Tiger realizes he’s holding his breath, waiting for the round that never came. He doesn’t know how it missed him. There are people down all around him, to the left and the right. He looks down to see if he’s been hit anywhere as the adrenaline of the moment begins to wear off. No … no blood. All his limbs. All his fingers. Granny’s Jesus! He’s still intact!
The trembling sets in. The realization of what could’ve happened. He, by all rights, should be dead.
That’s when it hits him. That feeling of dread. The silence. The empty void beside him, where she should’ve been. He forces himself to turn and look.
She went down in the initial burst, never even having a chance to raise her rifle. It’s still slung over her shoulder. She lays sprawled on her back, eyes open and staring blankly up at the station ceiling. There’s nothing but a big smoking hole where those big, beautiful breasts had once been. Some of the internal circuits inside the gaping wound still spark as they short out, trying to make a connection, still trying to fix the damage. But this … this is irreparable.
This isn’t how it happens in the movies. There’s supposed to be a blaze of glory, whatever the fuck that looks like. They’re supposed to fight back to back against insurmountable odds, and only after racking up an impossibly unbelievable body count, does she take a mortal flesh wound. He’s supposed to cradle her in his arms, promise his undying love and send her off peacefully with a kiss, as she simply falls asleep like a baby taking a nap. Maybe he gently closes her eyes for a little dramatic effect.
But this ain’t the goddamn movies. This shit sucks.
He’s had enough. He’s through with this soldiering shit. Dropping his rifle, he peels off his flight jacket and drops to his knees. He feels like he should be crying or something, but all he feels is numb. He doesn’t understand why. Gently, he leans over and kisses her lips one last time. He then lays his jacket over her face. It’s about the best he can do amid this chaos. He pulls her insignia patches from her uniform. Those he’ll keep.
Looking down the platform, he sees Cody directing recovery operations. Most of his staff is dead or dying, and he’s bleeding from a wound in his side. He orders the Devils to secure the perimeter as he points to the lone surviving Authority Mecha operator, struggling to get out of his harness.
He wants him. Alive!
Fuck that! Tiger picks the rifle back up, his blood starting to boil. He jumps from the platform, storming across the tracks to where the Devils have cut the Guardsman down.
He’s nothing more than a kid, maybe nineteen or twenty, with the rank of Ensign First Class on his sleeve. His hands are up, and he’s covered by the guns of three Devils when Tiger raises his rifle. Cody sees what’s coming and shouts out for him to stop, but it’s too late. The kid sees him a split second before Tiger pulls the trigger.
Tiger will never forget the look on the kid’s face for as long as he lives. The look of realizing you’re about to die and there’s nothing you can do about it; that look of unadulterated, helpless fear as he shot the boy down in cold blood.
He turns and looks up at Cody. The man looks away. There’s nothing to say.
Tiger regrets it immediately. Maybe it’s justified. It doesn’t matter. It’s done. And he’s done killing people. Walking away, he swears it’ll be the last time he takes a life.
He still sees that kid’s face in his dreams.
«◊»
Chapter 19
Josie Tuttle was dying, and he was taking his own sweet time doing it. As he lay on his brother’s couch, with Gideon and Junior holding vigil, Ollie stood nearby. Coughing up blood, wheezing and gasping for breath, Josie’s face was slowly turning the color of old bone. The incinerated lung, the hole in his chest, and the blood loss were slowly but surely siphoning the life from him. It was a terrible way to die, and moonshine and moonbeam only went so far in dulling the pain. Gideon popped him a few of his pain pills but saw no need to waste them. After all, he needed them for himself. He was going to live. His brother was a dead man stalling.
The sad thing about the whole ordeal was that with proper medical care, even as catastrophic as his wound was, Josie Tuttle could’ve probably survived it. The odds would’ve been overwhelmingly in his favor, but hospitals meant red tape and red tape meant ZiPs … and once the ZiPs put two and two together, Ol’ Josie would be patched up just so he could do himself a stint on Penal One. And at his age, Penal One was just a slower way of dying.
No, there came a time when you cut your losses and folded your cards. Nobody stayed in the game forever, and the house always won in the end. A real man went out on his terms. He didn’t go begging for a chip or two just to play another hand when it was apparent the luck had run out. And Josie’s had run out.
“Granny’s Jesus, Pa!” Junior wrung his hands nervously, watching his uncle bleed out. “Isn’t there anything we can do? Hell, I’ll take ‘em in myself. Ain’t right watchin’ a man suffer like this.”
Hearing these words agitated
