Fatal Strike (McClouds & Friends #10)(88)

I know, sir, but this is SERIOUS please come He gave in to the inevitable, following the beacon of Miranda’s mental signature. He reached out to monitor the rest of his staff . . .

And found nothing.

He came upon Miranda. She pointed, her face white and stiff.

Mehalis hung from the bough of a spruce tree, from a noose fashioned from the duct tape he had carried on his belt. His arms and feet were taped together. His face looked startled, eyes bulging.

Ten meters away, Biehl too hung, by his feet. Blood dripped copiously from his slashed throat. Greaves walked past Biehl’s dangling body. Twenty yards further downhill, he found Wilcox. Also hanging, suspended, from plasticuffs which held his hands together over a tree bough, three feet off the ground. His neck dangled at a strange angle.

Lara Kirk did not kill those men. All the yoga in the world would not render a hundred and ten pound girl powerful enough to hoist those men into the trees. This was her ogre’s work. Her brawny champion.

A loud rustling and snapping of twigs indicated that Miranda and Silva were joining him. Greaves closed his eyes, scanning for Lara Kirk, using that faint, elusive anti-signature, so like and yet unlike Geoff’s.

He heard the faint, faraway rev of a motor. A motorcycle. So they had a hidden vehicle down on the road. They would have a ten-minute lead by the time they got back down to the road to give chase.

So. This round went to them. Again.

Greaves turned, and started walking back toward the car.

Silva and Miranda hastened to follow. “Sir, what do we do now? Do we—”

“Cut them down,” he said. “Load them up. There are body bags in the car. Get to it.”

Silva and Miranda looked at each other, shocked. “Ah, sir . . . Mehalis was the one with telekinesis, for the heavy lifting. Do you suppose that you could, ah . . .”

“No,” he snarled. “I am not a stevedore. Go get those body-bags, and hurry, unless you want to fill one of them yourself.”

They scurried through the forest to collect the body bags.

The silence mocked him like a smirk, broken only by the plop, plop of blood, dripping from the dead man’s hair.





lara! haul ass! he’s coming!

Lara jolted out of her startled contemplation of the last hanging corpse, and struggled onward. His sharpness jolted her into a shaky trot. Her rubbery knees and ankles kept giving out on her, making her stumble and slip.

4 the lv of Christ pls less noise change course 20 degrees 2 ur right and fcking HURRY

She didn’t reply, just pushed on. Tears streamed from her eyes. She wasn’t quite sure why. She had no point of contact with whatever feeling had provoked them. She was numb.

A strong arm clamped her from behind. Sticky with blood, to the elbow. She squeaked with terror before she recognized him.

The world swooped, breath whooshed out of her lungs, and they slipped, slid, tumbled together down the last steep slope— and came up short, battered and coughing in the ditch at the roadside among drifts of knapweed and pine needles. Miles was up, hauling his computer bag and the motorcycle from the dark maw of the culvert before Lara even got up onto her hands and knees.

He yanked her to her feet and hoisted the vehicle onto the roadway, draping the computer bag over her back.

“You hold this.” He shoved an assault rifle into her hands. “Move!”

His voice stung like a flail. She swung her leg over the seat, clutched the heavy weapon against her belly, trying to hang on as the bike surged into motion.

Wind battered her face. She pressed it between his shoulder blades. His shirt blew open, flapping, wrapping itself around her forearms. Wet with blood. Thick and viscous, flapping her wrists.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Saw hanging bodies, staring eyes, dripping blood. She dug deeper, trying to find that place in her mind where she felt safe, inside the Citadel. She’d been comforting herself for months in that safe haven, and it had never failed her yet.

But it was different now. The warmth had all bled out of it.

It was the dead of winter in there.





21


He’d declared war.

Miles pondered that with the small part of his mind that was not co-opted by the churning machine. He had thought it was a shield, but now he realized that it was much more than that. The minute he’d opened a door and fired a shot outward, a huge waiting engine had roared into life. The Citadel was not a static wall, not a fortress to huddle inside.

It was a big, nasty, evil motherf*cking war machine.

With that war machine’s engine humming, he could let go of scruples and doubts and all his usual monkey-mind bullshit, and just do the job. Going after Greaves’ commando freaks, taking them all out with his knife, for instance. The person he’d been before would not have been able to coolly slash a guy’s carotid artery, hang him by his feet to bleed out like a slaughtered pig, and continue on his way. To kill again.

He didn’t even know the guy who had done that. Lara didn’t think she knew him either. He could feel it in her trembling arms against his belly. He could still feel her inside his shield, but it wasn’t the usual happy glow. There was tension, frozen uncertainty.

She was afraid of him now.

It had been sort of like that back when he started using the shield, but in a smaller way. People had complained about his coldness, his distance. It was that phenomenon, taken to its natural, inevitable conclusion. The possibility of becoming a stone-cold monster didn’t register so much as a blip on his emotional sensors right now.