Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

05 - Dead Men Don't Pay Debts

Nevay drove the long blade of her knife straight through Priatt's windpipe and through the back of his neck with sickening crunch. He gurgled, eyes bulging in shock, blood spraying out over his chest and across Nevay's face.

She ripped the knife free and was moving before Priatt's body hit the ground.

Her knife slashed wildly, opening the face of the woman to the left. Targe's shotgun boomed, and the man to the right was blown clean off his feet with a gory crater in his chest.

Kirk reacted on instinct. Dropping into a crouch, he twisted and cracked off a shot from his pistol, catching another of the rival gang members in the leg as the man tried to take aim.

He kept shooting. There was no room for mercy on the docks, not in the game they were playing now. His second shot went wide, but the third and forth caught the man in the stomach and the throat, sending him spinning. The man sprawled to the ground, coughing and spluttering, his lifeblood fountaining out over the floor plates.

A storm of bullets thundered from the rest of Nevay's crew, ready to act as soon as she kicked off the killing. They'd been waiting for that moment, and they were all better shots than he was.

The whole thing was over in seconds. Nevay herself, splattered with blood and panting with exertion, tugged her long knife out of the chest of a dead body and stood up, spitting and rolling her neck from side to side, as though she'd just completed an intense work out. She glanced left and right, surveying the corpses of Priatt and his entourage approvingly.

"Good work, folks."

"Jesus Christ, Nevay," Kirk muttered shakily as he rose from his crouch.

"This is what you signed up for, Kirk."

"Oh, it is? I thought you brought me here for diplomacy?"

"With this fat bastard? Not a chance. This was always going to take a little dirty work." She cast an unapologetic glance back over her shoulder at him. A black smile tugged at her mouth as she nodded to the man he'd killed. "Nice shooting."

Kirk grimaced and stuffed his pistol back into its holster. "You can't just keep killing everyone that looks at you sideways. You're going to bring every fucking gang on the docks down on top of us."

"Sometimes you have to send a message, Kirk." Wiping her knife off on Priatt's body, she sheathed it and turned to Targe. "Everybody alright?"

"Not a scratch," the big man replied, exchanging smirks with the other members of the crew. Despite his disgust at how little regard they had for life, Kirk had to admit, Nevay's group were very, very good at what they did.

Better to be on their side right now, he reasoned.

It hit him then that this would be the first of many such confrontations, the first step on a very long road to drag Hadrian's disparate gangs kicking and screaming into a new future. Sighing heavily, he dragged both hands down his face, as though he could scrub away the memory of what had just happened.

"What now?"

"Gotta deal with the rest of Priatt's people," Nevay answered, motioning Targe and the others towards the bodies. They began stripping the dead of their weapons and valuables as she kept talking. "We get out there fast; let them know that their boss is washing the docks right now. Maybe some of them'll be smart enough to get in line."

"And if they're not?"

"Then let's call it a hostile takeover, eh?" Her expression softened slightly and she walked over to him putting a hand on his shoulder. Her fingers curled to grip a fistful of his jacket. "C'mon, Kirk. Don't go all weak-at-the-knees on me now. I know you're not..." Nevay's mouth twitched from side to side as she tried to find the words. "Not used to this sort of stuff, but just remember the 'why', alright? We need the networks and the numbers. Otherwise nothing that we did – nothing we saw out in that place – is gonna mean shit."