by Cameron Bane
That amazement left as quickly as it had come. Beaming in victory, the man’s strong bony hands closed tight around Sarah’s throat. The beseeching lost look in her coffee-brown eyes seared my soul.
I leaped, attempting to jam my right hand in the doors but reached them a fraction of a second too late. As they sealed, the green indicator light above them blinked on, and the machinery kicked in. My fingernails broke and ripped free as I tried to force the doors open. Too late. The sound dropped, faded. She was gone.
Huffing and sweating profusely, I knew I was pushing my body’s endurance far past its limits, but there was nothing else for it. Warm blood flowed like sticky syrup from the bullet wound, soaking my already ruined undershirt and trickling down my leg and onto the floor as I looked at the elevator’s direction arrow.
And as I did, time slid to a stop. I’d thought Boneless was taking Sarah topside, to make good his escape. But the light indicated the car was headed down. Down? Why? All that was down there was …
The Pit.
There was no doubt about it now. I knew what he was planning to do; I knew it as sure as I knew my own name. With the death of his pet troops, things had gotten personal between us. Boneless’s goal to cap off the evening’s fun by tossing me alive—more or less—into that abyss, was ruined.
Instead he would throw in the girl.
*
Pivoting abruptly, I lost my balance and rebounded off the wall, causing an expanding ball of fire to flash inside my skull. Somehow I managed to regain my footing, and I began jogging and stumbling as fast as I could back the way I’d come. I needed another key card to follow them, and the only place to get one quickly was off a dead guard. And “quickly” was the operative word. Boneless had all the time in the world. Sarah had none.
Reaching the hallway where the bodies were, the quiet was like a tomb. I was tiring, my left arm leaden like a prizefighter’s in the ninth round. Cold sweat soaked me, and my breathing was faster and more ragged. I knew soon I’d be heading into shock. If God or whoever was still running this play, it was time He stepped up His game. Bending down, I retrieved a card from the belt of the first dead man I came to.
As I straightened up the room swam before my eyes, and more ominously, my back spasmed. Not this. Not now. I almost dropped to my knees. Bad, bad time for it to go out. The fierce stabbing in my side grew more intense with every maneuver as waves of nausea and weakness swept over me. Plainly put, I was a wreck. But again I recalled my Ranger instructions. Pain is an enemy. Fight it. Rest comes when the mission is done, and only then.
Without a backward glance I rushed back to the elevators as fast as I could, making no attempt at concealment. No point. I was winded, but pushed through it. As I slid the card in its slot, I was driven by one overpowering thought—to save Sarah Cahill.
The middle doors had barely opened when I jumped inside and punched the down button, my chest heaving with effort. As the thing sank, I tried to ready myself for what I might find. Five seconds more and it opened. Anyone looking would have seen me squatting on my haunches near the floor against the chance of Boneless getting cute and waiting there for me.
But the hall appeared to be empty.
With a grunt I stood reeling, and lurched out of the elevator and across the way, to the last door. According to Shelly the room with the blank door beyond it was the only place Boneless could be. The fresh pain of Shelly and her small son’s deaths unexpectedly flooded over me. I shoved it away, closing the door on it in my mind. Later. Later I’d avenge them. And take my time doing it.
Belatedly I checked the P-90’s magazine, like I should have done when I first picked it up. I’d thought it had felt suspiciously light but had neglected to check it.
And don’t you know it was empty.
Son of a— Well, this was just great. Murphy’s Law never takes a holiday; it had hit me from every angle. Obviously my thinking was more scrambled than I thought.
Tossing the thing away in disgust, I checked myself for anything on me that could be used as a weapon. Nothing. The facts before me were stark in their dread simplicity. I was a wounded, weaponless man, facing down a rested, trained martial arts expert in superb condition. Sounded fair to me. Not. And behind those doors, Boneless held Sarah. I hoped. For all I knew the freak had already killed her while I was farting around in this hall.
But he’d made several serious errors in judgment. The first was letting his temper get the best of him when I’d goaded him while I was still held in that chair; he’d simply over-reacted. Another mistake had been his leaving me with alone with Blakey and Chet; they’d been easy enough to handle. The last was his assuming I’d been killed in the firefight with his guards. The net result was, he wasn’t infallible. He was rattled now. He would be again.
With that I armored my mind against all sensation of fear and death, refusing to surrender. To free the oppressed …
Sliding the key card into the slot, my expression hardened and my resolute tone held dark promise. “You’ve met your match, you sick nutjob. This stops here. Today.”
*
Going through the first door I found myself in a short corridor, not unlike the entrance to the dome. Observing the mechanics, they appeared to operate on the same principal: the door I’d just come through closed and sealed tightly behind me before the one in front opened. When it did, as quietly as I could I slipped through it.
Shelly had been batting a thousand. The room was huge, its diameter nearly one-sixth of the length of a football field. Why? Maybe just because they could. Whatever, I gave the place props for intimidation, in a deep-space ore ship, metallically oppressive, Aliens kind of way.
Surveying the area at a glance, I saw the entire circumference was ringed with mirrors, reaching from floor to ceiling. For the split second I had to ponder it, the only answer that made sense was that those mirrors would increase the terror of any victims unlucky enough to still be alive when they were brought in. They’d also intensify Boneless’s pleasure as he made their final moments more anguished. Dead center in the middle of the floor I saw the Pit itself, its huge, iris-like opening cycled closed.
For the moment.
But as I said, I processed all this in only a flash of time. What grabbed my attention was what was happening just this side of the hole. Boneless lay on top of Sarah, writhing. He was fully clothed, his pants still zipped, but she was naked, and her features were etched in terror and shame. With the room’s bright acoustics I could distinctly hear her terrified reverberating screams as she struggled helplessly in his grasp.
Seeing me, Boneless’s face lit up in a smile, his eyes glinting with pleasure as he stood and jerked her to her feet. “John! Good man. It’s about time you made it. I wondered if you’d been hit in that melee topside.” Then he frowned. “But I see you didn’t get through it completely unscathed. As you can see, I had to start the party without you.” I felt my face harden in wrath. I didn’t answer, but slowly began moving toward them.
I’d only gone a yard or so when he stopped me with an upraised hand. “That’s far enough. Let me finish with the girl. Then we’ll chat.”
With sick appreciation, even with my blurred vision, it was evident what he’d done. Sarah’s face was battered, her right eye swollen and her split lip dripping blood. Worse, from somewhere Boneless had secured a curved knife, a wicked-looking monster, fully six inches long with a black grip. He’d used it to run an X-shaped cut across both of Sarah’s breasts and down her torso to her pubis.
The tip of the knife was now pressed against her flesh to deepen the cuts, and the blood trickled in steady rivulets down her body, where it laid obscenely red and glistening on the floor. I could tell from the rate of flow it wasn’t too deep or life threatening yet, but the very fact he’d felt compelled to humiliate and hurt her without cause made my pent-up rage come roaring to the surface.
Glowering, I threw down the metaphorical gauntlet, my tone murderous as I spat the words. “I’ll make
you a deal, freak. Best one you’ll get today. Me for her.”
With another unnerving smile Boneless moved the blade away from Sarah, his shark eyes glinting like black pools as he softly bobbed the knife up and down, the light from the mirrored room sparking and reflecting off the blade.
Then his grin gradually altered as the flicker of interest faded out. “No. No, I don’t think so. You’ll just have to wait your turn.”
“Why don’t you stop?” I yelled, my voice cracking. “Why are you doing this?”
“You mean this with Sarah in particular?” He motioned with his knife and grinned. “Or my appalling actions in general?” Before I could reply, he answered his own question. And it was one whispered word. “Revenge.”
“Revenge?” I frowned. “For what?”
His comeback was simple. And in that moment as he gritted the words, I saw the human behind the monster. “For being born.”
I shook off the horror of what he’d said. “Come on, Boneless, be a man.” I flashed a savage grin of my own. “What do you say? A strapping young crazoid like you needs a better challenge than a scared girl.” I spread my right, uninjured arm. “Let’s dance.”
“Taunts don’t affect me,” he said. “My father taught me years ago to ignore them.”
“He taught you a lot of things, didn’t he? Like how to inflict pain. Like how to shut out the cries of the weak.”
And suddenly the words were there. I knew. But how?
“Just like he ignored your cries, right? Your cries as a little child when he wouldn’t let you out of that box he kept you locked in for weeks at a time.”
Boneless stopped the knife’s movement abruptly. He’d grown very still.
“And what about all that nasty crap he made you eat?” I charged on. “The things he made you watch, the games he made you play?” The air of superiority was leaving him like water being squeezed from a sponge. “Is that how you learned, Boneless? Is that how you got to be the way you are, the sorry excuse of a man you became?”
His composure continued to waver as his lifeless smile slipped. “That’s a low blow, John.” I could hear just the hint of a tremor in his voice. “I expected better of you.”
My aspect was glacial as I said nothing.
He seemed to recover a little of his composure. “No matter. You and I, we’ll balance the books in a minute. I just have some things I need to finish with the girl first.”
“I’ll bet you’re disappointing her, too,” I shot. “That’s why you have the knife. Compensating for what life has shorted you. How close am I to the truth?”
My taunting speech must have registered somewhere deep inside Sarah’s overloaded mind, and she moaned. Whether it was in dread or denial I couldn’t tell as the sound bounced around. I ignored it. I was doing my best to keep my eyes riveted on Boneless’s orbs and not hers as I kept on drilling him. Implacably I ground out my words.
“If I had to guess I’d say your whole life has been one long, crashing disappointment, hasn’t it? Yep, bet so. Does the fact that people fear you make up for them not liking you? For not being able to stand you? Don’t you ever wonder why you’ve never had the love of a woman? Or a friend?”
His face grew venomous, making him look like a raging, mad dog about to spring. I went for the final jab, pouring gasoline on the fire.
“Or a father?”
Bull’s-eye. That tore it. With a feral scream of rage Boneless viciously kicked Sarah aside like a rag doll and charged me, knife uplifted. Meeting him with a brutal hit to his face I savagely kicked the knife away, where it landed near the center of the iris.
My blow had sent Boneless spinning backward and onto his hands and knees, facing away. While he was stunned, in one continuous wrenching motion I started hard charging back toward the door, and to the big red button I’d seen recessed in the wall next to it.
The one Shelly had said opened the Pit.
It was far from a fair contest. Though the distance was short, my heart blasted inside my chest as the blood roared in my ears. It was too much; the effort was like running hip-deep through heavy surf and sand. Maddeningly, my muscles were taking much longer to respond to my brain’s demands. Seconds seemed like years. Still I pounded on.
With my compounded injuries, it was no surprise Boneless was in far better shape for battle, and I felt the ghostly touch of his fingers whisper across my back as at the same instant I passed the big, red button. Gasping for air, I mashed it home.
And then he had me as I felt a heavy blow fall between my shoulder blades.
Momentum carried me away as I dropped to the floor with a hoarse shout, my head, shoulder, and side igniting in fresh agony. Misty darkness circled the edges of my vision as far beneath my feet I heard the rumble and whine of machinery kick in. From the corner of my eye I saw the iris open, yawning wide, the knife dropping in.
And as it fell, the most God-awful stench filled the room.
Picture an open dumpster outside a fish market on a Baltimore wharf on a really hot, humid August day. Add in a city municipal sewer system a week after heavy rains, laced with a harsh, acidic, chemical stench. Then top off the whole thing with all the Port-a-Potties at all the construction sites in the world filling up with vomit and diarrhea at the same time. Do that, and you might have an inkling of how the Pit smelled.
It smelled like death.
And in some eldritch way I’ll never be able to explain, it revived me.
I did my best to ignore the furious fumes burning my eyes, sinuses, and throat. Digging deep into reserves I didn’t know I had, I drunkenly staggered to my feet, scrambling away from the killer as I cut a hard, weaving right, and making a beeline back to Sarah. The equation was clear: I had to put myself between her and that maniac.
But suddenly Boneless was there again, this time smashing me hard across the back of my neck with what felt like his knobby fist. Obviously he was toying with me, like a cat will with a chipmunk before he rips its head off. But I know from experience it’s hard to make a solid connection on a moving target while running full-bore. Instead of knocking me out, as I’m sure he intended, the blow merely caused me to stumble and fall again.
“Merely” is a light word. Smashing onto that unyielding metal floor was disastrous. My right leg went numb, my speed causing me to roll like a log four or five times.
And almost right into that yawning pit.
Horrified, I slammed the heel of my right hand into the steel stop at the end of the gurney track, but it was no good. I was quickly running out of rail. Doing my best to keep my right arm rigid as I skidded, I mashed harder, my bloody fingertips finally finding a purchase.
After a lifetime I jerked to a halt, a scant inch from the edge. I shuddered. It doesn’t get much closer than that.
But flipping myself face-up, immediately the air was crushed from my lungs for the second time tonight. Boneless had landed hard on top of me, full force. In tortured agony, my throat and lungs searing, I fought to stay conscious and tap into what little was left of my remaining strength. My right leg was dead as mutton now, but it didn’t matter because both of my lower limbs were pinned. Only my right arm remained useful, but it felt locked in lead.
Kneeling astride me like a sick lover, Boneless’s strong hands probed beneath my body, gradually lifting me, shifting me forward. God help me, I knew what he was up to. Raw momentum hadn’t done the job. The crazy fool was trying to finish rolling me in.
Frenzied, I redoubled my efforts as I wrestled back, relying on the pure adrenaline rush of self-preservation. My eyes streamed tears, feeling as if they were about to sizzle and fry out of their sockets.
Suddenly the floor beneath my back fell away.
Boneless now had my whole upper body leveraged out over that hellhole, pushing hard to end it. My ears rang like gongs, and in the background I heard Sarah screaming hysterically; she’d finally found her voice. Whether it was for herself for me or for the whole nightmarish situation I didn’t know,
but deep in my mind the wild thought came up that if she could sing as well as she could shriek, she might give Celine Dion a run for her money.
Above me my adversary’s eyes glazed with grim blood lust, burning down into mine with ungodly expectation, his breath hot and foul and evil in my face. I felt him wedge one arm under the backs of my knees, and my heels lifted.
“In you go, John.” His voice was an insane rasp. “And mind that first step.”
My only response was cold, ungovernable rage. I had one last-ditch, winner-take-all move left, and it was a nasty one. Forming my right hand into a rigid flat spearhead, with a grunt I heaved myself to a sitting position. “You first.”
And I jammed those fingers straight into Boneless’s unsuspecting pale blue eyes.
They didn’t pop as I’d hoped, but having once been on the receiving end of a blow like that I knew the pain I’d just inflicted was right up near the top of the scale. He’d been unprepared for the savagery of my attack; clearly he was used to his victims being helpless, intimidated, and afraid. I wasn’t any of those.
Releasing me, instinctively he clapped both hands across his eyes and jerked up, bellowing. For a sickening moment I thought my scheme had backfired, and I was going to fall in. But grabbing the front of his shirt I violently pushed him off and away, and gripping the track again I managed to pull myself up and away from that putrid hole.
And then, of all things, my dear old Pappy’s voice rose up, reminding me of one of the few things he’d ever said I could actually use: “In a fight, John, they ain’t no rules. ‘Cause when it comes down to it, the meaner man always wins.”
True enough. And with Pap’s words echoing through my mind I rolled to my right, simultaneously hurling myself up and back, and with my left leg I ruthlessly kicked Boneless in his side just as hard as I could.