Born To Bleed (The Roger Huntington Saga, Book 2)

by Ryan C. Thomas

  “Such a beautiful catch,” Belle said.

  I did the only thing I could think to do. With my one good arm I put my hand under the lip of the table and shoved.

  Let’s get this straight right now: I am not a superhero. I love superheroes, love comics, love movies, but I know the difference between the real world and make-believe. Lena 12 was my first foray into comics and I’d chosen to make her a space assassin rather than a superhero with alien powers because Skinny Man had proven to me that heroes never come to rescue you. Batman or Spider-Man or Superman do not swoop in and save the day when you’re faced with death, or worse, torture. You’re at the mercy of your wits or your captor’s ineptitude. If you’re lucky, you’ve been taught survival skills and have the wherewithal to apply them in stressful moments.

  But here’s the thing. When I grabbed the edge of the table I felt stronger than I ever had in my whole life. Inhumanly strong, like superhero strong. You read stories sometimes about people who show incredible feats of strength when put in deadly situations--they lift cars, break down doors, jump really high. Call it an abnormal burst of adrenaline but it works. It’s like having a superpower.

  I grabbed the edge of the table and flipped it over with one arm. It came crashing down onto the sickos sitting across from me, Victoria still strapped underneath, now pinned between the table top and the bodies of the dinner party trying to eat her. At once everyone jumped back from their seats and yelled, creating a small mob that brought confusion and zigzag activity. I didn’t have time to hear what they were saying, because I was slamming my already-mashed up head back into the goon behind me, kicking myself up and backwards with all my might and taking us both down to the ground.

  I felt something slam into my side and heard one of my own ribs crack, almost passing out from the agonizing pain. Someone was hitting me with something metal, maybe one of the guns or a lead pipe. Who knows? It hurt but I was in a blind rage and pushed it aside.

  Underneath me the goon grabbed my neck and tried to knock me out but I reached out and found his gun, his finger still on the trigger, and squeezed. Bullets cracked and people screamed, suddenly running away from the fight.

  I was lifted off of the goon by two others, but as I felt myself hoisted into the air, the gunman on the floor shot at me, completely missing, and hit the goon on my right in the face which tore open a hole under his eyes large enough for me to put my fist in. All three of us fell sideways, Marshalll screaming to “stop shooting!” and I landed right on the faceless man’s gun, squeezed the trigger and hit the goon on the floor in the chest.

  The white-haired woman, in her effort to get out of the line of fire, tripped and fell on top of us, her scaly arm fat covering my face.

  “Stop shooting! Everybody stop firing!” Marshalll’s voice somewhere in the room.

  I heard the stampede around me, saw shiny black shoes and high heels running by my face, heard the table being moved, heard chairs squeaking and falling, Ben shouting something, a gun cocking.

  I fired again, making the third goon jump off of me, and leapt to my feet. Ben aimed at me through panicked dinner guests, and I ran to the bar, automatic weapon dangling upside down in my hand.

  Ben’s bullets skimmed my hair and hit the giant mirror behind the bar as I leapt over the bar top and landed on the floor behind it, thankfully on my right arm, though the pain was still damn near unbearable.

  “Stop fucking firing! Everybody calm down! Ben, just kill him and be done with it,” Marshalll said. He had changed his mind about having a talk with me. That can happen when you’re dealing with party crashers like myself, I guess. It was fine with me. If I was going to die, I wasn’t going to ever be tortured again.

  More bullets sprayed the area above my head, raining shards of jagged mirror down on my back. I crawled at warp speed to the other end of the bar, back near the hallway entrance to the stairs. Ben’s running footsteps came my way. I reached the open end of the bar and dove out just in time to get a shot off at him as he hit the bar top where I’d jumped over. My hand went wild under the frantic recoil of the gun and caused my ribs to flare up in agony. His ankle exploded outward in a mist of red and he crashed into the bar’s front, aiming at me over spilled drinks.

  I lunged at the doorway and rolled into the hall just as the jamb was chewed up by a succession of rounds.

  There was pain throughout my body the likes of which I’d never experienced. There wasn’t a muscle or bone that didn’t throb when I moved it. My entire face was so swollen now it hurt to blink.

  Three people were in the hallway: the judge, Marshalll’s wife, and at the far end, standing halfway in another hallway, the bald man in the black suit from the basement.

  “Obnoxious little shit,” the judge said. “You think you can get out of here alive. We’re going to rip you to scraps and let you die for eternity at the feet of Veles.”

  “Praise him,” said Marshalll’s wife, her hair now in strings over her sweaty face.

  I’m not cold blooded, but the gory stains on the judge’s chin reminded me of how he’d eaten that girl downstairs with such glee that I knew he had to die. He was a judge for crying out loud, and would weasel out of any conviction they slapped against him. In fact, much as this knowledge and the thought of shooting unarmed people disturbed me, I would have capped all three of them right then and there to ensure proper justice if the man in the black suit hadn’t nodded to me. Just like before. It was a slight nod of approval, strangely out of place, and I had no idea what it meant. It confused me for a second too long and gave Ben enough time to limp out of the doorway at the other end of the hall, gun raised.

  With a roar of pure rage, he shot and hit Marshalll’s wife in the hip. She screamed and spun sideways like a Tilt-A-Whirl and I threw myself down the stairs, crashing into the wolf statue, leaving wide smears of my own blood on its cloven feet. Ben had the high ground now, an advantage that would allow him to blindly shoot down and probably hit me, so I bolted down the next flight of stairs and back onto the ground floor.

  He didn’t come after me right away, maybe stopping to check Marshalll’s wife, maybe afraid I would have a bead on him. There was too much screaming and commotion going on up there to be sure.

  I needed to hide, to set up an ambush. Problem was, I couldn’t leave, not with Victoria still strapped to the table in the Observation Room.

  She’ll be dead by the time you get back to her, Roger. You should have shot her and put her out of her misery. But then you never do save them, do you? You love to see them die. You’re brutal and you love it.

  Skinny Man. Leveling up my psychosis to the point I knew I was going to have to check myself into a funny farm if I lived. Dr. Marsh’s calming exercises weren’t going to do me any good right now; I was too scared and overcome with shaking, in too much pain and feeling lightheaded.

  “You’re fucking dead, kid! You hear me! You’re a dead man!”

  It was Ben, he was finally coming down the stairs, and with him the footfalls of the two other goons that were still functioning. I shambled my broken body back through the collection of rooms I’d traversed earlier, back to the dining room with its metal operating table now cleaned of that girl’s blood, back to the hallways leading to the kitchens.

  It was a game of cat and mouse and I couldn’t think of a way to win. Ben would know shortcuts, passages, tricks to surprise me. I needed a plan.

  I needed to hide.

  CHAPTER 19

  Back to my video game strategy: there are a collection of games with pretty good AI for the bad guys. In them, if you draw attention to yourself it’ll bring out more enemies trying to kill you. I was in a real life video game now and had to think like a player. I only had to worry about three goons, but shooting one, if he was alone from the others, would give away my location, would draw the others. I had to ask myself just how badly I wanted to survive, and what I would do to ensure that. Could I be homicidal enough to take a man out silently with just my bar
e hands?

  I’d done it to Skinny Man, had taken an ax to him in the end. It scared me to know I could do it again now. I’m not supposed to be okay with killing people, which is what I always told Dr. Marsh, but such thoughts don’t faze me anymore, and it’s why I knew therapy was never going to cure me.

  I slinked into a small room with a large fish tank against the wall near the door and a television at the far end, some kind of recreational den. There was a stack of opened mail on an end table, and a letter opener on top of it all. I picked it up and switched the gun to my bum arm, just so I’d still have it if I needed it.

  I hid down next to the fish tank, which was sitting on a big black cabinet, and waited. I felt my ribs and rubbed my fingers over the swollen lump there. For a few seconds I just listened, but I heard nothing, and I worried my predators had all gone back up to help Marshalll resume dessert. The tank’s filter bubbled noisily near my head, and I watched the fish swim lazily while trying to catch my breath and fight the pain overtaking my entire body. It was a saltwater tank, filled with bright clownfish, anemones, angelfish, and what looked like a tiny shark. It reminded me I had a beta fish back home. If I died, who would feed it?

  Why did I even care?

  Through the water I saw a shadow enter the room.

  It stopped in the doorway, looking in. The lights came on, making my pupils hurt. I felt exposed, grit my teeth, wondering if he could see me through the tank somehow.

  The goon stepped toward the couch, tentatively heading for a closet opposite me. He raised his gun and opened the door, ready to tear whoever was inside to ribbons.

  I was out of my hiding spot in a flash, stepping onto the coffee table, jumping off, seeing the gunman spin around at the noise, a startled look in his eyes. He brought his gun up towards me.

  I jammed the letter opener into the side of his neck, just below his ear. He went rigid, mouth falling open, gun trying to find me. I grabbed it and shoved it down, praying he didn’t fire, pushed us both into the closet and let the door fall closed behind us, feeling him spasm against me. I twisted the letter opener and jammed it in further until the hilt was buried in deep, heard it scrape the low bones of his skull.

  In the darkness the coats wrapped around us and he started to gurgle, his breath exhaling into my mouth and eyes. I let go of the letter opener and threw my good forearm against his Adam’s apple and rubbed and pressed as hard as I could. His windpipe cracked and popped.

  He slumped down, myself on top of him, both of us on our knees with me still trying to break everything in his throat. He was just about dead when bullets tore lighted holes in the door above my head and slammed into the back wall of the closet where’d we’d been standing a second ago. I spun around, testicles retreating up into my stomach. The closet door was wrenched open behind me, and without thinking I fired with my wounded arm. The sound of the gun shots made me temporarily deaf, but I saw the other goon fall backwards onto the coffee table, breaking it under his weight.

  I screamed bloody murder, not because I’d just killed two men but because the pain in my arm was unearthly and I thought I was going to faint. So much so I dropped the gun and cried as I crawled back out into the room. Absentmindedly I leaned against the couch for a second and felt the baseball hat still on my head. Somehow that made me feel a little better and gave me strength. The struggle in the closet had opened up my gunshot wound even more and the blood was running hot and fast around the makeshift dressing. I tore the shirt bandage off, yanked an old sweater from the closet and wrapped it around the gaping hole, tied it as tight as I could, hoping to cut off the blood somehow. It was either that or pass out. Probably it did nothing but it gave me a psychological boost.

  Ben would be coming now, would have heard the gun shots for sure. I needed a new hiding place stat.

  Back in the hallway, I made a beeline toward the kitchen then thought twice about it. There was nowhere to hide in there except cupboards and the pantry and unless I wanted to go outside or downstairs--where’d I’d be lost and blind--I’d be trapped.

  Instead I made my way back toward the dining room that had hosted the night’s earlier scene of death and sorrow. It was a big room, again with two open entrances on either end, and would afford me the ability to retreat if I had to. I squatted down behind a couch, looked over it and gauged my surroundings. When I looked up I saw the giant chandelier above me and the wraparound balcony with the bookshelves and struck onto an even better idea. I could go up there, throw one of the books from the bookshelves down to where I was now, attract Ben, and shoot him when he entered.

  It was a better plan than anything I could think of at the moment.

  So I was up there in a flash, using the stairs off the small sitting room, emerging through the upstairs guest room, and snagged a heavy leather-bound tome from the closest bookshelf. It was a copy of collected works by Raymond Chandler, probably some first edition that was worth more than my car, not that it mattered.

  Aside from the guest room behind me, there was only one other room all the way around the balcony on the other side. I could see into its open door to another guest room, which at least gave me a heads up if anyone was coming at me that way.

  The seconds ticked away as I listened silently for sounds of Ben nearing the room downstairs. I could still hear the faint sounds of yelling and shouting from the rooms above me, probably Marshalll’s wife screaming in pain. If only Ben had hit her in the head I’d at least have one less psycho to worry about.

  For the first time I noticed all the weird shit in the room beneath me, all the little figures of one-eyed wolves and decorative daggers and headless women and scenes of sacrifices. Even the lampshades told stories of mothers and children being ripped to shreds by various demons. The grandfather clock in the corner had a swinging sword for a pendulum. The Persian rug wasn’t Persian at all, but showed images of dogs and wolves and snakes wearing crowns and climbing trees. All of it looked very old and very expensive.

  “Antique Road Show for the insane.”

  Just then I heard shuffling footsteps from somewhere below me, a low moan from a man trying to walk with a busted ankle.

  “C’mon. C’mon. Just come on in,” I said and raised the gun and waited, sweat dripping off my broken nose. When he didn’t enter I threw the book down with all my might, hoping to make as loud a crash as I could. The book bounced off the medical table, flipped up and took out a small lamp before landing half in the fireplace.

  It took only a second before it caught fire.

  “Oh shit.”

  And then Ben was running in, stopping just below me so that I had to bend over the railing and aim at an almost backwards angle. He saw me at the same time and fired up. Bullets dug at the railing before me and I rolled back into the bookcase. Had I hit him at all?

  “I’m going to kill you slow, kid.”

  Nope. Didn't hit him. “I’ve heard worse threats.”

  “It’s not a threat.”

  I grabbed another book and hurled it toward the grandfather clock, merely hoping to distract him while I ran around the balcony trying to get a shot at him.

  He was wise to my ruse and fired off a shot at me as soon as I got to the first corner, forcing me back toward the guest room. Two bullets came through the floor right next to me and I ducked into the guest room, realizing too late he was pushing me in the direction he wanted me to go.

  I heard him coming up the stairs even now, knowing exactly where I was. He wouldn’t even need to come in, just reach around the doorway and shoot me. I had to beat him to the punch, so I lay flat and stuck my gun out, saw his shoulder coming around the stairs at the bottom. Screaming, I fired and saw the bullets tear his shoulder to ground beef, saw the blood spit out like a geyser and hit the walls.

  The gun locked as the last bullet was fired. His body fell forward onto the stairs.

  Only it wasn’t his body. It was the goon with the letter opener in his neck, still dead, positioned there by Ben before
he’d entered the dining room.

  Ben had tricked me. Lured me back where he wanted me and gotten me to empty my gun on a dead guy.

  I scrambled to my feet. “Shit. Where the hell--”

  It hit me out of nowhere, knowing exactly where he was coming from. I just knew it.

  The other guest room.

  Before I could even look out at the balcony I felt the floor shaking beneath me as he ran around toward me like a linebacker.

  I panicked, grabbed the closest thing to me: a small nightstand on top of which sat a white clay lamp. The lamp crashed to the ground and shattered as I raced to the balcony, swinging the nightstand toward the massive hulk charging toward me. There was gunfire, and I felt the bullets explode into the top of the nightstand, waiting for them to pass through the wood and rip open my belly. My momentum kept me moving forward and Ben and I met in a crunch of flesh and furniture. I flew backwards to the guest room, Ben above me, stopping short as the nightstand’s top and legs caught either side of the doorjamb and formed a barrier that knocked him back like a man bouncing off a rubber wall, his bullets firing into the ceiling. I grabbed my empty gun from the floor and leapt over the nightstand at him as he righted himself, brought the gun down like a hammer on his head, trying to nail something invisible to his brain. He fired again, killing the books beside me and sending literary confetti into the air around us to join the smoke drifting toward the chandelier.

  Smoke?

  I smelled it but couldn’t care less. Ben was going to kill me unless I killed him first. So I hit him again in the head, caught him square in the eye as he punched out and found my chest, tossing me into the railing like I was made of straw.

  Beneath me I saw flames.

  Ben came at me again but I ducked and he swooned, dizzy from the head trauma, and for a second fell against the railing beside me, hands on the banister to hold himself up, head and torso leaning over it as he waited for his vision to clear.