He looked them over. “Omega? Maybe. I’ve heard they have something called ‘sweep teams’ for their dirty work. Why?” He eyed me. “You piss ’em off?”
“Yeah, I took the mickey out of them,” I said, leaning over the nearest dead body, one of the ones who had caught a few bullets to the head. I pulled the mask off of him and looked into a destroyed face. “I ran into an Omega sweep team once; they had tattoos on their chests.”
He shrugged as he nudged at the open collar of one of the bodies. “Don’t see an obvious one on this bloke. You could ask the last one who he’s with.” He pointed to the fellow whose gun had jammed on him when he tried to shoot me. I could see him, lying against the wall just outside the bedroom door, his black tactical gear a stark contrast against the dirty white walls of the flat. “I think I left him in a hurting way, but still lively.”
I walked through the door into the main room to find the door to the outside hall broken open, hanging off the hinges. I glanced back at Breandan, who shrugged. “Common sight in this building, I’m afraid. Neighbors won’t give it a second look.”
I turned back to the man lying unmoving against the wall, his head slumped over. I pulled his mask off and found his eyes closed, face slack. He’d had a pistol on his belt, but I could see Breandan had removed it when he’d knocked the man unconscious, and I pulled the tactical vest from him and slipped it over my own chest. Couldn’t be too careful when people were shooting at you, after all. I slapped him lightly in the face (lightly for me—it still rocked his head back) and his eyes flew open with a shock. “Hi,” I said in a sweet voice tempered by irritation. I was still holding the submachine gun that I’d pulled from the first man I’d killed, and with the tactical vest I’d taken from this one I had several fresh magazines. I kept the weapon handy, unafraid that he’d be able to wrest it away from me before I pulled the trigger on him. “Who are you with?”
His hair was dark and his face was pale, with a set of scars that looked as though someone had taken shards of glass and mashed them into his forehead above his right eye. “Who are you?” he asked me, staring back, awfully unconcerned for a man with a gun in his face.
I smiled and used the barrel of the gun to whip him hard in the scars. I broke the skin and a thin trickle of red made its way down his face as he looked back at me more in anger than shock or fear. “Let’s try this again,” I said calmly. “I ask the questions, you answer the questions. Very simple ground rules for our time together, and if you follow them, I won’t shoot you in the leg and then play around by sticking my finger in the bullet hole.”
There was a subtle hint of fear at that across those inscrutable features. “I can see you’ve been shot before,” I said. “Hurts, doesn’t it? Try to imagine me twisting your nerves, ripping at your wound, causing you so much pain …” I let my voice drip with sincerity. “Now … are you ready to talk?”
He sneered at me, chin jutting defiantly out, face like flint. “I’m not saying a word.”
I looked back to Breandan, who shrugged as though indifferent, and then I sighed. “Okay.” I tossed my gun backward at Breandan, who caught it, then I thrust my palms flat against the man’s cheeks. “Hold still. I wouldn’t want to have to hurt you as I’m ripping the memories out of your head.”
His eyes went wide and he started to struggle, but I ended that with a solid punch to the nose that broke it. He tried to slap at me with a hand, but I broke that too, at the wrist, and he cried out, but I ignored him. There was a building sense of pressure in my body as he began to jerk in my grasp. There was a sweet burning feeling at the tips of my fingers, like I’d stuck them in something that was making them tingle in all the right ways. I felt the man try to stand, but I leaned in and put my weight on him, straddling him, to keep him down. He screamed and I hammered him with an elbow to the midsection that knocked the wind out of him and left him gasping for air. All the while I kept my fingers on his face, locked on, my short nails digging into his skin as he tried to get a ragged breath in.
I could see the flash of memories, of things coming from his mind, facts and thoughts. I knew his name was Roger McClaren, that he was an American, a mercenary, hired by a group who he didn’t even know. I saw him in a room with the others that had come. There was a man giving him orders, a man who seemed vaguely familiar to me even though I couldn’t place him. He was tall, with a mop of hair that was out of control, and he stood before the mercenaries.