Toys

Chapter 107

I dropped across the seat. Metal splinters and glass rained down upon me, and the air screamed as laser blasts tore tunnels through the air where my head had been.

Fortunately, one of the many perks of my artificial endowments is a fail-safe sense of direction, distance, and velocity. Basing my actions just on my memory of the crouching Devlin phalanx, I kept my foot on the accelerator and managed a tire-burning zero-to-ninety in just under four seconds, at which point I violently yanked the steering wheel sideways and broadsided the augmented bodyguards. I killed, or at least badly maimed, six of them.

Then I went into a fast spinning turn and sped back for the rest while Lucy joined the melee from the other side with her own truck. Four more of the bodyguards were squashed between us like grapes.

But there were still two of them-smarter, or at least faster learners, than their peers. I watched in frustration as they jumped behind cars-each in a different direction-avoiding the obvious carnage.

Great minds thinking alike, Lucy and I jumped out of our ruined cars. Even if we didn’t shut down this entire operation, several Elite car owners were going to be royally pissed at us.

“Left,” she said and pointed to her own chest.

“Right,” I yelled.

Something told me the original Devlin wasn’t among the initial fatalities, and I personally hoped he was the one I was going after now. I’d never liked that huge, haughty bastard. And I was pretty sure the feeling was mutual.

My target called out to me, “I trained with Jax Moore, you pathetic skunk,” definitely sounding like the real McCoy.

“Oh yeah?” I taunted, hoping to provoke him into doing something rash. “Well, let’s hope you learned your vaporization-prevention techniques a little better than he did. I heard there wasn’t much left of him after we were done with that so-called interrogation.”

“Let’s do this, Hays Baker.”

Just then Lucy let out a victory whoop.

“I won’t go down quite as easily as my clones,” promised my Devlin.

“We’ll see,” I called, weaving my way crabwise between the cars until I finally had a clean line of sight-and then I did something I’d always wanted to do but had never had the nerve.

I took off at full speed toward the bastard protector of the War Criminal in Chief. I got up to forty easily, then fifty, and finally sixty-which was pushing my outer limit.

He spotted me and, fortunately, his ego got the better of him. Rather than trying to gun me down, he dropped his weapon and crouched to absorb my impact. Just as I’d hoped, he wanted to do this mano a mano.

With him having easily a hundred pounds on me, and a combat pedigree I’m sure I didn’t even want to speculate about, it was definitely something of a gamble on my part. At the last second, I turned my shoulder and drove into him with all my might, causing a noise like that of a wrecking ball hitting a modest-sized house.

It took me a moment to get my bearings back, and when I figured out which way was up, I felt as if I were standing on a waterbed. But as I turned to finish what I’d started-or die trying-I quickly realized I’d knocked him out cold. He wasn’t moving a muscle, not even any of the ones in his head.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been underestimated by a genocidal maniac in recent days.

“You all right, Hays?” Lucy called to me. “Because he sure isn’t.”

With that, she walked up and put two bullets into the sleeping giant’s skull.

“Like I said, Hays. Kill the head!”