Ghostwalk

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 1

Kane did not hear the shot or see anyone with a gun.

The shock of the bullet’s impact high on his right shoulder jerked him around, his feet tangling, his back slamming hard against the adobe wall.

Kane let his body sag to the ground. He could hear only his own strained breath as he swallowed air into his emptied lungs. As quickly as he could, he crawled behind a heap of chipped masonry. Pain streaked up and down his arm like flares of heat lightning, but he didn’t think any bones were broken. Still, he had to clamp his jaws tightly shut against a groan of pain. He fingered the small hole punched through his tricolor desert-camouflage blouse and winced.

His mind swam with anger. Your own fault, dumbass, he snapped at himself. He knew he should have checked out every structure in the ruins of the old village before leaving the shelter of the walls, but concern over a missing team member had made him reckless.

A single dirt lane led to the settlement, which was a cluster of small huts, most of them roofless, surrounding a well. The north wall had collapsed into rubble and dried mud bricks long ago. The place looked like a typical abandoned Outland village so Kane hadn’t strolled through it with any particular caution.

He hitched around, careful not to dislodge any loose stones and give away his position. The lowering sun was a blinding red ball, and if nothing else, Kane appreciated his sunglasses. His eyes swept over the featureless sandy plain. Less than a hundred yards to his right rose a range of low hills with a rolling tongue of sand dunes between them.

High, rust-red mesas towered between the low hills. He resisted taking a drink from his canteen, straining his hearing for any sound of movement. He heard only the singing silence of the desert stirred by the constant hot breeze. Sand and the dry wind sapped all the juices from his body, parching the throat and dehydrating the flesh.

The sun dropped down behind one of the flat-topped outcroppings, and long shadows stretched toward him. Heat waves blurred the far horizon. The peaks of the Jemez Mountain Range were only a wavering mirage many miles to the south.

Kane had been walking point, a habit he had acquired during his years as a Magistrate because of his uncanny ability to detect imminent danger. He called it a sixth sense, but his pointman’s sense was really a combined manifestation of the five he had trained to the epitome of keenness. When he walked point, Kane felt electrically alive, sharply tuned to every nuance of his surroundings and what he was doing. Most of the time, he could sense danger from far off.

Now he wondered if his senses, his instincts, were failing him. In potential killzones, he normally walked with such care it was almost a form of paranoia. He had grown accustomed to always being watchful and alert, to expecting the unexpected. This time his pointman’s sense had let him down.

Or, he thought sourly, I’m just getting old.

Reaching up behind his right ear, he tapped the Commtact, a flat curve of metal fastened to the mastoid bone by implanted steel pintels. Sensor circuitry incorporated an analog-to-digital voice encoder embedded within the bone. Once the device made full cranial contact, the auditory canal conveyed the radio transmissions directly through the skull casing.

Kane touched the volume control and a hash of static filled his head. Quickly he dialed it back down, grimacing both in frustration and pain. A frequency-dampening field spread out like a vast umbrella over the village, blocking all radio communications. He could think of only a couple of groups with access to that kind of tech.

Brewster Philboyd had volunteered to scout out the zone to prove his suspicions. When Kane declined to grant him permission, Philboyd had gone anyway. He had not returned.

Clenching his teeth, Kane inched toward one of the lengthening shadows. Although his shoulder burned fiercely from the impact of the bullet, he carefully flexed the tendons of his right wrist. With the faint drone of a tiny electric motor, cables slid the Sin Eater from its forearm holster and into the palm of his hand. His fingers tingled with a painful pins-and-needles sensation and they barely stirred.

The Sin Eater, the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, was an automatic handgun, less than fourteen inches in length, with an extended magazine carrying 20 9 mm rounds. When not in use, the butt folded over the top of the weapon, lying perpendicular to the frame, reducing its holstered length to ten inches.

If the autopistol was needed, a flexing of wrist tendons activated sensitive actuator cables within the holsters and snapped the weapon smoothly into his waiting hands, the butt unfolding in the same motion. Since the Sin Eater did not have a trigger guard or a safety switch, the autopistol fired immediately when his index finger touched the firing stud.

The wrist actuators ignored all movements except the one that indicated the gun should be unholstered. It was a completely automatic, almost unconscious movement practiced by Kane.

Kane heard a faint crunch, as of a foot coming down on loose stone. Carefully he leaned over, peering around the base of the rock heap. The figure of a man stepped through a wide crack in the adobe wall. Because he was backlit by the shimmering corona of the setting sun, Kane couldn’t pick out specific details beyond the very long-barreled pistol in the man’s right fist. The man moved quickly and purposefully, walking heel-to-toe with expert ease, keeping the wall to his right.

Inhaling a deep breath through his nostrils, Kane pushed the Sin Eater back into the holster, hearing the lock solenoid catch with a pair of soft clicks. He noted the foot-long sound suppressor that was screwed into the bore of the man’s autopistol. The silencer had successfully reduced the noise of the gunshot, but had also reduced the bullet’s velocity sufficiently so it had only knocked Kane down rather than penetrating the Spectra fabric of his shadow suit.

A sound suppressor seemed a very strange attachment for a man on foot out in the wastelands of New Mexico, but Kane had no time to wonder about it.

With his left hand, he drew the fourteen-inch-long combat knife from the sheath at his waist. He gripped the Nylex handle tightly while he grimly tried to coax more feeling into his right arm. He waited, barely breathing, listening for sounds of the gunman’s progress.

Built with a lean, long-limbed economy, most of Kane’s muscle mass was contained in his upper body, much like that of a wolf. A wolf’s cold stare glittered in his blue-gray eyes. A faint hairline scar showed like a white thread against the sun-bronzed skin of his left cheek. His thick dark hair glistened with sweat at the roots.

He listened to the stealthy tramp of feet, realizing that the way the man soft-footed through the loose gravel and sand indicated he wasn’t sure of his shot. Kane felt pressure moving along his nerves and he rose to a crouch, favoring his injured shoulder.

A shadow crept slowly across the ground toward him, then it halted. Kane figured the gunman was eyeing the pile of rock, studying the tracks in the sand, guessing that his quarry more than likely hid behind it.

The man advanced silently in a smooth, fast rush. In his eagerness to get past the heap of stone, he grazed the wall with a knee and was thrown slightly off balance. He stumbled, reaching out to steady himself.

Kane slashed out with the knife, the razored edge penetrating the leather of a jump boot and slicing the tendon at the man’s left heel. He uttered a strangulated screech and staggered forward, leg buckling.

The man’s shoulder slammed against the wall, and a webwork of cracks spread out across the sun-baked clay. Kane caught an impression of a smooth, round face contorted in agony and surprise. The hollow bore of the sound suppressor swung toward him. Although he gave the handgun only the most fleeting of glances, he identified it as a Calico M-950 rimfire.

Kane dodged to one side, hearing a faint thump, then the sharp whine of a ricochet somewhere behind him. With his right hand, he knocked the pistol aside, then whipped the blade of the combat knife forward, stopping the razor edge a hairbreadth from the man’s throat.

For a long second, the two men stared into each other’s eyes. A round button on the man’s dun-colored coverall glinted with dim sun sparks. The inscribed image showed a stylized representation of a featureless man holding a cornucopia, a horn of plenty, in his left hand and a sword in his right, both crossed over his chest. No words were imprinted on it, but none were necessary.

“The Millennial Consortium,” Kane said softly.

“I should’ve known.”

The man’s lips writhed back over his teeth in a sneer. In the same low tone he said, “The Cerberus crew. We did know.”

Chapter 2

The millennialist struggled, trying to align the bore of the noise suppressor with Kane’s head.

Kane tensed his wrist tendons and the Sin Eater slapped into his palm, the barrel smacking the side of the man’s head as it popped from the holster. He cried out in pain and fear, squeezing his eyes shut in anticipation of a bullet plowing a path through hair, flesh, bone and brain.

Kane didn’t depress the trigger stud or even increase the pressure of the knife blade. Calmly he said, “You’re leaking a lot of blood, pal. If you want to keep enough of it in you to stay alive, I’m your only option.”

The millennialist’s lips twisted in pain and frustration. His skin was pinked by the sun, and his wispy blond hair was cut very short. He resembled most of the other consortium grunts Kane had met over the past few years. He looked to be in his early thirties.

“All right,” he said hoarsely. “All right.”

He opened his hand and the Calico dropped to the ground.

Picking up the man’s pistol, Kane took the knife away from the man’s throat. “What’s your name?”

“What difference does it make?”

Kane shrugged. “None. I just thought it was the polite thing to ask of a man I’ve probably crippled.”