by Glen Frost
Both Prisoner Zero and John Anderson staggered backward, slammed into the banks of medical equipment by the wall of sound and no doubt disoriented by the grenade's screech. The prison guards were taking no chances. A boot applied forcefully to the back of her knee sent the woman crashing to the ground, where two of the guards covered her with their weapons. They were a little less inclined to be rough with Anderson, who all of them knew and for the most part liked. None of his colleagues laid hands on him, but when his fast-blinking eyes finally started to work again, they found themselves looking down the barrel of an M16 assault rifle.
"Fuckin A!" Burton whooped, punching the air. "Now that’s what I'm talkin' about!"
Choosing to remain silent, Jeff Zahn settled for a grim smile instead. It had all been surprisingly smooth and painless. The inmate was already face down, with the knee of one guard placed firmly in her back while the other unclipped a pair of handcuffs from his belt. It wasn't long before Anderson was getting the same treatment, albeit by guards whose body language looked a bit more apologetic than that of those who were restraining Prisoner Zero.
"Get the doc back down there," Zahn instructed his second in command. "I want her ass put back into a coma before I'm done taking a piss. Then we can all breathe again and get this damned place out of lockdown." And that’s when the mountain of paperwork states, he sighed inwardly, but that was something he didn't really want to contemplate just yet.
"You got it, boss." Burton was reaching for the secure interfacility phone handset. His hand froze mid-reach. "What the hell is going on now?"
The guards had all stopped moving. The man who had been in the process of cuffing Prisoner Zero now straightened up, leaving the job only halfway done. He dropped the handcuffs as though they were red hot, reaching instead for his tactical shotgun. Prisoner Zero was speaking to him, though it was impossible to make out exactly what. Neither Zahn nor Burton could lip read.
"That's Dave Byers," Zahn said, reading the patch Velcroed onto the back of the officer's ballistic vest. "What the fuck is he doing?"
The question was answered just seconds later when the shotgun-wielding Byers turned and put a full load of buckshot into the face of the guard next to him, blasting his head apart and spraying two of his fellow guards with blood and brains.
"Fuck!" Burton screamed, his cocky jubilation suddenly morphing into shock. It was a sense of shock that was apparently shared by everybody else down there in the medical cell, because nobody reacted to the prison officer's murder.
Byers appreciated the window of opportunity. Pumping the slide, he shot a second guard in the side of the head, followed rapidly by a third, blowing their bodies backward against the bed. Three more bodies had now hit the floor, which was fast becoming a bloody tangle of limp arms and legs.
Two guards remained standing, each of them wielding an assault rifle. They both began to swing the barrels of their weapons up to face Byers, but it was too late for one of them; he took the last remaining blast from the shotgun in his upper chest. The ballistic plate stopped most of the pellets, but the uppermost cluster of metal balls tore into the guard's unprotected neck, shredding his carotid arteries and jugular veins and leaving his throat a hemorrhaging mess of ruined soft tissue. He went down hard, choking and drowning in his own blood.
The second man was more fortunate. Byers' shotgun was empty. His own assault rifle was set to fire three-round bursts. He pulled back on the trigger. His ears already ringing from the multiple consecutive shotgun blasts, Officer Dave Bridge couldn't hear the sound of his 5.56mm rounds exiting the gun's muzzle, but he could sure as shit feel the recoil pulling the barrel upward.
The first shot went between Byer's thighs, missing him completely and ricocheting from one of the walls, bouncing back to hit him in the right buttock, where it blew out a ragged bloody chunk of flesh and gluteal muscle.
"Fuck!" Byers thought, but the words wouldn't come out of his mouth. He had lost total control of his actions, even his own voice. Nevertheless, he went down on one knee, his legs going out from under him. The second round in the burst hit him with a thwack in his center of mass, flattening itself against the protective plate on his ballistic armor. He kept falling. The third round hit him in the face, switching out the lights forever.
Seeing so many of his co-workers dead, Dave Bridge ripped off his helmet and threw it at Prisoner Zero with a howl of rage. His bald head was glistening with sweat. She had gotten to her feet and was working her way around toward Anderson, who she now used as a human shield. The helmet struck him in the chest, causing him to grunt, but otherwise did no permanent damage.
John Anderson lunged for him, taking the nauseated guard by surprise. He landed a knockout punch on Bridge's jaw, both shattering and dislocating it at the same time. The bald guard staggered backward, hands coming up instinctively to protect himself from further assaults.
It was too late for that.
"Kill him," Prisoner Zero said.
Mindlessly obeying, the bigger man ripped the M16 from Dave's hands, reversed it, then used the stock to stove in Dave's head, bludgeoning his fellow guard's sweat-slicked dome in with the weapon's sturdy butt plate. With every brutal stroke, Anderson's brain screamed at him to stop, but it was useless; his body simply refused to do anything other than whatever the prisoner had last ordered him to.
Dave Bridge's skull was cracked open like a hard-boiled egg at the breakfast table, leaking bloody brain matter from a variety of cranial openings that he hadn't been born with. His feet twitched briefly and then lay still, his entire body going limp and slumping back against the wall, all fight — and life — gone from it.
"Good. Now drop the weapon." Prisoner Zero expected instant obedience, and she got it. It had been that way ever since the government had made her what she had now become, the reason they had drugged her and locked her ass up in this shithole...wherever here actually was. She'd find that out soon enough, but first things first.
She had a prison to take over.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Anya trained with Miko six days a week (she was given Sundays off for the sake of her sanity for the next couple of months. Much of their training was pure unarmed combat practice; she learned more techniques than she could count for defending herself from attack and for incapacitating an opponent in the most brutally efficient manner possible.
As valuable as that training was, the real heart of the matter was the mental and emotional component. Miko instructed her in the finer points of guided meditation, teaching Anya how to shut out the external world and disappear inside her own self for progressively longer periods of time.
What she had at first been tempted to dismiss as nothing more than hippy-dippy bullshit turned out to be surprisingly valuable for Anya; enjoyable, even. She soon grew to relish the time spent sitting cross-legged on the gymnasium floor, her focus turned inward, her mind as calm as the surface of a pond on a day without any breeze. She invariably felt much better after those sessions, as though she had somehow been emotionally cleansed. Although it was hard for her to explain, the more she meditated, the stronger and more powerful she felt.
That inevitably bled over into her combat sessions. When she had first begun training with Sensei Miko, Anya had been like a bull in a china shop, she admitted ruefully to herself. It had always been a case of see, smash, and destroy. But the sensei had taught her a better way, one which brought with it a real economy of effort that accorded with her new-found minimalist approach to life.
"Consider this," the old man had said to her after one particularly vigorous training session, "from a tactical standpoint, let us say that you are tasked with destroying an enemy encampment. One that houses one hundred men, all of them living in ten tents. Let us further assume that you have the unlimited resources of the United States military at your disposal."
"Okay," Anya said, not entirely sure where this was going.
"What is the best way to take out that encampment?"
/> She pondered the question for a moment. Commander Wilson had taught her a lot about the way America's armed forces currently did business, explaining that there was a better than even chance of her being asked to work with them when she cleared as an Agency field operative. They had gone over the various units and weapons in the arsenals of each branch of the military.
"It depends upon the desired outcome," she said at last.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that if prisoners are required for intelligence purposes, then a special forces dawn assault would be preferable. If not, then a precision air strike would be the method of choice."
"Assume further that no prisoners or intelligence are required."
"If collateral damage was not a consideration, then I would recommend the airstrike," Anya replied without hesitation. "This removes or at the very least greatly minimizes the risk to American lives."
"That it does," Miko agreed. "What type of munition would you select to fulfill the task?"
"Five hundred pound laser guided bombs, or possibly a number of Tomahawk cruise missiles."
"Why?"
"Because those particular weapons have a sufficiently destructive yield to wipe out a hundred men in tents."
"So would a thermonuclear weapon," the sensei point out, "would it not?"
She gave him a queer look. "Of course. But that would be...excessive."
"Again, I ask you why."
"I thought that would be obvious, Sensei."
"Nonetheless, please enlighten me."
Anya sighed. "Very well. Nuclear weapons are significantly more expensive. They render the detonation site uninhabitable for many thousands of years afterward. There are political ramifications to using such a destructive munition. Public opinion would be outraged..."
"And so on, and so on," Miko nodded, stopping her wth an upraised hand. "And here's the point: when you first came to me eight weeks ago, Anya, you were like that thermonuclear weapon: a concentrated bundle of devastation just waiting to go off when your trigger was pulled. Is that fair to say?"
"It is." The old Anya, the one who had killed her murderers and every human trafficker she could lay her hands on, would have found that hard to admit. Although less than six months had passed, those events seemed as if they had occurred a lifetime ago. Now she was calmer, wiser, with infinitely better self-control. She was able to admit her faults and to take ownership of them. After all, how else was one supposed to correct them?
"Now, you are different. You bear more resemblance to the smart weapon; in fact, to stretch an already tortured analogy even further, you now have the focus of a sniper, if you choose to use it. When The Agency chooses to deploy you into the field, Anya, you will arguably be the most flexible weapon in their entire arsenal. You might be ordered to infiltrate a terrorist organization in order to assassinate its leader; alternatively, you could be sent up against the drug cartels with instructions to wipe out hundreds of criminals and their overseers, dismantling their entire infrastructure in the process.
"Do you see the difference? One mission requires the precisely targeted skills of the sniper, whereas the other calls for the weapon of mass destruction. You are both, whenever you choose to be. You are also neither."
"Neither? I do not understand."
"We have worked together for countless hours now, honing your abilities to fight and to kill. Yet there is one more piece of this puzzle that you need to master before we send you out into the world."
"And that is?"
"Survival."
Anya's brow furrowed. "Survival? I thought that you had taught me more than enough to survive any situation I might find myself in."
The Sensei shook his head. Was it her imagination, or was that just a fleeting hint of sadness she saw ghosting across his face? If that was the case, it was gone almost as quickly as it had arrived. Miko's expression returned to its usual inscrutable self.
"I do not mean surviving combat, Anya. I speak now of surviving the aftermath. Most true warriors are not destroyed by the bullet, the bomb, or the blade; they are often unable to conquer their own worst enemy. Themselves."
"Again, Sensei, I do not understand," she was forced to admit.
"In a way, I am glad that you do not." He gestured for her to sit, joining him cross-legged on the crash mat. "I have known many warriors over the course of my lifetime, my dear — and I am far older than you would imagine. Many of those who were truly great men and women were brought low by their own inner demons."
"Inner demons?"
"Anger. Unchecked rage. Fear. Greed. Addiction. Those are the enemies that a warrior must fight every single day, the ones that she must be ever vigilant for. They can destroy a soul from the inside out.
"Some seek oblivion in the dubious comforts of drugs and alcohol; for others, the lure of sexual addiction or the acquisition of material goods."
"I refuse to believe that sex is a bad thing," Anya countered.
"Nor is it...unless taken to excess."
They sat in uncomfortable silence for a while, Sensei Miko giving Anya the opportunity needed to digest his words. Finally she asked, "How do I combat those enemies?"
Good, Miko thought to himself, secretly relieved. She asks the right question.
"You build a fortress," he said simply. "Deep inside yourself. It will be your rock. Your bastion. Not a physical fortress constructed of brick and mortar; This fortress is a sanctuary for the spirit, for the soul. It may be besieged by your demons, surrounded on all sides by anger, lust, fear...and yet only the fortress need never fall...not unless you surrender to those demons and choose to allow them inside."
"I think that I am beginning to understand," Anya said, tentatively accepting his words. "This fortress that you speak of...it is built from calmness and inner peace, am I right?"
"You are," Miko nodded. "Exactly right. It is built brick by brick, day by day, with every meditation that you experience and every moment of peace and introspection that you encounter. It is strengthened even further with every small battle that you survive. Every time a negative emotion flares within toy, only to be defeated by your superior self-control and emotional bearing. Build the fortress, Anya. That shall be your salvation when all else fails you."
"I understand, Sensei." She truly did. It all made complete sense to her now that he laid it out before her so clearly and plainly, striking a chord somewhere deep down within her. "I will begin work on my sanctuary fortress today."
"The foundations have already been laid," Miko smiled. "Now all that is required is for you to start building."
The gymnasium doors opened, admitting Commander Wilson. He was flanked by three soldiers, all of them fully armored in tactical gear and carrying assault rifles.
"Sorry to interrupt," the Navy SEAL said, "but it''s time. Anya, come with us please."
"Time?" Uncrossing her legs, she rose to her feet. "Time for what, Commander?"
He looked her right in the eye. "Time for your final graduation exercise: A playdate with six of the correctional system's finest. We're taking you to one of our warehouses here on-site. You might want to strip off your clothes first. I suspect that this one could get a little...bloody."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The shower felt wonderfully good to Anya, an opportunity to luxuriate underneath a stream of steaming hot water and blast the blood, crud, and effluvia of six dead men off her body.
When she had finally finished (she could tell by the fact that the water swirling around her feet was finally completely clear) Anya reluctantly shut off the flow and stepped out to towel herself off, before changing into a clean set of BDUs. Commander Wilson had told her that Director Hubbard would probably want to talk to her sometime before the end of the evening, so it would be best if she didn't dress down into civilian clothing just yet.
Speak of the devil. No sooner had she brushed out her hair and tied it back into a ponytail than there came at knock at the door. Opening it, she found the SEAL co
mmander standing there. The look upon his face puzzled her a little; rather than being congratulatory, something she felt was well-deserved after successfully passing her graduation exercise with final colors, he instead seemed a little more businesslike than she had expected.
"Is something wrong, Commander?"
"Not exactly. But our timetable is moving up a little faster than was anticipated."
"Our timetable, as in...?"
"As in, we have a situation in Utah. One that might require your specialist services. So congratulations, Field Agent Kurlyenko. You're about to get badged and deployed."
Anya raised an eyebrow as she considered the implications of his statement. She had thought there would have been some type of ceremony, however minor; perhaps a few words from Commander Wilson and the director, maybe even Professor Walsingham; true to his word, the academic had monitored her through every stage of her training, varying her blood allowance to see what effect it would have on her strength and performance, and conducting countless other experiments.
One particularly memorable afternoon (for all the wrong reasons) had tested Anya's sensitivity to pain. She had initially believed that nothing could cause her physical pain in her revenant body. It was a notion that Niall Walsingham had been all too quick to disabuse her of.
"Historically, revenants have been believed to be invincible," the academic had told her when she came to his office one Tuesday afternoon following her daily marksmanship training. "But that isn't entirely true, if one studies the literature carefully. Nor are they impervious to pain."
"I can be hurt?" Anya had been genuinely puzzled. Since rising from the grave, she had been shot, stabbed, and undergone no small amount of physical trauma while she was exacting her revenge on Piotr and the rest of the human traffickers. None of it had hurt, particularly; when the weapons had pierced her flesh and entered her body, she had felt nothing more than some minor irritation.