by KJ Harlow
“Yes, I did.” Walter’s voice sounded grim.
“How the hell did this happen?” Tracy shouted. I looked across at her at a loss for words. “It’s like they knew that we were coming!”
“We don’t know, we’re still trying to figure that out ourselves,” Walter said helplessly. Agatha’s voice came through. I was bracing for the vitriol of an old woman but instead heard the calm, warm voice of a grandmotherly figure.
“Tracy dear, don’t despair,” she said softly. “All is not lost.” Tracy lifted her head, her eyes shimmering with tears that she refused to let go of. “We can still sense Tor and Greg. They are still with us.” She continued reassuringly.
Agatha was right. I closed my eyes – I could feel Tor and Greg’s heartbeats. They were alive!
“Agatha,” I said, forgetting my earlier angst for the woman, “what’s the best way for us to rescue Tor and Greg?” There was silence for a while. Had Agatha not buried the hatchet yet?
“You could feel it couldn’t you, Tor and Greg’s life forces?” I nodded, then realizing that Agatha couldn’t see me, hurriedly said, “Yes.”
“Good. Us Deliverers are bound together by the blood of those reborn to rid the world of torment. Follow the pulse and you’ll be able to find Tor and Greg.”
“And what about Riggs? Did Mortimer shoot him?” Tracy said anxiously. There was silence on the other side.
“Yes, we saw Mortimer shoot him.” Walter confirmed. Tracy swore. She spun, pulled out her gun and blasted the pot plant in the corner.
“But there’s something else you should know,” Walter said. Tracy and I waited for his revelation. “We can’t be sure,” he faltered, “but, he might not be a Tormented.” Tracy and I exchanged incredulous looks. The room was still sweltering, but that news was enough to make it seem like it had become several degrees cooler.
“Before Mortimer shot the hostage, he pulled off the bag on his head,” Walter explained. “It was definitely Riggs. After Mortimer shot him, his Ombre Gun didn’t materialize. From what we’ve seen in the past, it should always materialize quite soon after they have been turned, assuming the candidate was Tormented enough.”
“When Mortimer saw that there was no Ombre Gun, he lost it. He kicked and screamed and even attacked the new Conflicted he had just created,” Agatha’s voice brimmed with mirth. “He didn’t seem happy in the slightest.”
Tracy seemed to brighten up at this. She was holstering her gun while talking to Walter and Agatha through the Light Bug. I wasn’t sure what to feel now that Riggs had been turned into a Conflicted. He was still my boss, at least when he was human. Now that he was a Conflicted roaming around a hospital, would I have to draw my weapon against him? I didn’t like him, but I never wanted to shoot him in the head.
“What do you think, Rose?” Tracy asked me. She was looking at me expectantly. I hadn’t been listening to anything they had been discussing for the last few minutes.
“Sorry, I was off in my own world there,” I said laughing sheepishly.
“You’ll have plenty of time to be off in your own world when Mortimer shoots you in the head,” Walter said brusquely. I felt the heat rise to my cheeks. I mumbled an apology.
“Rose, it’s tough being a Deliverer. We can’t afford to lose focus. You saw what happened to Silas back there. Tor’s known for his unwavering concentration at the task at hand but with someone as excitable as Greg around him, even he might get chinks in his armor.” Tracy said gently. She was right.
“I apologize. Could you repeat what you asked me before?”
“I was just asking you what you thought about us completing our new amended mission of rescuing Tor and Greg.”
“The fact that Mortimer still hadn’t Ceased Tor and Greg is good and bad news. It’s bad because he’s clearly trying to lure you into his trap. If he was able to Cease four Deliverers in one hit, Dante would be very pleased.” Walter said tersely.
“It’s good because Tor and Greg haven’t been Ceased… yet. Yes, you’ll be walking into a trap, but if you’re able to free them and retreat, we’ll be able to regroup, predict Mortimer’s next move and thwart him before he does it.” Agatha said, finishing Walter’s thought.
“I’m up for it,” Tracy said, slamming her left fist into her right hand. “I know none of what’s happened in the last half an hour has been our fault but I still want redemption.” She looked at me, eyes shining fiercely again. “Rose, do you want to come with me? I’m not going to think any less of you if you want to retreat now. This will be dangerous.” There was that expectant look again.
“Definitely. It’s time that I Rid my first Conflicted.” I said firmly. I could do this. I just had to pull the trigger. It was as simple as that, wasn’t it?
”Then it’s settled!” Tracy said, beaming brightly at me. This girl had a way of filling me up with a confidence that I didn’t know I had. Yes, I still hadn’t Rid a Conflicted yet, but her belief in me almost took away all the uncertainty I had… almost.
“Rose and I will continue through and rescue the new hostages.” She suppressed a giggle. I wondered what would be going through Tor’s mind as he struggled under his bindings. How wounded would his pride be being rescued by a couple of girls?
“OK, good luck you two,” Walter said. The Light Bug clicked off as the transmission ended. Tracy looked across at me, her eyes shining with excitement.
“You ready?” She asked. I nodded. We drew our guns and started moving toward the radiology hall.
We stepped through the hall cautiously at first. There were about a dozen rooms with x-rays and CT scanners, sitting forgotten and unused. I was half-expecting a Conflicted to jump out from behind one of the doors and slash my throat. We made it through the radiology hall without being set upon once. It was eerie. What was Mortimer waiting for?
We came out to another waiting room. This one was smaller than the first. Bits of the wall were starting to peel. Mold grew from parts of the ceiling that had begun to cave in. Tracy relaxed and holstered her gun for a while. She put her hands on her hips, sniffed then crouched down.
“Hmm, it looks like they came through here,” there was something on the floor that I had missed. I could see two lines that trailed through the carpet. It looked like someone had been dragged through this room
“These trails can’t belong to Tor or Greg.” Tracy murmured, standing back up. “We saw them bust into that room, all guns a blazing.” She seemed lost in thought as we both pondered who the trail could have belonged to.
“Maybe it was Riggs?” I suggested helpfully. “He could have been knocked out and dragged to the middle of the hospital,” I reasoned.
“Mm,” Tracy said, noncommittally. That’s when we heard it. Both our heads bolted up. In a flash, Tracy’s Lucent Gun was back in her hand and close to her chest. I moved closer to her, mirroring her stance. It couldn’t have been right. This hospital had been abandoned for more than a decade.
“Did you just hear–” I whispered.
“Yeah,” Tracy said under her breath. “A kid giggling.”
My eyes glanced up to the sign above the hallway where the noise came from: ’Cafeteria’.
“You’re both wrong.” A girl’s voice sang, her words wafting innocently from the Cafeteria. That was it. I wanted to go home. I wanted to see Stan and have him hold me and tell me everything’s going to be OK. I hated horror movies, especially ones with demonic little girls. I watched the first half an hour of The Ring and ran out of the cinema a blubbering mess. Now I found myself inside one. My pulse was loud in my ears again.
Tracy walked ever so slowly towards the hallway leading to the cafeteria, her gun pointing straight at the entrance. “Wrong about what?” She said. I stood rooted to the spot. Tremors were going through my hand as I held onto my gun tightly. There was more unnerving laughter.
“Wrong about who came through that room,” the girl’s voice said. It appeared to be getting fainter.
Tracy turned
her head back at me and jerked her head violently towards the room, a serious expression on her face. Now was no time to be scared. I looked up, spying a little surveillance camera in the corner of the room. Was someone watching us and trying to psych us out?
“Tracy, wait!” I whispered as loudly as I could. She had already turned the corner and was moving into the Cafeteria. I had to do this. I had to be brave. Slowly, I followed her. We peered through the doors in the hallway. They led to kitchens and a serving area. I spied pots and pans hanging from the ends of their handles.
“There’s someone else we brought here,” the little girl’s voice teased. “Someone else we found with such delicious torment. He’ll be joining us soon.” She laughed now, a grown woman’s cackle trapped in a little girl’s body. I was sweating bullets. I swapped my gun into my left hand and wiped my right on my vest. Where was the voice coming from?
We could see the cafeteria in front of us. It was quite a big room with tables of different shapes arranged in no particular order close to the walls. North-facing windows had been boarded up. Moonlight forced its way into the dark room through the cracks in the boards.
“We’d like to meet them. Can you take us to them?” Tracy said, not sounding fazed one bit. There was silence.
“Rose and Tracy, hold your positions. We can’t see where this voice is coming from,” Agatha’s commanded, her terse voice coming through our Light Bugs. Then the laughter came back. It was coming from above us.
“Rose!” Tracy hurtled towards me and crash tackled us both into a sprawling heap, my head bouncing off the tiled floor. Gun fire pinged off the spot where I was standing a fraction of a second ago. I could see stars tumbling before my eyes. I could hear more gun fire. Someone was shooting at Tracy, who was rolling and sliding out of the way. The girl was giggling again, while Tracy kept dodging her gunshots.
I didn’t know who she was, but this little girl wasn’t lost. She knew exactly what she was doing – and she had a gun. Tracy had knocked me so over hard that I had slid under a dining table. I peered up from underneath the table and saw her: a little girl in a hospital gown. She had a pitch black gun in her hand that seemed to swallow up the little light that was in the room. She was firing at Tracy with wild abandon who managed to evade her shots.
From under the table, I pointed my Lucent Gun at her. Steadying my hand, I aimed and squeezed the trigger. My shot missed her by about a foot but had struck the wall next to her face. It surprised her. Her young face contorted into one of fury as she turned her gun at me. That was all the opportunity Tracy needed. She aimed her gun and shot the little girl in the chest.
She fell 25 feet and thudded heavily on the floor, motionless. Her gun slid away from her, towards the boarded up windows.
“Don’t move, Rose. She’s still dangerous,” Tracy swallowed while keeping her gun trained on the little girl whose arm was twisted at an awkward angle. “She’s a Tormented.”
I looked back at the little girl. She was on her knees. Her head was down, her chestnut brown hair long and unkempt. She was breathing heavily. Standing up, she looked at us. Her face was bruised from the fall, the look of a maniac etched into her eyes. She had a twisted smile on her face. With a sudden twist, she flung her left arm that had been dislocated back into position. I dry retched a little hearing the loud cracking sound.
There was some blood that came out from her gunshot wound, but it was fast drying. She flexed the arm that she had set back into its right place then smoothed out the hospital gown she was wearing. She pouted at us.
“Remember you cannot Rid a Tormented without knowing the answer to what’s causing their Torment. Try and find out as much as you can about her and don’t let her get her gun again.” Walter instructed us through our Light Bugs.
“You’re so mean!” The little girl cried.
“Who are you?” Tracy said, gun still pointed at the Tormented in front of us. The little girl sighed and started walking towards us. Tracy and I started backing away. “Don’t come any closer, or I’ll shoot you again!” Tracy warned, pointing the gun steadily at her. The little girl giggled again, malice lacing her laughter.
“It’s fun playing cops and robbers. But I don’t want to be a robber any more,” she kept moving towards us. Without warning, Tracy unloaded three rounds into the little girl’s chest. She slumped to her knees, blood pouring out from her wounds anew and dripping onto the cold tiles at her feet. After a few seconds, the blood had stopped dripping. She got back up and was shaking slightly.
“You ruined my dress!” She screamed, forcing out the last word so loudly that the boarded up windows trembled.
“Who are you?” Tracy repeated, her gun was now pointing at the Tormented’s head. I kept backing away. How were we meant to get out of this situation? For the first time since I’d become a Deliverer, the Lucent Gun felt useless in my hand. It might as well have been a pop cap gun.
“Why don’t you ask Tor?” The little girl said slowly, her lip curling into a snarl. My eyes widened.
“How do you know Tor? What is he to you?” I shouted without thinking. The little girl turned her attention towards me for the first time.
“My, my, why so defensive?” She said sweetly. Her face darkened as she dropped her voice. She lifted a blood-stained hand, pointing to me. “What is he to you?”
She wasn’t in front of us anymore. Where had she gone? She was by her gun. Tracy aimed a shot at her, but she had disappeared from that spot as well. We turned wildly, looking around for her.
“Ah!” Tracy swore as there was a bright spark at her hand. Her gun spiraled through the air and landed on the floor. The little girl had disarmed Tracy.
“Let’s make things a little bit more interesting then, shall we?” No sooner had she said that, Tracy had Soul Stepped to her gun and aimed a shot at the little girl, only for the trigger to stick.
“Damn! It’s busted!” Tracy said, looking at me. I was still holding my gun in front of me like I was allergic to it.
“I’ll let the others play with you now,” she said, smiling sardonically. “Bye bye!” And with that, she had sped away.
The room was quiet again. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck. Tracy gripped her gun. It glowed momentarily before changing its form into a dagger.
“Rose, be ready. Conflicted are coming.” She said hoarsely.
We heard it before we saw it: footsteps shuffling into the room. A big group of people, except they weren’t quite human. There must have been about twenty of them. Their eyes were blank. They parted to allow someone to come through. My breath caught in my throat: it was Riggs.
They stood still for only a second. In unison, their heads snapped up, their eyes focused on Tracy and I. The next moment, they all charged at us with blades raised.
“Rule Number One: have unwavering conviction when you shoot.” Walter said through the Light Bug. I shakily pointed my gun at Riggs and pulled the trigger.
Twelve
“Hi, my name’s Rose Eaving. Nice to meet you.” I stuck out my hand out enthusiastically to my new manager. My palm was sweaty. He ignored me and kept reading the forensics journal. I let my arm hang there for about three seconds, before dropping it awkwardly, subconsciously wiping it on my jeans.
I was over the moon to have been placed at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. I had only recently moved to Melbourne to try and make something of my degree in forensics when I got the call up from the VIFM. It was the state’s central hub for forensic study.
After learning that I was going to be paired up with Daniel Riggs, one of Australia’s youngest forensic scientists to have gotten an article published in the prestigious Journal of Forensic Sciences, I couldn’t have been happier.
“They spelled my name wrong,” Riggs said indifferently.
“P…Pardon?” I stammered.
“Look,” he shoved the journal in my face. “My name has two ‘G’s’, not one.” In a fit of rage, he flung the journal into the was
te paper basket.
“Good shot!” I piped when it actually landed in. Riggs turned to me, his closely cropped beard bristling with disdain.
“Run downstairs and buy me a cappuccino, will you? I’ve got some important phone calls to make.”
Over the next six months, he made me fall out of love with forensic science. Getting me to do literature reviews, clean equipment and run errands, he continued lapping up the praise for being the pre-eminent forensic thought leader who continued getting published in journals. He was also flown around the world to speak at forensic conventions while I did his dirty work.
I tried to be patient. I tried to talk to him. I tried to learn from him, but he was short-tempered, anti-social and jealously protective of his work. The first month was fine. The second month was an ordeal. The third month felt twice as long as the second. I don’t know how I made it to the sixth without losing my mind but there I was.
I had always tried to be tough. Without parents, I had to be. I told myself that this would come to pass. But this man made the time I spent at work miserable.
As he charged at me, I couldn’t help but notice how he had changed since I last him. His beard was wild and frazzled. His eyes, which I initially thought were dark and mysterious, were now dull and gray, looking at me but not seeing me; that part was the same.
For all intents and purposes, he was dead. His mind wasn’t there. His body didn’t belong to him anymore. He was a marionette being strung along by a puppeteer who promised him more power as long as he brought the torment. But he must not have been good enough, otherwise he wouldn’t be running at me right now, obeying a command to rip me apart. I, on the other hand, had been offered a choice. Heaven, Hell or becoming a Deliverer. Now I was the one who had the power.
As my finger squeezed the trigger, I finally understood. I never had unwavering conviction because I felt like I was killing people when I shot at the Conflicted. That was wrong. I wasn’t only delivering them back to the Underworld for Death to deal with, but I was also delivering them mercy.