He moved the shotgun back directing it towards her uncle again. “See darling, that was easy wasn’t it? It's better if you don’t fight.” Out of the corner of her eye she could see Xavier boiling with rage. “Uh, uh lover boy” he said to him shaking his head “don’t even think about it or things could get worse, much worse” he threatened.
He opened her bag and started rummaging through it, like a pig rooting through garbage, not caring what he damaged or threw out. He touched the orb.
“What the hell is this?” he cried his eyes gleaming at the sight of the golden ball. “Looks like the buggers found themselves some gold.”
Her uncle looked at Xavier “You have to protect it, at all costs” he pleaded.
Xavier nodded, ready to explode. He had had enough of him threatening Tasha, he couldn’t bear that guys oafish hands coming anywhere near her again. He leapt from his chair, grabbing Jose and wrestling him for the gun. The gun waved wildly through the air, as Tasha screamed ducking in the limited space to try to avoid its aim.
Her uncle mustered up all the strength he had and brought his fist flying at Jose’s face. It connected with a crack and her uncle fell back onto his seat groaning holding his hand in pain.
“Uncle” she cried reaching over to him.
“I think I broke it” he grimaced his fingers rushing to turn purple, “but it was worth it.”
Xavier wrestled him for the gun, whilst trying in vain to hold him down, but it was like trying to hold jelly with a fork. “A little help here?” cried out Xavier.
“What do I do?” she asked him.
“Get the damn gun off him” he said still struggling with him. The guy was strong like a prize bull. Tasha stood up and tried to wrestle the gun off him.
The gun went off. The sound was so loud in the confined space that it made her head buzz. Her ears ringing, she struggled with the disorientation as she realised that the recoil of the shotgun had knocked Jose fair in the nose, cracking it like a Christmas cracker in the hands of a two-year-old.
Blood gushed from his nose, lining his teeth with viscous red along the gums. Reeling with shock, he had finally released his grip on the shotgun and she was left holding it awkwardly in her hands, with it pointed directly at Jose.
She looked across to Xavier, he had managed to subdue Jose in a headlock and was holding his tactical knife to his neck.
But he still needed help.
“Help me” he said looking up at her, perspiration marring his forehead.
“What do I do?” she asked nervously, holding the shotgun like it was a parasitic leech that she had to get off her.
“Use the gun!”
“What?” she cried “No, no I can’t, please don’t ask me to.”
“I mean turn it around, use the butt on his head to knock him out.”
Jose eyed her disconcertingly “you don’t have it in you girly” he said viciously, “now give me the gun before you kill someone else.”
She looked at him furiously not gathering the full implication of what he had said.
She turned to look at her uncle and saw him gasping, the bullet had passed by his neck, nicking his major artery. He grasped at his neck, holding tight to stop the blood spurting across the cabin.
“He doesn’t have much longer” crowded Jose laughing wickedly his eyes dark and flat.
Her entire demeanour changed in an instant.
“You arsehole” she fumed “it’s all your fault.”
She raised the wooden butt of the shotgun and brought it down on his head gingerly, like a cat playing with a mouse, fanning it with its paw.
He looked at her sniggering as small amount of blood dripping down his head from where the butt had made contact. “Chicken shit the lot of you” he spat, like coughing up a dry ball of lint.
“Uncle…..Uncle, no, no, no...”
She cried looking at him clasping desperately to his neck, gargling and gurgling, sounding like he was choking for air.
“Do it” her uncle requested weakly, raising a bloody hand to grasp the front of her shirt, his grip like death. “They mean to kill you or worse.”
She aimed the gun at him, directly at his head, her look was one of withering wrath and vengefulness.
“Move!” She barked at Xavier.
Xavier stepped backwards, afraid of what she was going to do next. She closed her eyes and let out her breath and in that moment she pulled the trigger, feeling the hard click of the hammer as it release the bullet from the barrel, throwing her backwards onto her chair, bruising her ribs. The bullet went straight through his face, smashing his bone and teeth, blowing his entire head apart.
She had expected the sound of the gun, but not the sound of it as it tore through his head. She was used to the sound it made in movies, a dull thwacking noise like tapping on a watermelon.
That was the censored version Hollywood wanted you to hear. The reality was more graphic, gruesome and a sound that would never leave her head. Fragments of bone and teeth flew outwards, embedding themselves into the metal walls and leather seats.
Even more unexpectedly, the bullet continued its rampage, continuing its deadly path directly into the back of David’s head. It lodged itself into his head, directly hitting his brainstem at the base of his skull, causing instant brain death. The force of the bullet propelled his head forward and he lay dead, slumped over the throttle.
The plane dived suddenly and she lurched forward, releasing the gun it slid along the floor and under Xavier's seat. She steadied herself reaching for her bag, trying to ignore Jose’s head. It was torn asunder, ripped apart like a bomb had exploded in the middle of it. She had misjudged the full impact of a shotgun at close range.
She pried the bag out of his fingers and hurriedly scrambled through it, trying to locate the orb. Her fingertips touched it, lying on the bottom of her bag. She thrust her hand in further and pulled the orb out, its shining golden surface now covered in blood.
“Don’t worry Uncle” she cried out “I’m coming.”
Xavier had jumped over the front seat, and lifted David's head up off the throttle pulling it back up again to rectify the plane. Tasha started rubbing the orb on her uncle's chest, but unlike before in the subterranean cavern it did not light up.
“Why won’t it work?” she cried woefully.
“Xavier it's not working.” She pleaded for his help.
Xavier was unable to help her, was too busy trying to fly the plane.
“Stupid ball!” she yelled at it, as if it could hear her.
“God damn it, work!” She frantically unbuttoned her uncle’s shirt, her fingers shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.
She tried, and tried... rubbing the orb directly against his flesh, smearing blood on his pale flesh everywhere the ball touched.
“It’s not working Xavier” she sobbed. “Do you hear me? It’s not working. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
Her hope was fading…
She felt like she had left her body and was now floating, looking on down at the scene like a helpless observer.
Her uncle looked at her and reached out his hand to gently hold hers.
“It’s alright” he said with a weakened ghostly smile.
“It’s not!” she screamed. “This thing should work.” (the wretched orb will not work, why will it not work?)
She tried touching it closer to the injury - no, no, no. Nothing!
“Please” she could barely hear him now, his voice was like that of a whisper crackling, a croaky whining wheeze, “please, get it to the safe place. I love you.”
He pressed his ring into her hand, whilst he exhaled his last dying breath.
“No, no, no” she banged her fists on his chest in lamentation, the palpitation causing the last air in his lungs to hiss as it escaped his open mouth.
“This stupid ball” she held it in her hand “how does it get to choose?”
She looked down, realising she was covered in Jose and her uncle'
s blood, she almost dropped the orb in shock. Like the pre-Columbian Red Paint People, she was covered in a sickening redolent red, reserved for gracing the bodies of the dead.
“He’s gone” she cried out softly.
She slumped back on her chair, sobbing softly clutching in orb in one hand. “He was like a father to me.”
“I’m sorry” said Xavier over his shoulder “I have to fly this plane. This thing has autopilot, but I wouldn’t trust using it, it's probably broken like everything else on this damn plane.”
“It’s ok” she heard herself say from a distance, slumping even further into the chair.
She could not look up for fear of seeing the massacre that surrounded her, the walls splattered with red like a Jason Pollock ode to a serial killer. She felt herself going into shock, her hands were shaking and she felt cold, morose.
She could feel her mind detaching from her body, as if floating above it and looking down like an external onlooker, there just to observe.
“Hang in there.” Xavier’s voice sounded like it was coming from a distance through a deep fog that had surrounded her brain.
She looked down at the orb, now sticky in her hand and cursed it silently.
Xavier was trying to focus on flying the plane. He had flown planes before and was familiar with the pedals and the throttle, but he had never flown a Cessna 411 before and he was a bit on edge. At the same time, he was worrying about Tasha. He could see that she had gone white and was shaking, the telltale signs of shock.
“Stay with me” he said to her anxiously. “Tasha, look at me” he insisted turning his head towards her. She lifted her head ever so slightly. “I don’t know how much fuel is in this thing. I have to assume David knew there was enough to get back to the landing strip.” She gazed at him mournfully, her eyes glazed over, shining like the sweet sticky confection that covers a Cinnabon. “That is if I can find the damn landing strip and land this pile of crap safely” he mumbled to himself, not wanting her to hear.
What had felt like hours before now felt like minutes. “We’re almost there” yelled Xavier. “Buckle up.”
She reached for her seat belt and buckled it, not even realising she was doing it. Like someone who had just had a lobotomy, she sat lifeless, her arms falling by her side palms upwards, like her brain had short circuited and she could no longer feel anything at all.
Xavier was in a world of trouble of his own. The plane wasn’t responding quite like he had hoped, and there were no second chances. He was expecting to be hailed by a small control tower he had spied on the way around, and he didn’t have a handle.
Luckily for him, no-one hailed him. He puffed a small sigh of relief, confessing to himself that sometimes being in a third world country had its advantages, however one of them wasn’t safety standards.
Day visual meteorological conditions prevailed, or in other words the skies were clear and blue, and there appeared to be no crosswinds. That should have been comforting, but it was not. He had to guess on when to begin the descent, it was an unenviable position but he had both their lives in his hands.
He was approaching a thousand feet and falling and decided it was time to drop the landing gear. He reduced the throttle slowly and the plane started to pitch downwards gathering speed. He dropped the flaps in an effort to slow the plane, and started to pitch downwards again. He could feel perspiration leaking from his forehead, dripping down over his eyes and down onto his lips.
He licked his lips, tasting the salt of the sweat of his brow, wondering if this was how the last few minutes he would spend on this earth were going to play out.
The plane acted like it was going to stall, the plane's speed dropping below the airspeed needed to maintain lift, it chugged and moaned at him like an old married woman, so he set the throttle to 100%. The plane continued to fall eventually gaining enough speed for him to regain control, the ground approaching him at a dizzying pace. He pulled the stick firmly to raise the plane's nose up past the horizon and then chopped the throttle back to zero.
He breathed a sigh of relief as the plane's wheels hit the runway. The plane bounced faster and harder than a dead cat bounce on the stock exchange, and he could swear he saw part of the wing fall off. The plane dipped and the wing connected with the ground, half of it shearing clear off. It didn’t matter, the game of chicken they had been playing with the ground was over. He pressed his feet down firmly on the brakes and the plane reluctantly taxied to a stop at the end of the runway.
He climbed over into the back, shaking like an autumn leaf ready to drop, attempting to get to Tasha who looked like she had passed out on the chair. He looked down at her, noticing that amongst all the blood that covered her like slick red paint, her arm was actually bleeding. He touched it gently realising that a shard of bone had embedded itself into her arm.
“You have a little souvenir from our friend Jose” he said trying to lighten her mood unsuccessfully. She pulled her arm away stubbornly. “Let me look at it” said Xavier. “Here, I’ll cut it out.” He produced his tactical knife, and using it as gently as possible, he pried the bone fragment out. Not once did she flinch. Not once did she cry out. He grabbed the plane's emergency medical kit and applied a plaster. The wound was not big, but it was fairly deep.
“Here” he pulled her other hand to it, pressing it down on top of the wound “keep some pressure on it for a few minutes, to stem the bleeding.” He checked the rest of her over, but could not see any other wounds.
“We need to get the orb to Vatican City” she said faintly. “My uncle asked us to.”
“Yes, but you need to get cleaned up first.” He looked around hurriedly out the plane's side windows. There was no-one around on the private airstrip, but that could change any second. He grabbed both their bags.
“We have to leave, and leave now.” He threw their bags out of the stair door and grabbed her practically carrying her out of the plane and down the stairs. “Knowing what we now know” he said more to himself than her “David would not have declared us as passengers, especially due to what they had planned for us. That absurdly plumb smiling assassin.”
He dragged her behind the hangar and started stripping her bare.
She suddenly came to life “what are you doing?” she protested, pushing him back, starting to shake.
“Please, just co-operate” he begged, “I’m trying to clean you up a bit.” He found a spare change of clothes in her rucksack, and using a small towel he had in his, and a bottle of cold water, her started rubbing her body, cleaning the blood away from her face, hair and arms.
“From what I can see” he looked across from the hangar “we are not too far from the Tomas De Heres Airport. I vote we start walking right now and see if we can pick up a taxi on the way.”
She hissed a kind of wild laugh that shattered the silence she had been steadfastly maintaining. “They’ll probably try to rob us, and kill us.”
“Come on now, don’t think like that.” He scooped up her belongings stuffing them into her bag. “We’ll dispose of these when we get a chance.”
They started walking, and it wasn’t long before they were offered a lift. The guy who stopped was driving a beat up old truck with what looked like a Studebaker wooden truck bed on the back, filled with young pigs. He smiled at them, a grin with prominently decayed and chipped teeth that would have made even the tooth fairy shudder, and motioned them to climb aboard.
Tasha sighed “Why not?” the smell was practically unbearable. Pigs don’t react well to stress and they had peed and pooped all over the back of the truck. She climbed up, sitting amongst the filth, and sat as if in a trance. Xavier swung himself up beside her and sat quietly.
The farmer was heading into Cuidad, so they were able to get a hotel room, so they could both freshen up.
“We have to make it quick” said Xavier, I want to be at the airport in less than an hour's time. She nodded and took her key. The receptionist was very discreet and did not mention the sme
ll or traces of blood. She stood in front of the mirror looking at herself, barely recognisable from the woman who had been sitting in her conservatory a few days earlier. Her arms and legs were covered in miscellaneous bites, and she had a layer of filth on her body that would take a week to lather free.
She gripped the faucet viciously, as if wringing its neck would make her feel better. The water streamed from the shower and she closed her eyes, images flashing before them in stark vivid color, burned to her retina destined never to leave her vision, lurking like shadows of a recurrent nightmare.
She dropped her head against the wall, wanting to bang it on the tiles to remove the severe and desolate images of death.
She winced as she touched her left shoulder, the impact of the shotgun's butt had made a crimson reminder. In a few days it would turn purple and then melanoid, a constant visual reminder holding vigil for a much larger, deeper cancerous bruise hidden from the eyes, coveted like a precious object by the head and heart. (If only she could forget what had happened, erase it from her memory. But you can’t.)
She glanced at the soap, complete with a gnarly strand of pubic hair from its previous user and gingerly removed it from the soap holder. She filled the basin with steaming hot water and threw the bar in to soften it. She fished it out, the water scolding her fingertips and began mashing it on the vanity bar, crushing it and mushing it, adding a small amount of water as she went until it looked like a blobby, gluggy mound of sludge.
She retrieved the orb from her bag and washed it down. Crafts weren’t her speciality but she was going to make this time an exception. She started lifting the slimy goo and pressing it around the orb. Layer by layer she built it up, using the hotel hair dryer to slowly dry each coat, until pleased with its appearance she stopped to admire what looked like a lovely round ball of soap.
She found one last set of clothes in her bag that remained untainted and got dressed, struggling to get into them, before she heard Xavier banging insistently on the door. Xavier looked at her, trying to gauge how she was feeling.
“I’m ok” she said, as if telepathically comprehending and answering his unuttered question.
The Artifact: Natasha Burrows Series Book One Page 14