by W. J. May
Seems there had been a second alarm after all.
“What do we do?” he asked Tristan anxiously, glancing up to where the door used to be. It was a good thing, actually, that the warning lights had come on. Otherwise they would have been left stranded in the dark.
Tristan took a deep breath and forced himself to be calm as he considered their options. For a split second, it was easy to see why he had been the PC’s top recruit. Despite the chaos going on around them, he was steady, collected, and rational.
A year’s worth of training kicked into gear as he came up with the obvious solution. Even though it was the last solution in the world either one of them wanted to hear.
“We split up,” he said quickly. “You find the device, I’ll find McAllister.”
Simon nodded automatically, before a sudden impulse inside him made him stop. One that he didn’t quite recognize, but was still a huge part of him either way.
“Other way around,” he heard himself saying. “You get the device, I’ll get McAllister.”
Tristan’s eyes met his for a second in the roving lights before he nodded quickly.
“Fine.” He glanced down at the ground as if he could see the blueprints right there in the dirt. “We’ll just follow this tunnel until it curves to the right. That should take us right up to—”
“Tristan,” Simon cut him off, staring out into the shadows.
His friend looked up in horror as no fewer than thirty men came sprinting their way.
Go in the middle of the night, they said. Minimalize the casualties, they said. There’s only one alarm system, they said. Safety is our number one priority.
The men were already closer now. Close enough that Simon could see the beads of sweat on their faces as they ran towards them in the darkness.
Now what?
Tristan stared down the tunnel for a split second, his face flashing red in the lights, before his voice lowered into the most serious sound Simon had ever heard.
“Simon...Run!”
IT WAS SPRINTING AS Simon had never run before. Fighting as Simon had never fought before.
In what most people would have seen as a suicide attempt, he and Tristan streaked towards the men racing them down. There was a split second where he almost felt his feet leave the ground.
He followed Tristan’s lead and started sprinting along the wall of the tunnel, staying above the crowd as long as he could, before, like his friend, he was eventually dragged down.
“Shit!” He hit the ground with a sharp cry, and before he knew what was happening a dozen different pairs of boots were bashing into his ribs.
It happened so fast. So much faster than he would have ever thought. Over the last few months, he had spent a ridiculous amount of time wondering what it would be like during his first actual fight. His mind had raced with a million hypotheticals. A million different possibilities. None of them included the option that he would be crushed beneath the weight of an angry mob before he was able to lift a finger.
A gasp of pain escaped his lips as something inside his chest snapped. He tried to lift his hands to protect himself, but his arms were just as quickly kicked away.
So this is it, then. This is how it all ends. Killed by a horde of glorified security guards in a dark tunnel where no one will ever remember me. No one will ever know my name.
Simon bowed his head to shield himself from the worst of it, and tried to think of Beth as he felt different parts of his body begin to tear.
But then, just as a wave of heavy darkness was threatening to cover his eyes, he heard a strange noise coming from the other side of the tunnel. The sound of fist on fist. The sound of multiple men, in multiple states of disarray, cursing in German as they crashed against the walls.
“GET UP, SIMON!” Tristan shouted, spinning through the air so fast the string of words almost blurred into one. “GET UP!”
Simon lifted his head an inch off the ground to try to see his friend. Except he couldn’t. He could only see the growing stack of bodies piling up at his feet.
You’ve been trained for a reason, Simon. You’ve been trained to fight. GET UP AND FIGHT!
Simon’s eyes focused just in time to see the heel of a boot flying at his face. The kick that was meant to finish him once and for all.
Only it never got there.
He grabbed it instead.
For a second, the rest of the kicking stopped. How had he moved so fast? The questions came out hushed and quick in German. What exactly had just happened?
Simon tuned out the frightened exclamations as a grin crept up the side of this face.
Maybe his trip to Munich would be a pleasure after all...
There was a savage cry as Simon leapt to his feet.
The crowd of men around him fell back a step, but instead of releasing the leg he was holding onto, he swung the man around like battering ram, using him to knock a dozen of his fellows to the ground. They crumbled like dominoes, too stunned and hurt to move as Simon turned his attention to the rest of them.
It wasn’t going to be so easy to take them all down, he quickly realized. He had lucked into his little maneuver through shock value alone. These men had training as well. And now that he’d taken out of quarter of their battalion using one of their own, they were really pissed.
A fist caught him in the back of the head. Followed by another.
Before there could be a third he whirled around in a flying kick, sending his two attackers flying across the tunnel. Another man was felled by a blow to the chest. Simon grabbed another by the arm and relished every second as he felt the bones snap and shatter beneath his grasp. The accompanying scream was music to his ears, and simultaneously opened his eyes to a concept he had never really understood until just then.
Fear was a powerful motivating factor. The more the men screamed, the more the other men wanted to run away.
And Simon liked making them scream...
He bowed his head with a wicked smile and changed his tactics—fighting dirty. Doing things he would never have been able to do in the Oratory. Things that Jason would never have allowed.
Nails in the eyes. Kicks to the throat. Strategic hits to the spine delivered with enough force to shatter and paralyze the bones beneath them.
It was like a high.
A high he’d never known was possible. The more the bodies piled up around him, the more he wanted to fight. The more he wished there were more bodies to take their place. To let Simon practice. To let him home in on this feeling until he realized exactly what it was.
Then, a single sound cut through his dark reverie. A scream that was not meant to be with the others. He lifted his head in alarm to see Tristan drop to his knees, clutching the side of his neck as what looked like white lava dripped from his skin.
A flash of the same iridescent light streaked past Simon’s face the next instant, missing him by inches. His eyes shot to the other end of the hall, where he saw four or five new people running towards them. The second, more potent wave. The ones with ink.
“Tris!” Simon shouted.
“I’m okay,” Tristan shouted back. “I’m—”
A swift kick in the jaw cut him off, but he was back on his feet and retaliating before Simon could jump in to help—holding the offender in front of him like a shield as another wave of white-hot lava went shooting his way.
Simon watched in fascination as the faceless guard got it right in the chest, writhing around in screaming pain as Tristan ducked carefully behind.
Yes, it was fascinating. The way they screamed. The things that could make them scream.
“Simon!” Tristan’s voice was rough as sandpaper as he gripped the side of his neck. “The pavilion... you remember?”
Simon’s mind raced back as he nodded with a smile. It had been a cold day in December when Jason took the two of them out to the freezing pavilion on the Guilder lawn. It was there that he had shown them a special technique. One he promised would one day prove useful
.
Looks like today’s that day.
Without a second thought, Simon grabbed a human shield of his own and raced towards the person firing all the lava. When he got closer, he was surprised to see it was a girl. No matter. Girls could scream like all the rest. There was a rush of air behind him as Tristan closed in close behind.
“On three?” Simon gasped, panting with the strain of holding up the melting body.
Tristan sprinted breathlessly behind him. “Yeah.”
“One—”
“THREE!”
In a dazzling display of acrobatics, Tristan launched himself into the air above the lava girl.
Her face twisted up in horror, as her dilemma was suddenly clear. Now there were two targets. In the time it would take to eliminate one, she would fall victim to the other. After a split second of deliberation, she seemed to decide that Tristan was the greater threat.
It was exactly what Simon was hoping she’d do.
As she lifted her hands to follow his arc—molten fire still spewing from them—Simon threw the man he was holding with all his might. The unfortunate corpse sailed strategically into the air between them, saving Tristan from the blast while Simon launched himself upon the girl.
He needn’t have bothered. By the time Tristan had landed on the other side to begin battling the others, the melting body had fallen directly upon her—scalding her with her own fire. She threw back her head with a strangled cry, tears streaming down the sides of her face as Simon pushed away the body and landed on top of her instead.
This bitch had burned his friend. She would pay for that now.
In hindsight, Simon realized it was a good thing Tristan couldn’t see what he was doing.
With a burst of cruel satisfaction the likes of which he had never felt before, he picked up the corpse’s mangled jacket, still covered in pools of the lava, and pressed it slowly against her face. She tried to scream again, but he shoved the cloth into her mouth.
She was dying now. And it wasn’t a good way to go.
The blood vessels broke in her eyes, flooding them with bright crimson that teared over as it fell down her cheeks. Her body, which had at first been shaking, had stilled with only the occasional twitch. As she drew in a shattered breath, Simon leaned over her and smiled.
“It’s a shame,” he murmured, almost to himself, “to waste ink like that.”
Wouldn’t it be something to see how it would mix with ink as powerful as my own...?
He was tempted to take it. So tempted that he glanced down to see if there was enough skin still left on her arms that he could wrap his fingers around.
It was a mistake.
The second he looked away, her hand flew up through the air, clapping upon the back of his head as her fingers streamed with liquid fire. Simon leapt into the air and fell back, screaming as he stumbled into the far wall. A torrent of blood poured down the back of his shirt, but by the time he looked back at the girl she had already died.
“Simon?!” Tristan tore his eyes away from the fight long enough to check on his friend. “Are you okay?!” A man took advantage of his distraction to punch him in the stomach, but he spun around easily and snapped the guy’s arm.
Simon panted heavily as he bowed his head to his knees. It was a good thing that his partner had such impossible skill, because Tristan would have to take over for a second. In answer to his question, Simon honestly wasn’t sure.
“Let’s get,” he choked off with a tortured cough, “let’s get out of here.”
Tristan stabbed the final man through the neck with the same clipper he had used to cut the alarm wire, and hurried to where Simon was slumped against the wall.
“Sure, I can take you back,” he said quickly, trying his best to assess the wound.
As for himself, there didn’t seem to be too much damage except for the gristly gash on his neck. A lot of bruising, and maybe a hairline fracture or two, but it could have been much worse.
“I can run you back to the studio and call for help,” he said again. “Come back here and finish this myself while you wait for the doctor.”
Simon jerked his head painfully back and forth as a lock of his melted hair fell to the ground. “That’s not what I meant. Not that we should go—that we should get going. We don’t know how many more of them might be coming and we’re wasting time.”
“Simon...” Tristan said under his breath. Judging by the look on his face, Simon didn’t look so good. But they had been trained to trust each other. Appearances be damned. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Simon pushed to his feet with a groan, stepping carefully over the body of the fallen girl as the two of them made their way out of the tunnel. It was slower going than before. While they didn’t have to deal with security, Tristan seemed to be more injured than Simon originally thought, and Simon felt as though there was a good chance his head was melting off.
When they got to the fork in the tunnel, Tristan pulled them to a stop.
“This is it.”
The point at which they were supposed to turn. The point at which they were supposed to part ways, each with a different specific mission.
Simon glanced to the left and nodded bravely. “Let’s do it.” He started off on his own, but Tristan’s hand flashed out and yanked him to a painful stop.
For a second, he couldn’t say anything. He just stared up at Simon with a look of extreme worry shadowing his bruised face.
“Are you sure?” he asked again. “I don’t want to come back and find you lying face-first in the tunnel. That’s an awfully big house to live in all by myself.”
A genuine smile flickered across Simon’s face, followed by a stab of horrific guilt as he thought back to the girl. “I’ll be fine. Scout’s honor. I’ll meet you back here as soon as I can.”
“You’re absolutely—”
“We’re still going to get those curtains.”
Tristan’s lips curved up into a bloody grin and he nodded once. “Alright. See you soon.”
“See you soon.”
Without another word, the two of them headed off in separate directions—Simon staring warily ahead as their paths began to diverge.
Chapter 13
THERE’S NOTHING SCARIER than prowling around in the dark, searching for a man who doesn’t want to be found. It doesn’t help when every step is punctuated by the steady sound of blood and lava dripping off of your head.
Simon moved slowly, carefully. Stopping every few seconds to make sure that there was nothing he had missed, and that he wasn’t being followed. It was a laborious process, and after about ten minutes he had almost given up hope. But when the tunnel he was standing in widened suddenly into a much larger room, he grew a new round of confidence.
The smell of chemicals saturated the air, and the hum of a dozen pieces of machinery buzzed in Simon’s ears. Fluorescent lighting was strapped back and forth across the rafters, and Simon’s eyes took a silent moment to adjust. Before they could focus, he heard it.
The click of a gun.
He turned around slowly, lips curling up into a slow smile as he found himself standing face to face with the very man he had been searching for.
“Mr. McAllister, I presume?”
The man’s hand was shaking. Since he was wearing his lab coat with the sleeves rolled up, it was very easy to see that, as fate would have it, he actually wasn’t inked after all. A fact that made Simon smile even more.
The smile threw him, but McAllister tried to rally. “It’s Doctor McAllister to you.”
Simon chuckled. “Forgive me, Doctor. My mistake.” He took a step forward, and the gun flashed in the air between them. He paused, but only for a moment before taking a comfortable seat on one of the tall stools beside the work station.
The gun did not scare him. He paid attention to it, sure. There wasn’t a single second that he didn’t have his eye on it.
But scare him, it did not.
To s
tart, there was a chance he might be faster than the bullet. Not fast enough to escape the thing entirely, only Jason could do that, but fast enough to dodge so it wouldn’t hit anything vital. He had never done it himself. But he had seen Tristan do it once. And if Tristan could technically do it with his ink, then there was no reason Simon wouldn’t be able to do it also. The absurd levels of adrenaline coursing through his body could only help.
There was also the fact that Simon didn’t believe, not for one second, that this man, this self-proclaimed doctor, would have it in him to shoot a child. There was a picture on his desk up against the far wall. A picture of a boy who could be no older than Simon. A parent couldn’t shoot a kid the same age as their own. Not staring into those same young eyes. His hand was clearly shaking.
“What do you want?” McAllister asked.
It was a throwaway question. One meant only to buy time as he waited for his guards to come flying in to his rescue. Guards who, he had no idea, were currently piled in pieces on the floor.
“I want to talk to you,” Simon continued quietly. “About your work.”
Simply talking about his work was clearly not the answer the good doctor had expected him to say. Especially not given all the trouble Simon had taken to break in there. The hand holding the gun trembled some more, and his eyes flickered to a file sitting on his desk.
Simon followed his gaze deliberately, getting up with a casual smile. “May I?”
McAllister froze, then clearly decided this was not a fight he could win. The kid was only asking to look, after all, and given the fact that he was still up and talking, even with what looked like lava dripping from his hair, he was clearly not leaving until he got what he wanted.
He nodded curtly, and Simon picked the file off the desk. It was brief. More summaries than details. But the breakthroughs he had already made were astounding.
“This is incredible,” Simon murmured, thumbing through, apparently oblivious to the gun still pointed at his head. At a glance, he looked through case study after case study, each subject falling victim to the same combination of visual and auditory control. “And you’re already seeing these kinds of results?”