Blasted

by Chris Martin

  Ravage ran into the warehouse, where a virtual army of Russians was waiting for him. He didn’t care. He was coming under some heavy fire, but he didn’t even notice. He probably took some slugs, but he sure as hell didn’t show it. He stood in the doorway and kept firing. I watched in awe as heads exploded, guts spilled all over the floor and blood splattered in a chaotic fountain of red. The screams of the wounded and dying rang even louder than the steady rat-a-tat of Ravage’s pair of SMGs. When he ran out of ammo, he simply dropped his guns and shifted to hand-to-hand mode. Amidst the screams and crying Holly and I could hear the sounds of flesh ripping and bone cracking. Holly turned away from the horror, but I kept watching in admiration. Ravage was the perfect killing machine. Nothing would ever stop him until his mission was completed. And he loved it.

  Ravage emerged a few minutes later, carrying the head of one of his victims. The decapitated head was still dripping blood and had a revolting scream frozen on its face. Judging by the jagged chunks of flesh that hung from its neck, I figured that Ravage had simply ripped one of the Russian’s heads right of his body.

  Ravage laughed at the expression on Holly’s face and tossed the head onto the tracks. He was even worse than I remembered. Whatever bit of sanity he’d possessed when we worked together at the CIA and right after the project ended was gone. He was now a stark raving lunatic. An incredibly powerful, insatiable killer kind of a lunatic. There was no more controlling him. He did what he wanted with no thought on the consequences.

  It was about the time Ravage stomped on the severed head, crushing it like a spoiled watermelon, that I began to suspect that maybe teaming up with Ravage again wasn't exactly the best idea I'd ever had.

  -10-

  We drove away from the massacre in silence. Ravage began to come down from his high and began patching up his wounds. I avoided eye contact with Holly, keeping my eyes on the road and cursing my decision to bring Ravage into this mess. It was Ravage who finally broke the silence.

  “So what now, Blast? More action, I hope.”

  “Yeah, Blast. What now?” Holly chimed in sarcastically.

  I winced at the tone of her voice. For the first time since we’d met I detected a hint of thorough disgust for me. It made me feel dirty and ashamed. Not for who I was now, but for who I’d been before. She’d seen me in the Kill Zone and she’d accepted it because I’d learned to control it. Ravage hadn’t and didn’t want to. He was a wild animal. Just the way she figured I’d been when I was in MK-ULTRA.

  I pulled the SUV off the highway and cut the engine. We sat in silence and almost complete blackness for a few minutes.

  “Ravage, stay here,” I said.

  I got out of the truck and slammed the door shut behind me. I crossed over to Holly’s door and flung it open, pulling her out of her seat by her arm. I closed her door and led her a little way away from the truck.

  “What’s the problem, Holly?”

  “Your friend’s a little fucked up, isn’t he?”

  “You said it, doll,” I told her. “But what’s that got to do with us? As long as he’s killing the right people, I think we can use him.”

  “You can’t control a monster like that. You saw what he did back there. He ripped that man’s head off his shoulders with his bare hands. Is that what you used to be like?”

  That stung, but I was able to sting right back. “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? You’ve read my file. You know more about me than I do.”

  “This is getting us nowhere, Steve. We need a plan. If you think keeping Jason Voorhees around for a while longer is a good idea, I won’t argue with you. I trust you.”

  “Thanks. Besides, I don’t think we have a lot of choice about Ravage. He pretty much does what he wants to do.”

  “So what’s the plan? More senseless killing?”

  “There’s nothing senseless about any of this. Bringing Ravage in has helped us out a lot. Moore couldn’t have anticipated that move. We struck a big blow tonight. When Moore gets a look at that fuckin’ carnage that we left back there, it will give him something to think about. He’s got to be asking himself if the whole thing is worth it now. He’s lost a lot of men and a lot of power. Is it really worth all this trouble just to get back at a D.E.A. agent and her muscle?”

  Holly interrupted me. “But it’s more than that, Steve. I don’t know if it’s me they really want anymore. Have you considered that this whole thing might have more to do with you than with me? What if you’re the real target here and Moore’s been using me all along?”

  “It would make a certain amount of sense. I still haven’t figured out why Moore would have a dossier on me. The sooner I can get to that disk, the better.”

  “Then that’s our next move?”

  “That sounds good. Ravage will be a little disappointed, though. There’s not likely to be a lot of killing.”

  “So where’d you hide the disk?”

  “At the train station. In a locker. I had to get rid of the key, but I’ll be able to get to it.”

  “What about Ravage? He doesn’t exactly blend into the crowd. With him along, we could draw a lot of attention to ourselves.”

  “We’re not going anywhere, Holly. You’re going to hole up in some dive with Ravage while I go for the disk.”

  “You’re not leaving me alone with that thing.”

  “It’s perfectly safe. If anybody comes after you, Ravage should be able to handle it. And I don’t think he’ll try to attack you. He has no reason, and he always had a soft spot for gorgeous dames.”

  “You talkin’ ‘bout me?” a voice said from the shadows, startling us both. It was Ravage.

  “Hey, Ravage. We were just talking about our next move,” I told him.

  “What’s that? More killin’ I hope.”

  “Not just yet. I’m going to go for a computer disk while you make sure that nothing happens to Holly. You two just lay low ‘til I get back. Then we’ll get back to the killin’.”

  -11-

  I dropped Ravage and Holly off at some motel out in the middle of nowhere. It was a pretty disgusting flop house, but it would serve it’s purpose. My plan was to get the disk and bring it back in one piece. That’s what I’d told Holly and Ravage I was going to do. But there was one more thing I wanted to get done. I had to read what was on the disk. I had to find out about myself. About my life before MK-ULTRA turned me into a government-sanctioned killing machine. I had a laptop back at my place, in the underground bunker. I guessed that Moore probably had other things on his mind right about now, and wouldn’t be counting on me to head back home. It was a chance I had to take.

  It was well past midnight as I pulled the SUV to a stop in front of Union Station. I checked my .45 and confirmed it to be fully loaded. I got out of the truck and stuck the gun in my waistband. I didn’t think that I’d need it, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to take any chances.

  I found the locker with no trouble. Before I walked up to it, I decided to case the area. I made a few circuits of the immediate vicinity before I was satisfied that I wasn’t being watched. I approached the locker and paused. When I was sure that I was completely alone, I smashed the lock in with a screwdriver I'd brought along and ripped the door open. Inside was the duffel bag, just how I’d left it. A quick scan of its contents revealed the disk was still there as well.

  As I drove to my dump, I could barely handle the anticipation. It had been a long time since I’d felt this way. I wasn’t used to it and I didn’t understand it. I’d been programmed not to let emotions get in the way of the job at hand. The programming had all but wiped emotion from my brain. Yet in the past several days, I’d rediscovered that part of myself again. First with Holly, and now with the promise of learning who I’d been before the project. Before Holly, my past didn’t seem to matter. I had my work and that was enough. Living like a virtual animal. Ravage and I weren’t that different really. But Holly had done something to me. I would have told her if I thought I had the r
ight to say it, but I hadn’t earned that yet. I still had just a little farther to go before I could tell her that I loved her, if that was even what I felt.

  My place was deserted. There was no way that anyone was staking it out. It was safe. I still used caution as I opened the front door and made my way into the underground bunker, and didn’t really feel safe until I’d sealed the door. Now, buried ten feet below earth, encased in six inch steel walls, I was invulnerable. The truth was about to be mine.

  It made for some interesting reading. According to the file, my real name was Scott Clark. I was born in Dallas. My birthday was June 6. My parents were both dead, just like Adrian had said. He hadn’t lied about the brother and sister either. They were both still alive . My brother was living in the city, not all that far from my current location., and my sister was raising a family on the East Coast.

  Like Holly had told me, I’d been a Navy SEAL before I was recruited into the MK-ULTRA project. My family had been told that I’d died during routine maneuvers and I was given a full hero’s funeral.

  There were tons of facts and bits of information. When you put them all together, you had my whole life compressed onto one floppy disk, just one file out of two dozen. But that was it. It was like reading just another dossier. I had a detached feeling, like I was reading about somebody else. No memories were stirred. Nothing sounded familiar. It was all virtually meaningless. Whatever MK-ULTRA had done to my memory was permanent. I would never be the person in those files again. Scott Clark was dead. But what was Steve Blast? Certainly not a complete person. I had five years of memories in my head. No childhood. No adolescence. No first kiss. No ballgames with my dad. All I had was death and destruction and one soulless mission after another.

  But I had something else now. I had Holly and everything that she meant to me. If she could fall in love with me, I must have some worth. It wasn’t a lot to define a man, but it was a good place to start.

  I took a look at the other files on the disk. Holly had been straight with me. There were journals, ledgers, and detailed files—enough to earn Adrian Moore a death sentence. I took the disk out of my laptop and stuck it in an envelope. I addressed the envelope and put a stamp on it. I’d drop it in the first mailbox I ran across and this whole thing would pretty much be over. Adrian Moore would be someone else’s problem, and he’d have too much trouble to bother me.

  I had a lot to think about, and that was probably how he got the jump on me as I was leaving my dump. I never saw it coming. One minute I was walking down the sidewalk. The next I was on the pavement, struggling to stay conscious.

  I shook my head, trying hard to focus my vision. I finally got my brain to work again and located my attacker. I found myself almost wishing that he’d killed me with the first blow. Standing no more than six feet away from me was Ravage, eye deep in the Kill Zone.

  -12-

  “Get up, Blast. You don’t want to die like a cowering child, do you?”

  Ravage was about five seconds away from crushing my skull, just like the poor fools who I’d seen meet their maker at his hands dozens of times. My first thought was of Holly.

  “Ravage. Have you gone mental? What’s the deal? Where’s Holly?”

  He laughed at me, a contemptuous, ugly laugh that didn’t hold an ounce of humor in it.

  “You’re about to die a particularly gruesome death, old friend, and all you can think about is your woman? You really have gone soft, Blast. Now get up and face me like a man.”

  I struggled to get to my feet, but still didn’t have the strength to do it. I had to think fast, or Ravage wouldn’t wait. It was a miracle I was still alive. If it wasn’t for our shared past, Ravage would have killed me by now. Maybe there was some small sliver of humanity left in him that I could work with.

  “Why are you doing this, Ravage? We’re a team.”

  “I know, I know. We were a team. A good team. Until you turned on me. Now you’re soft. Like a woman. I probably wouldn’t have agreed to this job under normal circumstances, but I’d always wondered if I could take you. You were the only one in the whole project that I thought might be able to give me a good fight. How disappointing this is.”

  “You’re on a job here? For who?”

  “You deserve no answers, Blast. Only death. I’m giving you one last chance to get up and face me. In ten seconds you die where you lay.”

  I had to assume that Holly was dead. Moore had probably tracked them down and somehow gotten to Ravage. Jesus Christ, if he knew all about me, what was to stop him from knowing everything about Ravage? Now that he had Ravage, I was expendable. Moore had his high powered killing tool. I’d outlived my usefulness.

  I got to my feet, keeping my eyes on Ravage. If I was going to make it out of this, I had to enter the Kill Zone as well. The best and easiest way to do that was to convince myself that Holly was dead and that Ravage had killed her. He struck out at me with one of his combat boot-clad feet. I was able to duck out of the way, avoiding the blow altogether. The speed of my movements had obviously caught Ravage by surprise. That was an advantage that I didn’t want to give up.

  Before Ravage could mount another attack I hit him with everything I had. My fist struck the side of his face and sent him reeling. My knuckles screamed in protest as I punched him again, pounding the left side of his face to mush. I kicked out with my right foot and caught him on the left arm. I heard a loud crack and I thought I heard Ravage actually grunt a little. Nah. Must have been the wind.

  Even with a broken arm, Ravage was very dangerous. The Kill Zone was a safe place for him. He felt no pain. He lashed out at me with one of his oversize mitts and caught me right behind my ear. The blow made my ears ring. He was saying something to me, but I couldn't hear a word. For all intents and purposes I was deaf.

  He followed up that blow with a sharp kidney punch that left me gasping for breath. He was quickly regaining the advantage. He leapt at me like a rabid dog, eyes ablaze and mouth foaming. He grabbed my head from each side and began to compress his hands together.

  Ravage had one weakness I could exploit. He wanted a fair fight. It was the only way that he would ever be able to prove himself against me. If he fought dirty, that said nothing for his skills and instincts. As twisted and psychotic as Ravage was, he still possessed a perverse sense of honor. Otherwise, he could have just taken me out with a bullet to the brain when I first emerged from the house.

  I, however, had no such code of ethics. My only concern was getting the job done by whatever means possible. If that meant that I had to fight dirty, all the better.

  The kick to his groin caught him totally by surprise. I kicked him so hard with my steel-toed boots that I almost ducked, expecting his balls to come rocketing out of his mouth. They didn't, but his assault on my skull began to weaken. I shot out my right fist, catching him full in the wind pipe and was immediately released from Ravage’s grasp. I reached for my gun, but for the first time discovered it missing from my waistband. I knew I had it when I left the bunker, so it must have fallen out during the fight. My eyes darted from one corner of the yard to the next until they finally caught a glimpse of the black metal shining dimly in the moonlight. I leapt for the gun, but was too slow. Ravage leapt for me and caught me full in the solar plexus. I doubled over in agony, retching and cursing my stupidity. Ravage swung his good arm with all his might and caught me in the left eye. I dropped to my knees, tasting the salty sweet taste of my own blood.

  He was flapping his lips again, but I couldn’t hear a goddamn thing he was saying. I’m sure he was gloating. It was still a little early for that, though.

  I charged at him with everything I had left, scooping him up in my arms. Using the inertia of the charge I was able to throw him eight feet through the air. He crashed through the front window of my dive. The noise of the impact was loud enough to where I could make it out through the dull ringing in my ears. It looked to me like he’d struck the side of the house with his head before the rest of his
body pulled him through the broken window.

  I hoped against hope that that had finished him off. If it had been anybody else, I’d have called it a confirmed kill, but it wasn’t just anybody. It was Ravage, the pride of the MK-ULTRA experiment. I had the ugly feeling that he wasn’t anywhere near finished.

  Before I could retrieve my gun to finish the job, the front door exploded under the force of a kick from Ravage. He was beyond talking now, the animal had completely taken over. I made a desperate lunge for the gun, coming up about six inches too short. He was on top of me in a flash, ripping and tearing and punching. As my body took the punishment, I began to inch my way closer to the gun. It was my only hope. If I didn’t get to it, I was as good as dead.

  My fingertips touched metal and I eased my hand over the butt. Ravage had no idea what was going on, he was only interested in beating me to death. He was doing a pretty good job of it too. He hadn’t counted on one thing. My will was always stronger than his.

  That was what had pulled me through MK-ULTRA and life immediately after it. It had kept me alive during this whole mess and I was damned if I was going to let Ravage beat me. Nobody beat me.

  I descended into the same mad, unthinking beast that Ravage had become. I writhed my body, working it so I could face him. In the last few seconds, he caught sight of the gun and looked at me like my betrayal was the worst thing that had ever been done to him in his whole miserable, rotten life. I felt a twinge of regret and sadness as I squeezed the trigger, blowing a golf ball size hole in Ravage’s gut. He fell off of me and I struggled to my feet, keeping the gun trained on him.

  He struggled to get to his feet, clenching his belly, which was bleeding profusely. Call it weakness or sentimentality or whatever, but I couldn't bring myself to go for the kill shot. With that gaping wound, I probably would have been doing him a favor. He wasn't going to last long and what little life he had left would be lived in agony.