SHADOW PACK (Michael Biörn Book 1)

by Marc Daniel

  He immediately stepped out from the bathroom into the living room to find four goons armed with machine guns. The total lack of expression on their faces indicated these men killed for a living: professionals devoid of the slightest shred of compassion. Before Michael had a chance to make a move, they started shooting.

  Chapter 40

  Unlike his lab, always kept spotless, the Chemist’s living room looked like a war zone. Dirty clothes littered the floor, couch and loveseat. Cobwebs collected dust in every possible corner of the room, and every single piece of furniture was coated with an inch-thick layer of grime.

  The Chemist was pretty sure there was a coffee table hiding under the piles of mostly finished Chinese take-out cartons and countless other food items at various stages of decomposition, but he could not remember what it actually looked like. When something started to smell too bad, Victor eventually trashed the offensive item, but that was the extent of the cleanup he was willing to do.

  One of the first football games of the season was playing on the sixty-inch TV screen, but the Chemist, half asleep on the couch, paid no attention to it. His cell phone rang. Suddenly wide awake, he fumbled inside his pockets before finding the device buried under the latest addition to his empty pizza box collection.

  When he saw the caller unknown message on the phone’s LCD display, the Chemist felt a knot in the pit of his stomach.

  “Hello?”

  “Do you have what I requested?” said the voice on the other end of the line.

  “Not quite all of it yet,” replied the Chemist uneasily. “Manufacturing such a large amount requires time.”

  “You’ve had plenty of time already. People in your line of work typically understand the importance of timely delivery.” The tone was sharp as a razor.

  There was a pause during which Victor tried to come up with a reasonable excuse: one his interlocutor would accept. He had not been slacking, but the process was time-consuming. Short of working twenty-four hours a day, he simply could not go much faster than he already was.

  “I do not have time for your pretexts,” resumed the man. “I will be checking on you shortly. In the meantime, I suggest you turn off that TV and get back to work. I am not paying you to watch football.”

  Before the Chemist had a chance to reply, the Alpha simply hung up.

  Chapter 41

  A shower of bullets poured out of the men’s machine guns and drowned the room under a deluge of metal. Michael jumped to the side and successfully avoided the first volley, but the second caught him in mid-air and sent him rolling to the ground. He could feel the lead chewing his entrails and blood starting to pour out of the wounds riddling his midsection, but Michael Biörn was not easy to kill.

  In a single motion, he reached for the wooden chair lying to his right in a corner of the room and, from a half-seated position, hurled it at his closest opponent. The piece of furniture’s velocity projected the man into the wall, the impact shattering most of the bones in his back. The man slid to the ground in a seated position and sat motionless, back against the wall, blood sputtering out of his mouth to the beat of his dying heart.

  Already back on his feet, Michael threw himself at his remaining enemies, but the fifteen-foot gap gave the thugs plenty of time to adjust their aim.

  Michael felt the ground sliding under his feet as time seemed to slow down. Although his bullet-riddled head was on a collision course with the floor, he did not care. Isibel’s face was the only thing on his mind. His wife had been dead for over a millennium, but her memory still haunted his dreams… and nightmares.

  Michael Biörn was dead before his head hit the ground.

  The three remaining assassins walked carefully towards him, weapons still trained on his body. Shattered glass from the TV screen and mirror was cracking under their shoes. They found his corpse on the other side of the bed, soaking in its blood. His face was a bloody mess, its aspect closer to the inside of a battered watermelon than to a human head.

  While two of the assassins were pointing their guns at the dead man’s head, the third one squatted to check his pulse. The way Michael had killed their partner with a simple chair had left a lasting impression in their mind, but when the man indicated to his companions that the ‘bastard was dead’, they all relaxed.

  “Let’s get his head and get the fuck out of here,” said one of the men in Russian.

  “I left the axe by the door,” replied another one as he started walking to the door.

  “That was a tough son of a bitch! The boss wasn’t kidding around,” said number one with a tone of professional appreciation, which was as close to respect as men like these could manage.

  “No shit! Boris weighed easily two fifty and that chair sent him crashing against the wall as if he’d been a bloody roach,” replied number two, sounding amused.

  The third man came back with a fireman axe. He placed the sharp edge of the blade on Michael’s throat before lifting it above his own head.

  “Wait!” yelled number one. “Let’s cover him with the shower curtain first or we’ll all be covered with the bastard’s blood.”

  “Good idea,” replied number three, whose brain was clearly incapable of making such projections.

  He soon returned with the curtain and used it to cover Michael’s head and upper body. The curtain was transparent and therefore allowed the wannabe butcher to keep an eye on the dead man’s throat. He once again lifted the axe above his head and brought it down on Michael’s throat with all his strength. The blade was mere inches from its target when Michael opened his eyes and grabbed the axe handle in mid-air, effectively stopping the weapon. He had died many times before, but he always hated the coming back to life part. The whole being dead thing made it really difficult for him to prepare for action… and action was typically requested when he returned to the world of the living.

  The butcher’s jaw dropped in bewilderment, but before he had a chance to accept what he was seeing, Michael had wrestled the axe away from him and sent the curtain at the others’ faces.

  Still on the floor, he struck his unsuccessful executioner between the legs using the axe handle, incidentally projecting him upward at high speed. The man’s squeal of pain and terror died in his throat a quarter second later when his head went through the ceiling, breaking his neck on impact.

  Michael got back on his feet at the same moment his two remaining antagonists were freeing themselves from the curtain. Before they had a chance to even lift their weapons, he had decapitated the closest one with a single swing of his axe.

  Although the other man had stepped back and was no longer within swinging distance, he was only able to pull the trigger once before the expertly thrown axe caught him square in the chest. He exhaled his last breath effectively pinned to the wall by the weapon.

  Michael called 911 and headed for the shower. His body was healing fast and his face was almost back to normal already. He had to get rid of his clothes. They had been shredded to pieces by the bullets and were soaked in blood. It wouldn’t do for the cops to find his intact body wearing these rags… it wouldn’t do at all!

  Giving a Viking an axe… what a stupid idea, he thought as he stepped under the shower.

  Chapter 42

  Bent over her cauldron, the witch was muttering incantations in a tongue strangely resembling Latin. Unobtrusively standing in a corner of the room, the Alpha observed the scene with a cold detachment.

  The woman’s dirty gray hair was falling onto her shoulders from under the brown piece of cloth tied over her head. She wore a shapeless black dress that fell to her ankles and obscured most of her silhouette. The dirty inch-long nails terminating her fingers were, with her face, the only visible parts of her body.

  Although the day was still bright outside, twilight prevailed inside the room. Thick black curtains had been drawn in front of the only window, and the half dozen black candles spread out through the chamber provided the room’s sole illumination.

 
; The cauldron had been set on a small round table in the center of the room and not atop a wood fire as one might have expected under the circumstances. Why the old hag had to transfer the drug from the convenient sealed glass vials provided by the Chemist into her idiotic-looking cauldron, the Alpha could not fathom, but the woman was adamant on this point. The Alpha suspected the cauldron served the same purpose as the woman’s long curvy nails and gray shaggy hair: satiating the witch’s thirst for theatrics. Despite her taste for melodrama, she was the real deal. The Alpha had approached several witches before finding one able to solve his problem and he had had to eliminate just as many. Someone in his position could not afford to leave witnesses alive. People were prone to talking, and his secrets were not meant to be revealed just yet.

  The hag raised her voice as she pronounced the last words of the incantation. The spell was now completed, and the drug safe to use, assuming one knew what one was doing, of course.

  The Alpha left his corner to join the witch in the center of the room and help her with the painstaking exercise of transferring the drug from the mostly empty cauldron back into the sealed vials suitable for injection.

  As they filled the vials, his mind wondered to the Chemist and his next delivery. This one would be significantly larger than the others, maybe even enough to fill the witch’s cauldron to the rim. That would not happen though; the Chemist’s next delivery was not to be transformed by the witch. The Alpha had other plans for it.

  Chapter 43

  Michael Biörn had barely stepped out of the shower when the first cops arrived. He grabbed a towel from the rack and wrapped it around his lower body as they reached the bathroom, guns in hand.

  “Hands up,” screamed one of them to Michael’s attention.

  Both officers were pointing their weapons at him as he lifted his hands up in the air while trying to look as non-threatening as possible. This was no easy task for Michael as his three hundred pounds of muscles looked anything but non-threatening. The bullets had been expelled from his body and were now littering the bathroom’s tiled floor. Not a single scar remained from the ordeal.

  “On the floor, face down,” shouted the other officer, looking even more nervous than his partner. Once again, Michael obeyed, moving slowly to avoid rattling the officers’ nerves even further. If one of them were to shoot him out of fear and the wound started healing under their eyes, there would simply be too much explaining to do.

  More footsteps could be heard entering the hotel room as one of the officers handcuffed Michael’s hands behind his back.

  “I am the one who called 911,” said Michael non-confrontationally.

  “Which one?” asked the officer sarcastically. “There were a dozen calls made to report this blood bath.”

  “I called as soon as they were done shooting at me,” answered Michael in an even tone.

  More cops entered the bathroom at this moment to enquire about the situation. The smell of blood was thick in the air but Michael detected a scent he knew, and then immediately after a second one. The familiar odors were approaching rapidly; they would reach the bathroom any second now.

  “What the hell do we have here?” asked Detective Lewis in an authoritative voice as she entered the room with Salazar on her tail. Before any of the uniformed cops had a chance to answer, she recognized Michael.

  “Biörn! You’ve got to be shitting me!” she exclaimed. “Are you the one responsible for this mess?”

  “What’s your excuse for being on the crime scene this time?” asked Salazar defiantly. “I didn’t see any paw prints on the bloody floor…”

  “This is my motel room. I didn’t think I needed an excuse to be here,” answered Michael in his usual, controlled voice.

  Salazar tried to think of a clever comeback, but couldn’t. So he simply acted as if Michael hadn’t spoken at all.

  “Get him on his feet, and bring him in the other room,” ordered Lewis.

  When Michael was brought into the bedroom, he noticed a couple more officers were standing watch outside. A small crowd of inquisitive patrons had formed in front of the room and were trying to get a peep at the butchery.

  “You have some explaining to do, Biörn, and I would advise you be convincing if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life behind bars,” said Lewis in a matter-of-fact voice.

  Michael was about to open his mouth when David Starks entered the room.

  “Are you all right, Michael?” asked David, sounding concerned.

  “I’m fine.”

  “What in heavens happened here?”

  “The suspect was about to answer that question for us, Starks. What are you doing here anyway?” interjected Lewis.

  “Michael’s a friend. When I heard over the radio there had been a shooting at his motel, I got worried and came over to see for myself.”

  “You’re friends with this guy?” asked Salazar doubtfully.

  “I am. Why? Is that a problem?”

  Salazar just shrugged his shoulders in answer.

  “Can we get back to business now?” asked Lewis in an irritated voice. “Mr. Biörn was about to tell us his story.”

  All turned their attention to Michael who, standing half-naked between two cops, was expecting the towel wrapped around his hips to drop to the floor at any moment now.

  “Could I please sit, or put some pants on first?” asked Michael.

  “Sit him on that chair,” said Lewis to the officers standing on each side of him. They obeyed, and Michael started telling his story, omitting only the details that would raise the most questions—such as his resurrection or the total absence of wounds on his body. The cops listened attentively without interrupting him. When he was done, Salazar asked, “If I understood everything you said, you expect us to believe you were attacked by four men with machine guns and an axe and managed to escape without a scratch while killing all your attackers?”

  “The proof of the pudding is in the killing,” commented David humorously, but, beside the two uniformed cops surrounding Michael, nobody smiled at the joke.

  “Yes, that’s correct,” said Michael in answer to Salazar’s question.

  “Do you know what the statistical probability of someone surviving this type of encounter is?” asked Lewis to Michael. “Do you really expect us to believe your story?”

  Michael remained silent, but David came to his defense. “Did your statistical calculation take into consideration that Michael was ex-special forces and carries more muscle than all of us in this room combined?”

  It was Lewis turn’s to remain silent this time.

  “Fine,” said Salazar, “say we believe your story. Please tell us why there are a dozen case-less bullets lying on the bathroom floor?”

  All turned inquisitive looks towards Michael who answered, “I can’t answer that question. I found them there when I entered the bathroom to go shower. I have no idea how or when they got there.”

  This was not a convincing argument, but the truth was even less convincing. As long as his torn bloodied clothes hidden inside the bathroom ventilation duct weren’t found, he might just get away with his lie. He had also taken the time to grab another set of clothes and soak them in blood before dropping them on the bathroom floor as supporting evidence of his tale.

  “You really take us for morons, don’t you?” said Lewis, visibly pissed off.

  “And who bothers taking a shower immediately after killing four men?” added Salazar.

  “Someone who doesn’t like to be covered with other people’s blood…?” offered Michael.

  David Starks smiled at the comment, Lewis shook her head in exasperation, and Salazar just stood there with a blank look on his face.

  Chapter 44

  It was approaching ten o’clock, and night had now fallen over the city. Salazar, Lewis and Starks were standing outside in the poorly lit parking lot, still talking to Michael, who had retold his story three more times and answered a throng of questions from the suspiciou
s detectives before they finally agreed to remove the handcuffs and let him slip into some clothes.

  Michael knew the detectives had not bought his entire story at face value, but Lewis and Salazar had to admit he did not look like the aggressor in this mayhem. The fact that one of the dead bodies belonged to a gangster with known affiliation to the Russian mob did not hurt either.

  In the meantime, more cops had shown up on the scene, shortly followed by the forensic investigators. After photographing the room and bodies from every conceivable angle, the forensic team had moved on to dusting the room for prints. In the process, they had collected a multitude of potentially interesting pieces of evidence for genetic and other analyses. Of course, the fact the crime scene was a motel room was going to significantly complicate their work. Most of the genetic evidence collected was bound to belong to previous patrons or the motel staff.

  “I don’t know what you did to piss off these guys, Biörn,” said Lewis in a more courteous voice, now that she had calmed down, “but if the mob is involved, killing these four won’t make your problems go away.”

  “They’ll come back for you, and next time you won’t be as lucky,” added Salazar, who liked to state the obvious.

  “I am going to ask the manager to move me to another room for the night, and tomorrow I’ll look for a different hotel.”

  “That’s a good idea,” commented David Starks. “I can help you with that.”

  “What are you still doing in town anyway?” asked Lewis suspiciously. “Now that Harrington is dead and the case was handed over to us, you have no reason to stick around.”

  “I like Houston, and I have some unfinished business to attend to.”