saliva strung
with blood. “Fuck you,” he said.
Amba lifted the silenced pistol,
and put a bullet through his kneecap. He went rigid for a moment, his breathing
becoming heavy and laboured, and he slumped back a little against the broken
mirror.
“Explain,” she repeated.
“No,” he croaked.
“Who do you work for?”
He stared into her eyes, and
despite his pain, there was an iron will there. He would not talk. Maybe could not talk. He either did not know answers, or he’d been fed braineeze drugs.
Amba gave a narrow smile, but there was no smile in her eyes. Shit. Or maybe, maybe he was just tough. She’d soon see how tough.
She lifted her right hand,
extended two slightly hooked fingers towards his eye, and watched as
understanding dawned. She would scoop out his eyeball and feed it to him.
“No...” he whispered.
“Tell me, fucker,” she hissed.
There came a clatter, and a woman
appeared with her daughter, who was perhaps ten years old. They were staring,
the woman’s mouth open in shock, a realisation of horror dawning in her wide
brown eyes. But the child stared at Amba in innocence, head tilted slightly to
one side as if analysing the android. She was getting a good long look, and it
was too much, and it was too bad. Amba’s arm snapped up, and at the end of it
was -
the gun.
She shot the child first. It was
always easier that way. If she’d shot the mother, she would have had to watch
the pain of realisation in the child’s eyes. So Amba got it done the hard way,
but also the easy way. She got it done the right way. The young girl
seemed to settle down on her haunches with a sigh, a kind of sad deflation, her
arms going floppy, a red hole in her forehead above one eye. The mother was turning
even at the phzzt of the silenced gun. Turning, mouth opening, breathing
in sharply to scream -
Amba fired twice, one bullet
through the lungs, killing the inhalation with a hiss, second bullet through
the woman’s mouth, destroying lips, teeth and tongue, then on through the back
of her skull. Killing her instantly. Blood spattered the wall in what auteurs
called Picasso Piss. She was dead before she hit the ground, with shards
of teeth and shredded tongue on her blood-drenched chin.
Back to the man. The goon. The
heavy. No time. No time.
You’ve no time, said Zi, and Amba knew it. He
had his hands raised. He understood. She gritted her teeth. Shot him through
his hand and eyeball. He bounced back onto a sink, which began gushing water,
then slithered to the floor. The water sounded like rainfall. Beautiful, sultry
rainfall.
Amba put another bullet in his
skull, then moved through the other attackers, delivering a second blam to each. She dropped the gun,
washed blood speckles from her hand, and on her way out stopped by the mother.
She stared for a moment.
Slowly, drawn by an invisible,
unstoppable cord, Amba’s head turned to the child. She was pretty. Beautiful,
even in death. Her eyes, like her mother’s, were large and circular and brown.
Amba licked her lips. Shit. Shit.
She stepped over corpses and
closed the restroom door. Turning, her slender fingers closed over the digital
lock and crushed it, twisting. Locking it. Disabling it. Her slender fingers
were a lot stronger than they looked. A lot.
She queued through passport
control, and unusually, her heart was beating fast. After all, this was just
another murder, just another killing, right? It was what she did. She did the
job, did the job well, did the killing well. End of story. End of fucking
story.
She boarded the Shuttle. Was
shown to her comfy seat. Her face was impassive. And as she settled down,
settled back, watched a glass of water placed before her, rested back her head
against the comfortable headrest, and watched the surface of the water
disturbed oh, so gently by the Shuttle’s take-off - she thought back,
back to the girl, back to the bullet
James Patterson
P. S. Broaddus
Magdalen Nabb
Thomas Brennan
Edith Pargeter
Victor Appleton II
Logan Byrne
David Klass
Lisa Williams Kline
Shelby Smoak