Maxwell Cain 2: With a Side of Vengeance, page 10
Max hit a straight patch of road and glanced over. “No dad?”
Johnny’s mirrored sunglasses blocked his eyes from Max’s scrutiny as the hitman looked at him. “Nah.”
Max grunted and turned back to the road.
“Tough break,” Hank said sympathetically.
Johnny raised his rifle and fired a few rapid shots, liquifying the brainpans of the drivers chasing them. Three more jeeps overturned and caused a massive pileup the surviving motorcyclists had to slow down and navigate. Max noticed the hitman baring his teeth as he plugged the slower drivers.
Whining engines filled Max’s ears as he wove through a sharp swerve in the forest road. Five more motorcycles popped out from a narrow side path just ten feet from the jeep. The lead driver was too late to pull up but tried to swerve anyway, laying down his bike in a shower of sparks. He went under their wheels and the jeep ran him over, jostling the three escapees. The other four bikers fell in close behind them, aiming their SMGs.
Hank did what he did best: he opened fire with a spray of bullets. At such close range he was able to scythe his barrel in an arc of death, nailing all four bikers and hurling them from their bikes. They tumbled to the road just as the rifle clicked empty. Hank hurled the empty gun off the back of the jeep and reached for the next one.
“You aren’t much for aim,” Max told him, “but you make up for it with sheer cojones. We need to get you a minigun or something where accuracy don’t matter.”
“Man, I’d be in hog heaven.” Hank shot him a big grin. “That mean you got a job for me when this is all done?”
“Brother, you just try and refuse. I’ll drag you into my crew so fast that you’ll be killing scumbags alongside us next week, red tape be damned.”
“As long as we come back here and free the slaves Andy’s still got,” Hank said. “I ain’t gonna leave no one behind to face what I did.”
Max thought of Keel and tightened his hands on the wheel until the plastic squeaked. “Nah, we ain’t leaving anyone behind, Hank. That’s a promise.”
The forest road quickly became dotted with signposts, then ramshackle huts, then a gas station. Before Max knew it, they were driving through a shabby little town with buildings made mostly from aluminum siding and plywood. The town looked like it had been built piece by piece with whatever lay at hand. Dirty citizens in plain t-shirts and jeans leaped out of the way on the narrow roads as Max and his crew barreled through. He was forced to slow to navigate the tight streets full of vendors and livestock.
“Our friends are back,” Hank warned. Max glanced in the rearview and spotted more motorcycles closing on them from behind, along with a couple more of the black jeeps full of soldiers. He stepped on the gas but was forced to navigate carefully, allowing his smaller pursuers to gain quickly.
One of the bikers pulled even with Max on the driver’s side. He leveled his SMG at the jeep and opened fire, but with Max swerving all over the road the bullets pinged off the door and roll cage. One of the shots cut a burning line across Max’s shoulder and he hissed in pain.
A stack of heavy wooden crates blocked half the road ahead. Max threw the jeep to the left, slamming into the biker. He scraped the driver along a sheet metal wall, shredding his red fatigues and dismembering him in a shower of blood. The jeep barely slipped through the gap, and when Max veered back into the center of the road, the pinned bike spilled into the street. Another biker behind him slammed into the mangled vehicle and flipped over, landing on its rider with a sickening crunch.
“Where are you going?” Johnny shouted.
“Toward the ocean,” Max replied. “We gotta find the docks to steal a boat. But I’m all turned around in here. Any idea which way to the sea?”
Johnny pointed at an upcoming righthand turn. “Take this one!”
Max threw the jeep into a quick turn. The back end fishtailed on the muddy road and slammed into a vendor’s cart selling live chickens. The cages burst, and the jeep was suddenly filled with flapping white hens squawking in outrage. Max spit feathers from his mouth and seized a particularly angry chicken off the dashboard, then chucked it over his shoulder.
Behind them, six motorcycles made the hard turn. One of them hit a cluster of debris and rolled, slamming through a plywood wall. A second caught Max’s thrown chicken directly in the face and panicked, veering into another vendor stall full of dead fish. He crashed with a spectacular splattering sound.
“What do you know,” Max said. “A bird in the hand is better.”
Johnny fired back at the pursuing bikers, nailing two in the face. He missed the next three shots because of Max swerving, so he paused and glanced at his driver. “Do you always drop smartass one-liners?”
“Only when I’m driving or shooting,” Max said. “Especially when I’m driving and shooting. Which is –”
“Every day,” Hank and Johnny said in unison.
“I’ve hardly known you a handful of days and I can already tell that much,” Hank said with a grin. “You’re like the angel of death for scumbags, Max.”
“Buddy,” Max said, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
The enemy jeeps had fallen far behind as they struggled to navigate the tight passages and wreckage. Two bikers still chased them through the streets. Both closed fast, raising their SMGs and taking aim.
“Hey, Hank. Incoming passengers.” Max glanced in the rearview and then smashed the breaks, skidding to a halt. The two bikes crashed into the back of the jeep, slamming their riders onto the roll cage in the back.
Hank seized the two battered men under his arms and snapped their necks with synchronized pops, then dumped the bodies off the back of the jeep and turned back to Max with a casual shooing gesture of his hand. “Drive on, chauffer.”
“Everyone’s a comedian,” Max laughed as he stomped the gas and peeled out, speeding off down the street. He topped a hill and spotted the blue ocean spread out ahead just a block away.
The wooden docks lining the seaside were stripped bare. Not a single boat remained moored to the platform. Out in the distance, Max spotted a cluster of boats riding the tide, with a few stragglers still heading out to join the flotilla.
“Damn!” Max slammed the steering wheel. “Andy must have got the word out.”
“He sure did,” Johnny said, pointing to their right. From up the road just two blocks away came thundering a dense swarm of jeeps and bikes packed with red-clad riders. Automatic fire pinged off the road, punched holes in the jeep’s sides, and shattered the windshield.
“Life is just never easy, is it?” Max howled as he yanked the wheel to the left and took off along the bare dock, blazing down the coastal road at breakneck speed. Citizens out for walks and livestock wandering the streets dove out of his way as Max drove pell-mell through the ramshackle town in desperation to escape the pursuing horde.
As they drove, Johnny suddenly hopped up in his seat to stand and aim his rifle ahead of them. “Keep driving, Max, but slow down just a bit. When I say, gun it.”
Max felt a flutter of doubt but decided to trust the hitman. He slowed the jeep to half speed.
Johnny’s rifle thumped in a staccato rhythm. He swept his barrel back and forth across the left half of the street, where Max saw the bullets tear apart a massive hanging porch. Johnny’s fire shredded the support pillars and caused the whole thing to sag out into the street as the jeep rolled closer.
“Gun it!” Johnny roared.
Max stomped his foot down. The jeep’s engine growled and churned, yanking them forward as Johnny poured a last stream of fire into the biggest support beam. The hanging porch shattered and collapsed into the street in an avalanche of splintering wood, forming a makeshift barricade. As they sped away, Max glanced back to see the gangsters milling about in their vehicles, some of them hopping down to manually lift the wreckage away, but there was such a mess it would take them some time to clear a pathway.
“Who knew even a broken porch could give you so much relaxation time?” Max asked as he, Hank, and Johnny burned rubber up the coastal road back into the forest.
Chapter 20
No Way Out
Max drove into the lush forest, winding deeper and deeper into the island’s interior. The rolling hills were full of switchback trails and narrow dirt roads. Max avoided the muddiest paths to make tracking them as difficult as possible, and after half an hour the three men parked their jeep among the trees and crept out on top of one of the biggest hills Max could find.
Max raised his hand to shade his eyes and surveyed the sprawling island before him. The trees flowed all the way to the coastline, and just as Andy had said, the ocean completely encircled them in all directions. The ramshackle town was the only sign of urban civilization. Far to the east, Max spotted Andy’s tall ziggurat palace rising above the trees like an ancient Mayan ruin. He hadn’t had time to look at the place from the outside during their escape, but seeing the monumental place made him snort.
“Someone wants to play island emperor.”
A cocking hammer behind him caused Max’s blood to chill. He turned slowly, keeping his hands still, to find Johnny aiming a pistol at him from just a few feet away. The killer’s mirrored sunglasses reflected Max’s hard expression so he couldn’t read the hitman’s eyes.
“Time to settle things?” Max asked.
Johnny stood silent for a moment. He reached up and pulled off his sunglasses with his free hands, staring at Max with his predatory eyes. Max felt like he was staring down an angry bear that might charge him at any moment, and he didn’t dare look away.
“You got me dead to rights,” Max said. “What do you want to do?”
Johnny still didn’t say anything. His finger tightened on the trigger, but he didn’t shoot.
Max saw Hank behind Johnny. The big man caught the exchange and was about to unsling his rifle, but Max stopped him with a quick shake of his head.
Johnny must have anticipated the big man’s intrusion, too. “Hank, if you move a muscle, I’ll blow Max’s head clean off. Don’t push me.”
“How’s that any different from what you plan to do?” Max asked him bluntly.
For the first time ever, Johnny Legion hesitated. Max saw the moment in his eyes when the unstoppable killer actually wavered. Max wondered how long it had been since the stoic gunman had experienced a moment of doubt.
“What if I could offer you a better life?” Max asked him. “Not just a replacement for the life I took from you, but something infinitely better?”
Johnny narrowed his eyes. “What could be better than power and wealth at my fingertips?”
“Purpose,” Max answered. “Meaning. An eternal legacy.”
Johnny scoffed, but his eyes betrayed a new hunger. “What, join you on your stupid crusade? Defend the helpless, feed the needy, play the part of a white knight swooping in to save damsels in distress?”
“No,” Max said. “No heroics, no white armor. You kill people for me. You kill a lot of people. Same work you’ve been doing all along. The difference is, at night you can rest peacefully knowing your work made the world a better place instead of fattening some asshole’s wallet. You sleep the sleep of the just, instead of the just-barely-hanging-on. No more self-loathing, no more depression, no more covering up the pain with whatever your sin of choice happens to be. You pick up a gun and you force this world into a better shape, the kind of shape that doesn’t make more kids do what you’ve had to do to survive.”
Johnny bared his teeth angrily at that. “You don’t know me, Cain.”
“I don’t have to,” Max replied. “I’ve seen a million kids facing the same bleak hell. Let me show you a world that matters. You’ve let a lot of evil men direct your hands. Put them to work building something that will last, something that matters in the end.”
Johnny held his gun level at Max’s face. Then he lowered it and thumbed the hammer down. “I ain’t saying I’m joining you, Cain. I’m just not going to kill you right now.” He slid the mirrored sunglasses back on to conceal his eyes.
Behind Johnny, Hank’s shoulders slumped in relief.
“Good enough for me.” Max pointed at a hazy landmass in the far distance, off to the east beyond Andy’s step pyramid. “I’m gonna guess that’s the mainland coast right there. It’s too far for us to swim, and we can’t get a boat. That means we need alternate transportation off this island. I didn’t see an airport in that town we passed, did you?”
Hank and Johnny shook their heads.
“Then I’ll bet Andy’s got a little airfield around back of his pyramid. He brought us here in a cargo plane of some kind, so it’s gotta be parked somewhere.”
“You want to go back and steal a plane?” Johnny asked, incredulous.
“If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears,” Max said.
Johnny shook his head.
Hank sighed and rubbed his dreadlocked head. “This is gonna be ugly.”
“It will,” Max agreed. “But we’ve got the element of surprise, we’re armed to the teeth, and we’ve got one more secret weapon.”
“What’s that?” Hank asked.
Max’s face split in a feral grin. “We are the meanest killers on this whole damn island.”
Chapter 21
Starring the Author’s Obvious Fetish
High above the earth, perched in the open bay door of a bloated hovering VTOL aircraft with a grotesquely swollen metal belly, Sergeant Kate Valentine clutched the controls of her giant mech and glared down at the fortress below.
In contrast to the distended aircraft bearing it into battle, the silver humanoid machine wrapped around the resolute woman looked sleek and proud, a deadly purpose built with aesthetic lines and hues. Golden accents across the fifty-foot mech sparkled in the rosy dusk light as the glowing sapphire eyes burned into the target, relaying camera data back to Kate in the plush cockpit seat in its chest. The front curving wall of her cockpit was composed of a hundred tiny screens all relaying data from the front cameras to grant her a panoramic view of the battlefield. A giant pistol the size of a motorcycle sat on her machine’s right hip, and a lengthy tube lay racked upon its back, both painted in the silver and gold of the rented CDF machine.
Kate’s comm crackled as Nick’s voice flooded her cockpit speakers. “Sergeant Valentine, you sure you want to take point?”
“Oh, hell yes,” Kate exclaimed. “I’ve been itching for this battle since Major Stone showed me I could pilot a mech. Doing it on the company dime just makes it all the sweeter.”
“It’s not on the company dime,” Nick grumbled. “We’re paying the overdraft charges, and I got my butt chewed for two grueling hours.”
“All worth it,” Kate declared. “We’re piloting mechs, Nick! How can you not be excited? I feel like Heather from Combat Frame XSeed 3: Eternal Carnage!”
“Is that one of your video games?”
“One of my favorites.” Kate pounded her fist on her command chair’s plush armrest, and her eyes gleamed with an inner light. “Piloting a mech has been one of my many lifelong dreams. I only wish Max were here to see it. This mission brings us one step closer to getting him back. I’m gonna kill every bastard between me and Max. I’ll throttle his location out of Andy Wong’s broken little body, then I’ll wring out that weasel like a sponge until his head pops clean off.” Despite being alone in the cockpit and Nick’s call being audio-only, Kate mimed the wringing motion with both hands, her teeth bared in a vicious grin.
“… You probably look really creepy right now, don’t you?” Nick asked.
“I do not!” Kate put her hands back on the control sticks. “Are we ready to do this, or what?”
“Ten seconds. Prep for drop.”
“Roger.” A timer appeared on Kate’s forward screen, and when it reached zero, she charged down the loading ramp and leaped out into freefall.
Kate activated her rear cameras. Her front display shifted to show behind her as Nick leaped free of the cargo bay after her. His identical mech pulled its arms and legs in tight, rocketing at the earth like a loosed arrow. Kate flicked her cameras back to front and pulled the same maneuver, hurtling toward the growing fortress.
As they descended through the sky, tracer rounds zipped by.
“They’ve spotted us and opened fire with AA guns,” Nick stated calmly. “Our mechs should easily shrug off a few hits, but try not to get too damaged. CDF equipment insurance only covers so much, the repair bills can shove us even deeper into debt, and even these mechs aren’t indestructible.”
“Got it,” Kate said as she activated her rockets to zigzag through the air. Most of the AA fire missed her by a wide margin, but the few stray bullets that struck her narrowed profile pinged harmlessly off her gleaming armor plating.
“Approaching two thousand feet,” Nick announced. “Activate retrorockets and prepare for touchdown.”
Kate threw a switch on her front console, and the mounted rockets on her mech’s thighs swiveled to face in the direction of her movement. They fired with greater intensity than before, and her entire mech shuddered as the rockets helped her fight gravity. Her speed decreased as the ground rushed up to meet her, and in the last few seconds before impact, she swiveled her entire mech to land upright.
The silver and gold mech crashed down in a perfect superhero landing on one knee, its mighty fist planted in the soil to brace it up. Nick touched down nearby in a far more graceful landing, hovering to a stop so he stood perched upon a wind-whipped patch of grass.
“Yeehaw!” Kate whooped. “Time for carnage!” She pressed the button on her console to release her pistol’s magnetic docking clamp as she swiveled her arm control to grasp it. Her giant mech seized the handgun and hoisted it high as the combat machine rose smoothly to its feet.
