A Blood of Killers Read online

  He was through and into the dead town’s streets with a quick leap. Another bomb went off on the other side of the road, shaking buildings and bringing down a rain of dust and fine debris.

  The men pursued. But each time he glanced back, he found less directly behind him as they spread out into alleys and vanished into the ruins of houses.

  Max took closer note of his surroundings. This part of the town was old, war-ravaged. A necropolis surrendered only recently to death—clothing, toys, appliances, even decomposing bodies lay out in the open. Nothing useful would be found here. He should have headed east, into the larger battle. There would have been more danger, but also options for finding transportation.

  His enemies knew the territory, the shortcuts through the winding, narrow streets.

  But he still had the advantage of being able to fire a gun with impunity, as long as he held on to the baby.

  The Beast, at last, was rising, as much against the threat to the child as the danger to itself, or Max. He felt its rage coursing through his legs, firing up his pumping heart. He breathed more easily, though the Beast was still remote, a faint presence attending to the child, jealously guarding their bond. The ringing in his ears diminished.

  Without breaking stride, he climbed a mound of rubble, looked back, and caught two of the medallion men with clean shots.

  More than half the rounds gone. Changing magazines on the run was going to be impossible.

  He focused on the way ahead.

  The sound of ambulance sirens echoed between the houses. There had to be another passable road nearby, probably going east to west, intersecting with the north/south route Max had been taking.

  He turned to the left, heading north, taking a chance at running into the crossing road. Almost instantly, a man came at him with the butt of his AK-47. Max stutter-stepped and the man mistimed his blow. Max got off one shot that was enough to stop him, and kept moving.

  The Beast resented missing the opportunity to kill.

  So did the child.

  Max slowed, concentrated on moving quietly through the ruins. The boy, as if understanding the danger, barely breathed. A band of militia stormed past Max as he hid in a cul-de-sac. He doubled back toward the street wall before the group realized they’d missed him.

  The sun climbed higher into the sky. Artillery shells careened into the ground nearby, but Max couldn’t tell exactly where the shells were landing. In the distance, a rocket launched in answer. The jets, he knew, would come again very soon.

  He’d never carried a baby before. The warmth of the small body against his seemed like the heat from a frail campfire around which two flesh-and-blood humans huddled against the cold night and all that it might hold. The Beast was the light by which they could see each other, and all they ever had and would kill.

  The intimacy of blood and night and death startled Max.

  Two medallion-bearers stood atop single-story houses looking out over the streets. Max backed away, his route to the main road blocked. In the distance, a wounded man screamed. Smoke rose into blue sky from all around him.

  He took out a clip, put it between himself and the baby, fingertips keeping it in place. The boy positioned his hands to help Max, even flexing fingers too small and clumsy to actually grip anything larger than an adult’s finger in the effort to secure the magazine.

  Their hands brushed against each other. Max’s flesh tingled when it should have crawled.

  The sense of intimacy he felt with the child confused him, conflicted with his needs and appetites. He didn’t want the thing he carried, but at the same time couldn’t help wondering if the boy might someday grow into a companion closer than his old comrade Lee, than anyone he’d ever known, perhaps even replace the Beast as a source of strength and company.

  Would his own son be like this boy?

  Max stopped, went down on a knee and took a moment to gather himself.

  Someone passed on the other side of the wall. He could have shot him through a crack, but that would have revealed his position.

  The Beast grumbled. The boy shifted restlessly in the crook of his arm.

  What made him think he’d ever father a child?

  He took another slow, deep breath. These weren’t the kinds of questions he normally asked of himself. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever questioning his own actions. That was something the world did in its attempt to crush and annihilate him with the weight and numbers of the so-called innocents it harbored.

  The thing he carried was influencing him like a drug or hallucinogenic gas. He needed to get rid of this baby. Fast. Something bad was going to happen. He could feel change coming, a change he wouldn’t survive. He’d lose himself. Lose the Beast, and everything they’d become, together.

  What were his employers planning to do with such an entity? Why was this baby so important to the people chasing him? Max didn’t care.

  Would the boy grow up to be a killer?

  His replacement, or his killer?

  He’d have a better chance surviving by giving up the boy and making a break on his own. Toss the thing over the wall. Tell Mr. Jung the Mossad agent had lost the soft package.

  The Beast rebelled, refusing to give up its new favorite.

  Stupid. He’d lose his only protection against hunters capable of picking him off in the open at a distance. Even with the boy dead, or surrendered to them, he could see no reason why they’d let him live. Mercy was not a key in which the song of ancient laws could be sung.

  He tilted the baby’s head to meet his gaze.

  “Let me do my work and we’ll both live,” he whispered. Nearby, voices shouted to each other in Arabic.

  Max crept west toward the road he knew. More ambulance sirens drifted through the dead town.

  He was never prey. He was always the hunter.

  It was a simple truth, but one lost in the blast and the complexities of negotiating his place in the company of the soft package and the Beast.

  He had to take more chances. Use his advantages as well as his skills, like any predator.

  A single militiaman crossed an alley ahead of him. Max fired, shifting slightly to present a slim profile as his target, in a panic, fired back. The look of horror on his face—at his own death, or for almost killing the boy—provoked the Beast and dragged it just a bit further out of the comfortable den of its fascination with the infant.

  Blood had always been the Beast’s weakness.

  But he’d wasted three rounds for one kill.

  A jet executed a soaring turn overhead. Explosions rocked the earth further south. The eastern sky was darkening with smoke. It sounded like a war had found him, after all.

  Max raced through the gap. Stopped. Looked back at an AK-47, but let it go. Too hard to handle while carrying the boy. Waited in hiding for pursuers to run past him on either side as they raced to cut him off from the road. He brought down three more from behind. One shot apiece. Wounded, not dead. He changed magazines.

  Only sixteen rounds, this time. None in the chamber.

  A shadow moved. He aimed, without turning, at the memory of a roofline brimming with sun. Fired. A heavy object crashed to the ground.

  The Beast coursed through him like a shot of adrenaline. He was the hunter again. The world had returned to normal.

  He grabbed the last magazine from his pocket in preparation, gave up heading for the road and followed his nature to hunt what wanted him.

  He picked off militia and medallion men as they closed their net, moving constantly, silently, using the ruins for cover, slipping between and behind them. The boy remained quiet, staring at Max. Though they knew their own territory, it was any hunter’s ground.

  A militiaman surprised him from behind, swinging a metal pipe. Max ducked, felt the wind of the missed blow pass his face, fired. But he’d taken himself out of position and the bullet hit the archway the militiaman slipped through as he ran away from the gun.

  A rock hurtled through the air, missed
Max. Another rock came flying past his head.

  Max held the boy in front of his face, like a shield, and turned back and forth, randomly, while keeping the gun on the baby. He retreated into the remains of a house. Went to the back and began kicking down the loose stones of a wall. Part of the roof came down around him and he had to hold the boy close to his chest to protect him. The Beast tore at Max’s chest as if to add the shelter of its invisible arms.

  Outside, men gathered, flitting in and out of cover, enticing Max to waste ammunition while they approached for a final rush. Rocks flew in through the door, windows and partially collapsed roof. One stung his gun-hand shoulder, another bit into his calf.

  The Beast rose howling in Max’s head. Pain brought them closer.

  He managed at last to kick a hole through the unstable wall between two houses, fired at shadows in the billowing cloud of dust and emptied his second clip. The Beast guided his hand, catching scents and anticipating motion. His pursuers had been waiting. He’d wounded three, killed two.

  The rest outside came running at the sound of his firing. Max pushed through the hole he’d made. The Beast pulled at him to finish the wounded, to let it gorge itself on the blood of those who’d tried to hurt it. Max paused over one of the badly hit men. The Beast writhed like a trapped snake between his ribs. Max grunted, the desire for atrocity a burning needle piercing bone between his eyes. He gritted his teeth, dipped the muzzle of the Glock into the blood, painted the boy’s face. Then he dipped the tips of his extended gun-hand fingers into the pulsing throat wound of the dying man, licked, and tasted blood.

  The Beast raked the walls of its prison of flesh, demanding more. Max pulled himself away. The boy cried like a hungry newborn rooting for his mother’s teat.

  Max took off, wishing he’d already changed the magazine to catch the first of his pursuers coming after him through the hole he’d made.

  The Beast filled him, moved him, wore his flesh like a costume. The boy was forgotten in its savage lust to kill. Max felt nearly whole once again.

  The last of his ammunition in place, he barely made it to high ground before six more men burst out of the house from which he’d just emerged. He caught one before they dispersed.

  He was not the kind of hunter who waited for prey to come to him while dodging rocks. He was a hunter who ran with the herd and took down not only the weakest, but all the rest desperate to elude him. He was the hunter who mingled with the pack pursuing him, intent on killing not only its strongest, but all the others who hungered for his life.

  The boy cried in his arms, kicked, fought to get free. Max held the baby out at arm’s length in front of him, as much to shield himself from stones as to keep the child from disrupting his aim as he picked off his enemies. Their throws became erratic as they ducked his fire, and also seemed to realize how he was using their prize.

  When they stopped breaking cover, Max went to ground in a basement half-filled with debris. The child wouldn’t stop crying, exposing their location and interfering with his ability to hear anyone approaching. The Beast turned on the boy, tightening Max’s grip slightly even through his attempt at self-control, until Max was sweating and breathing hard and the child’s wailing had turned high-pitched and hysterical. He might as well have been one of the ambulances rushing to the scene of civilian casualties. Or at a funeral for one of his victims.

  Max understood. Mother and father dead, the boy had found the Beast only to lose even that source of comfort.

  Max wrapped the boy in his own T-shirt and left him in a wall niche, loosely tied up with his web belt so he wouldn’t tumble out, and climbed out on to a roof. He circled, keeping low, surprising one of the men who’d ambushed him. He choked the man, then as a reward to the Beast, gouged his eyes out and ate them. The Beast took the offering reluctantly, disappointed it had not fed on the man’s suffering. But survival demanded quick and silent kills. He tracked his prey as they closed in on the baby’s cries. He shot quickly, carefully, like lightning striking from a cloudless sky before his victims could scurry back to cover. He managed to cripple all but one, whose death Max mourned. He was saving them for later.

  The last of the militiamen and the lone survivor of the medallion wearers appeared. Intent on the baby’s position, distracted only momentarily by the wounded and the dead they passed, it seemed to Max that they wanted only to grab their prize before Max did any more killing. There were not enough hunters to chase him down. The two might even pause to settle their initial rivalry if they knew for certain he was gone.

  The way to the road was open. Suddenly, Max was free. He could say he’d thought the baby died with the Mossad agent.

  He looked to the east. The sun beckoned.

  But the Beast would not let him go. It demanded its due.

  He took his last two hunters out, quick and clean. The rest, moaning and bleeding among the ruins, he gave to the Beast, which took its time. Max found a knife, and that helped extend their stay.

  The sun was overhead by the time Max and the Beast were done. The fighting on the other side of the road had died down. The baby had stopped crying.

  Max found him still alive, even smiling. He untied the belt and picked the boy up. Marked his face with more blood. The baby lapped up blood eagerly. The heat, Max thought, had made them all thirsty.

  Weighing the child’s fate in his hands and his mind, Max felt as if he and the Beast had introduced the boy to his destiny, like uncles taking in a lost nephew. He was certain they’d given the child his first taste of blood.

  The Beast rolled inside him, sated, for the moment, and curious once more about the infant Max held.

  The boy cooed like a bird in the comfort of its nest, wrapped in Max’s T-shirt. Once again, the creature was exerting its influence over them.

  A simple twist of the neck would resolve the matter.

  But Max couldn’t, and neither could the Beast. Already, the child’s dependency on them was overwhelming. The old bonds had been renewed on physical contact. The idea of killing the boy felt like a threat against themselves.

  The only way to survive a burden that was also a threat was to pass it on.

  Max reached the road. With the battle moving off, traffic had increased, with trucks and cars passing in both directions.

  He waited, in hiding, until a suitable vehicle appeared heading south without any other traffic near. He jumped out in the road, held the baby up, waved his free hand. Bloody, half-naked, carrying an infant, he’d made himself perfect bait.

  The ambulance stopped. He’d have to remember that trick.

  The medic poked his head out of the window and spoke to Max in Arabic. Max snatched the Glock stuck in his BDUs behind his back. The medic and driver went down, two more shots hardly mattering in the battle’s settling air. Max threw the empty gun away, pulled out the bodies, put the baby in his lap and turned the ambulance around.

  An hour later he arrived at the rendezvous. A Huey waited in the LZ, rotors drawing off marker smoke into a vortex. Further off, two Hiace vans were parked with men by their doors, again dressed in jeans and vests and bearing Uzis.

  Mr. Jung dropped out of the Huey and ran to Max as he emerged from the ambulance.

  “The agent’s dead,” Max said, holding the baby out when Mr. Jung stopped before him.

  Mr. Jung glanced at the infant, Max’s bare and bloody torso, then went around to the back of the ambulance. “The wounded, they’re still alive,” his protector said, after opening the rear doors.

  He hadn’t thought to look in the back.

  Max looked to the vans and regretted not picking up one of the AK-47s and a bag full of ammunition. He’d been so eager to get rid of the child he’d forgotten the necessities of survival. He wasn’t sure what might happen next. Beyond his confidence that he could handle Mr. Jung and the guards, even without any firepower, he knew he wasn’t prepared to live a life out of sanction. Even hunters needed rest. Even hunters could be brought down by dogs in larg
e enough numbers.

  The mission had showed him the reality at the root of his caution.

  “So’s this,” Max said, taking a step toward Mr. Jung, shoving the baby at him.

  Mr. Jung laughed and accepted the charge. “Commendable work,” he said. “And most unexpected. You haven’t disappointed me, Max, and a good number of your enemies will be surprised.”

  The Beast wanted to lift Mr. Jung into the helicopter blades, but it was still gorged and its hatred was reflexive, lacking commitment.

  Already, Max ached for his charge. The Beast roiled like a sea gathering itself for a storm. “Is this thing an angel or a demon?” he asked, surprised by his question, not even understanding what he’d said, or why.

  He backed away from Mr. Jung, struggling to calm the Beast’s outrage at having to give up a part of itself. Max understood. He felt the same way. But they’d always been everything for each other, the only sure foundation either of them could count on against the cruelty of living men in the hard, sharp chaos of the world. They had to be everything for each other. There was no other chance for survival.

  What the child had damaged needed mending. He saw only one way to heal their bond.

  Max surrendered to the Beast, offering himself in sacrifice for whatever it had lost in giving up the child. He descended into the fog of its needs and hungers to walk in rage and hate and destruction, embracing all that was inhuman and demonic within him.

  He released his hold on caution, his need for survival and pleasure, and whatever else human that remained buried inside him.

  He waited for the drive of rage and the surge of power that would close the distance between himself and Mr. Jung, that would allow him to rip both his contact and the child apart, evade the guards and give him the skill and strength to run with the pack of his prey and bring them all down before they knew they’d been hunted. He left himself open to the Beast, prepared to be consumed, to lose any hold on the life he’d relished. He was ready to suffer. Die.

  The Beast passed through all that he was, as if trying on the suit of his flesh. It peered through his eyes at the world, at Mr. Jung staring back at him, the boy in his arms suddenly quiet and intent, at the Huey and vans and guards, the horizon and the infinite sky. It listened to the mechanical roar of the chopper’s engine, tasted the exhaust fumes in the air.