logic, addressing a problem before there’s any practical means to solve it is a waste of time and words. Any complaints would do nothing but draw attention to what was hurting. Instead he focused on his breath. Slater heard the deep six-count inhalations and the identical exhalations.

They reached Mesquite in less than an hour.

Alexis stirred as the Mercedes slowed, blinking and looking around. The desert city was low and sprawling, stretches of it eerily similar to their old suburb of Summerlin. The houses they drove past were sizeable, but spaced out further than those on the outskirts of Vegas, and the isolation outweighed everything else. The Mojave desert stretched in every direction, bleak and dark and hostile. The lights of the multiple casinos stayed on twenty-four hours a day, like seductive beacons on the frontier.

Violetta turned off the boulevard — the main artery of Mesquite — and took the Mercedes down the side streets. The streetlights inched further and further apart until their own white headlights were all that lit the way. It was impossibly barren on the edge of the city, and that was partly why they’d chosen the location.

As they pulled up to a small block of land choked with overgrown grass, sporting a small one-storey weatherboard house in its centre, Alexis