The Crimes of Orphans

by Obie Williams

  At least breakfast had been good. No, fucking fantastic. Rain had really dipped into the larder to make sure they were well fed for the day ahead, a home-cooked meal like none she’d ever had waiting for them as they all begrudgingly dragged themselves from sleep. Even Amelie had seemed impressed. Lita’s watch just ticked off the 12 o’clock hour and she still wasn’t hungry yet. But her head was starting to ache. Resorting to little more than maintenance drinking through the last few days’ traumas was wearing on her. She considered herself well past due for a bender.

  She was just considering taking the edge off with a swig or two from the bottle in her bag when she heard tires on the road below. She looked mournfully through the back window at her knapsack on the seat, then turned her attention to where a military-grade canvassed truck had just appeared from the woods. It released a low growl and a plume of smoke from its vertical exhaust pipe as it started ambling up the hill and around a bend to where the road through the cemetery passed by about a hundred feet in front of where Lita stood. As the truck came around that way, it pulled off the road to face her and the engine shut off, restoring the pleasant quiet of this secluded place.

  Lita drew her handgun and held it at her side. There was no point hiding it. If it was Christopher inside the truck, great, but if he’d sent anyone, they’d be similarly armed. It was just expected at meetings of this sort.

  Much as Lita half expected, it was not Christopher who climbed out of the truck, but two other High Palace guards, each carrying a large automatic rifle. The path between them and her ran between two rows of mausoleums until it opened up where the stout buildings ended twenty feet away. When the two men had reached the nearest of these buildings, Lita held up her free hand and they stopped in their tracks.

  “There’s a word I’m going to need to hear from you before we say anything else,” she said.

  “Ladybug,” the man on the right replied.

  She relaxed a little, but not entirely. Something didn’t feel quite right here. “Alright, now where’s Christopher?”

  “He couldn’t come without arousing suspicion,” the man on the right said. “He sent us to bring Ms. Lamoureux to a safe house.”

  “Yeah, that’s not how this is going to go down,” Lita said. “She’s plenty safe where she is right now. So what we’re going to do is set up another rendezvous, one that Christopher will be attending, and we’ll figure out where to go from there.”

  The two men exchanged a glance and the man on the left finally spoke up. “That’s not going to work for us. We’re under Christopher’s orders to secure Ms. Lamoureux immediately.”

  Lita shrugged. “Sorry, boys, but I’m just passing along Amelie’s orders not to bring anyone to come get her but Christopher or that other guy…”

  “What other guy?” the man on the right asked.

  “Shit, what was his name?” Lita said, her brow furrowing. She snapped her fingers a couple of times, as though trying to coax the name out of her head. “Harold? No…H-something…Henry?”

  “Henrik?” the man on the left asked. “That’s me.”

  “I thought it might be.” She was already raising her gun as she spoke, and she punctuated her sentence with a bullet to Henrik’s left thigh.

  He dropped his rifle as he fell to the ground, clutching at his wound with both hands and hollering in pain. His partner had his rifle aimed at Lita almost as fast as she retrained her own gun on him…but before either of them could pull the trigger, the mausoleum door to the man’s left flew open and Rain burst out looking like a homicidal marauder out of some desert wasteland.

  He was wearing his coat, of course, but also coveralls, a pair of falconry gloves, and a full welding helmet. When the man looked over and saw that coming for him, he recoiled and issued a surprisingly high-pitched shriek. Rain made quick work of him, grabbing the barrel of his rifle with one hand and clouting him in the temple with the other. As he fell to the ground, Rain ripped the rifle from his hands and took a few steps back.

  Lita, who suddenly found herself trying like hell to suppress a case of the giggles after what she’d just witnessed, approached quickly and snatched up Henrik’s rifle. While Rain unloaded his and tossed weapon and ammunition away in opposite directions, Lita put away her handgun and aimed her newfound toy at the guard who was not presently writhing and moaning in his own blood.

  “So he’s Henrik,” Lita said, “but I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Thomas,” he muttered. He propped himself up on one elbow and held his other hand to his head as he glared up at her.

  “Well, Tommy, I figure you’ve got about ten minutes to start heading towards the hospital with Henrik here before he’s liable to bleed out on the way, so what’s say you answer a couple of quick questions for me and then everyone can be on—”

  A loud crack echoed through the cemetery and a cloud of dust burst forth from the ground mere inches from Lita’s feet. She leapt backwards, lost her footing, and her free arm pinwheeled as she fell to her rear, though she somehow managed to keep hold of the rifle. Thomas was suddenly clawing at his ankle, probably reaching for a backup revolver. Lita moved to take aim at him, but then crack crack, two more dust clouds erupted right next to her, forcing her to roll away and cover her face.

  “Lita!” Rain’s voice came muffled through his helmet. Thomas had stopped trying for his weapon and was scrambling away for cover, so Rain dashed to Lita’s side and started tugging her to her feet. Then, with yet another crack, the faceplate on his helmet shattered, losing half its protective black glass. Rain cried out as he threw his arms over his face, and then it was Lita’s turn to pull his weight.

  “Jesus fuck, Rain, come on!” she screamed as she half-dragged, half-guided him towards the open door of the mausoleum he had been hiding in. Crack again, and Lita actually heard the air cut apart inches from her ear. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she yelled, still tugging Rain along, only a few yards away now. She shot a quick look over her shoulder and saw that Thomas was just getting back to his feet and he finally had that little ankle shooter in his hand. Lita issued a burst of automatic gunfire in his general direction, almost losing the damned rifle in the process with no second hand or shoulder to keep it steady. She couldn’t exactly aim, but she was close enough to send Thomas diving behind some gravestones. It was the last bit of time she needed to thumb the safety on the rifle and throw it inside the mausoleum, then grab Rain with two hands proper and hurl them both headlong into the protective embrace of six-inch-thick concrete walls.

  “Stay here!” Lita barked at Rain as she left him on the cold stone floor, drew her handgun, and turned back towards the door. But before she could get there, it slammed shut in front of her, cutting off all but a few meager slants of light filtering in through small, grated moisture vents high up near the ceiling.

  Outside, Henrik was sitting on the ground with his back pressed against the door. He had managed to hobble over there and get it shut, but when it started pushing back against him at intervals coinciding with the thud of Lita’s boot, he realized he wasn’t going to be able to hold it long. After the third such kick, just as Henrik was sure she was going to get out, Thomas was there, butting his shoulder against the door to hold it tight while he closed the hasp. There was no padlock—Rain had broken it when he and Lita had decided to use the mausoleum as a point of ambush—but the hasp had a turning eye mount that would keep it shut for the time being.

  “Hey, you alright, man?” Thomas asked, dropping to a crouch next to Henrik.

  “No!” Henrik spat. “That psycho bitch shot me! I want to get the fuck out of here!”

  “Don’t worry,” Thomas said, patting Henrik on the shoulder. “We’ll get you some help. Cleric’s guy up there covered our asses, so we just need to take care of those two and we can get gone.”

  “But Cleric wants us to—” Henrik began.

  “Fuck what he wants. He’s not here taking a bullet to the leg. I’m gonna go get those blast charges from th
e Construct work out of the truck and we’re gonna bring this whole building down on their fucking heads, get me?”

  “Yeah,” Henrik said, “sounds good.”

  “Good,” Thomas said, standing. “Stay put. I’ll be back in two—”

  Crack. Thomas dropped face-first on the ground with all the grace of a bag of rocks.

  “Tom?” Henrik said, blinking. “Christ, Thomas?” he said again, and fought against his pain to crawl over to the man. He shook him, trying to roll him over. Then, just as he was coming to the realization that he could see straight through a hole in Thomas’ head, there was a final crack, and his own lights went out.

  II

  From a small archway below a spire that topped a nearby mausoleum, Jonas wriggled free and hopped down to the ground, stretching the stiffness out of his muscles with a groan. While Lita had been there for two hours, he had been for nearly five. He took a pretty serious gamble by guessing where Lita would decide to set up for the rendezvous, but it turned out she hadn’t changed so much in the last five years. She ended up parking within ten yards of where he’d figured she’d go, and he only had to adjust slightly to get the perfect view through the scope of the sniper rifle he now had slung over his shoulder.

  What he hadn’t anticipated was that she would bring that bloodrat fellow—Storm? Snow? Some ridiculous name—who she had said was just some guy sleeping the day off in her apartment. Jonas had decided to wait and see how the vampire’s presence would make things play out and, as it turned out, his natural vulnerability had helped Jonas get Lita trapped more perfectly than he’d originally planned. He didn’t like not getting the chance to dust the freak, but that could wait for another time.

  Making his way across the grass towards the banging sound of Lita ceaselessly trying to escape the mausoleum, Jonas began whistling a tune he’d known too long to recall where he learned it. Some jaunty Old World ditty. An old-timer in a tavern had once told him it was called “Windy Change” or something like that, but Jonas didn’t care. He just liked the way it felt on his lips, especially when things were working out according to plan.

  Inside the mausoleum, Lita had stopped to catch her breath and rest her leg. That damned door was built solid. She was bent over, hands on her knees, and she glanced towards Rain, having to squint in the near-darkness of their stone prison. He had pulled the welder’s helmet off and was sitting up, rubbing the side of his face with one hand.

  “You alright?” She asked breathlessly.

  “I will be,” he said. His face stung like a bad sunburn, but there was no blistering. It would be all but healed by nightfall. “What the hell is happening out there?”

  “I’m not sure,” Lita replied. “Those two fuckers were holding the door closed, and I could hear them talking, but then…” she trailed off as she tilted her head to the side, listening.

  “Then what?” Rain asked.

  “Shhh. Hang on,” she said.

  Outside, Jonas had reached the mausoleum and ceased his whistling as he gave a light rap on the door. “Lita? You awake in there?”

  “Jonas, you piece of shit, let me the fuck out of here!”

  Jonas laughed. “I don’t think that would be in either of our best interests, Killer. No, I think that’s probably the best place for you and your boy toy for the time being.” Fishing into one of his cargo pants pockets, he retrieved the one thing he always carried with him, and which had come in handy more times than he could count. Unwrapping its protective cover of burlap and twine—which kept it both from poisoning him and knocking against his leg too hard—he retrieved a lead rod, about half an inch thick and five inches long. It slipped perfectly into the eye mount on the door’s latch, and he held it there with both hands as he closed his eyes and began to concentrate.

  “Jonas? Jonas!” Lita hollered. “Where did that mother fucker go?”

  Rain was behind her then, and she could hear him sniffing at the air. “Do you smell that? I think it’s melting metal.”

  “Jonas!” Lita screamed and booted the door again. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Stepping back to survey his work as he blew the heat off of his hands, Jonas nodded to himself at the malformed glob of cooling metal now holding the door shut. It wasn’t pretty, but it would hold. “Just keeping you out of trouble until this all blows over,” he hollered. “You should be thanking me.”

  “I’ll thank you with a bullet to your skull once I shoot my way out of here!” Lita yelled.

  Jonas chuckled. “Not unless you want bullets bouncing around in there with you. Even if you could manage to shoot through the door, you’d just set off the charge I’m putting out here.”

  “The fuck are you talking about?” Lita asked.

  “I told you, I’m just keeping you here until this is all over and done with. I’m not a complete dick. I’ll put a construction charge on this lock out here and set it for eight o’clock tonight. By then my employers will be long gone with the girl, and since they’ll think you’re dead, you’ll be free to blow town.”

  Lita glanced back at Rain worriedly. “And how do you expect them to find Amelie?”

  “Oh, come on, Lita!” Jonas scoffed. “How rusty have you gotten? Isn’t it obvious that we had people waiting by the main road for you to pass so they could backtrack to where you came from? They’ve got a damn good tracker, almost as good as Sti—” He jumped a little when the door rattled harder than before, causing the fresh weld to shift slightly.

  “Jonas!” Rain growled, “If I have to break out of here, I’m going to kill you in ways you’ve never imagined!”

  “Jeez, calm down, bloodrat. It’s not like this is any skin off your pale ass. Now quit knocking the door before you set this bomb off and blow us all to hell.” Jonas returned his attention to the cut of explosive he was wiring to a half-disassembled wristwatch. Apart from hitter and cleanup, another role Jonas occasionally provided for Cleric was demolitions. It wasn’t often called for outside of jobs that were meant to send a big message, but Jonas had a knack for it. He figured it went hand-in-hand with his natural abilities. Everything burns, he liked to say. You just gotta know what kind of fire to set.

  “Alright, Killer,” Jonas said as he finished up his work. “You two better get comfortable in there. Just be sure you’re clear of the door at eight o’clock.” He paused for a beat. “Might want to cover your ears, too.”

  “Jonas, I’m warning you,” Lita said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first fifty times. Tell you what, look me up sometime once you’ve ditched the neck sucker. Preferably after you’ve calmed down and gained some perspective on this whole situation.”

  “Jonas!” Rain yelled.

  “Jonas!” Lita echoed. “Tell me you at least halved the charge so you don’t liquefy our brains!”

  There was no response.

  “Jonas?”

  But he was already gone.

  III

  “Did you hear something?” Alex asked, looking towards the front door.

  “I…I don’t think so,” Amelie replied. She furrowed her brow as she followed Alex’s gaze across the room. They had spent the last couple of hours sitting in the living room, wending their way through topics of conversation, beginning with their shared frustration over being left behind and moving on from there. The subject at hand was places they had been or would like to go when Alex’s head shot up abruptly, his eyes like those of a deer who has sensed a nearby predator. The very look had stopped Amelie in the middle of her description of the Silver City Opera House, and now they were both silently listening to the house around them, waiting for any sign of whatever it was Alex had heard in the first place.

  Standing, Alex took up the combat knife that had been residing next to him on the coffee table and quietly made his way towards the window to the right of the front door. Its heavy black curtains were drawn, and Alex moved to the right side of the window to peer out without moving the drape. Outside, the grass in the clearing
shifted this way and that at the whim of a light breeze and a few bees were buzzing about here and there, but there was no other movement. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but Alex suddenly felt very sure that something was amiss.

  “Alex?” Amelie whispered. “Do you see anyth—”

  “Shhh,” he interjected. Then, a moment later, he looked over his shoulder at her and pointed towards the stairs. “Go,” he whispered.

  Amelie obeyed without hesitation. It was, after all, second nature for her to unquestioningly heed the orders of her protectors in times of peril. Following the plan that had been discussed before Rain and Lita left that morning, she hurried to the right side of the staircase and through the steel-reinforced basement door. Its weight slammed shut with such force that she jumped, and she had to fumble in the dark for a moment to find the two sizeable locks and slide them into place. A chill ran through her then as she realized just how dark it was in there. She knew there was no light switch up here at the top of the stairs; Alex had said there was a single hanging bulb with a pull chain down past the bottom step. She also knew she should feel her way down there and find a place to hide, but she couldn’t will herself to move away from the door. Instead, she pressed her ear against the cold metal and held her breath.