He barked something to the men around the truck.
From inside the cabin King heard a soft whimper — Beth putting on her best performance. Before the convoy had arrived, King had smeared his blood across her chest, adding to the notion that she was injured.
Helpless.
Alone.
A tantalising prospect for a gang of degenerate scum.
They all lowered their weapons — nothing noticeable to the untrained eye, but King’s senses were thrumming with anticipation. He watched the tension diffuse in the air — they had been expecting violent confrontation and instead stumbled across something else entirely.
Something they hadn’t been expecting.
Something tempting.
Their shoulders slumped ever so slightly and they relaxed, moving forward in an eager cluster to get a glimpse at their prize. They lost their situational awareness, giving up on the task at hand.
They had their money. They had a woman.
A good day, all things considered.
King sensed the intention in their movements, and subconsciously he flipped the switch.
It was all too clear what they were about to do.
He saw red, and impulse took over.
The Somali thug on the driver’s step slapped against the side of the tractor unit’s exterior with a wet smack as he took a cluster of bullets to the temple. He simply crumpled, an ugly sight given his elevated position to the rest of the gang. His legs went limp and he simply folded into himself, leaving a thin trail of blood and brains down the exterior of the vehicle.
A horrifying sight from a distance.
King couldn’t imagine the reaction it would instil in those not used to death up close.
Out of the seven remaining hostiles, at least a handful were bound to be frozen in shock at the sudden shift in atmosphere.
He turned his attention instantly to the three thugs who reacted instantaneously. They jerked around, twisting on their heels, searching for the source of the gunfire. Before any of them had made it through a half-revolution, King worked the barrel from left to right, targeting the threats in clinical fashion. They dropped one by one, falling like dominoes amidst the procession.
Amongst the three of them lay the owner of the second AK-47 — now stone dead.
All rifles were eliminated from the equation.
King didn’t relent.
Four men ducked for cover, realising that their comrades were dropping all around them. King saw them cower, their morale withering in the chaos, but he heard nothing. The non-stop burst of unsuppressed rounds directly next to his ears had temporarily shut off his hearing. He sent a pair of rounds through the nearest man’s chest, tearing the machete from his grasp as his torso jerked from the kinetic force of the impacts. He came down on top of his friend, pinning one of the remaining trio to the dirt under the man’s dead weight.
Two left functioning.
By that point King had sunk deep into combat mode, all hints of morality and mercy thrown out the window. These men wouldn’t have hesitated to rape and murder Beth, before setting off to find more dirty work they could be paid handsomely for. He ignored the twisted expressions of fear on their faces — masks of sheer terror that somehow made them look ten years younger — and took the last pair out with a pair of successive headshots.
At such close range, with his senses wired and his vision focused, he had no chance of missing.
Seven men dead.
Blood spilt.
Bullets dispensed.
The lone survivor of the carnage — which had unfolded over the course of less than five seconds — whimpered from his back, staring up at the sky as the sun materialised on the horizon. With an orange glow swarming across the hillside, King got to his feet, hurling loose brambles off his back as he exposed himself again. He touched the tip of the AK-47 to the skinny guy’s bloody forehead and pulled the trigger, ejecting a single round into his skull.
A mercy kill. Had he left the man to stumble around the scene, drenched in the blood of his dead comrades, it would have spelled a grisly fate. Other parties of armed bandits would have sensed his weakness and either enslaved or murdered him. On the other hand, with his gang of thugs no more, the guy would have likely succumbed to insanity if left to fend for himself in this desolate wasteland.
King turned his eyes away from the bodies. He methodically ejected the AK-47’s near-empty magazine and chambered a fresh one home, snatching it off his combat belt. He dropped the used magazine to the trail floor and levered himself straight up into the tractor unit’s cabin.
He glanced at Beth — her face had paled and she’d ducked below the line of sight as the gunfire had begun to rage. Her M45 sidearm sat tight in her sweaty palm. She’d been ready to use it. He had no doubt she would have slaughtered anyone who dared step foot in the cabin after her acting job had been rendered suddenly useless.
‘They’re all dead?’ she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
‘They’re all dead. Let’s go get Reed.’
He swung the driver’s door closed, fired the truck to life, and navigated around the sea of dead bandits spread between their vehicles. He didn’t spend a second admiring his handiwork. There was nothing to admire.
They surged toward El Hur, and the sparkling ocean beyond.
42
‘You waited,’ Beth said, breaking the uncomfortable silence always present in the aftermath of violence.
The kind of violence King didn’t think he’d ever forget.
He nodded, quiet, eyes fixed on the trail ahead.
‘Why did you wait for them to open the door? You know how dangerous that was? That guy could have shot me and there was nothing I could have done about it. That wasn’t part of the plan.’
‘It was. I didn’t want to tell you. I’m sorry.’
‘You used me?’
‘You could call it that.’
‘Why?’
King paused, wondering how much he should tell her.
Fuck it, he thought. She could have died back there. She deserves to know.
‘I have a fairly unique position in the government,’ he said. ‘It allows me discretion. Way too much discretion. And I didn’t realise the kind of ramifications I was dealing with until I saw Reed fly off the rails.’
‘You took it for granted?’
He nodded. ‘Exactly. And it’s been chewing me up inside ever since I saw Victor and Johnson’s corpses. Can you imagine I liked what I saw yesterday, and I passed that information onto my handler, and my superiors made the decision to recruit Bryson Reed on the spot? Can you imagine the kind of things he could do if he had no-one to report to, and no rules to follow?’
‘Look what he did even when he had people to report to, and rules to follow,’ Beth said.
‘We were so goddamn close to fucking everything up. I realised the kind of things I’ve been allowed to do, and it’s made me think. What happens if I keep bending the rules over time, in slight increments? Just enough to not realise what I’m doing. How far could I stoop morally before I caught myself?’
‘You wanted to see their intentions,’ Beth realised. ‘To make sure they were cruel men before you killed them.’
‘If I need to kill, I want to be beyond sure from this point onward. I don’t want to be like Reed. And it’s a fine line in this business. One action leads to another. I can never allow myself to go down that path. There’s too much responsibility on my shoulders.’
He found himself gripping the wheel as tight as his massive hands would allow, attempting to transfer some of the tension in his body through to the tractor unit. Beth must have noticed his white knuckles. She reached across the centre console and touched a hand to his face. ‘You’ll never end up like Reed.’