Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

Get up, she told herself. Get up. Now!

  The two men tumbled across the floor, grappling in reds.

  Iron Core was a good fighter. Strong, smart… He closed with Wyatt, grabbing the other man’s shirt for leverage. Wyatt broke the hold with an elbow across his face, then took Iron Core by his other shoulder and threw him to the floor. Iron Core rolled with the throw and came up with a brick in his right hand.

  Wyatt had a knife. A short silver combat blade. No, it was—

  Rachel blinked. A butter knife?

  “Get up, get up, get up…” she muttered, as she fumbled around in the scrap rubber to find the floor below. Her fingers brushed against something hard and stable: not the floor, but enough to put her back on her feet. She tried to clear her head of a new and suspiciously sloshy sound as she staggered towards the two men, drawing her gun on the way.

  Wyatt closed, the butter knife held point-out. Iron Core swung the brick towards Wyatt’s leading hand. There was a sharp tink! as the brick met the butter knife, then another and another, small sparks leaping into the air when the stone came in contact with the metal. Their free hands went from fists to claws and back again; they fought filthy, with eyes and genitals both up for grabs.

  They tripped over something that went skittering across the floor—the crowbar, just out of reach. The brick came up; Wyatt stabbed down. Iron Core roared as the butter knife bludgeoned its way through fabric and skin, and sank into the meat of his forearm. Wyatt put his foot into Iron Core’s shin and kicked off, diving towards the crowbar. He came up spinning, the crowbar in his hands.

  Rachel put a bullet in the ceiling.

  The two men froze.

  “Children,” she said. “Behave.”

  Iron Core glanced between her and Wyatt, his colors churning.

  “He’s thinking about rushing me,” she told Wyatt.

  Wyatt nodded and swung the crowbar. The curve of the hooked end cracked off of Iron Core’s jaw with the sound of a baseball tagged by the sweet spot of the bat. The militia man’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell backwards on the reeking garbage heap of a floor.

  Wyatt pulled the bar back for a second swing, this time with the business end of the hook aimed right between Iron Core’s eyes.

  “Don’t kill him!” she shouted.

  Wyatt lowered the crowbar. “Right,” he said to himself. The red bloodlust began to seep back into his sandalwood core like water soaking into dry earth. “Right. You need him alive.”

  “That, and you don’t have to kill people,” she said.

  “Maybe you don’t,” Wyatt said in a low voice. There was some bubbling as the bloodlust fought to reclaim his focus.

  “Gimme that,” she snapped, and took the crowbar from him. “Were you raised in a murderbarn or something?”

  The psychopath had the decency to look embarrassed.

  “Why are you here?” she asked. Sirens in the distance; the call she had placed to the MPD after Iron Core had clocked her had been given priority.

  He tilted his head towards the sirens like a hound.

  “Hurry up, man.”

  “After I tangled with this guy, I told the Hippos he was the real deal,” he said. “They had to stay and monitor the meeting. Ami sent me after you as backup.”

  There were too many implications stuffed into that package. Rachel shook her head. “Get out of here,” she snapped.

  Curious yellows appeared in his conversational colors.

  “Go,” she said. “Just go. There’ll be questions, and I don’t want you anywhere near First District Station. Hill will know who you are the minute he sees you.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

  “Go!”

  When he didn’t move, she sighed and went to collect the note that Iron Core had left for her.

  “Go,” she said again. The paper was old, thin from abuse and feather-light in her hand. She tucked it into the inner pocket of her suit coat for safekeeping.

  “What’s that?” Wyatt nodded towards the paper.

  “Bait.”

  She didn’t reply until the sirens turned onto their street. “He would have killed me,” she said. “You saved my life.”

  It hurt to admit it. Both of them knew what would have happened if Iron Core had swung that crowbar, but it still hurt to say it aloud. (Not as much as that crowbar would have hurt, true, it was the principle of the thing.)

  “I’m here to help OACET,” he said. It was the mildest of comments, but his colors were thick in smug pinks, with the purple of riotous laughter popping throughout.

  “It’s not funny, and don’t be such a smug asshole,” she snapped. “You look like a little girl’s bedroom.”

  “What?” Yellow confusion chased the other colors away.

  “Oh, dear Lord,” she muttered, as the first police car pulled up outside. “Last chance. Go.”

  “Your story will be stronger if you say you had help,” he replied. “Especially since you’re bleeding pretty bad.”

  “What?” Rachel was suddenly aware of the sticky mass of hair drying flat against her forehead. She touched it, and winced when she found the lump underneath. “Aw, damn it.”

  The police rushed in. Rachel and Wyatt stood, hands up, with Rachel shouting her bona fides until everyone’s colors turned blue. An ambulance was called for Iron Core: Rachel’s diagnostic autoscript put him with a broken jaw and a fairly serious concussion.

  One of the EMTs treated her head wound while she gave her statement to the officer. Straightforward stuff, and pretty much the truth: Rachel had thought something was hinky when the militia man was in the meeting, so she had gotten him thrown out and then followed him to see where he’d go. Unbeknownst to her, an old friend (*cough*) that OACET had hired to work security had tangled with the militia man in the hall, and when he spotted Rachel tailing him, he had followed along as backup.

  “Good thing he did,” Rachel said, as Iron Core was loaded into the ambulance on a stretcher. “Otherwise, that’d be me.”

  Wyatt, lurking about the EMTs as if waiting to make sure his friend was okay, was thoroughly pink and purple again.

  Once the cops had left them alone to manage the endless bureaucracy of modern crimefighting, she leaned towards Wyatt. “Is he military?” she said quietly.

  “You know he is.”

  “Ours?”

  Wyatt shrugged. “Somebody’s.”

  “You recognize the fighting style?”

  He shot her the mustardy yellow of scorn. “It’s not a movie, Peng.”

  “I’m a detective,” she sighed. “Systema? Krav Maga? Anything?”

  “You talk a lot.”

  “Blame it on the head wound.”

  Wyatt pushed off of the ambulance and disappeared into the crowd. No one moved to stop him. Rachel wondered if she should, then saw that OACET green and the soft browns of sandstone had moved into his colors: he was headed back to the old post office.

  She bummed a ride from the EMTs and rode shotgun with them to the hospital. Howard University Hospital, as luck would have it, and several members of the staff recognized her as the person who had torn up a good part of their landscaping the previous year. Rachel declined a thorough examination on the grounds of “Because I’m a cyborg, that’s why!” and said her own doctor would check her for a concussion after she made sure the prisoner was secure.

  The doctors weren’t happy about that. They made her fill out forms.

  By the time she was finished signing away her right to sue, Santino had arrived. He pulled her away from the desk and the two of them tracked down Iron Core. He had been moved to the Intensive Care unit, just in case—doctors didn’t take chances with concussions, as she had just notarized in triplicate.

  “Do me a favor,” she said, as she handed her partner the paper. “Take a photo of that and send it to Jason.”

  “Sure,” Santino said. He laid the paper flat on the reception booth and jiggled around with his phone until he got the ligh
ting right. “Whoa,” he said, as he checked the clarity of the photograph and started reading. “What’s this?”

  Rachel tried not to hate all things everywhere as her partner took ten seconds to skim something that had taken her five minutes to read, and had nearly gotten her killed besides. “He knows about me,” she said quietly, as Santino finished absorbing the balderdash in incredulous oranges. “He set this out as bait.”

  “Does he know you’re…” Santino left the last word unsaid, but his colors turned opaque over his eyes.

  “Maybe? I don’t think so,” she said. “But he knows it takes me forever to read, so he left this for me, gave me enough time to lose track of him, and then came at me as hard as he could.”

  “That’s a compliment, I guess,” Santino said. “Trying to take you out, instead of interrogating you.”

  “You can’t question an Agent,” she said. “Not without bringing the rest of OACET down on you like a load of dynamite.

  “Whereas we,” she said, as she took the paper back from Santino, “don’t have that problem.”

  Two uniformed officers were stationed outside of Iron Core’s hospital door. Rachel didn’t recognize them; the assault hadn’t happened in the First District. The cops knew her and Santino by sight, though, with Southwestern turquoise and cobalt blue moving into their conversational colors.

  “We’d like to talk to him,” she said to the first officer. “What’s his status?”

  “Conscious. Doctors cleared him. They’re gonna watch him for twenty-four hours to make sure his concussion doesn’t get worse, and then he’s off to Holding.”

  “Great,” Rachel said. “Hear anything from the FBI?”

  “You’d know before us.” He was a slight man with a core of soft, fluffy brown, and gave the impression of a determined teddy bear piloting a human suit.

  “Orders?” Santino asked them.

  “Hold the room, make sure he doesn’t leave, keep the media out,” the second officer replied.

  “Is he restrained?”

  The officers looked at each other and shrugged in oranges. “Don’t think so,” the first one said.

  “Oh, that’s a mistake,” Santino said. “This guy’s lethal. Can you get that started?”

  The second officer nodded and stepped away to make the call, and Rachel headed towards the door.

  The first officer moved to block her, but in the nicest of ways, his professional blues holding her back until he was sure she was aware of procedure. “This on the record?” he asked.

  “No,” Rachel said. “Detective Hill from First is going to handle the interrogation. I’m just his warmup.”

  “Hill?” the cop said, his colors brightening in excitement. “Sure. Just leave the door open.”

  “Right,” Rachel replied, before she cranked the knob and opened the door to the hospital room as hard as she could. The door slammed against the rubber bumper hard enough to shake the walls. On the bed, Iron Core winced in streaks of red pain that showed through the white bandages holding his broken jaw in place.

  “Headache?” Rachel said. “Yeah, me too. Even before you gave me this.” She pushed back her blood-soaked hair to show him the bandaged abrasion across her forehead.

  “Forgive me for monologuing,” she continued, “but it’s not like you can chime in and set me straight.” She accidentally kicked the foot of his bed as hard as she could. It set her own head to pounding, but it was worth it—even with the drugs in his system, Iron Core went bright red around his jaw.

  “So…” she flopped down in the armchair beside the bed, and dropped her boots on the arm that held Iron Core’s IV drip. The man in the bed made a noise like a whimpering kitten as a needle twisted somewhere. “Oh, sorry. So careless of me. Head wounds, you know how it goes.”

  Outside the door, the uniformed cop coughed once, politely.

  Rachel moved her feet to the floor. “Ethan Fischer,” she said, and his colors jolted towards yellow-white focus as he heard her use his name. “You were fingerprinted while you were unconscious. You’ve got no military record, which we both know is bullshit. You do have a criminal record that’s very suspicious, in that it’s got the right number of arrests but we haven’t found anybody who remembers arresting you. Or prosecuting you. And that time you spent in jail? Well, you have prisoner IDs and room numbers and all sorts of data, but so far you haven’t shown up on the security footage. At all. Our digital specialist still has a couple of years to process, but we’re guessing…”

  She looked over her shoulder to where Santino was standing in the doorway. Her partner said, “Nope.”

  “Yeah, we’re guessing nope,” she said.

  “Oh, right,” Rachel said, as Fischer’s colors took on some of the colors of confusion. “You’re dealing with cyborgs now. We move really fast when properly motivated.”

  “Future of law enforcement, you know,” Santino said. “Ideally, we’ll use the same legal processes as we have in the past. They’ll just be performed much, much faster.”

  “Yeah, I don’t want to be Judge Dredd. Judge, jury, and executioner? No thanks.”

  A flicker of red anger, and the twist of colors away from her Southwest turquoise that meant he didn’t believe her, oh, no, he didn’t believe her one bit.

  “Ah,” Rachel said, leaning in close. “There we go.”

  “Oh?” Santino asked. “Whatever do you see, Agent Peng?”

  “He thinks I’m lying,” Rachel said. “I don’t know if he joined up with Nicholson because he’s a true believer, but he definitely thinks I’m up to no good. I wonder if it’s just me, or all of OACET…

  “How about it, buddy?” She propped her chin on Fischer’s bed and stared at him with puppy-dog eyes. “Is it me in particular, with these freaky things I can do, or is it OACET in general?”

  “Can you tell the difference?” asked Santino from beneath the world’s worst poker face.

  “Ask him some questions,” she said. “I can figure it out from there. It won’t be admissible in court, of course, but this will never get to court, will it, buddy?”

  Fischer’s stare was hard enough to take on her own in a cage match.

  “Too bad we don’t know who he is,” said Santino, holding his hands palms up and pleading for divine assistance. “Well, who he really is.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel said, and stood to leave. “He’s covered his tracks pretty well. Too well for someone working alone. But however will we learn who those mysterious partners are?”

  She stopped and turned before she reached the door, and imagined she could feel a dirty trenchcoat swirl around her as she added, “Oh, just one more thing…” She reached into her pocket and retrieved the letter. “You gave me this,” she said. “A handwriting sample.”

  Fischer’s eyes widened as orange-yellow confusion crashed down on itself in sage green comprehension.

  “See, I’m guessing you’re military,” Rachel said. “From the way you fight, I bet you’re special forces. Ours, theirs… Who cares? Whatever. It means you’ve been part of the system for forever. Whoever set you up with this cover didn’t go through and delete every document you’ve ever signed, every form you’ve ever filled out…”

  He lunged.

  This time, she saw the attack coming—the yellow-white intensity of a man determined to confront her narrowed itself into a lance made from furious reds. The bed flipped sideways as he bore down on her, medical equipment raining down behind him as the tubes tore from his arms. Blood ran from his wrists and elbows, but still he came, focused on nothing but Rachel and the paper in her hand.

  She punched him.

  She expected Fischer to black out from the pain of a second hit to the face, especially a solid shot to his broken jaw.

  Then—too late—she realized she had never fought a special forces operative pumped up on painkillers before.

  Fischer rocked back on his heels from her punch, but didn’t go down. He recovered, twisting away to block her follow
-through before he sprang at her like a wounded tiger. She swore and went for her gun, but he had already closed the distance. Her breath shot from her as he crushed her against the wall, both hands wrapped around her neck.

  Santino and the officers were shouting at her; the cops had their guns out, Santino had his trusty Taser… There was no clear shot. Not at that angle. Not with him pressing against her throat with his full weight.

  Things were getting awfully sparkly around their edges.

  She finally got her gun out; he slammed his knee against her hand until she dropped it. She brought her own knee up; he was off-balance and she brought him straight down to the ground. Air—glorious air!—chased the blackout away, and she took a page from Hope Blackwell’s book by grabbing a handful of his hair and using it to slam his head against the floor.

  He rolled, one arm out and moving to throw her. As she fell, she reached out and grabbed the nearest weapon, and used her momentum to swing it at his skull.

  There was a sound like a plastic window cracking. Rachel turned the cheap flower pot over and began to bash it into Fischer’s face, dirt and begonia petals flying. He hissed, one hand across his eyes, as the edges of the pot began to cut his skin to ribbons.

  “Rachel, move!” Santino shouted, and she abandoned the flower pot to throw herself clear.

  Fischer lit up in whites as Santino’s Taser tagged him. The militia man seemed to hover on his knees for a mild eternity before collapsing face-first on the floor.

  Rachel pulled herself to her feet. Her headache was roaring in bloodthirsty vengeance, and the crowd of new arrivals—doctors, hospital staff, the stray patient who had suddenly gotten a ringside seat to a beating—who kept shouting at her wasn’t helping. She stood over Fischer and ran her diagnostic autoscript over his unconscious body.

  “What’s craniofacial dissociation?” she asked her partner. When he winced in yellows, she added, “No, don’t answer that. Just tell me if it hurts.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Good.” She gave in to the tickle at the back of her throat and coughed up potting soil. When she could breathe again, she knelt to gather up Fischer’s note and what was left of the begonias. The first went into her pocket, the latter to her partner, who started making the miserable noises of someone who has been handed a badly beaten puppy. “Sorry.”