Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) (43 page)

Foster keyed the intercom next to their
med-station. “Rae, get back here. Now.” He began pulling sealed
trays from a cabinet on the wall, next to the gurney.

The brown-haired woman came through the hatch
from the second module, took one look at Jake, and then started
giving Gwen orders. “George, we can handle this. Can you give me
some room? And tell Bee to get this monstrosity moving.”

“Don't listen to her, honey; she doesn't know
you like I do,” he said, brushing by her and patting the Mimi's
hull affectionately, before keying the intercom again. “Bee? Head
for the gate. Slow-like! We got hurt people back here.”

“
Will do, Uncle George.”
Her voice
squawked back and they felt the Mimi move forward gently.

“Penny up there with ya?”

“
I'm here,”
Carson's voice told him.
“
What can I do?”

George toggled the intercom. “Tell Bee to
concentrate on her driving. The Mimi angles a bit wide to be makin'
any sudden turns.”

“
Got it, George.”

“And Deputy? Don't touch anything up there
until I can run you through the operations manual. You break it,
you buy it,” George said harshly.

“
You know what? You're the most offensive,
pea-brained, narrow-minded, son-of-a—”

George shut down the intercom with a
sneer.

They watched nervously as Rae directed the
surviving Barbie in the cleaning of Jake's wound. Normally,
Foster's counterpart was an unassuming intellectual. When a problem
she knew how to handle came along though, the sandy-haired woman
changed completely. She took charge of the area around the gurney,
barking orders like a Major General commanding a legion of
Dragoons.

Kat pulled George away by one arm. “I didn't
know Rae had medical training.”

“Oh yeah,” he replied and lit a stogie with a
wooden match, once again struck against his cheek. “She's actually
got battlefield medic certification. To go along with the
Bachelor's Degrees in Bio-Chemistry and Metal Fabrication.”

“What?” That was a little intimidating. Hot,
able to use heavy weaponry,
and
brilliant? Kat felt a twinge
of jealousy at the beautiful woman's mounting list of
abilities.

George grunted. “Always been an overachiever.
At least, according to her. Personally? I jus' think she gets bored
easy.”

Rae was currently holding the gash in Jake's
flesh open with a pair of small surgical retractors and ignoring
George. “Shit. Knife hit the
bone.”

“That's bad, right?” Gwen asked. She handed
her more gauze swabs to blot Jake's wound.

Rae's lips pressed together in frustration.
“It's not good. This is
deep.
It's still bleeding quite a
bit, too. His color is terrible, which tells me he's losing way too
much blood, so I'm going to have to stitch him up. Then I'll seal
the wound.”

Foster squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Ah,
hell.”

Kat was confused. “That's bad?”

“Yeah. Ya might want ta go up front with Bee
an' Carson fer a bit.”

“I'm not leaving Jake,” Cho said firmly.

“It's alright, George. I'll probably need
both of you to help restrain him anyway,” Rae said.

George snapped his fingers and moved to one
of the floor-level crew bunks.

“Oh, that reminds me. While Rae's workin',
there's something you need ta see.” He unlocked the hatch and
hefted the privacy door up along its track. “Look who our girls
found on her way to the Hummer.”

Cho bent over and peeked into the chamber.
She didn't move or speak for almost a full minute. When she did,
her voice was low, cold, and full of promised mayhem.

“Hello...
Nichole.”

“She was trying to break into one of the
vehicles outside,” Foster told her, looking like he couldn't decide
whether to laugh at the idea or scrape something smelly off the
bottom of his boot. “Almost forgot ‘cause I had to take some
drastic measures when they walked her in. She kept carping like a
Russian Mafioso's moll, so it was either shut her up or shoot
her.”

Jake's ex was a mess. Her hair was totally
disheveled and some of it had been crisped, telling Kat the bimbo
had come close to being a briquette in a Nazi barbeque. Her
clothing—along with much of her skin—had been coated with ash and
dark smudges, making her look like she'd spent some time crawling
up a very dirty chimney.

She'd also been gagged with what looked to be
one of the fixer's dirty socks.

“George? Do me a favor and pull her out of
there, would you?”

Foster didn't bat an eyelid. Rae had informed
him of Karen's fate. That alone angered the aging fixer, almost
beyond the ability to speak coherently. When she'd told him what
happened to Laurel, and of her sacrifice on the building's roof,
however, the older man's expression had become—to accurately
describe it—absolutely-fucking-terrifying. At that moment, even his
niece had taken a cautious step back after bearing witness to the
towering rage and utter lack of anything resembling restraint in
his eyes. The survivors tended to forget, due to the man's
off-colored sense of humor and almost ridiculous lack of tact, that
in his younger days, George Foster had been one of the elite. A
member of a worldwide fraternity who'd engaged in everything from
airborne assaults with Rangers, to maritime infiltrations with Navy
SEALs, to clandestine black-bag operations on the orders of the
Secretary of Defense. He'd been judge, jury and—when necessary—an
executioner of lowlifes around the globe. Everywhere from Cape Town
to Cabo to Cairo.

He'd actually stopped keeping track of his
body count back in '74.

George picked Nichole up callously and set
her on her feet, ignoring the blonde's muffled cry when his
sandpaper-rough fingers bruised the flesh of her neck further. Kat
waved him off and pulled the sock out of the stripper's mouth.
Nichole spat little fuzzy tufts off of her tongue for a few
seconds, then glared at Laurel's friend venomously.

“Well. Thanks a bunch for fucking up a good
thing, you
losers.
Do you have any idea how hard it was
convincing a fierce pirate like Poole to let a
woman
have
any kind of authority?”

“Sorry to be an inconvenience,” Kat replied.
“You're lucky Rae didn't just leave you out there. She should've,
after everything you've done. You could've given all the ghouls
blow-jobs. Do you realize how many people you've managed to get
killed today?”

Nichole rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Like I
care? You do remember throwing Mike and me out into the street with
the infected, right? I don't owe any of you one damn thing.”

“You were put out for a
reason
,
girlie,” Foster growled.

“Yeah,” she drawled, in a poor impersonation
of the fixer's voice, “that worked out well, huh?”

Kat folded her arms and gave the madwoman a
steady look. “After all this, I should let George put a bullet
through your head.”

“Oh, please!” Foster begged her.

“I haven't seen a certain, red-haired
slut
yet. Anything happen I should know about?” Nichole
looked around the module, grinning savagely. “I told him what I'd
do to her, you know. I had such fun in store for pretty Miss Laurel
St. Clair.”

Kat remained standing and looked at her
silently. When her comment didn't elicit a response, the stripper
looked past Foster to where Rae worked feverishly on Jake's pale
form.

“I have to say, though. I think I like this
better,” Nichole said brightly. “It took a lot of wheedling. You
wouldn't
believe
how stupid some of those Purifiers
were.”

“They swallowed your line of horseshit,”
George said. He scratched at his cheek, giving her an obvious
middle finger. “So they pretty much had to be the dumbest
sons-a'-bitches who ever walked the face of God's green Earth.”

Nichole gave him a disgusted glance, then
looked back to where Jake lay bleeding. A smile grew across her
face. “I wish I could've been there. I wish I could've seen his
face, just as she died. Maybe even taken a picture of it, so I
could relive the moment over and over and over again!”

The pretty Asian still said nothing.

“And you want to know the best part?” Nichole
asked, her glassy eyes wide and completely mad. “After I've taken
away the person he loves most on this planet? Now, he gets to die
too! I swear, in all my wildest dreams, I couldn't have—”

Cho turned to Foster. “Take her cuffs off,
please.”

“What?” George asked.

“Her cuffs,” she repeated, and walked back to
the storage crates. “Take them off.”

Foster was incensed. “There's no fuckin'
way
I'm lettin' this—”

“George.”

He turned to see Laurel's friend remove her
sword and weapons belt. She gave him a look that warriors
everywhere knew. It was the look that said,
This is going to get
ugly.

She stripped off her tight Volcom tactical
shirt, leaving only her cut off tank-top and vambraces. She also
tossed her pair of Glocks in the storage bin before nudging the
hatch shut and spinning the lock. Turning once more, Kat watched as
the fixer released Nichole and stepped back smiling.

“What are you so happy about, you crusty old
fuck?” she demanded.

George didn't answer. He just leaned against
the bulkhead.

“Do you remember when I slapped you, back at
the safe-house in Columbus?” the blue-haired woman asked her, head
tilted to one side.

Nichole's eyes went flat.

Kat was the one who smiled now. “I see that
you do. You said it was a cheap shot. I think it's time we settled
something between the two of us.”

The blonde looked
very
upset now.

“I think you need to learn that you are not
the by-god, center of the universe,” Kat said, totally relaxed as
she stood on the deck. The Mimi rocked slightly as it ran over
creatures in its path, but Kat kept her balance easily without so
much as a momentary wobble. “I think if you try to go after Jake or
anyone else but me, Foster's going to put a
bullet
through
your eye and feel really, really good about it. Won't you
George?”

“
Praying
for the opportunity,” the
fixer said, pistol in one scar-covered hand.

Eyes narrowing, Nichole moved forward a
fraction. “How do I know he won't shoot me in the back anyway?”

“You don't,” Kat admitted and stepped up to
face her. “The world's changed in case you haven't noticed. I can
understand your failure to keep up with current events, though.
You've been too busy, what with spending all your time sucking off
bigoted jerk-weeds and shooting up. What I
do
know is you
are in severe need of an epic-level butt-kicking, and guess what? I
am just the crazy-ass, Nazi-killing, zombie-slaying
bitch
,
who also just so happens to think Jacob O'Connor is the bravest and
sexiest damn man ever to walk the face of this planet, to give you
one.”

Nichole ran forward screaming with her arm
drawn back, which completely telegraphed her punch. Cho waited
calmly until the mad-woman was only six feet away, and then blurred
forward with a quick, stiff-armed fist that caught the blonde
squarely in the center of her solar plexus. The air whooshed from
Nichole's lungs in an awkward rush, as her forward momentum was
brought to a sudden halt. She stood there clutching her chest, all
the while trying to inhale despite her clenched diaphragm in a fair
impression of a goldfish. Kat watched and waited for her to
recover. The woman before her had been the catalyst behind the
torture of Allen and Maggie. Nichole had contributed to the deaths
of Karen and the blue-haired woman's best friend Laurel. This
megalomaniacal, pea-brained
thunder-cunt
had attempted to
take Jacob away from her.

And she was due some pain.

After getting her breath, the blonde came at
her again, arms wind-milling. Kat would've laughed, if the sight
hadn't brought the taste of bile to her mouth. It was a miscarriage
of fate that this pathetic creature—because that's what Nichole
really
was—still drew breath, while Laurel didn't. Cho swept
her clumsy attack aside and sent Nichole reeling with an elbow to
the side of her face. The blonde recovered before bashing into the
Mimi's rear door, spun, and gamely tried to come at her again. Kat
bounced her off the transport's hull by redirecting a truly
ridiculous punch the woman threw at her head. She recovered and
staggered towards Kat again. That earned Nichole an open-handed
chop across chops, which caused her teeth to cut into the inside of
her mouth painfully.

Kat began to pummel Nichole at will. A right
cross opened up a gash in her cheek. Another blacked her left eye.
Cho's spinning backhand sent the stripper bouncing off the hull
again and into one of the motorcycles in the rear of the module.
Finally, a powerful haymaker dropped the blonde nearly senseless to
the gigantic vehicle's steel deck.

The ninja-girl turned to George and took a
step back. As he watched, a terrifying presence moved there just
behind her eyes. Something Kat normally kept locked away,
imprisoned deep within the darkest, dankest pits of her psyche with
the strongest chains her soul could muster. A diabolic shadow that
gloried in the pain she caused. A ravager only loosed on rare,
special occasions like this. When it needed to be unleashed on
people who preyed upon others.

On
monsters.

“Open the rear hatch,” she told him.

He nodded slowly and moved to the nearby
control panel, as Cho bent and hefted the now dazed Nichole by her
hair. The ex-stripper managed to rise painfully to her feet, and
Laurel's friend dragged her to the clam-shell as it slowly lowered
towards the passing pavement outside.