Will Staeger - Painkiller

Sure, he thought, I’ve got a few questions I could ask these guys-maybe probe the topic of what it is, exactly, that Muscle-head does with the zombies once he brings them in here-but he was starting to feel exposed. It began to occur to him that even in his prime-presuming he’d ever had a prime-that he hadn’t exactly been a crackerjack military strategist anyway. Back then, he thought, all you were was a goon: a highly trained, stupid goon, taking orders from people any idiot could have told you not to trust. And now? Now you’re a flaccid, drunken beach bum, who ought to be out riding a wave, or taking a look at a starfish, or an anemone, or maybe some octopus hiding somewhere inside a shallow coral reef. You have no business tangling with these motherfuckers, and no intelligent reason to be doing it either.

Thinking that the opportunity for surprise rarely came around at all, he figured that once it had, maybe what was needed was a goon such as himself, stupid enough to be willing to seize the moment. He checked the clip on the UR-14, and, finding it to be in working order, leaned over until his lips brushed against Laramie’s ear.

“The way I see it,” he said, “right about now, we’ve got three options.”

“Okay,” she said.

Considering the look he saw in her eyes, peering past the pipe at Deng and his team, Cooper suspected Laramie was thinking the same thing he was, but he took her through it anyway.

“Option one,” he said, “we do nothing and get caught.”

She nodded. “Hang around another five minutes and we may as well just pick that one. How about two and three?”

“Use Popeye’s homing beacon to bring him back, and, pictures in hand, get the hell out of here.”

“If he can make it back.”

“Yes-if.”

“And if he does, it would probably take, well-at least five minutes of hanging around, wouldn’t it?”

“I’d say longer,” he said.

“How about door number three?”

“For the moment at least, we possess both the element of surprise and a pair of automatic weapons.”

“We could look to hide out,” she said. “You know-avoid option one for as long as we can while we figure out what to do.”

“We could.”

“My lie-detecting talents lead me to surmise that, if given your druthers, you would choose option three.”

“Yes.”

She looked at him. “I can’t say that I’ve ever shot anybody. I can say that I’ve never killed anybody.”

“Get on the floor.”

“What do you mean, ‘Get on the floor’?”

“I have.”

“You-um,” she said. “Both?”

“Get on the floor.”

He moved across the phalanx of Gibson’s rented soldiers, a staccato-firecracker echo caroming through the cavern as he went. Hiram popped up next in the shooting gallery-dropping his grip on the dolly he’d been wheeling along, Hiram stepped away from it and squeezed the trigger of his Uzi before the dolly hit the cavern floor, but only one of the shots he popped off came close before the last three shells from Cooper’s first clip pierced the former bartender’s neck, shoulder, and heart, and Hiram’s body leaned sideways and draped itself lifelessly over the fallen dolly.

Having dispensed with the bodyguard contingent, Cooper ejected his spent clip, popped in another, and drifted out from his hiding place to seek a better angle on the principals. He continued firing as he moved; each of the others had found his way behind some obstruction or other, but as he rotated, pulling the UR-14’s trigger, Cooper could see a few of his bullets landing. As he emptied the second clip, he saw a partially hidden body bounce from the impact of his shells, flopping sideways to the cavern floor. He couldn’t tell who it had been.

He was in the process of ratcheting load number three into the gun when his unprovoked assault on the denizens of Mango Cay came to an abrupt end.

Gibson spun to the cavern floor, reaching out as he spun, slapping Deng to the ground with an open palm to the side of the premier’s head-the effect, due to Gibson’s arm strength, that of a grizzly knocking a spawning salmon off its intended trajectory up a waterfall. Deng bounced across the cavern floor and tumbled out of sight into the hole beneath missile 36.

Gibson himself landed behind a transformer, which approximately forty percent of the bullets from Cooper’s second clip proceeded to riddle. The transformer sparked, whinged, thwacked, and burst into flame, a narrow stream of black smoke curling roofward from its louvered vents. A bank of lights overhead doused, and half the cavern went dark.

Lacking the benefit of a Gibson grizzly swat, Admiral Li did not fare as well as his comrade premier. While he did manage to dive for cover and draw his pistol in a single fluid motion during the dive, the porous silo-housing he fell behind did little to stop the onslaught of the remaining percentage of bullets from Cooper’s second clip. Li’s pistol fell from his fingers as his body performed a spastic dance in objection to the rapid intake of bullets it was forced to endure. The forward momentum of his dive dissipated, and he collapsed on the cavern floor a few feet from Gibson.

Gibson took inventory of the sputtering, bleeding remainder of Admiral Li, the motionless lumps of the four mercenaries, and the prone, bent, and clearly dead Hiram splayed backward over the dolly. Two, then three seconds passed, during which time Gibson considered what he knew was about to happen next. Taking in the bodies, he did some math, and concluded that whoever was doing the shooting-not that it mattered now, but he had a pretty good guess-it would be more profitable, to the tune of an estimated two hundred million gross, were he to get the shooter to hang around for a little while longer.

He leaned back against the transformer.

“Alive!” he bellowed.

The sinewy muscles of his scrawny neck flexed and stretched as he elon-gated the word and repeated the wail.

“Alive!”

As Gibson’s echoing plea reached her ears, Lana the maid pulled her finger off the trigger of the MAC-10 assault pistol she had been about to fire. Instead, she took two long steps, covering the remaining distance between her and the trespassing figures of Cooper and Laramie, and struck Cooper in the side of the head with a roundhouse kick that sent him sailing six feet before his body hit the cavern floor. When he did land, it was with a skull-carom across the lava surface and a back-bending bash against a silo joist. Lana then spun in a short, efficient motion and rammed her left elbow into Laramie’s temple while Laramie attempted to rise from the floor of the cavern and fire back with her UR-14.

Laramie collapsed, sputtering, at which point Lana savagely and repeatedly kicked her, rolling her across the cavern floor until Laramie’s body flopped against Cooper’s at the base of missile 34.

Protection of Spike Gibson complete, Lana surveyed the carnage wrought upon the occupants of the cavern. Deng was nowhere to be seen; there was Gibson, alive and in perfect health; Li lay on the cavern floor, contorted, bruised, barely breathing; the four anonymous soldiers, dead and bleeding, were sprawled across the floor as though in formation; and finally there was Hiram, a six-foot-five-inch rag doll draped cold and dead across the dolly. Lana bent at the knees and touched Hiram’s face, lingering for a few long seconds.

Then she stood upright, nearly at attention, and lowered the MAC-10 to her side.

“Clear!” she said.

Deng clawed his way up the side of the hole beneath missile 36 and peered over its top edge at the floor of the cavern. He could see Gibson’s maid standing by the transformer; Gibson had just stood and said something to her. Everyone else was dead, dying, or comatose. Li was mortally wounded, but Deng didn’t mind this much, since if Li died here, now, it would only serve to make things easier.