Blackjack Wayward (The Blackjack Series) (51 page)

Slithering on the ground, I snaked down the caved-in back of the truck across the bumper and down to the pavement.

The ground thundered in front of me, bouncing me in the air. I landed, every painful break complaining, and looked up at Mighty standing over me.

“How are you doing this?” he roared.

My vision was blurred, and I only had one good eye, but I could see his hair frazzled, his body coated in sweat, his breathing heavy. He was tiring.

But he could take his time, not wear himself out. I wasn’t fighting back, was I?

I threw a punch but he avoided it easily, coming closer and punching me across the street into a wall. Before, he had rushed me, hitting me before I could react, but this time, he just strolled in my direction, his breathing labored again. I picked up a chunk of fallen concrete and hurled it, but he ducked under it and he punched me again, a backfist that sent me back into the wall.

“How are you doing this?” he demanded again, firing a flurry of blows that rocked my face and chest. He stepped back and let me slide to the ground.

“You should be dead, damn you!”

He reached down and grabbed my arm, holding it up in front of him.

“What is this?” he said, ripping back the long sleeve of the tech suit, but it took me a long time to focus with my one good eye. He was holding up the arm with Claire’s bracelet. The thin leather bands that held the metal discs had somehow survived the punishment, and now glowed. In fact, as he studied it, he began to notice a green pearlescent anima surrounding me. I remembered Claire taking a bit of my life force to keep her going, and I could feel the same happening now, the bracelet draining his life force to keep me alive.

I looked at his face, now closer than we had been the whole fight. I didn’t see an omnipotent demigod, I saw a tired old man, face lined with exhaustion, posing a false bravado of lost strength. I didn’t know how much of that could be the result of Claire’s bracelet and how much was just old Father Time showing on Mighty, after he’d exerted himself like he never had before.

He reached for the bracelet with his free hand and crushed it, along with the bones in my arms. I screamed in pain, losing what little strength I had. He pushed me down and straightened, towering over me so all I could see was the bit of light coming through between his legs.

His legs.

I threw a punch at his balls. He recoiled in defense but I half-caught him, doubling him over. The pain was mutual, as I had used my damaged right fist. His face was so close to me that I drew back, standing with my right leg, and powered all my strength into a left cross that caught him across the nose. I purposely made it a shallow punch, to catch the bridge of his nose, rather than the cheek. I felt it snap under my knuckles as my blow threw him across the street and through the nearby wall.

A jolt of fire ripped through my broken left forearm, but knowing I had caught him, knowing I had the strength to hurt him tempered the pain tearing through my arm.

He rose above the crumbled building, rubble and dust falling off him as he flew to me slowly. Mighty wiped the blood from his nose; it was just a small spot, a minor break.

Yet I couldn’t move, couldn’t stand. I was beaten and he knew it.

A noise drew our attention down the street and we both turned. A tall mecha, bigger than anything we had seen, was moving about a quarter mile down the road, trading fire with an unseen enemy. I could hear a whisper in my ears, like a distant song, a smattering of yelling that I could barely discern.

“That is the sound of your General Hinds,” Mighty said, wiping his nose and leaving a smear of blood. “His last few men are making a final, brave stand, but I’m afraid they will soon fall. And when I’m done with you, I will return to the White House and finish off your friends. Except for the beauty. I haven’t had a woman so comely in some time. I will tonight, though. I will have her and choke her to death as I finish inside her.”

The buzzing in my ear made me reach for it with my mangled hands, and I felt the earpiece dangling from the cable near my ear. I instinctively pressed it in and could hear General Hind’s voice in the back of my head.

“If there’s anyone out there,” the General said. “Anyone at all, we could sure use your help right about now.” His voice cut out, and I heard an explosion in scuttled stereo through the earpiece and my natural hearing simultaneously, but he fought to get through despite the loudness. “We’re under heavy fire … if anyone can hear me.” It sounded as if he was running.

“But I’m not done with you yet,” Mighty said as he landed next to me and grabbed my neck with both hands. He meant to choke me to death. “And now we have no magical accouterments to save you.”

I reached for his face with my hand, and he shook me away, but I finally got my left hand into his mouth and held it so I could reach over with the shattered fingers from my right hand.

He bit down, laughing as I screamed in pain, but he didn’t feel me close my grip around his jaw, bring my knees up into his chest, and heave with all my might. I cried, yelled, and squealed, pulling his jaw toward me, pressing his chest away at the same time, using all my strength against him. He realized my position of leverage far too late to use his overwhelming power. Mighty panicked, biting harder and taking a bit of my right pinky off.

I was so awash in rage that even the pain of a removed finger was nothing, the rubbing of bones in my left forearm a minor annoyance. Nor was the complaining of my smashed femur going to slow me down. My scream became a roar, and my world turned white with rage. He might be Mighty, but I was Blackjack, goddammit! If I was going to die today, the whole world would know, Lord Mighty would know, that I had died on my feet.

I felt the flesh tearing, heard the pop of bone and tendon, the give as muscle sheared, and his jaw ripped free of his skull. I flew off him, slamming into the ground.

At that moment, every shred of pain returned, every break sang through my body like the chorus in a requiem mass, reminding me of how ruined my body was. I almost faded, almost fell to the darkness that was dancing at the edges of my vision, but something in my hands was amiss. Had he bitten through all my fingers? Had he taken my hand as a whole? I looked down at the bloody mess in my hands, and saw Mighty’s lower jaw.

The man himself was on his knees, finally laid low and gasping as blood poured down his gaping maw. The skin had torn down to his neck, leaving raw flesh exposed. He gasped at me, overcome by pain, almost pleading with his eyes since he could no longer talk. His tongue lolled limply over the new gap in his face, the muscles controlling its motion hanging in useless strips from my hand. His chest and arms were soaked in crimson, and at his knees lay a pool of fresh blood.

I summoned up my remaining strength and managed to stand, the blinding pain from my left femur not enough to slake my anger.

Because the job wasn’t done.

He pawed at me as I came closer, shoving me back with a bloodstained hand, but his strength was sapped, his will gone, knowing that if he lived, he would be disfigured, no longer the princely wonder he had been.

I grabbed his hair with my left hand, raising him off the ground, and he clawed at my chest, ripping my shirt,

“Gah,” he said, speaking to me, perhaps begging for mercy. But I had none. There was nothing but cold death in my heart. “Aaaah!” he yelled, spattering blood at me as I reared back and stabbed him in the neck with the jagged bone of his own mandible. The bone pierced the exposed flesh, and more blood fountained out his damaged neck and mouth. He pushed me away, reaching for the jutting bone, but it was a childlike gesture, devoid of any power.

“Motherfucker!” I yelled, summoning up the strength to rear back my good leg, kicking down into his neck and jamming the bone deeper as his life ebbed away.

I dropped to my knees, laughing in satisfaction, watching his breathing slow, then still.

Lord Mighty was dead.

I inched forward so I could look into his face, his jaw-less form still and his eyes gazing off into nothingness. Every ounce of me cried out for help, for Mirage to heal me, but I knew I was miles away from the White House, and I doubted Chen would lift a finger to help me. Every broken bone sang with a vengeance and I could feel cracked ribs piercing my lungs, biting at my breath. My hands shook, caked in blood, my legs were twisted and useless.

Ahead of me, the ground shook. The mecha shook off a pair of RPG shots and fired off a stream of hot lead at General Hinds’ position. If we were close to the General, that meant we were near the Potomac, somewhere to my right, and Hinds had made it across the river. But the mecha, almost eighty feet tall, had taken them by storm, destroying their offensive.

“If anyone can read me,” Hinds pleaded, the sound of machine gun rounds almost drowning out his screams. “That fellow Blackjack that was flying about a minute ago, we could sure use you, son. Your country could use you.”

I fired my rockets.

The throttle was in my left foot, which was broken, so I pressed down hard despite the agonizing pain. I picked up speed as I streaked toward the mecha, aiming for the midsection joint. It was a circular ball and socket joint that was almost ten feet in diameter and corded with layers of heavy armor. The world blurred past, and I struck hard, then saw white.

And the world faded.

Chapter Forty-Three

I heard the voice twice, once close, and again far, but I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t breathe, and that was all that mattered. Something lay atop me, smothering me, and I couldn’t catch a breath of air.

Maybe this was hell?

The Hell of Always Choking to Death.

I pushed, but it hurt.

Better to choke

I rested, waiting for....

No, dammit! Move it!

I moved, shifting, but the voice complained. Closer, then far.

Can’t breathe!

I panicked, pushed; the pain wasn’t worth choking for.

Something moved.

“Get it off him!”

Was that me talking?

No, it was close, inside me, then far. “Come on, son! Help us out!”

I don’t use “son” with anyone.

I pushed again, something shifted aside, and light flashed across my face.

Hell of Things Shifting, then Light?

“Sweet Jesus in Heaven!” said a blurry figure that stood over me. It was a barrel-chested man with a severe face. My eyes blinked, or rather, my right eye did. My left eye felt like someone had laid a mound of concrete on that side of my face.

“Get a medic!” the man said, and I immediately recognized him as General Hinds. The voice in my ear was the voice coming out of his mouth. It was him. I had found him.

“I know you,” I said, but my jaw wasn’t working. I looked around, hoping it hadn’t fallen off completely. Or if it had, that someone could find it, let me have it. If I was going to lose my jaw, I wanted to at least keep it around.

But reaching up I touched my jaw. It tingled with pain, broken.

Good, like everything else.

Hinds got on his knees; it was him and a white blur.

Was he God?

“You stick with me, son. You hear? You stay with me, dammit!”

I shook my head.

“I’m okay,” I said but it was a blurb of vowels.

“You don’t quit on me, you understand? I don’t give you fucking permission to quit on me, soldier!”

My hand found his chest, and I finally saw it. My fingers were all broken, splayed and bloody like a grenade had exploded in my hand.

“Tell Apogee,” I said, gasping between words, and I was expecting the final darkness to close in. I had done it; I had saved the day again. Whatever came after, I didn’t care. It would be fine by me. This was how I was going to go down and it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, except that someone would tell her, that someone would let her know that she had made a difference. I had done it for me, but I had done it because of her. She had saved me; someone had to tell her.

“Apogee?”

I nodded, aware that I had little left, maybe one final whisper.

“Tell her I love her,” I gasped.

Hinds turned away from me. “Give them our location,” he yelled as the shadows that surrounded him faded in, slowly giving way to my final rest. “See if we can get through to her.”

A voice yelled from the edges of my consciousness; it was a yell, but I registered it as a faded whisper in the distance.

“We’ve got them, son,” Hinds said. “We’ve cleared through to the White House. It’ll all be over soon.” He spoke to someone else, but it was a blur, everything coming to a stop.

“You got her?”

Was he talking to me?

“We’ve got her, son. We’ve got her. She’s coming here, now! Stick with me.”

I closed my eye, turning my head, but he held my face, forced me to face up.

“She’s here!”

My eye flashed open, scanning, fighting the fading that surrounded me, fighting for the light to linger if only long enough to see her.

And there she was, lovely as ever, framed by the darkness that was going to take me.

“Dale! Oh, God!”

I didn’t see the bloody nose, the bruises, the sweat and the smeared grime. I saw her as the fairy tale, as the dream that had held me until this moment.

“I love you,” I said, feeling the flinching pain as I tried to smile.

“Damn you, don’t do this,” she said, the lie becoming real, her true face revealed. Her tears spattered on my face. For some reason, that was the only thing I could feel.

“General, contact Superdynamic. Tell him to get Templar to portal Mirage to our position.”

“Okay,” Hinds said.

“Do it!”

I tried to reach up, to touch her face, but my hands were an abomination, they made her cry further.

“Oh, baby, hang on. Please hang on!”

To have her call me that, now, at the end of everything, made it all worthwhile. Everything I had gone through, every ounce of pain racing through my body – to hear her caress me with her voice washed it all away. My face complained as I smiled, and the darkness swept in, hard and fast.

“Dale!” was the last I heard as I fell back into a dark pool at night, washed over and engulfed by the water.

People lie.

I didn’t see a light at the end of a tunnel. It was a deep dark pool, with a slow, incessant current dragging me down, away from everything. And it’s a lie that you see your distant relations come to welcome you into the afterlife, to guide you to ... wherever it is you’re going. No one I knew came, but I wasn’t alone. There were faces I couldn’t identify along the inky blackness that surrounded me, expressions that could just as easily have been my own. Each expression was wrapped in a memory darker than the last, and as I descended toward an endless void that welcomed me home, I saw the passage of time like paintings on the wall. There were no lies this deep, and no one to keep them from. I was alone, no one to impress, not even myself, and all my lies were laid bare in their absolute worst.

More memories filed in, trying to get my attention like unruly children, but I fought them back, overwhelmed by the reality of my being, by the truth of my history. I kicked the others aside, because they were expressions of the same, examples of a singular truth that I had long avoided: that I was a bully, a monster, a rage-filled creature, sated only by the fear and cowering of others. I was the bad guy, in every sense of the word, and the fluttering images confirmed it, displaying similar behavior throughout my adulthood.

There was no light to show me the way, because there was none inside me. I was a hollow beacon to all my ills, the reason for all my endless pain, and it was at that moment that I knew what I was headed for, spiraling downward into the abyss, diving headfirst into an endless oblivion.

I was going to Hell.

The dancing memories spun away, lingering above me as I fell further, faster and faster, into an endless pit of nothing. I flailed about trying desperately to slow my descent, but something drew my attention, standing out against the cold vacuum. It was palpable and close, something I could reach for. I went for it and saw it wasn’t beyond me, but inside me. It was inside my right hand, singing out as if a tiny point of light against the world of black, and after a while, it was all there was, the rest of me gone and consumed. The point of light was minuscule, hollowed, fighting to illuminate me from deep within my hand, from inside the bones. It was a pain, a faded memory of a time distant and past, perhaps beyond my lifetime, but of something good, something to hold on to.

All I had to do was grip it, to encompass it, and I knew it would lift me upward, away from all of this. I hesitated, still awash in the new truth, overcome with a rewritten history that made all truths into lies. After this, what could I trust?

The light was the only warmth I felt in the growing chill, the only comfort I felt in the welling sadness.

When it began to fade, as if I had gone too far into the cold emptiness. I began to fear that I might linger here forever, to fall further into depths I couldn’t understand.

I gripped the light, I held tight, and it lifted me. I rose gradually, a slight breeze tickling my face, but soon the world was howling past, imperceptible.

“He’s breathing!”

It was a voice that was familiar to me, but there were no voices in the cold deep. Just a wall of inky blackness everywhere I looked. Yet I had left that place so fast that it was still with me, if only in the chill in my heart. Yet I knew I was back from the pit of death. I was alive.

Something moved me, rolled me along, bouncing and carefree, and my senses slowly filtered back.

I felt my back resting against something soft, moving quickly over uncertain terrain. I tried opening my eyes, but I had no way to know if I was successful, whether my eyes were open and just not functioning, or if I’d lost the ability to see.

“Don’t move, Blackjack,” a different muffled voice said, distant and concealed, and I felt a cluster of people around me, moving with me. My ability to perceive sounds was localized, limited, and everything beyond a small range was filtered out. Whether this was a defense mechanism, or whether it was some physical error, I couldn’t tell.

“You’re going to be okay,” the first voice said. I faced the direction of this voice, but my eyes betrayed me, unwilling, or unable, to cooperate. When I tried to speak, a sour flavor danced to the back of my throat, a mix of flayed flesh and congealed blood, which reminded me of what had passed, reminded me of where I was.

I had fought Lord Mighty and lived. Now they were trying to mend my fractured body.

“Don’t worry about me,” I tried to say, but opening my mouth made me gargle on the cocktail of viscera mixed with a shattered bit of tooth that tickled the back of my throat and threw me into a violent fit of coughing. Making the effort to maneuver the shattered bone toward my lips was a herculean effort because my tongue wasn’t fully functional, like a broken arm trying to flex on unstable muscles.

Something pressed me down, the next feeling that came after the coughing fit, and a finger probed my mouth.

“Oh, my God!” This was the second voice again, somewhat less muted, somewhat closer, and I knew this person was manipulating my tongue, pressing it out of the way, reaching for something. When the hand left my face, I coughed again, but this time free of the shard of bone.

“Thanks,” I wanted to say, but again, I couldn’t tell if my mouth was working. All I could hear was the echoing of my throat gargling through my skull, reverberating into my ears.

“Don’t talk, baby, please.”

It was Apogee.

She was there, near me, close enough to fight through the haze, yet my eyes were failing me. I wanted to reach up and touch her face, to get more information, to find out what was wrong with me. But I didn’t really need to. The desperation in her voice gave me all the clues I needed as to my condition.

I wanted to see her, just a moment. Just a peek. I would willingly dive back into the pit of darkness if I could get a single look, but my eyes frustrated me. Instead, I reached for her. I let my hand search for her in the pained darkness, but I was somehow restrained.

“Where is Mirage?” Apogee cried, and I could tell she was angry. I had seen her at her rage-filled worst, and this was more desperate than that. Ironic that the woman I loved, the only person who I cared for, was someone who had wanted me dead.

“Oh, fuck this!” she said, but I heard it afterward, a moment later, as her dissociated voice left me, and a heavy breeze wafted across my body.

“Jesus!” someone said. Was it Moe? Was he here?

“Goddammit, Apogee!” someone else roared and it only took me a moment to realize it was Superdynamic. He was above me, close, very close.

“Super,” Moe said. “I got the kit here; I need to know what to give him, man.”

I bounced, hard.

“Forget the helo, I have the jet inbound,” Superdynamic said, yelling to overcome the loudness as they brought me closer to a helicopter. I could feel the whipping of the engine-driven rotors, the whine of the supercharger, the mini-vortex of wind driven up by the rotors.

“Sir, we can have him at our medivac area in fifteen minutes,” someone else said.

“He’ll be dead by then,” Superdynamic said. “Take over the pumping for me, dammit!”

“I got it,” said Moe and then I felt the big black man replace Superdynamic over me. What did they mean by “pumping”? Were they giving me CPR chest compressions?

I blinked, and a flash of brightness almost blinded me, making me press my eyelids as tightly as possible.

“You gonna be all right,” Moe said. “You hear me, man? You ain’t going nowhere!”

A figure moved behind him, amid the chaos of people standing over me.

“Mr. Superdynamic,” it said. “I recommend you give him 50ccs of adrenaline and 500ccs of epinephrine stat, or you won’t keep his heart going.”

I laughed, but it lasted only a second as a racking fit of coughing overcame me.

“That won’t even begin to affect him,” Super responded. “We need something stronger. Jet’s inbound, ETA 2 minutes.”

“He’s dead before that,” the figure said.

“Just let me go,” I said.

Moe stopped compressions a second, and I felt his warm breath floating across my face.

“What did you say?”