Superego
Page 27
Nothing happened. An instant too late, I noticed it had gotten darker. The emergency lighting was gone, and the only light emanated from the many fires around the brothel. Morrigan had something in her hand—some sort of EMP device. That would only delay the guns for a second before they went onto backup circuitry, but a second was all she needed to close in on me. I barely got my hands up to block as her fist came toward me like a small wrecking ball trying to demolish my skull. She knocked me down, and I lost grip of my guns.
She could have just stood back and shot me, but she wanted to personally beat me to death to show her contempt for me. That was arrogance. That would be her downfall.
Just not now.
Before I could stand she pounced on me, but we were near the center of the blast and the weakened floor gave way. We fell and slammed hard into the floor below us, and the debris from above pelted us. I worked against my aching body to scramble to my feet. Morrigan was already standing two yards in front of me. There was no humor in her expression—she was ready to kill me.
She was much stronger than I was, but she was also much stronger than someone with her frame should have been. That meant she’d be easy to throw off balance if I could just get her to commit her full strength to a strike and miss. When she came at me, I ducked under her left hook while putting my full force into a body blow. The muscles were so strong in her abdomen it was like hitting a heavy bag. I assumed it hurt, but it didn’t seem to faze her. She followed with a kick I couldn’t dodge and had to block. I barely kept my balance.
I wanted to put distance between us, but that was just panic. I ignored it. Morrigan would be expecting a retreat and would be ready to use it. I had to figure out how to fight her in close, and that meant a lot of finesse and going for her vulnerable spots…like her face. No creature ever likes getting hit in the face. And it would make her mad. She was the better fighter, so I needed her to make mistakes. She threw a straight punch that I dodged. She followed up with another left hook. I ducked under it and tapped her in the gut again, just wanting to make the connection and not worrying about the power behind it. Now came a roundhouse kick. I barely got out of the way, got behind it and pushed her off balance.
Now I had my small window of opportunity, and I slammed my fist into her face as hard as I could. She came right back at me with an elbow, but it missed, and I hit her hard in the head again. No fortified muscles there to soften the blow. She was hurting, possibly dizzy. This I had to keep building on.
She threw a panicked left and then a right, and I easily dodged both and came back once again as hard as I could to her face. Just as I connected I realized she wasn’t trying to dodge the punch. As I hit her, it felt like a sledge hammer had smashed into my ribs. She had sacrificed another strike to the head just to make sure she got one clear blow on me, knowing that was probably enough to end the fight. And that’s why brute force usually beats finesse.
It stunned me long enough for her to land a kick to my other side, shattering those ribs as well. I fell down and instinctively put my right arm up to protect myself, but she came with an iron grip on my wrist and then nailed my elbow, pulverizing it. I tried to get to my feet and pull free, but her foot shattered my knee. In a last-ditch effort, my left hand went for a hunk of concrete lying near me to throw at her, but she quickly grabbed my hand and squeezed until all the bones broke. Then her fist found my face, like a steel piston being jammed into my skull. I wasn’t sure if the skull was broken—I was so rattled I was hardly sure of anything.
I don’t remember what happened after that, probably due to the retrograde amnesia that tends to go along with violent blows to the head.
CHAPTER 38
I was in pain. And dizzy—probably suffering a nasty concussion. I couldn’t see much—maybe my eyes were swollen. I thought I was sitting in a chair with my hands bound behind me. My arms were quite thoroughly broken, so I did not feel like moving them to test how bound I was. I tried to push off the ground to see whether the chair was bolted down, but my legs did not respond well, as they were apparently smashed to pieces as well. I was completely broken and helpless.
But I was alive.
“Dip, can you hear me?” I whispered.
No answer. That could mean lots of things. I tried not to worry about it for the moment.
“Is he awake?” a woman asked. Sounded like Morrigan.
I tried to focus my eyes. I recognized the red hair, but I was having trouble with the face. “Looks like someone really did a number on you.” My jaw was still working, anyway.
“You should see the other guy.” She knelt down in front of me. “Guess what, Rico? We’re done with you.”
“And yet I’m still here.”
I could make out a nervous smile. “I know! Isn’t that absolutely ridiculous?! It’s not just me, right?”
“It’s infuriating,” said another woman in the room. “I just want to grab the first blunt object I see and go to town on him.” My vision was pretty blurry, but she looked human, though there was something white—a bandage maybe—over her nose.
“I know you?”
She approached me angrily. “First you slammed my head into the ground, then you broke my finger and stunned me, then you broke my nose. Now it’s payback time!”
Morrigan stood up and pushed her back. “Shut up, Donner! Just shut up! No one cares! And even if they did care…THEY’RE ALL DEAD! So shut up about your stupid nose and pinkie before I rip off your head and shove it up your ass!”
“Sounds like you may have some misdirected anger,” I said.
She approached me again. “Oh, no. I have plenty of real anger for pretty much everyone at this point. You know, I’m starting to think this whole thing is some convoluted plot to get me killed, because it’s about the only way I can make sense of it.” She turned behind her. “Donner, get me a chair.”
“Do you want a—”
“When does a simple command like ‘Get me a chair’ require further instruction, you useless twit? GET ME A CHAIR!”
“Sorry.” Donner fetched Morrigan a chair. There didn’t seem to be much to the room other than concrete walls and a couple of chairs. Morrigan positioned her chair in front of me and sat down.
“I don’t plan to ever settle down and raise a family,” Morrigan said.
“I don’t really think you’d be a good mother.”
She smiled. An angry smile. And she patted my sore, bruised face. “Thanks. I really needed that. Anyway, my point is that my people—the people I’ve trained and worked with and turned into real professionals—are the closest things I’ll have to children. You see? And I don’t know how much you know about mothers, since you’re all weird in the head, but once you kill enough of a mother’s children—and punch her repeatedly in the face—she starts to get kind of angry. I try to be professional, but right now all I want to do is rip off one of your limbs and beat you with it.”
“I say we do it,” Donner added.
“Or rip off one of Donner’s limbs and beat you with it. I really want to kill you violently, but I can’t. Do you know why?”
“It would be wrong.”
Morrigan laughed an insane little cackle. “Still got that sense of humor. He’s a funny guy, isn’t he, Donner?”
“I don’t think he’s funny at all!” Donner yelled angrily.
Morrigan sighed. “She can’t even banter. She is so utterly useless.”
Donner looked confused. “What’s banter?”
“SHUT UP, DONNER!” Morrigan screamed without turning around. She leaned toward me and whispered, “So who are you, Rico? Yes, you’re a pathetic psychopath, but why are you so important? Are you like Donner here?Someone’s nephew I got stuck with?” I smiled slightly. “People just like me, I guess.”
Morrigan stepped back. “Not well enough. Do you know what my orders were on this job?”
“You were supposed to make sure I died during it.”
She stared at me a moment. “Yeah. Not sur
e how you know that, but it doesn’t really matter now. And they were very specific about you dying making the hit on Gredler. But you can see the problem there—having to work with someone I’m also supposed to get killed. What if you figured out what was going on and struck back? Well, I guess that’s not a hypothetical anymore.”
“I figured it out because you were sloppy and tried to get me killed earlier in the game. You placed me at the café with no notice when the terrorists were attacking…and I don’t think those two ladies on the tram were just tailing me for intel.”
She smiled again. “It would have made things easier if you had gotten killed, accidentally, early on. It would have allowed me to go on with my original plans. Didn’t work out, though. And they actually threatened me—ME! Told me I’d be the target of the next hit if I or my people killed you. They threatened me not to kill you, some stupid hitman they don’t need anymore and want to get rid of. Does that make any sense to you?”
“It’s not my place to make sense of orders.”
Morrigan frowned. “We’re both just grunts, aren’t we? Well, Anthony Burke was very specific in his instructions, and you don’t cross him, do you?”
I felt an odd, sinking feeling. It was strange. I already knew he was okay with my death. I don’t know why it would make a difference that he was the one who ordered it. Perhaps I was more sentimental than I would admit. I thought back to the meeting I had with him on Ryle and felt an odd feeling. Sadness, maybe. That feeling that something of value was gone forever. A much more common feeling for me lately. But it was silly. There was nothing about Burke to stir sentiment He was just who I took my orders from.
“Under different circumstances I’d pity you, Rico,” Morrigan continued. “You’re really a sad, inconsequential creature who’s only good at one thing, and now no one has any use for you. Of course, since you’re such a freak, this all probably means nothing to you, right?”
“Not really.”
She leaned back in her chair. “And ya know the funny part? Well, I mean, so much of it has been absolutely hilarious—I’ve barely been able to catch my breath from all the laughing these past few days—but if I picked out the absolute funniest part, it’d have to be that the idea of you dying on this high-profile hit was so you could go out with some dignity.” She stood up and smirked at me. “Well, Rico, do you feel like you have your dignity right now?”
“I’m a sociopath. Dignity has never been a concern for me.”
She leaned down toward me. “Exactly! That’s why this is all so stupid! You’d agree more than anyone that, now that we’re done with you, we should just shoot you in the head! But, apparently for all your work, they wanted Rico—the boogeyman of the syndicates—to have a glorious death. And because of that desire, now here you are, tied to a chair, a bleeding, broken loser. Pretty ironic, right? I mean, that is a proper example of irony, I’m pretty sure.” She turned to Donner. “That is a good example of irony, isn’t it, Donner?”
“Huh?”
She looked back at me. “Completely worthless. By the way, we found and destroyed your ship. I know you had some AI on it and probably some sort of backup plan, but now it’s debris floating in orbit. So let’s just be clear on how completely hopeless things are for you.”
There was no way of knowing if that were true—unless Dip got back to me—but it was not comforting. “Damn, my stuff was on that ship. Now you’re just being mean.”
“No, that’s not mean.” She smiled. “I have other plans for mean. Your detective/former hitwoman friend was captured by police.”
My face twitched slightly at that news; I couldn’t help it.
Morrigan’s smile grew wider. “You do care for her! Wow. That’s insane. I thought you were too mental to have human connections. And if we only had more time, I would fetch her from police custody, which would be simple enough, and then gut her slowly in front of you. It would be like a nice little psychological experiment to see if we could get a human reaction out of you. Still, I want you to know we will go get her after this is all over and…I’m not sure exactly what we’ll do to her, but it will involve lots of torture. It’ll be fun. A job-well-done celebration involving her screaming very loudly. And she will beg for death a long, long, long time before she gets what she wants.”
I thought of Morrigan’s threat of cruelty against Diane versus the cruelty I’d already inflicted—pointlessly, since it evidently didn’t keep her safe. Anger boiled up inside me, but it wasn’t just directed at Morrigan. I pushed it down, as it was unhelpful. “You’re taking this way too personally. That never ends well,” I said.
“You’re probably right. None of this is really your fault. You’re like a child who doesn’t understand the world and just lashes out in confusion. I know none of this was personal for you, but at the same time, you killed my people. I can’t help but take that a bit personally.”
“Your people were killers working for a criminal syndicate. We do nothing but spread misery in the universe. It will be better off without any of us.”
Morrigan paused. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, you freakish psychopath?”
“I’m trying to look on the bright side here. There’s no reason to get worked up when bad things happen to bad people.”
She sprung at me, like a cobra to the kill, her fist smashing into my gut. “Then I guess this will make the universe happy!”
She knocked the wind out of me, and for a second it felt like my broken body wasn’t going to be able to fill my lungs again and I was going to suffocate right there. But the air slowly came, and I lived another moment.
Donner walked over. “If we’re supposed to keep him alive until we hear from the executives, you’d better not hit him again.”
“Thanks, Donner!” she snapped. “Maybe I’ll just have to hit someone else I don’t have a standing order not to kill!” Morrigan looked at me. “Here’s what happens now. I’ve sent word to Nystrom that you’ve turned against us and are now just a big bag of flesh and broken pieces of bone, so keeping you in this plan is rather useless now. When they finally tell me to do the sensible thing, I’m just going to walk into this room and shoot a big hole through your head. No need for further ceremony—I just want to get this done with, because we still have someone important to kill. You understand?”
I moved my head for a little nod. “Sounds reasonable.”
“Glad you like it. So, Rico, you supposedly feel nothing about the deaths of others—any feelings on your own inevitable death?”
“Not really.”
“You feel great fear just before the end, that I assure you.” She patted me hard on my dislocated shoulder. It took a lot of restraint not to cry out.
“Morrigan.”
“What?” She bent down to meet me face to face.
“I’d threaten you with a violent death, but you’re smart enough to know that’s pretty much an inevitability for you one day. My advice to you is to enjoy it, because whether or not the religious are right about the afterlife, you can be quite certain it will be your last chance to enjoy anything.”
She backed away. “You’re a funny guy, Rico.” She wasn’t smiling, though.
CHAPTER 39
Cold water splashed my face.
“He’s still alive,” I heard a woman say.
Apparently I had fallen asleep when they’d left me alone in the room. I had been dreaming, but I couldn’t remember about what. It wasn’t pleasant, whatever it was. Probably better than reality, though.
“Untie him,” Morrigan said.
My hands were released, and it became obvious that my bindings had been the only things keeping me upright as I tumbled to the floor.
I felt a sharp kick to my ribs, which gave easily, as they were already broken. “Get up!”
I tried to comply, but all four of my limbs were broken and wouldn’t support any weight. “I think I might need medical attention.”
“No, you’re good just as you are.”
I looked around the room for the first time since waking up but couldn’t make out any details, as my vision was quite blurry. Perhaps an empty utility closet. I could faintly hear the hum of machinery nearby. “So where am I?”
“I don’t think it really matters for you, Rico,” Morrigan said.
“But I left my knife with the receptionist in the other building.”
Morrigan stuffed a rag into my mouth. “And those were your very last words. According to the executives, we’re not done with you yet, but the rest of this will require you to lie there quietly in a useless little meat pile. Think you can do that?” She lifted me up and threw me over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I let out a muffled cry of pain, but I was too broken to even squirm.
“We’re clear,” I heard Donner say as Morrigan carried me out into a dark, undecorated, deserted hallway. We soon came to another room, at which point I was dumped on the floor, causing me to scream into the rag.
“You give me enough time to make an exit, then come in here and shoot Rico until there’s little left but ash,” Morrigan said. “That clear?”
“Can’t we just kill him now to be sure? It’s not like anyone will know.”
“Sure of what? Look at him. My orders are not to end him until after Gredler is dead. Let’s just do this and then go out and get really drunk.”
“Okay.” Donner left the room.
I was able to position my head so I could see Morrigan. We were in a small room with no light except that from a tiny window near where Morrigan sat. She was putting together a sniper rifle. What a pathetic way to make the hit. Shooting from a distance implies fear, and I never liked to show anyone I was afraid.
Morrigan noticed I was looking at her and turned to me. “I might as well explain the plan, Rico: I snipe Gredler during his speech. I get out of here via my nice little escape route, and Donner ‘finds’ this room and is the heroic security guard who kills the infamous Rico. Oh, yeah! I forgot to tell you. You’re infamous, because we leaked some of your exploits to the news agencies here. Anyway, Donner shoots you so many times that no one will be able to tell your bones were already broken. Yes, that’s right! You’re going to finally be done in by the complete and utter screwup Donner, since you’re just not worth any more of my time. I hope you find your death abrupt and pointless.”