Devil's Island Page 13

  Together, they fought across the cavern floor.

  Mai took the fight to their opponents, elbowing her merc in the face and then stabbing him through the ribs. She kept him upright, felt a bullet smash into his vest. By now she was right next to the shooter. She slipped around, grabbed his gun arm and broke it. He didn’t flinch, just came at her with a knife. Mai stumbled over one of the bodies, fell to one knee. The man swiped down at her, but she moved in and heaved him over her head.

  He landed heavily, crashing through a bleach-boned skeleton.

  Valance had backed away, letting the trophy hunters step forward. Mai noticed Valance signal two of the mercs to remain at the back of the cavern alongside him. Karin and Dino matched their own opponents in skill but were about to become outnumbered. Luther saw it. Looping his massive right arm around one man’s neck, he dragged them both into the fray that surrounded Karin.

  A blow to someone’s nose stopped them in their tracks. A kick to the groin sent another to the floor. Karin fell to one knee as a mercenary battered her head with two hands. But she still had the knife. She thrust it up into his lower stomach, left it there and dived away. He fell into the space she’d vacated.

  By now Luther had strangled his man into unconsciousness. He let the man drop and then flung his own knife end over end through the air. It slammed point first into the right eye of a trophy hunter. The man died instantly, never knowing what hit him.

  The other three hunters balked, not turning their weapons on the big man as they should do. Valance screamed at them. Mai stepped on the neck of the man she’d thrown and heard cartilage crack. She flung her own knife at one of the hunters; saw it glance off his gun where the sights were, making him drop it and fall to one knee.

  She ran across a floor crammed with bodies. She stepped on bones and through chest cavities. She skidded as her right foot came down on someone’s head and slid off. She fell to the left.

  Karin ducked behind two piled up bodies. One crawled with maggots, the other was covered in flies. She tried to stop herself from heaving. A bullet smashed into the dead flesh that protected her. She was trapped, unarmed; one of the three remaining trophy hunters had singled her out to die.

  Dino fought and kicked his own adversary. What the Italian-American had in skill, he lacked in strength, his light frame working against him in pitched battle. The merc he fought was big and well protected. Every blow Dino landed struck hard armor. His knife was trapped between their bodies.

  The merc had fought to bring his gun up and now the barrel was slowly turning toward Dino’s chin, first eight inches away and now four. Every second brought it that much closer. Dino resisted with every ounce of muscle he possessed, tried to wriggle away. But the merc was relentless.

  Karin saw that her friend was fighting a losing battle. He had seconds left. She rose, then ducked as the hunter fired at her, taking one more chunk of flesh from a dead corpse. She was pinned down.

  It was then that Mai regained her feet and chose to strike the remaining trophy hunters. Three of them couldn’t withstand her. First an elbow and then a knee, a whirling kick that shattered a cheekbone. A jab of stiffened fingers and a man was bleeding from an eye. She pirouetted among them in a lethal ballet, twisting and turning their bodies and keeping them between her and Valance at the back of the cave, breaking bones and tearing flesh with every passing second. Their guns smashed to the floor; their knives clattered away; their limbs sagged. Suddenly, the fight and the will to chase was out of them.

  And then there were no more trophy hunters.

  “You went the way all poachers should go,” she whispered, on her knees. “Utterly destroyed by their prey.”

  But her actions caused problems. There was now nothing between her and Valance and the two mercs. Karin was able to attack the merc bearing down on Dino. Punching at the side of his neck. When that didn’t work she reached underneath his body and leant her weight to that of Dino’s, wrenching the gun so that it moved away from her friend’s face and pointed straight at their enemy’s.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Both she and Dino turned away as the man’s head exploded. After a moment she rolled the dead body away and dragged Dino back to the two piled up bodies.

  “Saved you,” she whispered.

  “Had . . . had it under control,” he stammered back, but she could see by the whiteness of his face and his shaking hands that he had used up almost every ounce of strength in his battle.

  Luther was destroying another merc. As Mai took stock she saw that only Valance and his two mercenaries remained. The trouble was they were at the back of the cavern. Their guns were aimed.

  “Down!” she cried.

  She fell among the bodies. She felt old flesh beneath her; she felt exposed bone. Flies buzzed everywhere. Bullets slammed to left and right. She rolled further away, crunching over several old skeletons. She was in the boneyard proper, the place where the old dead lay. As she scrabbled around, eyeless skulls met her gaze, a ribcage exploded with a series of popping sounds, a leg socket jabbed her in the ribs. An index finger scraped her cheek, drawing blood. She rolled until she came up against something solid.

  She looked up.

  A cloud of bone dust filled the air. She was next to the rock face. It towered over her like an unattainable dream, full of promise but too deadly to risk. She chanced a look back over her shoulder.

  Valance was waving a Glock. His two mercenary friends were sighting along their barrels, trying to pick off Luther. They were advancing. Of course, they had nothing to fear at distance although they remained wary. Frantically, Mai checked around the floor for weapons but came up with nothing except a sharpened tibia. She hoped the other three had been cleverer than her.

  Valance advanced. Mai stole through the boneyard she’d just decimated, creeping like a ghost toward dead mercenaries. Karin and Dino stayed low behind two bodies. Luther was barely covered behind two more. Even as she watched, Mai saw a bullet strike through a dead man’s arm which had been bitten through by something unknown. The bullet nicked Luther’s thigh.

  She was almost past the bone dust.

  Valance stopped. “You did well, rabbits,” he said. “Better than all the rest. The best performance yet. Showy, but solid. But all that ends right now.”

  Mai wasn’t going to be fast enough.

  Valance signaled his men. Together the three charged, firing carefully. Bullets slammed into barricades made of meat and bone; the sound was tremendous.

  Mai risked it all and broke cover, running for mercs she’d killed earlier that had dropped their guns. She dived headlong as the trail of bullets almost reached Luther.

  But it was Dino that rose up. It was Dino that got to his feet amid the hail of bullets and pointed two handguns of his own, one held in each hand. He fired fast and straight from the hip, like a sharpshooter, shot after shot. A bullet skimmed his temple, but he never flinched. Then, a bullet struck him in the chest, sent him staggering back, but Dino never stopped firing, his aim always true. A second bullet hit him, making him cry out, fall to his knees. His fingers never left their triggers.

  Karin cried out and flung herself at him, bearing him to the ground. Mai was watching their enemy though. She saw what Dino did to them.

  His hail of bullets passed to their left and right, making them flinch before hitting them. First a shot to a man’s chest and then, half a second later, another to the same man’s stomach. He was already falling when a third bullet smashed through his forehead. The other merc fared no better, taking bullets to the face as he tried to whirl away.

  Valance was the one that tagged Dino though, standing tall as his colleagues died, and zeroing in on the Italian. It was Valance that shot Dino twice.

  In the process of saving himself though, he forgot one vital thing.

  Luther.

  Mai saw the huge American propel his body slowly, legs first, around his barricade and toward the next. This one he prized apart, sliding one
body off the next, and then crept over like a ghoul slinking among the dead. By the time Valance shot Dino for the second time, Luther was within striking distance.

  Valance saw the figure rise from the corner of his eye.

  “Shit—”

  Luther launched the full weight of his body at the mercenary leader, shattering ribs as he smashed into the man’s chest. The gun went flying, clattering off a rock face. Valance folded. Luther caught him as he fell, clamping one huge hand around the man’s neck and lifting him off the floor.

  “You don’t get to die that easy.”

  Valance kicked but Luther lifted him higher until his heels kicked in space. Valance produced a knife, but Luther still had a spare hand and simply grabbed the wrist and twisted until it snapped. The knife fell away. Luther lifted Valance to the extent of his reach and slammed him back against the rock wall.

  “You called our flight a performance,” Luther grated. “While we ran for our lives you joked and laughed, chasing us with automatic weapons. I really hope our performance blew you away.”

  Mai winced as Luther produced the grenade he’d taken earlier, shoved it down the front of Valance’s tight bulletproof jacket, pulled the pin, then threw the man back down the tunnel he’d emerged from.

  When the explosion came, Mai turned to Karin. “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, thank God they let us keep the flak jackets.”

  Dino gasped and coughed, clutching the two areas on his chest where the bullets had struck. His face was white.

  “Scary,” Karin was saying. “That was so scary.”

  “We’re not out of this yet,” Mai said. “Now, let’s climb!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Dahl checked his watch. It was a little after 4 p.m. From their vantage point they could see the Scavenger camp and all the activity down there. They had been forced to abandon their earlier attack when the entire Scavenger force surrounded their friends and sat down, guns resting across their laps, knives at their sides.

  “What?” Kenzie had said. “Is it story time?”

  A white-bearded, ropy-muscled individual walked before the Scavengers, brandishing a machete.

  Kenzie had pulled Dahl to the ground. “We can’t attack now unless it’s end of days stuff. They’re all in the same place and just a few feet from the captives.”

  Dahl saw it and knew she was right. They hit the dirt and broke out field glasses, shuffled as far forward as they could get. They could hear nothing. Dahl’s lip-reading skills explained a little, and the rest could be read between the lines.

  Hayden, Kinimaka and Molokai were about to become a part of a ritual. Some ceremony the Scavengers held dear. By all accounts, it was going to be a long one.

  Dahl watched as the dead body was removed from the fourth stake. “I still don’t understand why they aren’t packing.”

  “They don’t care,” Dallas said. “And they have nowhere to go.”

  “We’re gonna have to hurry this along,” Dahl said. “The nuke clock is ticking.”

  “Just wait a bit,” Kenzie insisted. “Let them get engrossed in their little ceremony. If it’s anything like some I’ve witnessed in the past, it’ll take all their attention.”

  Dahl turned his head. “Oh yeah, like what?”

  “I’ll explain another time but suffice to say they usually involve inebriates, drugs, smoke, blood and a dozen other things you don’t wanna know about.”

  Dahl studied the camp through the glasses. “I don’t like the look of this.”

  The white-bearded man was opening a gash in his arm, just below the left bicep. Whilst he worked he capered before his captives, whooping and nodding along to an invisible beat. Parts of the audience began to shake their heads too, keeping time to their leader’s crazy antics. As blood started to flow he turned to the other arm and parted the flesh there.

  To the left, Dahl saw two men behead the corpse they’d dragged off the fourth stake, before shoving it onto a pole. Then they stuck the pole in the ground near the outskirts of their camp. Dallas related the events, keeping his eye on all proceedings.

  Dahl’s attention was riveted on the center. The white-bearded man was letting his blood drip into a small stone bowl. Others came up, adding their blood to the mix. Hayden, Kinimaka and Molokai watched, fiddling with their bonds, stretching and pulling at the knots. Their hands were bound behind their backs, which would prove useful in hiding their actions, but their ankles were crossed and tied, which was a hindrance. Kinimaka stared wild-eyed at the ceremony unfolding before him, sometimes more engrossed in the ritual than he was with trying to escape.

  Dahl kept watching until Kenzie pointed out a smaller but closer slope from which they could view. They crawled down their own hill and up the next, now just a hundred yards from the Scavenger camp.

  Whitebeard held his hands in the air, coming to an abrupt stop. Dahl watched the blood stream down his arms to his shoulders. He lifted the blood-filled bowl. From a pocket he produced a rudimentary brush—a thick twig tied with animal bristles. Next, he stepped up to Molokai and unfastened his bulletproof jacket, letting it flap open. Then he pulled apart the top of his shirt. He dipped the brush in the blood and turned to the audience.

  “It begins!” Dahl heard him cry out.

  The leader of the Scavengers went to work, painting odd shapes first at the base of Molokai’s neck and then on his cheeks and forehead. He used the blood sparingly so that it didn’t drip. Once he was satisfied with the outcome, he moved on to Kinimaka and Hayden.

  By now, the entire Scavenger group were up on their knees, chanting, nodding their heads in time to the unheard beat. They were glaring at either their captives or their leader, engrossed. Nothing else moved. Nothing else made sound.

  The ceremony was everything.

  “Now,” Kenzie said. “We go now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  Drake scanned the skyline as they reached the base of the mountain. It wasn’t late, but the sun was already tending toward the west. Shadows were lengthening. Good sense dictated they shouldn’t be on the top of this mountain at night, yet they had no choice. Hopefully, Mai and the others would be up there.

  Sat waiting?

  Not likely, but he could dream. And, while he was at it, maybe one of the guys up top could be holding a freshly made bacon sandwich, the kind he liked with crozzled crusts and just a flick of brown sauce. That thought reminded him of Ben Blake—they’d often discussed the merits of rewarding the end of a mission with the good taste of a local Yorkshire bakery—sandwich or otherwise.

  Sadness washed through him. It had been a long time since he visited God’s Own Country. It had been much longer since he spoke to Ben Blake. There were times, when all was quiet, that he would hear Ben’s voice—exactly as it had been—advising or persuading him, pointing out the pros and cons of a situation. Every time it made him pause, made him think. Was it the same for everyone? When you grew so close to a person and then lost them, did they revisit your thoughts when a situation or a memory or just an everyday noise related to something they’d once done or said?

  The bacon sandwich scenario filled his mind. Young Blakey would have speculated on the sausage roll alternative, and the dos and don’ts of using ketchup instead of brown sauce. Drake heard it all clearly in his mind as if his old friend was standing at his side. The island vanished. Even Alicia went to the back of his mind, which was never an easy accomplishment.

  The world is worse for losing you, old friend. People are dead or lost now because you weren’t around to help or save them. My life has followed a different, poorer path without you in it. Maybe, if we meet again, I’ll get to tell you all about it.

  Wouldn’t that be great? Drake thought wistfully. To meet up with the ones you’d loved and lost at some time in the future. To sit, to chat, to love them again, to hug and hold them as long as you liked. To tell them how much you missed them. To talk like you used to. To remember the great, golden glory days when you
were all alive.

  Drake leaned against a rock, overcome with emotion. The recent deaths of Lauren and Smyth, and the past deaths of those he loved weighed heavy on him now.

  Alicia crouched at his side. “You all right, Drakey?”

  Somehow, she knew not to interfere too much. “Yeah, yeah. Just processing.”

  “Take your time.”

  He figured there would be time enough to process later. And, after everything that had happened during the last week and through recent years, realized it was catching up to him. But he needed time to deal with it.

  “You think . . . Hayden’s proposal will give us all . . . some space?” he asked.

  Alicia gazed into his eyes. “I think it might.”

  “I wonder how.”

  “I’m interested to find out.”

  Drake shrugged it off, straightening his shoulders and taking a deep breath. Whatever traumas fought inside his head would have to wait. The safety of Mai and the others came first, and then they needed to get the hell off this bloody island.

  “After you,” Drake said.

  Alicia moved out. They were up against the rock face in two minutes. Above rose a jagged black mountain. It would take some careful, skilful climbing to scale it, but there were no other options. They couldn’t surreptitiously breach the castle at this point; they didn’t have time. Behind, Drake saw the distant forest where the Creepers had been packing up and knew the valleys were beyond that. Hopefully, Dahl and his crew were already rescuing Hayden and the others. Vaguely, he could see the cliffs where they had first set foot on this island over twelve hours ago.

  “C’mon.” Alicia started up.

  Drake stowed his gun, tightened his backpack, and followed her. Soon, they were a third of the way up and resting in a tiny lee.