Distortion Offensive

Chapter 2

“Gun,” Kane snapped out in a harsh whisper, taking another step into the vast hall with Brigid just a pace behind him.

But before Kane and Brigid could venture farther into the busy church hall, several more people stepped from the ranks of the queuing locals and brought arms out from the hiding places within their dirty-looking clothes. People screamed and shouted, and everyone in the room dropped to the floor in unison as if struck by a massive weight. Kane stepped backward as he dropped, disguising himself within the shadows of the door. When he looked around he saw that Brigid Baptiste was just across from him, similarly lurking in the thick shadows cast by the porch of the antechamber, her body taut like a coiled spring.

“Hand over everything you’ve got left,” the leader shouted as he waved his snub-nosed .38 at Grant’s face, “or you’re going to be breathing out of a third nostril.”

“Oh, no, son,” Grant growled, “you don’t want to be pulling this shit with me.”

Grant was a huge man, with broad shoulders and dark skin. Though heavy, his body was entirely muscle, with not an ounce of fat in evidence. His black hair was cropped very close to his scalp, but he wore a luxurious gunfighter’s mustache. Right now, Grant wore a black undershirt and loose combat pants, while his Kevlar trench coat remained hanging over the back of a chair behind him. For this rare occasion, curse the damn luck, he had left his wrist-mounted Sin Eater automatic pistol in the secure locker of the Manta vehicle parked around the back of the church grounds.

The lead stick-up artist thrust the barrel of his pistol closer to Grant’s face, and he cocked the hammer with a sadistic sneer curling his lip. He was a young man, no older than seventeen by Grant’s estimate, and already he wore a fierce scar down the left side of his face, cutting a white streak through the dark stubble and red acne that covered his jaw. Grant’s dark eyes flicked across the room, noting the man’s accomplices in an instant before turning his attention back to their leader. They were all dressed in muted, unwashed clothes, and none of them looked to be much older than twenty, maybe twenty-five.

“I done fucks like you for just looking at me, man,” the leader announced through gritted teeth. “I’ll do everyone in this room if you fuck with me, you understand?”

Grant fixed his dark eyes on the bandit leader as, somewhere close to the door, a dog barked anxiously. “Oh, yeah,” he said softly, almost conspiratorially, “I understand.” Hands held loosely at his sides, Grant took a step back toward the open crate of rations. “You want me to hand them over one by one, or are you and your boyfriends going to come here and carry a crate out?”

The gunman glared at Grant, irritation on his frantic features as he considered his options. “You. You can carry it,” the man decided.

Grant snorted, his eyes still fixed on the nervous young gunman. “Can’t help you,” he explained. “This is a two-man job, buddy. You want to feel the weight of this bad boy if you don’t believe me.”

Irritated, the gunman spit a curse and strode toward the line of tables, stepping onto the nearest desk and clambering over it, his hollow boot heels echoing loudly against the wood like the clip-clopping of a horse. As he did so, Grant seized his opportunity, his leg snapping out and his foot slamming into the front of the table as the gunman climbed onto its surface.

The table’s legs screeched as they dragged across the floor with the impact of Grant’s powerful kick, and the gunman found himself toppling forward, losing his balance as the table disappeared from under him. The young man snapped off a shot at Grant, a bullet blasting toward the huge ex-Mag with a resounding crack, several people screaming in its wake.

Grant felt the bullet cut the air just past his ear, missing him by a quarter of an inch, but he was already rushing forward to meet his assailant. All around the church hall, the gunman’s allies were beginning to react, turning their own weapons on the man who had attacked their leader.

“Bunch of amateurs,” Kane muttered as he and Brigid readied themselves in their hiding place in the shadows of the porch. As the gunmen targeted Grant while he was safely protected behind the tumbling form of their leader, it gave Kane and Brigid ample opportunity to mount a surprise attack from the rear.

Over by the line of tables, Grant pumped his sledgehammer fist into the lead gunman’s thorax, knocking the man back up into the air as he continued to fall, driving the breath painfully from his throat. The gunman toppled sideways, crying out in pain as he slammed against the wooden floor with bone-shaking finality.

A trained ex-Mag like Kane, Grant was working on instinct now, and his leg snapped out once more to kick the snub-nosed .38 out of the gunman’s hand before he could bring it to bear. A stray bullet powered out from the pistol’s barrel as it flew out of the gunman’s hand and across the floor, embedding itself in the side of the water pump, water spraying everywhere.

As the gunman fell, his companions began blasting shots from their own weapons at Grant, peppering the wall behind the ex-Mag with shots as he leaped out of their path and rolled behind one of the tables. From his crouching position behind the scant protection of a desk, Grant extended the outstretched toe of his booted foot, hooking the nearby chair and scooting it across the floor toward him. His long Kevlar coat hung from the back, and Grant would need that if he was to make it through the next ten seconds alive.

Grant scanned the area to either side of him, seeing the other volunteers ducking behind the furniture as bullets drilled into the wall ahead. They looked frightened.

Abruptly the gunfire stopped. A moment later, Grant heard a voice from the other side of the desk as one of the gunmen spoke. “Richie?” the man shouted. “Richie, you okay, bro?”

Richie—the gunman whom Grant had knocked to the floor—groaned, his response something less than an actual word.

The speaker continued, issuing instructions to his people. “The guy went behind there. Ain’t nowhere else for him to go. C’mon.”

The man was half right. Grant was trapped behind the desk, but he didn’t plan on going far. With a thought, he activated the hidden Commtact communication device that lay beneath his skin, subvocalizing his command. “Kane, back me up.”

Kane’s reply was a single, whispered “Copy.” That one word was carried through the pintels of the subdermal communicator and straight through Grant’s skull-casing as though the other man stood right beside him.

Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, if a wearer went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact.

His brief exchange with Kane concluded, Grant was moving, leaping from cover and raising the Kevlar-weave coat out before him like a shield. The gunmen began firing instantly as Grant ran toward a nearby serving table, and he snapped the coat out at them, so that the long tails of heavy material whipped across the nearest thug’s face.

The gunman howled as the heavy coat struck him, leaving a red mark like a blush across his right cheek. He blasted another shot from the .357 Colt King Cobra in his hand. The gunman was distracted by the coat and the heavy bullet flew wide, allowing Grant to reach his objective.

Grant grabbed the handle of the pot of boiling soup, lifting it from the hot plate and tossing it out before him at the lead thug. As the angry gunman took another step toward Grant, the bubbling soup splashed across his face, scalding him like raking fire across his exposed flesh. In an instant, the gunman forgot what he was doing and toppled backward, reaching for his burning face as he hollered in his pain. Grant ignored him, leaping over the desk and flipping the half-empty soup pot out before him like an extension of his arm, a bowler rolling a bowling ball.

The heavy pot clanged against the skull of the next stick-up man with a sound like the tolling of a bell. The man fell backward against the floor, his nose caved in and blood pouring down his face. Grant leaped atop his fallen foe, lashing out again with the heavy pot he held in his right hand as bullets slapped against the Kevlar shield he held in his left.

By then, Kane and Brigid had emerged from the shadows. Before the gunmen could react, they joined the fray, felling two of their number in a swift, coordinated attack. Running, Kane drove a ram’s-head fist into the lower back of the nearest gunman before the man even realized he was under attack, forcing the man’s legs to give way so that he fell to the floor in the grip of paralysis—whether temporary or permanent Kane didn’t much care at that instant.

Next to Kane, Brigid dropped low, sweeping her outstretched leg at another gunman, connecting with his knee so hard that it popped the man’s kneecap with an audible tock that sounded like the clucking of a person’s tongue. The man tumbled to the wooden floor, crying out in a mixture of pain and astonishment as he turned to face his beautiful attacker. Brigid didn’t even give the man a second to retaliate. Her flat palm lashed out and bruised his windpipe in a sharp, savage jab. The man’s eyes rolled in his head as he sank into blissful unconsciousness.

As Kane disarmed a third gunman, Grant tossed aside the soup pot and slapped out at his own opponent’s gun, knocking it aside as the bandit reeled off a burst of gunfire that echoed in the enclosed space of the church hall. Then Grant drove a massive fist into the man’s gut, knocking the wind out of him and lifting him off his feet, such was the power of that incredible blow. As the man struggled to recover, coughing and spluttering from the savage punch to his gut, Grant drove his fist downward and into the man’s head, breaking his cheekbone and knocking him across the room. The gunman staggered until he tumbled over a serving table before flopping to the floor behind it.

Grant looked up and saw that Kane had dispatched his own opponent, but the final gunman was lifting his pistol and aiming it at the back of Kane’s head.

“Get down!” Grant shouted to his partner as his left arm whipped out with the Kevlar trench coat once again.

Kane ducked and a bullet blasted overhead. At the same instant, Grant’s coat wrapped around the gunman’s outstretched arm like a rope. As the bullet zipped harmlessly across the room, Grant yanked the coat back with such swiftness that the gunman found his arm dragged backward and his feet pulled from under him. He struggled to keep up with the sudden momentum.

Grant let go of the coat and the gunman staggered onward, hauled past the ex-Mag with the movement of the dragging coat. As he passed, Grant drove his knee into the gunman’s side, knocking him to the floor. As the stick-up man crashed downward, Grant fell upon him, slapping away the hand holding the pistol and driving his other hand down to hit the man’s face with its heel. The gunman was knocked senseless, his head slamming against the wooden floors with a loud, hollow echo.

“Everyone okay?” Grant asked as he pulled himself away from the final stick-up artist.

Around the church hall, the timid locals began to rise once more, smiling tentatively as they saw that Grant, Kane and Brigid had disabled all of their would-be robbers. And, spontaneously, a ripple of applause broke out among the people in that church as they showed their gratitude to their saviors.

However, hidden among the shadows near the church doorway, one woman didn’t applaud. Instead, her tanned face betrayed no emotion as she watched the scene with flashing dark eyes from beneath the hood of her jacket, her faithful dog waiting at her side.

Despite the disguising nature of the loose, ragged clothes she wore, it was clear that she was a tall woman, with a slender build and an economic lightness of movement. Her face was tanned with an olive complexion, with eyes the color of rich chocolate. The woman reached up with the long fingers of her slender hand, brushing a few rogue wisps of her dark hair back under the hood, pulling the front of the hood itself down lower, the better to mask her face.

As the crowd continued to congratulate the three Cerberus warriors, the woman turned and pushed her way past the milling crowd and out of the church hall, the dog obediently trotting along at her heels. The dog was some strange mongrel, with coarse, wiry fur and the look of a coyote about it. Its eyes were exceptionally pale, washed out to a blue so faint as to be almost white.

The woman stopped at the bottom of the stone steps that led to the church hall, gazing back over her shoulder for a moment to ensure that the Cerberus people weren’t following her. But no, they hadn’t spotted her among the crowds, had no reason to suspect she might be here. She had come seeking food, like the other residents of the shattered ville of Hope, but she hadn’t expected to bump into familiar faces like theirs. Her name was Rosalia, and she had met with the Cerberus rebels once before.

Rosalia had been here six weeks ago, when the earthquake had rumbled through the ground and the towering tidal wave had pummeled the beachfront. She had been a bodyguard then, in the employ of a local brigand called Tom Carnack, whose operation stretched into the Californian desert. Her position had put her at odds with the objectives of the Cerberus personnel, and she had clashed with Kane, Brigid and Grant, along with another operative called Domi, whose skin was an eerie white the color of bone.

Carnack had been killed during the encounter with Cerberus, and his operation all but destroyed. Now a few splinter factions of Carnack’s group remained, squabbling among themselves and with no clear leader emerging. And so Rosalia found herself once again out on her own, struggling to survive.

With no employer and no place to call home, Rosalia had found herself back in Hope, accompanied by the strange mongrel dog. What remained of the shanty dwellings had been reduced to a claustrophobic rabbit’s warren, which suited Rosalia fine. She could hide here, another refugee among the population of strangers until she was ready to move on. There was the nunnery, of course, just over the border, where she had been trained. Rosalia knew that she would always be welcome there if nowhere else.

Right now, however, she required rations and clean water, but she felt instinctively that revealing herself to Kane and his team would be foolhardy. Their business had not ended well. Better, then, that they thought her dead and dismissed her from their overly moralistic minds.

Rosalia hurried on, making her way from the church doors before ducking into a side street, the faithful mutt keeping pace with her. Rosalia had found the dog six weeks ago, while she had been wandering the Californian desert following the destruction of Carnack’s base, and the two had become companions on the road. Not given to sentimentality, Rosalia had elected not to give the hound a name, merely calling it “Dog” or “Mutt” or “Belly-on-legs.” The dog didn’t seem to care, happy to have human company, sharing its warmth with Rosalia wherever she slept. The dog itself was a strange, nervous animal, inquisitive but slightly wary around strangers, often hiding behind Rosalia as they walked the streets. That nervousness served her well, for it meant the hound would wake at the slightest noise or movement and would bark at any shadow it didn’t recognize. On more than one occasion, the dog’s sudden barking had woken Rosalia and saved her from being robbed or attacked while she slept in one of the empty, ramshackle buildings that remained dotted around the fishing ville.

Dog whined, and Rosalia peered down at it. Like herself, Dog could feel the gnawing in its belly as hunger threatened to consume it. It wouldn’t do to go hungry simply because of the Cerberus Magistrates and their interruption of her daily routine. If she didn’t eat, she would become weak, and once that happened Rosalia would become a slave to circumstance, or she would never eat again and simply lie down in the street to die as she had seen others do.

There, she said in her mind as she looked back up the street, her predatory instincts rising. Exiting the church, a young couple made their way down the stone steps, going slowly so that their child could keep pace with them. The child was a toddler, and the mother held its hand as it slowly navigated the hard steps to the street. Rosalia’s eyes were on the male’s bag, small but full of rations and two bottles of purified water. The young woman cheered as the child clambered down the final step, and it looked up at her and laughed. They were simple folks, Rosalia recognized, naive and lacking street smarts. Ville folk turned refugee with the destruction of Beausoleil or Snakefishville, most probably. Educated to be idiots.

And if the child starved because of her actions?

Better the child than me, Rosalia reasoned.

Beneath the waxing moon, the couple turned into the side street where Rosalia waited by the wall, hidden in the shadows of the brickwork. She was about to step forward, planning merely to brush past them and take the bag before bolting in the manner of a common street thief, when she saw movement at the far end of the narrow street. Two tough-looking youths had followed the couple and their child, clearly harboring the same idea as Rosalia. She saw the glint of metal catch the moonlight as one of the young men unsheathed a switchblade, and the whisper of a smile crossed her perfect lips. It was a bored smile, the kind that came when one could finally sense a break in the tedium. This would be Rosalia’s break from tedium.

One of the young punks began laughing, a sinister, braying sound that echoed off the walls of the enclosed street. It was meant to terrify, and the young couple walked faster, glancing over their shoulders as they rushed down the street. Then the two punks began to sprint, rushing along the street and surrounding the young couple in an instant, like a pack of wild dogs, howling and laughing as they did so, the animalistic noises echoing off the walls. Two more young thugs had appeared from the far end of the alleyway, and another stepped out of a doorway on the far side from Rosalia’s own hiding place, where he had been waiting just out of sight, a bend in the alley hiding her from him.

“Got something we want, Mr. Man,” one of the punks announced, pointing to the modest bag of rations he had acquired from the church.

“Keep away,” the man spit, reaching for his woman’s elbow and urging her onward.

The five-strong gang paced around the young couple, hemming them in and laughing among themselves. Another knife appeared in one punk’s hand, and Rosalia noted how weedy he looked, the arm that held the knife little more than skin pulled over bone.

“We went to eat, but they didn’t feed us enough,” the leering leader of the punks explained, his tone mocking. “We want more.”

Ironically, Rosalia could well believe that. These punks looked emaciated, wasting away like the fishing town around them.

The man stopped, standing protectively before his partner and child even as the group continued to circle them. “Get away,” he instructed. “We need to eat, too.”

“No, Mr. Man,” the lead punk said. “Not you.”

Rosalia stepped forward then, while the eyes of the teenage gang members were fixed on the man and his wife, intimidating them with the threat of casual violence. With two long-legged strides, she was next to the nearest punk, and without warning her hand jabbed out and drove into the soft, fleshy part beneath his rib cage. He yelped and fell to the ground, his eyes wide and his tongue lolling in his open mouth. Though he didn’t know it yet, his kidney had ruptured under the impact, and internal bleeding would fill and devour him in the next two hours.

As one, the group of would-be robbers turned to see the hooded woman in their presence.

“Who th—!”

Rosalia didn’t give the little punk enough time to even finish his sentence. Already her right leg was swinging high off the ground to kick the gang member in the face, and his nose exploded in a hideous burst of scarlet.

As the punk fell backward, Rosalia dropped and lashed out behind her as another of the gang slashed at her with his knife. The blade whizzed over her head, and Rosalia continued backward, driving the sharp corner of her crooked elbow into the young hoodlum’s groin. The punk screamed out as white-hot pain speared through his genitals, and Rosalia heard something soft squelch beneath the impact of her savage blow. The knife-wielder toppled forward, his cry of pain echoing in the enclosed space of the narrow street, and Rosalia snatched the blade from his hand as she flipped him over her back and into the next gang member, who was running toward her.