America, but an open-air distillery, and even a butcher. She was amazed to see gutted hogs hanging from poles, covered in flies, while scabrous half-feral dogs fought over piles of entrails beneath their carcasses.
In here, there was no chance of forcing a passage by brute speed, and the way ahead was quickly blocked. Stalled traffic, meandering pedestrians, animals, sightseers, they all conspired to bring the pursuit to a halt.
‘And we’re done,’ announced the driver, as he braked and cut the engine.
Birendra was out of the door and racking a round into his shotgun before Jules could even get her seatbelt undone. She flinched as the weapon roared twice, then three times.
‘What the fuck?’ she said.
But Shah was already gone, taking the machine pistol and the spare clips with him. Both he and the driver charged ahead into the space created by Birendra when he’d fired his warning shots into the air. Their second car skidded to a halt a few inches from the Volvo’s rear bumper and three more men, all heavily armed, emerged at a run. A nearby club pumped out Nelly’s ‘Hot in Herre’ loud enough for Jules to make out all the words. Nelly wanted his bitch to take off all her clothes.
‘Better get a move on if you want to be in for the kill,’ grinned this new driver. He was obviously staying to guard the vehicles. He was armed with a long black shotgun, just like Birendra’s, but he also took out a taser, and fired it up experimentally.
Jules didn’t fancy his lot, having to protect two expensive cars, filled to pussy’s bow with the sorts of goodies this crowd of cut-throats and ne’er-do-wells would love to get their hands on. As she set off after the others, she heard him tell the crowd, ‘First bloke who tries it on gets a couple of thousand volts up the arse. Anybody wants to have a go after that, I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off as per the operational guidelines of the Free Port Development Authority, section 56, paragraph B, regulations pertaining to the use of force by contracted fuckin’ security consultants.’
Jules was sorely tempted to see how that turned out, but she had to run on to keep up with Shah and his men. She heard no gunfire from behind, so perhaps the unlucky soul on guard duty would be all right. She really didn’t doubt that he would stick that nasty-looking taser up somebody’s bottom. He seemed just the type for it. Then again, so was she.
Ahead of her, however, she could hear the first crackle of gunfire from somewhere beyond a green-fronted payday loans shop. The gunfire expedited the emptying of the street life into the relative safety of the Lone Star Bar and Doug’s Tattoos and Smoking Accessories. She felt a thousand eyes on her as she ran through the rapidly vacated streets with her SIG Sauer pistol in hand, ignoring the stitch in her sides, dodging and jumping over potholes and ditches filled with raw sewage. Piles of rubbish and debris reached as high as the second storey of many of the shops, where children picked through the bits to see if there was anything to eat or sell.
Although the sun was almost directly overhead, she was soon running in shade as the side street narrowed dramatically, becoming little more than a crooked shaft bored deep into a squalid mass of tumbledown shacks, hovels and filthy open-fronted bars, wrought out of shipping containers in a fashion not unlike the office complex at Shah’s business premises. Unlike him, however, the owners of these bottom-feeding operations had not a care for good order or cleanliness.
In one place, which seemed to service a purely Chinese market, blood was pooling under the barstools of its patrons, who all turned on their perches to watch her run past. She had no idea where the blood was coming from, or whether it was human. Impassable to road traffic, the undrained passageway doglegged around to the right, between two saloons that appeared to loom over the laneway - this being due to the verandas on their upper floors cantilevering out to such an extent that only a few inches separated them, creating the effect of a tunnel. As narrow as the path was through here, at least it was clear.
She could see why now, even in the gloom. Brass shell cases gleamed in the mud, picking up the reflection of neon lights, and red candlelit lanterns from what she assumed was the door of a Chinese brothel. A man lay dead, face down in the filth. Dark arterial blood leaked from five or more bullet holes punched into his torso. The wound that had killed him, however, was almost certainly a shotgun blast that had carried away the better part of his head, spraying it over the fibrous cement panels of the saloon in front of which he’d died.
One of Shah’s men was waiting for her a short distance ahead, nodding when he saw her and gesturing for her to hurry up. He waited next to a solid steel door that opened onto a gloomy staircase. A short Chinese woman ranted at him in a language neither of them understood, undeterred by the presence of the man’s weapons. ‘They fucked off in here,’ he said.
Jules heard the cough and bark of back-and-forth gunfire from somewhere inside. She could also hear what sounded like the roar of a crowd. ‘What the hell is this place?’ she asked, as she flicked off the safety on her pistol.
‘Fight club,’ he said without further explanation. ‘Come on.’
They plunged into the darkness, past a drunk lying in his own vomit and shit. The stench of him was sick- making.
Shah’s man took the stairs, leading upwards, two or three steps at a time. Julianne’s body was seizing up, her muscles clenching and stiffening painfully after the shock of the crash. She had trouble even raising her head to follow his progress. Nonetheless, she charged after him without hesitation. For the first time in months she felt like she was finally ahead of the play. If they could just lay hands on these fuckers …
An automatic weapon coughed in the dark, and her escort lifted off his feet before crashing into the wall and sliding to the floor, leaving a dark organic smear behind. Another man stepped out of a doorway and jumped when he saw her.
Jules dived for cover, pumping rounds down the hallway while ducking through a door into a red-lit room full of candles.
The man roared in pain. ‘Bitch! I’m gonna fuck you up!’
American, she thought. Jules heard his footsteps. Scrambling back to the inside corner of the room, she waited for the asshole to step inside.
The muzzle of his weapon came through first as he charged in without sweeping the area. Jules took her time to line the front of her SIG Sauer up with the side of the bastard’s head and squeezed off a double tap that dropped him like a sack of shit.
She flinched and shuddered as blowback splattered her with skull chips and small gobs of grey matter. Biting down on her revulsion, she scrambled out past the body and checked on the man Shah had left behind to look after her, but his sightless eyes could see her no more. She swore, once, and picked up his G-36 to supplement her handgun.
The confidence she had felt rushing in behind him had evaporated entirely. She’d expected they would sweep in behind a trail of dead men left by Shah and Birendra and their comrades. Where had the guy she’d just killed come from? He was a white male, American. And that’s all she knew. He could have been one of Cesky’s men, a hitter who’d hidden himself to ambush stragglers like her, before doubling back to take Shah from behind. Or he could have been some unfortunate punter, or an employee of this ‘fight club’, who was simply defending his place of business from a pack of murderous buggers who had just invaded it.
The deeper she pushed into the building, the louder the crowd noise from downstairs grew. She stepped over two more bodies as she worked her way around a corner, and another one on a stairway leading down to what she assumed was the second floor. This building really seemed to have no coherence or logic to its internal design. Corridors branched off to nowhere. Sometimes doors stood open or closed down these dead ends. Sometimes the hallways literally led nowhere, for no reason.
More gunfire.
More cheering and shouting and rumbling from beneath her.
She followed the gunfire as best she could through the poorly lit space.
The gunfire and the trail of dead.
Another two left turns and she found Birendra propped up against a wall nursing a leg wound. He was sweating and struggling to maintain his composure as he applied a pressure dressing. He started to reach for his gun, stopping himself when he recognised her. Relief flickered over his otherwise impassive features.
‘Ms Julianne,’ he said. ‘Mr Shah has him, one floor down. He wishes you to go on ahead. My wound is not
