by Tom Shutt
“No,” he whispered. “No light. If anyone is around, they’ll see us coming well before we see them.” In the empty hall, there was nothing to stop the light from traveling the entire length of the corridor. Sam nodded, though Brennan could just barely see the motion.
The two walked as quietly as they could with weapons drawn. They kept their sidearms holstered; even with a silencer, pistols were noisy as hell, and it would only take one fired shot to attract every Leviathug in the building. Brennan extended one hand and let his fingertips brush along the wall for guidance, while in the other hand he held a short double-edged knife. Sam carried a hunting knife, the kind that woodsmen might use. The toothed edge opposite the blade doubled as a saw for cutting through small branches.
Brennan reached a corner and motioned for Sam to pause. He wouldn’t see the curled fist that raised by reflex, but he would hear the stop in Brennan’s footsteps. Tentatively, Brennan peeked around the corner. He couldn’t see anybody in the pale gray of the darkened hall.
“Come,” he breathed, and the two moved onward. They reached a lobby with a large double staircase; one set led to the second floor, while the other set descended into the basement of the hospital.
“Even odds in both directions,” Sam said. His voice barely carried to Brennan’s ear.
Brennan agreed. “Fifty-fifty.” There was safety in numbers, but it would also slow down their search effort by half. “Split up,” he suggested. “You go high, I’ll go low.”
Sam grunted affirmatively. “Heaven and hell,” he said. “Good hunting.”
Brennan descended the stairs without another word. He made it no more than a dozen steps before someone rounded the corner just an arm’s reach away.
Reflex and training brought his knife arm swinging, and the blade plunged noiselessly into the man’s neck, slicing through the jugular. He clamped his free hand over the man’s mouth and moved with his body, gently easing the fall so that neither his gun nor body made a sound as they met the ground. Blood continued to pour as he slid the knife out and wiped it against the man’s jacket. The dead man had a semiautomatic rifle slung across his chest, but he was otherwise unarmed and unarmored. Brennan wiped the blood from his hands as well as he could.
Thirty seconds on his own and already he had run into trouble. Brennan hoped that Sam was still hidden, still safe. He took a deep breath to slow his hammering heart and then continued. His eyes had adjusted to the dark, and he could see everything relatively clearly in differing shades of black. He stalked through the empty hall, sweeping his gaze left and right with each door.
Every room he searched was eerily empty; he had grown so accustomed to hospitals being full—of gurneys, nurses, whirring machines, men in white coats, visiting families, pictures, paintings, binders full of papers—that the opposite was intensely unnerving. The pervasive emptiness of the building shook him more than anything.
One long room finally showed promise. The door creaked loudly on its hinges, and Brennan cringed; he forced it all the way open with a sharp but short burst of sound. He checked the room for more members of Leviathan, but there was no movement except for the low ripple of fluid in the two basins in the room.
Each container was the size of a refrigerator on its side and twice as tall. They were laid end to end, and there the similarities ended. One held a clear substance, and one whiff of it was enough to tell Brennan that it was bleach.
The second basin held some kind of dark liquid with the thick consistency of cold maple syrup. He didn’t take the risk of smelling it; it didn’t take a scientist to recognize the sickly, toxic odor of Chamalla.
He retreated slowly from the room, past the syrupy hallucinogen and then past the basin of bleach that purified the patches before they were infused with Chamalla. He left the door open as he ducked back into the hallway, silent as a phantom.
He took a pair of steps around another corner before his eyes were suddenly flooded with light. Something very, very solid smashed into him, connecting with the back of his head just below the ears.
Brennan didn’t pass out, but the temporary stars in his vision and disorientation were enough to make him lose track of time as a pair of strong arms wrapped under his armpits and dragged him.
He wasn’t carried for long, though, and he hit the floor hard when he was deposited. His arms felt like lead pipes; the same strong person who carried him grabbed those pipes and tightened a coarse loop of rope around his wrists, binding them behind his back. Even if he could have moved, he doubted he’d have the strength or mobility to break free.
His blurry vision cleared, and he looked dizzily around the room. It was barren, just another former patient’s room. Drab wallpaper peeled on the walls, and the joined bathroom was a small husk of a room without the plumbing fixtures. Hinges squealed as the door opened, and Brennan’s head snapped around to see a familiar figure stepping into the room.
It had been a while since they had seen each other, but the man still had the same college cap he had worn during their first encounter outside of Nettle’s pharmacy.
“Badgercap,” Brennan muttered. The word came out thick and slurred.
The man known as Badgercap carried a light into the room with him, which he held aloft as he leered at the captive detective. “Oho, oho, this is my lucky day, isn’t it?” he tittered. The light jittered in his grasp, and his eyes were glazed over. A lazy smile hung on his face, which twisted with scorn as he looked at Brennan. “Another detective to start off today’s body count. I had quite the success yesterday, but today is a new day, I suppose.”
“You’re high,” Brennan said absently. Even through bleary eyes, he could see a patch on the drug lord’s exposed forearm.
Badgercap opened his mouth to speak, but just then Sam appeared from around the corner, carried by the hem of his shirt. He was in the grip of a large, heavily muscled man, and his hands were bound in the same way as Brennan’s. The mountain man had a massive revolver secured in a custom shoulder holster. Muscles threw Sam bodily, and he slammed against the wall beside Brennan. The sound of his body hitting brick was thick and dull, and the air rushed out of him as he slumped to the floor.
“Found this one skulking around upstairs,” Muscles explained to Badgercap. His voice was a strangled growl, and the tendons in his neck were tight against his skin. “He took down two of our lookouts before I found him.”
Badgercap turned and looked at Sam with a hungry smile. “Did he now?” He waved a dismissive hand toward Muscles. “Stand guard outside. There may be more than the two of them.”
Muscles grunted and lumbered out of the room, firmly shutting the door behind him.
Sam seemed to be collecting his wits and lurched into a kneeling position. Badgercap moved forward and savagely kicked him onto his side.
“Stay down, dog!” he cried, adding another vicious boot to the groin. Sam’s eyes screwed up in pain as he contorted, twisting his body to better protect himself.
“Hey!” Brennan shouted. “Leave him alone!” He received a swift strike to the head in response, but he rolled with the lazy blow and kept Badgercap’s focus on him. “What? That all you got?”
Badgercap’s smile twisted into a malicious snarl, and his eyes danced with manic fervor. “You are becoming a nuisance,” he said. His voice was high and crazed, and he swung another fist that caught Brennan on the ridge over one eye. A thin line opened where he struck, and a sheet of blood began to pour down his face. “I thought my last message was clear, but apparently you need a reminder. Stay out of things that are none of your business!”
Before he could turn around toward Sam, Brennan head-butted him at the knees. There was no real power behind the attack, but hurting him wasn’t the intention. “When you killed good men and women and kidnapped my partner, you made all of this my business.”
With a haughty demeanor, Badgercap gathered himself up. “You could have stopped at ‘killed good men and women’,” he said, breaking off into a fit of
giggles. As the madman paced about and leered at them with unrestrained excitement, Brennan and Sam shared a glance.
“What do you mean?” Sam demanded, anger rising in his voice. “What did you do to Noel?”
“Me?” the maniac giggled. “I didn’t do anything! But your partner didn’t look too good last time I saw her.”
True.
Sam struggled against his injured body as he rose to his feet. His lip was cracked, several fingers bent at unnatural angles, and he moved with the signs of dozens of untold injuries. His face was a mask of pure fury, and the glare he gave Badgercap made Brennan’s hairs stand on end.
“If you touched one hair on her head,” he growled, “I swear to God I’ll—”
Badgercap produced a handgun from his waistband and shot Sam twice in the chest.
Brennan watched in horror as his best friend of over a dozen years recoiled from the shots. Sam’s eyes dulled as he fell to his knees, and momentum carried his limp body to the side. He couldn’t see his friend’s face from where he knelt, but Brennan felt his body begin to shake as Sam lay there, unmoving. The two gunshots in the small, confined room were deafening, but they were nothing compared to the roar of rage that tore its way from Brennan’s throat, a wordless howl of noise and fury.
He had murder in his heart. He had killed before in self-defense, or in the cause of protecting others, and he had never shied away from that fact. But here, now, he bore a personal hatred for the man who stood before him. Bloodied, bound, and beaten, he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. It didn’t matter. He had lost two of his closest friends to this madman, and he would give everything for the chance to make him pay. Blood pumped furiously through his veins and it still came down in sheets over his face. He saw red as he rose to charge the man.
With almost casual arrogance, Badgercap turned and cracked Brennan square in the jaw with the butt of his gun. He heard the pop of a dislocated jaw as mind-numbing pain jolted through his skull. His head snapped to the side, nearly splitting itself open on the wall, and he lacked the strength to turn his face back toward his attacker.
“Now,” Badgercap said, kneeling before him. He cupped Brennan’s chin forcefully, the grip agonizingly painful. “Listen when you are being spoken to,” he commanded. “I am Leviathan! You are nothing!” He released Brennan and stepped away sharply, pacing anxiously. His stare never left Brennan’s face, and after a moment he stopped, his mouth parting slightly as if struck by inspiration.
“This should be fun,” he said, his teeth gleaming, “and you don’t look like you’re having fun. So let’s make this a bit of a game, eh? I’m a generous man, and you’ve got nothing left to live for, do you?” He leaned in close, and his rancid breath was warm and moist against Brennan’s face. “Here’s the game,” he said. “You get to ask me questions, finish your investigation, and maybe die content.” He lifted the pistol before Brennan’s eyes so he couldn’t avoid seeing it. “But for each boring question you ask, I get a whack at that ugly mug of yours. How long d’you think you’ll last?”
Brennan spat in Badgercap’s face. The other man wiped at the spit slowly, still showing his manic grin. He tried to think of an escape, a way out of this situation alive, but those options didn’t present themselves. He could charge Badgercap, though that would only reward him with a bullet to the head. Likewise, he gained nothing by refusing to play his game and staying silent; if anything, that would only infuriate his captor and bring death all the more swiftly.
Though a quick death might be better.
Brennan sighed. “Zachariah Nettle,” he said slowly, his jaw stiff. “You killed him.”
Badgercap’s eyes danced madly. “Is that a question?”
“Are you responsible for the murder of Zachariah Nettle?”
“There, that’s much better now. You aren’t as thick as your skull suggests.” He paced slowly, holding the pistol delicately in his hands. “Yes, I killed the pharmacist. We had a good thing going until he tried to haggle with me. With me, the thankless wretch. He wanted a larger cut, so I agreed.” His lips parted in a grisly grin. “Oh, yes, I gave him a very large cut,” he said, pantomiming a knife slicing through the air.
Brennan felt the truth of his words. A madman he might be, but he was being honest—he was following the rules of this ghastly game. His brain worked furiously to come up with another question, but one left his lips unbidden while he thought.
“You aren’t a thug,” his mouth said. “The night you jumped me outside the pharmacy, you talked like a street urchin. When you just spoke now, though, that accent was gone. It was just a mask,” Brennan said, meeting Badgercap’s glare. “Who are you?”
“Boring!” Badgercap declared. “I’m not interested in talking about myself.”
He hit Brennan with a fast left hook that stunned him more than it hurt him. Badgercap shook his hand after the punch, wincing, and then slammed the butt of the gun in his other hand in a backhanded strike to Brennan’s jaw. Rather than a pop, Brennan felt something in his jaw crack. Badgercap stooped to grab him roughly by the collar of his shirt and pulled him close, speaking into Brennan’s ear.
“Do not think for a second that I will hesitate to kill you. I thought I proved that with your friend here. I don’t want to kill you right off because, frankly, you have been a huge pain in my ass. It is going to take months to put my network back together, not to mention the sales I’ll lose in the meantime—No, no, this is not going to end quickly for you,” he whispered harshly. “I am going to prolong your suffering for as long as I can, just as hers was. And I will enjoy every second of it.”
Brennan’s mind was foggy, and he was having trouble thinking clearly even as alarm bells went off in his head. He and Sam had been too late—Noel was lost even before they entered the building. Sam had paid for it with his life, and it looked like Brennan was destined to go the same way. He needed to buy more time to think of some clever escape.
“Okay, okay,” he gasped, slumping to the floor as Badgercap’s grip eased. His voice slurred, and it hurt to speak through his fractured jaw. “I have a quethtion,” he mumbled.
Badgercap grinned, fierce and sudden, and danced back toward the door. “Well, go on, athk away!” he said excitedly, mocking Brennan’s lisp as he broke down in another burst of demented laughter.
Brennan gave him a bleary glare and hoped he looked more intimidating than he felt. Kneeling on the floor with his hands bound behind his back, he didn’t like the chances of that. He heard a low noise from the hallway, likely Muscles coughing.
“Why did you do it?” he asked, thankful there were no soft consonants in the question. His voice cracked with the words. “Why did you take Bishop?”
Badgercap leaned in very suddenly, smacking Brennan across the face. No, not smacking, he realized. In his excitement, Badgercap’s motion turned the gentle swipe into a partial slap.
“Are you crying?” he asked incredulously. “Oh, but this is delicious! But I don’t have an answer for you, Detective. See, I’ve already grown tired of our game. Your questions aren’t as interesting as I’d hoped they would be.” He cocked the gun and pressed it against Brennan’s skull. “I hope you got the answers you were looking for.”
A shot rang out, and Brennan’s face became a gory mess of blood. Badgercap’s chest exploded outward as a second round worked its way through his body, and he fell limply to the floor with a stunned look on his face. Behind him, leaning heavily against the open doorframe and holding Muscles’ enormous revolver, was a haggard and injured Detective Bishop.
“Brennan!” she cried, dropping the gun and rushing to his side. “Oh my God, what are you doing here?”
“What am I—what are you doing here? I thought you were dead!”
Bishop untied the rope that bound Brennan’s hands and he pulled them free, flexing them with newfound freedom. “Reports of my death,” she muttered.
Brennan pointed to Sam. “He’th not bleething,” he s
aid.
“Oh God! What the hell were you two thinking?!” She rushed to Sam’s side and rolled him over. His eyes were closed, and his face was starting to turn blue. “Oh God, oh God,” Bishop half muttered, half prayed. Tears welled in her eyes as she crouched over Sam, her hands spreading over his chest as she leaned against his body. “What the—?” she started. “He’s not bleeding.”
“That’th what I thaid.”
She ripped apart his shirt so the buttons flew all across the room. Beneath his clothing was a thick, black vest. Two shiny bullets were embedded in the thick material over his heart and lungs, and Bishop tore at the Velcro straps, ripping the confining vest from Sam’s body.
With an enormous gasp of breath, he sat up and looked wildly around the room.
Brennan looked at him in disbelief. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” he said, still not believing his eyes. “How did you—?”
Sam coughed and gripped his chest as he struggled to catch his breath. “Sweet Jesus, that was close. How long was I out?”
“About three minutth,” Brennan said.
“Is that all?” He sounded disappointed. “Well, I must’ve gotten CPR,” he said mildly. Sam looked hesitantly at Brennan, whose face was a bruised pulp of flesh with a dead man’s blood still freshly dripping from his chin, and then looked hopefully to Bishop. “Noel, please tell me it wasn’t him.” In that moment, he seemed to notice Bishop crouched next to him for the first time. “Noel!” he cried, wrapping his arms around her in a sudden embrace. “You’re alive! Oh, thank God.”
She accepted the hug with reluctance, though a wan smile touched her lips.
Sam looked at Brennan with shining eyes. “Your voice sounds ridiculous, by the way. So you saved her? How’d you accomplish that?”