From Oblivion's Ashes

by Nyman, Michael E. A.

  And suddenly, for the first time in her life, Angie knew hate.

  With filthy wrists, she wiped her eyes, but the angry tears kept flowing. Why had these people done these things to them? They hadn’t done anything to deserve this. They’d only wanted to save people, to help others in trouble, at the risk of their own lives. And now, here was Jackie, one of the nicest, funniest people Angie had ever met, and she-

  WHUMP!

  Angie was unable to finish her thought as something landed on her from above, slamming her to the ground.

  Like an angry cat, she twisted, getting her hands under her in one spasm of muscle. The rage burned in her like nuclear fuel, despite her surprise. She shrieked under the impact, her fingers curling like claws.

  But a hand grabbed her by the hair and smashed her face down to the floor with jarring force. The weight on her back pushed her down, riding her like a bronco. A knee landed hard on Angie’s elbow, pinning it, as the hand lifted her head up again. Straw and cow feces clung to her cheek as the person holding her slammed her face back down, hard enough to make stars dance in her eyes.

  Something hard and sharp pressed against the corner of Angie’s eye, and all her struggles ceased. Her captor twisted the handful of hair, holding Angie’s head immobile, even as the knifepoint gently kissed an eyeball.

  “I thought we had an understanding,” murmured a voice by her ear. “You were supposed to be a good little girl, and I wouldn’t cut out your eyes. Do you remember? And now, here you are, making my life miserable.”

  “Me?” Angie shrieked, her anger channeling fear into words. “What about you? Jackie’s dead because of you!”

  Pain drove through her outrage like a spear as Amber’s knife cut the skin around the eye, and despite her despair, she screamed.

  “This isn’t about me, sweetheart,” Amber answered in a silky voice. “If it was, I’d answer that I cut my own mother’s throat a year ago, so why in the world would you think I’d lose any sleep over shit that’s happened to you?”

  Angie’s feeling of rebellion collapsed as the blood from her cut seeped into her eye. “You… you killed your own mother?”

  There was a brief pause before Amber answered.

  “She was always a drunken bitch anyway. Drank her weight in booze every day and lost her biker boyfriend because of it. Eight years, up in smoke because she tried to take a broken bottle to his neck when he got sick of her shit. And she blamed me for getting dumped, just because his asshole-ness made a pass at me once. As if I’d let his greasy hands anywhere near me.”

  The knife, which had eased off slightly, returned with added pressure.

  “No!” Angie said, suddenly afraid for her eye.

  “The thing is,” Amber continued, “none of that matters, really. We had an agreement, didn’t we, honey? And you…”

  The voice in Angie’s ear had all the pleasure of a kitten’s purr.

  “... you broke it,” she said. “Now, Stan needs you whole, and Stan’s the man, as far as I’m concerned. So I won’t be taking both of your eyes. But I’m sure he’d agree, you don’t need both, right? And you need to be taught a lesson.”

  “No,” Angie pleaded as the knifepoint began to dig its way down. “No, please!”

  “Shh. Relax,” Amber said soothingly. “Trust me, sweetheart. It’s not all bad. A lack of depth perception will be a gift once these boys start taking an interest in you. Just hold still and be brave. You’d be amazed at how easily these things pop out.”

  “S-s-stop!” Angie wailed, unable to move as the knife dug deeper.

  KRAK!

  Angie heard a sound like two rocks colliding, and the knife pulled away abruptly.

  KRAK!

  Again, she heard the noise, and Amber made a sort of gurgling wheeze. Suddenly, the weight on Angie’s back fell away.

  Angie rolled over and looked up to see Jackie, standing over Amber like the spirit of vengeance with the salt lick in her hands, glaring down at the stunned woman with terrible eyes.

  “Just give me a reason, you psycho bitch!” she screamed. “Just give me one fucking reason! You’d be amazed at how easily these skulls pop open! Trust me, it’s not all bad! A lack of teeth will be a gift once the boys start taking an interest in you, right?”

  Amber rolled over onto her back, waved her knife weakly for a few seconds. But then the knife slipped from her fingers, her eyes seemed to roll back in her head, and she stopped moving. A small trickle of blood escaped her nostril.

  “Fucking bitch!” Jackie snarled, throwing the bloodied salt lick aside.

  “Jackie!”

  Angie was on her feet and hugging the woman.

  Jackie received the hug like a quarterback absorbing a tackle, holding on to Angie for support.

  “It’s okay,” she said, sounding drunk with pain. “I’m okay. Adrenalin gave me a bit of … I can’t… it’s good… to see you, Angie.”

  “I’m so glad you’re alive,” Angie said, crying even as the pain from Amber’s cuts tore at her. Some of the skin around her eye felt loose, lending a certain wobble to her eyeball that frightened her even as she cried. But Jackie was alive, and for a moment, nothing else mattered.

  “I’m glad too,” Jackie said, holding her away at arms length. “Now, let’s get out of here. I have an appointment with Dr. Burke, I know that much. You too, honey, by the looks of it.”

  “We have to be careful,” Angie whispered. “Danny is still out there, looking for us. He went to look for us in the place I used to get in, but-”

  “Got it,” Jackie said, sagging a little. “Just lead the way, Angie. I’ll try to keep up. But promise me that you’ll keep going if I can’t. My best chance to live comes if you get yourself out of here, okay?”

  Angie grabbed Jackie by the hand and looked into her eyes.

  “I’m not leaving you now, Jackie,” she said. “Not now. Not ever.”

  Jackie smiled sadly.

  The two of them managed to make it out into the main aisle, leaving Amber lying flat on the floor of the cow pen.

  “Which way do we go?” Jackie asked, looking dazed.

  Angie bit her lip, glancing across the distance to the second floor access point that she’d entered when she’d first discovered the slaughterhouse.

  “The way I came in is guarded,” she said. “And we don’t know who else is in between us and the way out. But I overheard them say they had guests at the front door. They were sending everybody they could spare that way.”

  Jackie considered this news. “So we want to go the other way, right?”

  “No!” Angie said excitedly. “If they’re responding with everything they have to someone at the front door, that means that Marshal and Uncle Luca are there. Believe me, Jackie. There’s nowhere safer for us to be than with them. If we can get to them, then we get free. I’ll bet they brought Albert there as well.”

  Jackie hesitated for a second, and then nodded.

  “All right, Angie,” she agreed. “We’ll try it your way.”

  Angie turned to open the gate but stopped. Instead, she looked down at Amber, still lying unconscious on the straw-covered, concrete floor. Angie touched the still open cut by her eye, then knelt down and retrieved the bloodstained knife from where Amber had dropped it. Without explanation, Angie tucked the six-inch blade into the pocket of her sweater, stood up, and turned her back on the fallen woman.

  Their spirits sank as soon as they stepped out into the main aisle.

  Coming around the corner just seconds after they exited was Danny, flanked by two black men carrying weapons. They spotted the two women instantly.

  “There you are,” said Danny, his face breaking into a grin as he hustled over. The two men with him looked at each other, their faces unreadable, then followed, weapons ready. One held a shovel, the other, a long spear-like weapon.

  Angie stared at them as they approached, too tired to run and anyway, she wasn’t about to leave Jackie behind. Instead, she pulled out t
he knife she’d taken from Amber, and stood in front of Jackie, who was clearly too sick to run and barely able to stand.

  Danny laughed as he came up to within a few feet. He ignored the knife, looking at his companions, then back at Angie and Jackie. “Shit! We’ve been looking all over for the two of you. And here you are!”

  “If you come close,” Angie said, holding up the knife in a hand that trembled with fear, “I’ll cut you. I will. I promise you, I will.”

  “I don’t think so,” Danny said. “Look over at your friend and see what happens to people who use weapons on us. Do you want that to be you? Just hand me the knife, little girl, and we can still be friends.”

  But Angie did not obey.

  Again, Chugger lifted Luca up off the ground in an attempted suplex, trying to bring the fight to the ground, and again, Luca’s feet found their balance, resisting the move and staying upright.

  “You’re going down,” Chugger grunted, gathering himself for another attempt.

  “Fuck you,” Luca wheezed. “Try going down on this.”

  He timed it perfectly, synchronizing his movement with Chugger’s. As Chugger once again lifted Luca off his feet, Luca twisted to throw himself forward. The combined force drove his head straight into Chugger’s nose and mouth.

  A couple of teeth flew from the impact.

  The unexpected move startled Chugger more than it slowed him, and he lost his balance for just a couple of seconds, lowering Luca back to the ground. Only a few seconds, but it was more than enough. As Chugger lowered him, Luca brought both his feet together in a powerful, double-heeled foot stomp onto Chugger’s right foot.

  Chugger howled in sudden pain as bones broke in his foot, and spastically, he released his bear hug on Luca.

  Gasping for breath, Luca staggered free.

  “Fuck!” Luca huffed, drinking in the oxygen and finding his bearings. “I gotta… fucking hand it to you, Jabba… you ain’t no fucking pushover.”

  Looking invulnerable to pain, Chugger attacked again, pressing to regain his advantage, but Luca’s right hand was a blur as it slapped Chugger’s grasping left hand away. Then it was the other hand slapped away as the fat convict lurched forward in a clumsy attempt to get his hands on Luca again.

  With surprising quickness and grace, Luca stepped around Chugger’s attack and delivered a lightning-fast punch to the man’s kidney.

  “Then again...” Luca continued.

  He ducked under a backhand that came around in a blur. He came back up like a boxer and drove two powerful punches into the man’s exposed upper ribs, just under the armpit.

  “... you got all the finesse of a bull in a china shop.”

  He reached out and caught another wild, grasping roundhouse with both hands. Pulling the arm outwards and slightly down forced Chugger into a brutal clothesline that savagely snapped his neck backwards. Gurgling in the back of his throat, Chugger flailed his hands, trying to grab at the arm, but a strategic kick to one knee sent him crashing to the floor.

  “Get up.”

  Luca stood over him, fists clenched.

  With a wild grin and a roar of challenge, Chugger came to his feet like an upward-moving avalanche, but a stiff-fingered jab to the throat wiped the grin off his face, stopping him in his tracks. What followed was a series of devastating, heavy-fisted punches which hit with the force of surgically targeted cinder blocks. Under the sheer savage power of Luca’s assault, Chugger took a step back and tried to cover up, holding his arms up to guard his head.

  Like a man picking fruit, Luca used his right hand to grab one of Chugger’s wrists, twisting it around like a doorknob, then seized the elbow with his left, locking him into an arm bar. Chugger tried to pull away, but with a horrible wrench, Luca forced the him to bend over forwards. Then, with a look of contempt, he let go of the arm, stepped forward, and almost gently took hold of the back of Chugger’s head in both hands.

  Crunch!

  The onlookers flinched as Luca drove a brutal knee into Chugger’s face, breaking cartilege and bone in a spray of blood. Crunch! Again, the knee hit. Crunch! With the third knee, Chugger was down on the ground, stunned, trying to scrabble to his feet and falling down again.

  “I used to be like you, Chugger,” Luca said.

  He kicked a knee out from under the man and sent him back to the floor.

  “I used my size and strength to win my fights, and it usually worked. But then my Pop sent me to study some martial arts. Mostly, it was supposed to teach me some kind of anger management, you know what I mean? And it worked! You gotta be able to contain and control your anger if you’re gonna focus it properly.”

  Chugger writhed on the floor, half-blind with blood and his face a mess of twisted bone and flesh. Amazingly, however, he was still trying to fight, rolling over and locating Luca by the sound of his voice. Blindly, he grabbed for Luca’s leg with both hands.

  In response, Luca kicked him hard in the ribs with his free leg. Chugger howled in pain, recoiling from the attack and no longer grinning.

  “The problem is, Chugger, I got a whole lot of anger to focus right now. More ‘n I’ve felt in a while. I don’t kid myself. I know I’m not a good person. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my time, but I had my standards.”

  Through the haze of blood and fear, Chugger spotted his fallen machete and scrambled towards it. Before he could reach it, however, Luca kicked him behind one knee, and he dropped like a stone. Casually, Luca sent the machete skittering across the floor with a sweep of his foot.

  “The things I did, I did to people like us, understand? They were people who knew the game they were playing and knew that someday, there’d be a price to pay. We all know it, even me. It was always just a matter of time before I got a bullet to the back of the head. Call it the mafia, early-retirement plan.”

  Chugger rolled away from him with frantic energy and came dazedly to his feet. His eyes were wide with fear now, in the midst of his hamburger face, and his hands were out in front of him defensively.

  “But like I said,” Luca said, approaching Chugger like he didn’t have a fear in the world, “I had standards.”

  His voice rose to a shout, as he unleashed a thunderous backhanded on Chugger, which snapped the man’s head around like a whip.

  “I didn’t fucking need to do shit just to prove that I was a man. I never treated people like animals, or beat the living shit out of someone weaker than me just to get my fucking rocks off. Even when I got so fucking angry, I couldn’t see straight - even then Chugger! - I was never a sick fuck like you.”

  Luca grinned like a crocodile, showing teeth.

  “For example, at a time like this, when the fight was pretty much over, I’d normally tell the guy to stay down, you know? Unless I was supposed to whack him, I didn’t see any point in taking things further. And you know, I’d end this fight right now, Chugger, except for two things. First thing? I’m still angry, and I feel like I still got some venting to do. But the second thing, even more important than that…”

  He leaned back casually to avoid a round punch that came with blistering speed, then ducked under a follow-up punch. Either blow, had it landed, would have taken his head off.

  When he came up again, it was with a devastating uppercut. His right fist shattered Chugger’s jaw and sent the big man over backwards, flat on the floor.

  “... I fucking hate rapists!”

  Luca hovered over Chugger’s fallen body, and his words seethed through gritted teeth. “You’re the fucking scum of the Earth, and when I think about Angie being left alone with you motherfuckers…”

  It was then that Chugger made his worst mistake. His jaw shattered, his eyes and nasal cavity blocked up with blood, he saw a way to lash out at the man above him, and he took it without thinking.

  Grinning up at Luca with a mouthful of blood and broken teeth, he sneered.

  “Angie? Ggrchh. Duh ‘ittle girl? I rabed her firsh, you fugger! ‘Ooo hear me? I rabed her an’ rabed he
r, again an again! ‘Ittle ‘itch cried duh hole dime, but I ‘ook her, an’I held her down…”

  Marshal, who’d been watching Stan with the cold, reptilian passion of an uninvolved observer, shook himself awake at this point, as Luca’s eyes flashed with murder.

  “Luca!” he shouted, but it was too late.

  With a cry of rage, the big Italian seemed to just collapse downwards onto the fallen Chugger, like a falling hammer or a roof caving in. One second he was standing over the man, and the next, he was sitting on his chest, driving punch after punch into the man’s head. There was no awareness, no act of sentience. The fury had exploded in Luca, scattering all his restraint, and in a matter of seconds, Chugger was dead, his face a pulped mass of red and splintered paste. Still, Luca hammered away at the man, his fist slamming down into the dead man with the sound of smacking meat.

  The room was absolutely silent as Luca finished. He stood up, still glaring down at the dead man beneath him, and pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and began to fastidiously clean the blood and meat from his hands, knuckles, and rings. Still angry, he gave the corpse a kick as he worked.

  “You killed Chugger,” Brock said, staring down in disbelief with his assault rifle practically dangling from its straps. “You killed Chugger... with your bare hands!”

  “Jesus Christ,” Stan breathed, looking pale.

  “Marone!” Vito murmured.

  Down below, the circle of criminals surrounding Marshal and Luca grew wider.

  Luca paused in his cleaning at the sound of Italian profanity, and squinted up at the man on the catwalk.

  “Vito?” he called out. “Fucking Vito Vitale? Is that you?”

  The man up top looked startled. “Yeah,” he said. “Who’s asking?”

  Luca resumed cleaning. “Thought your crew ran out of Niagara Falls, running fuckin’ contraband across the border.”