On the corner of a street south of the river, local militia smash a jeweller’s door from its frame with a sledgehammer. They’re drunk to the last man. Cheering the corporal with the hammer to keep their courage up.
‘Fucking heretics,’ one says.
Two of the others spit. Doubt they even know they’ve done it.
The door goes down and the jeweller dies in his own doorway. I see it happen as we walk past, protected by our ferox-skulled armbands from the militia and the furies. Fuck knows what’s on the bands to make the furies docile around us.
‘Pheromones,’ Leona says.
She has to tell me what these are. They’re animal stinks that trigger fucking or fighting. Leona says humans don’t produce pheromones. I ask her if she’s sure.
A woman drops a baby from an upper window. The child is still alive after hitting the sidewalk. It survives as long as it takes an NCO to stamp on its head.
The woman doesn’t know it’s dead, because she’s trying to lower herself by her hands, but she slips and lands badly. Slamming her face into the sidewalk, the NCO holds it there as he pulls her nightie to her hips and spits on his fingers.
She keeps trying to look round.
Wants to see the kid on the sidewalk behind her.
The NCO cuts her throat a second before he pulls out. An accidental kindness, since she dies with the dead baby unseen.
Leona has never seen a city sacked before.
At least, that’s what I assume. She looks outraged at my suggestion. Seems she’s seen cities sacked, just never seen one sack itself. Have to admit, that’s new to me too. And the crowd around me is getting bigger by the minute and more out of control. According to my old lieutenant there’s a sliding scale for these things.
You get people, crowds, mobs and riots.
I’m wondering where we are on that scale . . .
A grinding of gears announces the arrival of a scout car, complete with machine gun, searchlights, a dozen militia hanging from the back, and a freshly painted and still wet stencil of a ferox skull. It’s obviously been allowed over the bridge.
‘Over there. Doubters.’
Three men freeze in the glare of the searchlight.
A fury flicks its gaze towards them. In its grip is an old woman, whose head flails from side to side as she screams. As the fury hesitates between the meal it has, and the larger one it could have, a group of youths swagger from the shadows into the brightness of the scout car’s light.
They’re not militia. But they are organized.
One holds the torch, now redundant. The rest have knives stolen from a food stall. Crudely painted skeletons drip from their clothes. A single white line for the lower leg, a blob for the kneecap, and a thicker line above. The hips, ribs and arms are equally crude. Whitened faces and darkened eyes make them look as though they’re celebrating the Day of the Damned.
Blood splatters their ankles and boots so thoroughly it looks as if they’ve been wading through puddles of the stuff. Fanning out, the gang keep half their attention on the fury and the rest on their new targets.
One of the doubters tries to flee and falls to his knees with a cleaver in his back. The boy who throws it stops to take a bow. Amateurs. My least favourite kind of killer.
‘Out of here,’ I tell Leona. ‘This way.’
‘What about them?’
She means the gang in their festival clothes.
‘Who knows?’ I say. ‘If we get lucky the fury will kill them.’ Having finished with the old woman, the creature now flicks its attention between the gang and the doubters. Personally, I know which I’d kill.
A doubter family lie in the courtyard of their own home. Rich merchants from the look of it. A hunting rifle rests near the dead man. His wife has a bullet through her head. So does he. His son died fighting. Aged thirteen, maybe younger.
All the boy’s wounds are at the front, apart from the one that killed him. A bloodied brick shows how he died. His sister lies behind him. A year younger still, her gown ripped open.
‘Fuck,’ Leona says.
Yeah, I agree. No one who kills for a living likes killing children.
Eyes watch me kneel to take the rifle and I realize the girl is still alive. Her throat’s been cut. The problem with amateurs is they’re amateur. Furies leave nothing but dried husks behind. And troopers, even militia ones, don’t leave jobs like this half done.
‘It’s going to be OK.’
Hard to tell what colour her eyes are. She tries to speak but the words are lost in bubbles from her throat. The cut ends just before her artery. All it needed was half a second’s more professionalism and she’d be dead.
I place my hand over the gash.
‘Help me,’ she whispers.
‘Of course,’ I say, bending closer.
‘We have a regeneration tank,’ the girl tells me. ‘In the cellar.’ She tries to look to where her mother sprawls behind me. ‘Is she . . .?’
‘Unconscious.’
‘Really?’
‘A bad fall.’
Takes Leona a while to work out what my back-stretched arm means. And then she kneels beside me and I feel the warmth of a wooden handle and the comfort of a blade that takes the girl under the ghost of her breasts.
A single flicker of shock signals her end.
Don’t have a prayer to say over dead children. So I recite the only prayer I do have. The one which wishes dead comrades deep sleep and a better life next time. My voice is distant. Cold as ice. Has to be me speaking because I can taste the bitterness of the words and feel the anger behind them.
‘Sir?’
‘I’m going to hunt down whoever ordered this. And I’m going to kill him, slowly . . .’
‘Do we find Colonel Jaxx first, sir?’
Good question.
Taking the rifle, I drop out its clip and find it empty. Spent cases tell me why. The militia have removed their own dead, and left their victims. Come morning, this whole area will be an abattoir.
The gun room is at the back of their house. A steel cupboard lies open, with its safety chain left hanging slack in the owner’s hurry to fetch his rifle. A box of .762 is tipped on its side. He should have taken those too. His son and daughter might be alive if he had.
‘Doubt it, sir,’ Leona says.
She’s right, of course. But he could have extracted a higher price. That would be worth something. Fastening the suppressor into place with a single twist, I thumb ten rounds into the clip and find I have enough .762 left over to make my pockets heavy.
It’s a game rifle, complete with scope.
A very expensive game rifle.
And I stuff my jacket with round after round until I run out of pockets to take more. Jacking the first shell into place, I hook the webbing sling round my elbow and wrap it once round my wrist.
We swapped our Kemzins for weapons carried by the militia officers we killed, and now I’ve swapped my pick of those for this. Leona gets my previous choice, a light machine gun with curving clip.
Times like this I could do with having both hands.
Mind you, I could also do with my SIG-37, not to mention the sabre General Luc’s sergeant took from me when he removed my combat arm.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Let’s do this.’
Sergeant Leona wants to ask, Do what?
If I knew, I’d tell her. In fact, when I do know, I will tell her. Until then she’s going to have to wait.
Out on the street, four militia NCOs break down another door. They die silently; one after another in the time it takes me to sight. The last one goes down desperately trying to work out where my shots are coming from.
My next round blows half a fury’s head away.
The creature barely notices. Next time I see it, the fury is in an upstairs window, feeding from a girl who tries to throw herself into the street below.
Dropping to one knee, I centre the scope’s cross hairs.
The hollow-point takes the fury under its chin, spreads on impact and blows fragments of spine through the smashed mess I made of its skull earlier. My second shot kills the screaming girl. Like most people in this city she’s beyond saving.