Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

caught on something in there, and he wrenched it sharply from side to side to loosen it up. He heard the crack and snap of bones and thought, good, a little extra pain for his refusal to go along with things.

Bryan made a constricted, wheezing sound. His right hand was on fire. His face was wet with blood, sweat, and rain. Choking, weakening, he felt himself losing consciousness, and suddenly thought he was going to die and then thought about Natasha alone somewhere below him, alone with her hunters, alone in the wind and the rain and darkness, all alone, and then, crazily and again very suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, he thought about Buster Bunker, and the countless WCFW matches he’d watched on television and thought, Physics, Physics!, and grabbed the arm around his neck with his left hand, and dug both his heels into the soft mud underneath him, slowing his slide as best he could while pulling his attacker down with him, using his right shoulder as a fulcrum to shift his weight and haul him off his feet.

Kai grunted out a single expletive, “Shit!”

And exactly ten seconds after their deadly scuffle began, as Natasha pushed around the bend of the creek, he flipped over Bryan’s shoulder and slammed into the water-saturated earth of the slope below, landing hard on his back, all 270 pounds of him adding to the gravity bearing down on the slope and breaking away a huge, loose chunk of it.

Triggering a mudslide that sent him, Bryan, and a cascade of mud and debris tumbling down into the storm-swollen channel.

Natasha saw Bryan and her stalker fall into the creek about fifteen feet upstream. For a long second afterward, they were both underwater. But then a head bobbed to the surface, and she prayed it was Bryan.

It wasn’t.

The guy rose out of the creek with his back to her, bent slightly at the waist. His ball cap was gone and his long hair hung in thick, dripping sheets. His aura was dark red and malevolent.

Then she realized why he was leaning forward. He had his hands on Bryan’s shoulders and was dragging him up out of the water.

She didn’t know if Bryan was conscious or unconscious. Or worse than unconscious. With the big man between them, she couldn’t tell. The drop itself wouldn’t have seriously hurt him. The embankment was steep but not high. But he wasn’t moving, and she had no idea what had been done to him up there. She didn’t know whether he might have struck his head on the rocks.

Natasha pushed toward them, waist deep in the cold, roiling water, reversing the Maglite in her right hand so she was gripping it just behind its head. She could see better with it off. The darkness boosted her visual acuity. Everything around her stood out against it, sharply defined, highlighted in radiant brushstrokes of color.

And it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t just the Glowing. Something else was happening to her.

Perception is the key to human potential. Sensory and physical capacities are interactive. Use yours.

As she drew nearer to him, he turned his head halfway around in seeming slow motion. He was wearing goggles, probably night vision goggles, which explained why he hadn’t needed a flash in the woods. But they were askew on his head, only their harness holding them on. She didn’t think he could see her. Not clearly. Not with any definition. He looked almost blind in the darkness and rain. He’d angled his head over his shoulder, like a predatory animal, his eyes making fine adjustments, trying to focus. Searching.

He couldn’t see her.

Natasha pushed through the surging current, closing to within a yard or two of him now. He started turning the rest of the way around, releasing Bryan’s shoulders, letting him fall limply and heavily back into the water.

Bry had gone under.

Natasha gripped the Maglite, her left hand joining her right hand around the barrel. Held it out at her side, level with her hip. Like a baseball bat. The guy was huge. Probably triple her weight and seven or eight inches taller. But the Mag’s barrel would add more than a foot to her reach.

Her eyes tracked his turn from initiation to completion, broke it down it into a sequence of tiny, fractional motions. The right shoulder leading. The right leg his plant, his hip rotating above it. Then the left leg swinging around and his upper body and head straightening up in stages.

She couldn’t let him rise to his full height. She would have to hit him squarely. Hurt him with the first blow.

She strode in against the drag of the water and swung.

Kai saw her too late. If he hadn’t been wearing the goggles before his fall, his eyes might have adjusted to the darkness faster. But she was already within inches of him.

The barrel of the Maglite uppercut his nose, smashing into his columella, the bridge of bone and cartilage between his nostrils. It was a fraction of an inch wide. The flash’s bare metal barrel was three inches in circumference, and weighed over three pounds loaded with batteries. It splintered the bone and crunched Kai’s septum up and back. It shattered it with such driving force that, for an instant, his nostrils turned forward and outward like an animal’s. Pain exploded in the middle of his face. He staggered in the water, still not fully upright.

Natasha swung the flash’s barrel at the middle of his face again, this time from the right side, so it struck almost horizontally. It snapped what remained of his septum and pushed his almost onto his left cheek.

Blood streaming down over his lips, Kai took a dazed, astonished step forward and loosened something underfoot. It shifted one way, and the current pulled him another way, and he slipped and folded to his knees, cold creek water burbling and coiling and slithering around him.

She hit him again. A two-handed downswing to the back of his neck.