Tom crouched to throw himself into the fray when the statues started falling one by one. Goran Brander had decided to take the cover away from everyone. Stoke was unfazed, but the earth shaking cracks and snaps as Brander tossed each statue from its pedestal distracted Ellie. Stoke saw her opening and slammed her fist into Ellie’s temple twice then used Ellie’s face as leverage to yank her arm free and take aim. She straddled Ellie and brought her gun to bear but was shot square in the navel by Ian Finn as he came around the west side of the house opposite Pyper Hurley.
Stoke collapsed and her cheek bounced off of Ellie’s forehead. Ellie weakly pushed her away, but she didn’t get up. Instead her hand went to her bleeding face. Ian grit his teeth and nearly dropped his gun in pain. His forearm felt like it was being needled with burning twigs. That was the only targeted shot he’d get today, he knew. The rest would be from his non-dominant hand and God help whoever was in the vicinity. He was never a good shot to begin with, just a fast one. Ellie moaned on the ground and Ian ran towards her.
Yves Noel traced the perimeter of the courtyard with an aim on Brander, but it was a sorry aim. Brander was a two handed wrecking ball. He picked each statue up and carried it to the next before throwing it idly aside, slowly leveling the courtyard like a crawling tractor, all while staying behind stone. It looked as easy for him as playing chess. Yves shot at him anyway, and so did Diego Vega, but they merely chipped concrete. Brander was closing in on Ellie, Cy and Tom.
Pyper laid down a line of cover fire for Ian when she saw him take off towards Ellie. He skidded around chips of concrete, his footing unsure. Ellie was finding herself, first lifting her head, then ducking down to the floor again even as it trembled with the steps of an approaching giant. Ellie was the first to see Alex Auldborne walk out of the doorway to the house, and she knew then that this was their strategy: Attrition. Relentless attacking waves. Demoralize them, then destroy them. If anyone was left for Mazaryk they’d be battered and easy to finish.
Alex Auldborne posted up against a column to the left of the front door and aimed at Cy Bell, who had dared attack his striker. He shot three times and Cy absorbed all of them, then fell still, his gun clattering to the flagstone floor. The sound of the crowd was carried in strongly just then, whether from an errant gust of wind or because they wanted to ring in Auldborne’s arrival. Either way, Auldborne approved. Pyper saw his gun buck beyond the column as he fired and she slid back to get an angle on him, but he spun with her, repositioned, and fired twice. She staggered forward still and fired at his feet and her diodes came close enough to cause him to lift up a shoe before one more well-placed shot took her down.
“How many times must I finish things myself?” he yelled.
Ian reached Ellie moments after Cy was riddled with diodes. He grabbed her with his bad arm and screamed aloud, then called for Tom’s help and together they started to carry her away to cover even as Diego Vega stepped out, incensed by the sight of Auldborne. He took a breath to scream a challenge, but Brander reached them first. He picked up a statue of a nude woman wreathed in vines and threw it at Diego—hundreds of pounds of stone thrown like a shot-put. If he’d been even two feet closer it would have hit Diego full on and most likely crushed him. The statue cracked at his feet with the sound of a breaking tree. A chunk the size of a bowling ball slammed into Diego’s leg and buckled him, then a smaller piece glanced off of the top of his head and he dropped to the ground, senseless.
Ian tapped his com, breathless. “Yves, pin Auldborne behind the column while we deal with Brander.”
Yves flipped around and emptied his clip at the column by the door as Auldborne swung behind it again. He reloaded as smoothly as if he was pouring a glass of wine. He fired once more to the other side of the column and smiled as Auldborne’s shadow flinched.
Brander swooped in on Tom, Ellie, and Ian like a wraith, a cloud of debris ahead of him and a cloud of dust behind him. He fired into Diego’s unconscious body once in stride to finish him. Tom popped to standing and fired at him but it was like shooting into a sandstorm. He couldn’t tell where his diodes hit or where Brander cracked the statues and pots himself. Soil and shards of concrete bit into his face and stung his eyes, then Tom’s gun clicked empty and he knew Brander heard it. He looped into the open and aimed at Tom, but by then Ian was up, shooting with his right hand and doing his best to manage the recoil. Brander automatically switched to the bigger threat and his gun roared and Ian took a diode square in the shoulder that yanked him back like a tethered dog. Seeing Ian hit shook the last of the cobwebs from Ellie’s brain and she felt for her gun. Brander fired again and the diode streaked by inches from her neck. The sound was so loud and the dust so thick and the crowd was screaming just behind them and she could feel it leaning against the wall like a transformer station’s hum. Ellie dimly registered Ian reloading and shaking like a weightlifter and then a cold gust of air blew over the wall and swept everything away and Brander could see clearly. Brander aimed at Ellie and smiled but Tom leapt from the ground underneath him and hit Brander’s gun hand up into the air. His shot careened into the sky.
Tom fell to the ground but leapt once more, this time striking Brander’s chin with his head. Brander popped back half a step as blood shot from his mouth along with a thin sliver of his tongue. And he was laughing. When Tom tried for a third blow Brander caught him by the neck and lifted him up and spat flecks of blood into his face as he jammed his .50 caliber into Tom’s stomach and fired. Tom became dead weight, but still Brander held him and laughed, his mouth bubbling blood and spit.
Then there was a series of shots from across the fountain and Brander stopped laughing.
“You fucking go down!” Yves screamed, grinning like a maniac at his hits. “And you stay down!”
It was all he had time to say. Alex Auldborne knew when to take his shot, and he picked Yves off with a diode to the dome of his skull. Yves pitched forward and his gun skidded to rest under the fountain.
Brander still stood, but his breaths came in short, quick bursts and his smile faded. He still held Tom aloft from the neck but he contemplated him as if he had materialized in his outstretched hand. Ian aimed his gun with his right hand and held it out and it shook, but he gripped it tighter, until his hand was white around the stock, then he closed one eye, aimed at Brander, and fired once. The diode shot past Tom’s shoulder and plowed into Brander’s chest, right below his heart. He dropped Tom in a heap and Ellie caught Tom’s head just as Brander collapsed as if a great velvet stage curtain had been cut at the ropes.
Three now remained standing in the courtyard: Ellie, Ian, and Alex Auldborne. Beyond the walls the crowd raged with cheers and cries that blended into a single constant note, like the sound of an overturned beehive. Another gust of wind brought smoke from the burning walls down upon them and the water from the fountain splashed over the basin onto the dusty flagstone. Ellie wondered how long all of the shooting took. It felt like hours but she figured that even seven minutes would be generous. Months of preparation for minutes of execution. It seemed obscene how quickly everything came to a head, flippant in light of the destruction and the littered bodies. Then Alex Auldborne’s voice wafted over the courtyard.
“Takes a lot to bring the big man down, doesn’t it! I’m still not sure where Eddie found that fellow. I’d say in some northern troll cave, if he wasn’t so polite and well dressed. Hullo? Is anyone still alive over there?”
Ellie and Ian silently looked at each other. Ian cringed as his wounded shoulder seized and then began to drip cold. He shook his head to clear the pain. His left arm was useless and now his right shoulder was a lump of burning ice.
“Oh come on now, don’t be modest. Stand up and take a bow! It was quite a show!”
As if in emphasis, his last words were drowned out by a helicopter that passed low and buffeted the smoke into eddies in the courtyard before it bucked back up to circle with the others. Auldborne was walking towards them directly through the
center of the courtyard and would cross near the fountain soon. She heard the steady scrape of his steps and the crashing of a broken statue that he shoved out of his way with authority. She wondered if Auldborne had ever huddled anywhere before in his life as she was huddled now. Ellie could see the old mania slowly seeping back into Ian’s eyes with each step Auldborne took, changing them to a hard, glossy green. He was fighting his diode hit, in his own way, but if it wasn’t treated she would lose him.
She grasped his good shoulder and brought his attention back to her and he softened.
“We’ve got to split up,” she whispered. “Come at him from both sides.”
Ian nodded.
“Wait until he reaches the fountain. Then we hit him.”
She let her hand linger for a moment longer, then she turned and crawled one way around the shattered perimeter while he crawled the other. She stopped behind a ruined pedestal on the far side of the fountain and chanced a look. She could see past the bubbling fountain and across the courtyard to the house and fence beyond. She saw Ian settle behind the planter where her men still lay, along with Diego, and just beyond him Goran Brander. Auldborne was distracted by the broken stone and debris and muttered as he walked. He was almost to the fountain. She sought for Ian’s face to time their appearance, but he was obscured.
And then he stood without warning. Auldborne was still ten feet back from the fountain, but Ian stood anyway. Ellie realized what he was doing too late. He wanted to take the diodes for her, and he did. Auldborne snapped to him and shot once, hitting him square in the knee: Auldborne’s favorite crippling blow. Ian sank and Auldborne aimed again but paused. He saw that Finn wasn’t even carrying a gun.
“What’s all this then, Finn? A suicide mission?”
Ellie’s heart broke with that hit. It leeched more of Ian’s lifeblood from him. He was bowed now, close to breaking, but this was her chance. If she broke and shot quickly, she could get a jump on Auldborne. She stepped out in complete silence, praying for even a one second advantage.
Ellie knew she didn’t have much in the way of gun skills. The weapon still felt foreign in her hands, a tool for an unknown trade, like a strange wrench or a compass, but she’d practiced by focusing on the basics: pointing and squeezing. After hours and hours of drills back in Cheyenne she managed to convince herself that she could hold her own in a stand-up firefight.
The problem, she realized now, was there are no true stand-up firefights. There is running and dodging and shooting and mayhem, and evasion was just as important, if not more important, than knowing how to shoot. Alex Auldborne could evade. Ellie Willmore could not.
Ellie’s first two shots went wide as Auldborne caught her movement and pivoted as surely as a ballroom dancer to returned fire on-target, clipping Ellie’s left hand as she held it to position her gun while she ran. She screamed in pain and flicked her fingers out as they went numb, but she still ran, and she still held her gun. She swung herself sideways to present a thinner target and aimed again, but Alex was faster and loped to his left to get another shot at Ellie full on. Then Ian hitched himself up. He leapt with his good leg like a wounded stag and crashed full on into Auldborne from the side.
Auldborne’s mastery of melee combat relied on one thing: precision. He was as deadly as poison, but like poison he needed precise ingredients. When his movements were upset, he faltered. Ian Finn hit him and threw him towards the outer lip of the courtyard, and Ellie had her window for a stand-up shot. She took it, and nailed him in the hip. His form failed him and he lurched sideways and took cover behind the same column by the door. She saw his eyes open wide in surprise and shot twice more, missing, but cracking the stone near his face and blasting him with grit. He staggered into the open again and stepped badly on his wounded hip and fell, but he wasn’t about to let Ellie get another easy shot. He blinked rapidly and his face cracked into a toothy snarl as he hitched on one elbow and took aim at her, but she was running again, towards him, jumping over stone and marble and leaping from benches in long strides and screaming like a hurricane. His shot missed and didn’t faze her and Auldborne made a decision: he scrambled back, only able to gain purchase by pushing backwards into a limping momentum that soon had him nearly throwing himself away from her and towards the iron gate in the high fence. Ellie heard the telltale snap of the lock clicking open just as he slammed his back into the gate. She leveled for another shot but held in disbelief as the gate cracked open onto the roaring park and Auldborne threw himself bodily into the crowd like a man falling backwards into the sea. He was swallowed up like a sandcastle in the waves.
Ellie dropped her gun to her side and wiped the sweat from her face as the gate kicked back in on itself and latched, then locked once more. Ian pulled himself up and stood on one leg, leaning weakly against the fountain, watching Ellie and heaving great gulps of air. His head swam. He felt for his cigarettes in vain. No cigarettes, only a slow numb creep from the hit on his shoulder that was tickling at his neck now, and a burning at his knee that he knew would soon go numb too and feel like a swollen balloon ready to pop. Stupid, he thought, not buying a pack of cigarettes for my last day on Earth.
The spinning in his head accelerated and he almost fell off the lip of the fountain, but Ellie was there.
“Ian,” she said, “come on. We need to get inside.”
Ian wanted to say that they should go after Auldborne. Make sure he was out. He tried to say that you had to make sure with a man like him, but it was all he could do to calm his own heart and slow his bleeding and he found himself being led through the front door and into the Black House.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
FRANK YOUNGSMITH EXPECTED TO walk into the Black House and find towering, cobweb strewn halls and echoing floors, dusty footprints and spooky creaks and cracks, perhaps a candelabra here or there and always the soft, distant tones of an organ being played, but not a soul in sight. What he found was more like a full blown business trying to conduct daily operations during a five-alarm fire.
Uniformed help scurried up and down the halls, carrying papers, hauling wiring, toting server banks, shredding documents, hauling bags and folders and briefcases. A number of men and women in plainclothes conferred pointedly with each other and gestured firmly out towards the courtyard. There was even a group of disturbingly calm children with an air of business about them. Everything was well lit and well decorated. There were television displays along the hallways and in the offsetting rooms. A red carpet ran down the center of the entryway and ended at the foot of a wide stairway at the far back of the house. A hanging chandelier did swing softly above him, but its crystals sparkled in the daylight. There wasn’t a cobweb to be seen.
A stout and bald older man in a trim black suit and tie stood wearily behind a podium off to the right, reading from a black ledger with one hand and rubbing his forehead with the other. He held a thick black telephone in the crook of his neck and while he glanced at Frank he forgot him entirely as the gunfire erupted in the courtyard outside.
Frank stepped in line behind men carrying planks of wood to the perimeter of the house and stayed with them until they rounded a corner. The gunfire popped and in the hallway a line of people formed against the near wall to look through a series of large round cut glass windows that were set just above the courtyard. While an awning below obscured almost everything from them, they still speculated at each break in the firing and winced at the crashing sounds.
He was at the crossroads of the house. Corridors led off to his left and right, and just ahead was a stairway leading to the second floor. He knew he wanted to get to the Red Room, the heart of the place, where he would find Lock, or someone who knew his whereabouts. The stairway up looked the most intimidating and so he reasoned that was where he should start. He walked up, stepping aside as people streamed by him, some running, some trying not to run, and he soon found himself in an anteroom that stretched out to his left and right and wrapped around the corners of the house. Sim
ilar round windows were set in the walls and cast big spots of light upon the carpet. Before him stood a wide set of mahogany double doors and in front of them stood an official-looking man in a suit. The man fidgeted and tried to peer down the stairway and out of the windows as the distant sounds of the gunfight raged on. He paid no attention to either Frank or any of the other people who scrambled up and shuffled down the stairway, but Frank sensed that if he approached him he would take notice very quickly. Although he looked to be a member of the staff and not any player Frank could recognize, he was not small.
Frank straightened his coat nonetheless and readied himself. He walked a good ten steps down the hall, but when the man focused upon him with wild eyes, seeking recognition, Frank cut an immediate right and walked quickly along the curving hallway of the anteroom, pressing himself to the wall by a window. Frank looked behind him. He wasn’t followed. He looked out of the window and let out a breath. The crowd was arrayed below him like a massive rug of humanity; even from the second story he couldn’t see the end of it. He wiped sweat from his face and let out a shaky breath. He was never going to find Lock if he couldn’t confront a doorman. He steeled himself and turned back and just as he rounded the corner again with renewed confidence he heard the door open. He froze as Alex Auldborne crossed right in front of him and nimbly descended the stairs as he flicked his gun from its holster inside his jacket. He never even so much as glanced Frank’s way and then he was gone, but Frank could feel his cold fury like the draft of a passing truck. He stood there like a spooked rabbit for another thirty seconds.
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