Page 20 of Rarely Pure and Never Simple
THE HYPOCRITICAL OATH
Blaze scanned the compound, hidden from the road by the beginnings of foothills. Metal signs hung on the twelve-foot-high fence. When he pulled out his scope to read them, his stomach rolled.Variant Free Zone.
They'd stumbled across one of those damned variaphobe extremist compounds, and he'd left Damien alone up there. He spun back toward the plateau, pulling his Mannheim 1200 from its shoulder holster as he leaped back up the rocks. Odds were good that these shitheads had killed those two kids Damien had sensed, and even better that they'd kill Damien in a heartbeat when they spotted the vehicle.
He heard the voices over the thumping of his adrenaline-jolted heart and crouched low as he topped the rise. Damien was on his knees by the car, two shitheads with guns trained on him in front while another, also armed, approached from behind.
Damn.
With no time for subtle or cunning plans, Blaze called up his flame hard and fast, the surge of power stealing his breath. He pulled the fire from his fingertips into a white-hot ball and hurled it like a skipping stone at the compound a hundred yards away. It hit the fence with an explosive bang and rushed down a wooden support post, the flames spreading fast through dry brush and winter grass. Normally, he liked to watch his masterpieces of incendiary art, but he didn't have a second to spare.
He surged up, hurled a smaller fireball at the dry shrub next to the idiots on the boulder, and started shooting with his free hand. His first shot took out the guy on the left, his second, the one on the right who had been dancing around like a lunatic with his jacket on fire. As he turned to take care of the one threatening Damien, a shot slammed into his chest and spun him half around. Breath knocked clean out of him, unable to tell if he was still among the living, he watched as Damien leaped to his feet and started beating the last man standing with a shovel.
Not something you see every day, a gunman beaten senseless with camping equipment.
He wanted to call out to Damien, to ask if he was all right, but the night darkened around the edges and slammed shut around him.
Slowly,the whiteout faded. The screaming, clawing panic died whimpering. Damien stood panting, the shovel still clutched tight in both hands, its surface darkened with some substance he didn't want to think about. A man lay on his face in front of him, terribly still.
I've killed someone.
The shovel dropped from his numb fingers with a clang.
Again.
Blaze… where was Blaze? He turned in a desperate circle. The flaming bush must have meant Blaze had been nearby when the shooting started. There wasn't any shooting now. The only sounds were crickets and his wheezing breath.
Damien held his breath. Wait. That was someone else's wheezing. A familiar pair of boots stuck out from behind a sphinx-shaped rock. Blaze. He could barely punch in the code as he ran. It took three tries before he connected to the emergency channel Dr. Parma had given him.
Triage operator, state your emergency.
"Agent down! I need immediate medical evac!"
Your location's onscreen. Please keep the channel open.
"ETA?" Damien flung himself to his knees and whipped off his coat. He bunched it up to press it against the bleeding hole in Blaze's chest. "Fuck! What's the team's ETA?"
Nearest evac team is on the way, sir. Twelve minutes. Please remain calm.
"You hear that, tough guy? Twelve minutes. You hold out that long. And then hold out some more."
Of course, Blaze couldn't hear him and probably would have laughed at his frantic babbling if he had. There were two dead children buried out here and probably three dead strangers, but it all paled in comparison to the life slipping away under his hands.
Damien sobbed a breath in relief when he heard the jet rotors of the evac transport whine overhead.
Several hoursand a lot of waiting through medical procedures had dulled the edge of Damien's nerves. Blaze rested quietly now in the bed across the room, the nanites busy inside his chest cavity with lung- and muscle-tissue reconstruction.
Normally, Damien would have left him and continued following trails. The doctors assured him that Blaze was out of danger but he would need nearly two weeks to recover. Why he stayed… Blaze had been hired to protect him, yes. He'd expected warnings about risks and perhaps some shots fired if they were threatened, but Blaze's defense of Damien had been ferocious and had threatened his own life. It didn't feel right at all to leave after that.
It was peaceful in this wing of the hospital. The staff went about on soft-soled shoes and kept their voices low. They had brought Damien a comfortable chair that he could curl up in, and no one insisted that he leave. This might have been odd behavior for most hospital staff, but he suspected Dr. Parma's hand in it. He was certain he had made a frantic, half-coherent call about Blaze being at death's door. Something about having to watch over Blaze because he needed someone to.
A vague sense of embarrassment lingered over that call. It probably hadn't made much sense.
With the adrenaline levels easing down and a snack retrieved from the vending machine in the hall, Damien had settled in with his generic wafer tablet, nothing as fancy as Blaze's PiSlice, to write out his reports for Dr. Parma on the first two located kids, Katie Hempstead and Cory Tanner. Security forces were still questioning survivors from the variaphobe compound after they had recovered both of the kids' bodies, but Damien had no doubts. Bigots had shot them and buried them in haste. The odd part was that they hadn't been traveling together nor had they been shot at the same time. Katie's trail was older.
Damien stopped and frowned at his holoscreen, trying to think of the best way to convey what he knew as fact but couldn't prove.
"Hey. You stayed."
