The Hammer Falls Read online

  The roar of seventy-thousand fans screaming Horace’s name coursed through his mind like lightning.

  The barrel of Mogilevich’s pistol snapped up to face him.

  “THUN-DER!”

  The energy of crowds long gone washed over him again, and every hurt and sadness he had ever felt in his life disappeared in the tumult. He became a thing of steel and pistons and neon-blue.

  In the window, streaks of tracers from the drones raked the stars, silken threads of phosphorescent slugs stitching the tapestry of sky.

  Roaring like a bull, he dove across the desk, reaching for the gun and Mogilevich’s throat.

  Muzzle-flash painted spots in his eyes, and something ripped through his ear, turned the armor on his shoulder and arm into a hardened plate, but one hand closed around warm metal and flesh, and the other hand snatched a clump of suit.

  His weight piled into Mogilevich and bore them both onto the floor.

  Mogilevich’s rings slammed into Horace’s cheek with the effect of a baby’s touch.

  Like taking a toy from a toddler, Horace ripped the gun free and flung it away.

  He gathered a knee under him, jerked Mogilevich off the floor by the snatch of suit, and slammed him into it again with all his strength. One of Mogilevich’s ribs cracked. The jacket fell away, revealing a shirt soaked with blood. Horace’s shuriken must not have missed after all.

  “Where are the kids, fucker?” Horace roared in his face.

  Then a second door across the room burst open. Dark figures charged into the room, laser lines and dots scanning the bookcases and shelves of jars. He slammed the mob boss down again, and the body underneath his fist felt softer somehow.

  Laser dots homed in.

  The chatter of submachine gun fire filled the room with light and noise, exploding across the hardwood desk and ricocheting from Horace’s back.

  With a roar, he seized Mogilevich with both hands and flung him through the air toward the guards.

  Another spattering of gunfire at the spinning body, cries of “Hold your fire!”

  The gangster’s body piled into the two front guards, bearing them into the two behind. Two guards went down with him in a tangle of arms and guns, two staggered back.

  Horace snatched up the chair knocked flat by his earlier lunge and flung it at the standing guards, then launched himself after it. The chair knocked down one of them, but the last guard brought up a fat, stubby weapon with a barrel the size of Horace’s thumb and a massive drum of a magazine. A fully automatic barrage of shotgun blasts hammered into his chest.

  Even under the armor, his Go Juice injector shattered under the onslaught. The heat of the muzzle blasts singed his face and hair. The entire torso of his armor seized taut, and the successive concussions not only knocked the breath out of him, the armor seized his ribs and diaphragm so tightly his lungs could not draw a breath.

  The pounding impacts flung him backward. Another burst followed him as he tumbled, a thunderous roar that turned his hearing into nothing but a quiet ringing. Something hard swatted his right hand. He crashed into a leather easy chair, tumbled it over backward into shelves full of clear jars. What felt like a baseball bat slammed into his unprotected ankle.

  Glass exploded under the barrage. Great heavy jars and shards of glass and isopropyl alcohol and gobbets of preserved tissue rained down onto his face, one jar crashing into his forehead with a painful thud, but it didn’t shatter. His eye caught a close-up glimpse of the contents—a matched pair of oblong, biological globules with shreds of attached tissue—before the pain in his hand squeezed his eyes shut and the jar tumbled away.

  When he opened them again, chunks of chewed steak dangled from his right wrist. He smelled blood. His blood. The entire forearm of his armor turned hard and tight, cinching off the spurting blood like a tourniquet.

  A half-crazed absurdity jammed between infinitesimal moments of thought—What a useful feature! He would have to keep this armor for his next match!

  The shotgun barrage ceased, and the sound of a massive magazine being reloaded replaced it, along with cursing, groaning, clattering.

  Mogilevich’s voice, coughing, gasping, “Blow his fucking head off!”

  Footsteps crossed the room.

  Horace shrugged away jars of testicles, struggling to right himself, struggling to breathe.

  Laser dots danced through the jars, converging on his face. Two shapes loomed over him.

  Then he caught a distinct whishing sound, a round thump, a spurt and splatter. The laser dots swung away.

  A burst of sound and sparks and smoke halted the figures.

  A gurgle of pain from across the room.

  He sucked in a great gasping breath and heaved himself upright. Agony lanced up from his ankle. His foot swung askew from the gruesome trench cut through it by a shotgun slug. The opposite half of the room filled with acrid, swirling smoke.

  One of the guards sensed his approach and spun to face him—just in time to catch Horace’s left roundhouse in the temple. Something crunched.

  From out of the smoke between the pounding beats of music, sliding through the guitar riffs, emerged pale arms, a silken gown, and eyes as fierce as a leopard’s. Tina seized one of the guns and with a deft twist wrenched it from a guard’s hands and then she clubbed him in the face with it. She flung it at another guard, who paused to fend it away, only to have her sweep his feet from under him. He landed on his back with a terrific crash, heels in the air, and then Tina’s fist slammed his front teeth into the back of his throat.

  Then Horace caught the distinctive snick of an old-style switchblade from somewhere in the smoke beyond her.

  “Tina!” he roared. “Behind you!”

  Frozen in a moment of indecision between two targets, the guard before him spun back. Horace stepped in, captured the man’s weapon arm in his left armpit and snapped the elbow with a hard wrench. In the middle of the man’s scream of pain, Horace’s headbutt slammed into his nose. Horace let him collapse and then crushed his skull with one last hard fist.

  A glimpse of Mogilevich’s gray-white widow’s peak and savage eyes emerged from the roiling smoke, an arm wrapping around Tina’s neck from behind. She instantly delivered a sharp elbow to the rear, driving a grunt from her attacker, but it wasn’t enough. Tina convulsed. Horace heard the unmistakable sound of a blade stabbing into flesh, over and over like a sewing machine needle, the burble of lungs filling with fluid. Mogilevich dragged her back into the smoke, out of sight.

  “Tina!”

  Throwing himself into the smoke, dragging his injured foot and gritting his teeth against the agony in his ankle, his arms found only emptiness, blindness. His feet kicked a head lying free on the carpet, stumbling deeper into smoke, tripping over a limb, a submachine gun.

  The chorus of “Thunderstruck’s” guitar riffs tore the air like bullets. And through it, he caught the sound of footsteps stumbling away.

  He waved his arms trying to dispel the smoke.

  The face of a guard emerged from the smoke, and Horace cocked his arm to strike it down, but it hung from the doorjamb, nailed there by the electro-fiber blade through the eye socket, leaving the body to dangle there like a discarded doll.

  “Tina!”

  Bellowing through the smoke, limping on his ruined ankle, he found himself in a conservatory with a ceiling over-arched by a section of the great glass dome. A snow-white grand piano lay bathed in the light of stars and flickering tracers. Lush greenery obscured the room’s limits. Across a floor of an intricate black-and-white mosaic, a dark, wet trail spattered, smeared by the prints of feet both bare and shod. As he followed, his own blood merged with the trail.

  He followed the trail into the next room, a museum of sorts, filled with marble busts, wall-sized oil paintings, and glass cases containing ancient hand weapons, swords and daggers, sabers and double-edged broadswords, many of them encrusted with jewels, hilted in gold, ancient Slavic styles that resembled Nordic blades. Some
of them wore their age as pocks in the steel, inevitable rust-spots carefully polished away.

  Smashing one of the cases open with his elbow, he snatched a broad-bladed sword with a thick, gold-chased pommel. His massive hand made it look almost like a dagger. Its beauty made it a work of art, but it was still as proficient in the art of killing as the day it was forged a thousand years ago. It had a good balance and heft, and the edges were sharp enough.

  Then he noticed the blood trails diverged. One trail went through a door into the next room, and the other...

  Tina lay against the wall beside a display case of Chinese swords, a hand across her midsection, a dark pool spreading under her. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were wet.

  He knelt beside her. Her eyes flashed open and a tiny stiletto slashed toward his face, but too encumbered by blood loss to endanger him.

  Catching her wrist easily, he said, “Easy there, killer.”

  “Thought I could get him...” Her voice was a wet gasp.

  He eased her forward to look at the wounds in her back. Multiple stab wounds, little wet mouths drooled crimson, licking at the perforations in her dress. “We’re gonna get you out of here. Hang in there, darlin’.”

  “That’d be great...”

  “You die on me, and you’re gonna get the spanking of your life.”

  “Fuck you...” She said a name, too, but her breath trailed off to sibilance.

  “Bunny,” he said, his voice choking.

  “There’s a helo on the pad behind the house,” Bunny said, “Ten minutes to a regenestation hospital from here.”

  “Can you fly it?”

  “I’m offended that you even ask that question. Jimmy can fly anything.”

  “You and Roxanne okay?”

  “We’ve had some close calls, but we’re holding our own. Some of the guests have decided to re-enact the Gunfight at the OK Corral.”

  The faint crackle of gunfire sounded through his earbud.

  Bunny said, “He’s in the next room, hiding behind the bar.”

  “Guards?”

  “None on the third floor.”

  “Thunderstruck” rose to a powerful final crescendo.

  “By the way,” he said, “Thanks for the soundtrack.”

  “It’s Hammer Time.”

  He gathered himself, levered himself to standing, hefted the ancient Slavic blade, and dragged his foot behind him.

  The next room was a well-stocked bar. Mirrored shelves glittered with glass bottles and crystal decanters, a walk-in wine cellar, the kind of place for a man who loved the finest of wines and liquors. The scent of cigar smoke lingered on the air. A bar about three meters long, a polished hardwood slab, before the shelves of scores of bottles. A trail of bloody shoe-prints circled behind the bar.

  An idea brushed his mind as Horace surveyed the bottles behind the bar.

  Bunny’s voice in his ear, “I can’t tell if he’s armed. He’s out of sight of the cameras.”

  The rest of the room was filled with low tables and antique chairs. Clamping the sword under his useless right arm, he snatched up a chair by the left hand and flung it straight at the wall of glass bottles and mirrors behind the bar. With a tremendous crash, shattered glass and bottles and liquor and splintered chair rained down behind the bar.

  A cry of surprise and pain was Horace’s reward. The room filled with the scent of vodka, whiskey, cognac, brandy, liquors with the highest alcohol content. From the low table next to him beside the ashtray, he snatched up an antique Zippo lighter, flicked it open, and thumbed the striker wheel. Flame.

  He tossed the flame over the bar in an approximation of the cry’s source. The flame arced down and disappeared. A flicker of blue and orange, then a whoosh.

  Mogilevich screamed.

  Horace waited.

  Blue alcohol fire rose up behind the bar.

  A figure stumbled upright, howling in panic, a torch of blue flame, flailing and slapping at itself in a vain attempt to extinguish them.

  Horace caught the smell of burning hair.

  He met Mogilevich at the end of the bar with his sword, driving the blade through the Russian’s chest and out between his flaming shoulder blades.

  “I guess you won’t be fucking anyone anymore,” he said.

  And then, just to be sure, he chopped off Yvgeny Mogilevich’s burning head and left it in his lap.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Cradling Tina’s body in his arms, Horace followed the yellow lines in his HUD toward a back stairwell leading to the helipad. He couldn’t run. He could barely walk.

  Bunny giggled. “You’re late, you’re late, for a very important date!”

  A tremendous impact and explosion echoed across the entire mountainside, making the walls and decor shudder.

  “What the fuck was that?” he shouted.

  “A drone, a drone, and now there’s only one alone,” Bunny sang.

  “Was it your drone?” The last thing he wanted to share the sky with was an operational, hostile drone. After several moments of no reply, he said, “Bunny?”

  Still no reply.

  “Roxanne, are you there? Has Bunny gone bye-bye down the rabbit hole?”

  Roxanne’s voice, “Unknown. Did you get him?”

  “He’s as dead as Dmitri. And so is Tina unless we get her to a hospital.”

  The audible shudder of emotion almost choked off her words. “We’re in the car. As soon as you’re airborne, pick us up.”

  “No, thirty seconds can mean her life. Hospital first.”

  The pause and her tone bespoke annoyance at being countermanded, but she said, “Very well. We will attempt to descend the mountain by the road. What about Lilly’s children?”

  A stab of worry. “I didn’t get that.”

  “We shall see what our new slicer can uncover in that regard. If we can keep her on the rails.”

  “Oh, guards! Oh, guards!” Bunny’s weirdly enhanced voice sang over the house audio system. “The bad guys are hiding behind the cars in the gallery!” Then she came through Horace’s earbud. “I’m keeping them busy. Engines hot and waiting.”

  Every step was a bone-grinding agony in Horace’s wounded foot, but he carried Tina onward. His breath heaved. His heart tripped and spun, tripped and spun. Every step took twenty minutes. Her eyes would not open. He could not tell if she was breathing. She was still warm to the sensation of his one good hand.

  Then they were at the side of the helo, a double-rotored speed-demon favored by the filthy rich. The cabin was so small that he had to prop up Tina in the front seat, strap her in, and then throw himself in the rear, cursing with frustration. He filled two seats. Before he could finish strapping himself in, the aircraft lurched skyward, leaving his stomach and scrotum on the helipad.

  Below lay the stony sweep of the mountainside. The road down the mountain glimmered with headlights. Others were still clustered at the house’s front entrance. On the parking platform, the strobe of weapons fire spattered back and forth.

  “I see a firefight out front,” he said.

  Roxanne said, “Apparently there are some vendettas being discharged. We are moving downhill.”

  “Keep your heads down. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”

  As the helo banked toward the glittering carpet of Las Vegas, Horace spotted two flaming wrecks lying off the road, one deep in the trees, the other on its roof near a sharp curve. Perhaps a kilometer off, a stream of liquid tracer fire rained down on several of the fleeing limousines from the military drone.

  “I love spreading cheer and good will to people who so desperately deserve it,” Bunny said. “Now buckle up and fly right.”

  The jeweled grid of Las Vegas swept under them with astonishing speed. Tina’s head sagged against her shoulder, unmoving. He checked for a pulse at her throat but could find nothing.

  Sadness streamed down his face until the next helipad rose out of the sparkling carpet to meet them. The carpet melded into white, then faded
into black.

  “Sir, we have to get you to a regenestation. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

  “No, her first.” He was lying half on the helipad tarmac, half in the helo, half-conscious, his good leg tangled in the harness of the rear seats.

  “We’ve already got your friend regenerating.”

  “She okay?”

  Four people were lifting him onto a gurney. “Too soon to say.” An oxygen mask clapped over his face.

  “I gotta find out about a friend. Buffalo, in the hospital. Coma. Gonna pull the plug.” He was moving under bright hallway lights now.

  “Jesus, what kind of suit is this?” someone said. “How do we get it off?”

  “They can’t pull the plug!” he said.

  “Calm down, sir.”

  A prick and a hiss under the flopping meat of his ravaged ear. Suddenly he felt better, sleepy.

  “Okay...”

  Roxanne’s voice was a husky whisper in his ear. “Horace, it’s me. Can you hear me?”

  He tried to lick dry lips, but accomplished little. “Yeah.”

  “You did it!” she whispered. “You big, beautiful son of a bitch! You did it!”

  Warm fingers touched his cheek.

  “Lilly.”

  “I am good to my word. She’s in regeneration now, just like you and Tina.”

  A warm hand filled his good one. “The kids?”

  “Bunny sliced Mogilevich’s communication records like they were cream cheese. Buffalo PD has the kids in protective custody.”

  “You’re the Goddess of Love and Mercy, whoever the hell that one is. Tina would know.”

  “And you are my warrior king.”

  “Hammer Time.”

  “So how come you didn’t terrorize the whole hospital for me?” Tina asked.

  “It didn’t come up,” Horace said.

  “I wish someone would terrorize a hospital for me.”

  “You’re a strange kid.”