King froze in his tracks, allowing Reed to tighten the choke.
If the man wanted to choke him unconscious and drag him the rest of the way, there was nothing he could to do stop it. Reed was too powerful, too composed.
But King weighed a hell of a lot, and he imagined Reed didn’t want to put that kind of burden on himself. A second later his suspicions were confirmed as Reed loosened his grip. The dark circle on the edge of King’s vision dissipated.
‘I don’t know where you’re from,’ Reed said, keeping his voice low as they walked. ‘But you obviously get paid well. You know what my salary is?’
‘As a Force Recon Marine?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Just over fifty thousand a year if I’m not mistaken. Clearly low enough to want to kill a bunch of people who trusted you and make off with some dirty profits. You’re scum. Don’t try and justify it to make yourself feel better, you piece of shit. Hope you rot in hell.’
King had intended to infuriate Reed over the course of the speech, throwing insults at him one after the other in a relentless stream.
It paid off.
Reed applied the same amount of pressure to the choke as he had before, cutting King off in the middle of his tirade.
But the man had become predictable.
He’d done the same thing twice.
King sensed Reed turning all his concentration to his right forearm, subtly taking his mind off the weapon pressed to his temple. King dropped all his weight at once, letting all tension go from his legs, slipping a few inches toward the ground before Reed caught him. But King weighed over two hundred pounds, and Reed found himself straining to hold the deadweight by the neck with a single arm. He lost balance momentarily and leant forward to tighten his grip.
At that moment, King tensed both legs and exploded off the concrete, launching back a couple of inches in the other direction. As Reed pitched forward, the top of King’s skull cracked him full in the face, hard enough to stop anyone in their tracks.
Bones broke and blood spurted.
King had no time to assess the extent of the damage. He writhed and bucked like a bull at a rodeo, suddenly possessed by raging energy, changing his demeanour in a single instant. It startled Reed into hesitation and King jerked his chin down hard and fast. He sensed enough wriggle room to burst out of the choke hold and capitalised on it, tearing free from the man’s grip while the nerve endings across Reed’s face screamed for relief.
Everything had taken place in less than a second — three short, sharp movements that ripped him out of the choke. But everything came down to what happened next — King understood he had another half-second to seize control of the weapon before the barrel turned in his direction and fired once. It would barely take Reed any time at all. Even though his nose had shattered under the kinetic force of the headbutt, his fast-twitch muscle fibres would kick in and he’d send a round through King’s forehead before he could move one step further.
King had one attempt to snatch the gun.
Or he would die.
He shot out both hands, fingers splayed, palms open, searching in the murky darkness for his target.
Intense, primal focus lent him assistance.
He wrapped both hands around the wrist wielding the M45 handgun and jerked the barrel away from him. With disaster temporarily averted, he focused all his energy on wrestling the weapon off Reed.
But Reed’s frame sported similar raw power, and the two found themselves at a stalemate, writhing from side-to-side across the concrete as they jerked and wrenched with all their might. The M45 spelt the difference between life and death. It meant everything.
Then King remembered that his wrist was broken, recalling the experience as a fiery wave of pain sliced up his right arm, buckling his knees and making his eyes water. Reed had pinned the broken appendage in a vice-like grip, crushing it between his own fingers and the barrel of the sidearm. He had forced it entirely from his mind as the instinct to survive took over, but now it all came roaring back in a singular moment of weakness.
That was enough.
His pincer-like grip on the M45 slipped, barely noticeable but providing enough leeway for a guy like Reed to capitalise. He noticed the sidearm tearing from his grip, and even before Reed had gained full control of the weapon he thundered a combat boot straight up in the air like a kicker trying to punt a football the full length of the field. The toe of his boot slammed home against Reed’s genitals, hard enough to override any kind of willpower and buckle the man where he stood.
Reed’s face paled and he crumpled on the spot, unable to prevent his body’s natural reaction to the horrifying blow. As he went down, he kept enough composure to shield the M45 against his own body, drawing it in to prevent King from making a snatch at it.
In the heat of hand-to-hand combat, where mere inches meant the difference between life and death, King recognised that Reed had saved himself with the procedure.
King wasn’t getting the gun.
Accepting that fact, he pivoted on his heel and sprinted away at full-pelt.
31
The moment he turned his back on Bryson Reed, King’s heart threatened to burst out of his chest in panic. It was an acute feeling he had experienced many times over, and it never lessened over time. The realisation that he could only will his body to move so fast hit him like a ton of bricks, sending fear through him in crashing waves. He wouldn’t know if Reed had time to shoot — he would simply take the brunt of the impact to the back of his skull and the lights would darken forever.
The thought spurred him on.
He couldn’t have been on the move for more than a second before a nearby semi-trailer provided some form of cover, yet it felt like an eternity. He hurled himself behind the enormous vehicle, ducking instinctively, pressing his chin to his chest.
Just in time.
Sparks flew a few inches above his shoulder as a round ricocheted off the side of the massive trailer. If Reed hadn’t been dealing with a nightmarish type of pain, he might have been more accurate.
No.
King had seen the man’s handiwork.
He definitely would have hit his target.
But the incident unfolded over the course of milliseconds, and then King was out of harm’s way. He scrambled for the other side of the trailer in a mad panic, tearing the skin off his palms as instincts took over and he threw all concept of temporary pain to the wind. Gunfire roared in his ears as Reed sent another few bullets in his direction, the reports crackling through the complex in just the way they’d both been hoping to prevent.
Pandemonium erupted.
Workers yelled to the heavens and scattered like flies, sprinting for their lives away from the source of gunfire. They had either been trained to flee the scene when confrontation broke out, or there had been enough qualms within these walls in the past to teach them that hanging around a gunfight would achieve nothing.
They worked in a volatile business, after all.
No matter how ordinary it looked at surface level.
‘Motherfucker!’ Reed roared from the other side of the trailer. ‘You ruined it!’
King said nothing in return, his ears still ringing from the gunshots. At that moment he realised that Reed was an impulsive man — anger and disdain laced his tone, unrestrained. He hadn’t bothered to try and hide his emotions.
He had been planning something, and King had stifled it by causing a commotion.
‘Guess I’ll just do it by force,’ the man called, clearly sensing that King had morals. ‘This is on you. No-one had to get hurt.’
Unarmed, reeling from his badly mangled wrist, King was helpless to prevent what came next. He skirted back behind an open-topped transport truck, used to ferry pallets of goods between each of the major warehouses in the complex. He kept his head down, searching for a path back to the jeep where he could get his hands on the HK416.