By Sh33p, CultofSh33p@aol.com
The great sequal of New Age. It'll knock your socks off. Tim Seltzer, seltzer@seltzerbooks.com
Sh33p Disclaimer: I don`t own Zoids. Consider this disclaimer valid for the whole damn story :P
Foreword:If I had to pick one... I`d pick Cowboy Bebop - See You, Space Cowboy, orrrrr Cowboy Bebop - The Real Folk Blues. Different songs, same tune, works just as well with either.
The weapon was a comfortable weight in his grip, a comfortable weight made even more so by the rounds that he knew were in his pocket. It wasn`t much, when one paused to consider the odds he was about to go against, but it was still enough if he played his cards right. The seat was firm, too firm for his own tastes but it had been sat in by his former surrogate brother so often that it had a faint body imprint in it. The cockpit itself was filled with an unbearable tension, the kind that he had only felt several times in his life.
A part of him wondered if Jack would have been mad to see the old thing going like it was about to, assuming that circumstances had been different.
One hand took to the controls. Hesitantly, he put the heavy gun back into his longvest, then raised his other hand to the controls as well. Gustavs had never been his style, he had too big a habit of wrecking them to really like them, but this one seemed to handle just right for his tastes.
The engines rumbled a bit, the heavy armor creaked as well. The trailers were disengaged and the Zoid transport had been perfectly positioned just far enough within the trees to prove invisible to the prying eyes of any guards that might or might not have been on duty.
Silence broke with the sound of a wind chime, no doubt a custom modification that Jack had made. He always did have bad taste, after all.
"I`m all set to trigger the Sleepers, how are things on your end?" The other ex-mercenary asked in a taut voice that only made its usual gruff, deep tone seem even more menacing than it already did.
"Hope the old Burger Gustav is insured," Brad replied. If the situation were changed, he probably would have been grinning at the statement.
"I doubt insurance even pays anymore. Start your run at the first explosion, got it?" Jack asked, equally as business-minded as his younger comrade was.
"Got it," Brad said bluntly, popping open the cockpit and getting ready.
["Four orders o` fries and a burger," the girl at the counter said, handing a tray to the dirty looking pre-teen by the name of Johnathan Sebastian. He was obviously not the best fed boy his age, and the scar across his exposed shoulder proved that he wasn`t the best taken care of either. Still, he paid for the order, took the tray and walked over to a table where three other boys were sitting.
Brad Hunter, Eric Sanders and Hal Edwards. Each of them was a bit shorter than the last, with Brad being the tallest after John,, Sanders being the most heavy set despite his equally underfed physique and Hal being the skinniest of them all.
Hal was also the first one to pull a jagged looking, home-made knife out of his pocket and start cutting the burger into four equal pieces by the time John had sat down.]
An explosion sounded in the distance, ice blue eyes shifted and narrowed in its direction and Brad`s foot seemed to become a solid lead weight, each hand leaving the steering in the process.
The first went to the rim of the cockpit, the second went to the cruise control switch, which was promptly flipped so hard that the plastic threatened to break. Dirt screeched under the heavy transport`s wheels, but by the time it began to move, the limberly built man with the stripes on his arms had made his move, leaping out of the cockpit and landing in a crouch before rolling out of the way of the Zoid`s stabilizer cap.
A tree snapped like a twig and collapsed onto the old Burger Gustav building, only to snap further as Jack`s Gustav plowed right through it, crashing into the building and leveling it completely.
Brad drew his gun and broke into a sprint away from the crash, all but diving into an alleyway between an ice cream shop that had been one of the burger joint`s only close competitors and the hotel that sat next to it. Instinct guided him to kneel behind an old dumpster that had most likely not been touched in two or three years, reaching into his vest and then drawing the weapon out of the inner pocket he had crammed it in.
It was huge, as six shooters go. Gunmetal black and polished to a neat shine, the rubber grip intentionally made rough and dry, with finely crafted grooves to further aid the fingers. The barrel was awkwardly placed to fire from the bottom of the revolving six shot clip, while a heavily weighted strip of metal above it had been pressed with initials for four people on one side, along with an old quote on the other, one with more meanings than most people would ever realize.
["You are who you choose to be."]
Seconds trickled by. Footsteps followed, ones that he could only barely register. When they stopped, he stood up in a snap, the heavy revolver already held out and aimed in front of him. No one in his line of sight.
["Dumbasses," thought the thirteen year old Brad Hunter as the fifteen year old Johnathan Sebastian sat nearby, clutching his badly bleeding forehead with a wince. Eric knelt next to him, but Brad was already moving in a run with vengeance in mind, bursting out of the alleyway with-]
- gun in hand, his aim already coming into effect.
[There were four of them, one with a knife that was dripping with Jack`s blood, another with a busted temple, the third with a bleeding stomach, and the other holding his arm from where Eric had stabbed him through the bone. Brad would-]
- show no mercy with the element of surprise, pulling the trigger and reeling from the straight kickback of the gun. Unlike your average handgun, Jack and Brad`s customs both used the weight of the extra metal and the awkward position of the barrel to force the recoil back down, sending the counterforce of firing them straight into the hand at just the right angle to avoid throwing one`s aim off if they were resilient enough to hold their arm forward.
Two shots -
[- and the first gangster went down, the one who had injured Jack. The attack was angry and fierce, but Brad was relentless with it, stabbing him from behind with his own home made dagger. The piece of jagged pipe went through skin like a real knife, punching inches deep into the youth`s skin, piercing organs and cracking through bone before tearing back out. The second-]
- dropped by the time his comrade`s blood finished spraying into the air. Neither man even managed to turn around and view their assassin, which was exactly what Brad had intended. Explosions lit through the twilight before dawn as Hunter took off into a run down another alleyway, he knew them all like the back of his hand.
Little had changed in the years since he had left the town, the back alleys and the streets had become cleaner, but all the layers of dirt and grime removed still didn`t change their patterning.
He moved in a straight line, counting off the four bullets that he knew he had left and then skidding to a halt at a junction between four paths. Right went directly to the church, straight meant having to take the long way, but straight also meant that there was less of a chance of being spotted.
So he moved straight, beginning to continue his run only to realize a second too late-
[- he had been spotted. A knife whistled through the air as several members of the more established gang that had grown up almost a generation earlier in the city shouted and began to pursue, though Brad was no longer in any condition to try and outrun them.]
The bullet had hit him right through one leg, missing the bone and the critical veins and arteries, but still tearing muscle and leaving him to almost double over at the first step he tried to take with it, forcing him to stumble along, dragging his wounded foot in his wake and propping most of his weight on the other leg.
"Shit," he bit out, resting one hand on the brick wall of the building next to him, then slinging the other - the one with Jack`s gun - around to face the intersection.
His instincts were right as four men, all heavily armed with sub-machine guns, jammed into the alleyway. He dropped them like flies by the time the last one finished taking aim at him, a bullet in each of their newly-removed faces, aimed perfectly to go straight into the brain.
"I`ve been hit," he told himself. "Gotta be more careful," he added, hobbling to where he leaned against the wall, then pulling out six rounds on a stamping device of some sort. Frantically, but with precision, he yanked the gun open with one hand, the spent cartridges popping out. The stamp went into place, Brad pressed the handle and all six rounds slipped into place instantly.
The stamp was discarded, his hand jerked up and the gun slapped shut all over again, and not a moment too soon either...
["There they are!"
Hal lay dead in a pool of his own blood. Eric and Brad stood over him in shock as the rain poured down, accented by thunder and lightning while Jack grabbed the nearest piece of hardened debris he could get his hands on - in this case, a discarded baseball bat.]
Gunshots tore through the air, bullets hit like piranha bites into the concrete and brick, at least one hitting flesh as Hunter threw the gun forward without consciously bothering to aim it.
The trigger was pulled -
["AHHHH!!!"
A crack of the bat, the first gang member went down, bleeding from a busted temple as the second closed in. The baseball bat was like a katana in the unskilled, yet lethal hands of fifteen year old Johnathan Sebastian, who smacked aside the second`s knife with it, possibly breaking a finger or two in the process before lashing out with a kick to the groin. The twenty year old yelped and stumbled over, the butt of the baseball bat jabbing down near his neck.
John recovered with the speed of youth, hopping back and making ready to crack open the older gangster`s skull, but his tunnel vision damned him as another knife flicked through the air and slashed deeply across his forehead, from hairline to hairline, almost down to the bone. With a pained scream, he fell back, the knife whipping back around and cutting a shallower swath just over his right eye, moving downward this time and barely missing his eye and cheekbone in the process.
Rain and blood mixed in seconds, Jack was only barely able to turn around by the time he had to close his eyes or face being blinded by his own blood leaking down into them, exposing himself to another knife wound in the process, this time a stab near the small of the back.
By the time that the gangster had drawn back, Brad and Eric were all over both he and his downed comrade, with Sanders plunging the stolen knife of one of the second gangster into the original owner`s stomach and pulling it out the long way, while Brad literally dove over the falling John`s body and tackled the other`s attack to the ground, fists flying in an irate barrage that only grief could cause.
"I`ll kill you!" Brad screamed - and meant every word of it, his fists raining into his victim`s face even faster than the water pouring down on all of them.
A bullet flew through the air-]
And one of the guards went down, followed by another of his fellows, even as the lone wolf faltered back, his free hand automatically falling to his newly bloodied side. They weren`t excellent, but they were also distracted by what Jack was doing to their Sleepers, and that was all the opening that Brad needed.
Another gunshot followed, the third soldier fell and died with a crater in his skull.
"Fuck," he growled out, stumbling forward on his good leg and breathing hard as blood start leaking from the wound in his side. It wasn`t a killer, not from the gunshot itself, but combined with the shot to his leg and potential infection...
"No," Brad bit out to himself. "I`ve got a job to do."
With that, he willed himself onward, staggering through the alleyway and coming up to its edge, slowing his breathing down as much as possible and leaning against the corner.
[The handgun was fast, but Eric was faster, flinging himself off of the ground and stabbing the gunman in the arm. His shot had missed, but the damage had been done to the group as a whole.
Hal was dead, John was deeply injured and Eric and Brad were the only ones left with any fight in them.
The knife ground through flesh and muscle, tearing right into bone and cutting straight through as a result, receiving a hard, angry twist before tearing back out, the butt of the weapon cracking hard across the gunman`s cheekbone. Sanders was normally a calm, reserved individual, but he had a hidden rage that boiled like Hell beneath his surface, the kind that was triggered only by the kinds of conditions he was in now.
The kind that could allow him to murder someone in cold blood, looking into their eyes as he did it.
With that rage still flaming in his eyes, the teen drew back for a killing blow, intent on stabbing the bastard through his eye and into his brain, but Brad was faster still, grabbing him by the wrist and yanking him away.
"I`LL FUCKIN` KILL YOU!" Eric screamed, throwing the knife down and running to where Jack was knelt, as if his threats were going to be carried out at a later date. He and Brad virtually yanked Sebastian off of his knees on the ground, each shouldering him and running off into the night without a word.]
Three bullets.
Just like he had so many years before, Brad threw himself out of the alley, this time flying through the air on his side, the gun held out. Just as he`d expected, the soldiers had three pals who weren`t going to play by his rules and rush into a cramped combat situation, each waiting to ambush him.
Unfortunately for them, they were the ones who were ambushed.
More gunshots rang out, the barely-paved road exploded in miniature dust geysers, and one by one, the men went down. The first had his head literally blown off as the bullet tore through his throat with enough force to blow a man`s chest open with full body armor. The second had part of his head blown up in his helmet, which was ripped off by the bullet that killed him, scalping what remained of his skull in the process.
Brad screamed in pain as the third troop scored a direct hit - or three - on his shoulder, the first punching straight through the outmost side and the second two tearing into the wound, even as his gun-toting hand shifted its aim, one final bullet scrambling the man`s brains. He didn`t wear a helmet like the second, but it wouldn`t have made a difference.
The three bodies fell, Brad went down with them on his good shoulder, blood leaking down from the wound on his other.
"Need a reload..." He thought, forcing his arm to move into his pocket on sheer willpower, then drawing out his remaining six bullets. The gun snapped open, the spent shells popped out and the six new ones were clumsily, painfully put in, not that he could do anything with precision using the arm with a wounded shoulder. To make matters worse, it was his right arm, just as the first wound had been to his right leg. That made one side of his body nearly useless, while the wound to his side was on the left.
"I hate this shit," he winced out, using his good elbow and leg to scrape along on the quasi-asphalt, over to a street light, which he promptly leaned against on the ground, trying to catch his breath.
Another explosion ripped up in the distance, just as three more soldiers ran out of the church, guns raised. Brad played dead, hanging his head and holding his breath, praying to any god that existed that they wouldn`t shoot him.
Each of the three covered the distance to their fallen comrades in record time, but all of them vanished a second later as a pair of heavy plasma bolts screamed through the air and slammed into the ground, causing an explosion that licked at Brad`s feet.
"Knew those Sleepers wouldn`t hold `im for long..."
"STOP FIRING OR WE`LL START KILLING HOSTAGES!!!" Came the cry over a loudspeaker from the church.
His eyes snapped open, resolve made them look even colder, sweat poured down his face and his teeth were shown in a furious display. Jack, wherever he was, never fired a second shot. It was obvious that those in the church weren`t paying attention to the lone gunman anymore.
"Good," he spat. They were digging their own graves and saving him some effort.
By force, he started sliding up to his feet on the street lamp, his right hand was starting to go numb, in addition to shaking incessantly. He ignored it. His leg was throbbing from the gunshot wound to his thigh, but he ignored that too, stumbling and staggering forward through the smoke of Jack`s single strike before finally breaking into a hard, almost impossible run.
He hit face first into the church`s outer wall, scraping alongside it in his pained walk towards the corner. It was a left turn, making it impossible for him to effectively check ahead of time.
Exhaustedly, he continued, stopping briefly near the corner before wheeling around it, gun poised to fire, but no one was there. The doors were still open, but no one was running out. That meant they probably had everyone packed upstairs or guns were trained on everyone down below. Either way, it wasn`t the kind of firefight he really wanted to go into...
But he had to.
["Something on your mind?" Sister Ilene asked thoughtfully as she walked into the main room. Johnathan, in full bandages, sat across the aisle. Eric had gone to bed after making sure the two would stay.
It was a church after all, one that sported an orphanage, though when it came to the three boys in question, it was more or less a hospital that sometimes took them in. It had never been prosperous enough to properly care for them as far as food went, but the attendants tried their best, and what they had went a long way.
One thing they had in abundance though, was kindness.
"... I..." Brad trailed off heavily, staring at the altar without anything to say for what he had done. John wasn`t quite as mute.
"Sister, I... Have a question," John began, though his voice was weighted by injury.
"Ask away, dear boy," Ilene said. She was younger than the other attendants, and though she was by no means a celibate after having been married over the course of the past year, she still had an air of purity that the others almost all lacked, save for the recently departed Father.
"What do you become when you can`t forgive yourself for something you`ve done, and you`re not sure if God will either?" Sebastian asked uncertainly, though the question really wasn`t for him. It was Brad`s, he just didn`t have the courage to ask it. Ilene didn`t seem to mind, crouching down between the two with a smile that seemed as bright as a full moon on an otherwise starless night.
"You are who you choose to be, Johnathan. God will forgive you either way, so long as you try to do what`s right," she began, shifting her gaze from John to Brad, those deep, violet colored eyes seeming to know that whatever horrible secret he was keeping, it needed some form of resolution.
"You`ll find forgiveness someday, too," she said. He only gave her the same sideways glance he would one day give to someone else who would ask the question that would define his life in a few short words.]
With courage and resolve, he threw himself through the doors, ignoring the terrified adults who were crowded together in the rows of seats, all of them hunched down for fear of being shot.
["If we are who we choose to be..." John began, interrupting the conversation between the other two.
"Can I be Jack Sisco?" He asked. The name was the same as that of the departed Father that had so looked after all four of them throughout their early childhood.
Ilene hesitated, then turned to him with a soft, almost bemused smile.
"Yes. Jack it is."]
A yell, bullets flew with precision before the four guards could ever hope to even take aim at him or anyone else. Blood slipped into the air, screams followed and four bodies hit the floor, all falling at nearly the same time.
"Get out of here, all of you!" He shouted at them, though none dared to move, save for one woman.
She was older now. A bit taller, a bit rougher around the edges of the eyes but still just as radiant and beautiful as she had been back there. Her light red hair had been let out of the nun`s hat she had once worn, her robes had changed to those of a priest, but there was still the look of sincere concern that he always been one of her countless trademarks.
Were she a bit taller, and if her hair wasn`t smoothed straight down, Ilene Canaris would have looked almost exactly like Naomi Fluegel, and if her hair was shorter and bubblegum pink, she would`ve born a similar resemblance to Leena Tauros.
"Brad?" She said with disbelief, though he only gave one of the rarest, most lopsided smirks in all of history in response, using his gun wielding hand to steady himself in the walk he made for the stairs.
"Try and get them out of here, Sister," he ordered huskily, sparing her the pleasantries of an unpleasant reunion.
"... Mother, now..." She offered, rushing to his side and doing her best to try and prop him up against her, even if it meant ducking under one of his arms and trying to support his weight on her own, blood staining into her robes in the process.
"Didn`t know the church`d changed that much. Sorry," he said with rare sincerity as she tried to walk him down the aisle. "Just get me to the stairs, I can do the rest..."
"You`re hurt..."
"I`m dying, let me do some good with what time I`ve got left," he begged, though he didn`t know if it was the truth or not. God knew it felt like it.
She disagreed, that much was obvious from how her hold on him tightened suddenly, but she went through with it anyway, helping him along as best she could.
The stairs were impossibly high, it felt, but he started climbing them once he got to them anyway. Mother Ilena slipped from beneath his arm and stepped back, the already faded smirk died away and his movements became more labored, the numbness starting to take hold of his arm and leg alike. It was a wonder he hadn`t keeled over in exhaustion yet.
After time unknown, he had made it up the stairs with no resistance, entering the room where the children had been kept. All of them snapped to attention as the bloodied, wolfish man with the gigantic black revolver staggered into the room with what looked like the fire of Hell burning in his blue eyes, and all of them didn`t object when he stumbled out of the way of the door, collapsed to his hands and knees and spoke up raggedly.
"Go. Downstairs... Now," he ordered fervantly, holding his head up as the children promptly started running by him for the door, though more than a few had the sense of level headedness to grab those too young to walk and carry them out themselves, going last rather than frantically cramming out through the bottleneck.
No resistance yet. He was starting to wonder if there were even any others, but old instincts kicked in the moment he noticed a vague shadow near the very edge of the entrance to the stairs that lead above.
"Figures they`d use the fucking bell tower," he complained to himself after all of the children had left, starting to crawl across the upstairs bedroom with no surrender and no retreat glaring in his eyes. Once at the door frame, he hoisted himself up in whatever way he could manage, the revolver held tightly in hand.
["You`re a hard man to figure out."]
No hesitation.
He all but leapt like a cat around the corner, the gun raised, and two triggers had been pulled by the time he hit the wall with a half-scream.
A body fell down the stairs, the face now missing from the mouth up to the eyebrows, but it wasn`t a clean kill. Not that killing was ever clean to begin with.
He now had a fourth gunshot wound, this one in his stomach. The bullet had punched right through him, missing the spine by less than an inch but still causing massive damage. It didn`t matter.
With what remained of his energy, he began to walk the last mile up the stairs. If there was anyone left, he was going to kill them. No ifs, no ands, no buts.
["You are who you choose to be."]
The door was already open, he charged in, gun held high but tunnel vision damned his rush.
The last gunman hid near the door, Brad almost tumbled over the edge, but still managed to prop himself up and turn around in time to take aim.
"DON`T FUCK WITH MY CHURCH!" He screamed at last, just as the soldier, stood up, taking aim with nearly equal speed and pulling the trigger of his handgun far faster than the injury-slowed ex-mercenary could ever manage. The bullet blazed like a bite sized demon through the air, accompanied by a second gunshot in the opposite direction before the first had ever even ended.
["So which are you, Brad? A coward, or a hero?"]
One bullet blew past another, one man let out his dying breath and collapsed to the hard wood floor and the other felt his breath become markedly shorter as what felt like a sludge hammer at mach two plowed through a rib, then a lung, then the same rib once again before tearing out of his back with a spurt of blood, the momentum jarring away what little remained of his balance.
Time slowed, Brad Hunter let out a smile and tumbled over the edge, the pain fading to a distant pressure as a coppery taste filled into his mouth, a red, saliva and blood mixture beginning to trail down his lower lip and chin as he entered the air.
Birds took flight in the background the ground gained speed and the lone wolf crashed into the stone paved walkway between the steps and the door of the church on his shoulders and neck. His skull cracked, his neck vertebrae did the same and his formerly good shoulder broke, but no pain reached him.
Instead, he lay there, unable to move, unable to keep his eyes open for more than a few seconds, but by the time they began to slide shut, the sun had begun to come up.
"Never seen a bluer sky..."
He said, and meant it, even as that beautiful, cloudless sky faded to
black.
Author`s Note: Didn`t come out exactly how I had wanted(the flashbacks weren`t quite what I`d intended them to be), but still worked just as well - if not better.
As for the inevitable religious questions: No. I`m athiest and I view Brad and Jack as being, more or less, agnostic. They left their faith at the door years ago, now they just don`t care too much because they`re trying to live now, not in an afterlife or anything like that. Christianity on Zi isn`t even Christianity as most people would recognize it since, due to my own background for how humanity wound up there, it`s more a blend of every religion that the original colonists bore, evolved to compensate for a massively decreased population, etc, etc.
Aaaaanyway, onto the replies!
Illidan: Well, we had a few more deaths than usual, but this time: I`d really appreciate it if you comment on something other than the violence. Not mandatory, but still :P
The Big Fisch: Vega`s around, but since he and Lars are still burning rubber for Nyx, they probably won`t become highly significant for a little while. Quite welcome for the linkage, by the way.
EndlessAdventure: Technically, she wasn`t acting dumb. When you`ve got an enemy that vulnerable, you`re supposed to go for the quick and easy kill because you don`t want to waste time dicking around and dodging away from an opponent who most likely won`t be able to dodge an attack or throw one back at you in the first place. She didn`t exactly have foresight into what Zeke was planning after all. As for the next guy...
I`ll let you all wonder on that.
Regarding the WC3 fic: I suggest you leave comments on it in a review for it. And no, John and Chronus aren`t Mark and Kyle redux, I always have two or more people who verbally shred each other in my stories, it`s something that goes back to the relationship that formed between Piccolo and Zangya in the HT stories. Rohkai is also not Harabec because, for one thing, Harabec isn`t a 7 foot tall Jamaican Troll in leather pants. The characters aren`t fully developed yet because it`s only on chapter three and I still have more of the main cast to bring in and a main plot to find, I`m not exactly writing it for epic purposes, I`m doing it for my own enjoyment.
And that`s that. Enjoy, leave a review, and Sh33p out. See ya next time!
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