Razor's Traitorous Heart: The Alliance Book 2 (2 page)

He slid his finger over the tablet in his
hand to read over the report Cutter had given him. A picture of
Chicago before the destruction showed a fairly modern city for the
level of advancement of this species. He skimmed through the facts.
Two men, Colbert Allen and Destin Parks, controlled the region.
Intel suggested the men had at one time worked together before
splitting. Allen took the southern half of the city while Parks
took the northern half. The fighting had intensified over the past
six months.

He touched the screen and a new image
appeared. Several pictures, taken with a long distance, high
resolution imaging device showed several groups of people. The top
one was marked as being Colbert Allen. He was a tall, slender male
with short blonde hair and cold blue eyes. He was surrounded by
several men that reminded Razor of some of the lower class miners
and pirates he had encountered during his years as a warship
commander. His gut feeling told him the male would not be easily
persuaded to lay down his arms.

His eyes moved to the next image. A
dark-haired male, shorter than Allen stood surrounded by a group of
men who were listening intently to whatever he was telling them.
Destin Parks was the direct opposite of Allen, not only in coloring
but in his expressions. Concern, intelligence, and something else -
Razor enlarged the image so he could study the male’s face more
closely. He raised an eyebrow in surprise - sadness - if he had to
guess, he would say the male was sad.

A dark frown creased his brow as the shadowy
face of someone standing off to the left of Parks suddenly caught
his attention. He would have missed the person standing in the
shadows if he hadn’t enlarged the image. He touched the screen
again to enhance the face of the human.

Shock ricocheted through him as the delicate
features of a female came into focus. She had a rounded face framed
by short, dark hair. He bit back a silent growl of frustration. She
was standing too far back in the shadows for him to make out the
color of it. It was either a dark brown or black like his.

Her eyes were focused on Parks. A dark
intensity in them told him that her eyes probably were the same
color as her hair. She had a small, smooth nose that was
surprisingly appealing to him. Her lips were firmly pressed
together in a straight line that told him she wasn’t happy with
whatever Parks was saying. He couldn’t see what the rest of her
looked like as Parks and his group blocked her body. He focused
back on her eyes. This time the growl of frustration he released
wasn’t silent. Fear and worry shone clearly back at him.

“What?” The pilot started to say before a
curse escaped him as an alarm sounded. “Fuck! The son-of-a-bitches
have fired on us. Hold on.”

Razor’s eyes jerked up to the primitive
display. The tracking of a ground-to-air missile moved across the
softly glowing display. His mind was calculating the time to impact
even as he was calling out a warning as the dark frame of a crane
appeared in front of them. The pilot, intent on using defensive
measures to miss the missile coming at them, had swerved to the
left and reduced altitude. He tried to correct their flight
pattern, but Razor knew the machine they were in would not be able
to react in time.

“Brace for impact,” he growled out as the
helicopter violently shook.

The sound of screeching metal on metal
echoed loudly through the helicopter. He gripped the bar near his
head as the aircraft swung crazily around before it tilted and
started to fall. He ignored the sickening feeling in his stomach as
he stared out the windshield as they began falling toward the
ground. His body jerked forward when the tail caught in the cabling
of the crane. The straps holding him to the seat strained as he
hung face down. He thought for a brief second that he might
actually live through the crash unscathed. That slim hope
disappeared when the air-to-ground missile struck the top of the
crane holding them. The explosion above ripped through the metal,
sending small, deadly fragments raining down around them. The hot
shards sliced through the thin metal skin of the helicopter. An
explosive curse burst from his compressed lips as the jib of the
crane crumbled under the heat and weight, sending them plummeting
downward. The helicopter rocketed into the remains of a skyscraper.
Darkness descended as his head slammed into the windshield.

*.*.*

Kali drew in a deep breath, forcing the cold
night air into her starving lungs. She bent over with her hands on
her thighs, drawing in the clean, fresh air before standing
straight and looking up at the stars.

She was near the downtown area tonight. She
loved escaping the confining spaces of their current headquarters.
She loved being outside. She always had.

She had climbed to the top of the
Harrison Hotel Electric Garage
. She wanted
to go higher, so she walked over to the steel framing that held the
partial remains of the sign, high above the city. At over
twenty-one stories, it wasn’t the tallest structure still standing,
but it was close. She didn’t bother going up to the top of the
crane mounted on top of the building. It was a left over from BTA,
before the aliens. It was too windy tonight to chance climbing
it.

Kali scaled the metal girders holding the
lettering of the sign like a monkey. She’d had plenty of practice
over the past few years. She didn’t stop until she reached the top
of the ‘H’. Most of the other letters had fallen away, but this one
still stood proudly against the inky skyline. The letter was wide
enough that on a calm night she could stand up on it and raise her
arms to the sky. If she closed her eyes as a gentle breeze swept
by, she could almost imagine she could fly. Tonight it was too
dangerous to stand up. Instead, she contented herself by sitting on
the edge and looking out over the city she called home.

“I wonder what it will look like in the
future,” she murmured as she gazed out of the ghostly remains.
“When Destin reclaims the city, we’ll rebuild it even better than
it was before.”

Kali didn’t want to admit in her heart that
she was afraid that would never happen. If Colbert… if Colbert was
successful in killing her brother and overtaking the northern half
of the city, she knew it never would. She lowered her head as she
remembered how the young boy she and Destin had befriended as kids
had betrayed them in the cruelest way.

“Why?” She whispered as she ran her fingers
over the scar on her wrist. “How could he do this? To us? To our
own people?”

She shook her head and blinked back the
tears of anger. It had been almost two years since Colbert had
turned on them. Destin hadn’t believed her at first when she
expressed her concern over Colbert’s increasingly irrational
behavior. He thought it was the stress they were all under. He
often told her it wasn’t easy trying to rebuild a world amid all
the destruction and uncertainty of their future, that some people
handled it differently than others. Destin had embraced the chance.
He was determined to use the skills he had been learning as a
mechanical engineer before the world went crazy to build a city
like the ones they saw in the Sci-Fi movies they used to sneak
into.

Colbert… Colbert saw a chance to rule
through power and he wanted Destin by his side. Colbert saw what he
thought was a chance to rise above the street kids they had been
and become the absolute leader. Only one person stood in his way.
One person who knew his weakness. One person who knew who he really
was inside and what he desired most next to power.

Destin had almost died because she had been
afraid to speak up. She had always known that Colbert loved her
brother. When she was younger, she thought he loved Destin like she
did, as a brother. When she was sixteen, she caught Colbert looking
at Destin with a silent hunger that she recognized as anything but
brotherly. Colbert had been eighteen to Destin’s twenty at the time
and was the leader of one of the most dangerous gangs in their
neighborhood. He didn’t like that she and Destin chose a different
path. Kali knew Colbert blamed her for that. Destin would never
have allowed that type of danger to come near her and he told
Colbert as much. Both she and Destin had other dreams they wanted
to follow.

Colbert’s obsession with Destin remained
hidden from her brother, but once Kali had glimpsed the hunger in
his eyes that day, she had quietly watched Colbert from a distance.
Two years ago, she caught Colbert spying on her brother when he was
with one of the women who had joined up with them. Kali finally
broke down and told her brother about her suspicions.

Two days after her meeting with Destin, the
woman was found dead. The woman, Maria, had broken her neck when
she supposedly fell through a weak spot while on patrol with
Colbert and Johnson, Colbert’s second-in-command. Colbert swore
that he tried to save Maria but Kali had been suspicious and asked
Doc do an autopsy on Maria. Doc said that the bruising around
Maria’s neck indicated she had been strangled and that additional
bruising and blood under her nails showed she had fought against
her attacker.

Colbert overheard Kali telling Destin the
results. At first, Colbert had denied it, claiming the cuts on his
arms and face were the result of retrieving Maria’s body from the
building. When Kali presented the evidence from Doc and asked for a
blood sample to see if it match
ed
the
blood under Maria’s fingernails, Colbert exploded into a desperate,
jealous rage. The knife aimed for her brother’s heart had cut a
deep path across her wrist as she stepped between them to protect
Destin.

Destin’s call for help was answered by Jason
and Tim. They had subdued Colbert, but his treachery ran deeper
than either she or Destin knew. His followers helped him escape the
makeshift jail they had constructed. Several good men died that
night. Men that had families. All because Destin didn’t love
Colbert the way Colbert loved Destin and refused to join him in
ruling Chicago.

“What a screwed up world we live in,” she
murmured as she leaned back and stared up into the night sky again.
“Why can’t people just learn to live together?”

She gasped as the dark lit up when someone
from the southern half of the city launched a ground-to-air
missile. Her eyes followed the path as it streaked across the night
sky. Her low cry of denial was carried away on the wind as she saw
the target. A Black Hawk helicopter flying low dipped to the left,
heading toward her.

Kali watched as the helicopter approached in
slow motion. It took a moment for her to register that it was
heading straight toward her. She rolled backwards and flipped over
the side of the sign. She scrambled down the metal frame, jumping
or sliding as fast as she could. She was almost to the bottom of it
when the sound of the helicopter grew louder and she swung around
to look. A hoarse curse burst from her lips and her eyes widened in
horror as she recognized the shapes of two men in the cockpit.

Time appeared to stand still as the pilot
swerved again. It was obvious he didn’t see the outline of the
large rooftop crane sticking up like a greedy hand. Kali jumped off
the sign’s metal frame as the tail rotor caught in the thick metal
cables of the nearby crane. The horrific sound of screeching metal
echoed above the wind. She hit the ground and rolled as another
sound mixed with the doomed aircraft. The whistle of the missile
ended with an ear-shattering explosion.

Kali continued to roll until she was under
the metal overhang of a fresh air intake duct mounted on the roof.
She curled into a ball and covered her head as flaming shards of
hot metal rained down around her. Fear threatened to engulf her as
a part of the helicopter’s main rotor blade snapped and several
large sections flew wildly through the air. One long piece,
approximately six feet long, pierced the metal duct inches above
her head.

She lay breathing heavily as the sounds of
creaking metal and the snapping and popping of flames continued to
fill the air. Cautiously raising her head, she looked around at the
wreckage. She was amazed that she was still alive. Rolling until
she was on her hands and knees, she slowly crawled out from under
the impaled duct. She knelt on the gravel and tar-papered roof
staring in shock and horror at the destruction.

The crane that had been installed to replace
some of the lettering before the alien invasion now stood twisted
and disfigured, as if it had been made out of papier-mâché instead
of steel. The ‘H’ was broken in half. The section that was missing
had taken out a good ten feet or more of the short wall surrounding
the roof. Long ropes of steel cabling hung like the remains of a
spider’s web blowing in the breeze. Sparks and small fires
continued to burn, lighting the darkness so she
could
see the hideous outline of what remained of the
helicopter.

Kali walked slowly toward the edge. There
was no way anyone could have survived such a crash. The tail boom
was shredded with large chunks missing from it. The tail rotor was
completely gone. She glanced around and saw what she thought were
pieces of it sticking out of the building across from her. Climbing
over the rubble, she raised a trembling hand to push the hair that
blew into her eyes back behind her ear and looked over the edge of
the building to see if the helicopter had fallen all the way to the
ground.

She drew in a surprised breath when she saw
that it hung suspended two floors below her. Her eyes followed the
tangle of steel cables that barely held it. She jerked back when
the whole thing shifted as the crane tilted and bent under the
weight of the helicopter. Scrambling backwards over the broken
brick and mortar from the building, she turned and headed for the
back corner where the metal fire escape was attached to the side of
the building. She doubted that the two men were still alive, but
she needed to confirm it. She couldn’t leave them if they were
hurt.