around the globe, and she showed no signs of abatement.
That was why Delahunt had started using the resources of Cash’s crew, HedSpayce, for gathering information on Ka55andra. For Cash, it was no major problem. Her crew had enough ability, and what they couldn’t get on their own, they asked for around the bulletin boards across the Net, as discreetly as possible.
Having Ka55andra, someone who had ties to international terrorists and assassins, finding out they were on her trail would have been hazardous to HedSpayce’s health.
“I’ll look forward to seeing you, Carmen,” Cash said. “We haven’t gotten together in a couple years.”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, in the work I’m in, business is too good,” Delahunt answered, sounding sullen, defeated.
Cash figured that her friend worked for something akin to the CIA or the Department of Homeland Security, and she felt a pang of sympathy. If work was keeping her busy, that meant that she was keeping her finger on the pulse of tragedies and horrors across the globe. Trying to maintain a watch on that either turned you callous or slowly bled your spirit one atrocity at a time.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Carm.”
“It’s okay. Anything you have, just send it to my BBS. I’ll have my department look it over, too,” Delahunt answered. “I just wish we could budget you more money.”
“No problem, Carm. Though, maybe a little tax break come April…”
Delahunt chuckled on the other side. “We’ll see what we can do, Mandy.”
“Thanks,” Cash answered, not quite certain whether Delahunt was joking or not.
The door of the warehouse loft offices was rapped, and Cash sighed. “I’ll have to talk to you later. Sounds like we’re getting a new delivery.”
“All right. Take care, okay?”
“Sure,” Cash replied, and she turned off the phone and tucked it into her pocket.
She opened the door and looked up to see one of the largest human beings she’d ever seen. He looked down on her but remained silent. A voice from below caught her attention, and she looked at a squat little man holding a clipboard.
“Is this HedSpayce?” the dwarf asked.
“Uh, yeah,” Cash answered. She looked past the dwarf and the giant, seeing a lanky, long-haired man with a handlebar mustache standing in the hall. He looked as if he were made out of toothpicks, he was so skinny. His eyes were black, and creepy. They had dollies, loaded with stacks of boxes of paper, diskettes and other office supplies. These weren’t their usual deliverymen, even though they wore the right uniforms and their boxes were stamped with the right return labels.
She just didn’t know. The mammoth delivery man looked too mean, too cruel, to be anything other than a professional wrestler, or worse, a serial killer. The giant somehow managed to squeeze his wide shoulders through the doorjamb and rolled his dolly toward the center of the office.
“Where do we drop this off?” the little one asked. Cash looked down at him as he pushed his cart in.
“Oh, the supply room is this way,” she said as he handed her the clipboard.
The clipboard was one of those digital delivery invoices, with a stylus to sign your name on a pressure-sensitive LED screen. HedSpayce’s office address was displayed on another little screen at the top of the brown unit. She signed her name and started to hand the clipboard back to the dwarf when something snaked around her throat.
It was an arm, the wiry thin limb of the creepy, long-haired delivery man. Suddenly, that toothpick-thin body was a lot stronger than she thought, corded muscles squeezing her throat and picking her up off the ground. Her feet kicked and she tried to let out a choked scream.
Nothing got past that strong, muscular forearm.
Henley, a handsome young black kid, rose, shouting at the man strangling her. The giant turned swiftly and wrapped his massive hands around Henley’s head and yanked him off his feet, snapping his body around and hurling him through a bank of cubicles. As the young hacker’s body crashed through the offices, screams of confusion filled the air.
Cash struggled, her fingers trying to dig into the forearm of the killer strangling her, but the cords of his muscles were too tight. It was like squeezing steel. His other arm snaked around and he aimed a long-barreled handgun at another of her friends, a pretty young woman named Claudia, and peppered her white blouse with bloody splotches. Claudia’s corpse dropped to the floor, and the HedSpayce executive forced a screech past her constricted larynx. She reached out to claw at his gun hand, but his arm was too long for her to grab the pistol.
The snakelike gunman twisted and put more shots into the head of Hideo, another of her co-workers, as he ran to her rescue. Tears burned in her eyes as she watched another of her friends collapse into a lifeless heap at her feet. Cash couldn’t speak, and her lungs strained for a fresh breath of air.
Everyone else was running now, but the giant ripped apart two boxes and pulled out two big, barrellike weapons. Thundering booms filled the room, and cubicle walls suddenly sprouted softball-size holes. More hackers and office workers tried to scramble for safety, but the giant’s weapons smashed the same massive channels through their chests and heads.
It was a massacre.
The dwarf had gotten another weapon out of a box. It looked like a water bottle with handles, a belt trailing from the side of it. However, it spit flames from the muzzle that sliced through the office. Computers burst apart in sprays of sparks and chips. Cash’s co-workers also burst open as the high-velocity slugs hammered into them.
The woman’s struggles weakened. She mouthed a desperate plea, then remembered the cell phone in her pocket. Maybe if she hit 9-1-1…
Jacob “The Snake” Cannon lowered his modified CZ-75 as he felt Amanda Cash slump in his arms. “She’s gone.”
“Took your time about it,” Linn “Gremlin” Keller snarled, slipping his personally designed belt-fed Ripper XM-1 back into its box. Keller was a brilliant weapons designer and had produced a full-powered machine gun that he could fire without being knocked off balance by the recoil. “You just love having the girls struggle, don’t you?”
Cannon smirked. “I’m part snake, Gremlin. You know we like to feel the last wiggles of our prey.”
He licked Cash’s earlobe, then let her slip to the floor in a puddle of long red hair and tangled limbs. “Haggar!”
The gigantic David Lee “Mammoth” Haggar stopped clomping through the wreckage of the cubicles and looked back to his partners.
“You know, while you two are talking,” Haggar answered in a deep baritone, “there might be survivors dialing for the cops.”
The giant stopped and triggered one of his custom-designed Striker 12 shotgun pistols into the body of a downed office worker. Keller had shortened the barrels on the 12-shot, rotary drum shotguns specifically to give the titanic assassin a weapon that he felt comfortable with. An oversize trigger guard and grips for his big hands completed the fitting of tool to user.
“Right. Spread out,” Keller said. “We won’t
