Holy fuck! How could a man just disintegrate like that? It just didn’t seem right. Not right at all.
Someone was shouting at him. Vaguely, he heard his name. Slowly, he turned. It was Papa Doo. He was yelling his name.
“Ollie! Yo! What tha hell? Light those fucks up!”
Ollie came back to his senses, realizing he was just standing there, slack-jawed and in shock. The gangbanger was trying to jar him back to his senses, trying to get him back in the fight. All around him pulse rounds zinged. Ollie looked at his rifle. He knew he should shoot, but there seemed to be a disconnect between his brain and his trigger finger. He just couldn’t seem to get his body to respond like he needed to.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. That fuckin’ Tuttle was crazy! They were supposed to be finding Tiger Thomas, not starting an all-out war with a bunch of mercs. Sure, he’d agreed to help the old coot, but this was a helluva lot more than he’d bargained for. He was already facing serious jail time for ambushing Tiger’s Pegasus. That didn’t include any future charges if it were discovered he’d sold his wife to Martian white slavers. He’d be looking at hard time on Penal One for that.
In the period of only a few days, he’d gone from a moderately successful businessman to becoming mixed up with a bunch of low-bred outlaw pimps and drug dealers. He’d forsaken everything, his family, his business … all for a taste of revenge. His whole life had been ruined, all to get even with a smartass spacer for cracks in his walls. A spacer they had yet to even look for since this madness started.
The hell with this! If he was fucked, if life as he knew it had ceased to exist, he’d be damned if he was going down cowering behind some fence in some cookie-cutter subdivision fighting Gideon Tuttle’s battles. He was his own man. He’d go out his own way.
With a cold look of utter disdain, he raised his rifle and aimed it at Papa Doo. His finger was on the trigger when the deafening roar of high-performance aerocraft engines filled his ears. He looked up to see one of those big, black, nasty-looking merc AC’s descending out of the sky and right toward him.
And then suddenly, a huge dark shape was out of it and falling toward them.
What the fuck is that?
***
“Go get ‘em, big boy!” From the pilot seat of the attack ship, Grant looked over his shoulder at Sherman, who was standing in the open hatch. The monstrous creature had been stewing for a fight ever since they’d left the Dentons. It was what he’d been created to do. Now, he was going to get his chance to wreak havoc.
The big furry, killing machine didn’t have to be told twice. Clad from head-to-toe in midnight black armor, Sherman launched himself through the door and out into the open air like a kid off a diving board. The target looked up at the last second. The beast caught the surprise and horror on his face, but it was too late.
Far too late.
***
Ollie watched in horror as the enormous black creature from Hell fell from the sky and landed squarely atop Papa Doo. He felt his stomach churn, sickened by the sound of bones snapping from the forceful impact of the living projectile. Whatever it was, it had to have weighed three times what its quarry did, and it drove the doomed gangbanger to the ground like an open hand smashing a house of cards.
His spine snapped like a twig, and his body now paralyzed from the waist down, the helpless Papa Doo howled out a blood-curdling scream before it was choked off by massive jaws closing over his face. With a twist of his neck, Sherman slung the doomed man twenty feet across the yard. Papa Doo barely hit the ground with a sickening thud before the beast was atop him, mauling his helpless body in a blur of razor-sharp claws and teeth.
Ollie was petrified with fear. He couldn’t move. He could only stand and watch as that … thing … tore the screaming, crying man to pieces. He knew it would be only a matter of seconds before it turned on him, but he couldn’t make himself run. What use would it be anyway? Where would you run to escape something like … that?
Suddenly, something, or somebody, was pulling him. A hand on his collar jerked him backward. Caught off-balance, he stumbled and fell to his knees as he was turning. He looked up, expecting to see another monster preparing to turn him into a pile of bloody musk. Instead, he saw the wild-eyed Junior.
“C’mon!” the young man wailed at him. “Get up! You wanna die?”
Junior pulled the dazed man to his feet. Ollie suddenly realized that no, in fact, he didn’t want to die. Fear stiffened his jelly legs, and the two men started running for their lives.
***
Cutter was out of the car and shooting before the Tuttles could recover. He shot Crawdaddy in the face with one gun, and the punk went flying backward, landing in the street. A smoking hole was all that was left between his forehead and his chin. The pistol in his left hand spewed, and the other gangbanger died instantly, his heart incinerated. Another shot took off Worm’s shooting arm just below the elbow. He screamed out in pain as he fell to his knees.
“Fuck me!” Gideon swallowed hard. Without taking his eyes off Cutter, who was now calmly walking their way, he yelled up to his brother. “Let’s go! Now!”
“Fuck that!” Josie felt the rage rise as Cutter walked by the screaming Worm. As casually as tossing an empty soda bottle in a waste can, he raised his right hand and dispatched Josie’s man without even looking,
