“Come out, come out,” he whispered. But she remained entranced, although tears began to pool in the corners of her eyes. He glanced at his wristwatch and ran his index finger lightly over his lips in thought. Max should have shown himself by now. Things weren’t happening fast enough. He needed to create a bigger bang.
“Don’t make me drag you out like a rat,” Auldborne scolded. “Have some dignity.”
When she didn’t move, he huffed out a sigh and began to shed his overcoat, but just then a group of students bolted for the front exit. There were four of them, and they had hidden themselves behind the study cubicles. They weren’t quiet about it, and they didn’t get much of a jump. Auldborne snapped up and fired at the glass case in front of them well before they reached it in the center of the room.
Where the diode struck the case, the side flashed brightly before exploding outward with an electric crackle. The other three sides and the top collapsed inwards and slid off the stand, smashing upon the ground like dinner plates and leaving the sculpture exposed. The room erupted in screams and one of the four runners collapsed, either from fright or from the glass shrapnel. The other three kept running. Auldborne sighted again, this time at the lion itself. Those few brave souls who dared to peer around their desks and hovels were rewarded with a ghostly flash when his second diode hit the sculpture and the outline of the lion’s head was burned into their retinas for a moment before it disintegrated spectacularly, blowing outward like a cloud of razor mist. It peppered those that ran, slicing into them like a sandblast. Even Auldborne covered his face with one forearm and had to blink away the nuclear white aftereffects.
When the room came to, all four were on the ground, flopped over on their stomachs, heads in their hands. Two of them swam on the carpet, trying to kick away, but all four of them honked and wailed, their voices cracking.
Auldborne looked back down upon the small blonde girl. She was weeping freely but did not move.
“That ought to have alerted just about everyone,” he said, before leaning in closer to her once more. “You can thank those four poor fools later.”
————
The crack of the glass explosion echoed up the stairway just as Max and Ellie made their way down the first flight, and when they turned the corner they ran directly into Draden Tate. Max was stunned unto a dead stop but Ellie kept going, unrecognizing, and she was past the big man and in the hallway proper before she realized something was amiss.
“Unbelievable,” Tate said. “The Russian was right.”
Max’s jaw went slack. “You? What are you doing here? Where is Mazaryk?” And although Max started to sight his gun, Tate had the drop on him. Tate’s shot would have punched clean into Max’s chest if Ellie had not thrown herself into Tate’s knee. Instead the diode slammed into the meat of Max’s outer thigh. Max’s leg buckled and his cast-arm hit the banister to his left where it, and he, slid forward, tumbling down the flight into Tate just as he batted Ellie away with the broadside of his arm.
The three collapsed to the floor, and a large chunk of the cornered student body decided to make a dash to freedom. Tate was up quickly and he cleaved through the vanguard of the crowd with a wide swipe of his hand, trying to get a clean bead on Max, who leaned heavily against the lockers nearby, piecing himself together and looking at his gun with glassy eyes. Tate shouldered his way towards him.
“This is twice now I beat you on stairs. Maybe you stay away from stairs here goin’ forward—”
Ellie slammed the whole of her weight into his lower back, and he had to take a step forward to steady himself. When he saw it was the same girl he’d just smacked out of his way, he paused and squinted. Ellie knew immediately that she’d gotten in over her head. She turned and tried to move away but Tate snatched her arm like he might a drifting piece of paper. She was almost yanked off her feet when he pulled her in to him.
“You know ‘dis bitch, Max?” he yelled. “What she to you?”
Max, who had been slowly hobbling on his injured leg, righted himself and stared at Tate with manic clarity. Tate was oblivious to Ellie’s flailing as he squeezed her in the crook of his right elbow. Her face first turned red, then a paler red, as she tore at his wedge of a forearm. Max seemed not even to see her. He brought up his gun and aimed it at them both.
“You should have killed me on the dock, Draden,” he said quietly, and he fired.
A heartbeat one way, a single degree of difference the other, and it might have been different. The shot was nowhere near clean, but Max took it, and it was true. Tate staggered backward and dropped Ellie, who shot away like a fox and fell to the ground by the lockers nearby, beyond Tate’s reach. Every student still within eyesight of the three of them flattened themselves to the ground.
Draden eyed his shoulder curiously, and pressed his opposite hand upon it. When he took it away again it was dark red. He shrugged off his vest and let it fall to the ground. His T-shirt was slowly saturating at the shoulder. Thin rivulets of blood traced their way down the valleys of the veins on his forearm.
“What the fuck you playin’ at?” he asked, as he hitched forward. He steadied himself with that arm on instinct, but it buckled and he fell a few feet from Ellie, who gaped at him. “That was no diode,” he said, pushing himself up to his knees again and leaving a dark red hand print on the floor. He began to fume, and in the scrabbling, screaming hallway Ellie could still hear the hiss of breath through his nose. His eyes were glossed with red rage, like cracked marbles. Ellie was the first person he saw, the only thing he could put between himself and Max’s gun. He lunged at her, but she lunged at him first, slamming her fist directly into the hole in his shoulder. It hit with a squelching sound, like squeezing a sponge, and he roared and floored her with a wide swing from his left. Her vision skipped across her head, but as she fell to the ground she heard the pounding sound of shoes coming towards her instead of running away. As Tate snatched for her again, Tom Elrey slammed into his side. It was as if he’d shoulder-tackled a heavy sand bag, and he bounced back with the effort, but it toppled the big man. Tate looked balefully at the two students, then up at Max who sighted him while frantically searching about at the same time. Tate’s blood was splattered around him, streaked a lighter red where he’d fallen and smeared it. He bared his teeth as he pressed his free hand against the wound.
“If you move, I’ll kill you,” Max said. “Now where is he?”
“Where is who?” came the voice from his left, as cold as water under ice. All four turned to see Alex Auldborne already through the library doors. Max didn’t hesitate: he flattened himself to the lockers, hooked his gun around and fired at Auldborne, but the captain expected this and stepped out of his line with the calm, measured grace of a Victorian dancer. The bullets lanced through the library and slammed into the rear wall. He adjusted the sight of his own gun almost as an afterthought and swung his body parallel to Max’s firing line, far too fast for Max to adjust. He fired once and shot the gun from Max’s hand as he walked, his heels clicking softly.
The ease of all this mayhem was appallingly beautiful to Ellie. Like a fine set of knives slicing up the belly of a fish. Only then did she comprehend what she’d fallen into. This man, this Alex Auldborne, was death... death refined. A cut-crystal jewelry box stacked neatly full of explosives.
Max watched his gun clatter away on the linoleum. His hand was struck with a searing numbness of the sort that happens just after a terrible burn, before the pain comes. His gun was his only hope. He moved towards it, hitching as he shuffled his weight.
“Don’t insult me, Max,” Auldborne said, and Max paused before dropping his head. “And who are these two? These must be your hangers-on I keep hearing rumors of.”
“Leave them be. They mean nothing to you.”
“That’s right. But it doesn’t mean I should leave them be.” And he shot Tom Elrey on the crook of his shoulder. The diode hit with the sound of a hard thump on the back. Tom sucked in one wild-eye
d breath and collapsed. It was a toying shot, merely to prolong pain. He writhed, digging his shoulder into the floor as if he could staunch the pain like a fire.
“And this one, what’s your name sweetheart? Is that boy over there your captain?”
Ellie forced herself to speak. “I’m the captain,” she whispered, pushing her way to standing, her back against the lockers.
Auldborne popped an eyebrow. “My god. You are? A girl! What are you, fifteen? Is this the best that Greer Nichols and his jolly team of fuckups could come up with? Children?” He swung his gun about as routinely as a golf swing and shot her in the kneecap. Ellie couldn’t help herself this time: she screamed loudly as she collapsed, and Alex breathed in again, savoring it like an aromatic meal.
From flat on the ground, Tom spoke, and although there was pain in his voice, there was no fear. “I’m sorry Ellie,” he said, and she craned around to seek him. “The party, Ellie. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Shut up, Tom. None of that matters anymore.”
“That’s just it,” he said. “I didn’t know. The things I thought mattered didn’t. This matters now. Cy matters. You matter—”
Auldborne silenced him with a shot to the plum center of his chest.
“Jesus. Bit long winded, isn’t he? Bunch of children! I think we can safely count out Team Blue for a generation. The best thing you could do for your country, girl, is to die like the one before you.” He raised his gun to her once more, but his eyes fell upon his own striker, who was sitting in a heap, hand firmly pressed up against his shoulder, bleeding freely.
“What’s all this now?”
“He shot me, Alex.”
“I can see that. Get up.”
“No, he shot me.”
In the cold silence that followed, Alex Auldborne noticed the bright streaks of blood. He turned to Max, who was shaking where he sat, although from anger, or fatigue, or fear, Ellie couldn’t tell. When the full fury of Auldborne’s shark-gray eyes fell upon him, he stared right back at him, unblinking.
“You tricky bastard,” Auldborne said coldly. “You came here to kill someone today.”
“You weren’t supposed to be here,” Max said, as if reasoning with himself.
“And who, exactly, were you expecting?”
“You know who. Mazaryk. Not his sideshow. Mazaryk was supposed to come to the house, not the school. Nobody was supposed to see...
Auldborne’s breathing became soft, to the point where Max couldn’t see his chest rising and falling, but his gloved hand creaked as he formed a tight fist.
“I’m finding it a good deal harder than I thought it would be not to kill you outright. But a promise is a promise. Her, on the other hand... He sighted Ellie once more, picking his point of contact like he was perusing produce at the market. “Quite defiant. Look at her, Draden! She refuses to look away from me.”
Draden grunted, but paid her no mind. A sticky little pool of blood was forming under his elbow, and his dark coloring was ebbing ashen. He was busy working his belt off and looping it into a tourniquet.
“She doesn’t need both eyes, does she?” Alex asked, and as he sighted up her left eye he paused a moment more to watch her shy away, not in fear, but in awful expectation, as if she’d seen the purple flash of lightning and was awaiting the thunder. In that moment, Alex found nothing to savor, and it made him angrier than before, but then he heard his name being called.
“Alex.”
It wasn’t loud, nor was it particularly strong, but it was clear.
“Alex.”
Auldborne looked up and past Ellie, down the now nearly empty hallway, and he saw the dark silhouette of a man in the stark relief of the winter light of the atrium, awash by the red and blue lights of the first responders amassing outside. The man was short, almost diminutive. He wore a puffy coat two sizes too big and hunched slightly over himself. He took a long, hissing drag from a dangling cigarette and exhaled a haze of smoke before plucking it from his mouth and throwing it to the ground.
“I found you,” he said, in a soft, singsong tone.
“Finn?”
“Found you, Alex.”
Auldborne snaked his neck forward to get a better view of the still figure down the hall. “You shot my sweeper. You’re supposed to be in a coma in London,” he said, his voice hard. All humor gone.
“My life is a waking coma,” Finn whispered down the hall as he shrugged off his jacket and let it fall to the ground around his feet. Auldborne straightened.
“Well. Welcome to our little party,” said Auldborne, a snarl upon his lips. “Shame you’ll be leaving so soon.” And with that he raised his gun, but Ian, as always, was faster. Much faster. It was as though his left arm was detached from his drifting body, and for a split second he was a snapshot of motion; his core still as stone but his arm an arced blur. This was Auldborne’s misfortune. His fortune was that in all of Ian’s wandering, his aim hadn’t improved one bit. Ian had four shots off before Auldborne could think, three lanced into the glass windows of the library behind him in explosive fashion, one slammed solidly into Alex Auldborne’s arm. Then Ian Finn ran at him.
Auldborne grunted and peeled his lips back as he was knocked off balance. He was forced to shoot low in response, almost underhanded, so instead of hitting Ian in the head or chest, he hit him in his gun hand. Ian cried aloud and dropped his handgun but didn’t falter in his charge. Already Ian was almost upon him. With no place to retreat without opening himself up, Auldborne launched himself towards the Irish striker in return, slashing the distance between them in a blink. They hit each other with explosive force, like a mixture of oil and fire. The walls and the doors and the locks between Ian and his man blew to pieces, and it was as if Ian’s body was stretched fully for the first time in months.
They pitched over in the air and landed in a writhing mass upon the floor. All Ellie, Max, and Draden Tate could do was push out of the way. Ian had lost himself completely; he was sobbing like a child as he reached for Auldborne’s head with both hands as if to crush it, but Auldborne, as always, retained some detached sense of himself even while in chaos. So it was that he was just able to shift enough to find the pale, veined underside of Ian’s deadly left hand again, and fire a second diode straight into it. Ian screamed and Auldborne actually smiled into the face of his rage and laughed aloud, until Ian slammed his head into his face. Then Auldborne’s laugh became a sputter. Ian slammed his head down upon him again, and again, sobbing harder each time, his tears spilling upon Auldborne’s bloody mouth and crushed nose. Auldborne brought his gun up, but Ian swatted it away with his numbed arm.
Ian was faltering drunkenly to one side, his forehead swelled and weeping blood along a long slice from Auldborne’s tooth, but the heavy weight of rage had fallen upon him, so he couldn’t see that Cy Bell was walking down the hallway. Ellie yelled for his help, but he was walking strangely, steps staccato, as if his joints weren’t quite aligned. His face was ashen, and his eyes screamed warning. When Cy saw Ellie call to him, with her back against the lockers and Tom crumpled upon the ground next to her, something in him broke and he dashed towards them, yelling for her to get away, as if she could move, as if any of them could be saved.
He never reached her. He was shot in the back of the neck and he fell like a buck hit mid-stride, and when he fell a smaller man was revealed behind him. A man Ellie knew instantly. A man that she’d studied, gazing at strange pictures from odd angles and watching jarring, shaky camera footage purporting to catch a glimpse of him here or there. But he was crystal clear now.
Ian never even turned at the sound of the gunshot that felled Cy Bell. His vision was tunneled upon Auldborne and only Auldborne. He raised his head for another cracking blow, rearing up like a python to strike, when a gun dug into his forehead, pushing him back further and baring his throat entirely.
“That’s enough, Ian.”
It was the frosted voice of Eddie Mazaryk, and Ian recognized it at once.
He opened his puffy eyes and saw the captain of Black looking curiously between him and Auldborne the way one might compare two of the same photograph, one in color, and one in black and white. Ian Finn let loose a weary moan, like a man dying of thirst who has overturned his only cup of water upon the sand. Auldborne’s bloody sputtering turned once again to laughter.
“Murderer,” Ian said.
“Who?” Mazaryk replied. “He, or I, or you?”
“Murderer,” Ian repeated.
“Why do I have such a hard time shaking you? What do you owe the dead, Ian Finn?” he asked softly, forcing Ian to standing and stepping back a pace. He wore a black half-coat of velvet over a crisp ensemble of white, and gleaming black leather riding boots that came nearly to his knees. He was about Ian’s height, but Ian seemed diminished again and wouldn’t meet his probing gaze. Instead, he stared at Auldborne, spread eagle upon the ground, eyes closed, surrounded by flecks of blood and with a dark red grin upon his face, as if resting on a patch of heather after a pitched battle.
“Nothing,” Auldborne said. “He owes them nothing, and yet he is here. Now why might that be, Ian?”
Ian watched him through rivulets of blood. He glanced at Eddie Mazaryk and his battered left hand slowly settled itself around his stomach. He again looked sickly.
“It’s me,” Auldborne said. “You have this strange obsession with me.” He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling as if it was a deep blue sky. “But I don’t care about you, Finn. How does that feel? How does it feel to hate someone so much when that person never even thinks about you? Never even gave you a thought until you walked down that hallway? Or perhaps it isn’t really me that you hate. Perhaps it’s an idea you have of me. Or that your country has of me.”
“Death deserves death,” said Ian.
“I agree. But perhaps you should be thanking Eddie here, because he saved you from what might have been a terribly awkward moment when, after all of this, you find out that I didn’t kill anyone.”
The Tournament Trilogy Page 59