Freedom Incorporated by Peter Tylee (the best ebook reader for android .TXT) 📕

a cyborg… But he’s certainly fucking insane.

*

Jen was feeling stronger. Now she wished the world would stop spinning for long enough to get her bearings. But she was thankful her headache had dulled to a background throb. It’d been the worst headache she could remember - and no painkillers to ease the suffering. It’d felt as if her brain was swelling inside her skull and had run out of room to expand.

The shots have stopped. She wondered whether that meant Dan was dead. Or captured. She wasn’t sure what’d be worse. She wished she had a weapon and, with all the gunfire, she supposed there had to be guns lying around. Where’re the other women? The thought of orchestrating an uprising appealed, it was the most liberating thought she’d had in days.

If I can just find some guns… She blundered into a laundry and squinted in surprise. Disorientated, she’d been expecting one of the lounge rooms. Where am I? Nothing looked familiar and that scared her. It was one of the withdrawal effects; everything was obscure in her mind. Her hands looked big and her feet looked small. She tried not to focus on the distortion lest she went mad, and she kept chanting her tasks in her mind. Find a weapon. Find Dan. It didn’t really matter in which order those things happened. As long as they both happen.

An indiscernible amount of time later she found the room she’d been looking for, the one most of the shots had come from. And what a grisly sight it was. It pricked her nausea to new levels. Four men lay slain in a contorted exhibit of human limbs, a ghastly sculpture. Their skin was pale because much of their blood had trickled like thick syrup around their remains. Jen paled too, the vulgar sight sending shivers of revulsion through her body. She had to turn away and slapped a palm to her mouth to stifle a gasp and quell her uneasiness. Soon she symbolically shifted her hand to cover her eyes, her mind rendering the sight in equally horrid detail.

She turned slowly back around, removed her hand, and opened her eyes, slitting them just far enough to survey the devastation through a haze of eyelashes. None of the handguns had escaped the splattered gore. That’s disgusting. But Jen was determined to fend for herself. She abhorred blood, but she hungered for survival and ordered herself to select a weapon. So, without even a grimace, she mechanically bent down and obeyed her inner voice.

It was sticky and warm, just the way she remembered. The iron-like smell of haemoglobin assaulted her nose and brought bile to the back of her throat. She came closer to vomiting then than in the past four hours.

She looked at the gun, her mind magnifying it to the detriment of her stability. She was so intent upon the weapon and the viscid feel of blood coating her fingers that she didn’t notice somebody creeping up behind her. One solid hit and the gun went sprawling from her fingers, knocked to the far side of the room.

Wha…? But someone locked her into an abrasive headlock before she had time to finish the thought. Whoever it was, he was strong. He tipped her backward, taking her weight against his body. The lock around her neck was threatening to crush her windpipe and was already partially collapsing her arteries. She could hear the blood pounding in her ears like a base drum, slowed by the hallucinations in her mind.

“Don’t say a word.” It was Junior.

Ah yes. Jen recognised the ginger hair on his arm.

He pressed the tip of his gun firmly into her temple and the pressure revived a painful memory of her earlier headache. Junior was focussing elsewhere and didn’t even realise he was close to strangling her. For him, she was a tool, and always had been. To be used as he saw fit and cast aside once he was finished. And right now, she was the perfect human shield, the one person Dan wouldn’t risk killing.

A brazen smile snarled across Junior’s lips. Come on fucker… you and me. Right now.

*

“How the hell did you do that?” Simon asked incredulously, looking at Dan with a mixture of awe, respect, and concern.

“You don’t want to know.” Dan’s eyes reinforced the statement and Simon knew better than to probe further. “Esteban’s still here. So is Frank.” He paused a second before adding, “Maybe more, it’s hard to say, this place is a warren.”

“Not to mention they might just be regrouping,” Simon warned. “Or going for reinforcements.”

Dan doubted it. “This isn’t their fight, so I don’t see why they would.” He was right. The Guild was all for unification against common threats, but it was mostly lip service to an ideal. No member was willing to die for another’s problems. They were on the run, and most of them wouldn’t come back. They’d return to their cosy lives and sprout stories of their glory days to people who didn’t care and didn’t particularly want to hear.

Someone was approaching from the left corridor and Dan whipped his Colt up, already squeezing the trigger. But recognition stopped him and he snapped the Colt away when he saw it was a woman.

She was tall and slender, and supported enormous breasts with folded arms. “Don’t shoot.” She raised her hands to show she wasn’t holding a gun and her beasts visibly sagged, straining her back.

Dan waved her close. “Is there anyone left down there?” He indicated the direction she’d come with his Colt.

“No. They fled.” She extended a hand. “I’m Mindy.”

Both Dan and Simon accepted the offer and warmly shook her hand. “I’m Dan.”

“Simon,” the officer said, smiling politely. “We’re here to help.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured that.” She looked around, hungry for revenge of her own. “You need a hand?”

“You offering?” Dan asked, rather stupidly Simon thought.

Mindy nodded. “I know how to shoot. I used to be in the Air Training Corps.” Her eyes hardened. “Seems like a millennium ago now, but back then I was on the rifle shooting team.”

Dan snapped together the two halves of his Cobra-KT and undid the safety catch, selecting semiautomatic operation before handing it over. “There are only a few left - maybe two - but you’re welcome to help if you think you can.”

“Come on.” Simon was eager to have things finished. “We know he’s somewhere back there, toward the portals.”

“Ah…” Dan cleared his throat. “But there are two sets. He could’ve gone through those portals and appeared on the other side of the compound.”

“So we have no idea where he is,” Simon summed up. “Fantastic.”

“Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t suggest breaking up,” Dan said. Only a fraction of his consciousness was aware of what he was doing, experience and skill had taken over. He was on autopilot. “But there are three of us and three directions to sweep.”

“I’ll take the left,” Simon volunteered, waiting for a nod from Dan before departing to check every room as he zigzagged down the corridor.

“I’ll take the right,” Mindy offered.

Dan held up a hand before she could move off. “Wait, my friend’s in here somewhere. She’s new. Her names Jennifer Cameron…”

“Yeah, I’ve met Jen.”

Good. “Okay, I just didn’t want you shooting her, that’s all.”

The determined expression in her eyes momentarily softened. “Don’t worry, I won’t shoot your girlfriend.” She departed before Dan could explain.

She’s not my girlfriend. The thought lingered in his mind while she vanished down her corridor. That left Dan with the centre. He slapped both hands around the grip of his Colt, having already fed a new string of bullets into the clip. They were his last rounds. After that, he’d have to find more nine-millimetre ammunition, find another gun, or fight with his fists.

I’m coming Jen…

“Dan Sutherland. Fancy meeting you here.”

Dan swivelled, his Colt level before he’d completed the turn. A wash of alarm boomed in his skull when he saw who it was. Junior had Jen in a headlock and he was pointing a Browning semiautomatic at her temple.

“Jen…” He froze, realising the outcome of the next few seconds would determine whether she lived or died. “Are you okay?”

She nodded the best she could, more with her eyes than anything else. The pressure from Junior’s forearm squeezed her oesophagus and vocal cords so that she could muster only a choking wheeze when she tried to speak.

“Let her go,” Dan ordered tersely, menacingly adjusting his aim.

Junior shook his head. “Put down the gun, then I’ll think about it.”

Dan judged his chance of getting a bullet into Junior’s head. He was perilously close to Jen. If his aim were off by less than one tenth of a degree, he’d kill her instead. Damn.

“Let me make it easier for you, tough guy.” Junior pressed his muzzle even harder against Jen’s temple. It was going to leave a nasty bruise. “Put down your gun or I’ll spray her brains over the floor.”

Jen’s stress hormones were a hundredfold above potentially lethal doses and her blood disorder began to react. The capacity for her haemoglobin to carry oxygen to her brain was dwindling fast and, even without Junior’s arm, she was choking. She wriggled, ignoring the pain from the cold steel against her temple, and freed herself enough to speak. It came in contorted gasps, “Take the shot.”

Dan hesitated.

Junior echoed her, “Yeah, come on Sutherland. Take the shot if you have the balls. Or aren’t you good enough?”

If he’d still been suffering under Zyclone’s protective umbrella, he wouldn’t have hesitated. He missed the confidence it breathed into him, especially at times such as these. Now he was wreaked by doubt. He couldn’t hit Junior and be sure he’d miss Jen. The brute had pulled her onto her toes and was crouching low to give Dan as little as possible to shoot at. No… I can’t.

Junior saw the defeat on his face and snapped, “No, I didn’t think so. So put the fucking gun down.”

Dan was about to comply when he caught the disappointment in Jen’s eyes. He froze, thought, and steadied his aim instead.

Jen took strategic advantage of nausea brought about by oxygen-deprivation and gagged on a jet of vomit that surged explosively from her mouth. It sprayed down her front and coated Junior’s trousers, assaulting him with its pungent acidic odour.

He relaxed his grip and she twisted to face him for the next convulsion, spraying him in the face. Junior responded the same as most people would under the circumstances, instinctively swatting the vomit that clung to his mouth and nose and made it difficult to breathe. Jen crumpled to the floor and Dan shot Junior thrice in the head. He fell backward, away from Jen.

He rushed to her side, oblivious to the chunky vomit puddling around her. “Jen! Are you all right?”

She shook her head. “No.”

An irrepressible song of euphoria was whistling through Dan’s mind. He couldn’t explain why any god thought he was worthy of a miracle, but one had bestowed a miracle on him anyway. It was only then that he noticed Jen’s breathing was short and sharp, and a frown crossed his forehead.

“What’s happening?”

With Dan’s help, Jen rolled away from the vomit. “I have…” - she had to gasp for air - “…a blood disorder… can’t breathe…”

A helpless panic replaced his euphoria. “What can I do?”

Jen closed her eyes, trying to control her breath. The onset of haemoglobin-failure was itself a stressor and contributed to the downward spiral in her condition.

“Nothing… just tell me… I’m safe.” Jen was calming down, but wasn’t yet sure she’d live. It would get worse before it got better.