by Matt Rogers
The gun.
His brain switched over to autopilot.
Get the goddamn gun, and move.
He reached down and snatched at the Kalashnikov, wrapping one hand around the stock and one hand around the grip. He wrenched it off the ground. Crimson blood ran slick between his fingers and the cold steel of the weapon, and the rifle slipped from his grasp. It clattered back to the dust.
One second ticked by.
Veins straining in his forehead, Slater made another wild grab for the rifle. Pain tore through both his hands, blood flowing from the pair of wounds. Neither bullet had lodged in his hand, but the skin had been shredded all the same. Grimacing, he wrenched the AK-15 off the ground.
It slipped again.
Another second ticked by.
You don’t have time.
You can’t grip anything.
You need to move.
The primal, instinctual part of his brain that was permanently set to fight-or-flight begged him to stay where he was. It pleaded with his common sense, demanding that he was too injured to continue. Any kind of pursuit he could make would only result in his own demise. There was no point. He was already woozy from blood loss, and he had no idea how badly the bullet had cut his hip. For all he knew, he could only have seconds of consciousness left.
So he stayed on one knee for the briefest of moments in time. He looked around, spotting the two separate families on either side of the giant space. Both mothers were cradling their children against their chests, protecting them from any further harm.
And the last remaining thug had just run off with the final pair.
Slater clenched his teeth. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t stay put. It went against everything he stood for, everything he’d worked toward over the course of his career.
He had to move.
Even if it resulted in his own death.
He made one last snatch for the gun, and again it slipped — this time he barely got his fingers around the Kalashnikov before crippling agony arced up his wrist and made him involuntarily let go of the rifle.
Useless.
He couldn’t grip anything.
Go.
Unarmed, reeling from the chaos, he took off at a flat out sprint across the space, surging after the trio that had fled the room seconds earlier. He couldn’t quite fathom how he was even standing, but he somehow managed. He was a twenty-three year old athlete in his prime, and the big Eastern European brute would be burdened by the two resisting hostages he was dragging along with him.
That was enough to convince Slater that he had a chance of catching them.
But then what?
The guy had a rifle, and Slater had nothing. He couldn’t even use his hands.
Cross that bridge when you come to it.
So he pushed himself faster. He raced back out into the corridor and turned left, pumping his arms and legs like pistons. Blood dripped off his hands but he ignored it. He covered distance as fast as his legs would allow, battling down the natural urge to stop and tend to his injuries. He didn’t have time to do anything but put one foot in front of the other and barrel toward his target.
It was the only way he’d ever done things.
If he came across the trio and slowed down, he would die. He had nothing to defend himself with except his own body, and he couldn’t use that unless he closed the gap between himself and the last thug in record time. He wouldn’t get lucky twice — if the thug had a beat on him with the Kalashnikov, it would only take one squeeze of the trigger in such a confined space to finish Slater off.
He had to hope for a miracle.
He had to hope the thug would be distracted.
He reached the entrance to the giant stairwell, and even from a distance he could see the vast vertical tunnel lay shrouded in shadow. It would be close to four in the morning, if Slater’s calculations were accurate, and the night pressed down on everything. It helped him forget what kind of state he was in — it was hard to notice the blood in the darkness.
Slater heard motion — the sounds of struggle — coming through the open doorway to the stairwell. He didn’t think twice.
He hurried straight through.
25
Slater sprinted out onto the same concrete platform as before, facing the same precipitous drop that speared eight storeys down through the centre of the stairwell, culminating at the ground floor. With no central partition to split up the stairs, the descent to the ground floor consisted of the concrete spiral arcing around the perimeter walls, heading down into the darkness.
Directly ahead, the trio were ready to descend.
Slater could barely make out their silhouettes in the lowlight. Above his head, the night sky hung overbearing and grim, providing the slightest natural illumination. He’d caught the thug at the final hurdle — the man was wrestling with the woman and the child, who were doing everything they could feasibly manage to break free. He had them both by the arms, hurrying them toward the first flight of stairs, dangerously close to the unobstructed edge of the eighth storey platform.
If they struggled too hard, either of the hostages might take a step too far to the right and plummet to their deaths. There was threadbare scaffolding and steel supports intersecting across the central drop, but it wouldn’t be enough to break their falls.
If they did manage to crash to a halt amidst one of the erected wooden platforms, it would result in such a shocking list of injuries that death would be inevitable.
Slater slowed his pace.
He had to.
He couldn’t immediately work out which of the silhouettes was the thug. The child was immediately recognisable as a young girl, tiny in comparison to the other two, but even though the woman and the giant gangster were vastly different sizes, it was still hard to fathom in the dark. It took a vital half-second to deduce who the enemy was — the last thing Slater wanted to do was target the wrong outline.
He got his target sorted, and broke into an all-out sprint.
There was less than ten feet between them.
Then everything changed.
Almost in slow motion, Slater spotted the thug’s head twist as the man looked over his shoulder. In the darkness the pair locked eyes as best they could, and Slater saw recognition spread across the man’s face.
He knew Slater was coming for him.
The dynamic shifted.
The guy immediately stopped trying to wrestle with the hostages. Slater could almost tell what he was thinking. This mysterious dark-skinned intruder had mown through their entire force, decimating them with apparent ease. The thug didn’t know how hurt Slater was.
He must have imagined his own time was up, his death inevitable at the hands of this phenom.
But one thing was certain. Slater was desperate to protect the hostages.
And that was the one minuscule victory the thug could seize before he died.
He could strip Slater of his success. He could tear the one thing away from him that he valued above anything else.
The protection of the woman and her child.
Slater sensed all of this in a heartbeat, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. He was already sprinting full pelt toward the trio — there was no way to increase his pace, nothing that shouting a warning would achieve. He saw the thug reach down and gather up the Kalashnikov AK-15 swinging from the strap on his hip, but instead of trying to point it in Slater’s direction he sent the barrel scything upward to aim at the pair of hostages.
Just like that, everything became clear.
Slater knew what he needed to do.
He couldn’t slow down. If he had any hope of succeeding at the last second, he would need to sprint directly into the side of the thug, which would send both of them tumbling off the side of the enormous stairwell with uncontrollable momentum. He would need to carry them both into the abyss, falling eight storeys through a mountain of scaffolding to their deaths.
Did he have it in him to sacrifice himself, right here
and right now?
Could he do that?
It didn’t matter.
Even turning his mind to the question made him hesitate, so imperceptible and unnoticeable that no-one would have ever known that he slowed down, even if they’d been staring directly at him.
But he knew.
Deep in his mind, he knew that he slowed.
He was going to commit. He told himself that. He accepted the fact that he would die for this woman and this child that he’d never met. He knew he had that capacity, and he barrelled straight onward.
But that split second of questioning, that tiny shred of time in which he had to ponder whether he could…
…that was all it took.
The thug pulled the trigger of the Kalashnikov before Slater could reach him. He was only a couple of feet away by that point, but the muzzle flare burst into life all the same, and the bullet left the barrel all the same, and the frail woman no older than thirty-five crumpled all the same.
Lifeless.
Unmoving.
Dead.
Slater’s insides melted. Crippling anguish rolled through him, even as he continued his feverish pace toward the thug.
Now they were a foot apart.
Half a foot.
The thug swung the aim of the Kalashnikov around to aim at the young girl, the barrel slicing through the air to line up with her head.
She screamed, a piercing shrill that cut through the night and echoed down the stairwell.
No.
Slater knew what he had to do.
This time, he didn’t slow down for a millisecond.
He ran into the side of the thug at close to the speed of an Olympic sprinter, crash-tackling the guy with enough bone-crushing momentum to send them both sprawling off their feet, carried through the air and over the edge of the precipice. The impact rattled Slater’s brain inside his skull and he gave thanks to the semi-conscious state he slumped into as he used his own body as a battering ram.
Together, they plunged into the darkness.
And the gun hadn’t gone off a second time.
26
For what seemed like forever, Slater felt weightless. His stomach sunk into his feet, overriding all the superficial pain racing through him. He lost touch with the thug and the bulky Eastern European man spiralled away in the darkness, crashing into a mass of scaffolding with enough of a sickening squelch for Slater to recognise the guy as unquestionably dead.
Then there was just his own fate to worry about.
He didn’t imagine he would have to worry for much longer.
Half a second later he smashed into a wooden platform with enough force to splinter it into two massive pieces. He tore straight through, letting out an unbridled yell as he sensed the bone in his forearm snap cleanly in two. He fell another few feet and bounced off a metal pipe, knocked off-course into another mess of plastic sheeting and wooden planks. This time he crunched through enough material to slow him considerably, and when he finally came to a halt amidst the devastation it took him a few beats to realise he was alive.
Probably not for long.
He’d never experienced pain quite like this. Battlefield injuries could be gruesome, but they seldom carried the intensity of what he was feeling right now. A bullet wound resulting in massive blood loss could cause unconsciousness pretty fast, but this was a different kind of injury. Blunt force trauma had been applied to every square inch of his body, and he realised the extent of his wounds when he tried to shift his weight around in the pile of wood and rubble and found himself helpless.
He couldn’t move.
The headache that surged into existence drilled into his eyeballs, like a blowtorch applied to his brain. He could barely stomach the agony, and when his vision transitioned into murky darkness he almost welcomed it. Anything would be a relief compared to the beating his body had taken from the fall. Then again, the fact that was he alive to feel this pain was a pleasant surprise. He’d been ready to die when he hurled himself off the edge of the eighth floor, and that knowledge would take some time to process when he regained his health.
The darkness was absolute, and Slater could see nothing. He didn’t even know where he’d come to rest — it couldn’t have been much lower than the sixth floor, considering a longer fall would almost certainly have killed him. He lay motionless, surrounded by destruction, and waited for something, anything, to happen.
At some point he blacked out. Amidst the cocktail of pain wracking his body and the darkened surroundings on all sides, it was hard to tell when unconsciousness took hold. Everything was a seething blur of swirling night. His awareness became similar to an old projector switching between slides — every now and then something happened to seize his attention. A flash of light. A quiet voice. Some kind of commotion nearby. None of it meant anything. If there were any members of the Eastern European gang left in the construction site, they would dispose of him fairly effortlessly. He couldn’t move.
Although getting him out of the scaffolding would prove cumbersome.
He kept lying there, and hurting, and exhaling laboured breaths. He couldn’t do anything else. Hours seemed to pass, but it might have been minutes.
When the broken scaffolding around him started to move, and the whir of some kind of heavy machinery started up close by, he could barely muster the energy to turn his head. It seemed as if he’d aged ten years, but that didn’t make any sense considering it was still dark.
A blinding light shone in his face, and the wooden planks underneath him shifted in place — the entire framework of scaffolding he was resting on had been adjusted. More machinery whined, and a calm voice asked him if he was okay.
He wasn’t sure where the words came from.
He couldn’t see what lay inches in front of his face.
He nodded once, and then blacked out again.
Sinking to a darker place.
Before he fully gave himself over to the darkness, he played back the mental image of the woman’s body crumpling on the eighth floor. He thought of the way her shoulders had slumped, and her knees had given out, and all the life had been sapped from her in an inconceivably short amount of time.
He would never forget it.
27
Thirty days later…
Lars Crawford didn’t particularly like Chicago all that much.
He kept a purposeful stride through the downtown district, never losing sight of the destination he had in mind. Every now and then he locked eyes with the odd passerby, and he never failed to exchange a polite nod of acknowledgement with them. By all accounts he was a quiet, unassuming man. He wondered if anyone would guess that during work hours — which seemed to consist of every waking moment these days — he ran one of the most secretive government divisions the United States military had ever seen.
At five-foot-nine, with a skinny unathletic frame and a weak jawline, he didn’t have much in common with most of the black operations soldiers he handled on a day to day basis. By necessity, they were often large, unimaginably powerful men with the physical capabilities to effectively carry out the instructions delivered to them by their own brilliant minds.
Prodigies, all things considered.
Lars certainly labelled Will Slater a prodigy.
In the aftermath of the destruction, it had been concluded that Slater had killed thirteen men — Ray D’Agostino included — on that single night in Chicago. Of course, none of this had been officially determined by any authorities — Black Force had their own internal investigation process, something of a requirement when they controlled operatives who could do whatever the hell they wanted in the field. They needed to hold their men accountable for their actions, and after a turbulent two weeks of consideration, Lars and his superiors had come to the conclusion that Will Slater had done incredible work.
An unsavoury collection of Dagestani criminals had been massacred, and the police and media had chalked it up to a horrific gang war. No-one had ever suspected
it had been the work of a single individual.
An individual who Lars had flown from Washington to meet.
He’d already been given the address. He found the rusting metal door wedged between a delicatessen and a barber, sporting a tiny silver plaque with the inscription LIONEL’S BOXING GYM carved in uneven letters. Not his first choice for their first in-person meeting since the debacle had unfolded, but Slater was the one calling the shots.
He could afford to now, after everything he’d done.
Lars and his colleagues all understood the intrinsic value they had in an operative like Will Slater.
Even though he was young, he was walking in the footsteps of the warrior responsible for the division’s creation.
For the first time ever, Lars found himself thinking, Jason King’s got competition.
He descended a narrow set of concrete stairs, battling a small wave of claustrophobia. The ceiling hovered only a few inches above his head, and the confines of the space stank of dried sweat and exertion. Lars was unsurprised that Slater had ended up here, especially considering the fact that doctors had told him it would take six months to get back to full health.
At five thirty in the morning, Slater was the only man here. Apparently he’d struck up a relationship with the owner over the course of his month-long recuperation, and the elderly Lionel allowed Slater twenty-four-seven access to the space. Lars had taken the information in stride, simply nodding when one of his underlings informed him about the odd development.
Slater’s physical condition wasn’t the only thing the man needed to recuperate.
Lars found Slater in the corner of the gym, which consisted of a long low stretch of basement with memorabilia on the walls and old-school boxing equipment spread across the floor. The man had taken up position in front of a heavy bag shaped like a teardrop, suspended from the concrete ceiling by a thick metal chain.
Old-school.
Just the way Slater liked it.
Lars crossed the room, overwhelmingly out of place amongst the sweat-stained equipment, and kept his mouth shut as he observed one of his finest operatives. Slater stood with his chin held high, possessed with an inner confidence, refusing to cower in the face of the list of injuries he’d suffered. Some obstacles couldn’t be overcome, so his left arm remained bound in a sling as the bones in his forearm healed from a pair of clean breaks.