Only the Strong

by Ethan Cross

  Ackerman snorted. “Please. What’s going to happen to your crowning achievement if you kill us now? Executing defenseless opponents doesn’t seem to be your style.”

  The Gladiator drove the butt of his pistol down hard into the small of Ackerman’s back. His brother merely grinned and blew the big man a kiss.

  Marcus asked, “Can you see the girl?”

  “Yes, she took a round in the shoulder. She’s alive for now. I think she passed out from the shock.”

  “You really think that if she had shot Gladstone, then the dogs would have gone wild?”

  “That’s what I would have trained them to do.”

  “But you’ve got that weird animal magnetism. Couldn’t you have put the whammy on them? Like the Crocodile Dundee, hypnotizing thing?”

  Ackerman said, “I’m not familiar with the reference, but I understand your meaning. Against one, of course. Against two, probably. But against a whole pack, not likely.”

  Two more bullets erupted into the floor, and the Gladiator screamed down into their faces, “I may not want to kill the two of you right at this very moment, but don’t worry, it’s coming. And if you don’t shut up, I’ll kill one of the girls. Are we clear?”

  ~~*~~

  Chapter One Hundred Eleven

  Corin woke from a dream about Sammy protecting a wounded sea turtle that had washed up onto the beach. The memory was a good one, a moment of innocence and love that seemed so alien to her now. The voice summoning her from her slumber was also one that she remembered well, but not one that she recalled fondly. It was Derrick Gladstone saying her name. She tried to hold on to a more pleasant reality, but a spray of water into her face brought the fantasy crashing down.

  She opened her eyes to a sky of reds and purples and heard Derrick say, “I’m very disappointed with you, Corin.”

  She tried to sit up, but a terrible pain in her right shoulder brought her back down to the smooth concrete. Then she remembered the gunshot wound inflicted by the Gladiator. But that had been inside. Where was she now? She was obviously no longer indoors, and she lay upon a sloping surface of stamped brown concrete.

  In response to Derrick’s message of disapproval, Corin groggily whispered, “I’m not too happy with you either, Doc.”

  “I’m sorry to say that your little coup attempt was less than successful.”

  She pushed herself up onto her left elbow and looked into the face of her tormentor. Derrick sat in his wheelchair several feet above her on a railed platform. Beside her, on the concrete which seemed to slope off into oblivion, was Tia, the young woman with no tongue. Sonnequa stood atop a similar platform on the opposite side of the open space, in front of some type of small control panel.

  Fearing that Derrick had already taken her to his private island, Corin asked, “Where are we?”

  “My apologies,” Derrick said, “I’d forgotten that you’ve only been with us a short time. It truly feels like we’ve known each other for much longer. Your sisters and I dined here last week, but that was while you were still undergoing insemination.”

  Corin had discovered that the closer she came to death, the more the filter between her thoughts and her words had broken down. But now was not the time for rash action. She halted the urge to hurl obscenities and stopped herself from once again telling Derrick how she was going to end him. Instead, she gritted her teeth and, sensing what was coming next, latched on tightly to a piece of nearby metal—some sort of sprinkler or fountain system embedded into the concrete.

  Derrick said, “If you had enjoyed the privilege of dining with us last week, you could have experienced this magnificent view under better circumstances. We’re about five stories up in a restaurant that was once called Ristorante La Cascata, which is Italian. It means simply ‘Waterfall Restaurant.’ I’ll give you one guess in which part you’re currently resting.”

  Glancing over her shoulder at Tia, Corin said, “Grab that metal nozzle and hold on for your life.”

  Derrick laughed. “Clever girl. Sonnequa, if you would be so kind . . .”

  Knowing what was to come, Corin didn’t look to the Good Wife for a plea of mercy. She merely closed her eyes and squeezed the small fountain mechanism with all the strength she had left, which wasn’t much. Her right hand had grown numb and weak from the wound in her shoulder, and her left arm felt like a limp noodle.

  A second later, she heard the rushing of water. A second after that, she felt a gentle stream cascading over her. The cold water actually soothed her ruined extremities, but even the slow trickle was enough to begin pulling her down the slope toward oblivion.

  She didn’t open her eyes until the flow abated, and Derrick said, “You may have noticed the chain around your ankle.”

  In truth, she hadn’t realized that her right foot was ensnared by a thick metal chain. She had little feeling in her feet now. As she looked down the slippery slope of the man-made waterfall, she realized that the chain had been wrapped through a pair of cinderblocks, which rested precariously on the edge of the five-story drop off.

  “The chain is connected to enough weight to easily pull you over the edge of that precipice and into the darkness beyond. You’ve actually seen what lies at the end of your fall . . . the lake beyond the glass adjacent to your living quarters. What you may not realize, however, is that this lake is not natural. It was actually an old quarry and is several hundred feet deep. Imagine what it would be like for those cinderblocks to be swept over the edge, pulling you with them. The five story fall wouldn’t be the death of you. No, you would ride that train all the way to the inky depths of the pit. There you would drown and die and ultimately be consumed by the creatures of the dark. And, as I’ve told you, our actions have consequences beyond ourselves, and so poor Tia has been chosen to share that fate with you. I don’t enjoy this sort of thing, Corin, but you’ve given me no choice. Believe it or not, darling, this is truly going to hurt me more than it hurts you.”

  ~~*~~

  Chapter One Hundred Twelve

  Stefan Granger—as he preferred to be called; his true name, just as the skull mask was his true face—should have been preparing for the fight of his career. Instead, he had been summoned by his egomaniacal brother and told to bring two “things” to the roof. The first was the saw they used to cleanly sever the limbs of the bodies Derrick used for marketing purposes—a 20v cordless circular saw equipped with a diamond blade and no safety guard—and the second of Derrick’s “things” was their Parkinsons-afflicted mother.

  He took the elevator up to Ristorante La Cascata and arrived in time to hear Dr. Death loudly proclaiming, “I read somewhere that it only takes six inches of water on the road to cause total loss of control of your vehicle. I would think far less would be able to sweep those blocks over the edge.”

  As he grew closer, Granger saw that Derrick had dropped Corin and Tia into the restaurant’s fake waterfall fountain and was threatening to send them over the edge.

  Hearing them approach over his shoulder, the mad king wheeled around and said, “Just in time, baby brother.”

  Scowling, Granger replied, “What is this, Derrick?”

  In a booming voice, his brother called out, “Sonnequa, keep the ladies moist for me please.”

  Granger’s anger rose as he watched the water cascade down the slope toward Corin and Tia. He felt no moral obligation to protect them; morality was an illusion forced upon the weak minded. Or so his biological father, the professor, had always told him. But both of the women Derrick was playing with had earned their survival through blood and pain. And through that crucible, they had also earned Granger’s respect, something his brother had lost long ago.

  “Why are you doing this now? We should both be preparing for the broadcast.”

  “You have to make time for the important things in life.”

  “Mother could have watched your sick
little game on the video feed. Why in the hell did I have to bring her up here now? This is my night, not yours. When we get to the Island, you can play genetic messiah all you want. But tonight, I’m going to prove that I’m the best of the best.”

  “I don’t like your tone. You will remember your place, baby brother. You may have taken up the Gladiator title, but you will never take up the name of the King. Now . . . I think the time has come for us to re-unite Mother and Father.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Looking at their mother with a devilish glee in his eyes, Derrick replied, “I say we cut her into little pieces with the bone saw, starting at her feet, going up appendage by appendage. Then we toss the pieces of her over the waterfall like chum. Call it a grand memorial ceremony for Father, a great thinker and a credit to our kind, who was stolen from us long before his time.”

  “That’s not how I remember him.”

  “You were too young to remember anything.”

  “I remember everything.”

  Granger, in fact, recalled this old swimming hole long before an entrepreneur lost his nest egg on the now defunct resort. He had heard the older kids, his brother’s friends, talking about skinny-dipping up at a place they called Undertow Lake. The teenagers would dare each other to dive down until they felt the pull of the current against them. It was apparently a harrowing experience, but he’d never heard any stories of swimmers dying beyond the urban legends of what happened to someone’s cousin twenty years ago.

  How many bodies were at the bottom of the lake? He couldn’t say for sure, but he knew there was at least one.

  He had ridden in the front seat beside Mother as they had taken a short drive up the mountain and disposed of Father’s remains one rainy September evening. The place had smelled like moss and rot even then. They had tied cinder blocks around Father’s body, just like the ones now chained around Corin’s and Tia’s ankles.

  Having learned later that merely weighing down a body usually wasn’t enough to keep the remains from bloating and decaying their way to the surface, he had lived in fear of that crime being discovered for much of his young life.

  Granger said, “If you’re going to sentence Mother to the pit, you’ll have to do the same with me.”

  “Speak plainly. What are you mumbling about?”

  “I killed our father, Derrick. Is that clear enough for you? The night he left, I overheard everything. He was abandoning us all to have a love affair with another man. I got a knife from the kitchen, and as he was packing the car, I stabbed him in the throat.”

  Derrick was silent a moment, an expression of confusion and disbelief on his face. Finally, in a feral snarl, he said, “You’re lying. You were only five years old. You couldn’t have . . .”

  “Why do you think Mother hated me so much? Why did she want me dead?”

  “Because your abnormality is what chased Father away.”

  Granger laughed, but inside he wanted to snap his brother’s neck. “Is that what you think?”

  “I’m not suggesting I feel the same way, but, yes, he—”

  “She hated me because I know where all the skeletons are buried. Plus, I think she was afraid of me.”

  “But . . . why? Why would you have attacked our father?”

  “I heard everything that night. He hated us all, Derrick. He never wanted children. He wanted his work and his sexual freedom. He thought of us as a burden to be discarded, a skin to be shed. I don’t remember all the words, but I vividly recall the emotions. He wasn’t the man you thought he was. Ask Mother.”

  Turning to the old woman in the wheelchair, Derrick said, “Blink three times if he’s telling the truth.”

  Mother’s eyes were cold and defiant as she responded in the positive with the only muscles over which she could still maintain control.

  Derrick’s facial features quivered with rage, and his eyes showed that he was about to come unhinged. But Granger waited and watched as his brother, the cold and calculating narcissist, worked things out in his mind and then said, “It doesn’t matter now. Doesn’t change anything. But the old witch can’t live to see the Island. We’ve played with her enough.”

  We certainly have, Granger thought. It had been Derrick who had first come up with the idea of “haunting” their mother after his supposed death. Derrick would set her up to see her murdered son in the schoolyard as she drove past. He would sneak Granger into the house and hide him under his bed, so that the younger boy could walk past their mother’s door like a wandering spirit. It had been Derrick, with his reluctant help, who had truly driven their mother to madness and a crippling abuse of alcohol and prescription medications.

  Granger said, “She’s paid for her crimes.”

  “She will never have suffered enough for the way she treated us. It’s truly amazing that I was able to pull myself up from the gutter to the pinnacle of our species, but I’ve had to work ten times harder because my mother, who was an educated woman, should have known better than to spend her meager teaching salary on cigarettes and Everclear over food for her three children! Don’t you remember the days of taking whore’s baths in gas-station restrooms because she had neglected to pay the water bill? She disappeared for a third of our summer vacation one year, and we found her in—”

  Through clinched teeth, Granger said, “None of that matters right now. In a few minutes, I have the fight of my life.”

  “It matters now more than ever, baby brother. She’s not going to the Island. She doesn’t deserve to reap the rewards of a harvest she tried her best to spoil.”

  Every muscle shaking now, Granger whispered, “You love the sound of your own voice, don’t you? Just a narcissistic fool who uses a lot of words but says nothing. A man who cares about nothing and no one but himself. Everything you have done your entire life, even when it appeared altruistic on the surface, has always, at its core, been about you. Making you the center of attention. Putting you up on a pedestal. You think everyone else in the world is sick and needs you to cure them. But what you can’t see is that people like you are the disease. A head crammed with knowledge, but so little understanding. You genuinely believe that everyone loves you, when, in reality, we barely tolerate you.”

  Primarily using his arms, Derrick launched himself from the wheelchair onto his unsteady legs. When standing, Derrick was actually a couple of inches taller than Granger and used that advantage now to stand over his younger brother.

  But Granger didn’t back down at all. He wasn’t afraid of his brother. He feared no man.

  Derrick ripped the bone saw from Granger’s hand and activated it in front of his younger brother’s face. Then he said, “You sniveling freak! How dare someone like you question me. I should have ended you the moment we found out you were defective. I should have put a pillow over your malformed face along with your clearly malformed brain and—”

  Even during his hand-to-hand fights, Granger always carried a set of small push daggers concealed in a custom-made quickdraw holster on the back of his fighting shorts, just in case. Rage overtook him now, and without a further thought, Granger pulled one of the daggers with his right hand and punched it in and out of Derrick’s chest with a blow intended to puncture a lung.

  The surprise and fear that came over his brother’s face was one of the most amusing sights Stefan Granger had ever seen.

  Derrick stumbled backward, tipping over his wheelchair. And then, with the improvised bone saw still held in a clenched fist, Dr. Derrick Gladstone flipped over the railing and down the concrete waterfall.

  ~~*~~

  Chapter One Hundred Thirteen

  The frigid waters had stung her skin like a swarm of bees at first, but after the initial attack, the cold helped to dull her other pains. Corin had positioned her abdomen atop her one lifeline—one of two small fountain nozzles in the center of the sloping waterfall. She had
instructed Tia to do the same, but she knew that, if those blocks went over the edge, the force would be enough to pull them both from their tenuous perches.

  The Good Wife had been uncharacteristically merciful by only turning the water flow up to a steady trickle when she could have easily washed her sworn enemy over the edge. But Corin supposed that Sonnequa’s concern was for Tia and not her.

  When she heard the two brothers shouting, she dared not look up for fear of losing her unsteady balance.

  But then she heard a scream, and her gaze reflexively shot up in time to see Derrick’s body falling on top of her.

  She braced for the impact. It was only a glancing blow, but his weight still crushed her against the concrete and expelled all the air from her lungs.

  As he rolled over her, the madman’s left hand clawed her flesh and locked around her bicep, causing the metal fountain nozzle to dig into her hip while simultaneously halting his tumble.

  Wheezing for air, his white dress shirt covered in crimson, Derrick still found the strength to pull himself to his feet, nearly wrenching Corin’s arm from its socket in the process. She would have wailed in agony, if she had any breath by which to do so.

  King Derrick’s eyes were wide and wild. He tried to climb over her toward the opposite railing, where Sonnequa stood. But Corin kicked at his knees with her untethered leg, causing him to fall back atop her in a heap.

  The wild-eyed doctor grabbed her by the throat with his left hand and raised a cordless circular saw he held in his right. Time seemed to slow for Corin, and she feared that her brain was being deprived of oxygen to the point she would black out.

  She noticed the dried brown blood and gore splattered over the yellow surface of the saw and knew what Derrick was about to do.

  He pulled the saw’s trigger and thrust it toward her.

  Corin dodged the blow, the saw striking the concrete with a high-pitched scraping.