Zakaria, caught now in the familiar grip of battle-fury, raced forward, springing over the bodies of the fallen Huntsmen troops, which were strewn across the blood-sticky floor of the corridor.
‘Follow me!’ he shouted as he reached the two enormous doors, which were peppered with deep dents from the M-60’s barrage and Njinga’s shotgun slugs.
Njinga snapped herself out of the surreal post-combat trance and forced herself to push forward, even though it felt as if her arms and legs were those of a detached, artificial body she was somehow inhabiting, like a Virtual Reality gamer moving through an entirely digital world. Meanwhile, in front of the doors, Zakaria checked his wristwatch.
‘If Ranomi succeeded in getting in, and her helper on the inside let her in, she should be arriving at this door in precisely twenty-three seconds.’
‘Wait,’ Njinga murmured, staring with a look of consternation on her face at one of the corpses on the ground.
The man’s helmet had been blown off, along with a large chunk of his face, but on his neck was a peculiar tattoo.
‘What’s wrong?’ Zakaria asked.
‘These aren’t Huntsmen troops,’ Njinga answered, squatting down next to the body and studying the tattoo.
‘Of course they are! Look at the uniforms, the weapons! Come now, we do not have time to waste.’
‘The tattoo on his neck, it’s a RENAMO symbol. This guy is Mozambican.’
‘So? The Huntsmen recruit their killers from all over the world.’
Njinga shook her head and pulled off the helmet of another dead soldier. He too was black, and he also had a RENAMO tattoo on his neck.
‘I’m willing to bet every single one a’ these assholes is Mozambican,’ she muttered, shaking her head. ‘I don’t like this, Zakaria, I don’t like it. These aren’t real Huntsmen troops. Something is wrong here … something is very wrong here.’
‘We don’t have time to worry about this now,’ Zakaria grunted gruffly.
He turned and bashed on the door with his steel-clad fist in the rhythmic pattern that was their passcode. To his immediate relief, a muffled thumping came through the door, also in a coded rhythm. However, just to be sure, he bashed out another pattern, this one asking Ranomi whether she was safe, or whether had a gun to her head.
The answer came back at once: safe. Zakaria thumped back one final code: ‘we are safe and ready, so open up.’
The sound of heavy bolts being moved inside the doors signalled to the pair of them to step back to allow the huge pieces of solid steel to swing outward. When Ranomi saw that there were only two of them standing there, and that Chloe was missing, a brief look of alarm flickered across her countenance. She regained her composure rapidly, though.
‘Zakaria, Njinga, are you ready? Let’s get phase two moving.’
Zakaria, however, simply stood in silence, shocked to the point of catatonia, it seemed. He had flipped up the visor of his helmet and was staring at the girl next to Ranomi with a strange mix of wonder, fear and disbelief on his face, as if she were a ghost.
‘By the Great Mother,’ he muttered softly. ‘It cannot be … it cannot be!’
He pointed at Adriana, who was staring with fear-wide eyes at these two terrifying figures – the futuristic sci-fi warrior and the fifteenth-century knight, both of whom were armed with multiple guns.
‘William’s Aurora!’ Zakaria gasped in a tone of sheer disbelief. ‘Aurora?! How can this be?!’
52
WILLIAM
William jogged up the steps, focusing on regulating his breathing and steadying his movements; he could not afford to become short of breath, or get shaky in this situation. Slung over each shoulder was an AK-47, and each rifle was equipped with a wickedly sharp ten-inch bayonet, while around his waist was a belt packed with ammo clips for the twin assault rifles. He also wore a backpack full of essential items, and in each hand he carried a crossbow, for if he came across any Huntsmen troops he would need to take them down quickly and quietly, and a gun, even with heavy suppression, would immediately raise the alarm in this confined space.
Inside his mind a tempest of whirling emotions churned; familiar battle-madness began to ripple its hypercharged tingle through his limbs, along with the sawing blades of fear and anxiety that accompanied the onset of deadly combat. In addition, slicing through both of these was the katana of controlled collectedness, a razor-edged state of focus in which had trained his mind and consciousness over many decades.
There was also something else, though.
Emotion, raging and churning like a chemical reaction gone awry; acids boiling and frothing and building up to the point of violent explosion, for here he was in the heart of his mortal enemy’s lair. He had been lusting after this encounter for well over a century, and had replayed the scenario over and over in his mind so many times it had become more of a prophesy than a mere fantasy; a foregone conclusion, he hoped and prayed … and believed.
There were also other things he had gone over in his head, again and again and again; memories that tore at his core, at the very deepest centre of his being, like vultures stripping flesh from a carcass, devouring everything until only bare bone remained.
Regret, for all the things he could have changed – and could not have changed – had eaten away at him with the persistence of creeping acid, nibbling its caustic bites at metal, metal that had once been polished and gleaming but now, after the action of that ceaseless decay, had become a chewed up, pockmarked shell of what it had once been.
Guilt,for all of his past sins, for betraying those he had claimed to love, for plumbing the depths of darkness and stuffing his being full of lie after lie, like a garbage bag crammed too full of refuse, bursting at
