by Lincoln Cole
Haatim walked aimlessly around the outside of the destroyed and broken down hotel toward the lobby. Lost in his thoughts, exhausted and bitter, he ought to hurry back to Frieda and Dominick to let them know that he’d found a survivor, but right now, he didn’t want to talk to anyone.
The moisture around his eyes froze against his cheeks. He made it to the outer fence and perimeter of the enclosure around the property. Here, the Council had holed up for Frieda’s trial, and now it had turned into the place in which they had all died.
The fence hung damaged and broken, and near the breach, Haatim found dozens of piled bodies. Dead men and women, some of them servants of the cult who’d broken in, and others the mercenaries hired to protect the Council against just such an incursion.
So many dead. It looked like a warzone. It was a warzone. Only in movies had Haatim seen brutality and death like this, and he’d never imagined how much worse it could prove in person. The smell of blood hung in the air and a metallic taste like copper on the tip of his tongue.
The snow lay drenched in it. Haatim turned and looked back at the hotel, broken and destroyed in the middle of the storm. He tried to remember what it had looked like only a few days earlier, before any of this had happened, but couldn’t.
Only these ruins remained.
He found Frieda inside the destroyed lobby of the hotel with Dominick. They looked like they ran on fumes alone, barely able to stay on their feet. They all needed a break, a chance to recover and catch up with everything that had happened. They wouldn’t get that anytime soon.
The warm air from the slow-burning fires spread throughout the building washed over him when he walked inside, thawing him out, but he barely felt it.
“I checked the first floor,” Dominick said to Frieda, and then glanced over at him when he entered. “No survivors.”
“Keep looking,” Frieda said. “I refuse to believe that everyone is gone.”
“I will.” Dominick turned back toward the stairs. He hesitated. “I don’t know what we’ll find.”
“We have to check.”
“I know, but we won’t have a lot of time. Once the storm clears, rescue teams and police will come out here to find out what happened, and they’ll ask a lot of questions. We can’t be here when that happens.”
“We won’t be.”
“They could be on their way already.”
“I know.”
“Then, don’t you think we should—?”
“We have to keep looking,” Frieda said. The expression on her face remained unreadable. She looked exhausted but had the same poise and grace about her that Haatim had come to expect from his time spent traveling with her. She always stayed calm and collected, no matter the situation. “We won’t leave until we’ve combed every inch.”
Dominick hesitated and then nodded. Frieda had been hurt badly in the train incident, and of the three of them, she was the worst off. They had patched her up in the helicopter before landing, but she would need medical attention soon. If she was willing to press on, then they knew they couldn’t object.
He glanced over at Haatim, expression grim, and then headed to the stairs. Haatim watched him go: he couldn’t remember a time since first meeting Dominick a few months earlier that he’d seen the man this serious. Dominick always joked and laughed; optimistic to an almost annoying degree.
It appeared as if that optimism had gone.
Bullet holes riddled the walls of the lobby, and the casings covered the floor. Shards of broken wood surrounded them, and three bodies in military garb lay in here. All of them had gotten stacked into the corner hastily, forgotten and dismissed.
When, finally, Haatim looked over at Frieda, she sat staring at him, studying him. From the look on her face, she had been gazing his way for some time. He met her eyes, frowning.
Frieda asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
She tilted her head to the side, curious. “What did you find?”
Eerie how easily she could always read him.
“I found my father,” he said, the words mechanical. “Down in the loading bay.”
“Aram? Alive?”
“Yes.” Haatim nodded.
“Is he injured? Why didn’t you bring him up? Does he need a stretcher?”
Haatim didn’t reply straight away. “He is injured.”
“But alive?”
“For now.”
Realization dawned on Frieda’s face. “He did this.”
“Yes.”
“How? What happened?”
“He betrayed everyone. He has the responsibility for all of this, including what happened to you.”
“What?”
“He made a deal with the Ninth Circle to get back my sister, but they didn’t exactly hold up their end of the bargain. Whatever lives inside her, it isn’t Nida. Not anymore.”
Frieda blinked. “Nida. That’s what happened to her? I thought it a cruel joke by the demon, using her body like that after her sickness. I never thought …”
“Everyone died because of him.” Haatim shook his head. “We lost everything.”
“Not everything,” Dominick called down. He had returned and now stood at the top of the stairs. “I found Jun in his room. He’s injured and has lost a lot of blood but managed to patch himself up fairly well. I think he’ll make it.”
Frieda let out a sigh of relief. “Thank God.”
“He’s a stubborn old bastard. Haatim, come help get him to the helicopter. We need to get him to a hospital.”
Haatim followed Dominick up the stairs to the third floor of the hotel. They made their way down the hallway toward Jun’s room. This section hadn’t gotten as badly damaged as some of the others, though it did have a desolate feel that made Haatim’s skin crawl.
The lights flickered under the power of the weakening backup generators as they ran out of power. The two men went silently, not even glancing at each other. Haatim considered telling Dominick about his father, and then changed his mind. He didn’t want to talk about it. Frieda could fill him in on it if she wanted, but Haatim had done with giving that man any of his attention.
They passed a few dead people on this floor: the body of one of the Council’s guards lay near an open doorway. It looked like the man had gotten caught off-duty and unprepared. Someone had executed him with a bullet in his forehead, and he lay in a pool of drying blood. Haatim felt sick to his stomach while he helped Dominick drag the man out of the way, trying to come to terms with what his last moments must have felt like while Nida and her army poured into the hotel and took it by force.
It must have been horrible. Men had tied up Haatim in a hotel room with his unconscious mother, but if he had been here, he would have ended up like this man: just another body mixed in with the dead.
“What are you wondering about?”
Dominick’s words pulled Haatim back to reality. He realized he had stood unmoving for the last several moments, lost in his thoughts.
He shook the concerns away and focused on the task at hand. “Just … we weren’t here.”
Dominick nodded. “I know. I keep thinking … what if I had been here. Could I have helped? Could I have stopped this?”
“I doubt it.” Haatim shook his head. “The Council got completely outnumbered and overrun.”
“I know.” Dominick nodded. “They would have killed me too. It still makes me wonder. So many people dead. Why did they spare us?”
Haatim didn’t have a good answer for him. Subdued, they headed back out into the hallway and down to Jun’s room.
Jun lay on the floor, covered in blood and leaning against the hotel bed. Pale and barely conscious, he had a bullet wound in his side. He’d managed to wrap one of the white linen sheets around the wound to staunch the bleeding, but it bloomed with a giant ring of blood where it had seeped through.
“Don’t worry,” Dominick said softly, gathering up the blankets from the bed. “We’ll get you some help, Jun. Just hang on.”
“Worry?” Jun blinked his eyes open and panted. He looked unfocused and in pain, but Haatim could see the strength of will that had kept the old man alive despite everything. “Why would I worry? I mean, it’s not like you’re taking your sweet time with this rescue effort or anything.”
Dominick chuckled. “We can come back if you aren’t ready to go.”
“At the rate this hotel charges? Not a chance.”
“How’s your side? Want me to check it?”
“Sure. Let’s spend another ten minutes here while you see if I bandaged myself okay.”
“Did you know that you get sarcastic when you’re in pain?”
“Did you know that you move at a snail’s pace when you’re trying to save people? I’m just going to chalk it up to laziness.”
Dominick handed Haatim one end of the blanket he’d retrieved from the bed, ignoring the old man. “Help me get him onto this, and we’ll use it to carry him down.”
After some wrangling, they managed to get Jun Lee onto the comforter. Each time they moved him, he let out a grunt of pain but didn’t complain anymore. He held on by a thread and had lost a lot of blood. If he survived this, it would make something of a miracle.
When they lifted him to carry him out to the helicopter, it surprised Haatim at how light Jun seemed. He hadn’t looked like a small man when Haatim had first met him, but he proved thin and frail underneath his clothing. Haatim hadn’t spent a lot of time with him but had considered Jun one of the older and wiser members of the Council: someone who kept others in check.
They carried him as carefully as they could down the stairs. Frieda had disappeared from the lobby when they got Jun down. Where had she gone? With Jun so badly off, they needed to get him to help.
“Where’s Frieda?” Dominick glanced around.
“I don’t know,” Haatim said. “Probably checking for more survivors.”
“We don’t have much time,” Dominick said. “Jun doesn’t have much left.”
“No, I reckon not,” Jun said. He still panted and gasped, clearly in pain while the blanket weaved up and down with him. It made for a terrible gurney, Haatim knew, but better than nothing.
They brought Jun out through the lobby door and into the winter landscape beyond. It had begun snowing again, though not as heavy as earlier. They carried him out to the helicopter and set him down in the back, resting him on the hard metal floor.
“No gurney?” Haatim asked.
“I didn’t think to grab one since landing in Switzerland. This isn’t your regular life-flight equipped ride. I wasn’t exactly prepared for something like today to happen.”
Haatim let out a sigh. He could fully understand their lack of preparation. Even after his months of training with Frieda and Dominick, he couldn’t imagine how they might have prepared for something like what Nida had done to them.
“I do have a first-aid kit and some supplies. I’ll get Jun patched up with a new bandage. I don’t have much pain medication, though, past Tylenol and Advil.”
“I’ll be fine,” Jun said, gritting his teeth. “This is nothing I haven’t experienced before.”
“What do we do now?” Haatim asked.
“We need to get airborne.” Dominick glanced over at him and stepped away from Jun. He spoke softly so that the old man couldn’t hear. “Jun won’t last long unless we can get him to a hospital. Even then, it’s hard to say. He got hit pretty hard and won’t have a lot of time left if we don’t get him to a real doctor.”
“I’ll go get Frieda.”
“Hurry,” Dominick said. “Two minutes. If you don’t see her, then just get back here.”
“We can’t leave her here.”
“We can’t let Jun die, either. Worst case scenario, Frieda has to take care of herself, which she can. Jun can’t last another hour without help.”
Haatim hesitated, then nodded. “All right.”
“Go get Frieda. Sweep the building to make sure no one else remains alive, and then get back here. I’ll prep for takeoff.”
“Where do you think she’ll be?”
“Check the library. She mentioned that she wanted to look for something.”
“Okay.” Haatim rushed back through the deep snow and into the lobby of the hotel. His entire body had grown cold from spending so much time outside, but it didn’t bother him nearly as much as it might have a few years ago. Dominick had taught him how to deal with the pain and push it somewhere else. He knew how much his body could tolerate.
In the lobby, he saw no sign of Frieda, so he shouted for her, but got no answer. Then he ran up the stairs, shouting as he went to get her attention and see if anyone else might respond. No replies came, though, from her or anyone else.
Though Dominick felt in a hurry, Haatim didn’t want to leave Frieda behind if they didn’t have to. The authorities wouldn’t take long about getting out here, and leaving Frieda meant that she would have a difficult time of getting back to the city.
He headed straight for the small makeshift library that the Council had put together shortly after coming here. It lived on the third floor, an old sitting room that they’d converted with shelving space. The extent of the Council’s library proved, basically, nothing more than a single bookshelf and a collection of old tomes that they had gathered through the years that had importance to their Order. Historical accounts, mostly, detailing their origins and everything that had happened through recent centuries.
He found Frieda sitting at one of the tables in the room, staring at the ground with her hands folded in front of her. Her shoulders sagged, and she wore a defeated expression that he’d never seen on her.
Around her lay the scattered remains of all of the Council’s books, many of which Nida’s mercenary army had destroyed. The books lay with pages torn asunder and ripped up, and many of them had gotten burned.
The history of the Council lay scattered around the room, mimicking the Council itself in the surrounding hotel.
The woman didn’t even seem to notice him come into the room.
“Frieda.” He spoke softly, worried that he might startle her. She didn’t move, so he raised his voice. “Frieda!”
She glanced up at him. “Yes?”
“You okay?”
She shook her head. “I apologize. I went somewhere … else.”
“We need to leave. We can’t stay here, and Jun needs serious medical attention.”
“All of this.” Frieda shook her head. She barely seemed to hear him or understand what he wanted. With her eyes dull, she held up a few torn pages. “We lost everything today. So much death. I—I never thought …”
“We need to go,” Haatim said. “Jun won’t last much longer, and we need to fly him out of here.”
Frieda stared at him for a long few seconds, and then, finally, nodded. She stood slowly, surveying the carnage around her. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Let’s go.”
“Check upstairs one last time, please. Make sure no one else is alive.”
“We don’t have time.”
“Please, Haatim. It’s our last chance.”
He thought to object, since Dominick had insisted on hurrying, but he doubted they would make it back out here before the police arrived. If anyone remained alive that needed their help, it would be their last chance of saving them.
“All right,” he said. “Tell Dominick I’ll come right out.”
Haatim sprinted up to the fifth floor and ran through another cursory sweep. He didn’t want to accept the fact that no one else had lived through the attack. Over a hundred people had lived in this hotel, and the idea that all of them had died seemed unthinkable. He ran down the hallway, passing the carnage and looking around for survivors.
As expected, he didn’t find any. Most of the rooms stood empty. The doors hung broken from forced entries, and holes and blood riddled the few that housed people. He found two people, but both of them had long since expired.
On the way down, he
glanced at the other floors and called out, but received no response. It looked like all of the luck had run out. Jun became the only survivor of the attack.
Jun, and Haatim’s father.
When he made it back outside to the helicopter, Frieda had found her way outside and waited for him. She must have heard the chopper turning on and come out to find them.
Dominick had the helicopter started up and idling, and he glanced down at Haatim from the cockpit. “Find anyone else?”
“No. Empty.”
“We need to leave now.”
Haatim turned toward Frieda, who climbed into the back and then offered him her hand to help him get in. He made it halfway and then froze, staring at the passenger seat behind her.
Aram sat there, eyes closed and making pained gasping noises.
“What in God’s name is he doing here?” He gestured with his arm, angry.
Aram’s eyes popped open, and he looked at his son guiltily.
“We can’t leave him,” Frieda said.
“Like hell, we can’t.”
“The police will get here soon—”
“We should just hand him over to them.”
“—and we can’t let them have him or any of us. They’ll ask too many questions.”
Though Frieda had it right, Haatim still couldn’t stifle the rage running through his body as he looked at the man who used to be his father.
“He betrayed everyone. All of these people died because of him.”
“We can’t just leave him.”
“We should drop him in the woods,” Haatim said.
“We won’t just let him die, either.”
Haatim stared directly at Aram. “Why not?”
Frieda didn’t reply for a few seconds. “It isn’t our way.”
Dominick shouted, “Close the damn door. We need to get up in the air. Haatim, get up here. You’re my copilot.”
Haatim hesitated another second, and then climbed the rest of the way in. He slammed the door behind him. It proved difficult to move through the helicopter, but he made it to the front and put on his headgear. Dominick pointed at the helmet and microphone, and Haatim flipped it on so that they could communicate.
“Haatim, I promise, it wasn’t my idea. Frieda was adamant.”