He seemed to be struggling with my plan.
“So you want me to—”
“Yes.”
“But it’s my own—”
“Aware of it.”
“But—”
“Oh no-no, Mister M. ‘But’ is not a word that we use in this discussion. You have your orders. Don’t disappoint Johnny, he really does love the use of his limbs.”
***
The pieces were in place. I selected an attic in the gutterage and stashed my belongings under the boards: a spare set of clothes, some ammunition and my Helix access tags. Then, I dressed myself in a jaunty turtleneck and styled my hair over my eyes before heading over to Strauch’s apartment complex.
Visitors got searched, but I wasn’t a visitor. I lived here, and I had the access card to prove it. I stopped the elevator at the Markhams’ floor and waited in the entrance. The doors started to ping indignantly, pushing gently against my back.
On my phone screen, I watched the lobby through a camera I’d placed in the flowerpot. Markham was almost late.
There was an explosion of glass as his car rammed through the front doors. Screams came from all directions. He got out of the car, wrapped head-to-toe in a dark balaclava, and held up a shotgun.
The weapon was empty. He knew this. The hotel staff did not. He shouted at them angrily and told the guards to drop their guns. They hadn’t been expecting an entrance like this, and slowly lowered them.
He advanced into the hall and backed into the second elevator. The doors closed, and the staff began to shout into walkie-talkies and phone handsets.
The sliding door was positively straining at my back now. I put a hand on the elevator wall and waited until the rumble of the second box passed me by, before drawing a heavy blade from my trouser leg and stepping back into the shaft.
Time to act.
Markham was headed—as per instructions—to the top floor. I had to arrive moments after him in order to take advantage of—
Gunshots were heard to my left as I came to a stop. Strauch’s posted protectors had just leadlined Markham all over the elevator walls. The doors opened and I stepped out into the confusion.
Three of them—of course—had waited outside the doors of the second shaft. Markham had been taken by surprise, most likely. I hadn’t told him about the extra security.
The noise had masked my arrival. Two of the team were still outside, looking in. The third was checking the body. I twirled the knife, holding it tightly in my right hand. In my left I held my favourite pistol.
I took two bounding steps and drove the knife through Nameless Redshirt #1. As expected—I’d tested on the armour Dante had sent—it drove under the armpit and punched through to his heart. He went down without a noise; not that the others hadn’t immediately noticed my presence.
I let go of the knife handle and tossed the pistol from my left hand to my right. Slamming the butt into the back of Nameless Redshirt #2, I pulled my arm around his throat and hoisted him to his feet. I planted one shot directly into the helmet of #3, sending him crashing back into the elevator, before exploiting the weakness at the neck to finish #2. #3 got to his feet, unsteadily, and fired a round in my direction. His aim was off, completely, and I shot him in the face again. He dropped, dazed. I kneeled next to him, gripped his helmet tightly, and twisted. The resistance died and he went limp.
And then there were… Twenty one? How many people does RailTech have?
I lifted Strauch’s apartment card from the captain and swiped in. So, maybe the event wasn’t as obscure as I’d planned. Maybe Strauch wouldn’t be sleeping. So what? He was going to die.
The apartment was immaculately maintained. Even the air felt clean. I cautiously stepped through the kitchen and living room until I found a locked door. All signs pointed towards the bedroom. I sighed and burst into sing-song.
“Yes, Eric. A lock is going to keep me from redecorating your wall with skull fragments. What is this, amateur hour?”
I fired around the lock, reloaded and kicked the door in. The bedroom spread out before me. I stepped inside.
Crunch.
Something made a noise underfoot. It wasn’t carpet. I kneeled down, keeping my eyes forward, and picked something up.
Small, golden-brown and brittle. Crouton?
I felt the dart hit my neck. Incredible pain flooded my system. The world was spinning. I started firing wildly. I don’t know if I hit anyone.
I staggered against the door. Suddenly I was on my back. Everything was rotating and flipping and I was falling towards the ceiling and getting sucked into the floor all at once.
Fuck.
The spinning persisted, but I managed to focus on a dark figure above me. The psst of the tranquiliser gun sounded and I felt a sharp pain in my chest. The universe-swirling intensified.
“I warned you, K. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Vincent.
I spiralled into the void.
#0231
“I saw that officer again. Slinking around that family home. That’s the third crime scene of mine he’s visited, the third that he has no real authority in. He’s not being pulled in for assistance. He’s just tagging along. I’m not sure I like it, but hell, it’s not like he’s going to find me.
“Hey, if you’re lucky, he might even take a look at your crime scene. I wouldn’t be too sure, though. I’ve learned that people hate being put into boxes, and they hate it even more when those boxes are sealed and put into a lake.
“What are your thoughts on the matter?”
20: Capture
Flicker out, flicker in. Unconscious, dazed, for longer than I could tell. Permanent darkness: blindfold. Heading west: long, winding turns. Out of the city: smell of cut grass and pollen. Otherwise, lost. Drugs and thinking. No. Flicker out.
Flicker in. Long corridor. Spooled up in massive, muscular arms. Almost felt safe. Almost, but drugs starting to wear off. Flicker out, flicker in: now on a hard bed, staring blankly upwards. No blindfold, still no light.
I lay there for a thousand breaths before I made my first attempt at movement. Left arm, extend outwards. Cold steel. Wall? Wall. Right arm, extend outwards. More cold steel. Sit up.
Being upright was still too much effort, I discovered, slumping to the floor. More cold steel. Dash of light upon impact. One thousand more breaths. Try again.
It took time, but I eventually managed to steady myself against the bed frame. More cold steel, of course. It felt like the mattress was the one part of the cell that wasn’t. My ears were ringing faintly and my head ached at every heartbeat, but I was upright. From that point, I felt around the rest of the room.
It was tiny. I’d stored bodies in roomier dumpsters. I located a toilet and forced two fingers down my throat, emptying myself over a few ghastly moments. I tasted metallic blood on my tongue, mixed with acid and bile. A thousand more breaths and I had regained enough strength to get onto the mattress. Sleep now, plot later. Flicker out.
***
I woke up as the sedative was eliminated from my system. Everything was pain: neck, chest, fingernails. My teeth were getting pulled by an invisible dentist. PCP-monkeys were throwing an axe party in my head. Even my eyeballs hurt. But I was awake, pain or no pain, and I could think. Godsend.
I stood up and mapped my prison more accurately. The darkness was still all consuming, but I found a corner and explored from there. The bed, small as it was, took up most of the space, and the toilet reduced the standing room to a few square feet. The door was smooth from the inside, save for a hatch at the bottom. Standing on my tiptoes I could feel the ceiling. Steel all the way, except for a tiny half-sphere of what felt like glass in the corner. Security camera. I stared in its direction.
“Nice place.” My voice was weaker than I’d expected. “What’s the rent?”
There was no response. Of course there wasn’t. Why would they bother? I wished I had something to throw, but everything seemed bolted down. Even the mat
tress was held to the cot with reinforced plastic bindings.
I felt my way to the door and braced myself against it. I pulled back my arm and struck it. I was weak. A semi-resonant clang vibrated my bones, but the door held.
I expected it to hold. Not only would I refuse to be kept in some second-rate detention facility, but I wasn’t trying to break it down. I was looking for a reaction. I hit the door again.
There was a hissing sound above me. I felt along the walls and found that slats had opened at the top. Gas was seeping in: some kind of sedative. There was nowhere to go, and no point in trying to resist it. I lay down and took a breath.
Fuckshitwoah!
Everything started spinning again. It was almost terrifying—extreme dizziness and disorientation in the pitch-black darkness. I rolled off the mattress and onto the floor again, groaning and holding my head. I don’t know how long I lay there.
I thought about counting time, but I had no baseline from where to start. So what if I waited for an hour? That didn’t help me work out the time, or the date. I lay on my back and tapped my fingers together and tried to critically evaluate my situation.
Vincent had the drop on me, the sly fucktruck. I didn’t know how he was so prepared. I assumed that a camera had picked me up somewhere. Maybe he’d just shacked up with Strauch. I imagined the coupling, briefly, and smirked.
I mentally ran through all the known prisons and detention facilities west of home. I’d spent time as a guard in one, while undercover. This was not it. Their solitary cells were concrete, not metal. The other was a mental asylum that had been decommissioned in the late 2000s.
I had a feeling I’d missed the re-opening party. I had visited once, to eliminate a patient who knew too much, but the general layout eluded me. There were too many twists and turns for me to track where I was. All I remembered were a lot of downward stairs. I was far below the earth. Buried alive.
***
I heard footsteps through the door a while later. How long later? Not a clue. I had stopped even trying to count. Instead, I revisited some of my favourite kills. The darkness was a canvas, adorned and decorated with my conquests. My hands dripped with blood. My breaths were thick and my heart was beating rapidly.
In my eyes, I’d just finished slamming someone’s head against a stone floor. His name escapes me now, along with his crime. I think he had owed me something. Ancillary details get fuzzy after a while; the only facts that matter are those in the now, the thrash-twitch, the scuffle and the slamming and choking and squeezing and the oh-god-I’m-killing-him. The triumph, all-consuming. Thrash, twitch, triumph. His hand was planted on my face, desperately pushing me away, but I had a longer reach than he did. Each impact shook my body, until his head cracked and spilled its ruby prize all over the cobblestones.
The footsteps jerked me out of my personal Wonderland. They were dull, rubber soles on a hard floor. Combat boots? Fainter clicks and jingles revealed body armour. It was a guard. No, two guards.
They stopped outside my door. I had no restraints. I braced myself for action.
The vents hissed again, and I dropped to my knees. The world shuddered for the third time and I felt all resistance crumble. The door swung wide.
The light was excruciating. Either they had sealed the cells off expertly or they had only just switched them on. The bright halogen bulbs pulled a cry of pain from my throat. I lay against the bed, whimpering out of instinct, and felt myself being lifted from either side.
They frog-marched me down the corridor. We took a left turn, then a right turn, then another left turn before entering another room on the left. I breathed deeply through my nose out of nausea, and picked up on a familiar scent.
I was dropped into a chair, in front of a desk. There was a cold squeeze, and I felt cuffs clicking around my wrists. I flexed my fingers and tried to open my eyes.
The brightness still burned, but I could see if I closed my eyes to slits. A mirror was in front of me. I guessed that it was one-way glass. I fluttered my nostrils, trying to recycle the scent I’d picked up. I closed my eyes and spoke.
“Last time you wore that cologne, we danced.”
The door shut. I picked up the shifting of a guard in the corner. I flexed my fingers for a second time and tapped the table.
“We danced in the moonlight. You were so dashing. I was actually meant to kill you that night, but I decided to poison your hotel mini-bar instead. Of course, you didn’t drink… I sometimes wonder whether the next occupant did.”
I took a breath and knocked the table with my knuckles before standing. There was a movement to my right, but the guard didn’t stop me. I stood, hunched and chained, and resumed my soliloquy.
“Not that simple, is it? Last time I saw that specific brand in your house, the bottle was almost empty. That was almost a year ago. I’m fairly certain they don’t sell it in this city anymore. Yes, I may have looked for Christmas last year.”
That was a blatant lie. Good guess, though. The quality and availability of perfume and cologne had nosedived globally. People had more important things to drive supply.
“So, why would you go to whatever lengths to get this specific brand? I think you’re testing me. You’re trying to suss out how aware I am. I suppose that if I was really on the game, I’d act stupid and pretend to not remember anything. Smart girls can play piano, tennis and dumb, Vincent. Then again, maybe this is just another layer of the bluff. Your cute play wasn’t that useful, was it?”
I stopped tapping, opened my eyes and stared straight through the one-way glass, pointing my index fingers along my line of vision.
“Don’t think you can fuck with me, Vincent. I will fuck you right back.”
There was a pause, followed by a static click. Vincent’s voice came through speakers near the ceiling.
“I’m a little to the right.”
I clenched my fists and rolled my eyes.
“Fuck.”
“Just kidding. Screwing with you. Fact that you’re doing the same tells me all I need to know.”
I bit my lip. The static cut off and, a few seconds later, the door opened. Vincent walked in and sat down across from me.
“You’re looking healthy,” I remarked.
“You look like crap. Enjoyed the gasp?”
“Pardon?”
“The sedative. Fresh out the RailTech bakery. Messes with your inner ear, something about balance. Thoroughly unpleasant, I’m sure.”
I spread my arms as much as I could—about twenty centimetres.
“Try it. They’re giving out free samples in my room.”
The tiniest smile was struggling to break free from the corner of his lips. He eyeballed me for a few seconds before pushing a folder across the table. “We have a lot of questions, K.”
“Strange. I don’t have that many answers.”
The smile flourished into a wry grin. He tapped the folder. “Oh, you just might. Where is the boy?”
My brow furrowed. “Fuck you. What does that have to do with it?”
“Johnny Markham.”
“Oh. That boy. What time is it?”
“Is that relevant?”
“Maybe.”
I’d already caught a look at Vincent’s watch. It was 03h24. I wanted to see what he told me.
“Two in the morning. Give or take.”
“You know, it’s a little funny.”
“What is?”
“Well, I intended to reveal where the boy was after I’d killed Strauch. It was part of the deal, I’m sure you’ve been told. If you hadn’t intervened, you wouldn’t be asking me that question… It’s just a little funny.”
“Where is he?”
I spread my palms on the table. “No.”
“No?”
“I said no.”
Vincent held my stare. “So what you’re saying is—”
“I won’t tell you where the boy is.”
“Why?”
A shudder gripped my body. I leaned
forward and flashed my eyes.
“Because that is on you, Vincent. Because of you, the boy will die. Because you interfered. It’s all part of the lesson.”
His head tilted to the side and regarded me coolly. He wasn’t a neonate to my antics. “That’s not on me,” he said.
“Oh, it is. Next question.”
It wasn’t a request. It was an order. Vincent never liked it when I bossed him around. His eyes hardened up and his fingers began to curl angrily.
“We aren’t done with this one.”
“Two AM, you say? That’s twelve hours since he went missing.”
I leaned to the side and looked at the one-way glass.
“Yeah. Twelve hours since he went missing, from two in the afternoon, when I took him. Be sure to write that down. I’m not getting out of here based on legalities anyway.”
My attention shifted back to Vincent.
“That’s quite a while. You’d know the statistics better than I would. How long do most child abductees survive? Six hours? Eight? I know the recovery time at twenty-four is less than five percent. Tell me, how is Mrs Markham doing?”
Then, smirking, I corrected myself: “Ms Markham.”
“She’s holding things together.”
“You’re lying. Was it that bad? Did she cry, Vincent? Did she throw herself onto your shoulder and sob her eyes out? Tell me how she reacted. Paint me a word-picture with your mouth-organ.”
“Will you tell me where Johnny is?”
“No. We’ve discussed that, Vincent. Try to keep up.”
“She took the news with strength. No tears, no breakdown. Impressively resolute, actually.”
He waited for my reaction. I tapped my nose and maintained my smile.
“Liar. Now who’s screwing around?”
“That’s the story and I’m sticking to it.”
“Cute.”
“I’m asking nicely, K. You can stop this from escalating.”
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