“Have to do better than that, sweets,” Gloria gloated.
Jak didn’t answer. He wasn’t going to waste energy and breath on idle words. Instead, he stood and waited. Every sinew and fiber itched to attack, but the cool hunter’s brain that had made him wait silently for days on his prey back in the Louisiana bayou, where he learned to listen to his instincts, told him to let her make the first move.
Gloria stood, swaying, the panga held loosely in her fist. She laughed, a harsh, bitter gasp of breath, her lips drawing back over her teeth in a leer and her eyes—for one brief moment—returning to the Gloria that he knew.
Before this had time to register in his mind as anything more than the briefest of impressions, she was on him again. With a yell that cleansed her mind and galvanized her spirit, she flew at him, the panga weaving a pattern before her that cleaved the air with the razor-honed blade in such a way that to get past the defense would be the surest way to lose an arm.
Jak’s answer was simple and efficient. The arc of the panga proscribed the air at a lowest point around the Gate queen’s knees. It would take her only a few steps to reach him—she had already taken the first when Jak took action.
The albino flung himself down and forward, so that he was close to the ground. The warm smell of the loam rose up strongly, almost as a stench, and hit the back of his throat as he grazed the ground. Rolling, he was under the defense of the blade, looking up as the panga grazed the air above his face. It began to dip as Gloria’s reaction clued in to Jak’s offensive maneuver, but not enough to literally cut him off. Jak was past the arc of defense and took the Gate queen at the calves, sweeping them out from under her so that she fell forward.
Unable to keep her balance, it was all that she could do to stop herself from falling onto the panga blade as she pitched forward. Her arm out to one side, she caught it awkwardly as she fell, the blade jamming in the soil and acting as a sudden barrier to the free movement of her arm, the bone snapping as it was driven in two directions at once. The sudden pain forced a high pitched scream from the woman, and her body jolted in the opposite direction, as though an electric shock had flowed through her.
Jak was on his feet and running toward her as she tried to recover from the pain and shock of the broken arm, which hung limply at her side. She looked up at him, the pain misting her gaze. Fumbling, she reached for the blaster that was bolstered on her hip. Jak knew that it was a Vortak Precision Pistol, capable of incredible accuracy because of its lack of recoil, and that he had little, if any, time in which to act. But the pain and shock had dulled her reactions, and she was too slow. With his last stride, Jak took a flying kick at the Gate queen, his heavy combat boot connecting with her skull at the temple. It was too high to snap her neck, but enough to fracture the bone and to render her unconscious. With a dull grunt, the light went out in the woman’s eyes, and they rolled back into her head as she slumped to the ground.
Jak was beside her before she hit, taking her head in one hand and pulling it back so that her throat was exposed. Like the rest of her, it was covered in a patchwork of sores. In his other hand, Jak had a leaf-bladed knife.
The blade pricked her skin, drawing a bead of blood. For a moment, Jak delayed his action. Usually, in such a situation, he would have no hesitation in cutting the throat of a foe and eradicating the threat. But this was Gloria…
He shook his head. Whoever this had once been, it was no longer the woman he had loved, and her only aim had been his chilling. He knew what he had to do.