Covenant (24 page)

            “What’s so funny?” he asked.

            “Eh?”

            He looked her over.  She wore a hooded rain jacket, and underneath, a black tracksuit.  He patted down her jacket, discovered that she had a belt holster hiding a Smith & Wesson .38. 

            “I’ll be taking this.”  He took the revolver and stashed it in his waistband.  “Where’s your partner?”

            “Is outside, he look for you.  Please, do not hurt me.”

            “Listen, answer my questions and you’ll be fine.  What’s your name?”

            “Maria Valdez,” she said slowly. 

            “What’s your partner’s name?”

            “Is Noah Cutty.  Si.”

Cutty and Valdez.
  Finally, he had names to attach to these people.  Although the names might’ve been aliases, they lent an extra weight of plausibility to the night’s surreal events. 

            “What organization sent you to kill me and my wife?” he asked.

            She frowned, gaze bewildered.  Either she truly did not understand him, or she was playing dumb.

            “Which church are you from?” he asked. 

            “We are loyal servants of the kingdom.”  She spoke in a flat monotone, as if she’d been programmed to speak the words. 

            “That sounds like the same nonsense your partner was telling me.”      

            “Is no nonsense.”

            He scanned her up and down again.  He remembered that her partner also wore a solid black tracksuit.

            “You and your partner, you’re dressed alike,” he said.  “Is that some kind of uniform?”

            “Eh?”

            “Just turn around,” he said.  “Slowly.”

            She did as he asked.  Holding the gun on her, he peeled away part of the rain jacket, to reveal the tracksuit top.  There was a small golden emblem embroidered on the breast pocket. 

            “I’ve seen that badge before,” he said. 

            Releasing a sharp cry, the woman seized his wrist, brought it to her mouth, and bit down savagely.

            He shouted—the pain was so intense that he almost dropped the gun.  As he tore his arm away from her teeth, blood spraying, she delivered a slashing chop to his throat. 

            Gasping, he lurched backward, throat feeling as if he’d swallowed a hot coal. 

            With the fluid speed of a trained martial artist, she dipped, took hold of the front of his shirt, and slammed her foot hard enough into his abdomen to knock the breath out of him.  Screeching, she jerked him forward, leveraging his own momentum to catapult him through the air over her.  He crashed onto the floor on the other side of the kitchen, inadvertently biting his tongue and tasting salty blood, his pistol clattering out of his fingers and spinning under a table, out of reach.

            He coughed, spluttered, shook his head as if clearing away dust.  He felt blood seeping from his bitten wrist, pain burning around the wound.  His stomach ached from when she plunged her foot into it, even though he was wearing the body armor vest under his shirt.

            He’d gotten basic martial arts training in the Corps, but it had been years since he’d used the techniques.  Unfortunately, this woman moved like she
lived
in a dojo. 

            Behind him, she bounded to her feet as agilely as a cat. 

Better remember your lessons fast, or she’s gonna finish you off, man.

            Breathing raggedly, he spat out a mouthful of blood and began to rise.  As he got up, she stalked toward him.  She was grinning maniacally.  Enjoying this.

No way I’m going down, not here, not now.

            He lunged at her.  Evading him easily, she kicked him in the ribs, her foot a dark, deadly blur.  He grunted, knees wobbly.  He turned back to face her.

            Just in time to catch another slashing kick, this one to his midsection.  The blow sent him reeling drunkenly against a table, chairs toppling to the floor. 

            His eyes watered.  Jesus.  She kicked with such velocity and power that in spite of the body armor he wore, he was sure she was leaving behind nasty bruises.   

Maybe trying to fight this girl head up was a bad idea,
he thought, dimly.

            Spinning like a ballerina, she kicked him again, a perfectly placed blow against his chest that made his heart clutch.  He stumbled against the refrigerator, knocking it backward.  He groped for the handle to keep from losing his balance and spilling onto the floor. 

            Dancing around him, light on her feet, she kicked him in the ribs yet again, drawing a hiss of pain from him and hurtling him back against the table. 

            He bent over, groaned.  His body ached in what felt like a hundred places.  He wasn’t cut out for this kind of combat, and was clearly overmatched against this female Bruce Lee. 

            As she circled him, the woman’s dark eyes were amused.  She was
toying
with him, he realized, as if he were little more than a lame sparring partner that she could put down at her leisure whenever she got bored with knocking him around the room.

            That idea pissed him off more than anything else, and he felt a fresh surge of adrenaline coming on.

            She whirled to kick him again.  He anticipated this one, blocked the kick, but she was so damn fast, she spun like a dervish and punched him in the face, a sharp snapping blow to his jaw, and his legs bowed, almost gave way.  She hammered him twice more with that machine-gun fist, and he felt himself going down then, all of the fight gone out of him, chopped down by one of the most unlikely opponents . . .

No . . .

            A reserve of strength came from somewhere.  He got his legs under him before he toppled over.  Then he seized her by that tracksuit, lifted, and swung her with all his might.

            She flew across the room, screaming with what sounded like surprise.

            She slammed against a bank of cabinets.  Groaning, she sank to the floor.  She curled into fetal position, her body a dusky shape in the dimness.

            “Didn’t want to do that . . . senorita,” he said, throat raw and aching.  “I was taught . . . never to raise my hand to a woman.  But you had that shit coming.”

            She unfolded her body and rose into a crouch.  She pointed a silver-plated pistol at him, the gun glinting in the faint light. 

            While she had been contorted into a ball, legs drawn to her chest, she must have retrieved the weapon from a concealed spot, probably an ankle holster.  It looked like a .22—a smaller caliber, but it could nonetheless do some damage if you hit the right spot.

            Although he had the .38 stashed against his waist and wore the vest, he raised his hands in the air.  No point in pushing his luck a third time in one night.  The look in her eyes dared him to go for it.

            “Only wanted to . . . talk,” he said, and took a step backward.  He lowered his hands, and one of them brushed across the back of a chair.  “You were . . . one who drew first blood—literally.”

            “I do not want to kill you, senor Thorne.”

            “Good, ‘cause I don’t want to die.” 

            The door at the front of the house banged open.  A man yelled: “Valdez!” 

            That would be her partner, Cutty.

            Valdez moved forward, gun honed on him.           He backed up another step.  Clutched the wooden back of the chair.

            Cutty stormed around the corner.  He was short, perhaps five-two, but as stout as a bull, and looked about as angry as one.

            He had already drawn his gun, a large semi-automatic glistening with raindrops. 

            Anthony heaved the chair at him, and fled down the hallway. 

39

            Lisa had long known that Anthony was stubborn about doing things his way.  It was one of the traits of his that she loved, though sometimes it drove her nuts.  He was a man of purpose and action and let nothing deter him from what he thought was right. 

            But she was stubborn, too.  He hadn’t married some docile little wifey.  Like it or not, she had a mind of her own and a willingness to use it.            

            For maybe ten minutes after he ventured out into the storm, she waited on the sofa, purse clasped at her side, top unzipped to give quick access to the gun.  Then, she couldn’t tolerate sitting still any longer.  She got up and went to the front windows.

Stay away from the windows . . .

            She peeked through the curtains.  Outside, the storm raged as if a colossal battle were taking place in the firmament, rivulets of rain hitting the glass like expended shells.

            She didn’t see Anthony, but the light was still off in Mike’s rental house.  Anthony had lamely tried to convince her that he believed it was due to a mere power outage.  As if she had a big “G” tattooed on her forehead that stood for “Gullible.”

            Both of them knew that, somehow, the church crazies had found them.  If they had learned about Mike’s rental—and God knows she didn’t want to speculate how—then why couldn’t they discover that she and Anthony were hiding in this place, too? 

            Her lips drawing into a taut line, she spun away from the window.  Quickly, she gathered all of their things.  She hurried into the garage and loaded everything into the jeep.

            Although she worried about how long they’d have to live this paranoid, nomadic lifestyle, it no longer felt as disconcerting as it had earlier.  When your survival hung in the balance, you could adapt to anything. 

            But being on the run, constantly looking over their shoulders, would make it difficult to go back to the comfortable world of live, work, and play, make it hard to immerse herself in the minutiae of mundane affairs, and make it impossible to believe that life was as simple and orderly as she had once thought.  She finally understood how delicate the fabric of their world really was, how one unexpected event could rip out a patch that forever altered your existence.

            Most of all, she finally understood, at a heart-deep level, how Anthony had become the man that he was.  This descent into strangeness and terror might result in them actually becoming closer than ever.       

            Gun at her side, she hit the button to open the garage door.  The door clambered up, and the thunderstorm charged in.

            She moved to the edge of the doorway and looked toward Mike’s rental again.  What she saw robbed the breath from her lungs.

            The troll-like crazy man, wearing a rain slicker, was going inside the house.

Anthony’s in there.  I can feel it.  The nut is going in after him.

            She hustled behind the wheel, fired up the engine, and reversed out of the garage.  Rain crashed onto the truck so violently she felt as if she were inside a steel drum being pelted by gunfire.

            She hadn’t intended to close the garage door—she wanted Anthony to know that she had gone—but when she saw a metallic object in the grass that looked suspiciously like one of his revolvers, she halted in the driveway and hopped out of the truck. 

            Instantly, she was drenched.  She raced across the lawn, almost lost her balance on the slick grass, plucked the handgun off the ground, and scrambled back to the dry comfort of the jeep.  She placed the revolver on the seat beside her. 

            He had armed himself with two firearms before leaving, but he wouldn’t have dropped the revolver in the grass and left it there unless he’d had no choice, unless he’d been on the run.   

            She glanced at the rental house.  

            Now what?   How could she help Anthony if he were in a tight spot?  What if he didn’t make it out of the house alive?

No, he
will
make it.  Don’t you dare to think otherwise.

            An idea came to her.  She whispered a prayer, and pulled out of the driveway. 

40

            Running down the hall, the fanatics at his heels, Anthony dashed into the first bedroom, on the left.  He slammed the door, found the lock and twisted it, for all the little good that would do.

            The bedroom was furnished with functional pieces: double bed, dresser, desk, lamp.  It looked like a standard-issue hotel room, which was probably the point in a pre-furnished home.

            The dresser was near the doorway.  Quickly, he gripped the edges of it and hauled it across the door.

            The door erupted open, but smashed against the obstructing dresser.  Cutty roared in rage.  He charged the door again, and the wood buckled and the dresser rocked.

            Backing away, Anthony drew the .38 he had taken from Valdez out of his waistband.  He swung out the cylinder.

            “Shit.”

            The gun had no ammo.  Not one round.  Unfortunately, the spare .45 ammo that he’d stored in his pouch wouldn’t fit the weapon, either.  

            He had no choice but to run.

            There was a curtained window on the other side of the room, lightning flickering outside the glass.  He slapped the locks open, lifted the window, and kicked out the screen.  It winged away like a kite into the rainy night.

            Across the room, Cutty hit the door again, hard as a juggernaut, and finally tipped over the dresser.  It crashed to the carpet with a thunderous boom.    

            Anthony squirmed out of the window and, as he dropped to the grass below, heard Cutty’s semi-automatic chopping the air above him, and the man’s infuriated cursing.

            Anthony landed on the ground, the impact rattling his shins and knees.  He stumbled against the house. 

            He wasn’t in shape for this kind of stuff any more.  His lungs ached, his throat felt packed with glass shards, his wrist felt as if it had been gnawed on by a rabid dog, his entire torso hummed with pain from the savage kicks the deadly woman had delivered, and his face was swelling from the punches he’d endured.