“You had a bad trip, you dumb-ass,” V muttered. “Bad trip. This is all just a bad fucking trip. Now run the fuck along back to Daddy and Mommy’s.”
Like the good little preprogrammed toy he now was, the kid was up on his new old-school Converses and tearing off after his friends, a look of total confusion on his flushed face.
Vishous pulled another jump ahead and intercepted Frick and Frack. And what do you know, V’s mere presence, materializing out of thin air, was enough to bust through their panic—the pair hard-stopped like they were chained dogs that had run out of steel links, jerking back in their shoes and pinwheeling their matching Buffalo Bills parkas.
“You asshats are always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Mentally lights-outing them, he patted them down, cleaning their pockets and their short-terms at the same time—then he sent them off on their pussyfooted flee once again, praying that one or the other of them had an undiagnosed heart condition that would suddenly show up under the strain and kill him outright.
Then again, V was a nasty bastard, so there you had it.
No time to waste. He headed back to try to catch Rhage, re-outing his forties and looking for the most efficient way to the sonofabitch. Too bad dematerializing into the thick of things was a no-go, but shit, there were guns pointing in every direction of the compass. At least necessary coverage came quick, first in a series of maple trees and then in the form of a building that had to have been yet another dormitory.
Slamming his back against the cold, hard brick, his ears tuned out the heaving breathing of his lungs. The heaviest discharges from firearms were on the left, up and forward of his position, and he quickly dumped both clips even though he had three bullets remaining in one and two in the other. Fully restocked, he jogged toward the far corner of the building and put his head—
The slayer popped out of the last window he’d ducked under, and without the creak of the sash, V would have gotten drilled. Instinct rather than training had his arm swinging out and around before he was conscious of moving, and his index finger pumped off a pound of lead right into the fucker’s face, clouds of black blood exploding out the rear of the skull like ink bottles getting dropped from a great height.
Unfortunately, an autonomic contraction of the slayer’s grip on whatever autoloader it had in its hand caused a number of bullets to go flying, and the burning stripe on the outside of V’s hip meant he’d been hit at least once. But better there than any other place—
A second slayer came around the corner, and V caught it in the throat with his left-hand gun. That one appeared to be unarmed, nothing of note dropping to the overgrown grass as the thing grabbed for the front of his neck to try to hold in the black gusher.
No time to peel any weapons off either of them—or to stab them back to the Omega.
Up ahead, Rhage was in trouble.
Out in the heart of the campus, in the town square–like area formed by a circle of buildings set some five acres apart, Rhage was center-of-attention with a peanut gallery of at least twenty slayers closing in on him.
“Jesus Christ,” V muttered.
No time for strategy. Duh. And no one else coming to Hollywood’s aid, either. The other brothers and fighters were engaged all around, the attack having dissipated into half a dozen skirmishes that were being fought in different quadrants.
There was nobody to spare in a situation that could have used three to four wingmen.
Instead of one who had a thigh wound and a grudge the size of Canada.
Goddamn it, he was used to always being right, but sometimes it sucked ass.
Vishous surged forward and focused on one side of the melee, picking off slayers as he tried to give his brother a viable escape route. But Rhage . . . fucking Rhage.
He was somehow on it. Even though the math didn’t add up to anything but a casket equation, the dumb bastard was a thing of deadly beauty as he slowly circled ’round and ’round, discharging his weapons on a first-come, first-served basis, refueling his autoloader without missing a beat, creating a ring of writhing, half-dead undead bodies like he was the eye of a helter-skelter hurricane.
The only thing that wasn’t in control? His handsome-for-the-history-books face was contorted into a monster’s snarl, the killing rage within him not even partially leashed. And that would have been almost acceptable.
If it weren’t for the fact that he was supposed to be a professional.
That sort of murderous emotion was an amateur’s downfall, the kind of thing that blinded you instead of focused you, weakened you instead of made you invincible.
Vishous worked as fast he as could, spot-on’ing chests, guts, heads, until the stench saturated the open air even with the wind blowing in the opposite direction. But he had to compensate for Rhage’s ever-rotating shooting field, staying out of range himself, because shit knew he had no confidence that the brother would differentiate between targets.
And that was the fucking problem when you were half-cocked in battle.
Then it was done.
Kinda.
Even after those twenty or twenty-five lessers were down on the ground, Rhage still spun around and continued shooting, a death carousel with no more riders left on its demon horses that was too stupid to know where its own off switch was.
“Rhage!” V glanced around as he kept his guns up, but stopped his own discharging. “You fucking idiot! Stop!”