Jack hadn’t had much sleep on the plane the night before and he was exhausted. The low rumble of the engine was making him even more sleepy. He slumped down in his seat. He could feel the engine’s low drone through his whole body. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open as she drove slowly onward into the decaying ghost town.
“Shit,” Angela said under her breath, “I don’t believe it.”
Jack sat up, suddenly wide awake. “What?”
She rolled to a stop and turned off the engine.
“There,” she said, pointing through the windshield.
Jack squinted into the distance and finally saw a small orangish glow get brighter, then dim. It was a man smoking a cigarette. He was coming out of an alleyway and across the road they were on. Jack then spotted another man walking beside him. He was smoking, too. The two glowing dots moved along with the shadowy shapes of the two men crossing their path, their faces briefly lit whenever they took a drag.
“That’s them,” Angela said in a whisper.
Angela reached up and turned off the switch for interior light before carefully opening her door. Jack got out with her. They both pushed their doors closed quietly just enough to catch but not letting them latch so they wouldn’t make a noise.
“Do you really think it’s the men you’re looking for?” he whispered.
“It’s Miguel and Emilio.”
“Two of the men who attacked you? Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
She sounded convinced. He didn’t know that he was. He thought that it might simply be two vagrants. He couldn’t make out any features of the two dark shapes silhouetted against moonlit concrete and brick of abandoned factories.
Angela was convinced, though, and she was already moving out ahead of him. Jack pulled one of his knives out of a pocket and popped the blade open. She walked on the balls of her feet, making virtually no sound.
The way she moved reminded him of a large cat advancing in on prey. She would freeze in place, watching, motionless, then move again in short dashes. Jack stayed close, trying to mimic her movements. As he started to hear their voices chattering in Spanish, she moved slowly as she kept her eyes locked on the men.
When they talked and laughed and looked the other way, pointing off at something, she moved more swiftly.
Jack was surprised that she still hadn’t drawn her gun as she closed the distance to the men.
He was alarmed when she suddenly broke into a run. As fast as she was moving and with her long legs, before he knew it she had opened some distance out ahead of him. He was even more alarmed that she didn’t have a weapon in hand as she rapidly closed the distance to the men.
Both men halted abruptly when they saw her coming. They flicked their cigarettes off to the side and drew big knives. Jack could see the moonlight glint off the combat blades.
They started running toward her.
It seemed insane. A girl in cutoff shorts and boots with no weapon to hand, her platinum-colored hair flying out behind her, her arms pumping as she charged at a dead run toward two men with knives.
Jack didn’t think this would end well, and it was too late to stop her.
FIFTY-ONE
Just before Angela reached the men, she bent down without slowing and snatched up something.
Jack thought that it looked like a metal rod of some kind—possibly a length of rebar—about three feet long. She must have seen it lying there in the moonlight when she broke into a dead run. She had been trying to get to it before the men with large knives reached her.
As the men charged toward her, she abruptly stopped. She twirled the rebar in her fingers like a high school cheerleader twirling a baton.
Just before the men reached her, she tossed it up in the air and caught it by one end. Holding it like a baseball bat, she took a mighty swing as the man out in front reached her.
Her swing connected with the man’s hand as if she were knocking a ball out of the park. His knife flew away into the night. He let out a cry of pain as he crumpled to a knee. Angela used her swing to spin herself around and slam the rebar into the other man’s forearm just as he tried to stab her. Jack could hear the bone break. Holding his broken arm, the man staggered back a few steps.
The first man had scrambled back to his feet and recovered his balance. He lunged at her to catch her in his arms. Gripping the rebar in both hands as he came at her, she rammed it, end-first, into his face so hard that it speared all the way through his skull and broke out the back. The man’s dead weight twisted as he toppled, ripping the metal rod through his head from her grasp.
Angela ducked into a squat as the second man leaped toward her. His arm reaching out for her went over her head.
Angela pulled a large knife from her right boot. As the man was still staggering past her after missing, she pivoted and with two lightning strikes sliced through his Achilles tendons. He howled in pain and shock when the tendons snapped back up into his legs, the calf muscles pulling up into fat knots of unconnected muscle. He tried to walk on stilted legs but toppled to the ground.
He sat up, trying to reach his crippled legs with his one good hand.
Angela threw a side kick into his face, slamming him back down onto his back. Without an instant’s hesitation, she landed on him, straddling his chest with her bare legs. She pressed the point of her knife to the fleshy spot just below his left eye right above the cheekbone. Blood ran from his broken nose. It was clear to Jack that if he moved, he would gouge out his own eye. The man knew that as well and froze.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Miguel, leader of his merry little band of rapists.”
“Sorry. I am truly sorry, se?orita,” he pleaded, holding his hands up to the side in surrender.
Angela smiled. “I seriously doubt that you’re the least bit sorry, at least not yet, but you will be.”
“Where did you take the material you made?” Jack asked from over her shoulder. “The Semtex explosive you were working on? Where did you take it?”
Jack put a hand on Angela’s shoulder, not knowing for sure what she had in mind. “Angela,” he cautioned in a low voice for her alone, “we need to get information from this man.”
She shot a look of fury back over shoulder. “Oh, he’s going to give us information. You don’t need to worry about that.”
She turned back to the man under her. “Isn’t that right, Miguel? You’re going to give us the information we want, right?”
“Please, please, se?orita! I am so sorry!”
“Answer my friend’s question. Where is the material I saw when I delivered the package to you? Where did you take it?”
“I don’t know! I swear!”
At his denial, and without hesitation, Angela pushed the knife in under his eye and levered it underneath, popping the eyeball out enough for her to rip it out with her other hand. She held the mess of it in her bloody fingers up in front of his good eye as he shrieked and flopped under her.
“Stop screaming, or your tongue is next.”
She didn’t raise her voice. She was so calm, so dead serious, that it made her words far more frightening.
The man wept in terror but he stopped shrieking. “Please! No more!”
He suddenly reached for her hair with his good hand to try to gain control of her. Jack was just about to intervene to protect her when with two swift slashes she cut the tendons in the crook of his arm and then at his shoulder.
The nearly useless arm dropped to the concrete as he shrieked in pain. She put the point of the knife in his mouth to make him go quiet.
“I’ll ask you again. Where is the material I saw when I delivered the package to you? I want you to think very carefully before you answer because if you lie to me again I’m going to start cutting things off you, things you would not like to be without.” She put the point of her knife against his cheek and with a quick circular motion cored out one of his larger moles. He cried out. “I’m going to cut off something more important if you don’t tell us what we want to know.”