Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 010

The cargo doors slammed shut, and the darkness inside the truck became absolute for a moment before Soren's eyes adjusted to the thin lines of light bleeding through the gaps in the metal panels.

The smell was the first problem. He breathed through his mouth and moved quickly, pulling Evan by the arm toward a corner of the cargo bed that was marginally cleaner than the rest. The other occupants shifted to make space without being asked, the automatic, exhausted accommodation of people who had long since stopped having opinions about their surroundings.

Evan's head was a mess. The rubber baton had done its work thoroughly, leaving a pattern of swollen welts across his scalp and a cut above his temple that was still seeping. Soren pressed two fingers against the skull behind each ear, checking for the particular softness that would mean something had given way underneath. Nothing. The bone was intact. A concussion was likely, a fracture was not. Under the circumstances, that counted as good news.

He tore a strip from the hem of Evan's shirt, folded it into a pad, and pressed it against the worst of the bleeding. Then he sat back against the cargo wall and let the truck's vibration settle into his bones.

The vehicle had been moving for perhaps twenty minutes when he noticed the scatter of branches and dried root matter caught in the gaps of the cargo floor. The truck had hauled plant stock at some point, seedlings or cut flowers, and several of the branches were still intact, finger-thick and reasonably straight. He picked one up, found the sharpest edge of the truck's interior paneling, and began working the end against it with slow, patient strokes.

Two hours passed. The sun came up somewhere outside, and the light through the door gaps shifted from grey to gold, falling in thin bars across the faces of the men around him. Nobody spoke. Most of them had the particular stillness of people who had stopped spending energy on things that weren't immediately necessary.

"Ugh..."

Evan surfaced with a sharp intake of breath, one hand going immediately to his head. He held it there for a moment, eyes pressed shut against the pain, then opened them and looked around at the moving cargo walls with the slow recognition of a man reassembling recent events.

"We're on the truck," he said.

"We are."

"I thought I was dead." He let out a careful breath. "Are we heading to Port Morrow?"

"That's the assumption."

Evan's gaze moved across the other occupants, taking them in properly for the first time. The wounds. The missing limbs. The eyes that had nothing left in them. He looked at them for a moment without speaking, then looked away, the way you looked away from something you couldn't do anything about.

"The driver's been talking," Soren said. "I can't follow it. Do you have any Frontier dialect?"

Evan's expression shifted from pained to cautiously useful. "I studied for two months before I came out here. Let me try."

He crawled forward, pressing his ear toward the gap between the cargo section and the cab, and stayed there for several minutes, face tight with concentration. Then he came back.

"I'm sorry," he said. "They're talking too fast. I'm getting maybe one word in five."

"Not surprising."

"I can speak it," said a voice from across the cargo bed.

Both of them looked. The man who had spoken was somewhere in his mid-forties, wearing a plaid shirt that had seen better months, with the particular look of someone who spent most of their professional life in front of a screen. The hair at the top of his head had retreated considerably. He had the kind of face that defaulted to calm under pressure, not because he wasn't afraid, but because he'd learned at some point that fear was less useful than attention.

Evan studied him. "You're from the mainland?"

"Yes." The man nodded. "I've been listening since we left. They said they're taking us to a factory called Axiom Works. Something about transplant procedures."

The words landed in the cargo bed like something dropped from a height.

Evan turned to Soren, the color in his face doing something complicated. "Transplant procedures. As in organs."

"As in organs," Soren confirmed.

"So we need to get off this truck."

"We need to get to Port Morrow first. There's nothing to be done while we're moving." Soren kept his voice level. "One problem at a time."

Evan opened his mouth, then closed it again. He looked at the other men in the cargo bed, made the same calculation Soren had already made about speaking freely in a confined space full of strangers, and let it go.

The truck slowed.

Not the gradual deceleration of an approaching stop, but the sudden, deliberate reduction in speed of a vehicle that had encountered something unexpected. The engine noise changed, and then the truck stopped entirely, still on the road, the surface beneath the tires too smooth for a destination.

Evan pressed his eye to the nearest gap in the door. "We're still on the highway."

Voices from outside. The driver's, raised and carrying an edge of irritation. Other voices answering, harder in tone, with the particular cadence of people who were not asking.

Evan looked at the translator. The man had already closed his eyes, concentrating.

"The driver says they're with the Blake family," he said quietly. "He's telling them to clear the road." A pause. "The other side says the road is exactly where they want them."

The gunfire started before he finished the sentence.

Rounds punched through the cargo panels in a ragged line, punching daylight through the metal in a series of sharp, percussive impacts. Soren dropped flat, pressing himself against the floor, and the men around him went down in the same instant, the survival instinct cutting through even the deepest exhaustion.

"Down! Stay down!"

The exchange outside was brief and one-sided. Four or five weapons against two or three, the disparity audible in the rhythm of the fire. The truck's side of it thinned out quickly. The other side didn't.

Then silence.

Soren gave it ten seconds, counting them, then moved to the door and put his eye to one of the fresh bullet holes.

Four men in civilian clothes were working the scene with the efficiency of people who had done this before. Two of them were going through the driver's pockets. Another was checking the escort vehicle. The fourth was heading toward the rear of the truck with the purposeful stride of someone completing a checklist.

Soren looked at the sharpened wooden spike in his hand, then at the door.

He heard the chain come off the latch.

The door swung open. The young man on the other side took one look at the cargo bed and his eyes went wide, the surprise of someone who had expected cargo and found people instead. He turned to call back to the others.

Soren came through the door.

The distance was two feet. The spike went into the young man's eye socket before he completed the turn, driven in with the full force of a close-range thrust, and the sound he made was very brief. Soren caught the AK rifle as it fell, brought it up, found the two men by the driver's door, and put two rounds into each of them before they had fully registered that something had changed at the back of the truck.

He moved left, using the open cargo door as cover, and acquired the fourth man, who had made it back to the driver's seat. Four controlled shots through the already-broken windshield. The glass that remained turned red.

Upgrade Firearms Proficiency.

【Firearms Proficiency upgraded. Current level: LV3.】

The knowledge arrived the way it always did, immediate and structural, filling in the gaps between what he knew and what he needed to know. Grip pressure, sight alignment, the geometry of cover and exposure, the way a weapon behaved at different ranges and angles. He felt it settle into his hands like something that had always been there.

He dropped to one knee, ejected the magazine, checked the remaining rounds by feel, and reseated it. Then he went flat.

The last two men had found cover on the far right side of the truck, behind the engine block, and were firing blind around the corner in his direction. Soren rolled under the chassis, positioned himself behind the front axle, and fired along the ground in a low, sweeping burst.

One man took it through the lower leg and went down hard, his weapon skidding across the asphalt. The other broke immediately, threw his rifle aside, and ran for the banana grove on the right side of the road, crashing through the broad leaves without looking back.

Soren rose to a crouch, tracked the running figure, adjusted for distance and movement, and fired twice.

The man made it eight more steps.

He did a full circuit of the scene, weapon up, checking each body. The man with the leg wound got two rounds. The man in the driver's seat got one more to the head. The young man by the cargo door didn't need confirmation. When he was satisfied that nothing in the immediate area was still a threat, he lowered the rifle and let out a slow breath.

Evan's head appeared over the edge of the cargo bed, eyes moving across the scene with the wide, slightly disbelieving expression of a man recalibrating his understanding of the person he'd spent the night next to.

"What," he said carefully, "just happened."

"Get down here," Soren said. "We need to move these bodies and change clothes before anyone else comes down this road."

Evan climbed out. He looked at the nearest body, then at Soren, then at the rifle in Soren's hands. Something shifted in his expression, the easy, adaptive sociability giving way to a more fundamental reassessment.

"Special forces?" he asked.

"Get moving," Soren said.