Content Warning: Up until now, this story has been at the second-highest content rating. I've now upped the rating to the maximum, and I should warn that this chapter may not be for the squeamish.

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Chapter Ten

Neither Cindy nor any of her friends had seen head or tail of Herbal since he'd packed it in at Jam Pony a year ago. He and his wife had been evicted from their apartment by a greedy slumlord, and the only other place they'd been able to find space in was a little beyond their means. Since then Herbal had been working two crappy jobs instead of one, and had energy for little more than sleep. In addition to the new apartment being clear on the other side of the city and the fact that Herbal was now on a somewhat more restricted Sector Pass than his Jam Pony job had allowed, he'd been like a ghost to his friends, but when Cindy had called him to tell him about Max's possible visit, he'd dropped everything, and had managed to make it across to Sector Nine to meet Cindy when she came out of Jam Pony.

"Thinkin' of comin' back to Jam Pony if I can find a cheap place to stay 'round here," he was saying as they stepped into the elevator at the apartment building.

"And what does your wife have to say about that brainstorm?" Cindy asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Nothing. Ya recall Weenston?" Herbal growled.

"He came back?"

"By invitation. This time I thought best to show'm both to the door."

"Good decision," Cindy assured him instantly.

"Soon's I and I find some place closer to home, I'll be back to grovel before the great Reagan Ronald." Though he obviously didn't relish that thought, Cindy could tell he was happy about the idea of coming back to where all his friends were.

"Can always crash here," she suggested. "Had an empty room since Max moved into Terminal City, and no sign of any takers. Probably all afraid I mighta caught some terrible mutant disease from my former roommate. Been pretty much rent-free since a friend of Max's scared off some bent po-pos who came to collect – everyone just chips in enough to keep the walls standing and the water running."

"Sure ya don't mind?" Herbal asked.

Before Cindy could answer, the elevator pinged and the door squeaked open jerkily. Sketchy was in the hallway outside the apartment, and Cindy was furious to see that he wasn't alone. A blonde girl a little taller than herself was with him. Sketchy stood behind her with his arms around her waist, and the pair of them were giggling a little.

Sketchy's grin fell like a hammer when he saw the look on Cindy's face, and was replaced by an appropriate amount of fear.

In the middle of the awkward greetings, Cindy dragged Sketchy away by the collar; both Herbal and Sketchy's new flame had the sense to pretend not to notice, and began chatting amiably.

"Explain, 'fore I pry open these doors and toss you down," Cindy hissed, jerking her head towards the elevator. "Doubtful the fall would kill you, but your new squeeze landing on top of that mouldy potato you got for a head? That just might do it."

Sketchy started blabbering on about how he'd met the girl only the night before, and that he'd invited her to go with him on a field trip for a story he was working on. Neither knowing nor caring about whatever his 'big scoop' might be, she impatiently ordered him to skip to the part where he brought her along to meet his fugitive Transgenic friend who was supposed to be dead.

"Not quite sure how that happened, to be honest," Sketchy muttered, his eyes downcast.

"I do – girl hikes up her skirt for you, and you shoot out your brains along with your…"

The elevator sounded again, followed by the ever-decaying doors screeching as they opened. Max stepped out, dressed more like her usual self in jeans and a leather jacket, the clothes she'd worn for the meeting with Lydecker in a backpack slung over one shoulder. Her face lit up the moment when she saw Cindy, and she rushed forward, almost crushing the other girl in a tearful hug.

In the parking lot outside the building, Sterritt and Bors sat in their compact. Cora glared silently at her partner, prompting him to calm his voice a little as he relayed the news. "…positive location on X5-452," he repeated. "No visible support. She entered the building alone."

When Bors was done on the phone, a man sitting in another nearby lot in a grey SUV dialled his own. The two men in the back, along with the woman sitting next to him, began a perfunctory check on their equipment, all having a good idea of how the conversation would go.

The Manticore database had yielded no match for the blonde girl accompanying Theodore, and a check on the Police servers had turned up a brand new I.D. Although unable to confirm her status as a Transgenic, there could be no doubt the girl had been placed by Eyes Only to watch over the reporter. Both Theodore and his girlfriend, however, had been temporarily forgotten about since X5-452 had appeared.

Within twenty minutes of 452's arrival at the apartment building, a large black van had arrived in the parking lot. The side panel slid open and a large woman with a long ponytail dyed somewhere between red and purple stepped out. She wore a long coat to hide the black combat gear and weapons, and left her rifle in the back of the van, crossing the lot in long strides, glancing about a little, and finding nobody watching. Sterritt lowered the window as the woman approached, automatically sizing her up as she did everyone. Sterritt had never seen her before, but the leader of the Phalanx's Alpha Squad wasn't someone whose people could ever fail to recognise once they'd heard her reputation.

"Anything change since your last contact?" Thula asked. Sherritt shook her head in reply. "The Conclave wants this done cleanly," she told them both. "There are too many potential witnesses in the building, so we'll wait until she's out in the open – her probable route back to Terminal City provides us with some likely spots. For now your orders remain the same, but once 452 has been dealt with, nothing Eyes Only or anyone will make much of a difference in their fates."

"Assuming she doesn't humiliate you again," Bors sneered.

Thula leaned down and looked across at Bors. Her face was totally passive, not even her eyes betraying any hint of what was on her mind. Bors met her glare, his own expression not quite as emotionless as hers. Caught between the pair of them, Sterritt didn't bother to apologise for her partner's attitude; despite her respect for the Phalanx, she couldn't consider the Jam Pony debacle to be anything but their worst operation in history, but unlike Bors she wasn't stupid enough to say so aloud.

The silence stretched uncomfortably until broken by a small clatter of metal nearby, as a large black cat knocked the loose lid from a trashcan and began tearing at the plastic bags within. Bors broke his gaze momentarily and glanced out his window at the cat, taking an instant to scan the street and make sure they were still otherwise alone.

When he turned back, Thula was gone from outside Sterritt's window. Before he had a chance to say anything, he found himself showered with shattered glass from behind, and a pair of large, powerful hands clutched his head. A brief gagging sound was followed by the squealing of torn tendons and sinew coupled with a low thump.

Without another word, Thula went back to the van and disappeared inside. Sterritt first looked up at the window of 452's former apartment, making sure nobody had heard the glass breaking, then quickly ran her eyes over the rest of the building's windows and the still-empty street behind her. Once certain nobody had noticed, she sat back and regarded Bors silently. It was an odd sight; his body was slumped forward and slightly away from her, leaning on the corner of the dashboard and the broken window, but his neck had been twisted in such a way that his head hung limply, teetering behind his shoulders upside down, stupidly surprised eyes looking straight at her. Blood trickled from his mouth, running up his cheek, past his nose and into his right eye, just as the other eye began misting over to resemble a doll's eye.

Twisting the knob on the side of Bors' seat, Sterritt pushed the back of the chair until it lay horizontal, and then did the same with the corpse. That would do to keep it out of sight until she could dump it somewhere later – usually the Conclave would want something more than the simple dumping of a Familiar's corpse at the nearest convenient site, on the off-chance that a coroner's tests would turn up any anomalies, but in this case they would be far too concerned with how he'd wound up like this to look very closely at blood work. Thula would of course freely admit to being responsible for his death, daring anyone to try and punish her for it, and it was most unlikely that anyone would care in the least bit about Bors once his killer came forward with 452's equally mangled remains slung over her shoulder.

Hours later, when Max emerged from the building, she had once again donned the green sweater from earlier on, and had left her hair pig-tailed – along with a pretty decent ID from Dix, it was more than enough to avoid notice by any cops she would encounter at checkpoints on the way back to Sector Seven. For the first time since escaping the Jam Pony siege, she'd managed to put the chaos her life had become from her mind.

Although initially worried at the presence of Sketchy's new girlfriend, her apprehension had quickly dissipated. She couldn't put her finger on it, but something about Melissa had made her drop her guard almost instantly, and within ten minutes and two rounds of something resembling tequila Original Cindy had picked up at a market, everyone was laughing and chatting away as if they'd all known each other for years. Not once, in four hours, had the subject of Manticore or Terminal City been raised. Instead they'd passed the time reminiscing about their servitude at Jam Pony, recalling heavily dramatised stories of the mountainous amounts of already unbelievable stuff that went on there. Sketchy had spent most of the night as red as a tomato, as a good deal of the stories involved him being beat up, strung up, or left without his clothes; sometimes all three.

It turned out that the redesign of Normal's car had been the result of his denying Sky the day off for his birthday; he'd taken the day anyway, and along with a bunch of others who'd stumbled out of Crash after a whole day and night of heavy drinking and bizarre activities – which included a drunken invasion of a lecture on astrophysics at U-Dub – they'd decided the car could do with a touch-up. Once he found out who it was, Normal had been too afraid to fire them for fear of what they might do next.

Sketchy and Melissa came out alongside Max, Herbal having lost consciousness on the couch upstairs. The goodbyes at the door had almost brought Max to tears again as the thought of going back hit her, and she wondered briefly when, if ever, she might see her friends again. All in all, however, she was still much happier than she'd been for a long time, and promised to drop in again the next time she was outside of Sector Seven.

Exchanging a couple of quick hugs with Sketchy and Melissa, Max went around to the back of the building where her bike was. The booze having run out much earlier than expected, she'd had a few cups of coffee, and was already well clear of the effects of the alcohol, so riding wouldn't be a problem.

When she was halfway down the street, the black van began to follow. Confident of the route she would take, and when they would have their opening, the driver kept enough distance not to be noticed. Wrapped up in his own task, he never noticed his own tail, the grey SUV, and neither did the rest of the team, busy running final checks on their weapons and equipment.

The first checkpoint Max had to pass through was a good distance away, on a relatively empty stretch of road. Apart from the cops, the only people nearby would be drunken bums sleeping on corners and in alleys, and maybe a streetwalker or two. This presented the best time for an ambush.

"We hit her when she's stopped at the checkpoint," Thula told her team, not for the first time. "No survivors. Kill everything. Cops. Hookers. Dogs. Everything. Sorsha," she told the other woman on the team, "when it's done, grab the tapes from the guard house and smash all the equipment. One of our people in the Municipal Police Force is making sure there won't be any hoverdrones nearby. Once she's down, keep shooting until she's splattered all over the walls – but let's try and keep her face intact. I'm thinking of having her head stuffed."

About a kilometre before the checkpoint, the road passed briefly through the remains of what had once been a massive public arboretum. An eventually abandoned development project had stripped the land of most of the trees and plant life, and empty fields of tall grass stood on both sides of the road.

"Just over a minute to the checkpoint," the driver announced.

"Start to close the gap," Thula ordered, but the instant the words were out of her mouth, a loud pop warned of a tyre blow-out. In the middle of a sharp turn, the driver struggled to keep steady, but to no avail. This time they heard the sound of the van itself being hit a couple of times before the second tyre went. With a hop, a skip, and jump, the vehicle careered into the grass. The first SUV had now been joined by a second, and from both vehicles a storm of automatic weapons fire was unleashed. Although the weapons themselves were silenced, the sound of the van jumping and rolling across the grass combined with the repeated pings and smashes of gunfire blazing through the van, the equipment, and the second-most senior member of Thula's team, could easily have woken the dead.

By the time the van finally came to a halt, they were all scrambling to their feet, save the driver, who had gone through the windscreen. Thula's second, Jonas, grunted angrily as he inspected two wounds – one in left butt cheek, the other a few inches higher, no doubt costing him a kidney. In typical Phalanx fashion, all the injuries served to do was piss him off, and he kicked the back doors open and was first through, with his weapon raised, searching for the attackers.

The two vehicles had sped right past the totalled van, killing their engines at some point in the distance, unseen through the long grass. As Thula and the other three members of her squad poured out after Jonas, they saw their driver picking himself up, shaking his head roughly. He began to quickly make his way towards them. Before he got halfway there, the unmistakable clap and whistle of a long distance rifle came from somewhere in the distance. Nobody saw him take the hit, but he fell face down in the grass, and made no move to stand again.

The rest of the team all hit the deck, and Thula issued the silent command to follow her. The shot had come from behind them, which told them that the two cars weren't the only problem. They crawled to where the driver had gone down, and Thula turned him over. Confused at not seeing any wound, which should have been immediately apparent if it was enough to take down one of her people, she then noticed the massive pool of blood underneath his head. The bullet had gone through his open mouth.

"Spread out," Thula ordered. "I doubt there are enough of them to contain an area this large, so everyone just punch a hole wherever you can, and rendezvous at the sector eight secondary safe house in one hour. Once you're out of the thick of this, try to take one of them alive. I want to know who's itching to die so badly they'd tried to do this to us."

The order was punctuated by the gunfire beginning anew. Everyone dashed in a different direction. The low visibility didn't do much to hide their attackers; it seemed that at one in the morning in the middle of nowhere, they weren't as concerned as they had seemed before about keeping their actions quiet. Before the sound of shots coming from her own people began, Thula made out the distinct sounds of at least six different kinds of rifles, all of which she identified as being high-quality, expensive weapons. They may have been stupid, she told herself, but they certainly had deep pockets. That ruled out Transgenics, she mused, at the same time ducking and rolling as the rush of air by her cheek told her she'd almost had her head blown off. She fired wildly, knowing their was little chance of hitting anything, but trusting the spray of bullets would instil enough caution in those nearby to give her a chance to get further ahead of them and try to find a spot where she might get a good look at the scene around her.

After a moment she tripped over something the ground, but kept running even as she looked hurriedly over her shoulder to see that it was Jonas, already dead from a series of chest wounds. Movement nearby made her raise her weapon, but she stopped with her finger on the trigger as she realised it was Sorsha. The other woman didn't notice her, running backwards as she emptied an entire magazine into thin air before continuing.

Abruptly, Thula noticed that things had gone much quieter all of a sudden; she knew this was a bad sign, and wondered how many remained. When the silence stretched for almost thirty seconds as she ran, getting just ahead of Sorsha, who almost shot her in the back in surprise at her sudden appearance, she knew there was nobody else.

She was dimly aware of the squelching sound of brains in a blender as her last team member fell, and didn't register the sight at all as she turned and fired another burst into the darkness. A grunt and the dull thud of a body dropping in mid-sprint and skidding in the dirt announced her first kill. The almost total darkness made her second easier; she knelt in the long grass and tossed the empty rifle aside. One of her attackers appeared not two feet away, a highly polished G3AZ pointed towards the heavy thunk of the gun landing in the earth. She stepped calmly behind him, and had his weapon in her hand and had set off again before his broken corpse even hit the ground.

The beam of light in her eyes blinded her; instinctively she leapt aside fired in full auto. The light exploded, but before Thula could scramble to her feet, she lost total control of her body, as at the very instant a round from a Colt .45 tore right through her Kevlar vest, two Tazers hit her in the back. Though neither the bullet nor the electricity caused her any pain, she found herself completely unable to stand, or even crawl away.

Finally the shocks subsided, but her situation had only worsened. Four men and two women stood all around her, all keeping a respectful distance having seen what she'd done to one of their companions a moment ago. Armed with various assault rifles, each of them also carried a sidearm, and most had P-90s slung over their shoulders. Balaclavas and NVGs obscured every face.

Thula glanced down at the wound just above her left breast. Even in the darkness it looked pretty nasty, but she calmly assessed that if she could somehow escape, she could easily make it back to her own people and get it treated. What really hurt was the thought that she had failed yet again in killing 452.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a car door slamming on the nearby road. None of the gunmen moved an inch, and she knew that the new arrival was not just a passer-by who'd seen the flipped van and wanted to make sure nobody was hurt.

The newcomer walked slowly towards them and stepped between two of the gunmen. Fury erupted all over Thula's face when she saw who it was.

"I don't believe we've met," he told her. He lightly gripped an Mk.23 Socom pistol in his right hand, but didn't bother to point it at her, apparently secure in his opinion that he was looking at a thoroughly defeated opponent, not worth even the slightest shred of unease. Smiling at her reaction to seeing him, he announced unnecessarily, "I'm Donald Lydecker."

"Fucking reject!" Thula screamed. Her rage boiling over, she forced herself up with lightning speed. The stolen weapon beside her forgotten, she lunged at him.

Surprised by how quickly she leapt up and closed the distance, Lydecker barely had time to raise the weapon. None of the others fired for fear of hitting him instead of her. The pistol was only inches from her when he fired, and she collapsed against him as blood and muscle was torn to shreds by the bullet rocketing through the side of her neck.

Lydecker was knocked off his feet, an accidental squeeze of the trigger as she landed atop him sending an additional round to impact the ground next to one of his own people's feet, who hopped quickly aside, exhaling slightly in relief at not being clipped. Forcing Thula off him, he stood and turned her onto her back with his boot. She stared up at him, immobilized by the blood loss. Lydecker himself was covered in blood, and a pool of it spread all over the ground beneath her, confirming a severe arterial impact.

One last feeble attempt to rise sapped the last of her strength, and confirmed what she already knew despite only a dull physical sensation, as if her body were turning to lead, refusing to do what she commanded it to do. Wondering briefly what a throwback would feel in such condition, how much pain they'd be going through, she regarded Lydecker venomously. "…never should have been born," she croaked weakly.

"I'm well aware of popular opinion surrounding my existence," Lydecker told her. Casually blasting her twice in the face with the large handgun, he added, "You'll forgive me if I happen to disagree."