Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“You know,” he said conspiratorially, “this has been such a pleasure for me, so much more than mere business. I feel that we are brothers. We are both men of the dark skin, our forebears were swarthy, and only a little polish hides our true nature as men of color. I feel our alliance is determined by nature. It is time for those of us of the darkness to take over. The world has too long been dominated by los gringos or les blancs , or whatever one chooses to call them. I have lived among them, I know them. I was educated at Harvard, you know, and have studied them. It could be said I majored in White People, ha ha. You know them too. You have hunted and killed them. Such entitlement they have, such a sense of nobility and position and grace, not knowing how they are loathed among those of us who are not of them. Really, it is about race— la raza, as we call it — and how they have assumed for centuries our inferiority and how that time is coming to an end. And you and I, my friend, we are on the front lines — you in your way, I in mine — not just to bring down an entity known as the United States, with its capital in Washington, D.C., but an entire culture, a civilization, and the assumptions upon which it was built. They consider themselves superior because freak chance awarded them custodianship of the Industrial Revolution, but to make it work, they had to steal from us at a rate beyond calculation. Their wealth and power was built on our flesh and sweat and death. They thought they built a thing when, in fact, it was our muscle and our lives that paid the price. And, from that, they assumed possession of all material goods and all spiritual succor. It was, I tell you, the greatest crime in history, and only now are we beginning to understand the extent of the white man’s thievery, not just from Africa, not just the labor of the Negro, but from the world over. From all the peoples of color, they looted and pillaged and alchemized our tears into their gold. It is my deepest pleasure to be a weapon in the war against all that.

“That is the point of the narcotics: they are weapons, not pharmaceuticals, their mission to eat at the structures and disciplines of these pretenders, so stupid in their ways that they do not see the larger picture and understand that we are rotting out their infrastructure from beneath them so that it will collapse upon itself. And, in the end, all men will have the character bred out of them or softened by the pleasures of the chemicals that we sell, crippled by their need, desperate for the effect. They have no strength left — not physical, not moral, not even metaphorical — and so they too shall pass, and the world shall become the communion of ‘we,’ of color and blood, well bound by the intensity of our co-struggle and our—”

“Can I see the gun?” Juba said.

“What? Why, yes, of course. Yes, what a beauty it is. A perfect symbol of our struggle. How appropriate it is at this moment.”

He walked to the gun case, unlocked it, and removed the gold-plated AK-74.

“This is not a toy,” he said, “or a fraud. The plating is genuine twenty-four-karat, the rubies and diamonds that encrust it are all real. It is said to have a value of close to three million dollars. It was given me by a consortium of Mexican gentlemen who understood the nature of my struggle and my commitment to my race. See how it gleams and sparkles?”

The weapon indeed gleamed and sparkled in his hands.

“It is a monstrosity to some tastes, a work of art to others, a kind of melding of fifteenth-century aesthetic drawn from the treasures the conquistadors had come to the New World in search of, as applied to the fist of the twenty-first century, that expression of guerrilla will and courage as perfected by Sergeant Kalashnikov in the workshops of the old Soviet Union at the end of the Great Patriotic War as it prepared, planned, and plotted for its next Great Patriotic War, men of the East, men of small stature, who would end the rule of—”

“May I?” asked Juba.

“Of course. I do go on, don’t I?”

Juba removed the magazine from his belt, where it had been tucked under his sweater, and, with knowing hands, rocked and locked it into the mag well of the weapon, smiling mildly all along, hit the bolt latch with a strong palm, so that it flew back, admitted a cartridge to the chamber, slammed forward with the system’s prototypical klak . Menendez watched this brief ceremony with fascination, as it was the last of all things he imagined happening, and he, normally so sure, could generate no policy toward it but instead fell into a sort of numbed enchantment.

Juba stepped toward him and rammed the muzzle of the rifle into his throat, the angle upward and just to the right of the larynx, so that the barrel pointed into the cerebral vault.

Menendez made sounds like a thirsty frog requesting water, finding it difficult to form words with the cylinder of the flash suppressor shoved an inch into the flesh of his throat.

“Gk … Gk … Gk …” he said, eyes opening wide in realization of what was happening.

“You should not have required me to kill my friend,” said Juba.

Bang , said the AK-74.

La Culebra liked to do certain things to Rosita at one place, while Rita did certain things to her at another. Then they would change positions, and he would work there while Rita came up here. There was always a lot of delightful sound involved. It was moist, yet fricative, and seemed accompanied, if one listened hard enough, by a chorus of droplets landing everywhere. Wetness was general over the three of them, including the slide and slurp of fluids, salty, even fishy, flavors, dribble tracks zigzagging this way and that, and the skin upon which these phenomena played out was so prehensile — theirs and his — that it always found some new way to lie or arrange itself. It was so very interesting. Sometimes, comically, his mask slipped, rising or falling from the dynamics of the action, and his eyes were covered. That had become quite enjoyable because, at that moment, both women went down below and began to work on him while, at the same time, they were working on each other, all of this in warm darkness. The energy developed could be quite astonishing.

He heard the shot.

He immediately knew something terrible had happened. But he was naked with two naked women. He disengaged, reached for and pulled on his clothes.

He hated to be so unprepared. He straightened his mask, tightened his belt buckle, and slid into the harness that contained, in different locations, seven different blades. A black guayabera shirt went over it.

“What is—” began Rita.

“Shh,” he hissed, hearing more shots, all single taps, suggesting careful aiming, and knew that some kind of catastrophe was occurring.

“Stay here,” he commanded, and went to investigate.

The bullet killed but the gas destroyed. Roaring at supersonic speed and energy, it vaporized all before it, scalding a funnel-shaped zone of vacancy, an eviction notice from the high lords of physics to Señor Menendez’s skull, emptying it of matter, which it distributed artfully on the ceiling, on supersonic zephyrs, forming whorls and pinwheels and lone dazzlers of abstraction. Droplets of crimson goo were flung everywhere, and Juba had to do a quick wipe on his eyes to clear them of the mess.

He turned to discover Alberto, standing, as if encased in amber a billion years ago.

“Stay with me, old man,” he said to him, and gave him a playful smack on the shoulder.

The sounds of footsteps arose, from the main passageway, and Juba fired quickly at the shapes that suddenly filled it, not a burst, as only fools fire bursts, and placed 5.45×39s into thoracic cavities as they became available. One shot, one kill; three shots, three kills.