When the alarm started sounding, Magus knew something had gone seriously off the rails. Then a breathless sec man burst into his office suite and gave him the terrible news.
“Cawdor isn’t dead,” the man said between gasps for air. “He and the others shot the hell out of us, and they’re coming this way!”
Magus knew what the one-eyed man was capable of when free to operate in an open field. With him and his cohorts running loose in the redoubt, anything could happen. All of his effort in revising the timeline, reliving the past, all his glorious plans for a return of status and respect had just gone out the window. There was only one safe option left: retreat. Another ignominious retreat. But losses had to be cut. Defeats swallowed. Wounds licked.
“Kill him!” Magus said, pointing a steely finger of doom at the bearer of bad tidings.
Such things were expected of him.
The enforcer seized the man by the neck and stabbed him in the chest with a talon. One slice ripped him open from sternum to pelvis. The creature then proceeded to yard out the contents of his torso while he squealed and thrashed.
McCreedy gave Magus a desperate look.
“No, you will live a bit longer,” Magus said. “I need you to drive me. Toss him the keys. Let him free his legs.”
McCreedy caught the keys the enforcer threw at him. He quickly unlocked the manacles around his ankles and got to his feet.
“Carry me!” Magus shouted at the enforcer.
Like a small child, he was scooped up, draped across the creature’s brawny arms and rushed out of the room to the beat of its heavy feet. The up-and-down motion made his head loll wildly. Objects in his field of vision lurched and yawed.
There were obvious benefits in living one’s life twice. This time he had had the foresight to plant another set of gassed-up escape vehicles in the next arroyo.
He kicked his legs at the knees to make the enforcer run faster.