Incensed now, he charged again.
This time she held her ground and — when he hurled himself at her — Max simply went limp and dropped.
As the guard flew over her, she caught him in the throat with an uppercut. The guard sprawled onto the forest floor. He rolled and tried to rise, but it was clear he was losing momentum, his breathing ragged through the blood-filled broken nose, even as he choked from the last punch.
As he sat up, Max was on him again. Three quick rights sent him back down, groggy. When he lifted his head again, Max — tired of her new game, deciding this snake-cult son of a bitch didn’t need to suffer, just die — took his skull in both hands and gave it a violent twist, breaking the man’s neck like a celery stalk.
She let go of the head, and the limp dead form slumped to the ground.
She went off to look for Joshua and spotted him, spread-eagled about ten yards away, his eyes closed, his chest barely moving. She went to his side, knelt next to him and finally forced herself to look at the wound in his chest. To her surprise, she saw no blood on his coat.
Max steeled herself to lift it back, but then Joshua moaned, opened his eyes, blinked a few times, and in a strangled voice barely above a whisper, asked, “What happened, Little Fella?”
“You were shot, Big Fella.”
“Took one for the team?”
“... Afraid so.”
Joshua swallowed thickly. “C–Cold.”
She stripped off her leather vest and covered him with it as best she could.
He moaned, and it almost sounded like a death howl.
“Does it hurt?”
“Hurt,” he repeated. “Like I got punched — hard.”
His hand went to his chest and she tried to pull it away, but he was stronger. Reaching under the vest and inside his coat, he drew out something red, and for the briefest moment Max had a vision of him pulling out his own heart.
But what he had in his pawlike hand was a book...
... the hard-back copy of Gulliver’s Travels she had used to find Ray White in Appleton.
Slowly, Joshua sat up and looked at the blood-colored volume with a neat entry wound in the cover that went almost all the way through. When he riffled the pages, the bullet tumbled out.
“Are you mad, Max?” he asked.
“Mad?”
“Joshua ruined Father’s book.”
Relief flooded through Max and she grabbed her monstrous friend in her arms and gave him a big hug.
“Ow!” he growled.
“Aw, did that hurt?” she asked. Pulling back and taking his face in her hands, she gave him a big, wet, sloppy kiss.
This time he didn’t say anything, and when she let him go, a wide smile spread over his face. His eyes were glassy, and he wobbled for a moment.
Then he passed out.
“Big Fella,” she said, and shook him.
He was dead to the world... but not dead, thank God.
Plenty left to do tonight, and now she had two or three hundred pounds of dog-boy transgenic to haul out of these woods.
Still, it was a hell of a lot better than leaving his dead furry body behind.
Chapter nine
Meet the new boss
Just twenty yards from the west side of the house, Mole and Alec huddled in the woods. Between them and the mansion lay the building’s blue shadow, one last suggestion of night, even though ten minutes ago — on the other side of the massive, mausoleum-quiet building — the sun had broken through, bringing a not entirely welcome morning. And yet the chill of the night clung to them, as they squatted like oversize gnomes at the base of an oak.
“Where are they?” Mole asked, the reptilian face wrinkling with impatience. “What do you think? Should we go lookin’ for ’em?”
“We should do what Max said,” Alec said, “and wait.”
“Mr. Frickin’ Rule Book all of a sudden!”
Alec offered up his trademark smirk. “Is it my fault you ran out of smokes?”
Mole said nothing, just scowled.
Alec’s smirk softened into a smile. “Relax, buddy. They’ll be along.”
“They musta heard the shots.”
“Yeah — and we heard shots, too, remember? They maybe had a little trouble of their own.”
“They maybe got iced.”
“Maybe. But for now we wait.”
Mole sighed heavily and settled in. “All right... but it’d be easier if I had a damn cigar.”
“Life with you would be easier for me if you had a damn cigar... On the other hand, one look at the smoke and every goon and gun on the grounds’d be down on us.”
“Yeah yeah yeah. It’s a frickin’ moot point, ain’t it, smart-ass?”
A familiar female voice cut in: “Why don’t you two try marriage counseling?”
Mole swung around and there was Max, coming up a path between trees, an arm around Joshua’s waist, walking him along like he was drunk. To Alec, the smile on his friend’s furry face was even a little dumber than usual, as well as inappropriate, considering the circumstances.
“What’s up with Furballs?” Mole asked.
“He was shot,” she said.
“What? Jesus—” Mole said, getting to his feet.
“You mean he was stabbed,” Alec said, frowning, also getting up. “We all saw it, Max.”
Helping the beast man along, she said, “That was then... this is now — but he’ll be okay.”
Mole was helping her with Joshua, who they walked over to the base of a tree, sitting him down.
“Where’d he get it?” the lizard man asked.
“In the front cover,” she said, and quickly filled them in, finishing, “But he took the full impact of the slug — he’s pretty shaken.”
Joshua said, “Max kissed Joshua’s oowwie,” and grinned stupidly.
Alec and Mole exchanged lifted-eyebrow glances, then Alec said, “I don’t even want to know.”
Mole, amused, leaned toward Max, saying, “I got shot, too...” Then he puckered his lizard lips, as much as lizard lips could pucker, anyway.
And Max said, “You wish... Let’s see it.”
Mole showed her where the bullet had cut a crease in his vest and his side; the bleeding had stopped.
“Get over yourself!” she said. “I nick myself worse shavin’ my legs.”
Alec and Mole reflected on that image perhaps a beat too long, and Max snapped, “Can we get to business?”
Alec gestured through the trees. “I know about your cat-burglar background and all, Max — but how do you intend to get inside that dollhouse?”
The three-story antebellum mansion made, as before, an intimidating adversary, hedge in front, at least three windows on each floor on each side of the house...
“Windows,” Max said.
“What about them?” Alec asked.
“That’s our way in.”
The X5 frowned. “We’re not going to try to take out the alarm system? Those things’ll be as wired as Sketchy on Saturday night. Not very subtle, Max.”
“This from the guy who shot up the whole damned island on the way in.”
Alec looked hurt. “They started it — anyway, I heard way more gunfire from your side.”
She arched an eyebrow, a fist on a hip. “What, are you afraid alarms will alert them to our presence?”
Alec smirked humorlessly. “Well, maybe the gunshots already did that, yeah.”
Mole cleared his throat.
They both turned to look at him.