Swift and the Black Dog

by Ginn Hale

“Damn, Jack! You do know how to make an entrance.” Peter’s smooth voice rose from beyond the broken door. He sounded relaxed, almost amused.

  Amber emergency lights flared and dimmed, flashing like strobe lights in a stage play. Jack bound past the crooked remnants of the door and sidestepped the guard’s burnt body. In the sputtering light the heavy wooden bookshelves, classical sculptures and solid desk seemed to jig in and out of shadow, while gold flares burst up from dozens of mirrored surfaces. Peter’s angular face leered at him from as many reflections.

  Small green lights glowed from the mahogany case of the two-way radio that sat atop Peter’s desk. Tinny, distant voices called through a hum of static. Sitting up straight in his leather wingback chair, Peter held the transmitter in his left hand and leveled a silver pistol at Jack with his right.

  Peter’s long shadow jumped and jerked with the eerie speed of a spider as he stood.

  “Everything’s fine, here,” Peter informed the men on the other end of the radio signal. “Carry on.”

  The amber security lights dimmed, then surged back to life and Peter fired. The wooden shelf behind Jack splintered and he dived behind a marble plinth, which supported a life-size alabaster bust of Peter.

  “Oh come on, Jack!” Peter called to him. “I’m standing right here. Aren’t you going to bring down the sky?”

  A second shot cracked over the thunder and gunfire outside. Stone splinters sliced across Jack’s ear. With each fast breath he drew, Jack felt the wound in the left side of his chest spearing through his nerves. Blood already soaked the waistband of his pants; it felt warm as piss, but thicker.

  “Did you cringe and hide like this when you killed the Tyrant?” Peter demanded. “I expected more from you.”

  “Seriously, Pete? You want me to burn you to ash right where you stand?” Jack asked. He peered into one of the mirrors as the lights again flashed to brilliance. Peter had moved closer, but that wasn’t what concerned Jack.

  “I’d expect you to try!”

  No doubt he did. Jack standing up in a volley of light and power was just what he needed to capture Jack’s form and Way in his mirrors.

  If the condition of the ivory gun hadn’t made Jack suspicious of the real situation, then all the mirrors would have. As it was, he took them in with the sick feeling of certainty. Rachael might have done him the favor of telling him the truth. But then she had probably feared that Jack wouldn’t have had it in him to put things right, unless he had the evidence shoved in a battered tin in his coat pocket.

  “Nice looking place you got here,” Jack called as he tugged the reeking ivory gun out of his pocket. That wouldn’t stay a surprise for long. “You know I’d feel bad scuffing the floors.”

  Peter snorted.

  “Stop making me laugh, Jack.” Another bullet tore through the corner of the plinth. “I’m trying to kill you.”

  “Yeah, about that.” Jack stalled, waiting for the lights to again offer him a glimpse of the room. “What exactly did I do to piss you off?”

  Just as he finished speaking the security lights flared and then steadied. Jack stole a glance around the plinth. He had the mirrors fixed in his mind. What he needed to find were the bone masks. On the shelf behind Peter’s desk, two stood as if on display. One bore Beadle’s sly visage.

  The other twitched as the slivers of Jack’s face that the mirrors had captured struggled to lock into a whole aspect.

  “Honestly, you haven’t done anything,” Peter’s voice drifted. “In fact, killing Rachael? That was a huge favor. I only wish I’d been there in person to see her sizzle. At least I like to imagine that she sizzled when you burned into her…. Did she?”

  “What the hell?” Jack demanded. “Rachael was one of our own. One of us.”

  He heard Peter’s footfall a little closer and tensed. Peter fired wide, shattering a vase on a bookcase to Jack’s right. Jack bounded from his cover, and scraping the muzzle of the ivory gun against the wall, he traced an invisible line beneath three of the mirrors. Another bullet ripped past, this time blazing so hot that it cauterized the flesh of Jack’s left arm as it dug out a furrow of skin and muscle.

  Jack dropped behind a display of bronze figurines. Sweat soaked his body and his hands shook as adrenaline flooded his bloodstream.

  “You brought the ivory gun.”

  “Yeah,” Jack just managed to keep his voice calm and level. “Rachael insisted.”

  “The bitch!” For a moment even the storm and machine gun fire outside seemed to quiet. Peter’s voice rose softly. “So, you know?”

  “Yeah, Beadle. I know,” Jack replied. He hadn’t wanted it to be true but he couldn’t deny it any longer. “I just don’t understand. Why did you do it?”

  Beadle forced a dry, dull laugh and Jack stole a glance at him from between the muscular thighs of the bronze nude.

  “Because we were betrayed, Jack. At the end of the revolution, we were gods. People fell to their knees in fear of us. We could’ve done anything—everything we wanted. The world was ours!” Peter’s youthful visage lit with excitement but then his countenance dimmed to a sneer that Jack had seen on Beadle’s face countless times before. He contemplated the gun in his right hand.

  “But Peter and Rachael conned me into supporting some stupid republic. Like I’d be satisfied filling out paperwork and making endless speeches. We could’ve gutted our enemies and made any laws we wanted. But no, they’d had enough fighting. They wanted to settle down and debate endlessly with bureaucrats.”

  Beadle looked straight at Jack and, flashing a wry smile, held his gaze for a heartbeat. Then Jack flattened as Beadle fired off another shot. The bronze jerked as a bullet embedded into its polished torso.

  “You were the only one who knew better,” Beadle went on speaking conversationally. “I should have paid attention to you, Jack. Gone back down and had myself a fine time kicking asses and slitting throats on the Bone Ledges, just like the good old days. But Peter conned me with all his sweet talk about greater power and shaping future governments.” Beadle looked momentarily sick. “All he actually did was pander and wheedle for votes like every other boot-licker.”

  “You could have just left him.” Jack suggested but he was only half listening to Beadle now. Beadle hadn’t come this far to have one conversation reform him.

  “I did one better,” Beadle responded. “I buried him in my place and became a more potent Minister than he ever could have.”

  “You did always want to be a natural blond.” Jack stretched his arm back though it hurt like hell and started his shoulder bleeding. He just managed to draw his line below another two of Beadle’s mirrors.

  “True.” Beadle sounded closer, his voice tinged with nostalgia. “It really was touching to see you at the funeral. You always look so handsome when you’re heartbroken.”

  Jack’s gut clenched like he’d been kicked. He’d wept at that funeral. He’d wanted to die and here was Beadle congratulating him like he’d won a six-buck circle-jerk.

  A furious, cleansing fire rumbled through Jack’s mind. He fought it down. He couldn’t let Beadle prod him into exposing his Way yet.

  “And doesn’t that just return us to the question of why you’re trying to kill me?” Jack ground out. “The only person who bothered to look sad when you died?”

  “Harsh, Jack.” Beadle didn’t sound the least perturbed but his voice did seem to be nearer and more to Jack’s left than it had been.

  “Though to be fair, you are right,” Beadle went on. “I never was one of the popular ones. Not like you. You don’t do crap and people adore you. They snap up your posters and swoon over every broad-shouldered prick who plays you in the films.”

  “Are you listening to yourself?” Jack answered as he edged closer to the dark wood desk. “You’re the Minister of Security, how much more popular do you need to be?”

  “Minister!” Beadle shouted. “It’s just a crapload of paperwork and campaigning for a pathetic crumb of power.
And then Rachael wouldn’t even let me enjoy what little there was of that.”

  Beadle fired his pistol and Jack leapt behind the desk, though an instant later he realized that Beadle hadn’t shot at him but instead drilled a hole into the decorative ministry shield hanging on his wall.

  Seven shots. That likely left five more bullets in Beadle’s clip, and one in the chamber. Beadle liked to build his guns to hold a baker’s dozen.

  “She wouldn’t stop nagging about civic responsibility and how I could channel my drive into lasting reforms.” Beadle shook his head. “It was pathetic. She used to be tough—the goddamn Shadow of Death! But ten years on and she just turned into another soppy old auntie. Made me want to puke, hearing her nag my soldiers about limiting use of lethal force against civilians. The Shadow of Death squawking when a couple of my boys have a little fun gunning some pissants down.”

  Jack stared at Beadle, feeling a strange kind of dissonance. He’d been prepared to hear Beadle excuse his actions on the grounds of self-preservation or even ambition, but not because Rachael had lost the murderous edge she’d possessed as a furious teen.

  “So, you spiked her?” Jack asked.

  “As if she gave me a choice. She was going to expose me and press charges. Talk about disloyal. She deserved the spike.” Beadle shrugged. “Not that I got a chance to drain her. I’d forgotten how fast you could fry a bitch, Jack.”

  A meaningless protest caught in Jack’s throat. It hardly mattered to Beadle that he hadn’t wanted to harm Rachael.

  “What I wouldn’t have given to smell her burn,” Beadle’s expression turned wistful. “The tapes just don’t do you justice. Still, it was beautiful to see you cook that mouthy nag. Less than a minute of film, but it’s so much more pure than any of those idiotic, sanitized films that the Ministry of Culture turns out about us every other year, don’t you think?”

  Jack took in Beadle’s wide admiring smile from the shadows of the desk. He realized that he’d gotten it all wrong thinking that Beadle had betrayed the ideals of their shared youth. Beadle hadn’t changed at all. The same gleefully murderous and fearless creature that Jack remembered from their first meeting stood before him now.

  “You really murdered Peter and Rachael because they didn’t want to keep pretending they were still seventeen?” Jack asked. He managed to drag the muzzle of the ivory gun across the bookshelf, but he had to use both hands to keep steady. The smell of his own blood wafted on the filthy odor of the gun.

  “You weren’t there,” Beadle replied. “They betrayed everything we were and everything we did.”

  “People change. That’s life.” Jack choked back the bile rising in his throat. “We all have to grow up sometime.”

  “Not me.” Beadle sounded serious. “And you aren’t exactly one to talk either, Jack. I mean, how long are you planning to drag out the heart-broken loner routine?”

  “Honestly, I’m done with it.” Jack eyed the last line of mirrors. Two leather chairs and a drink table offered sparse cover.

  “Good, because if you aren’t over me by now I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” Beadle said and in spite of himself a tired laugh escaped Jack.

  For just an instant he remembered how they’d laughed and teased each other all those years ago.

  “I hadn’t originally planned on putting you in the ground in my place.” A hint of melancholy drifted through Beadle’s tone. “There was this younger guard, Finch or something like that. The dark, sincere type you go for, actually. Perfect and he didn’t even know he was one of us. But Rachael had him transferred. She just made it fucking impossible for me.”

  The mention of Finch crushed the faint nostalgia threatening to temper Jack’s outrage. And realizing that Rachael had protected the young man made Jack doubly furious at the way Beadle had betrayed her.

  He edged forward as Beadle went on, “There was a time when you would have gladly laid down your life for mine.”

  Yeah, and there had been a time when I thought a blowjob in a public toilet was the height of romance.

  “It’s not as if you’re doing anything much with your life—”

  It hurt like hell but Jack lunged from the cover of the desk. He swung his arm out, slashing the muzzle of the ivory gun under the last four mirrors, and completing the circuit. He released the rings of smoke from around his fingers with an electric crackle. The blue smoke rolled up from the line Jack had traced, obscuring the faces of Beadle’s mirrors like a shroud.

  “No!”

  Beadle fired a spray of bullets after Jack, tearing apart the gold moldings of the wall. Jack hurled himself behind a bookshelf. Wood splintered all around him. A hard kick landed against his left shoulder and knocked him to his knees.

  “Those took me months to build, you ass!” Beadle shouted.

  Blood poured down Jack’s left arm and the edges of his vision narrowed, as if he were falling into a dark tunnel. Jack gripped the ivory gun, focusing on the solid feel of it in his hand. Its sour stench hit him like a whiff of smelling salts. He forced himself up to his feet and swung the ivory pistol up, to take aim.

  Beadle drew a bead on Jack at once.

  “I know you, Jack.” Beadle’s tone was soft, almost pleading, but his grip on his pistol didn’t waver. “You aren’t going to murder me.”

  He was right, of course. Even if it killed him, Jack was going to do Beadle worse than the fast death of a bullet through his skull. Jack fired into the bone mask on Beadle’s shelf, shattering it in an explosion of gold light.

  All the tremendous power of Beadle’s Way kicked back against the assault. An arc of gold light slammed Jack to the floor and burst the ivory gun apart. Then it flooded back along the course Jack had traced, ripping through wood paneling and bursting Beadle’s mirrors. Like a reflex it struck against the source of its devastation: the power that had crafted the ivory gun.

  Realization and horror transformed Beadle’s expression.

  “No! Jack, you wouldn’t—not to me.” He swung the muzzle of his pistol down to Jack’s face.

  The golden light smashed into Beadle’s chest, hurling him back onto his heavy wooden desk. The mahogany radio crashed to the floor. Beadle fired as he jerked and twitched in the blaze.

  Then the gold light burned itself out and Beadle lay supine, trembling across the desk. Jack wasn’t sure if a bottle of ink had overturned or if Beadle had pissed himself. Liquid gleamed in the security light as it dribbled off the edge of the desk.

  Jack tried to push himself up to his feet but pain flared through his right hand as he pressed his palm to the floor. Glancing down Jack noted that shards of the ivory gun had raked open dozens of shallow gashes in his hand and forearm. A spent bullet jutted from the floor only inches from Jack’s thigh.

  His right side hurt with each breath he took and rivulets of blood soaked down his left arm. He should have been in agony but mostly he felt exhausted. Maybe he was dying. Or already too dead to feel anything more.

  On the desk, Beadle whimpered and held his shaking hands to his head. Piece by piece, Peter’s countenance cracked off and fell away. The skin peeled from his arms and clumps of blond hair fell across the floor, exposing the gaunt terrified face of the boy Beadle had been so long ago, when he’d first hidden himself away in a mirror.

  He was broken down to his very Way. Most likely, they’d have to carry Beadle out on a stretcher when they came with the warrant for his arrest in a few hours. But he would live to stand trial. Beyond that, Jack didn’t have it in him to give a shit.

  He stared at the ceiling, thinking of nothing. Then he wondered if Finch was up yet. Probably getting dressed and preparing to come here and arrest Beadle.

  Gritting his teeth against the pain now shooting through his side, Jack rolled onto his knees. He stood.

  He didn’t want Finch seeing him laid out and bloody as a dog somebody had put down. Finch didn’t need to know what breaking Beadle had cost Jack. That hadn’t been the point of doing it.
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br />   Slowly, Jack made his way out of the office, down the hall and out to the balcony. The storm he’d raised still hurled down rain and howling wind. Exhausted guards staggered across the muddy grounds, the fight drained from them by an enemy utterly unscathed by bullets or rage.

  As Jack slipped over the balcony the clouds whirled around him. The wind wrapped him in sleet and flung him out into the sky. He felt the first rays of sunrise strike his face as he fell.

  Chapter Nine

  He woke on Hanford Terrace again, drifting in an inner tube through a familiar swimming pool full of water lilies. A glossy black mastiff watched him from the water’s edge. She studied him as he blearily trailed his bloody hands through the water. Then the dog leapt in and paddled to him. She caught the cuff of his coat in her teeth and steadily pulled him into the shallows.

  The cracked tiles of the cerulean ceiling rolled over Jack. He managed to turn his head and saw Finch standing at the edge of the pool, stripping off his heavy coat. His dress uniform suited him. Jack guessed he’d worn it especially to emphasize his rank when he and his friends from the Ministry of Justice went to arrest Minister Tyber.

  Finch waded down the granite steps, and hauled Jack out of the water, while the dog padded alongside them. As Finch lowered him to the ornate tile floor, the dog melted into Finch’s shadow.

  “Got your man?” Jack asked, though his words came out in a rasp.

  “In both senses. Yes, I think so,” Finch replied. “We took Minister Tyber into custody two hours ago. Only he wasn’t Tyber— I guess you already knew that.”

  “Yeah,” Jack managed.

  “You shouldn’t have gone alone.” Finch pinned him with a hard stare, but then his expression softened and he stroked the wet hair back from Jack’s face.

  There were so many things Jack shouldn’t have done, but this once he didn’t regret his decision. He’d saved Finch.

  And maybe he’d even fostered the beginnings of a new, better government. Who knew? He might as well indulge himself in the grandiose notion as he lay bleeding out.

  And if he had to die, this wasn’t a bad view for his last.