Read Online The Far Shores (The Central Series) by Zachary Rawlins - Free Book Online

mid-turn
with an instinctive tackle. They went down together onto the sand and the
rocks, Alex landing on top, both struggling for control of the pistol. Alex had
the presence of mind to drive his knee into the guard’s leg, one hand pushing
the gun aside, the other prying the gas mask aside, where it would hopefully
obscure his view. The pistol went off twice, the flare of hot gas creating
blinding afterimages in Alex’s vision. Alex tried the knee again, catching the
guard in the upper thigh and eliciting a grunt of pain.
    The guard abandoned his
gun and produced a serrated combat knife from a holster slung across his chest.
Alex caught his arm as the guard swiped downward, aiming for Alex’s exposed
face. He blocked the strike, though the knife sliced across the top of the
knuckles of his right hand. There was no pain, but Alex’s hand was immediately
slick with blood.
    More gunfire nearby, from
the direction Katya had dived. There was no time to worry about it, though Alex
could hear bullets ricochet against the rock and hiss as they buried themselves
in the sand. Alex kept a firm grip on the guard’s wrist to control the knife,
forcing his other hand beneath the guard’s mask. The guard bit down on one of
his fingers, and Alex yelled as he drove the point of his knee into his
midsection. Alex scrambled, shifting weight so his hips pressed down on his
opponent’s stomach, wrestling for the knife with one hand while clawing at his
face with the other.
    There was a gunshot
right behind Alex, an ejected casing bouncing off the back of his head. The
guard cried out again and dropped his knife, instead striking wildly at Alex
about the head and arms. Alex used the opportunity to wrap both hands around his
throat, digging both thumbs into his windpipe.
    Alex was blinded by the
flare of another gunshot, this one so close that he felt the heated gases
passing by his cheek.
    It took Katya a few
moments of shaking him and saying his name before he finally realized the man
had stopped struggling. Alex groggily released his grip on the guard’s throat.
    She helped Alex up, his
legs trembling and unsteady beneath him. The guard had been shot in the
kneecap, with another rather neat bullet hole punched through the forehead of
his rubber gas mask. Katya holstered her pistol and scanned the darkness ahead
of them.
    “C’mon, Alex,” Katya
said, tugging him along by the fabric of his fatigues. “We need to keep
moving.”
    Another ten meters, and
Alex got his bearings back, enough to wish rather frantically that he had
refused to be a part of this operation. He wasn’t sure if he felt better that
Katya had killed the guard that he had meant to strangle. He wasn’t even
certain that he could blame his training for the impulse. While his time in the
Program had left him trained and primed for combat, Alex worried that his
tendency toward violence was rooted in some fundamental defect in his nature.
    He kept moving,
flash-blind eyes searching vainly for any sign of another ambush. Alex followed
Katya, running until his chest ached, only remembering his injured finger when
he tried to wipe the sweat from his eyes and instead smeared his face with
blood.
    They rounded a
protrusion in the cliff face wall, and the superimposed image of the facility
telepathically implanted in his vision was supplemented by the glow of halogen
lights, still some thirty meters distant. Katya halted them for a moment,
surveying the distance between hesitantly, before nodding and leading them
across the remaining distance at a pace just short of a flat-out sprint.
Whether by luck or design, they encountered no further alarms, and any
remaining guards were wise enough not to make their presence known.
    The sand in front of the
facility had been cleared of rocks, packed down, and then marked with
reflective paint to form a crude landing area for helicopters, so close to the
rock wall that Alex marveled at the bravery or foolishness a pilot must