Body Count

by mike Evans

  Gabriel took their weapons. Regrettably leaving his sniper rifle behind, and hopefully stashing it well enough that no one would find it today, he might have the slimmest opportunity to retrieve it at some point in the future.

  He pulled the two men behind a desk, hoping that they would be far enough out of sight that no one would run into them if a second team came back through the floor once they gave up looking for him. He thought how he’d pay handsomely for a piece of duct tape and truly wished that he had a roll on him for their mouths.

  Gabriel ran to the opposite side of the floor, and when he opened the doors there were a group of men waiting for him, all armed to the teeth. Gabriel turned on a heel to run back, but that was when everything went black as a shot of pain exploded through the back of his head. He didn’t know if it was from the shotgun blast hitting him or the butt of a rifle or pistol that had struck him.

  Chapter

  Three

  CIA Holding Cell

  Gabriel lay on the cot, the three agents watched over him waiting impatiently for him to wake up. They had known people who had gone into a coma after being struck in the head too hard. Gordy looked at the other two men and asked, “So what the fuck are we going to do, let him sleep all day or are we going to get him up?”

  Howard, who was the lead agent, stared for a second longer and determined that he really was out for the count and said, “Go ahead and go in there Gordy, take Derek with you in case he’s just faking it though, it is time to get the show on the road.”

  Derek said, “You sure that you don’t want to go in there with him sir?”

  Howard said, “Derek, you know if I wanted you to question me, you would need to go through about ten years worth of work and promotions to do so.”

  “So you want me to go in with Gordy sir?”

  Howard stepped back a foot, opened the door and nodded for Derek to go into the cell. Neither of them made anymore jokes. The two of them had been through enough training to know even if someone were in a cell and looked like they were on their deathbed, that it didn’t mean that the person couldn't come out of it in a heartbeat and break their necks. Howard closed the door behind them and letting it click shut. He walked forward a step, watching through the thick cell bars ready to critique his men’s every move. Derek hunched over and yelled, “Hey, asshole, get up, do it now!”

  Gordy said, “Fucking new guys. You realize that if he isn’t conscious he’s not going to hear you right?”

  Gordy shook Gabriel roughly, something not many had done willingly. Derek said, “Uh are you sure that you should be doing that sir?”

  Gordy turned around to say something, which was his second mistake. He was ready to say something to Derek about not knowing his ass from a procedure and the look on Derek’s face was all he needed to see to know how screwed he was. Gordy tried to step forward in the small cell. He knew something was coming his way and was confident that it was going to hurt very badly.

  Derek meant to move forward but Gabriel was faster than the two of them. Gabriel had opened his eyes, saw the two men, and felt a pain that was washing over his brain and working its way throughout his entire body. He got a look that was nothing but filled with bad intentions. Gabriel brought his left leg across, landing a foot on the back of Gordy’s knee, dislocating his kneecap and guaranteeing Gordy would need a pair of crutches, if he was still alive when he was done.

  Derek reached for his pistol out of instinct and the academy training that had been ingrained in his brain. What he gripped was his holster, which unfortunately was void of a gun. The fact that the three of them had emptied everything in their pockets before entering the cell had escaped him. Gordy gripped onto Derek’s suit jacket as he fell to the ground screaming at the top of his lungs, “My fucking knee! Goddammit son of a bitch.”

  Derek pushed him to the side and rushed toward the prisoner. Gabriel tried to sit up and when he couldn’t right away, he laid back down on his back and gripped the sides of the cot as Derek came in towards him, Gabriel kicked with both feet into his gut, sending him down to his knees. Derek tried to get up off the floor too quickly, losing his lunch, then he looked up with a face that almost made Gabriel pity the man. Derek tried to tell him to stop, but Gabriel’s bare foot came out of nowhere, connecting with his cheek in a side kick to the skull that sent him toppling over.

  Gordy gripped Gabriel’s slacks as he set his feet down. Gabriel grasped Gordy by the hair and brought down a punch that was nothing but knuckles, breaking his nose and sending a geyser of blood down Gordy’s shirt.

  Gordy screamed in pain, trying to find a way to hold his broken nose that did not hurt in a throbbing way. Gabriel stared through the bars, making eye contact with Howard. Gabriel took a step forward and the room began to spin. Gabriel tried to shake it off but failed. He screamed, “Open the fucking door now!”

  Howard pulled his radio from his belt and yelled, “We need backup in lock up now, get help.”

  Gabriel looked at the man again and screamed, “Open the fucking doors!”

  Howard shook his head no, and that was when Gabriel bent down and pulled up a bleeding, and now semi crippled Gordy to his feet. Gabriel placed a hand behind Gordy’s neck and one on his chin and said, “Open this door now, or I’ll break the son of a bitch's neck! Do not mistake me for someone that isn’t capable of it.”

  Howard had his hand on the handle, but for the life of him could not make himself turn it. He said as calmly as he could, “If you kill him, we are going to have you dead to rights on charging you with murder.”

  Gabriel laughed at this. “What am I in the jail cell for now asshole?”

  Howard lied through his teeth, but in his defense, he didn’t know exactly how angry or how dangerous the man on the other side of the door was. Gabriel said, “The next six seconds of your life are going to change these men’s outcomes dramatically. I’m going to count to three and if that door doesn’t open, I'm going to snap this fucker’s neck, and then pick up the next guy and repeat the process. I want out, and I want out now! One, Two…”

  The door clicked open and started to swing outwards slowly. Gabriel pushed Gordy to the side. Gabriel held onto his coat to help keep himself from falling over. He did a step sidekick into the door sending the heavy object flying towards Howard. The door connected and knocked him back out of the way. When he tried pushing back up off of the wall Gabriel was already through. He clutched Howard by his tie then pulled him forward. He said, “You would have been smart to have just let me get away. Those pieces of shit deserved to die.”

  “Jesus what did they do to you?”

  “They took everything I had,” Gabriel said. He brought back a right punch that bounced Howard’s head off of the cinder block wall. When Howard’s head started to sway side to side, Gabriel put one more punch into him then let him fall to the ground on his own. Gabriel grabbed the radio, hitting the transmit button immediately. He said, “False alarm down here boys, my guys got it. I don’t know what they were doing, Christ you’d think that they were newbies.”

  A dispatcher came back over and said, “Are you sure about that sir?”

  Gabriel had heard how short the man was with his men and snapped, “Do I need to be questioned by you goddamnit? Tell them everything is fine, I don’t want to sit here for two hours while they comb through every single thing they can, trying to pretend like they are being thorough.”

  The radio dispatchers voice came back over saying, “Whatever you say sir. I’ll relay the message immediately.”

  Howard said, “You aren’t going to get out of here alive, not with what you did. The ‘don’t shoot to kill’ order goes to hell once you are a fugitive on the loose and inside of a government building that you don’t have clearance to be around.”

  Gabriel said nothing, he was happy with them knowing nothing about what he knew. He looked down at the man’s shoes, put his foot next to one and saw that they were close enough to be perfect for size. He brought back
his fist and delivered a vicious blow to the man’s face. He wouldn’t have knocked him out, but the cinder block behind him took care of the next hit, and in less than a second, shook his brain enough to turn the lights out. Gabriel helped him to the ground while stripping his suit coat and tie off of him. He made as good as he could with it and then stole the man’s shoes. When he looked like he would fit in, he pulled the man into his cell with Gordy and Derek, leaving him there. He checked himself in the mirror, wiping off the dried blood that must have been from when he was struck in the head at the office. Gabriel patted the man down, finding his keys and his ID card complete with barcode. He tried to sprint away, but when he got fuzzy, he had to settle for a jog yet still lost his balance and fell. His head was not back to normal and he knew there was going to definitely be some time which he needed to heal after this ordeal was said and done.

  He pushed up from the ground resting on his knees for a second and taking a few deep breaths. Gabriel slid the ID card across the door control and prayed to a God that he rarely asked favors from that it would open. The light changed from red to green and he heard the electromagnet lock, click off. Gabriel pushed it out of his way and ran into a long hallway that led to a set of stairs. The door shut behind him and when it clicked, he also heard the racking of multiple shotguns. Gabriel slowed down, looked around, and saw that he had absolutely no where to go except to the stairs. When he approached, he saw that there were at least five men dressed in full body armor. Each of them were carrying shotguns, which he was hoping were not loaded with lethal rounds. Gabriel knew that the option of staying here wasn’t a good one so he waited until the fuzziness in his head subsided a bit before taking off into a run. He would not stop until someone either knocked him out again, put a hole through his body, or he was safe and in the clear.

  One of the men on the detail screamed at the top of his lungs, “Stop, get on your hands and knees now!”

  Gabriel being as non-compliant as possible, jumped to the left for only a millisecond and then jumped to the right. The man fired off a shot, sending a bean bag round into the wall. Gabriel smiled, knowing as long as it wasn’t a head shot; there was a good chance that he was going to survive. When he jumped to the right, he leapt onto a handrail and then up into the air, skipping half of the first flight of steps. The man racked the gun, trying to get a second shot off. However Gabriel flew directly towards him with a heel out, connecting it with the shield covered face, sending the man down backwards. A second guard was standing, ready to fire, but Gabriel pushed the first guard in front of him, letting him take the shots that would definitely come his way. The second guard screamed, “Get the fuck out of the way Paul, now!”

  Paul screamed, “I can't you fuck wad, look at me!”

  Gabriel drove Paul into the second guard using him happily as a shield. When he had completely pushed him into the other guard, he bent down and took his shotgun and fired off one round into the first man’s back and the second into his chest, sending both of them to the ground where they started to writhe in pain. Gabriel went to take another shot and knew that he was almost out of ammunition. There were four more men on top of the second stairwell. Gabriel, who had not unshouldered the shotgun, aimed at the man on top of the steps, surprising the other three in a good way, and fired off a round.

  What they had not realized was that they would now become human dominoes. The top guard lost his balance, screaming over the gunfire about the pain from the shot to his shin. He topped over, knocking the rest of the three down to the ground past Gabriel. When the first of the new set of guards tried getting up, Gabriel brought the twelve gauge butt down into his head, knocking him out clean. The other two, who had only been the unlucky victims in the middle and weren’t hurt yet, grabbed onto Gabriel bringing him down to the ground.

  Gabriel did not ask for them to let go because he knew that it would do no good. He eye gouged the first man, only blinding him temporarily, not wanting to disable him for life as the man was only doing his job. When the third man gripped Gabriel around his neck, he reached down, stripping off the man’s nightstick. Gabriel forced it between the man’s hands and his own neck and twisted until he lost his grip. Gabriel leaned forward then coming back hard, he elbowed the man in the gut. The helmet and his own head injury were the only thing keeping him from getting an insanely hard, nose breaking head butt.

  Gabriel pushed up off of the ground and brought the night stick down hard enough to knock the man out and to break it over his head. He knelt, stripping off one of the men’s gear and hoping that this had a better end result. Gabriel thought that if he didn’t end up blowing the God damned facility up, that there was going to be a round of ass chewing going around like no other. The SWAT team that was supposed to be the best of the best had made mistake after mistake. Their first was underestimating Gabriel not being able to escape his cage. Had he given them any time to think things over, they might have stopped underestimating him.

  Gabriel opened the door slowly, unsure what other surprises would be sitting there waiting for him. He didn’t have time to worry about it as the stinging that came from his right butt cheek sent a warm feeling running through his entire body. His legs gave out from beneath him and he started to slide to the ground. He looked behind him and saw nothing but boots charging towards him. He tried to get up off of the ground but it was pointless. The men’s feet began to connect, one after another, with his chest, ribs, leg, and groin. It had seemed like forever, but was probably more like seconds, until he collapsed on the ground. Air was something he couldn’t suck in for anything and he wheezed and figured if he had a chance to piss again that he was going to be seeing a fair amount of blood in his urine. He tried again to push up but a man kicked him to the side and over.

  Another new man leaned across Gabriel's line of sight and said, “Well I’d say by the time that these boys are done there isn’t going to be a whole lot left of you.” Gabriel got a good look at the man while he spit blood off to the side and doing everything he could to not pass out. He said in between forced breaths, “When this is over…..I’m going to kill you.”

  The man smiled and Gabriel could hear a round of laughing. He brought a foot down hard into Gabriel’s chin, making the world spin until it went black. The men didn’t pick him up or call for a medic; they simply pulled him by the feet alongside the floor and into an interrogation room where time would not pass quickly. Gabriel tried to watch where they were taking him, but all he could see were the halogen lights above him that made him feel like he’d been abducted by aliens and was being dragged through their ship. When he made it there, he was hoisted into the chair and left handcuffed, with two men sitting on each side of him in a chair ready and waiting for him to try anything stupid. Once he was settled into the chair, he passed out finally.

  Chapter

  Four

  Half hour later

  Howard sat at his desk trying to hold his head in a way that did not make it feel as if it was going to split open and explode. He pulled out a bottle of pills, dumped four on the desk then slammed them back with a bottle of water, wishing it was an amber colored fluid instead of clear. He called to the director and said, “Sir, its Howard, have you gotten the memo on what happened.”

  The director said, “Well yes Howard, it would seem like hell has came down on our fucking heads. You got two agents almost killed and another, what was it, five or seven that got the shit kicked out of them worse than yourself and your two men did? Is there a reason we have someone like this raising hell inside of our gates?”

  “Sir, we had him locked up, he escaped, you can’t plan for things like this sir, they happen.”

  “Howard maybe you thought that yesterday was my first day, but I can assure you it wasn’t. There is no excuse for what happened today. Don't worry about this ass chewing, it will be the first of many.”

  “Director Lincoln, sir, I didn’t mean any disrespect towards you I can promise you that. This happened and I haven’t
had time to wrap my head around it quite yet. They did secure him and they are holding him in interrogation, which is the good news.”

  “That is the good news? So you are going to tell me that there is still bad news that I don’t know the details of yet to come?”

  “Sir, there is a string of shit I need to tell you about. I’d rather do it now than wait. Frank Fox got shot, he’s dead. One of the men that we know he uses from time to time was killed too. We don’t know why this man killed them, but he did and he didn’t seem very remorseful about it. We are trying to figure out everything now. We want to see what relation they had but the prints they took off of him aren’t coming back with anything for me. When I ran it through the criminal database, there was nothing.”

  The director barked a laugh out and said, “You realize that he’s probably in his thirties right?”

  “Yes sir, that’s probably about right, what does his age have anything to do with it?”

  “He could have been in one of the last classes that went through the program.”

  “I’m obviously missing something sir. I don’t understand what you are getting at, are you saying that you think that he is one of ours, or that he was one of ours at one point in time?”

  “Well from the slick moves he was using, he sure as hell got trained by someone. This wasn’t a random act of violence. You need to work this backwards and you need to get all of the answers that you can. When I start getting questions asked of me, I sure as hell want to make sure that they get answered and that you don’t leave me sounding like a fucking idiot. Do I make myself clear damn it?”