Seventeen: Tightening the Noose

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2052 Old Germany

The house was close, Mwamba could feel their target, his life-force was strong; it would not be an easy objective. The compound was set on about 40 acres of land on a hill at the edge of the city, giving the position a natural vantage point over the countryside around it. The air was thick and the darkness heavy, giving the Reckoners the advantage they needed to avoid detection as they crawled up the hillside. There was no light coming from the city save for the bursts of punctuated gunfire in the distance, and the steady drum of artillery miles away to the north, faintly lighting the horizon with the warm glow of their explosions.

The first gate had posed little challenge to the two executioners, as there was only a mere squad of six guns waiting for them there. The men were good, they knew what they were doing, well paid killers. On the other hand, the Reckoners killed for something other than money, and they would not be stopped so easily.

No one in the camp even knew that the guards at the gate were dead. Mwamba and Wayland had waited in the darkness outside the gate for nearly six hours listening to the chatter on the intercoms, and had discerned from all the banter exactly when the guards would be changed and when station check-ins were to occur. The guards that were dead were fresh on their shift, a seeming disadvantage since they would be awake and fresh for the fight. However, the shift change meant that there wouldn’t be a station check for at least thirty minutes to an hour, since the shift wouldn’t need to be checked on so soon after a change. They would be fresh and awake, why would they need to be checked on? It was an unwritten rule, one that the guards had adopted out of laziness rather than discipline. Nothing ever happened this far outside of town, the battle was way to the north and except for the very irregular attack on the perimeter, usually just peasant rioter rabble, there was little to fear that six armed men couldn’t easily take care of.

That unwritten rule meant two things, first that the Reckoners had at least thirty minutes before the dead men would be noticed, and second that thirty minutes was more than enough time for the Reckoners to kill every living person in the camp.

The blueprints of the fortified mansion were invoked from the back of Mwamba’s mind as he silently led the way between infantry stations. Each station, five in total, held a six man squad. The gate was the only station that was really on its toes, the station that mattered, since its distress signal was supposed to alert all other stations to trouble. It took almost no effort for the Reckoners to burst in to each station, kicking in the metal doors on the back of the bunker, always left unlocked due to idleness or disrepair, and to kill everyone inside within thirty seconds. Six minutes had passed since the guards at the gate were dispatched, and already the entire platoon was dead except for the three squads currently off rotation sleeping in the barracks, and the pair of guards sitting in the house manning the radio and internet uplink equipment. Of the three squads in the barracks, one was showering since they had just been relieved from gate duty, one was playing poker, one member of which was in the bathroom when Bludgeon snapped his neck, and the final was off rotation and sound asleep. Mwamba and Wayland had no problem murdering unarmed and even unconscious men, because they knew what kind of men these were, and the monster who they worked for.