A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  Max wished he’d known they would be walking. He would have brought his car. He had a feeling there’d be more walking before the night was done.

  They waited another half an hour in the doorway of a closed delicatessen while organ music, sharply seasoned by a thin gruel of voices, dribbled out the open doors. “Midnight mass,” the boy said.

  The misty rain stopped. A car parked and one of the men sitting on a stoop came over to talk to the passenger. A single wail of despair curled through the humidity, rising to rival the crippled choir, then cut off, suddenly.

  The Beast ranged through the streets sniffing at a dozen quiet, deadly dramas between predator and prey. Sometimes Max had trouble telling them apart. But he liked the neighborhood. There were no cameras or police cruisers, no undercover cops. There might not be too many more years before the neighborhood was sufficiently run down and enough of its properties abandoned for developers to step in and rebuild. But for the time being, the area offered many possibilities as a hunting ground.

  He and the Beast would have to circle back soon, for fun.

  “There she is,” the teenager said. He didn’t point or bring any attention to himself trying to direct Max’s attention, and in fact sank deeper into shadow.

  He did have potential. Max looked over the bedraggled cluster of mortal meat coming down the stairs. They all looked alike. They were all victims, one as good as the next.

  The small crowd dispersed. The boy broke out after it seemed there was no one left on the street. Max waited until the boy was no longer visible and followed.

  They were tracking an older woman. The teenager was closing the distance rapidly, and Max came up behind them both over three lonely blocks. He was only a few steps behind him when the teenager took out a long blade. Strong. Not a rickety little folding knife but a hunter’s weapon.

  The woman fumbled in her purse. The rattle of keys was the only sound troubling the air. She never bothered to look over her shoulder. There was no reason to. The boy had talent.

  At last, she turned to a gate along a rusted metal waist-high fence. The boy came up to stand just a half-step behind her, but she was checking the front door and the line of bushes separating her front yard from the neighbor’s to make sure no one was hiding ahead of her in ambush.

  Now, Max thought. The Beast swelled in his chest, eager to share in the kill, or at the very least, the blood and meat.

  “Mom,” the boy said.

  The woman whirled with a cry. She dropped her purse and held her hands up to fend off a blow. Her feet were apart and well-braced. Strong instincts. The boy had come from good stock.

  Now, Max thought, seeing the knife dart through the frail defense, slicing past the frayed jacket sleeve to stab and sink cold, sharp, wide steel into the soft, pulsing flesh of the throat.

  He might have gone for the heart, but for the boy, the throat would have been easier.

  “You’re back,” the woman said, lowering her arms, her voice tremulous, her eyes brimming instantly with tears. “My God, you came back.” Her hands rose again, and she clasped them as if in prayer.

  The boy hadn’t made a move with the knife still at his side.

  The woman spread her arms wide and with a tearful croak took a step forward, lips breaking into a grin.

  The moment had passed. The boy leaned back, his feet shuffling as if he was getting ready to take a blow. But his knife hand never rose.

  Max had the knife in his hand by the time the mother took a second step. The handle was sticking out of her chest by the time she made the third and fell into her son’s arms.

  The boy made a sound Max couldn’t identify. Didn’t matter. He pulled the woman back to him, picked up her purse, and carried her with one arm around her shoulders. There seemed to be no curious neighbors observing from behind blinds.

  He was at the door by the time the boy had caught up. He gave him an elbow shot to the face, to back him up, then opened the door and entered the house. The boy stumbled in and Max knocked him sideways to the floor with a right cross.

  He kept the lights off. Stripped. Stripped the woman.

  Let the Beast have its way.

  This could have been a clean job. Quiet. A woman vanishing on the street on her way home. So many people disappeared in the world.

  The teenager grabbed hold of Max and tried to pull him off. Max pushed him back, hit him hard in the sternum to knock the breath out of him. The kid stumbled back, landed on his ass against a sofa, gasping. Watching.

  The holstered Glock lay between them. The boy didn’t make a move for the weapon.

  Max wanted him to watch. To see everything he could in the darkness. To hear the sounds Max and the Beast made over his mother. To smell her insides. To feel the liquids pouring from her, pooling over the floor until, like a warm kiss, they touched his fingertips splayed against the floor.

  The boy cried. Then he whimpered. Max was done, but the Beast continued, sating its deeper hunger.

  The boy crawled away.

  When the Beast was finished, Max cleaned up. He called Mr. Jung from the mother’s phone and told him what had happened. The boy finally scrambled to his feet outside and ran away. Max hung up without waiting for Mr. Jung’s response.

  He followed the boy.

  Again, things would have been simpler with a car.

  Two hours later, across town, on a street throbbing with light and people spilling out from bars and clubs, he watched the teenager enter a tall, shining apartment building.

  The boy was well provided for, he observed, with a touch of disappointment. Here was the root of his weakness.

  Max tracked him to his apartment. Burst in.

  The boy had a pregnant girlfriend.

  He silenced her quickly, and this time beat the resistance out of the boy with half-a-dozen blows. He tied up and gagged the still-conscious teenager, securing his head so he couldn’t look away. Thought about cutting off the eyelids. But the boy still had potential. He went to work out his pleasures on the girl, and when he was done with her, he played with what she’d been carrying like a cat with a bird whose wings it had broken. The boy didn’t shut his eyes.

  The cleaners and sweepers are going to be busy, he thought.

  When he was done washing up again, Max removed the boy’s gag, responding to his incessant muffled cries.

  “Now you know what must be done,” Max said.

  “Shit,” the teenager said, spitting and heaving at the same time. “You’re fucking crazy. That shit ain’t even right. You can’t get away with that. With any of this. You’re fucking crazy. Insane.”

  “But I can. If we were anywhere else besides here and Western Europe, I could get away with a lot more.”

  The boy stared at what remained of the girl. At least he wasn’t crying. “This isn’t what I signed up for.”

  “Then you should have applied for a job with a government or a corporation. We’re who they come to when they need people capable of this.”

  “I can’t do it. Not … what you did.”

  “Then you might not be able to do anything for much longer.”

  “I don’t care. You took everything. I’ve got nothing left.”

  “You’ve got nothing to lose. Which is the point. You have everything to gain. You’re empty, now. Soon, you’ll be hungry. As any predator should be.”

  “Maybe I should kill your ass.” A flicker of rebellion lit his eyes even as revulsion twisted his lips.

  “That would be the end of your career.”

  He called Mr. Jung and again told him what had happened. Mr. Jung gave him a time and place to meet and told him the apartment would be cleaned out.

  “What about the boy?” Max asked.

  “He’ll be taken care of.”

  Mr. Jung appeared on time, as he always did, from an unexpected direction, as he sometimes enjoyed doing: he pushed a steel grating plate up off the street and appeared out of a building service vent.

  Max didn’t
bother helping him out.

  “He’s not a killer,” Max said.

  “He had great potential,” Mr. Jung said, brushing himself off. “Still might.”

  “Not for what you want him for.”

  “His father has high hopes for him.” Mr. Jung took out an envelope and handed it to Max. “You never know how these things will play out over the long run.”

  “Does he know who his father is?”

  “Do you?”

  Max let the question fly away. The Beast, still drunk on its feasting, was amused. “What are you going to do with him?”

  “That will be his father’s problem.”

  “I suppose I, or someone like me, will get the call.” Max thought, it would have been simpler to handle everything at the apartment.

  “In matters like these, blood answers for blood. If that’s what’s called for.”

  The Beast’s attention pricked at the circle of consequence, and a tremor of fear and excitement passed through the both of them. “A good policy.”

  “Only because you have no blood to answer for. None, that is,” Mr. Jung said, then laughed before he continued, “except the kind you’ve spilled.”

  “I don’t answer for that, either.”

  “No, you don’t. Not seed or blood.”

  “Just give me the regular jobs,” Max said, and walked away. “The ones no one else can do. This wasn’t worth my time.”

  “You were the only one for this assignment,” Mr. Jung said. And then, perhaps because the distance between them had stretched at Max’s brisk pace, or because something had caught at Mr. Jung’s throat at the last moment, he said, so faint he could barely be heard, “You always are.”

  Max didn’t strain to hear or understand what Mr. Jung had said. He checked corners and windows, searched the shadows for any sign of enemies, for the shadow of his own killer. But there were none. Only the rats danced in the darkness. The Beast was quiet, sated.

  In a world where blood had to answer for blood, he had that much to be grateful for.

  THE HAUNTED KILLING FLOOR

  Max had been here before.

  Back then, a safe house. Now, home to a family. Sometimes, things changed.

  He sat in the target’s chair at the desk in the attic office. The equipment was custom, with self-destruct mechanisms set to trigger at any hint of tampering. Secure.

  The house alarm was still on. His entry, difficult and delicate through the roof, never registered.

  Dust lingered in the air, gathered in clumps and drifts on the floor and furniture. Tile scraps, wood shavings, old plumbing and plaster, a hint of lead and asbestos filled a pair of old metal buckets in a corner. The first floor bathroom hadn’t been there before. Space had been cleared in the attic loft for another. The kitchen, remodeled with new appliances. Upstairs bathroom, renovated. Floors and walls replaced throughout the house, detailed with classic molding and border trim. New furniture all around, none of it from kits. The wiring had been upgraded, as well as the security. Someone had come into money.

  His target’s investment of time and financing into clandestine operations had paid off well.

  Yet the changes were all illusion. Superficial transformation.

  The blood was in the floor joists and wall frames. Someone was buried in the basement, beneath the sagging concrete floor. The stairs still creaked under the weight of the lightest footstep.

  The Beast recognized the place. It heard the echoes of screams long gone.

  Fear, cold and sinewy, unwound from the belly of the house to crawl up the stairs, choke the passage, gather in a tightening circle around him to squeeze breath from his lungs, crush the blackness of his heart.

  Memories.

  Max smiled. The Beast embraced the fear like a lover.

  Yes, he’d been here before. Marked his territory. Usually, he never went back when he’d bled a place dry. There was no point. But sometimes, after the work was done, he’d circle around to pick off strays he’d spared to stay focused on the target. There were demands that his work remain the priority. No one cared what he did afterwards, as long as he cleaned up.

  He’d found his fill of appetite, here, and left never intending to return. Specific names, faces, acts, were all blurred by time and repetition. But his new target was not directly connected to the old hit. Nothing from that contract had survived.

  All the new target had done back then was provide information to his superiors leading to their calling in Max to deal with people staying in the old safe house. Since then, the man had come into money. He’d been given access to higher-level operations after Max had cleaned out the house. The fact that Max was on his trail meant he had not used his resources wisely.

  Skimmed financial transactions, perhaps, or arranged side deals. Sold information. Not too much. Just enough to live the dream of success. Married. Had kids. Returned to a discarded asset—just to make the money last a little longer—made the old, bloody, ravaged skeleton his own. A little stolen wealth could go far, if used wisely.

  But how much was too much?

  Someone else noticed, perhaps after being stung by the secrets the man had exposed. Maybe there’d been an investigation. Perhaps the information on the safe house had been false, and Max’s executions a terrible error. Judgments had been passed.

  Or, the theft had never been discovered. Certainly the equipment told Max the target was no fool. Maybe the money was legitimate, in the way legitimacy was defined by the trade that employed them all. There was always that possibility. The hit could have been the result of someone’s vengeful impulse for a perceived slight, a minor betrayal. Even whim. Jealousy. Max had seen all of that.

  Max didn’t care about the present and its reasons, the past or its echoes. Though his demonic Beast seemed content to chew on old atrocities, for now. He just didn’t want to wait too long. Aroused by old blood and screams, his bones ached, flesh tingled, muscles burned with the burden of hunger. He needed the job to be over so he could tend to the Beast before it became bored with the past.

  The front door opened. Children’s voices rose up the stairs, though their running footsteps carried them to the first floor living room where a large television and accompanying electronics filled an entertainment center. Someone else played a monotone but rhythmic song punching in the code to turn off the alarm.

  Dust danced in the air.

  Unexpected.

  Odd.

  His fingers stroked the Glock grip in the shoulder holster, warmed by body heat.

  A woman’s scent squeezed through a space between floor and door, carried by a gust. The mother. Her children were young, still innocent. But older than he’d expected. Not the preschoolers that would have fit into the target’s time line of marrying and having his own children with her. He should have paid closer attention to that part of the briefing. But since they weren’t part of the package, he’d relied on secondary sources for family intelligence. These kinds of details weren’t supposed to matter. He was never supposed to meet them.

  Family. The man hadn’t even come home with them.

  It was always the little things that turned a job bad.

  The woman warned the children about the construction. The dry wall hadn’t been put up yet in the hallways. Exposed electrical cables looped and curled as they snaked their way to the basement.

  No doubt, the mother and children belonged to the house.

  But they were supposed to be staying with friends while the new house was being redone. Not far away, granted. She had a right to check the house, visit her husband. Their routine dictated that the children should have been in school, and the woman visiting her father in a nursing home. They were supposed to be out of the way. No collateral damage.

  His employers were tired of collateral damage.

  Why were they here?

  Only the target was supposed to come home. Soon, now. He had business he needed to finish through the computers in the attic. The need for secrecy in his work
had been the door through which Max had chosen to enter the man’s life to execute the mission. The only door more reliable was the one opened for secret sins, but in this case, the two were intertwined.

  There were surveillance feeds tied into the bank of monitors. Max had seen the recordings as part of his mission brief. Bedrooms. Bathrooms. Even dorms. Nothing like mixing business with pleasure.

  Max understood how that could happen, though the target’s tastes were not his own.

  The Beast was becoming aroused by the woman and by Max’s suspicions. Turning away from the comforts of old feedings, the Beast tuned itself to the possibility of danger, and fresh prey.

  No, there was nothing menacing in the woman or children. The Beast lingered on the promise of prey.

  Max pulled the gun loose from the holster, expecting the real threat to materialize in an explosion of broken glass—ambush by a tactical team already in place long before he arrived. Betrayal. He’d been warned. He’d tried to minimize collateral damage, but accidents happened. Still, how could he have missed a trap? Why hadn’t the Beast warned him?

  A team didn’t appear. There was no intervention. He was still in the hunt.

  Prey. He smelled blood on her. And fear, on all of them.

  Fear crept through the house, invisible and toxic, transforming random noise—the tinkle of glasses, childish cries too forced to be delight, an announcer’s voice from the television—into ominous signals. The fear was fresh. Not a memory.

  Exposed wall framing groaned, as if in anticipation.

  Max let the gun slip back into the holster.

  Something was still wrong. The Beast paced along the boundaries of his flesh, sending chills through him. For his demon, the woman was already seasoned and served. But the target was due any moment.