by S A Gardner
In two minutes, the child-eating, out-of-shape bastard was panting and wheezing. And I made my move.
Pretending to wrack my hair in abandon, I produced a dart from my wig, loaded with triple the deadly dose of potassium cyanide. Just what this doctor ordered with him being triple the size of a normal human being. The dosage was in mg/kg.
Hiding it between my fingers, I threw my hands over his neck and pumped it right into his carotid.
His eyes widened the second the dart pierced his hide, the realization in their hideous depths instantaneous. I smiled at him. So was my poison.
“Just a little something, for everyone you mutilated and massacred.” I hissed my taunt right in his ear. “It’ll be a minute before you lose consciousness. Though with you being an oxygen-deprived boar already, I’d say thirty seconds. But don’t think you can call for help, or that you’ll get off easy with a nice, painless death. I’m happy to say cyanide-poisoning victims have ultra vivid and harrowing deaths. Those seconds will feel like thirty years.”
I relished imagining what the poison was doing to him on the cellular level, stopping oxidative metabolism and oxygen utilization, suffocating him cell by cell.
His repulsive flesh shuddered under my hands in an amalgam of outrage and disbelief. That monster had lived his vicious life thinking death was something that he dealt other people.
I threw my arms around him, kept shaking him around. “Right this second you’re getting dizzy, you’re already struggling for air. Severe arrhythmia and collapse will complete the clinical picture of the massive myocardial infarction I want to simulate. Then I’ll watch you convulse and die a horrible death. My only regret here is that it’s still too merciful a death for you. But needs must. The irony gods decreed I need your death quick and clean. The things I could have done to you otherwise…”
He was twitching now. He already knew that whatever happened now, he was dead.
He opened his mouth and a gutted gorilla’s roar issued from him. Son of a bitch. I hadn’t thought he’d be able to issue another sound. Must be his demon protesting its imminent exorcism.
Thankfully, the others close enough to hear him over the frantic music thought he was joining in the abandon. That was until he swayed, bumped into other dancers right and left, garnering glares proclaiming him a drunk ape.
I pretended to be dancing a frenzy, watched him dying on his feet through half-closed eyes. At the end of the minute, his massive thighs gnarled over each other as he made another stuck-boar noise, half swung over his axis then collapsed.
The ground beneath my feet shuddered.
His fall brought his guards rushing towards us. As they descended on him, more and more people noticed the fallen behemoth in the middle of the packed dance floor and a commotion occurred. Still, it was more curious and amused than anything, everyone reaching the same conclusion I’d meant them to reach.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” I exclaimed for all to hear, my hands digging into my wig in pretense agitation, extracting more darts, preparing my next strikes. “I didn’t mean to tire him out this way.” I leaned over the two guards, almost spilling my breasts in one’s face as he looked up at me, eyeing that lovely gun he was packing. “Will he be OK?”
I placed a hand on each guard’s shoulder. The others would be in similar positions, about to take three or more guards down, confiscate their weapons. The moment we did I’d give the signal to the others outside, and they would…
Suddenly, the double doors of the ballroom crashed back on their hinges.
They smashed into the walls with a bang so thunderous it brought the music and chatter to a sputtering halt. Every eye in the ballroom snapped towards the source of the boom. And I saw him.
A bloody man standing framed in the doorway.
Oh, God—no.
This was it—the glitch that would bring down everything.
Thirty
Everything froze as if someone had hit the pause button on a live stream. And I knew. I had a second.
Use it. Do it.
I did, injected the two guards at my side with the darts as the man at the door fell down like a cut-down tree, slamming face-first on the hardwood floor, spattering blood all over those nearest to him.
I lunged to grab the guards’ guns—but I was too late.
The eerie silence exploded into pandemonium. A ram from behind sent me flying over the two dying guards. I impacted the floor cheek-first, next to my first suffocating victim. My eyes defocused on his still open eyes, on the malice that overrode even the panic. He’d probably had his monster trapped, and not vice versa.
I tried to push to my feet, and was knocked down again and again in the stampede towards the French windows leading to the gigantic terrace and gardens. Hard-soled shoes tread on my legs and hands and back, and kicked me in the head. Shouts and screams and gunfire ricocheted in my battered skull. Among those running over me, I recognized guards rushing to their employers, yelling on their communicators to their teams on the outside. I couldn’t see Damian. Or any of the others. It had all gone wrong.
Then it got worse.
Three guards pounced on me, dragged me to my feet. I saw most of the escorts meeting the same fate. It was only logical to consider us the most probable source of betrayal. Then people were pouring back into the ballroom in a riot, their panic clotting the air. Our team must have fired at them to herd them back inside. They knew we’d lost the stealth factor.
God—what was keeping them from initiating step two?
Vertigo still churned me around as I swayed on my feet, black pain shooting from my cheekbone directly into my gray matter, mingling with the dread of Damian’s ominous verdict.
There will be losses. Accept it.
Like hell.
My gaze tore around. Damian—where are you?
I saw only Matt and Suz, being herded at gunpoint, too. And nine more fallen tuxedoes were scattered around the ballroom. All big men. One of them was a platinum blond. God… Damian!
I strained in my captors’ hands for the step that would get me a direct look at his face. I got it, and… Oh, God—oh, God…
Not him. Not him.
It was another guard. All of them guards. So Matt and Suz had thinned the ranks. Probably Damian had gotten his share, too. But—dammit, where was he now?
Assume he’s OK. Count the remaining guards.
Twenty four. Not counting the ones holding me.
I sought Matt’s and Suz’s eyes. Stall until step two kicks in. Act if it doesn’t. Each nodded to me their readiness.
Before any of us could move, one of our targets, the Thai sex-slave trader, let out a sickening squeal of broken English, a threat that he was going to get to the bottom of this. Then he just shot his blonde escort in the head.
I recoiled, as if the shot had splattered my own brains.
No. Focus, dammit. Can’t afford rage. Not now.
But this one—this one I was getting myself. No matter what it took.
C’mon, c’mon. Where are you? Step two, dammit—step two!
The lights went out.
Yes. About time.
My leg lashed up in a vertical kick, smashed my foot into one of my captors’ faces. I felt the scrunch under the brick-hard toe of my sandal, his nasal bones driving right back into his hypothalamus. His hand on my arm lurched with discharging nervous transmissions, protesting that he was already dead.
I shook his lifeless grasp off me, swung my fist at the next one, at larynx-level. I connected, felt the cartilage crackle under my knuckles as it caved in. I heard the rattling breath intake just as I heard the shot.
It exploded into me, detonating tissues, slamming me into the third guard. I barely diverted another shot, knocked his gun away. He only fumbled for me in the dark, grabbed me by the neck and squeezed. I couldn’t even tell where I’d taken the bullet. I only felt a scorching wave advance through me. A freezing tide wasn’t far behind.
The bastard you killed mig
ht have already taken you with him. These may be your moments of death-denial.
Make them count.
The total darkness brightened with bursts of crimson and yellow as the vice around me neck cut off air and blood. My fingers fumbled for a dart in my wig.
With an arm on fire and the black world receding into nothingness, I stuck the dart right into his face. It sank in after meeting tough resistance. I knew what I’d just penetrated. His eye. He screamed. Once. He let go of me.
I almost crumpled to the floor. Pain now had an origin. My upper left quadrant. Not a good place. But I wasn’t dying yet. Get his gun. I threw myself over his twitching body, fumbled for his gun, found it.
And I screamed, “Get down.”
I couldn’t specify the escorts in this order. But if they could hear me, and it made them stop playing target-for-stray-bullets-in-the-dark and get the hell flat on the floor, they’d minimize their danger from the indiscriminate gunfire some spooked loons were spurting. I wanted them safe. And I didn’t want the rest of the guests dead. Yet.
Someone suddenly grabbed me in the chaos. One of the guards I’d thought I’d killed?
Dammit. I couldn’t fire. I was blind, could injure anyone.
I swung around, both feet aiming for every fatal spot I estimated from the position of the hands and—nothing. Nothing connected, as if I was fighting a phantom, one who thwarted me in a lightning succession of countermoves—of prophetic blocks…
Damian!
I was sure the moment his hand touched my bare skin. His fingers splayed around my nape, bracing my neck as he fitted a night-vision goggle over my eyes. It had a built-in infrared spotlight illuminator to overcome our total darkness conditions. And I saw him—a black and grey negative of himself on a background of green phosphorescence.
He lurched when his hand came around my waist to support me up and met the warm viscosity now drenching my whole left side.
“You’re injured!” he rasped.
Yeah. And I was beginning to feel where. Left armpit, just below my shoulder joint. “Doesn’t matter—we have to end this.”
I turned away from him to wade in the ocean of unearthly green, disregarding the dozens of shoving and stumbling negatives, homing in on the ones with the infrared emanating signals we’d tagged the guards with. A dozen remained. Between me and the others they didn’t remain for thirty seconds more.
Then I was swept up in Damian’s arms and out of the ballroom.
I saw two shapes following us. Matt and Ayesha. He must have signaled them. I gave a signal of my own, for the rest of our teams to secure the scene and for lights to come back on.
Damian rushed me to the sitting room Desideria had first received us in. I squealed when he lowered me on her magnificent couch.
“Shut up, Calista,” Damian hissed as he stood up, making room for Matt and Ayesha who pounced on me, examining my wound.
In a minute, Matt huffed. “This was close-range. Two more inches and the bullet would have ripped your aortic arch.” A vicious growl issued from Damian at his diagnosis. Matt nodded his corroborating anger, went on, “As it is, the sternocostal head of your pectoralis major and your anterior deltoid’s are blasted all the way to their humeral insertions. This will need repair.”
I bit my lip at the pain even his gentle exploration caused as Ayesha injected me with a low dose of morphine, just enough to manage the pain without impairing me. “I trust you’re not proposing doing it here and now?”
Matt smirked at me. “You’ll hold until I slip you into me busy schedule.”
Then he and Ayesha got to work, cleaning the wound, applying pressure bandages to stop my hemorrhage and administering resuscitative measures. I watched them as they worked and something didn’t sit right. Ayesha was too subdued.
“Ayesha, what are you not telling me?”
It was as if I’d snatched open the gates of a dammed river. It gushed out of her eyes, down her cheeks. My heart crumpled around the horror as Damian’s words ricocheted in my head again.
There will be losses. Accept it.
I slumped back on the couch, nerveless. I couldn’t ask who. I didn’t want to know who. This way everyone would remain alive just a little longer, if only inside my head.
“It’s Ishmael—and Sam,” Ayesha hiccuped.
God, no–no.
I wanted to scream for her to take it back, not to make it real. But I was voiceless, pulseless. And she was going on.
“We’d taken care of everyone right outside the ballroom. They turned away to run put the lights out, when one of our marks shot them in the back. I-I was on the other side of the hall, s-saw them go down. I shot the man again and he still staggered up opened the door before I could stop him…”
So this was how—oh God, oh God! Ishmael—he couldn’t be dead—we couldn’t be a “core eight” without him—and Sam—Sam…
Everything erupted in black and crimson and uncoordinated motion, in growls and orders and tear-drenched entreaties.
“Maldita sea, don’t even think it…”
“Lie still, Cali…”
“Please, don’t, Cali…”
I tore at their restraining concern, choking, “I’m not dead or dying. I’m damned fine. Now let go, damn you.”
They must have known. That I’d reached breaking point. They let me go, followed me back to the scene of devastation the ballroom now made. I didn’t look on the way. I didn’t see the friends I’d killed by dragging them into my crazy existence.
Ayesha pulled her mask back on over her drenched face as we entered and inspected our handiwork for the first time.
The corpses of the dead guards, the behemoth I’d killed, the escort and those who’d been killed by accident littered the extensive floor. All others were cowering there, their hands over their heads.
I passed by those I knew were Shad, Pierro and Lucia, extracted a gun from the latter’s holster on my way to stand in front of the line of our hostage monsters. Time to deliver our rehearsed speech, get this done and get the hell out of here.
“You are about to become an example of what our movement intends to do to all the corrupt who use and abuse the masses…”
I stopped, my heart almost uprooting itself with each thundering boom, rage and agony pushing me over the edge. There was no way I could stop myself from improvising.
I searched the crowd of faces I’d long fantasized about exterminating. Right now I was looking for a certain one, the one I’d promised myself I’d get, even when I hadn’t known if I’d live or die. I would have gone after him in hell.
I found him.
I walked up to him, kicked him in the balls. He fell to his side, the squirming, flimsy maggot that he was.
“You made your life and fortune destroying countless women, vermin. Look at me,” I growled as I forced him to a sitting position with more kicks. “You’re going to die at my hands. A woman—like those you enslaved and abused and terminated.” I brought my gun to his head, shaking now, lava bubbling over from my heart and gut.
The shot went off, and the man’s blood and brains splattered me, corroding through the last of my restraint.
Tears drenched me, obscuring the sight of the lifeless body slumping at my feet. But it didn’t hide the fact that the gun was quaking in my hand, unfired.
My head snapped around, saw him, his gun still raised. Damian.
He’d killed him for me. Always trying to spare me from breaking my Hippocratic oath by taking human lives. Hadn’t he noticed he was a couple of hundreds lives too late? Though it was impossible to consider a man like the one he’d just executed human or a life.
He walked over to me and everyone cowered at his approach. He took my hand, led me away, passing the firing squad his team were forming. He stopped in front of Desideria, her husband and Sir Ashton. He shot Desideria first, then Sir Ashton. Shad shot Henderson.
I saw blood spurting from Desideria’s turquoise bodice and Sir Ashton’s crisp white shirt. I
almost vomited.
Damian kept my hand in his as he and his team blasted two dozen other people, seemingly at random.
We couldn’t afford to single out our nine targets still. No one should ever know why they’d been killed or tie it to TOP or PACT or us. Their deaths would be lost among those of others whose crimes were as punishable by a thousand deaths.
Damian still kept my hand in his as we ran out to the airstrip where all jets were. We boarded the one with best access to the runway and evicted its crew. It was Sir Ashton’s. Later everyone would believe we’d just hijacked the jet closest to the runway.
Everything phased in and out during the short fly and the rough landing a hundred miles from Desideria’s estate. At some point I realized I was changing disguises.
“You’re sitting the rest out, Calista.”
I ignored Damian’s order. His eyes and Ayesha’s, who was helping me with my disguise, met over my head.
Something snapped inside me. “Quit it! I may have limited use of one arm but I’m still leader of the medical outfit, the one needed right now.” I turned to Rafael before either could slam me with any disputes. “Intercepted all emergency calls?”
He nodded as if this was the most superfluous question he’d ever heard. Then he said, “I, too, think you should…”
My snarl cut him off. “The next person who tells me what I should do, gets hurt. I’m going back for Ishmael and Sam. And I’m sure as hell going back for Sir Ashton and Desideria, so shut the hell up, all of you!”
In minutes I was onboard one of the three helicopter ambulances we had prepared. In twenty more minutes I was back at the scene of our simulated terrorist attack.
As soon as we descended on the scene the swarm of police who were arriving intercepted us. I dealt with the officers as my team divided into the agreed-on chores. I was keeping Ishmael and Sam for myself.
Two officers followed me as I went to them. I had to put on the mask of placid professionalism as I examined them.
They were still warm. They each had a single, fatal injury.