Me and my big mouth.
Then the man stumbled forward, going down on one knee. Nebraska was about to hit him with a quip—What’s this? A proposal or an execution?—when he saw that behind the merc was McKenna, looking a little worse for wear, but pointing a gun at the guy’s head.
“Untie him,” McKenna said, nudging his prisoner with the gun.
The merc scrambled to his feet and obeyed, making quick work of it despite his trembling hands.
“They have Rory,” McKenna explained, then frowned as Nebraska rose to his feet with a groan. “Shit, they rough you up?”
Nebraska rubbed his wrists, which were chafed and bleeding. “Whatever. Done worse to myself back in the day. I was the kinda drunk who thought the fastest way down a long flight of stairs was to just relax.” He nodded at the remaining merc. “What about him?”
Three seconds later, the merc’s face had left a permanent impression in the barn’s outer wall. Streaking the wall with blood, the merc slid down to thump to the ground like a discarded laundry bag.
Nebraska winced. “That’s what I get for asking dumb questions.”
When the gun barrel prodded the back of Casey’s skull, she closed her eyes tight and waited to die. Her heart beat loud in her ears and she found herself remembering the first time she’d ever looked through a decent telescope. Her pulse had quickened then, too, and her imagination had been set afire. All her hopes and ambitions had been born in that moment, and now she was going to die because of them.
Not only that, she was going to die on her ass, wrists handcuffed to a chair. Somehow that bothered her more than the concept of death itself. If she had to die, she wanted to do it standing up.
She felt the gun barrel twitch against her head. No bullet followed. Her guard had paused at the sound of heavy footfalls in the corridor, clumping noises approaching. They had an intruder.
“Who goes there?” her guard demanded, his voice tight. Maybe he was wondering who to shoot first, or whether he needed her alive, so he could use her for a shield.
The intruder poked his head around the corner, and Casey heard the thin intake of air as the guard started shitting his pants, albeit metaphorically.
Standing there, in the shadows, massive shoulders hunched and mandibles clicking, was the Predator dog with the bolt through its skull. It was a big, dumb, snuffling, drooling brute—it was even wagging its tail, for Christ’s sake! But the guard didn’t know that the creature had been tamed by the cranial trauma that the bolt gun had inflicted.
In fact, the guard was making little squeaking, mewling noises now, clearly unsure whether to shoot at the thing and provoke it or just stay still in the hope it would go away.
Casey saw what the Predator dog was carrying in its mouth before the guard did—the grenade from the clearing, which the dumb monster had leaped into the ditch to fetch and had now finally brought back to continue its game. Still lashing its tail from side to side, the beast trotted happily toward her and dropped the grenade into her lap.
She heard the guard mutter something about Jesus as she snatched up the grenade, lurched from the chair, pulled the pin with her teeth and spun toward him. The guard’s eyes went wide and he tried to take aim with his gun, but she was too close and he was too distracted, both by the grenade and the Predator dog, and he could only fumble with the barrel as she jerked her handcuffed wrist, whipping the thin wooden chair up at him. The impact caused the gun to go off, the report echoing off the walls and making the Predator dog whine. Before he could fire off another shot, Casey put the grenade down the front of the guard’s shirt and turned toward the railing of the loft, dragging the chair behind her. She knew the guard wouldn’t have time to shoot at her if he wanted to live.
As she leaped, the chair smashed against the railing and she had a flicker of a moment to fear she’d be snagged on it. Then she plummeted to the floor of the barn, hit the ground and rolled as the chair shattered on impact beside her.
Overhead, the loft exploded. Her ears buzzed, felt like they were stuffed with cotton. From the corner of her eye she saw another merc rushing at her and she pistoned to her feet, swinging the remains of the broken chair around on the handcuff chain in a single, swift motion. The shattered wood smashed the merc in the skull, nearly taking his face off. Blood sprayed out in an arc and spattered the ground as he fell.
More blood showered down from above, in a cloud of dust and dry wall and straw from the explosion in the loft. Casey staggered away, her ears still ringing. As the smoke cleared, she saw the Predator dog clumping down the steps from the loft, totally unscathed. He had something else in his mandibles this time and he dropped his new toy at her feet, still interested in fetch.
Casey had no desire to pick this new toy up, though. It was the scorched head of the guard who’d just been blown to pieces.
Hot bile burned up the back of Casey’s throat, but she managed not to puke. As she fought the urge, her ringing ears caught the sound of muffled boot steps approaching on the double. She lifted her cuffed wrist, ready to use the remains of the chair on its chain as an improvised weapon a second time. But then she saw McKenna and Nebraska hustle around the corner, both looking like they’d just survived a gang war. They were both armed, both breathing heavily.
“Hey,” McKenna said, almost casually. “Can I interest you in getting the fuck out of here?”
Casey grinned, breathless. “‘Getting the fuck out of here’ is my middle name.”
McKenna shot a sidelong glance at Nebraska. “And I thought ‘Gaylord’ was bad.”
They started to head out, then abruptly McKenna halted, grimaced, clutched his abdomen.
“Oh boy,” he muttered.
Casey looked at him in concern. “What?”
“Must be the coffee,” McKenna said apologetically. “Uh… excuse me.”
He bolted, disappearing around the corner, heading toward the barn’s exit door.
Casey turned to Nebraska, bewildered. “Where’s he going?”
Nebraska smiled and raised an eyebrow. “I think he’s about to give us a tactical advantage.”
20
Five minutes later McKenna was back, looking washed-out, sweaty, but no longer in gastric distress. Clearly embarrassed by what had just happened, he looked at Casey and said without preamble, “Doc, if what you’re saying is true, my son’s headed for a spaceship, and so is a ten-foot monster.”
“Eleven,” Nebraska corrected, and shrugged. “I used to be a contractor. Got an eye for measurements.”
McKenna scowled at the irrelevancy. Sensing his agitation, Casey laid a reassuring hand on his arm. “Hey,” she murmured. “We’ll get him back.”
McKenna looked anguished. “He’s just a kid, he can’t—”
“He’s not just a kid,” she interrupted firmly. “He’s a chess prodigy with an eidetic memory who decrypted Predator language. He’ll be fine.”
McKenna nodded, though not entirely convincingly, and they went outside. Looking at the RV, McKenna knew it wasn’t going to get them anywhere—not without being picked up fast. As soon as someone bothered to check on the dead bastards back at the barn, they’d put a BOLO out on the vehicle. McKenna knew they needed new transport, and hopefully the rest of the Loonies were on to that. His main priority right now, though, was to make sure they had enough firepower to survive the mission before them.
Together, he and Nebraska went through the RV, stuffing backpacks with as much ordnance as they could carry. A dozen ways to kill people—anyone who tried to get between McKenna and his son—went into those backpacks. Thanks to the lunatic gun seller who’d stocked up the RV in the first place, they also had earwig comms units, and McKenna grabbed them so they could all be linked up, whatever happened from here on in.