Flashback

A ninja had gone down and Val was straddling him, still trying to wrest a long gun from a second guard. Leonard’s medic was down, writhing, but the larger man he was wrestling with zapped Leonard with a taser. Nick saw his father-in-law drop like a bag of bricks and just had time to wonder if the taser had killed him.

Sato shoved him back, trying to clear a space between them, and for a few perfect seconds, Nick’s back was against his son’s back as he and Val swung and clubbed and butted away opponents and for those few seconds he was so close to his boy that their combined fury and determination to survive became a single force, almost a form of love.

Then there were numerous taser zaps behind him and Val fell away.

Sato squared himself off to finish with Nick but Nick leaped in the air, landing on the broad man’s upper body, head-butting him fiercely again, and shoving both of them out the open door of the wildly banking helicopter.

Sato had grabbed the winch-frame girder again but it had swung out on its heavy hinges over nothing, Sato’s huge weight dangling from it by one hand and Nick clinging and grabbing and hanging on to Sato. He was screaming and clawing, determined to pull the Jap from his perch and make him fall with him.

The dragonfly banked steeply back to its right and Sato’s and Nick’s legs flew high, almost touching the whirling rotors. Sato did a complete three-hundred-sixty-degree swing over the horizontal winch bar—like an Olympic athlete doing his routine on the high bar—and the metal frame was bending and tearing out of its hinge sockets from their combined weight. Nick had no idea how Sato still had so much strength in an arm that had been broken so recently. Maybe the polymorphic smart-cast added strength.

Ninjas crouched in the madly tipping open doorway, aiming their weapons at Nick and screaming in Japanese.

Nick realized that he was snarling, clawing at Sato’s eyes with his nails, and biting at the big man’s huge neck like a wild animal. The two men spun back and forth under the groaning and swinging winch bar, connected to the dragonfly ’copter only by Sato’s right hand.

Nick began chewing Sato’s right upper arm above the cast, biting for muscle, willing to chew to the bone to get the sonofabitch to release his grip. It was more than a thousand feet to the tilting ground below. Nick thought he could already smell the stench of Landfill Number Nine.

All right, I’ll go there, but we’ll go together, you motherfucker, thought Nick through his snarls and chewing and clawing. Terminal velocity, two hundred miles an hour, the both of us.

Sato threw away the pistol he still held in his free hand and clubbed Nick on the side of the head with a giant fist. Nick saw flashing lights and he lost his cuffed grip on Sato’s bleeding neck and head.

He was loose and falling. By himself. Sato still hung on.

Nick screamed his defiance even as he fell away. But the dragonfly banked hard left, the tilted rotors slashing air inches above Nick’s tumbling head, and then he felt Sato’s lunging left hand—impossibly strong—close around his cuffed wrists.

Then, even more impossibly, Sato hung on to the screeching and bending winch girder with his right hand while he swung Nick up and around and threw him—contemptuously, it seemed—back into the open door of the helicopter.

Val and Leonard were sprawled out, either dead or unconscious. Nick smashed against a bulkhead and felt something tear in his leg but leaped up against the dark shapes coming toward him. He could see Sato swinging back into the chopper behind the ninjas. Nick’s teeth were bloody with Sato’s blood and he had flesh in his mouth and he wanted more…

Nick heard the zaps of at least three tasers at once and then he heard nothing at all.

1.20 Texline, Republic of Texas—Saturday, Sept. 25

It was the pain that finally made Nick open his eyes.

He was astounded that he could open his eyes. Had Sato waited until he regained consciousness to carry out the executions? Had that been part of Nakamura’s orders? Was Nick supposed to watch his son and father-in-law be shot before he received the merciful bullet to the brain?

His head hurt so much when he opened his eyes that he felt as if he’d already been shot in the head. He tried squinting through the headache and through a strange pain from his left leg.

The first thing he noticed was that he wasn’t lying among the rotting corpses at the edge of Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine. It was dark outside and he was in a lighted, open-sided tent. Lying on a cot with clean sheets under him. There was something on his face… a clear oxygen mask. Nick clawed it off with his free hand.

His free hand. He wasn’t flex-cuffed anymore. His left leg was in a cast and he wasn’t wearing his chinos.