by CW Lynch
Murder, pain, blood, death. Those were the very best stories, and Adam and Cane King's story would be sure to have all of these in abundance. It was a story surely worthy of The Ink.
THE COURT OF THE KING
"Wake up!"
Water hit Owen White's face, pulling him back up from the cold darkness of unconsciousness. He cursed his luck that he wasn't dead. Opening his one eye, swollen already from the pistol whipping he had received from Taylor, Owen White saw the smiling face of Cane King.
Owen tried to move, and found he was tied to a chair. His ankles were bound to the legs of the chair with what felt like rope, his arms were behind him and still cuffed. There was a window behind King and from the light playing across it White guessed that it looked down into the courtyard where he and Nutt had detonated their car bomb earlier.
"Hello Detective," oozed King. "I understand you wanted to see me?"
White tried to smile back, feeling in his mouth a mess of blood and broken or missing teeth. Taylor had worked him over a bit, that was clear. He was glad to have missed it.
"I'm here to arrest you, Mr. King, in connection with the murder of several police officers. For starters."
Cane King laughed, a genuine, from-the-gut laugh.
"Incredible," he chuckled as the laughter died down. "Detective, you have got some almighty balls, I'll give you that. Don't you think you should be begging for your life right now?"
Owen turned his head, tried to focus and see who else was in the room. Everything he knew about King, Taylor, and scum bags in general was telling him that he was dead. Maybe not in the next hour, or two, but very, very soon. The only variable was the amount of pain they would inflict in the meantime, and even that was a scale that started at "lots". The one thing he might still be able to achieve was to turn Taylor and King against each other. Having seen what Taylor could do, Owen didn't want an animal like that loose on the streets. All White had to do was convince King that Taylor was looking to overthrow him and he could be assured that Taylor would be getting a body bag right next to his own.
Owen smiled when he saw Taylor, just to the left of the window, playing that damned stiletto of his. He'd had time to bandage up his side, but there was still blood seeping through onto his shirt and jacket.
Like hell that's a flesh wound, thought White. Well done Rogers, you tagged him good after all.
"I'm not begging you for anything, King," grunted White.
Cane King's fist hit Owen White hard in the stomach and everything inside him moved around like pieces in a jigsaw box. His ribs felt jumbled and loose, stabbing his insides in places and pushing up against his skin in others. He coughed up another mouthful of blood and realised that he was probably bleeding internally.
"Like I said, I'm not begging for shit," said White, spitting a glob of blood onto the floor.
Cane paced the room, rubbing his knuckles into the palm of his other hand. Taking a deep breath he took a run up of a few steps and punched White hard in the stomach again. White wheezed as the air rushed out of him. Before he could catch his breath, Cane hit him again, and again.
"You want… to kill me? You hit like a little girl." croaked White "Your boy Taylor over there could do… a better job. Guess that's why he wants to run… the show."
King glanced at Taylor. White saw it, and knew instantly that his suspicions were correct. King was afraid of Taylor. Not a lot, not enough to ignore how useful the psychopath could be to him, but enough to believe White's accusation. White suspected that the spot at King's right hand had once belonged to Mick Garrity until King had realised that Taylor had none of Garrity's limitations. It had been Taylor who had killed and gutted Lee Grice, White was sure of it, and even Cane King had to be afraid of a man who could do that.
"Is that the best you can do?" asked King. "Try to turn us against each other? You're not in one of your interrogations now, Detective. You want to play good-cop bad-cop with me? It would help if all the other cops weren't fucking dead!"
"Suit yourself," replied White. "Just remember it was me who told you to watch your back when there's a knife in it."
King's fist again, this time landing in the side of White's jaw, loosening teeth and sending a mouthful of blood across the room.
"Let me tell you what's going to happen, OK?" he shouted. "When you go back to them, you go back broken - do you hear me? You go back limping and beaten and pissing your pants every time someone slams a door near you. You're going to be so fucking terrified that you're going to sleep with the lights on from now until the day you die. And everyone will know, EVERYONE WILL KNOW, that I did it to you. And the best bit? Not one of them will do a god-damned thing about it."
King punched White again, straight into his shattered eye socket. White screamed despite himself, the pain almost unbearable. His chair toppled backwards, leaving him on his back like a stranded turtle. King's boot slammed into his side, again and again, turning White's ribs into broken glass inside him. White tried to turn, to position one of his arms to block some of the kicks, but he was tied too tight. All he could do was soak up the punishment and hope the shadows around the corners of his vision soon drowned him in sweet unconsciousness.
King stopped for a second to catch his breath.
"Nice… speech…" White wheezed.
King squatted down over him, his face so close that White could feel droplets of sweat dropping off King down onto him.
"Keep it up," King growled. "Because I can. When I'm done with you tonight I've got a doctor who's going to patch you up. I'll come back tomorrow and start again. I'll break you, it's just a matter of time. All this talk of a vigilante, some kind of fucking ghost? It was all bullshit, wasn't it? Just a fucking cop in a Halloween mask."
Owen White's one good eye was full of blood, he blinked to try and bring Cane King's face into focus. If Magpye wasn't already dead, the best and only thing that White could do for him was keep his existence a secret. If King thought that White was the vigilante then that gave White the edge, even if it was an edge he was going to pay for in broken bones. White blinked again. He wanted to look King right in the eye when he delivered that little "fuck you", but there was something moving, something he couldn't focus on.
"What are you looking at?" asked King.
White's eye finally focussed and he couldn't stop himself from grinning. On Cane King's cheek was the tiny red dot of a laser sight.
"A dead fuck, that's what I'm looking at."
The window behind King exploded and White was blinded by a splatter of hot blood.
Yossarian Nutt. Sniper and all-round bad cop.
CORRIDORS OF THE DEAD
Adam King strode through the mill. Bodies lined the corridors, the remnants of the crossfire between the cops and the Kingsmen. Bodies, not corpses, as King counted more than one breathing his last as he passed. So much death, the reaper couldn't get to them all at once. Adam listened to their ragged breaths, watched the light flicker in their eyes like dying candles in the dark.
He felt no pity for them, showed them no mercy. He sensed their ghosts shake loose from their dead flesh and pass him, racing headlong into the night to scream and scream and scream. It seemed like all the dead cried out for vengeance on someone.
Adam let them go. His head was already full. Able and the circus ghosts bubbled at the fringes of his mind, their memories washing against his own like tidal foam. He focussed his mind on keeping them out. Their time would come. He'd seen what Able could do with their skills and talents combined, when he became the thing that he called "Magpye". The creature was lurking, a shadow beneath the surface of the water, it's full and terrible power concealed for now. It was as cunning as it was primal, but Adam was determined to bridle the beast. Able let the creature take control; Adam would be its master.
After all, he was a King.
Locked out of his body, Able watched through Adam's eyes as he walked through the charnel house the mill had become. There was so much blood, so many g
hosts. Able had never been in the presence of spirits that were so fresh. The presence of every one of them felt like an open wound on the surface of the world through which a howling maelstrom could be heard, threatening to pull Able through into whatever lay beyond. So much blood, so much screaming. All of Able's ghosts came into his mind full formed, but these new things were raw and skinless, peeled by their sudden and agonising deaths. Ghosts, like men, were born into the world bloody and howling.
"Adam King was your first ghost, don't you remember?"
Dorothy's voice. Able felt relieved to hear from his old friend again.
"No," answered Able. "I honestly never thought about it. I barely remember anything from before… you know. Most of the time I feel like I woke up with you all already in my head one morning, and we've been doing this ever since."
"No, it was nothing like that," replied Dorothy. "Try to remember. Try to remember who he is."
"Why does it matter?" asked Able. "He's in control now. I'm not like you, Dorothy, or the others. I can't do anything. I'm useless. It's just dumb luck that we all ended up in my body. I don't even get to drive most of the time. Adam's going to keep me out forever and I'm going to fade away to nothing. I can feel it. I've no memories to hold onto, nothing to stop my just… sinking away. The Kings win after all."
"You've got all the memories you need," replied Dorothy calmly. Able felt a pressure, something pushing down on him in the strange incorporeal space he occupied. Impossibly, he felt cold and wet, felt his dead heart pounding in a chest he didn't have.
"What is this?" he asked, his ghost voice shrill and panicked.
"Try to relax," said Dorothy. "It's just a memory. It's one of yours. We need you to see it, because we want you to understand."
"Understand what?" asked Able.
"How we're going to beat Adam King."
***
Able blinked, and suddenly was somewhere else. He was outside, it was night and it was raining. It was raining and he was running, running hard. Running from something, but he had no idea from what.
All he knew was that he was running. Running for his life.
Gravestones rose up in front of him, forcing him to cut left and right, costing him valuable seconds. The smaller ones he leapt over, the hot breath of the thing behind him lending desperate strength to his limbs.
His every breath was pain, his lungs a furnace in his chest, but he ran on.
The gravestones became tighter packed, and larger, slowly giving way to monuments and mausoleums. The graveyard seemed to go on forever, but in the distance Able could see lights. Bright, glaring, lights that turned the muddy brown and dirty greys of a rain-washed graveyard into stark black and white. Silhouetted against the white light he could see people and he instinctively adjusted his headlong trajectory to run towards them.
People. He would be safe with people, wouldn't he?
Either that, or he'd get them all killed.
He found himself hurtling headlong into the pool of harsh white light, and realised it was too late to change his mind.
"What the hell?"
The shapes turned towards him, their faces moving into focus as his milk-white eyes, tuned for darkness, grew accustomed to the light.
"Holy shit, turn that camera around, we've found him!"
"No way, he's fucking *real*."
Able skidded to a halt, falling backwards as the unblinking glass eyes of television cameras were shoved into his face. On his back, he scrambled desperately to get away, to escape back to the shadows, but the lights were turned to focus on him and there was no escape from their incandescent stare.
"Look at his eyes! Is he blind?"
"Running around out here at night, I don't think so! He must be some kind of albino or something."
"Hey Marv, get over here! Someone, get Marv' over here. We've got to get this on film. We've caught the freaking Ghoul!"
Pushing his way through the crowd of silhouettes, a figure bulkier than the others. A shape that somehow Able recognised.
"No, get away, get back all of you," Able spluttered. "He's right behind me, he'll kill you all!"
"What the hell? Is there someone else out there?"
The larger shape pushed through and spoke in a voice more commanding, somehow more *real*, than all the others.
"Turn those damn lights down and put the camera away. There's no such thing as the Ghoul and whoever this is you're scaring the hell out of him!"
Strong hands under Able's arms, lifting him up.
"It's all right son, I've got you."
The lights, one by one, turned their shining eyes elsewhere. The lidless orbs of the camera lens dipped, almost ashamedly, to the floor.
"Can you tell me your name, son? Do you know where you are?"
The memory flooded over Able. This was the first time he had said his own name out loud, the first time he had even *known* it since… before. Before was the other dream, the slaughter in the circus, the death of his mother and his friends and everything he knew. This memory, instead, was a start. This was a birth.
The ghost of Able Quirk held its phantom's breath and waited for the memory to speak.
"My name…" said a voice, weak from not being used, "My name is Able Quirk."
"Able… Quirk?"
The supportive hands vanished from underneath Able, sending him down to one knee. The shadowy figure took a step back into the edge of a pool of light.
"Son, do you know who I am?"
Able looked up, his eyes blinking once more as he looked from the darkness into light.
Standing in front of him, larger than life itself, was Marv the Magnificent.
NUTT
Taylor had leapt into the bullet's path just in time.
Searing hot, it had passed through his shoulder, glancing off bone and exiting before slicing off the top of Cane King's ear. They fell together, Taylor and King, landing on top of Owen White. Taylor gritted his teeth and buried the pain. He'd been shot twice tonight, it wasn't going to happen a third time.
Calmly, he rolled off Cane King and crawled on his belly across to the window. He felt the wound on his side open up and was forced to bury more pain.
"Sniper," he said, his voice retaining its strange monotone quality despite the circumstances. "Firing from the other side of the building, I think."
Cane had crawled towards the door, finding refuge behind an old desk. He was clutching his split ear, blood running down the side of his face and between his fingers.
"I thought you'd got them all?" he growled. "Who the fuck is this now?"
"Nutt," replied Taylor. "Ex-Tactical turned detective. Garrity said he was a wreck after what we did to his partner."
"Garrity's wreck just shot my fucking ear off!"
Taylor tore a length of material from his shirt and used it to tie a tourniquet around his shoulder. "I can see that, Mr. King," was his only reply.
From the other side of the mill, Nutt had watched Taylor flash across his scope a split second after he'd pulled the trigger. He knew he shouldn't have used the laser sight, but he'd wanted to give White a chance to get out of the line of fire. Another mistake, like the mistake that had gotten Grice killed. Another mistake, like pulling back and letting White take charge of this operation, which was a mistake which had gotten them all killed.
Taylor was impossibly fast though. Faster than a bullet. Nutt filed the information away, just in case. Little pieces of information like that could save your life.
"Fuck," grunted Nutt, assessing the situation as simply as he could.
His first day training with firearms, his instructor had told the class that there was only one fundamental truth to working tactical operations - sometimes they went wrong. Bad. South. Screwed. Fucked up. He said the mark of a good tactical officer was how he dealt with that when it happened. The mark of a great tactical officer was that he also walked away from it.
This operation? It had gone as far South as anything Nutt had ever known
, and that could mean only one thing. It was time for the other thing that his instructor had told him, about what to do when things went so bad that you knew you weren't walking away.
"Take as many of them with you as you can, buy the next guy a chance."
Ditching his rifle, Nutt pulled a sub-machine gun and a pistol out of his canvas hold-all. Based on this sweep of the building, it was just down to him, Taylor, King, and whatever was left of Owen White. This was going to get close, bloody, and personal. At least, that was the plan.
***
Owen White lay on his back, a mass of broken pieces held together only by pain and their past association to each other.
He didn't want King to be right, but there was a tiny part of him that wanted to stop fighting now, and it was starting to convince the rest of him that it was right. He'd never be a cop again, not after tonight. One eye, a busted leg, a dead squad and a pile of bodies he'd need to account for. If he was lucky he'd die here tonight and not in some hell-hole prison where being an ex-cop was like having a target on your back for the rest of your life. He listened to King and Taylor discuss his fate, unsure of what to hope for.
"You want me to kill him, Mr. King?"
"No," replied King. "He's finished, he's more use to us alive. A message for any other hero cops thinking about breezing into town. Go and take care of this Nutt, I'm going to find Grace and get out of here."
"You want me to call Garrity?" asked Taylor, "We're going to have some clean-up to do."
"No, not Garrity," replied King, venom in his voice. "Garrity's intel nearly got us all killed tonight, and I'm down God knows how many men thanks to these cop-fucks. No, I'll speak to Mr. Garrity alone and at length some time in the near future. Just make sure Detective White here finds his way to a very public station house, and then give Paddy Keane a call. He's a dab hand with a box of matches and the insurance on this place can pay for some new shoes that don't stink of pig."