The Inside of a Wound
Chapter eighteen
Hiro
The red emergency lights turned the cargo bay into the inside of a fresh wound.
Blood-colored light washed over corrugated metal walls.
Cargo straps swayed from the ceiling like hanging veins.
Long rows of steel crates stretched toward the cockpit, bolted to the floor as if even they feared being thrown into the sky.
Holding the kusarigama in his hand, Akiro stood at the center of it all. His remaining guards fanned around him in a tightening ring. They were the last wall of flesh between us, and they didn’t have guns in their hands.
And behind them. . .pressed into the shadows at the rear, our father crouched low. A gun trembled in each hand.
The Fox. . .for the first time in my life. . .looked like prey.
Tonight, we’ll finally kill you.
The plane climbed.
The floor tilted under my boots.
Wind screamed through the torn-open hatch behind us and dragged at my clothes, and on both sides of the cabin the engine housings rattled in their mounts. Those thin walls vibrated with every rotation of the props.
That stopped me cold.
Now I understood why Akiro’s remaining guards no longer had their guns out.
With these heights, air pressure, and impact of any gun, the walls would be paper. One bad angle, one round through the wrong panel, and we punctured a fuel line or shredded an engine, and then all of us rode this thing into the trees together.
Reo must have instantly come to the same thought.
"Watch your bullets!" Reo yelled over the wind. "We hit an engine, we all die up here!"
Kenji's masked head turned a fraction toward me. He understood at once. He flipped his silver guns in his grip. His thumb found the switch to shut them off, and then he holstered them. "We need this plane in the air until we land it.”
Aki nodded. "Blades.”
“Hands,” Yuki added.
“No bullet spray." I put my gun up.
Reo answered without looking back. "Understood."
The twins answered together. "Understood."
Then Akiro’s guards came for us.
The twins met them first, moving as one animal, the way they always did, two bodies running a single mind.
One went high.
One went low.
The matching kitsune masks gleamed wet red in the emergency light. The lead guard raised the blade in his hand and one twin slid under it and opened the man's thigh while the other twin rose behind him and drove a blade up beneath his jaw.
The guard folded.
The twins were already past him.
Kenji tore off his mask and dropped it on the ground.
Reo came in from the right and attacked two others. His blades did clean, economical work. He opened a throat. He took a wrist. The dim light worked for us and against them.
One panicked and took out a gun anyway. The muzzle flashes blinded. They were white bursts, yet the twins and Reo lived in the space between those flashes.
A guard stumbled backward into a crate.
Reo finished him against it.
The final man got his daggers up halfway. One twin pinned the wrist with a blade through it and the other took his throat, and the daggers clattered to the floor without firing.
Akiro’s guards were dead in seconds.
Good.
Then Akiro uncoiled the kusarigama. “Will you all be going after me or will you make it fair with just one?”
Kenji leaned his head to the side. “Make it fair?”
I laughed. “You’re more like our father than I’ve ever given you credit for.”
Akiro blinked. “Is that right?”
“You’re an absolute coward.”
“Hiro.” Akiro glared. “The funny brother.”
“And you were always just our father’s puppet.”
Fast, Akiro whipped the chain. The heavy ball cracked against a steel support beam beside my head. The sound rang through the whole space like a struck bell, and I felt it in my teeth.
I dropped under the backswing.
The sickle came next, a flat silver arc aimed at my eyes, and I gave ground and let it pass and felt the wind of it on my cheek. The chain caught a cargo strap on the recoil and Akiro snapped his wrist and tore it loose, and the ball came around again from a wall I hadn't been watching.
This was the trouble with him in a box.
In the open, a chain weapon needed room. In here, every surface gave it back from a new direction—floor, ceiling, crate, beam.
He bounced it off the metal and made the whole cabin into his hand. I couldn't trade range with that. I had to take it away from him.
“That’s enough of that.” I closed in on him.
Behind me Kenji's guns clicked.
What?
He had them out fast and aimed to the side. Fire bloomed orange at the muzzles, lighting the cabin in two-foot bursts. Thank God he didn’t use bullets.
Men I hadn't seen rose out of the darkness from behind crates, and rushed us.
Smart. You hid some, but we’re too strong, Akiro.
Kenji set them on fire.
"There’s more of them!" Reo called out.
I looked over my shoulder.
Seven rushed out of the cockpit.
Not bad planning, Akiro, but still. . .too much has happened for us to die here.
We all battled them.
I caught a man's wrist as he swung a knife. I broke his elbow over my forearm and drove my palm up into his nose and felt it give.
The plane lurched and threw both of us against a crate and I used the wall to fold him into his death. Once done, I left him on the floor.
I checked to make sure Kenji was alive. The twins worked beside him in the strobing dark, all sweeping legs, trapping arms, and short brutal elbows. Most of all, they protected my brother like they always did.
I headed for Akiro.
“Not so fast, brother.” Akiro swung at me.
I let the ball pass, lunged inside the chain's reach, and got my hand on it. “This is nice. Can I have it?”
“No!” Akiro pulled.
I did too. “Are you sure?”
For one breath we were locked, the chain singing taut between us with his eyes wide above the steel.
Then Kenji came out of Akiro’s blind side. Kenji's hand closed on the kusarigama's shaft, and with one savage pull he ripped it from Akiro's grip.
“Ah!” Akiro's hands flew open. All confidence drained out of his face like water sputtering out of cracked glass.
Now you feel it.
“I’ve got him.” Kenji grinned. “Go check on the Fox, Hiro. Be a good son and make sure our father is doing okay.”
“I would love to.” I headed off.
Two men stood between me and the Fox.
I looked at them and shook my head.
“Are you sure you want to die for him?” I quirked my brows. “Seriously? He shits in a diaper. There are better men to die for.”
One charged.
I took the lead man's arm at the shoulder and turned him into a shield right as the second man's knife buried in his own partner's back, killing him fast.
Then, I had the other guy’s knife hand. I broke it and put the second man down on the metal with my elbow across his temple.
The Fox raised a gun and fired at me.
Fuck!
I fell to the ground.
The round went wide and punched clean through the wall, and a small hole opened beside my head with a shriek of wind that hadn't existed a second before.
“Check on me?!” He fired again.
Sparks burst off a crate.
A third shot came close to me. I dodged it, yet someone gasped. For a second, I swore it was a twin and hoped I was wrong.
“How about I check on you?!” His thin arms shook so badly the barrel painted circles in the air.
And I saw the truth of all of this.
The Fox was no longer the bully of my childhood who I hoped to impress. The monster to my mother. The dictator of Japan.
Now the Fox was old. He was sick. His skin had gone the gray of a man the body had already started leaving, and his jaw trembled, and he kept pulling the trigger and kept missing.
“This is depressing.” I finally got up and walked toward him through every miss.
The Fox’s guns clicked empty. He had the nerve to fucking gasp in distress. He raised the other gun and aimed it at me.
Akiro yelled, “Father, be careful!”
I checked that way.
Kenji had Akiro's own weapon in his hands now, and he swung the heavy ball down into the Fox's gun arm—into our father—and the bone cracked wet and loud, and one gun dropped to the floor.
Blood sprayed black across the metal floor.
The Fox screamed.
And in the same motion Kenji whipped the ball back around and slung it into Akiro's face.
Oh shit.
Akiro's head crashed into the wall.
I blinked.
The skull and the steel together opened a small split in the panel, and the wind tore in through the new seam, and Akiro slid down the dented metal leaving a long dark smear, and stayed down at the bottom of it.
His chest did not rise.
His eyes remained open and blank.
The cabin went quiet of any new enemies.
Kenji let the kusarigama fall and rounded on the cockpit door. "Reo! Have the fucking pilot turn this around. We're landing it on the island."
I glanced to the side and saw we were already over the ocean.
Holding his side, Reo rushed off, shouldering past the crates toward the front of the plane. "On it."
The floor leveled by a degree. The engines held. We were still climbing, still flying, still bleeding wind from two new holes, but the plane was finally ours.
And then there were only the three of us at the back of the massive cabin.
Me. My brother. Our father.