Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

He moaned as he started to wake, so I kicked him in the ribs, probably shattering two or three of them. The man did not call out in pain. He made a grunting noise, but he did not writhe or cough up blood. He was awake enough to know that I’d kicked him, but he did not curl up to protect himself.

“Get up, asshole,” I said, and I kicked him again, in the same spot, doing damage to organs that were no longer protected by bones.

“You kick me again, Harris, and I’ll break your specking legs,” he said calmly.

“I don’t think so,” I said, and I kicked him again. I kicked him hard, and I felt the side of his body give way like the side of an overripe melon.

Lewis sat up coughing. When the coughing stopped, he looked to his right and spat blood.

“How many of you are there?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding as if he did not take my question seriously.

My next kick was not to the ribs. It was a roundhouse, and it struck him across the cheek. Had I connected two inches higher, I would have shattered his eye socket, but I did not intend to inflict that kind of damage. Not yet.

The kick to the face knocked Lewis flat. He lay there, rubbing his cheek, and said, “I’m going to break your arms and legs and your ribs before I kill you.” The words rang hollow, but his voice radiated anger instead of fear.

“I don’t think you understand what’s going on here. See, now, I am the one standing, and you are the one on the ground who just got his face kicked. Correct me if I’m wrong; but the way I see it, you are in the shithouse, pal.”

“It looks that way,” he said as he sat up.

I kicked him again. This time I kicked him in the ribs first, and then doubled up on the kick and fetched him a simple soccer kick across the face.

Lying on his back, staring up at me as he felt his injured ribs, he said, “Stop kicking me.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You won’t get anything out of me if I’m dead.”

I wasn’t sure that was true; his autopsy might provide all kinds of answers. “Tell me what I need to know, and maybe we can both walk out of here,” I lied.

“Why the speck would I let you walk?” he asked. He rolled backward, toward the jeep and slid into the trench headfirst. I felt sorry for the bastard, until I saw how quickly he sprang to his feet.

The expression on his face looked more animal than human. His eyes focused on me to the exclusion of anything else, his lips formed a sneer.

My combat reflex kicked in quickly. A reviving soup of adrenaline and testosterone flowed through my veins, clearing my mind and sharpening my reflexes. There was no fight or flight once the reflex began, there was only fight. Lewis lunged at me quickly, striking first high, then low, then crashing into me with all of his weight. I fell backward, with him attaching himself around my waist, still slamming his fists into my ribs and gut. I hit the ground hard, knocking the air out of my lungs. As I struggled for breath, he pounded his left hand into my chest and his right hand into my face.

Ignoring the flashing lights that filled my eyes, I fought back. I grabbed his blouse and pulled him toward me as I hit him in the face again and again. I worked a knee loose and drove it into his ribs. That slowed him, and I threw him off me; but I was dizzy, and it took me a moment to climb to my feet.

He recovered more quickly than I did. As I tried to clear my head, he jumped to his feet and came at me again. I kicked at his knees and struck his broken ribs with the heel of my right hand. The blow should have put him down, he had to be badly injured; but he grabbed me and threw me backward to the ground, then stomped a heavy boot into my gut, knocking the fight and the air out of my lungs.

Lewis dropped a knee into my chest and wrapped his fingers around my throat. “I’m going to enjoy this, Harris,” he said in a voice that sounded triumphant and insane.

A single shot rang out, echoing through the forest, and Lewis flew off me, smashing into a tree a few feet away. A quarter of his head was missing, from the right eye to the top. Still gasping for oxygen, I sat up and stared at the bloody mess of his head.

The air slowly returned to my lungs. It felt like fire inside my chest.

Sitting on that rocky ground, fighting for breath, the pains in my back and arm and shoulder starting to register, I knew who had saved me even before I saw him. A few moments passed before he stepped into my view.

Seven feet tall, thick as an oak tree and just as stout, his shaved head as bare as a billiard ball and his skin as dark as mahogany, Ray Freeman came and stood over me, his sniper rifle hanging loose in his right hand. Here was a powerful man who could snap a man’s bones or crush his skull with his bare hands, but he preferred the work of the sniper.

“Nice shot,” I said, my throat not quite able to add voice to my words.

My vision was still a bit blurred. The light was to Freeman’s back, so I could not see his face. I didn’t need to see it to know that I would find no sympathy in his gaze.

He was not a man given to compassion. We were friends, of a sort; but the last time I had seen him, he fired that very rifle at me. He’d shot me with a “simi,” simunition, a gel cartridge loaded with fake blood used to simulate an assassination. He’d come all the way across the galaxy to deliver a message for the Unified Authority. They wanted me to know that I was not beyond reach. The U.A. attacked Terraneau the following day.

Despite the burning in my chest and throat, I inhaled enough air to speak. “You could have popped him before he started choking me.”

“I wanted to see how you would do.”

Freeman spoke slowly, and his voice was so low it sometimes didn’t sound human. His voice was the sound of cannon fire or a lion’s roar.

“How did I do?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer. He wasn’t the kind of man who wastes his breath stating the obvious. He was a man of few words.

The jeep wasn’t going anywhere, not without a winch and a tow truck to pull it out of the ditch. Even if we did pull it out, I wasn’t in any shape to drive it. My right eye was nearly swollen shut, and I could barely stand, let alone drive.

Freeman offered to take me back to the base in his car. He’d only parked a few dozen yards from the jeep, but I covered the distance like an old man suffering acute appendicitis. I’d walked one hundred times the distance earlier that morning when the only things that hurt were my feelings. Now my head was spinning, and the ground seemed to roll under my feet like the deck of a ship in a storm.

“So what brought you to this neck of the woods?” I asked.

Freeman did not respond. He did not take well to humor. I knew this, but it only made me wisecrack around him all the more. His sphinxlike persona presented a challenge.

Speaking in a language he was more likely to answer, I asked, “How did you find me?”

“I followed the clone.”

“Was there any reason why you followed that particular clone?” I asked.

We reached the car. Anyone else might have opened the door for his poor, crippled friend, but Freeman climbed in, started the engine, and waited for me to catch up.

I opened the door, jerked my head back toward the trees, and said, “I want to bring him along.”

“Get in,” Freeman said. I got in without knowing whether he would refuse to pick up the stiff or if he planned to back his car into the forest and get it. He backed the car up the dirt road and stopped a few feet from the abandoned jeep.

“Put him in the trunk,” Freeman said.

Having barely been able to walk to the car, I wanted to protest, but I knew better. I was the one who wanted the corpse, not Freeman, so it stood to reason that I should be the one carrying the corpse with a head like a smashed-in gourd.