Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

Tinnitus had set up a high background whine in his ears. Cutting across it was a confusion of shouting, gunfire near and distant, a scream.

Calvary stayed down, kneeling with his head low. There was a lot of gore, much of it decorating his face and hair. With the two of them, him and the dead man, huddled like that, it might be difficult for somebody coming upon the scene to tell if either of them was alive.

Calvary’s face was turned on the soil towards the half-headed body slumped beside him. Suddenly the head rocked up and forward and then came to rest again. Calvary understood that something had hit the body in the torso, an instant before the crash of the shot came, horribly close.

Jesus, they were shooting the corpses .

Calvary felt the bulk of the shape above and behind him and heard the sudden silence and then the racking of a spent magazine out of the butt-end of a pistol. He turned and hefted the dud grenade and hurled it at the man. It was one of Krupina’s Russians, a man he hadn’t seen before. The useless egg hit him hard between the eyes and he went down, his own weapon flying fromon wa his hand. Calvary stood, took a second to find his feet, then made a move for the man’s gun, but there was shouting and gunfire in the trees nearby and another ricochet howled off the bark next to his ear and made him fling himself back.

Then the beast kicked in and Calvary forgot about guns and grenades and the other beautiful trappings of modern life and barrelled himself away across the grass and into the trees, stumbling and crow-hopping and sprinting over fallen smoking bodies and dropped branches, his arms flailing, all pain ignored, his being contracting to the pulsing torrent of his heart and his lungs.

*

Bartos hit the path at a lumber, his phone pressed to his left ear, his right hand reaching inside his jacket for the stock of his pistol. Into the handset he screamed, ‘Talk to me, damn it.’

Ahead of him, beyond the spires of the church, the air flashed and sparked with gunfire, the noise rising and spreading above the city. Behind, his driver had abandoned the car and was racing to keep up.

‘An ambush — ’ Miklos’s yell was cut off in a blast of white noise, as though something had rasped against the mouthpiece. ‘They’ve got us pinned.’

‘Where’s the Brit?’

‘I can’t tell how many there are, it’s — ’

‘ Where’s the Brit? ’

‘He’s running.’

‘Which way?’

‘It’s hard to say. I’m pinned behind a tree.’ Before Bartos could reply Miklos said, ‘Wait. Looks like towards the art gallery. I’ll — ’

His voice was torn away and the crash of a rifle set to rapid fire blasted down the line. Bartos listened as he charged down the path.

‘Miklos?’

The line was dead.

He knew the layout of the park. Had conducted late night business there several times before. He especially knew the gallery in the southwestern corner, because that was where the ruins of Libuse’s Baths were. The legendary prophetess Princess Libuse was supposed to have thrown her lovers to their deaths from the tower there. Bartos had himself done something similar, not to lovers but to business rivals.

He tacked right, towards the wall at the perimeter of the park.

*

At Calvary’s back was an unseen sound-picture of violence, the heavy crack of high-calibre fire in rapidly sequenced patterns. His animal brain told him he needed to be away, to insert distance between himself and the carnage.

rain to"+0"›The wall was ahead. He weaved instinctively, providing a zig-zagging rather than a linear target for whomever might be taking a bead on him from behind. A path separated the five-foot-high wall from the grass and he traversed it and peered over the edge. Dense wooded ground sloped away towards what he assumed form the noise of cars was a riverside road, far below.

He ran left, following the wall southwards. The gunfire was becoming more intense behind him, the bursts more prolonged. He wondered where Max and Jakub were, whether they’d made it out or were holed up in the park.

Ahead he saw a jutting promontory, some sort of ruined tower on the edge of a sheer cliff face. Beyond, the vast unsettled bulk of the river.

It was difficult for Calvary to distinguish individual sounds in the melange his brain was receiving: the pulse of blood in his head, exploding small-arms fire, human yells. But something was trying to rise to the foreground. He concentrated on it as he ran until it became clearer. It was the sound of footsteps pounding, but not his. It was coming from behind him. Then, suddenly, it stopped.

It could mean only one thing, that whoever was behind him was taking aim . He sidestepped in mid-run and dived, rolling on his shoulder, an instant before the shot sang past. There was a double crack, that of the firing mechanism and the impact of the bullet against the wall, followed by the whine of a ricochet. Calvary came up on his feet and saw the large man, thirty yards behind, advancing at a trot, gun arm extended.

Bartos Blazek.

Calvary was unarmed and at that distance he didn’t have a hope of reaching the man without being hit, so he ran at the wall and leaped over, the second shot coming dangerously close this time, its slipstream tugging at the back of his jacket. He crashed into the foliage beyond the wall and landed hard on the leafy carpet of the ground and kept the momentum going, ignoring the knuckles of root and branch ploughing into him as he tumbled over the earth.

At the base of a large oak he paused and hugged the bole and risked a glance round. Almost vertically above him, Blazek was clambering gracelessly over the wall. Two other men, a couple of his minions, lither and quicker, had already dropped on to the slope a few feet along from Blazek and were scrambling down, their guns drawn.

Calvary was off again, dodging and slipping in the mulch, the low branches slashing at his face. One end of the bandage was flapping in front of his eyes. He shoved it aside. Dizziness and disorientation were beginning to take hold again.

He caught a glimpse of movement to his right. One of the men was flanking him, coming up at the five o’clock position. It went against every instinct but Calvary stopped when he drew alongside another thick trunk. He scrabbled at the lower branches, found one that was both dry enough to be wrenched off and solid enough for his purposes.

A quick glance round the trunk showed the man almost on him. Behind, the other man was closing the gap, Blazek further back, cursing. Calvary pressed his back against the trunk, counted to three, forming a mental image of the man’s position based on where he had last seen him, then whipped his arm across in a backhand strike. The branch caught the man acrosstheent the throat and he howled and dropped to a sitting position. Calvary brought the branch down hard on the crown of his head.

There was no time to grab his gun because the second man was stumbling towards him, carried down the slope by his own momentum. Calvary turned to meet him. From further up came Blazek’s bellow and then a crackle of light scattered across the top of the wall an instant before the high-velocity rounds sizzled past down the slope, a salvo of furious wasps. Calvary flung himself down just as Blazek’s man ducked behind a trunk.

Both Blazek and his man were pinned, now, helpless behind cover. Calvary crawled headfirst down the slope, feeling like Dracula descending from his castle window. Ahead, not close but no longer impossibly distant either, he could make out the end of the trees, the main road.

He lifted his head but dropped it again as more stray slugs whined past. Behind him he was vaguely aware that Blazek and his man were returning fire, their handguns puny against the power of the automatic weapons levelled on the other side. The slope became steeper and Calvary dropped the last few feet, hitting the ground with a jar, fetching up against the base of a concrete wall.