Capes
Page 25
“He? You still think that Mr Jones is what? The devil? That’s still your deal? After all these years, I’d have thought that you’d have gotten some new material, Cynthia.”
“Oh, he is very real, my child. Evil is upon us, Madam Prime Minister. The war is still here and we are suffering casualties. Just yesterday, two of my disciples were taken from me, but now they rest in heaven receiving their just rewards for their service and their ultimate sacrifice. But never you fear, for the army of the Lord is always fully stocked with willing soldiers.”
“You’re even crazier than I remember,” Rosemary exclaimed with widening eyes as the other woman strode and preached as though she was in her own church speaking to her own congregation.
“He walks among our people, Rosemary, our kin, our land, but there is still time to turn him back, to send him back to Hell, to defeat him. You can still be of use to us. You can still join the armies of the light and stave off the darkness before it envelops us all. There is still time for you.”
“Actually, time’s up.” Cynthia smiled as the door to the library opened behind them.
When she’d gone to the desk, it wasn’t just to retrieve the small silver revolver from the drawer; it had also been to press a panic button that was under the desk.
As the door opened, she made a mental note to fire someone for the long response time, but now she felt flooded with relief and renewed superiority as she regained the upper hand. However much insanity flowed through Cynthia Arrow’s veins, it wouldn’t be enough to stop a bullet from one of her private security guards.
Several footsteps entered the room, but none of them at a rush and they were not stopping. Rosemary’s gloating expression gave no sign that she was paying any attention as she stood up in victory.
“You made a big mistake coming here, Cynthia, but if it’s any consolation, I think it’s safe to say that it will be your last.”
Rosemary stood tall, the dull and all too familiar ache in her leg momentarily forgotten as she stood towering and triumphant, feeling like it was 30 years ago.
As she stood in the centre of the room, the newcomers started to edge their way around the room, and now Rosemary’s grin faltered as she finally looked up.
There were indeed security personnel entering the library, and they were her people, but they were also now joined by domestic staff, cooks, cleaners, and gardeners, all of who entered the room silently, their faces emotionless stone.
“What… what is this?” Rosemary demanded as she looked around at the gathering.
“This is power, Rosemary.” Cynthia sighed with disappointment. “The true power of the Lord as his light flows through me. Did you think that I’d been hiding all this time? Licking my wounds, living in shame? I have been planning, Rosemary, planning for this day, for this time, learning from past mistakes, and I have taken his word to my heart, just like I had hoped you would.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This isn’t your board to play on, Rosemary; it never was.” Cynthia held up a hand, and in response, the expressionless staff – some of who had been in the ex-prime minister’s employ for years – suddenly produced blades and held them aloft.
“You… you can’t do this!”
“I assure you, my dear, that I’m not doing anything. This was all you.”
With that, Cynthia stood, turned and started to walk out of the room with her hand still held aloft. Just as she reached the door, she dropped her hand and the staff burst into life, rushing forwards with blades swinging downwards.
Cynthia left the room accompanied by Rosemary Williams’ short-lived screams
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chapter 18
NEW POWER
The jungle was dark and thick. Normally teeming with noisy life, now it lay silent and dormant, a sentient entity holding its breath, knowing that something was about to break.
Crimson closed his eyes under his mask and opened his senses up to the world around him. He could feel the humid air on his skin even through the thick leather outfit he wore. He could feel the wildlife watching on in silence, knowing that there was a predator on the prowl and for once it wasn’t Crimson himself.
There was a stench of blood in the air, a thick coppery taste mixed in with the death on offer.
His men were all dead. Sure, they weren’t perhaps the greatest warriors of all time, but they were trained by him; they were good listeners and quick learners. Whatever had cut through them was a force to be reckoned with.
Somehow, even with his senses operating at full capacity, he still couldn’t hear the killer. There was no scent of it on the air and no breathing for him to pick up on.
Normally, he could pick through the world around him and filter out the useless noise until he could select the appropriate and home in on his prey, but now he was lost and the long-forgotten sense of fear was starting to make an unwelcome reappearance.
It had been longer than he could remember when he’d last felt out of control of the world around him, when he’d last felt impotent, when he’d last been scared.
His boots never made a sound across the jungle floor. He moved with the stealth of a predatory cat, surefooted and silent.
The layout of his base was designed to be impenetrable. He’d built the place from the ground up, testing every corner for weak spots and always adjusting the security to cover any such failings. He had been confident in his own protection, but that confidence now lay shattered at his feet. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was about to be buried by his own hubris.
He continued to scout the base, moving through the shadows, hidden from view, tracking a killer but inexplicably still finding no trace.
The whole thing was starting to feel more and more like an out-of-body experience. He was a man used to being in complete and utter control but now fear was gnawing at his mind, and he was struggling to keep it out.
His foot brushed against something on the ground and he looked down to see a body split open down the middle from throat to groin. Staring down at the body of one of his men, he paused – not at the sight of a brutal slaying, but at the fact that he’d already walked past this body.
He looked around at the trail, suddenly sure that he’d already come this way but unsure how he’d managed to walk the same way twice without realising it. His sense of direction was always perfect; his eyes saw in the dark with faultless precision, but now he was somehow walking in circles.
The jungle seemed to be closing in on him. Huge canopies that hung overhead were now folding in on him, cutting off the sky and suffocating life. The light was already dim but now a large shadow loomed out over him and plunged him into complete darkness.
The twin blades were in his hands in a flash, but even as he turned, he felt the air being split in two as something lashed out.
The blow caught him squarely in the chest and sent him spinning backwards. He hit a thick tree trunk and heard it split under the impact. Ignoring the pain, he rolled to the side and was on his feet in an instant, just as something huge ran into him at lightning speed.
While Crimson might have lost a little of his own speed down the years, he was still quick and he managed to get one blade up in front of him like a lance, plunging it deeply into the chest of his attacker.
The machete went in up to the handle but there was no cry out of pain, only a hard judder that ran up Crimson’s arm to his shoulder.
What felt like claws dug into his back, piercing through the leather, and he could feel blood spurt underneath. He clenched his teeth together, unwilling to give his assailant the satisfaction of hearing him admit the pain.
He was being carried on the thing’s chest as they barged through the jungle, massive arms clamping him tightly and squeezing the breath from his body. His face was buried in a mass of red fur and his first thought was that he was being attacked by some kind of wild animal, something like a bear, only there shouldn’t be one anything close to this size in South America.
With his arms clamped down at his sides, and the life being crushed from him, he was stuck for any effective strikes. He kicked and kneed the creature but nothing made a dent and he could feel himself getting weaker. An ordinary man would already be unconscious, but Crimson was no ordinary man.
He strained and struggled to free one of the blades held up his sleeve, his body rocking and rolling with the effort as the jungle raced by. His sense of direction told him that they were heading for a long drop off a steep waterfall.
Slowly, inch by inch, he worked the small throwing dagger down his sleeve until eventually it popped out into his hand.
The bones in his arms felt like they were about to crack, but through sheer force of his will, he managed to squeeze the knife out and catch it in his hand.
His head was bouncing up and down and his whole body was now screaming out in pain as he felt it weaken. He knew that he was about to go limp any second as the jungle parted into a clearing and the waterfall drop loomed.
The creature had his arms pinned near the wrist as its paws clamped down hard. Crimson now used the blade to cut into his own right wrist.
The blood spurted up and acted as a lubricant. He used it to squirm his right hand free from the clutch. The creature slowed as if suddenly realising what was happening.
Crimson’s hand twisted out, lubricated by his own blood. He had to concentrate on not dropping the small blade now that his hand was soaking wet and sticky. Once he had a firm grip, he started to stab, hard fast jabs into furry animal flesh.
The waterfall edge loomed up and Crimson now knew that the creature’s intention was to throw him over or maybe even jump with him in its arms.
He stabbed harder and faster, using every last vestige of strength he could muster. He might have now been running on fumes, but they were the fumes of an angry bitter man, one who would not die like this.
Being held at chest height, he was unable to see the thing’s face and still had no clue as to what he was dealing with, but it didn’t matter. Survival was all that counted now.
The cliff edge loomed up and he knew they were about to go over. He felt razor-sharp claws dig into his back, cutting close to the spine and lifting him up and away.
He was now held out like he weighed nothing and he concentrated his attack on the thing’s wrist, hacking away at the flesh and fur. They were on the very edge of the waterfall, and held out like this, he was already over it, suspended over a drop that fell so far he couldn’t see the ground below as the water cascaded downwards and sent up a misty spray.
Crimson roared in anger and frustration as he hacked away, finally being rewarded by a spray of black blood.
The creature’s grip slipped and they were suddenly both falling as his attacker lost its balance and they pitched over the side.
As he fell, he stabbed out in desperation, the small knife mercifully burying itself into the edge of the cliff and almost ripping his arm out of its socket in the process.
Hanging off the side of the waterfall, he risked a look downwards, but all he saw now was a plummeting indeterminate shape disappearing into the spray below.
He hung from the side for several moments that stretched into eternity. Instead of thrashing about in a blind panic, he instead slowed his heart rate and breathing until he felt under control.
His fingers were gripping the small dagger, but his hand was wet from his own blood. If his shoulder wasn’t all the way out of its socket, then it was close. The pain was a dull roar, but he had beaten worse odds. Inch by inch, he heaved himself upwards, slowly crawling back to life until he hoisted himself up and over the edge with everything he had left. He felt the shoulder pop out of the joint before he was finally lying panting for air on the ground.
His back felt like it had been shredded open and he was losing a lot of blood. His arm hung loosely down by his waist, and he knew that the longer he waited, the harder it would be to pop it back in.
His body was weak now through blood loss, but still he pushed on. He staggered up and over to a nearby tree and slammed himself into it, feeling the shoulder pop back in as he swallowed a scream.
The walk back to the compound and the fully kitted-out infirmary he kept there wasn’t going to get any closer, so he started to move.
His mind was full of questions but he pushed all of them aside. There would be time for answers later, and he was looking forward to finding someone to ask, but now he had to heal. How could he kill anyone if he was already dead?
As he staggered and stumbled, he tried to keep one thought at the front of his mind – revenge – but that just wasn’t getting the job done.
He could feel blood still seeping down his back and running down his legs inside his leather outfit, way too much for his liking. His head was spinning, his senses were weakening by the second, his legs were struggling to keep moving forwards, and all his mind was telling him to do was to lie down and die.
In the end, it was her face that came to him: Jenny. There had been no torrid love affair, no professions of passion, no declarations of crazed eternal love. She had simply been the closest thing to a friend that he had ever known.
He’d never loved anyone before, but he’d seen what love did to people. It was a destructive emotion that had ruined many a strong man and he’d made a very early promise to himself that he would never succumb. But for some reason, Jenny had gotten under his defences… not because he loved her… no, the emotion was far more dangerous than that. It was because he’d liked her.
She walked with him now, keeping him company and keeping the unconscious darkness away as her form faded in and out of existence.
He was about to tell her something of consequence, something for the first time, in spite of himself and his set-in-stone rules. Something that mattered. He was about to tell her that he liked her, when he woke up.
He sat bolt upright in the bed, his heading spinning partly from the sudden movement but more from the strange buzzing in his head. For the briefest of moments, he saw her in the room.
Jenny was standing at the foot of the bed, her face watching him intently with a strange neutral expression that he couldn’t quite place. It was compassion of sorts, but a complicated emotion as though she hated herself for feeling it, and then she was gone.
Gone might not have been the most accurate word because she wasn’t so much gone as she was changed, and then he saw her for what she really was.
“I ought to kill you for that,” he snarled, but the venom just wasn’t there as he’d intended.
“I needed to see,” Doc replied without apology.
“Get a good look, did you?”
“Enough. Unfortunately, you didn’t. That thing that attacked you knew enough to stay out of the light and out of your sight.”
“It was big, strong… hairy,” he added. “But no, I never saw it clearly. It killed my men and damn near got me too,” he said as he swung his legs out of bed.
He slept in just a pair of boxer shorts, and his while body was still lithe and toned, it was also crisscrossed with scars, a tapestry of his life and the sort of life he’d led.
He crossed the room and dressed in sweat pants and a hoodie, Doc getting a flash of the most recent set of injuries across his back, deep-set scar tissue from what looked like horrific wounds.
“Surprised I’m still here?” he asked as he caught her looking.
“A little bit,” she admitted.
“It’ll take more than that bastard to finish me off.”
“Not much, by the look of it.”
He thought for a moment before nodding in agreement.
“You think that he’s brought one of his mistakes with him?” he asked.
“CJ?”
“Who else? I mean, doesn’t our whole world revolve around him?”
“I don’t know. It defin
itely seemed like some kind of an animal from your memories.”
“Didn’t smell like anything I’ve ever encountered, I know that much.”
“So it could be from… you know…,” she said, pointing upwards.
“Stranger things have happened.” He shrugged.
Doc stared at him for some time in silence, as though having an internal debate with herself; eventually, she decided to speak.
“It’s not real, you know…, or do you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Jenny. The image you have of her, of the two of you.”
“What the hell is this, Doc? More mind games? Why don’t you save it for the weak?”
“Look, maybe it’s not my place.”
“You got that right. Whatever is up here…” He tapped his own temple. “It’s private, Doc. You should know better by now. You should know better than to go poking around uninvited.”
Doc took another long pause before continuing. “Jenny Scott worked here for almost six years.”
“So? I know that,” Crimson pouted.
“She worked over in the design department. I believe that she helped produce some of your equipment on the design front.”
“What’s the point here, Doc?”
“The point is, Royce, that I think you spoke to the woman all of about three times in the six years, and even then you barely shared more than a dozen words.”
“You’re full of shit,” Crimson said with a defensive laugh.
“It’s in your head, Royce. This… relationship of sorts with Jenny, this… connection that you think the two of you shared, it’s all in your head. It was never real.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know I do. Whether you want to admit it or not, you know I’m right.”
“A man’s head should be a private place, Doc. You got no right to go poking around in there without an invite.”
“Look, Royce, I’m just trying to help you here,” Doc said gently.