Infestation Cubed. James Axler

on its heel, letting loose a strange keening wail as it wound back and sent its improvised pipe-ax whirling toward Domi. The albino girl jerked her head out of the path of the cartwheeling scythe. Its crudely sharpened tip ripped a long furrow through the side of her hood, cloth flapping away from the side of her face.

      Had it not been for her catlike reflexes, Domi knew that she’d have suffered at least a shattered cheekbone, and perhaps worse given the strength of the hunter’s throw. She adjusted her aim, only a few degrees of movement as she continued her charge to meet the enemy, and pulled the trigger again. At this range, there was no finesse with the shot. She was going for center of mass, the mutant’s broad chest making a relatively easy target to hit. With a squeeze, she pumped the second round in her Detonics, and the half-breed stopped in his tracks, eyes flinching and squeezed shut in pain.

      Domi had no illusions about the debate about the stopping power of handgun bullets. The end of a fight was the end of a fight, and she wasn’t about to turn her attention from an opponent until it was down and not struggling to kill her. With a kick, she launched herself through the air, whipping her knife around in a savage arc. The monstrous mutant lifted one of its brawny arms, blocking the swing of her knife, keeping its razor edge from its throat.

      One shot to the chest, and the thing still had the speed to block her neck slice, but luckily, Domi intended to bring down the six-foot reptilian with more than just a bullet and a blade. Even with the knife blocked, she slammed both of her knees into its chest, bowling it backward with her weight and momentum. She knew that she wasn’t big enough to win a fight with the half-breed with just her brawn and muscle, but her deadliness came from far more than even the remarkable strength of her steel-cable muscles.

      The creature let out a roar as it fell, and its chest seemed to sag a little under one knee as they sailed toward the ground. She’d managed to nail the ribs that her .45 bullet had gone through, and with her mass focused behind the joint, she’d caused the mutant even more damage. Broken ribs parted as they both hit the ground, shards of bone making its chest sag as she landed on top. The teardrop-eyed predator’s face was a mask of pain and fury, and though one arm wasn’t working thanks to skeletal trauma, it whipped its fist toward her face.

      Domi’s sun goggles went flying as she barely had a chance to roll with the punch, cheek and forehead grated by scaly knuckles that left her porcelain skin red and raw. The bright sun intruded, searing her eyes and distracting her for a moment. That gave the enemy a chance to shove her off and roll away from her. Domi tumbled and got her legs beneath her, springing to her feet in an instant. The half-breed was on its knees, one gnarl-fingered hand pulling a second of the bent pipe-axes from its belt, ready to continue this battle on more even footing.

      Domi snapped the .45 up and fired again, this time her aim striking dead center, her bullet tearing through the left side of its chest. She was going where she assumed the heart was, and from her battles with the Nephilim, she knew that they had the same vitals in the same spots as most other humanoids. Whatever she hit, the bullet’s impact jerked it back and into the ground, weapon tumbling from nerveless fingers. She lunged forward, stooping to make sure the thing was dead with her knife.

      Domi didn’t want to waste any more bullets, in case the second hunter was still in the mood to battle or her gunfire attracted more unwanted visitors. Even as the mutant’s lips peeled back in a snarl, talon-tipped fingers rising to grab her throat, the albino girl speared her knife through one of its black, teardrop-shaped eyes, plunging six inches of steel into its brain.

      One down, and the other had disappeared from sight, which meant some of these creatures had a glass jaw, or the wounded hunter had enough brains to launch an attack from stealth. Domi wasn’t going to wait around passively to determine what was going on. She locked her attention on the direction she’d last seen her opponent disappear to, and stepped back toward Lakesh.

      “Domi!” the scientist snapped in warning.

      Lakesh had spotted the movement just before the feral outlander could, but his cry served to focus her attention on it just a shade quicker. It exploded from behind a ramp formed by a collapsed wall, leaping with an ax in each hand. Its face was untouched, but bent in vengeful fury.

      Domi pulled the trigger, but even as she did, she knew her first shot missed the fast-moving, high-jumping attacker. The round went low, and it had gone high, but the hunter wasn’t the only one wielding a weapon in each hand. She shoved the point of her knife skyward, twisting to minimize her profile.

      Physics was not in Domi’s favor. She was a shade under five feet in height, and no matter how tightly packed her muscles were wrapped in her strong limbs, she was still only half the weight of her opponent, who was not only airborne but tackling her with a sharpened, improvised hatchet in each scale-knuckled grip. She’d managed to slip past the mutant’s flying ax swings, but the bulk of the pouncing hunter drove her into the ground, bowling her easily off her feet as both of them crashed to the sand.

      Domi heard the report of a handgun, but she knew it wasn’t her own. She’d kept her finger off the trigger to not waste ammunition or get it shattered in her enemy’s tackle. It had to be Lakesh, and as they rolled through the sand, she noticed him leap to his feet out of the corner of her eye. She’d have yelled for him to stay back, but she was in combat mode. Her throat was closed off; she couldn’t speak anything more than an animalistic grunt. Blood had splattered along her arm, but it wasn’t the ferocious spurt of a severed artery. Her enemy was twice wounded, and it took everything she had to twist herself out of a bone-snapping bear hug. Scales snagged on the fabric she wore, sharp nails blunted as they clawed for her flesh to hold her still.

      Domi raked the razor edge of her knife along those scales, parting the skin, but without leverage all she was doing was making the fight messier. Damp cloth matted to her skin, and a fist crashed down on her shoulder with numbing force. The .45 dropped from limp fingers as the entire arm went dead, but Domi wasn’t out of the fight yet. Though her hand was a clumsy lump of inert flesh for the moment, she managed to swing it up toward the mutant’s face. She’d willed unfeeling fingertips into hooked talons, and the ungainly hand raked across one of her opponent’s eyes.

      The half-breed let out a pained gargle, leaning away from Domi and giving her the room she’d needed before. With a twist, she had her knife in an ice-pick grip and she threw all of her weight behind its point as she aimed for the marauder’s lower abdomen. The blade had trouble penetrating between the opponent’s ribs as she couldn’t get her weight behind it, but with only muscle and scaled skin to resist, Domi sunk the knife in, her face sprayed with hot gore signaling the creature’s aorta was opened up. Clublike fists rained on the back of her head and shoulders, but the strength of those blows was lessened by shock and rapid blood loss.

      Domi wrenched the knife free, turning a six-inch stab into a wide, yawning gulley through skin, organ and muscle. With the blade loosed from the restraining flesh, she was able to back up, her enemy doing likewise.

      The mutant’s retreat wasn’t to regather itself, only to keep coils of intestines from pouring out into the Vegas sands. Lakesh fired his handgun again, and the mortally wounded beast was thrown to the ground.

      “Stop shooting!” Domi croaked through her adrenaline-tightened throat.

      Lakesh lowered the pistol, his hands trembling.

      Domi reached out and shoved the web between her thumb and index finger in the V formed by the hammer and the back of the pistol’s slide. That movement happened just in time to keep the hammer from striking the firing pin as a flinch on Lakesh’s part tripped the trigger. He glared down at the weapon as blood trickled from Domi’s alabaster skin around the metal.

      “You’re bleeding,” Lakesh said.

      “Let go,” Domi whispered.

      He did so, and she was able to cock the hammer back, thumb the weapon on safe, and tuck it into her belt. The damage wasn’t much, a minor U-shaped cut where the pistol’s hammer tried to scissor the skin on its way to make the gun fire. Still, Domi licked away the rivulets of her blood and wrapped a relatively clean cloth around it.

      Lakesh looked shell-shocked