Max Collins - After the Dark

Standing in the window, the two Familiars grinned at her. Max got up, dusted herself off, and with a toss of the head, flung the hair from her eyes.

“Fellas — I been thrown outta better places, by better people.”

Like an ugly family portrait in the frame of the broken window, the two guards just kept grinning at her. The scarred Familiar said, “You’re always welcome here.”

And he gestured with a little “com’ere” curl of the fingers.

Max smiled. “I think I will make another visit. Only this time, just for a change of pace — I’ll kick your asses.”

“Go,” the scar-faced one said, and the rest of the phrase presumably would have been “for it,” only Max didn’t let him get that out. Instead, she launched herself back through the window, taking both men down with her in a wide generous embrace.

Max rolled off them, leaving the two startled men on their backs; then she landed nimbly on her feet and pirouetted, facing them, a woman possessed. They scrambled up even as her fists and feet flew in all directions, and — despite their incredibly high pain threshold — the Familiars could not withstand the one-woman onslaught. Though there were two of them, the guards were no match for this whirling dervish of a pissed-off X5.

The vast living room — the meager furnishings that remained sheet-covered and pressed up against the walls, like mute spectators — gave the three combatants plenty of space to maneuver on the hardwood floor.

The scarred one went down first, a vicious kick catching him on the side of the knee, tearing ligaments audibly. He didn’t cry out, of course, but any lack of pain couldn’t make up for the physical facts of life, and the leg gave out underneath him when he tried to attack her. He made one more sweeping attempt with his good leg, which she jumped as if skipping rope, and the aftermath of the guard’s attempt was to present his chin at a nice angle; and Max clipped him with a straight, swift, hard right that turned out his lights.

The other one cartwheeled toward her, delivered a fast one-two and cartwheeled away.

“That looked pretty,” she said. “Blow me another kiss, why don’t you?”

And she waved for him to bring the shit again, and he did, this time cartwheeling in and kicking her first with his right, then his left foot, before cartwheeling away — she’d pulled back some, but he did catch her. She raised her gloved hand to her face, wiped a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth, and waved for him to come back one more time.

This time he backflipped into a cartwheel, apparently hoping to confuse her, but Max was ready, and when he was braced for that split second on just one hand, she hit the floor in a baseball slide, knocked the guard’s palm out from under him and dumped him on his head.

He jumped to his feet, only to find Max cartwheeling this time, right toward him; then she dropped into a roll and launched at him, her fist burying to the wrist in his crotch. He said nothing, his eyes bulging and watering as he bent over, obviously surprised by the intensity of the sensation.

“See?” Max said, with a demented little grin. “Some kindsa pain you just can’t completely breed out of a guy...”

And she came up, delivering a hard head butt that broke the guard’s nose, twin streams of blood erupting from either nostril as he went pitching back into the wall.

He bounced back at her, consumed with rage, blood and spittle flying as he roared toward her. At a fraction of the last moment, she sidestepped and the guard blasted through the middle unopened window, breaking glass raining all around as he came to rest over the sill, half in the room, half outside. It was as if he were taking a breather.

Then he stood, turned, blood dripping from several cuts as he stepped through the shattered glass. Coughing, he frowned and reached up and felt a huge shard protruding from his neck. He coughed again as if that might dislodge the scratching in his throat.

“Got a tickle?” Max asked. “Let me help.”

She stepped forward, yanked the glass from the man’s neck, and ducked, anticipating the arterial spray, which easily rose to the ceiling, where it painted a scarlet Jackson Pollock abstraction.

The Familiar’s eyes went wide and his hands flew to his throat, but it was too late. Max drop-kicked him, sending him on through the window this time, to leave him outside to bleed to death. She knew it wouldn’t take long.

Say what you will about Manticore, she thought, but science’ll beat out pagan breeding rituals, any time.

She left the living room — and the drip-drip-drip of her opponent’s blood off the ceiling — and went into the hall.

Joshua was emerging from the back of the house, in the midst of fighting another guard — obviously a Familiar (any human would be crushed by any one of Joshua’s formidable blows) — backing the man slowly down the hall toward Max with a series of punches alternating between face and belly. The guard was putting up a good fight even though Joshua towered over him. Slowly, the battle neared her.

“Don’t be cruel to animals,” she said.

The guard turned, and she delivered a right cross that spun the man back toward Joshua, who caught him with a left hook. The Familiar’s eyes closed and the guard melted to the floor.

“Hard to hurt them,” Joshua said.

“They’re like robots,” Max said. “But when you shut off their electricity, they go down.”

Joshua nodded, getting the concept.

“Check on Mole,” she said. “I’ll look for Alec.”

They each took off in the direction from which they’d come, Joshua toward the back to find Mole in the kitchen, Max to the front to look for Alec, moving away from the living room. She ran into him at the bottom of the staircase, just as four Familiars opened fire with automatic weapons from above.

Both Max and Alec dove into the dining room, but they knew this sanctuary would last barely ten seconds. Already they could hear the guards thundering down the stairs. The room had a long table covered with two sheets and a dozen sheeted chairs, as if a banquet for ghosts was in sway. At the other end of the room, sharing the same wall as the door they’d used, another door led, presumably, to the kitchen.

Communicating with hand signals, they put a plan together — no time to decide whether it sucked or not, and anyway, it was a collaboration — then the X5s set it into action.

Alec took off for the back, while Max flattened herself against the wall, next to the near door.

When the first guard came in, Max jerked his gun out of his hand, and pulled him to her. As she did, a second guard fired at them, killing the guard Max held in front of her, a human shield.

Alec — having slipped out the door at the back of the dining room — came up the hall from the kitchen, Mole on one side of him and Joshua on the other, and the three of them waded into the remaining guards, just as Max discarded her dead shield and attacked the nearest opponent, using the butt of the commandeered weapon as a club, knocking him unconscious and to the floor in a pile.

Within seconds all the three guards were down, likely out for the rest of the day, if not dead. None of the three transgenics gave that a thought, not even the compassionate Joshua — these four were soldiers, bred by Manticore for combat, and soldiers did not linger over the casualties they’d created, shedding tears.

“You all right?” Alec asked Max.

“I feel good... You two?”

Mole said, “This is fun. If I had a frickin’ smoke, my life would be a song.”

Joshua said, “I’m alive, too, Little Fella.”

“Stay that way, Big Fella,” she said. “Let’s get upstairs then — I’ll take the point... Mole, you ride drag.”