by Glen Frost
"Fear," she responded without hesitation.
"Wrong. Or at least, it is only partially correct. Before she can conquer the enemy, the warrior must first conquer herself; her basest traits must be rooted out and vanquished. Fear, while far from a virtue, can at least be a useful servant...if it is properly controlled."
"As you say, Sensei." She didn't really understand what the old man was talking about, but what was the point in questioning him? Wherever this was going, she may as well just keep her mouth shut, her eyes and ears open, and go with the flow.
"I can see that the first lesson will take more than words." Miko's eyes glimmered with amusement. He took a few steps back from Anya, stepping onto one of several blue crash mats that had been pushed together to form a padded surface. "Attack me."
In Anya's situation, most people would have said, "Huh?"
Anya wasn't most people.
Darting forward, she lashed out with a straight left, aiming squarely at the Sensei's face. Except that he was no longer there. Somehow the old man was behind her. She felt his foot connect with the back of her left knee. Her leg gave out, sending her crashing to the mat.
"Try harder."
Rising smoothly to her feet, Anya adopted a fighting stance, legs apart and feet firmly planted on the mat. Miko stood casually with arms folded, a look of wry amusement on his face; it was that smug expression more than anything else that was starting to piss her off.
"What are you waiting for? Christmas?"
Her expression darkening, Anya took a short run-up and launched herself into a flying kick that would have taken his head off...if it had connected. The sensei rolled effortlessly underneath her, pivoting on the mat and delivering a stinging slap across Anya's buttocks that was thunderclap-loud, echoing from the walls of the gym.
She was beginning to feel humiliated, and the sudden spanking really hadn't helped matters. Spinning around on the balls of her feet, Anya bared her teeth and charged at the old man, fists flailing and windmilling in front of her. It made no difference; Miko circled around to her left, easily keeping himself out of range and allowing Anya to chase him round in a complete three-sixty. With any living, breathing opponent the end-game would have been obvious: tire them out and wear them down, then move in for the takedown.
But Anya wasn’t an ordinary opponent, and the old martial artist had to know that. So what the hell was his game? Anya couldn't figure it out, and that was bugging her more than a little. Still, she reasoned, she was both faster and stronger than he was, and with practically limitless reserves of energy, it was inevitable that she would win sooner or later.
They continued to circle around one another, Anya occasionally darting in to strike. Sometimes the move was a feint, at others a genuine attack, but it made no real difference either way. The Sensei was simply too slippery. Wherever she was, he simply...wasn't.
Fuck this noise.
Her exasperation growing, Anya's attacks became increasingly wilder and more reckless with every passing minute. She was fast reaching the end of her patience with this irritating little old man.
Which was exactly when he chose to strike.
Suddenly he was in her personal space, confronting her head on. Sensing her imminent victory now that the little shit had chosen to stand and fight, Anya grinned wolfishly and launched a flurry of punches, letting fly with all of her pent-up rage.
Not a single one of them landed.
Miko batted the strikes aside, blocking with his forearms and fists, more often redirecting the energy of her blows rather than absorbing it. He worked Anya's arms out wider on either side of her body, then stepped in even closer and head-butted her on the nose. Fortunately for Anya, her nose had been smashed flat on the night she had died; the current appendage, along with the rest of her face, was nothing more than a psychic projection.
She didn't feel pain as the living felt it, but could still find herself stunned on occasion. The sheer force of the blow knocked her flat on her ass. Miko came down on top of her in a scissor squat, crushing her neck in between his knees.
We’ll just see about that...
Readying herself to break the lock, Anya tensed every muscle fiber in her body — and heaved.
Nothing happened.
This was impossible! She had taken her usual dose of fresh blood this morning; she should be able to bench press a pickup truck! Yet the diminutive, grey-haired martial artist was holding her down as though she were nothing more than a petulant child.
Her anger flared once more. Anya struck out blindly with both fists, trying to break the deadlock. Was that a hint of panic she felt, lurking somewhere behind all that humiliation and rage? Miko grabbed her wrists. His grip was insanely strong, and no matter how much she flexed her muscles, Anya was unable to free her hands.
She was defeated.
"Had enough?"
The question must have been a rhetorical one, because the Sensei rose smoothly to his feet and offered her a hand up. He was still smiling, which she found nothing less than infuriating. Anya ignored his gesture, standing up without accepting the proffered help. Had living blood still flowed through her veins, she felt sure that her face would have been deeply flushed, so deep was her frustration and anger.
"Master yourself," the sensei said, his voice calm and even, "or you will never master an opponent."
A bitter retort sprang instinctively to Anya's lips, but she bit it back before she could give it voice. She knew that the old man was right. She had gotten angry, and that in turn had gotten her ass kicked.
Maybe Miko could teach her something after all.
The sensei watched the light of control return to Anya's eyes, slowly replacing the inferno of rage that had burned there during their fight. He nodded almost imperceptibly.
"Good. So you do have some self-discipline. That's a good start." He clapped her on the arm. "Forgive me for humiliating you, Anya; I took no pleasure in it. But a point had to be made.
"What point?"
"Why don't you tell me?" He regarded her with hooded eyes.
She paused for a moment to reflect. Finally she said, "The angrier I got, the worse I fought."
A broad grin broke out on Miko's face. "Good! Why was that?"
"I lost control."
"You surrendered control," he corrected, wagging an index finger for emphasis. "That may seem like a small difference, but it is absolutely crucial to understanding the warrior mentality."
"I'm not sure that I understand."
"I, on the other hand, am sure that you don't understand." Miko's smile lessened the sting of his words. "Consider this: The mind can only serve one master at any given moment. The master can sometimes be peace, tranquility, and rationality; at others, it can be anger and rage. Both are pure states. The first makes for a fine master; the second must be harnessed as a servant. There is simply no other way."
Anya ruminated on that for a moment. Finally she met his eyes once more and said, "There's more to you than first meets the eye, Sensei. How the hell did you manage to keep me pinned down? I should be able to tear a man your size in half."
"You have your secrets, and I have mine," Miko replied airily.
Once again he is dancing around, dodging and evading, Anya thought to herself.
"One day, I may share a little more about myself," he went on, "but that, as with anything else of real value in this life, has to be earned rather than given."
She bowed to him once more. It seemed the correct thing to do, a mark of respect from student to teacher.
"Very good," he nodded his approval. "Now, are you ready to take the next step on the warrior's path?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When the massacre that had taken place in Prisoner Zero's cell was discovered, thanks to a timely alert and follow-up phone call from Doc Felix, the prison's night shift supervisor (known informally as the night warden) wasted no time whatsoever in addressing the situation.
Jeff Zahn was a career correctio
ns officer. During his thirty-four years of service, he had climbed slowly but surely up the promotional ladder, starting at the very bottom as a prison guard and rising through the ranks to become the second in command of Utah's state of the art Supermax.
Zahn was five feet eight inches tall, weighing in at a lean and spare one hundred and sixty pounds; not bad for a man on the wrong side of sixty, he knew, which was partly due to his obsession with mixed martial arts. There was hardly an ounce of fat on his frame. The former marine still kept his blond hair shaved high and tight in a buzz cut, even though it had been over thirty-five years since he had left the Corps and found his second vocation as a corrections officer.
He had been trained for situations just like this; the service loved its policies and procedures, and had outlined in exacting detail the steps to be taken in the event of the on-duty death of a correctional officer.
Step one: Lockdown.
"I want all our people up and off their asses, stat. Make sure that every last one of these fuckers is accounted for. Then get me a staff head count."
Locking the prison down was a hell of a lot easier in a Supermax than in your everyday garden variety jail facility, as more than ninety percent of the inmates were kept under lock and key in their own cells at any given moment. Making sure that those prisoners were still exactly where they should have been, while also bringing in the few who were out on their one-in-twenty-three exercise rotation, took no time at all.
"All prisoners and staff are accounted for, sir, apart from the four that the doc told us about." Zahn's second in command, Steve Burton, was listening to the chatter on his Motorola portable radio with one ear, but still managed to keep feeding his boss with a constant stream of updates. "Every officer is mobilized. We're on full lockdown, as of now."
"Good. Nobody gets in or out." Zahn took a moment to breathe. The night watch usually didn't involve much in the way of actual work. He got a lot of administrative shit done, but this was the first time he'd had to deal with anything that even remotely resembled an emergency.
The main control room/operations center for the Supermax was centrally located. Roughly forty feet by seventy feet on a side, the room was dimly lit by the glow of bank upon bank of monitor screens that showed the feeds from scores of cameras in real time. Jeff sometimes felt like a spider sitting in the center of a massive web when he was in here, watching over the lives of his people and also all of his charges too. All it took was the click of a button to allow him to look inside any of the facility's cells or rooms, even the restrooms; there were no privacy protections inside a maximum security prison. The only time his own guards were guaranteed to be off-camera was when they were taking a shit inside one of the cubicles of their own communal toilet. Otherwise, whatever you were doing was fair game at all times, and if the night warden wanted to know what you were up to, there was no real way of concealing it.
By default, the screens displayed the output of cameras in corridors and communal areas. The operations center staff — six guards, plus Zahn and Burton at night — generally didn't worry too much about what was going on in an individual cell unless an inmate was placed on suicide watch, in which case he or she would receive a little more scrutiny.
Prisoner Zero was a special case. When they had first shipped her in, way the hell back in January, the mystery woman had caused more than her fair share of gossip among the guard staff. An unidentified federal agency had brought her in — nobody was sure exactly which one, but the orders had come down all the way from the top of the tree — and had spent the best part of a day converting one of the cells into something that looked more like an emergency department room than a prison cell.
No matter how hard Zahn had tried to get answers, his enquiries were either stonewalled or rebuffed entirely. Whoever this woman was, his superiors weren't talking; they simply made it very clear that she was to be kept on ice inside his facility, sedated several times a day by the prison doctors, and under no circumstances was she to be messed with in any way, shape, or form...otherwise his career, and that of his colleagues, was going to find itself drastically curtailed.
The guards all made a point of swinging by to check in on her for the first few weeks. They did that with every celebrity prison, like the Al Qaeda fuck who had been incarcerated last Christmas, but the difference was that rather than being famous, Prisoner Zero was a complete enigma. Nobody had seen her on the news, she wasn't some high-profile serial killer or urban terrorist...she was just an ordinary, everyday white chick who happened to be in a medically-induced coma.
After a month had gone by, the staff pretty much forgot all about her. The docs continued to keep her under with a regular supply of sedatives. She never caused even the slightest amount of trouble. The novelty soon wore off, and life at the Supermax went back to normal.
Until tonight.
The silent alarms had come first, followed almost immediately by a panicked phone call from Doc Felix, whose voice had sounded genuinely frightened from the other end of the line. After calming him down and suggesting that he might want to prescribe himself some of the infirmary's supply of valium, Jeff had listened with increasing disbelief while the man's story had unspooled, starting out with one of his guards fucking the comatose woman in her hospital bed and concluding with the rapist and three more of them ending up dead.
It had all sounded pretty far-fetched to him, but all that it had taken to confirm the babbling doctor's wild-ass story was for him to bring up the monitor feeds from Prisoner Zero's cell. Sure as shit, there they were; the bodies of four men lay scattered around the small room, which was starting to look more like an abattoir than a medical cell.
Zahn squinted at the monitor screen, taking in every little detail. Prisoner Zero was wide awake now. She seemed to be talking to the last man standing; he recognized the unmistakable form of John Anderson. Why the hell was he just standing there, Zahn wanted to know? He clenched his teeth without realizing it. The man ought to have drawn his sidearm and dropped the woman by now, if she really was responsible for all this. He could buy her having overpowered the rapist, but just how the hell had she gotten the drop on four armed guards like that? It didn't make a damn lick of sense.
Well, common sense could wait. He had a situation to defuse. If he was lucky, he might just be able to salvage something of his career...if he could snuff this thing out before it flared up any further.
"Assemble a response team. Now." Protocol dictated that once the facility was locked down, a number of the available guards were to be pooled and formed into something a lot like a SWAT team. "Get the boys suited and booted. I want their asses in there inside of five minutes flat."
Nodding his understanding, Burton turned away and keyed up his radio mic, speaking into it in a low voice.
Zahn realized that he had broken a sweat, something that rarely happened outside of a workout these days. Four men dead...a sexual assault upon the most vulnerable of prisoners...his mind whirled, considering the possibilities. No matter the angle from which he viewed the situation, the outcomes were all bad for his career.
He must have fallen into a deeply contemplative state, because the next thing Jeff Zahn knew, his right hand man was tapping him on the shoulder gently. "I said that the response team is ready to go, sir. They're en route to Prisoner Zero's cell now."
Snap out of it, Jeff. Take care of business. Worrying isn’t going to help one bit.
His gaze went back to the monitor screen. Prisoner Zero and what he was beginning to think of as the traitorous John Anderson still appeared to be deep in conversation, giving no apparent care to the fact that they were surrounded on all sides by dead bodies. Zahn narrowed his eyes. They'd care about it soon enough.
On a different screen, one which was displaying the corridor outside her cell, the two men watched in silence as six guards wearing full tactical gear appeared from the far end of the hallway; ballistic helmets, pants, and Kevlar vests were the new order of business, and each
was armed with either a combat shotgun or an assault rifle, with a pistol belted at the hip for backup. Not that they'd need it, Jeff mused. There was enough firepower between the six of them to take down a platoon.
The response team stacked up behind one another in single file. Peering out from behind a set of protective goggles, their leader watched the cell door for a moment, as though daring it to open. When it plainly didn't, he allowed the assault rifle to fall from his grasp, dangling on its sling from one shoulder, while he removed a cylindrical device from the thigh pocket of his BDUs.
"Flashbang," Burton said under his breath. Zahn shot him a look of annoyance. He knew what the damned thing was: The flashbang was a type of non-lethal stun grenade, designed to throw off a shockingly loud noise and enough light to temporarily blind anybody foolish enough to have their eyes open when it went off.
"It's a good call. Prisoner Zero will be cowering on her knees when that thing goes off. Hopefully the boys can get her restrained without having to put a bullet in her." The senior man knew that a non-lethal outcome was the one thing that might still save his career at this point. He wasn't a praying man by any means, but if he had been, he would have been in full swing talking to the big man upstairs right now.
The second man covered the leader with his tactical shotgun, waiting patiently while he unlocked the exterior door. After a countdown from three to zero on his fingers, the leader opened up the inner door with his thumbprint. Zahn and Burton watched with bated breath as the automatic door slid open on its rail. As soon as there was a gap wide enough to accommodate it, the response team leader primed the flashbang and pitched it into the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Although neither of the senior officers could hear the thunderous roar, they could see the cameras that covered Prisoner Zero's cell white themselves out for just an instant. The heavily-armed corrections officers, stacked up in a line out in the hallway, had braced themselves for it, each with one hand resting on the should of the man if front. Now, in the aftermath of the detonation, they stormed the medical cell, weapons raised and sweeping in arcs back and forth in front of them.