A Blood of Killers Read online

  If the agent also survived, he’d get him another day.

  Max scanned the wall on the street’s west side, found the break the Mossad agent was heading for. The old stone houses beyond, pocked with bullet holes, some with roofs and walls partially collapsed, looked abandoned. Max coiled himself for a sprint. Gun ready, he focused on getting through anyone trying to stop him, then finding transportation. If he timed it right, he could step on the agent’s ankle as he ran, perhaps break it.

  Two pickup trucks full of militia appeared suddenly out of the south, roaring through the street and skidding to a stop behind the burning Mercedes. The two men from the car, already on their knees from wounds, went down as the militia finished them. Another fire fight broke out between the newcomers and the ambush team.

  Now.

  The soft package cried.

  Max took off.

  The firefight died down suddenly. Men called out excitedly to each other in Arabic.

  Max glanced over his shoulder. The militia had abandoned the fight with the shooters along the eastern wall. They had fanned out and were running after him. A few had their AK-47s raised in firing position.

  He dove, not needing the Beast’s warning this time, just as the Mossad agent got up on one knee to race for cover.

  He hadn’t bothered checking. He was thinking only of the soft package, getting it to the rendezvous, completing the mission.

  Bullets cut him down, slicing through his legs and torso. His blood sprayed over the package he clutched to his chest.

  He went down twisting to land on his side, still protecting the mission’s purpose. By chance, or miracle, the exiting bullets missed the baby.

  Perhaps the value in what they’d killed for and stolen was as an engine of miracles.

  Another quick burst of gunfire crackled in the street.

  Max slithered on the ground, intending to break the agent’s neck to finish him. Purely in the interest of protecting the mission, he’d tell Mr. Jung.

  But the agent was already slipping away, his incoherent mumbling fading as blood poured from his tom up body. Max picked up a few words: kanaph, cherubim, diabolos, sair. Meaningless. Then he was gone.

  The Beast hissed its regret, demanded a taste of blood.

  The soft package slid to the ground, its swaddling of torn desert camouflage cloth coming loose. A baby’s head lolled at the top of the bundle. Tiny arms burst free, stretched spasmodically in all directions, pudgy fingers wiggling. Some of the agent’s blood streaked the back of the baby’s hand. The child brought the hand to its mouth and eagerly sucked its own flesh. An instant later, the infant was waving its arms again, hand clean, but mouth red and smiling.

  The thing looked like bait, eagerly luring prey to its doom.

  Its eyes, large, black, fixed on Max. Strands of black hair fell over its brow. It cried out again, howling like an animal caught in the jaws of its hunter. Max reached for the baby, stroked its hair. He wanted to say, you’re not my prey, yet.

  Max glanced over his shoulder. A militiaman was down and curled against the vicious kicks of a comrade who was cursing in Arabic. Max recognized those words. The rest had lowered their weapons into safety positions and stopped running, instead approaching cautiously at a ginger walk as if they realized they’d entered a minefield.

  He looked to the soft package, feral thoughts racing after instinctive connections.

  The Beast, to Max’s surprise, warmed to the infant. One instant, the Beast wanted to tear it apart with Max’s teeth. The next, the Beast demanded Max carry the thing off as if it was a cub, by the scruff of its neck between a killer’s teeth.

  Max couldn’t understand what was happening to the Beast, or with the militia.

  More men emerged from behind the western wall, trotting forward, dressed in street clothing and head wrappings different from what men wore locally. Small medallions hung from strings around their neck, uniting them through the strength of a hidden faith or purpose, like secret Christians from days as old as some of the surrounding stone houses and walls. The militia turned, raised their guns. A dozen voices clashed in passionate contention, arms and weapons waving in the air, frantic gestures and muzzles bobbing like flotsam on a restless sea.

  Max reacted, moving from the pull of his gut, the curling of fingers, and all that he’d learned from the murder of mothers.

  He snatched the infant. Stood up. Held the baby over his head in one hand, fingers sinking flesh, the Glock pressed against the soft, doughy side of its body while the swaddling cloth slipped to the ground.

  He could feel its chest expanding and contracting in his grip. Its skin burned, as if he’d pulled the child out of a pit of fiery coals.

  The baby stopped crying. He half-expected it to piss on his head. But the infant remained calm while suspended in mid-air with the hard metal of a weapon pressed to its belly.

  As if it had been born to death and was comforted by its closeness.

  Instead of the baby, it was Max who screamed, in defiance, in anticipation, in frustration. And joining him in his cry was the Beast, not with the blinding, blood-boiling roar that propelled him far beyond his mortal limitations, but with a mere echo his own dim fear of imminent annihilation.

  Max fought against the urge to cradle the infant to his chest.

  When his scream and his threat had frozen the advance of the men arrayed before him and left his throat raw, it was the Beast that purred as if the child really was its cub.

  Max took a sliding step back toward the western side of the street, still holding the gun to the baby over his head. He tried to concentrate on the distance he had to cover, the likelihood of being shot, wounded, captured or left to die. The walk was taking much longer than a run. As the militia and other men started following him, drifting wide to flank and encircle him, waving at each other and at him as if to calm any impulses to kill, Max’s attention focused on the wrecked jeep. Another feral thought leapt to consciousness. The ambush team had been after them, not the Mercedes, which at the last moment had presented a more logical focus as a vehicle in which to carry a child. The militia had not been responding to the attack on the Mercedes and its no doubt politically-connected occupants, but had been pursuing Max and the agent, intent on recovering the child.

  Rock the Casbah. That was the song.

  Irrelevant. Both him and the song. They wanted the baby. Apparently alive. But why blast the cars and endanger the child’s life? The situation didn’t make sense. Just like the mission.

  He lengthened his sliding backward steps, waiting for the Beast’s anger at being corralled to ignite. But all it seemed to want to do was stare into the baby’s eyes, like an animal fascinated by its own reflection. The ringing in his ears grew louder, and sprains and bruises from the fall he’d taken flared with fresh pain. His mind cleared, as if he’d climbed a mountain and broken through the cloud cover to find himself cold and lonely in a clear and infinite sky. The Beast was a faint howl rising from unreachable depths. He was, quite suddenly, alone.

  Threads of reasoning slipped through Max’s mind, leaving him with the only question that touched the real threat to him: What was wrong with his demon?

  Had it finally rebelled against the necessity of Max having to channel and even contain its appetites? Did the infant have some special significance to the Beast? Did they share a bond Max could not feel?

  He made a leap of logic he knew was driven only by the wound of abandonment: Did the Beast want Max dead so it could jump into a fresh young body?

  Even knowing he was reacting from vulnerability, his gun hand trembled with the struggle between pulling the trigger to put the child out of the Beast’s reach and the need to use the baby to escape.

  Mr. Jung’s mission priorities never factored into the problem’s equation.

  Another jet passed overhead, firing missiles at a distant target. Sirens rallied against the din of battle. More vehicles raised dust as they came barreling up the road.

 
Max sneezed. His trigger finger remained rock steady.

  A few men from the mix of militia and medallion-wearers had put down arms and were holding out their empty hands, speaking rapidly, with what passed for appeasing tones in the company of local men.

  The militiaman kicking the comrade who Max assumed had killed the Mossad agent took out a pistol and put two bullets in the offender’s head. He held the gun high up, showing it to Max, then placed it carefully on the ground and gestured toward the body and then to Max, as if offering the dead man as a sacrifice in exchange for the child.

  The rules of the life and death game they played had changed. Again. And without Mr. Jung’s intervention.

  The baby. Everyone wanted it. Yet it had been blasted with the rest of them by a rocket. Firing a gun on the baby, though, was punishable by death.

  The sun blazed bright into his eyes, rising through the war in the town, transforming men and buildings into jagged slices of obsidian.

  His mind flailed in the absence of the Beast’s rage. Leaped again.

  Bullets might harm the child, but not the explosive force of an RPG or the shrapnel it produced. Not the flames of a burning car.

  The jump didn’t feel right. The rules weren’t making sense.

  Max looked up at the baby. Discovered he held a boy.

  The boy was staring at him from between raised legs. His arms and his hands, now fisted, seemed to float as if supported by air. He didn’t fidget in Max’s hold. His black hair was matted from perspiration against his skull; his eyes, dark with the ink that would write the story of his life, never blinked.

  Max felt like he was holding something that was more than a baby. The infant’s weight suddenly made his arm shake with the effort of keeping his hostage aloft, as if he was holding up the sky.

  Had he ever been that tiny? That silent and unnatural?

  He heard again the muffled shots that had murdered the boy’s parents before he’d snatched the child from the crib. Had his mother been grateful, in the startled clarity of her dying moment, for the mercy of Max’s killing after feeling what was coming in her belly for all those months? Had his father been relieved that he wouldn’t have to live with the burden of responsibility for bearing the seed of the child’s conception?

  The thread of voices talking to him in Arabic wove through his head and thoughts. Shadows tried to touch him, but he stepped out of their reach. He was off the road, on the embankment’s rocky soil.

  Max had killed the parents too quickly, under cover of night, to read their final expressions. He’d refused to feed the Beast. Mr. Jung would not have wanted to read about Max lingering over death, perhaps considering the gratification one of his unnatural appetites, in a mission debrief.

  And how would Max have interpreted any unexpected reactions if he had stopped to notice them?

  He wouldn’t have cared. The only thing that mattered was surviving in the world, and satisfying both himself and the Beast once he’d fulfilled his responsibilities.

  It was a sign of the Beast’s preoccupation that it did not rise up in resentment over the memory of kills it had not fed on.

  One of the medallion-bearers broke into tears as he pointed at the baby and seemed to plead with Max to let him have the boy.

  Max had cut the distance to the broken western wall by half. But his enemies were closing, circling, nearly in position to cut him off.

  The track of land between road and town was wide. He had meters to go before daring a foot race.

  They wouldn’t shoot.

  He wasn’t sure he could make it.

  Kill the boy now, freeze them with the shock of the loss, then run. Or run first, kill if he was brought down.

  The thumps of a few isolated mortar rounds being launched nearby added a brief new line to the music of battle, but offered no immediate help.

  He peered into the boy’s eyes, looking for an answer. He swam in their darkness for a moment, sun and street and dust suddenly banished. Hard, sharp shapes shifted in and out of the gloom. A tingling sensation traveled up an invisible limb, found his spine, crawled the length of its bones and nerves, settled in his chest where an ache opened cracks in the rock he always thought he carried there.

  He found comfort in the boy’s eyes, their silent depths thick and heavy with mystery.

  Max thought he understood at least a part of the Beast’s attraction to the creature.

  He shook his head, feeling the threat of danger at his throat. The brightness of the Middle East morning world suddenly returned and washed the boy’s darkness away, leaving the trace of secrets behind.

  One of the medallion men chanted what sounded like a prayer. The militiamen had stopped talking. Their shifting eyes exposed the calculations they were making for a quick rush.

  Max turned again to the Beast inside him, desperate for its reckless power. He gasped for breath with the effort, his stomach turning, ready to heave bitter bile.

  He found the burning star of its rage, diminished, contained as only Mr. Jung could have desired, but couldn’t stoke it back to life. He pounded at the Beast with his own frustration, but slipped, fell, inside of himself, toward and then suddenly around the Beast, and then along a slippery tether of rage and something else, something frightening and alien and destructive—love was the only word he could come up with, and it wasn’t a meaningful fit.

  It was the Beast’s bond with the boy.

  He rode the link, no differently than riding the Beast’s rage except that it did not make him stronger. Instead, it carried him to a foreign land, a place where nothing was familiar.

  He caught a flash of the child’s fear, a glimpse of what had and was happening through its eyes.

  His perceptions sharpened, leading him to connections he would not have made an instant earlier.

  The child’s hot skin told him fire would not touch him. The lack of bruising or cuts, despite the blast and the Mossad agent’s leap from a moving car, informed him that other elements like air, even in a shock wave, or earth, couldn’t harm him. A random hit by shrapnel would also probably fail to cause any damage.

  It was the focused, human intent to kill, in the shape of a bullet, a knife, a club, to which the boy was vulnerable.

  Max found firm footing on death’s common ground.

  As a warning, he shot the closest militia soldier in the leg. The man was falling before anyone’s expression registered that he’d moved the gun. He’d hoped the men would hesitate, that a few would stop to take care of their fallen comrade.

  The medallion men faltered, but not the militia. Only one of their number checked on the wounded man, and he quickly resumed his position.

  A bullet to a more critical area, perhaps.

  Max’s assassin’s mind turned back to the boy, questioned how any limitation on death was possible, and then, leaping ahead, if poison would work, or if it was too slow and divorced from the driving power of human will to be effective. The boy would no doubt survive snake bites, even spoiled food, so poison was probably not an effective tool. Traps might also lack the specificity of a killer’s purpose. Even the accidental and anonymous threats of a modern battle, with bombs and bullets sprayed into impersonal killing zones, would prove ineffective according to these new rules.

  It was as if the child had emerged from a primal age when predators and their prey, or warriors and their enemies, decided each others’ fate with tooth and claw, spear or club, and disease or old age or accidents had not yet become death’s instruments. Only gods, or the murderous resolve of a mortal man, might end life. Like some ancient heroic warrior, or perhaps a monster risen from a deep pit, the boy was protected from all harm except the specific threat directed against only him.

  The infant boy understood his strength and vulnerability, if only with the instinct of a cornered animal. Max picked up the scent of trapped prey, as well as the reason for the boy’s fear and the caution of others.

  Beyond the immediacy of the gun Max held pressed agains
t his body, the greatest threat to the boy was his own dependency: a bullet intended for someone carrying him conducted all the intention necessary to kill him. By the primal law in which the child existed, the death of a protector meant death to whatever had been sheltered. It was the same logic that made victorious armies slaughter the citizens of a conquered city.

  Superstitious nonsense.

  And yet, the truth and honesty of such reasoning resonated in both Max and the Beast.

  But there was no such magical law in the real world.

  Just as there could be no such thing as the Beast, with Max since his earliest memories, feeding and nurturing him on the bloody milk of death.

  Max let the contradiction flutter away. He had to stick to figuring out what the boy was about in this world, not in some imaginary past or hallucinogenic present.

  He moved to fire another warning shot, but the men were ready, tensing to rush as they watched his gun hand.

  He put the gun back firmly pressed against the baby’s body. They’d figured out he might get three or four shots off before their numbers overwhelmed him.

  The child meant that much to them.

  The rules. Whatever their nature or truth, they explained the reasoning behind an RPG attack, broad enough perhaps in killing intention to clear away protectors without harming the child. The way he was being approached and the execution of the man who’d endangered the child told Max that at least the men before him believed in the rules he’d surmised, even if Max did not.

  He couldn’t believe such things might exist.

  Sudden movement made Max bring the gun down. Without a clear thought, he’d made the choice not to kill the boy.

  A militiaman jumped forward, followed by two others from Max’s flanks.

  Max put holes in all of their guts. Predictably, human instinct took over and the rest of the men froze for the first two shots.

  Max took off, racing for the wall.

  Shooting on the run, holding the baby to his chest, all the while tracking the closing net of his pursuers, he wasted five rounds taking out the two closest to cutting him off from the break in the wall.