Silence Read Free

revenge.
    And when the boot stepped around
Sheikoh’s corner, his body responded quicker than conscious
thought. He threw himself forward, drawing a black blade from his
boot in one, fluid motion. His vision stuttered. He was standing
over the gangster, looking down into a pair of shocked eyes. All
six inches of silent electroblade were lodged in the man's throat.
The dude was barely able to gurgle his surprise, before falling
onto the ground like a sack of flour.
    Sheikoh put a foot on the man's chest
and jerked the blade free. An icy chill settled deep inside his
bones. His eyes flinched away from the gangster’s face, and then
hardened. Innocence was a luxury. It had no place in the real
world. The real world was kill or be killed. Innocence was
something Sheikoh had lost his chance at a long time ago. And
staring into a pair of empty eyes wasn’t going to change
anything.
    Sheikoh suddenly realized that he was
holding a long metal tube.  He glanced down at a shot gun with
slight surprise. A vague memory of ripping something out of the
man’s hands glanced across his mind.
    His thoughtful frown twisted into a
grim smile. Things were starting to go his way. He might actually
have some real chance at surviving this. Sheikoh stepped into a
cloak of shadows with the lethal silence that’d earned him his
street name.
    “ Ready or not here I come…”
Sheikoh muttered beneath his breath.
    He faded into the night.
    Sheikoh glided through the dark, easily avoiding the
gangsters searching for him. He made mental notes of the factory’s
layout as he went. Finally, after a few long moments of quiet
footsteps later, he reached his destination. But he wasn’t the only
one there.
    A gangster leaned against a clunky
filing cabinet. Sheikoh could tell the thin, pale man was afraid,
even in the dark. He could almost taste it in the air.
    There was a faint tremor in the hand
holding a pistol. The gangster swung around, leveling it right at
his face. Sheikoh froze. He was going to die. His eyes
stung.
    He was going to die . He was really going
to die. Thirteen years, all the sweat and blood he’d paid, all of
his struggles and triumphs, all of it wiped out in a single second -
    A rat skittered out of the
darkness.
    Sheikoh held his breath.
    The gangster let his pistol fall to
his side.
    Still frozen, Sheikoh watched the
gangster shake his head, flash a smile of relief. Slowly,
carefully, Sheikoh let his pent up breath sigh between his lips.
The man was obviously off his guard. Sheikoh crept forward,
cradling his silent blade. His body was as cold and as sharp as
blacksteel. His movements were lithe, yet chained to their task. He
was eight feet away.
    Five feet away…
    Four and a half feet…
    Four…
    The man’s eyes focused on him.
Sheikoh’s heart stuttered. He reached out and grabbed the dude’s
leather coat, jerking the man off-balance, and the man dropped his
weapon. It clattered noisily against the hard, stone
ground
    The gangster was unarmed and staring
up at Sheikoh. His eyes were wide and fearful. Pleading. Sheikoh
hesitated.
    This dude wasn’t
fighting back .
    What was he supposed to do? Kill him
in cold blood-?
    A scream tore through the
gloom.
    Sheikoh’s hand blurred,
slicing through the man’s throat. Terror cut off with a weak
gurgle. The gangster fell back through the echo of his own scream.
A dead body dropped onto the stone floor with a dull thud!
    Sheikoh’s chest fell along with,
weighed down by the corpse.
    He knew he’d done the world
a favor, knew the
dude at his feet would’ve watched him die without a second thought.
Nonetheless he couldn’t banish the cold pit in his
heart.
    He’d lived the terror behind that last
expression. Too many times.  
    Footsteps pounded his way, jolting
Sheikoh back to reality. He shook the hair from his eyes and tried
to ignore his heart beating in his ears. His back was to a wall,
and he was boxed in without cover of any kind. If anything went
wrong, he was done