Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  He recognized her immediately.

  "Oh God," he moaned. He ran to her. Ellie's arms hung limply to the straw. Spirals of blood rolled down her forearm and puddled in her palm. Her face, too pale. Her eyes ringed with bruises.

  He wrapped his arm around her hips to hold her and struggled to untie the strap. Tears of fear and frustration streamed down his cheeks as he tugged and tugged at the knot until it finally loosened and Ellie fell to the ground in a heap. He rolled her onto her back and felt for a carotid pulse. It was so weak he could hardly feel it. Her skin was cool to the touch. Lowering his forehead to hers, he felt her whisper-soft exhalations on his lips.

  The majority of the blood was on her right arm. A clear plastic catheter had been taped onto the inside of her elbow. Before it could release another precious drop, Carver yanked it out of the vein.

  He had no idea where he'd discarded the flashlight or the weapon, only that neither were in his hands when he cupped them to collect the water from the blasted slow tap. Returning to Ellie, he poured the pathetically small amount of fluid past her lips.

  The straw was dry and sharp under his knees, poking into the skin.

  Carver looked up when the darkness closed in around him again and saw Jack run across the hall to the other room where Hawthorne and Wolfe were lowering another body from the ceiling. He rose from beside Ellie and walked tentatively across the corridor.

  The flashlights crossed a pair of ripped black slacks, then a hairy chest barely concealed by the tatters of a button-down shirt, before settling on a ghastly, pallid face smeared with blood.

  Locke.

  Hawthorne checked the man's pulse for what seemed far too long before giving a brisk nod.

  "Get them out of here," Jack said. "Right now."

  Carver was already back in the other room. He picked Ellie up and cradled her across his chest. Her head lolled over his arm. Wolfe was already ahead of him when he reached the corridor, gripping Locke under his arms and dragging him past the closed doors and toward what they hoped was a second exit. Jack and Hawthorne covered them from the front and back. The doors to either side remained closed. When they reached the end, Hawthorne disengaged a heavy lock and shoved the door outward, allowing the light to flood in.

  They emerged onto a stone ledge hidden by a cluster of firs and tangles of ferns, on the other side of which a grassy slope led down to a thin stream. Wolfe and Carver carefully rested their charges on the softest ground they could find.

  Jack and Hawthorne ducked back inside the tunnel.

  There were still four closed doors and they had effectively been separated.

  That had been the plan all along, hadn't it?

  "Stay with them," Carver said. "Don't let anyone near them. You hear me? Not even if he looks like me, understand?"

  He sprinted back toward the opening in the hillside, grabbing for a gun he knew wasn't there. There was still the snubnose on his ankle, but he couldn't afford to waste any time stopping to unholster it.

  Carver charged from the light into the darkness.

  He heard the squeal of hinges and the scrape of timber across concrete.

  And knew he was too late.

  IX

  Carver struggled to readjust to the darkness. All he could see was the pale glow emanating from the open doorways. Everything else was a uniform black.

  His footsteps were the only sound.

  He reached the first set of doors and turned right. The smell struck him first: the biological stench of blood and decay. Hawthorne's light played across a body sprawled on the straw. It shimmered with black fluid. There was blood everywhere, glistening from the floor and walls.

  Hawthorne walked closer, the fluid slapping under his feet. He squatted and directed the beam at the head. The shoulder-length hair was drenched, clinging to the skull and forehead. The texture of stubble on the cheek under all the blood confirmed it to be male. The lone visible eye stared blankly through the hay that obscured the rest of the face.

  Carver turned as Jack crossed the hallway from the room he had just cleared.

  Hawthorne rose and moved to intercept Jack. He placed his hand against Jack's chest to bar him from coming any farther and shook his head. Jack shoved Hawthorne's arm away, but Hawthorne kept his body between Jack and the shadowed form on the floor. Jack raised his flashlight to see around Hawthorne, struggling to illuminate the partially concealed face.

  Carver followed the beam and looked at the body again, wondering why Hawthorne was trying so hard to keep Jack away from it. He crouched and inspected the face. The light flashed across it almost like a strobe as the two men continued to jostle.

  He gasped and staggered backwards, nearly depositing himself on his rear end in the massive pool of blood.

  The face had been his own.

  Jack finally managed to get past Hawthorne and fell to his knees beside the body. His hands trembled as he reached out tentatively, recoiled, and then tried again, as though it would take his tactile senses to confirm what his eyes were telling him, a truth he was unprepared to accept.

  It was horrible to watch. A man who had spent every waking moment over the last three decades in search of his lost son, only to find him sprawled in a mess of blood.

  Jack made a wretched mewling sound.

  Carver wasn't sure what he was supposed to feel. He had only learned he had a twin brother that very day, and truly hadn't begun to process that information yet. The concept was still abstract. The man on the floor merely shared his face. Winn Darby, or whatever his name might have been, was a monster. He had killed more than twenty people that they could confirm. How many more corpses were out there waiting to be found? Carver felt pity for Jack, and tried to summon any emotion for himself. Sadness, loss, even rage, but instead only felt numb. He couldn't fathom what had happened unless his brother had been a loose end like the rest of them. When he realized they had all been brought together to be killed, he hadn't considered the possibility that his brother was part of that same equation.

  Tears shimmered on Jack's cheeks. His shoulders shuddered, and he finally laid his hands on the son he had never known.

  Hawthorne had to direct his flashlight away from the painful display of grief. The beam glimmered on the crimson floor. There was so much blood, so much....

  A flash of memory. Carver kneeling beside Ellie, the sharp straw pressing into his knees. The catheter in her arm. The hay on the floor. Jesus. The hay had been dry.

  "Oh, God," Carver whispered.

  He heard the squeal of a hinge from the hallway, the scraping of wood.

  Hawthorne turned toward the doorway, raised his weapon, and hurried into the corridor.

  Carver knelt and unholstered his snubnose. He caught movement from the corner of his eye, heard a muffled thuck...thuck...thuck...

  A deafening report, then another.

  Carver's ears rung as he spun to find the source of the sound.

  Hawthorne's flashlight beam jerked up to the ceiling as his body hurtled in reverse. He struck the frame of the doorway, hard, and collapsed to the floor.

  The scent of cordite filled the air.

  The only light was from the flashlights: one lying on the floor in the hallway, focused on a small section of the wall and the opposite doorway; the other on the floor beside Jack, pointed toward the rear wall of the cell. A blur of shadowed movement and something heavy fell on Jack's flashlight, darkening the room.

  There were only six bullets in the snubnose, and the Beretta was all the way down the hall in the wrong direction.

  The gunshots had come from the corridor.

  Jack had been ambushed right there in the room with him.

  He was bracketed. There was no time to think.

  Instinct took over.

  Carver threw himself sideways into the hallway, firing twice in rapid succession to at least clear his immediate path. Both bullets struck the wall. He landed on his side and slid through the pool of Hawthorne's blood on the floor.
>
  A bullet screamed past his ear and ricocheted with a spark from the concrete behind him. He flopped onto his back, sighted down the length of his body, and squeezed the trigger twice more. Beneath the ringing, he thought he heard the sound of something hitting the ground.

  He grabbed Hawthorne's flashlight and lunged to his feet, away from the doors, knowing the other man in the room would soon be on top of him. Through a haze of gun smoke, he saw the body ten feet deeper into the hallway, flat on its back. One arm twitched, pawing at its upper chest. The heels kicked at the ground, scooting it backwards in increments of inches.

  Carver whirled and directed the beam and the gun back toward the other end of the corridor. The light reflected from the blood on a man's face. His eyes were wide, the only part of him not covered in red.

  "Hi, Killer," he said. Carver just had time to register that the voice was much deeper than his own when he felt a sharp pain in his left side. Something cold and stiff prodded inside him.

  Carver fired and the man with his face flung himself to the right. The heat of the discharge merely dried the blood on his twin's left cheek and singed his hair while the bullet careered harmlessly down the hall. But at least whatever had been inside Carver had come out. The cold was replaced by hot, and then by searing pain.

  He swung with his left arm and connected with something forgiving. There was what might have been a crack of bone, and something metallic bouncing off cement.

  A fist struck him where the blade had entered and he nearly blacked out. He stumbled backwards and hit the wall. Something cracked deep down. The smell of blood, its taste in his mouth. The pain. The rage. He didn't just want to shoot the man. He wanted to tear him apart.

  The dark shape rushed at him and he fired. In the strobe of muzzle flare, he saw the body snap backwards and a spray of blood frozen in time behind.

  Carver heard a scrabbling sound and could barely discern the human form rising from the ground. He leveled the snubnose with the man's head and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  The man leapt toward him and hammered him in the midsection. They were falling and then the weight slammed down on his chest, knocking the wind out of him. His snubnose skittered away from him along the floor. He clawed at his brother's cheek, felt a swell of warmth against his fingertips. A fist impacted his gut and the pain drove him from his right mind. He grabbed a handful of hair and pulled the man's face closer to his. Before he knew he was going to do it, he bit into the flesh where his nails had opened the skin.

  Another punch to the wound in his flank and the weight rolled off of him. His brother was on his feet and running before Carver even reached his knees, struggling in vain to draw air.

  He couldn't allow him to reach the door at the end of the corridor or he'd never find him again.

  Hawthorne's sidearm was on the ground near where the flashlight had fallen.

  Carver grabbed it, pointed it at the silhouette of the man preparing to dart out into the forest, and fired. The body was launched forward and skidded across the stone outside into the bushes with a crash.

  He lowered the gun. Curls of smoke twirled through the corridor. He watched the shaking stand of ferns slowly still through the doorway.

  When he finally caught his breath, he limped down the hallway, holding his side. Blood sluiced through his fingers and began to trickle down under his waistband and along his thigh. Batting his eyes against the sudden increase in light, he stepped out of the hillside and onto the flattened rock. A spatter of blood crossed the ground in front of him, a wet red arrow pointing to the underbrush. There were dots and smears of blood ahead, just as he knew he was leaving behind.

  The same blood.

  Carver fell to his knees on the ground and started to shove aside the branches. The dead leaves were wet and marred by splotches of black, the detritus torn up. Plants were bent and broken leading out the other side, where a trail of blood led down the grassy slope through the forest.

  It disappeared when it reached the stream.

  X

  The corridor was now awash with light. Portable generators fueled the halogen fixtures mounted on tripods every dozen feet. They grumbled from outside on the rocky embankment. Special Agents passed him in a flurry of activity, hardly seeming to notice him any more than he noticed them. The tunnel looked dramatically different now that he could clearly see it, but that wasn't an improvement. Walls that appeared polished now displayed eggshell cracks and the wood of the doors looked like planks salvaged from a sunken ship. The cast-iron chandeliers were positively medieval. The concrete floors showed the cracks of an ever-shifting planet, and worse still, the crusted, rust-colored stains of suffering. He made sure not to step on any of these as he walked deeper into the mountain.

  Carver didn't look into the first room to his right when he passed. He had seen more than enough blood for one lifetime. After following it from Colorado to Arizona, and then to Washington, he had finally found it. He just hadn't expected it to be the blood of a father he had never truly known mixed with that of a long lost love and a suspiciously hairy CIA agent. Some of his own was in here too. As was his brother's. And Lord only knew how much had come before that. He could still taste it in his mouth, and what frightened him the most was what it had done to him. What it had awakened inside of him.

  He was no longer numb, but empty, incapable of feeling even the wound above his hip. His mind was still trying to rationalize what had transpired down here in the darkness. He wasn't sure that it ever would.

  A group of windbreaker-clad FBI forensics specialists parted when he approached, revealing the body on the ground where he had left it. Lucky shot to the left thigh; even luckier shot to the throat. He hadn't been able to bring himself to look at the man until now, as to see him minimized by death might somehow humanize him and give a pitiable face to the beast behind everything.

  Henrich Heidlmann, but no one would ever know. The man would prove to be a specter. His fingerprints and DNA wouldn't generate a match in any database. He would remain an enigma to the world at large, which thought a war most people hardly remembered had ended in a faraway land instead of under the very ground from which Starbucks and grunge music had sprung.

  Carver committed every feature to memory. It was his responsibility. The man would never be held accountable for the countless deaths he had caused, any more than Carver would be held accountable for his. And this was his penance. To know the visage of true evil, to seek it in every set of eyes he passed on the street.

  Heidlmann was so much smaller than seemed possible, especially for one who fancied himself a god. He was maybe five-foot nine. White hair, bald on top. Gunmetal-gray eyes. Teeth the color of weak tea. Blood covered his face, but there was hardly enough of it. There should have been more to at least intimate he had died slowly, badly, not merely the arterial spurts on the walls and the dried black amoeba around him.

  One of the agents said something to him, but the words were an incomprehensible jumble.

  Carver walked on and looked in the room where he had found Ellie. It looked like a stall in any barn. Only the gouges in the walls and the nearly imperceptible bloodstains on the straw remained to argue that it wasn't. That, and the Beretta and penlight he had cast aside, which he now returned to their homes beneath his jacket.

  Faces and bodies passed, but he no longer even looked. There was nothing more for him to see here. He doubted a time would ever come when the memories weren't still fresh in his mind.

  The rain had started to fall from the starless sky, beating down the foliage for keeping its secret for so long. From where he stood, he could see the dark stream, which mocked him with a continuous chuckle. Agents combed the woods, their barking dogs echoing throughout the valley. He already knew what they would find. There would be no body, only a trail of blood that would lead right back to him.

  * * *

  Wolfe looked like hell. Carver could see the dark hollows of his eyes even through the sunglasses
. He was waiting outside the emergency room at the University of Washington Harborview Medical Center with a paper cup of coffee when Carver arrived. They acknowledged each other without words, in the way only people who live through a harrowing ordeal together could.

  They entered the building side by side and passed through the hordes of the sick and injured. A freestanding sign advertising the flu clinic had already been changed to reflect the new dates, two weeks down the road. A boy in cleats and a green jersey held a visibly broken arm and sobbed into his mother's arms while the obese man beside her vomited into a plastic cup. Carver hoped they knew how lucky they were.

  An elevator took them to the intensive care unit. Glass-enclosed rooms surrounded a central nurses station. Several agents hovered around the desk, making everyone look nervous. Wolfe led Carver to the second room on the left and past a guard who made no attempt to stop them. The off-white curtains were drawn over the large interior window. A sliding glass door opened into a room lorded over by beeping and humming machinery. Carver recognized the rapid infuser from beside the steel table in the room at the house in Arizona. Locke was under the covers nearly to his chin, only his left arm exposed to grant access to the port in his elbow. He was diminished, but the color was slowly returning to his face and lips.

  Wolfe said something about the doctors offering no guarantees or timeframes, yet they were encouraged by the speed with which Locke was recovering and optimistic regarding his prognosis. He mentioned that badgers were notoriously feisty little devils, a comment for which Carver needed no clarification.