Otaku's faulty device detonated and Freya took that moment on and beyond, because within less than a second there was just bone and blood. A supersonic blast within a space no more than eight feet, cubed. An enclosed space of steel, a high-order explosive, and a 123lb woman who wore a red dress.
*
X.
The Path of Least Resistance
A firework contains an explosive mix, most often within a tube. A gun, or even a cannon, or a musket, all work on a similar, related principle. The force of the explosion propels an object along the path of least resistance. The reason, in effect, that when a person pulls the trigger of a gun that the explosion and subsequent gaseous release does not vaporise their gun hand and half of their forearm.
A gun is constructed, usually of steel. A bullet rests in a shell. The shell is packed with explosive, in different proportions. The steel is hard, the exit along the barrel of a weapon is not. Force propels the bullet when the pressure of the hammer upon the shell causes the mixture to ignite.
Modern projectile weapons, such as pistols and rifles, have spiralling, or rifling, along the barrel. As the projectile travels along the barrel, the rifling causes the bullet to rotate upon exit, spin. Rifling makes weapons far more accurate than a cannon or musket or firework ever would have been.
An elevator shaft, containing a supersonic explosion, was, by and large, a greater scale projectile weapon.
The roof of the elevator cab was made of steel, and held the cables. It was strong, well constructed. The floor of the elevator took the greater weight.
The explosion took the path of least resistance.
When David Lowe's ocular cavity was penetrated by a fragment from the explosion, as he leaned over the shaft to call to his wife, it was not a fragment of metal that penetrated his face.
It was a fragment of his wife.
*
Two of four copper shoes remained, clamped against the buckled sides of the elevator.
When David Lowe fell through the ruptured roof of the elevator into the mess of blood and bone, all that remained of his wife, his weight broke the hold of the second to last shoe of the governor system.
The fall, onto his head, knocked the giant unconscious, and set the elevator falling.
The 227lbs of the other man had never been in the elevator. Now, though, the weight of a 280lb man falling into the elevator, with the added effect of gravity, was too much for the unsupported elevator cab to handle.
The last copper shoe lost purchase. The elevator picked up speed, rushing toward the bottom of the shaft.
*
Cables, governor, and the hydraulics at the base of an elevator shaft make elevators, by and large, the safest means of human transport available.
The impact at the bottom of the shaft ruptured untold blood vessels in David Lowe's body. It didn't break anything, though, because he was unconscious and limp to start with, rather than standing.
Had he been standing, his ankles, hips and maybe his lower back would have broken in the impact, rather similar to injuries sustained in most falls.
He bounced up into the air, back down.
Woke, finally, in his wife's tattered remains.
*
XI.
The Beast in the Cage
'A man, son, is responsible for his own actions,' said a father with thick, heavy hands.
David Lowe's face had always been blunt. At fifteen, when he began to lift weights, his face was blunter, still, from the tough loving of an old man with heavy hands.
'A man is always responsible for his own action,' said the man, and hit.
'You own that, son,' said the man, once, breaking David's nose and fracturing his cheek after David had stayed out past his curfew by an hour because he'd missed his bus because he, at fourteen, had stayed late shopping to buy his mother a cloth heart to hang from her wardrobe. His mother hung hearts all over the house.
At fourteen the man had broken David's nose and cheekbone.
But he'd been broken long, long, before, where it hurt the most.
His old man owned that.
*
But the lesson stuck.
A man makes choices, makes mistakes. Make a mistake, make it right. You own it.
You own it.
He couldn't make this right.
Waking, hurt all over. Not dead, but he wished he was.
Pain like he'd never known, and broken so completely that even though he woke, was alive, he didn't want to live.
David Lowe was covered in his wife.
He owned it.
He hated himself, his father, the man with the gun, Otaku, the strange man with the scarecrow mask on his head.
But he hated himself more than anyone had ever hated themselves... Maybe ten or twenty men in the world hated themselves more.
But it was epic, this hatred. So large that he couldn't grasp it.
In among the debris of a love so immense, the pieces of his wife.
And from those pieces, he emerged. Keening, like a grieving widow in some Arab country, wailing. So heart sore he couldn't carry the weight of it, couldn't think, couldn't allow himself to feel any kind of relief at being alive.
He felt nothing but despair, and with it, despised himself. Wanted to tear himself to pieces with his own immense strength. To pull his own arms from their sockets, to gouge out his good eye so that he didn't have to look at the red mess of the only thing that had ever been good in his life.
A man so strong, and so completely broken. A beast, in a cage. No bars, just a shattered elevator in a burned shaft.
No bars but in his mind. He knew he was a beast, a monster, a leviathan rising out of the deep sea of self-loathing, a black pit around some hideous and gargantuan tentacled-thing, grasping out and pulling love itself into its gapping maw.
He was despicable. A sideshow freak. A giant crushing a mouse.
'You own this,' said the shadow of his father, and for once, he knew his old man was right, had always been right.
David Lowe pushed himself through the viscera of his wife's remains, up, onto unsteady feet.
Pulled at the door of the elevator. Buckled steel, a broken man.
A beast in a cage.
'Not no more,' said David, surprised at his voice, his lungs and throat damaged in the blast, too. Husky, low, like a voice full of blood.
He grunted and wrenched the doors open, stepped out in to the lobby in front of a terrified concierge dialling the police on the hotel's antique-looking phone.
David Lowe ignored the man and stumbled toward the stairs to finish his business.
He owned it, alright. And a man paid his debts.
*
XII.
Otaku and the Man in the Mask
Otaku stepped from the stairwell onto the top floor of the Regal hotel, weapon in hand, wondering where and when everything had gone so wrong.
He figured it had been when the man who looked like a giant, crying baby, had come to his door.
Either way, time to make it right, he figured.
He turned his head away from the shattered window at the end of the corridor and the darkness that leaked from the night into the hallway. He looked along the length of the hall toward the elevator shaft.
*
The man with the gun was called Harry, and he and Otaku had worked together for over fifteen years.
A reliable, simple man, with small needs and cheap desires.
Much like Otaku himself. It had been a good working relationship.
The gun was nowhere to be seen.
The man who carried the gun (a different gun, everytime, always) was a broken and tattered heap in the middle, roughly, of the corridor.
There were three doors on the top floor. Penthouse suites, Otaku knew, because he did his research. His own cameras were in the Other Man's suite, and in the hallway, to the right of the shattered window.
The Other Man was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the giant baby.
&nbs
p; On the floor, head canted at an unnatural angle, was the man with the gun.
Dead, for sure.
Other than Otaku, there was only a man wearing a sackcloth mask.
*
Otaku made mistakes.
The mask didn't.
'Who the fuck are you?' said Otaku.
The mask didn't say anything. There was no hole for a mouth, nor holes for eyes. The mask didn't speak. It never had.
Instead, it moved.
And Otaku didn't move fast enough.
*
There's a problem, always, with explosives in small spaces.
A grenade, homemade, which Otaku had, was swiftly useless.
He never carried a gun. He wasn't a fighting man. He wasn't strong or skilled in anything other than the creation of explosions.
He couldn't, in fact, think on his feet.
What he should have done, when things began to go south, was close his laptop in his rented room, put the laptop in his padded bag, and walk, not run, from the hotel. He should have gone home, gone online, removed his persona from the numerous websites he frequented, laid low, waited out the mess.
The scarecrow man wasn't large, or fast. He was simply implacable and constant, and while he moved, every second of movement made Otaku's powerful explosive more and more useless.
The mask didn't hold a weapon. Didn't stop moving.
It grasped Otaku's head either side and drove its thumbs into Otaku's surprised eyes.
Blinded, agonised, Otaku dropped the homemade grenade without ever releasing the pin.
The mask had no teeth, no eyes.
It had Harmon's hands, to use, though.
Otaku was blind, but he could feel. He felt the scarecrow man's hands shift from his useless eyes to his throat.
I'm fucking blind, he thought. He raised his own hands, inexpertly trying to push the man, the thing, away. He raked the rough cloth with his fingernails, thumped the face beneath the weird mask. Nothing. No sound came from the scarecrow man.
His throat was in a tough, tight grip. He bucked and pushed, until there came a moment when he understood that his struggles weren't helping at all. Anything he did would be ineffective. He was a dead man.
It choked the life from Otaku. Hands around his throat, Otaku didn't see spots but a deep redness where the thing that was killing him had ruined his eyes.
He flailed against the mask, but it would not shift. His vision, at the edges, began to blacken, a soft and slow shift from a torn and bloody red to black and blackness and nothing at all...
He's fucking killing me, he thought.
Otaku made plenty of mistakes, but in this, he was right.
*
XIII.
The Beast Within
Police sirens sounded in the distance, closing.
But different sirens, too. Some kind of inner city symphony. Fire engines, ambulances, police. Sounds converging and covering the low hum of traffic and city life with a blanket of noise like the year-round snow of towns and cities all around the world.
David Lowe heard nothing but the roar from his bruised lungs and the rushing of blood in his head.
His eardrums were ruptured, rather than perforated. Blood and other, clear, viscous fluid ran from his earlobes and onto his neck.
His chest, penetrated by three bullets, was labouring as he climbed the stairs. The second and third bullets fired at him had hit his immense ribcage. One rib was shattered, the other chipped. The fourth bullet had entered the space between his ribs and was in his lung. The bullet was fragmented and the lung, punctured, wasn't working quite as it should.
It was filling with blood, and his oxygen was low from exertion and damage. His adrenaline, though, was flooding his system, still.
When he fell through the torn steel roof of the elevator, Lowe's shin was torn open to the bone. Blood flowed down his shin and onto his shoe.
His scapula, broken when the blast threw him into the ceiling on the top floor of the Regal Hotel.
His hands were torn open, ragged, almost useless now, by steel cable.
Burned on his face and missing a large portion of his hair.
He was blind in one eye with a fragment of bone from his wife, whom he had, with his actions and his insane jealousy, destroyed.
David Lowe felt every one of his injuries and relished them. He grinned, he puffed, he panted, and he owned it.
He'd brought it on himself, and he owned it.
He roared, climbed, coughed blood, hated himself.
But he climbed, because a man paid his debts.
*
XIV.
The Man in the Mask
The man in the mask didn't matter to the mask.
The man in the mask was called Harmon.
The mask wanted the big man, the giant, the anomaly.
Strength and power and rage. Hatred, loathing. Love.
It wanted those things.
The mask was just a thing of patchwork, dried blood, hessian.
And yet it knew, it understood, it breathed and felt and it didn't make mistakes, because it was just a sackcloth mask with no eyes to deceive and no mouth with which to lie.
*
The man with the gun lay broken and peaceful on the red and yellow diamond carpet of the corridor. The gun, forgotten, was beneath him.
Debris and scorch marks covered nearly half the length of the corridor.
The force of the blast, a wave of air, had shattered the window at the end of the corridor, fully forty feet and change from the blast.
The gun had two bullets left in it.
A grenade, homemade, rolled, rocked, and settled against an upturned plant pot with a sturdy yukka. The pin was still in.
The mask wanted neither the gun nor the grenade.
It stepped over Otaku's corpse. Otaku wore a Gundam t-shirt beneath a tight leather jacket. His pot-belly was exposed and his t-shirt had ridden up above it. His tongue lolled out, his face turned to one side.
The mask heard the roar, heard the passion. Coming up the stairwell.
Long way to go. Man's hurting. Let him tire.
It took a keycard from Harmon's suit pocket and opened the door to the top-floor suite.
*
The mask didn't want to kill the giant.
It wanted to own him.
*
Harmon, the mask, searched the top-floor suite for a weapon, but there wasn't one. There wasn't a kitchen, with a hand drawer full of long knives.
Either way, it didn't think a long knife, or ten long knives, would stop the giant.
It wanted something else. It wanted to ride him, to take him. To own him, like his guilt.
There was no weapon...but sometimes the best weapons aren't made of steel or wood or plastic, but of flesh and blood and bone...like the man it wore.
The mask spoke, shortly, to Harmon. The mask and Harmon both, cunning in their own way. The mask a thing without sanity, and Harmon a man who'd lost his so long ago he didn't even remember it.
Harmon stepped out from his penthouse suite on the twentieth-floor of the Regal Hotel, into the hallway. He held nothing in his hands. No weapon, no briefcase. The mask wore him right up into the stairwell.
Then, Harmon took the mask off and the mask took off Harmon.
*
XV.
Last Man Standing
Masks don't lie. They can't.
It's the man behind the mask that lies.
*
'Jesus Christ, man...are you alright?'
Harmon stood above the wreckage of the man called Lowe. Concern on his face, a good suit, and something bulky pushing out his right jacket pocket at an odd, clumpy angle.
Just a smart man in a business suit. Wool, probably, even though it was the height of summer.
Little things like the temperature, the seasons, the turning of the earth...in the moment, a man can't think wide. Thoughts narrow down to the essential. The mind focuses with determination on the things most im
portant to its preservation.
Lowe stopped climbing, blood on his chin and his lungs hurting worse than anything else. Though his vision was hazy, there was nothing but low light in the stairwell anyway. The man before him was swaying, or he was.
Lowe had focused on nothing but the climb, steady and slow, and his need to kill. He was ready to tear people apart, ready to butt and kick, punch, rend.
And a man in a business suit was asking him if he was okay.
For a moment, Lowe couldn't speak. He was tired, his lung was punctured, his ears were swimming.
The suited man's words were dull and broken, barely audible through Lowe's shattered ears.
Lowe's rage, his loathing for himself, was towering. Suddenly, he was disarmed by an entirely ordinary man, who was simply voicing his concern.
Lowe tried to speak, tried to remember why he had climbed so many stairs with his blood filling him in places blood should not be.
I killed my wife, he thought.
He remembered that. Nothing else.
Lowe was shutting down. He was nearly done.
He'd killed his wife. He'd seen her blood, her bones, her viscera. He'd lain in it.
'Call the police,' he said. As he spoke, flecks of blood came from his mouth. He was standing still, his hand on the rail in the stairwell, but he stumbled and put a knee down on a riser, his other leg shaking.
Lowe's head was down. He wasn't looking at Harmon.
Harmon put his finger on the mask in his suit pocket.
It felt rough, eager.
Slip me on him. Now. While he's down...
Harmon stepped forward.
'Let me help you,' said Harmon, and took the mask from his pocket.
Deadlift (The Mulrones Book 4) Page 4