by J. D. Heath
The nurse frowns. “Well there was the young lady. She called last night.” She slides a look at the door and I do too. There’s a uniform standing there, forming a wall of blue. “Is everything all right?”
“It’s fine. Thank you.” She nods and bustles away and out. I stare at the flowers. My head hurts, badly. The words on the envelope fly through my brain.
The profilers had it all wrong. Gina’s not a male, not a psychopath with some sort of fetish. She’s not living with her parents and stunted emotionally—all the things Tayne had been.
I don’t know what she is. I know she has a reason for killing. The card proves it. I need to figure it out, and fast. Her reason for killing is tied into the scythes she leaves with the bodies, it’s somehow tied to the taking of her victim’s tongues.
And all of her reasons are somehow connected to Control, the shadowy organization that created and ran the Dying Game.
A stray bar of sun strokes across the table and the flowers send a bloody glow across the sheets. A chill rolls through my body, a sense of dread comes up, leaving me momentarily breathless.
Why does the Reaper, reap?
Something dark peeks out from between the stems. At a casual glance it look like a part of the dark, square vase. But it isn’t and I know Gina. She’s good at hiding things in plain sight. She saved our lives with that skill while we were in the Fortress, after all. I frown and rummage past the flowers. My fingers connect with something solid and I grip it. It’s a slim, black cell phone and a cord.
The USB. She wants me to open it. Now.
I dip my fingers down deeper into the vase. Dry as a bone. No way were those flowers delivered hours ago. They’re still fresh, fragrant, and smooth. They’ve been brought in and not by a delivery guy who just leaves the flowers on the nurse’s station either.
“Gina.” The word leaves my mouth and I know she’s close by. She has to be. She’d want to make damn sure I got the phone and the USB.
She’s close. I have to find her. I pull the needle from my arm and yank the rails down. My feet swing to the floor but a wave of dizziness hits. My body slides sideways and my head ends up against the rail on the other side of the bed.
This stupefies me. I’m weak and helpless. My feet are on the floor but there’s no way I can lift myself. The ache in my skull becomes a full-on assault of agony. The lights are killing my eyes and I can’t figure out how to lever myself into a position that will get me up and walking.
The machines let out an indignant squeal and I hear feet rushing down the hallway.
I stuff the phone, the envelope, and the cord into the vase a mere moment before a woman steps into my room. She’s tall and imposing, with sandy-blonde hair and patrician features. She says, “Let’s just fix that.” She hits a button and the machine goes silent.
The uniform steps in right behind her. I say, “It’s okay. I’m fine. Just a little accident with a line.”
I have to get out of there. Fast. I have to find Gina. I don’t think she’s running away from me. I think she wants me to find her. We have the same enemy, still, it seems, and we do make one hell of a team.
Blood drips from the hole the needle left behind in my arm. The uniform shuts the door. The blonde woman looks down at me, her brows drawn down tightly over her ice-blue eyes. The uniform crowds closer, his leg striking the bed and sending it a little to one side.
She says, “Hold him,” and that’s when I see the syringe in her hand.
I croak out, “What is that?” I struggle to sit up and manage to but the cop shoves me down again without a word. Something’s wrong. The uniform. It’s wrong. The tag’s on the wrong side and it doesn’t fit like it should. I see this in the blink of an eye but it takes my brain and body a dangerous amount of time to understand what’s happening.
The woman snarls, “Dammit, help me with him and keep him quiet! Now! Before someone comes in here!”
He’s not a cop even if he’s dressed like one. I doubt she’s a doctor. But she’s got a dangerous looking needle in her hand and it’s aimed at my veins and I’m fighting for my life all over again.
The fake cop’s a big guy, all muscle. His hand’s like steel and it bands across my arm, pressing it into the bed. I lift a leg and manage to land a kick in his thigh then jerk upward. I mean to slam my head into his but I halt just in time. I’ve already got a busted skull. I can’t afford to fight that way. I have managed to distract him though, just long enough to get my other arm up and my fist into his nose.
Blood flows. The woman, clearly not having any of this particular shit, grabs my arm and tries to force the needle into it. I fight back, yanking so hard the bed goes sliding across the floor, the wheels that move it along squeaking and groaning on the linoleum.
The woman grabs the rail and yanks hard. The bed skids toward her and the cop again. I kick out both feet, catching him in the gut and manage to land a glancing blow on the point of her chin. She staggers backward but comes back toward me, the needle still in her hand. It doesn’t take a genius to know whatever is in that needle, it’s meant to kill me. I have to keep her away from me, keep that needle away from me.
I try for my feet again but my knees buckle. The cop side-arms me; knocking me back onto the bed, which promptly shoots across the floor again and bangs into a wall. My skull lets out a long whining sound and then a flash of intense pain that makes everything go hazy for a split second.
I open my mouth to shout out a no but that dies when I see the cop’s face, see his eyes tracking toward the bridge of his nose and then his body speeding toward the floor.
What the fuck?
Gina!
She’s holding a gun and she looks pissed.
The woman’s at the bed again and she’s got her nails dug into my arm so deep that I can feel the sizzle of pain under my skin. She hasn’t seen Gina or registered what’s happening. I kick her, a hard kick right to her gut. I don’t hit women, but her? She’s a goddamn demon from Hell as far as I’m concerned and fuck her.
The woman screeches a bit but that’s the only sound she makes. Gina’s behind her now. Gina yanks and spins her around and they go down on the floor in a tangle. I get to my feet, and slip downward yet again. Everything’s spinning. I sort of want to puke.
Gina whisper screams at me, “Help!”
Oh shit. Yeah. Okay. I manage to get up on my knees and walk myself across the floor. Gina’s got her hand across needle creature’s mouth and the gun to her temple. A quick look at the cop shows me that Gina cold cocked him with the gun instead of shooting him.
I grab the hand holding the needle and then, as she struggles against me, I take it up to her neck. The woman lets out a low terrified cry that’s muffled by Gina’s fingers. The needle slides home, going under her skin. I hit the plunger and the fluid in it vanishes. Her body goes utterly rigid. I let go of her hand and she flails and kicks at the floor for a moment ten goes limp. Her head falls to one side.
The cop’s groaning. Gina gains her feet and then yanks me to mine. I can’t get my balance, everything’s spinning and dipping. She grabs the stuff and then we’re moving. The memory of the Dying Game sweeps in and so does the lure of insanity. Has all this been some kind of strange dream?
Am I still in the Fortress, being hunted by Baumer, by Norton, by Tayne? Gina’s hands and shoulder, the heat of her body bring me out of that seductive darkness and into the world again. I am out of the Fortress, we both are, but we’re still in danger, we’re still being hunted and we have to move. I will my legs to hold me up, to move and they do. I take shallow breaths to keep my ribs from aching and it seems to work.
The hallway is deserted and silent. The thick reek of chemicals lays on the air. We pass a waiting room and I hear the low swell of voices from inside it. The elevators are ahead but Gina tugs me into a room and then settles me into a wheelchair set by a bed.
I mutter, “I can walk.”
Her hand squeezes my shoulder. She leans over and I feel
the soft pressure of her breast against my skin, smell the scent of her hair. “I know you can. But you’re still really hurt and I need to move faster than you can walk.”
Then she pushes me out of the room and away from it. We head into an elevator and then we’re in an echoing lobby, still moving fast. Sunlight strikes my face and I stare up at the sky, my mind staggered by such a simple and totally glorious thing.
Gina rolls me through a parking lot until we get to a nondescript sedan. She pops open the passenger door and helps me in then gets into the driver’s seat.
She cranks the car and starts to reverse. I say, “Why’d you do it? Cut Norton so that I’d know you’re the Reaper?”
She puts the car into drive. We cruise through dappled and full sunlight and out onto a two-lane highway. I say, “Gina, you had to have known I’d know.”
“I did.” Her chin’s up and high. Her voice doesn’t quiver. “I wanted you to know.”
“Why?”
She turns the wheel, taking us away from the hospital. “They’re hunting us. You have to know that.”
“You mean Control.”
“Yes, and they’ll stop at nothing to kill us.”
Who is she? That’s the question. Who is this woman who’s the serial killer known as the Reaper? “You knew about Control before the Dying Game.”
“Yeah,” she sends the car onto a four-lane blacktop. “I did. I do.”
I try to think. Come up with one question. “Why does the Reaper reap?”
Her fingers clutch at the wheel until white shows along the ridge of every knuckle. “I only killed people who had knowledge of or who were members of Control.”
Control? What did Control have to do with the Reaper’s killing spree? I can’t comprehend what she’s trying to tell me. I lean in, “The people you killed were normal people, they were…”
“Leticia Scarborough was a slaver. On the surface she was just a nice lady who dedicated herself to social work and to helping foster kids. Underneath that? She fixed paperwork so that girls and boys disappeared, kids whose parents were dead. Kids whose parents wouldn’t say anything. Kids without anyone in their lives. Kids like me and my twin sister, Katy. She sold us to Control, and I killed her for it.”
There’s a hole in the pit of my gut. The whole world’s spinning like a top. Gina has a sister? A sister who’s been stolen by members of Control? Do I even want to know why? “Oh my God.”
Gina speaks and there’s nothing but steel in her voice. “I’ll kill as many as I have to. I want Katy back. I know she’s dead. I’ve known it since I escaped from them and their Marketplace. But I want her. I want her bones and I want justice for her, for me, and for all the others that they stole and sold and buried when they weren’t young and pretty enough anymore, when they were too broken to make nice toys.”
There’s a pool of hot and deadly hatred burning in my belly right now, and it’s all directed at Control.
Gina’s just told me all of it. No further explanation needed. I don’t need to ask what happened to her in her earlier run-in with Control. I don’t need to ask if there’s any chance her sister is alive. I want to ask how she escaped but there’s only so much a human being can take when it comes to things like this. Sometimes the hows and whys of our escape from the evil that has taken someone we love is the hardest thing to explain—and live with.
It’s all about Control. It’s always been about Control. I reach across the console, lay my fingers on her hip. “Who are they? Who is Control?”
She says, “I have some names, I got a name from Leticia and went from there. I killed them off one by one to make sure they’d never be able to tell anyone who’d come for them.”
“Is that why you take their tongues?”
“No,” her voice is savage. “They stole our voices. Why should they have one?”
I love her. I do. I love a deeply fucked up woman who’s not a serial killer, but who is definitely a killer all the same, a brutal and unflinching killer. One who’s been killing for revenge, because she wants justice, and because she wants her sister back.
God I understand those reasons, understand them so very much.
I let my fingers stay there on her hip. “You know what I think?”
Gina glances at me. Her face is veiled and caution is the only thing I can read on it. “What?”
“I think we need a whole lot of guns if we’re going to go up against Control.”
The car speeds toward some unknown destination. Her hand drops off the wheel and lands on mine. Our fingers twine together. “We need a lot more than a whole of guns.”
“Should we get some grenades too?”
A smile forms. Laughter spills from her mouth. “Sure, why not?” She stops laughing. “But first you need some clothes. I mean that gown’s…” Her lips quirk upward again. “Fetching, but it’s also highly recognizable.”
I look down at the wadded and stained hospital gown. “You’re right. Hey, how’d you get this car?”
“I stole it. We have to get to Vegas, and fast. But I don’t know if you’re okay. You should probably still be in the hospital.”
I should be. Even now there’s a painful ache in my skull and my body’s sore and weak. “I’ll be okay. What’s in Vegas?”
“A stash box and some connections. One’s a doctor. We need him to make sure you’re okay. We also need to go to ground for a while.”
“You want to hide out in Vegas? Why not hide in the desert or some tiny out-of-the-way place?”
“The best places to hide are in plain sight. It’s easy to stick out when there’s so few people around.”
“You’ve been running for a long time, haven’t you?”
Her head moves up and down. She doesn’t look at me, just the road. “Too long. I can’t run anymore. It’s not just about revenge Morgan, it’s about a reckoning. It has to come and it has to be now. I’ll understand if this is a ride you want to climb off of.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Now she looks at me but it’s just a fast shift of her gaze from the road to my face and back again. “You do know if you stay with me then you really will be the vigilante they claimed you to be.”
I have zero intention of being a vigilante. I intend to go along with Gina, to help her. I intend to keep her alive because I love her. There’s no way around that fact. No matter what she’s done, I love her.
But I’m not going to let her kill. No way. I want justice for her and I want her to be spared the cost of her brand of justice. Everyone thinks the Reaper is dead and I intend to make sure that she does nothing to let anyone know, ever that he’s not. That she’s the reaper.
Justice can be had. Nobody is ever above the law, not really. We’ll find a way to bring Control down and make them pay but not by killing.
I’m not a fool. I just killed someone who was trying to kill me. I will have to defend myself again. Because Control isn’t about to be satisfied with anything less than our dead bodies and I know until they get it they will just keep coming.
Self-defense is one thing.
Murder is another.
Justice and revenge can be the same dish, but we have to stay alive to serve it.
The car speeds through an intersection and I close those thoughts off and away. I ask, “Why the Powers?”
She eases back into the seat a bit. Her fingers lift off the wheel and settle again. “They were renters.”
That confuses me. “Renters?”
“At the Marketplace. The wealthiest were buyers. The less wealthy were renters.”
Jesus. Do I want to know more? I have to know. Any good investigation stars with gathering the facts.
I know two things right now. Control’s evil and incredibly powerful. They’re rich and they’re powerful and they’re fucking evil.
The night that Parnham carried me out of the charnel house that was my childhood home he’d said to me that darkness was always killed by light. That bad men were brough
t down by good ones, and I had the power to help bring down the man who’d done that to my family because I had seen his face, I’d seen the face of evil and now I could help them put a name to it.
I know the name. I need the faces. I’m going to help Gina drag Control out of the shadows.
There’s only way to stop evil. Bring it into the light.
And kill it.
CHAPTER 19: GINA:
It was stupid, staying to keep Morgan safe. I should have been putting as much ground as I could cover between me and Control. By the time he woke up I should’ve already been a few states removed from the scene.
I had the accounts to think of, a plan I needed to see to, and information that could get me to the highest levels of that ruthless organization.
But I stayed anyway.
I knew the coveralls were a dead giveaway. As soon as the emergency responders rushed to Morgan I did a fade, right into the crowd, letting the dark blue of the coveralls give me cover as I darted away from that side of the parking lot and toward the side where the emergency vehicles parked when not in use. I found an open ambulance and snatched a uniform from it. I got inside a hallway and then a bathroom. I washed as best as I could and then bundled the coveralls into a plastic trash bag. I cruised down the hallways until I found a bio-waste bin and could dispose of the coveralls. From there I found my way to the ward where coma patients rested. I crawled under a bed and stayed there, sleeping fitfully through the night on the cold floor.
If there’s anything you can count on in a coma ward it’s that nobody checks to make sure the patients are sleeping well. When dawn began to show in the window I crawled out and rummaged through the closet and belongings of a few of the sleepers. I found enough clothes to cobble together a wardrobe and then I got into the shower and washed every crease and crevice of my body and my hair. I had to finger comb the strands after but that was okay. I tucked it up and under until it formed a sort of coil and then bundled up the uniform and tossed it into a chute marked laundry as I crept through that hushed ward.