They needed to get out.
They needed to get out now.
They needed to get out right now.
Jen put one of her hands on the doorknob. Then, thinking for a second before pulling it open, she popped the karambit knife from its hiding place against the small of her back and tossed it to her sister. There was no back and forth about who should have the knife.
“One . . . two . . .” Jen said, as Bobby-Leigh flicked the blade open and gritted her teeth in a determined snarl.
“Three!”
Jen whipped the door open.
* * *
Beverly didn’t have any idea why Dan had just shot Brennachecke with an arrow. She’d thought they were on the same team. And even if they weren’t, she couldn’t imagine a scenario where the goody-goody old man could have done something to deserve wrath like that from a normal person.
Bam-bam-bam.
The sound of gunshots vibrated through the air as the guards opened fire with their automatic weapons. Beverly took a stray bullet in the calf and fell to her knees. She felt no pain. In fact, she didn’t realize she’d been hit until she looked down and saw the blood oozing out of the wound.
“What the fuck are you shooting at!” she screamed as she watched Brennachecke, with the end of Dan’s arrow sticking out of his back, turn and launch himself like a linebacker into the guard closest to him, bringing the surprised man to the ground. The old soldier came up with the man’s AR-15 and the man himself didn’t come up at all.
Dan stepped forward and nocked another arrow. Brennachecke shot him in the gut just as the missile was released. The arrow zipped past Brennachecke’s head, taking a chunk of his ear with it.
The old soldier didn’t even flinch. Beverly really wished she knew what the beef was between her ex and the old man, but being clueless didn’t stop her from enjoying the face-off between the two. She looked at the MIC to see if he was enjoying this as much as she was, but the man was all glassy eyed and pale with fear. What a disappointing sorry sack of shit, she thought, as one of the three remaining guards turned his weapon on the fallen archer. Fractions of a second before the guard put bullets in the man who’d almost killed Brennachecke with his fucking arrows, the old soldier inexplicitly shot the pirate in the head and saved Dan’s life.
What the fuck? Beverly thought, but her attention was suddenly taken by the sound of the Man-in-Charge’s screaming. For a second all eyes turned to the MIC as he ripped the IV line out of his arm and fled the room like a scared little girl.
What the fuck?! Beverly thought for the second time, as bullets started to fly from the two remaining guards.
Bam-bam-bam. Bam.
Bam. Bam. Bam-bam-bam.
She dropped all the way down to the floor as the projectiles smashed into the walls all around her, but missed Brennachecke completely.
“What the fuck are you idiots shooting at!” she repeated. But before either of her men could answer, Brennachecke cut them down. For a second, Beverly thought he was going to murder her too, but he didn’t.
“Take me to the Kessler girls,” the old soldier with the arrow through his chest said to the Blood Queen.
Beverly smiled, but before she could respond, Dan pierced her heart with an arrow. Brennachecke turned, mechanically raised his gun on Dan, and fired a slug into the man’s chest.
“Fucking . . . hypocrite . . .” were the last words Dan ever spoke. Brennachecke was sorry about that, but his grief and pity was quickly compartmentalized. Dan was a loss, but the mission continued. One glance at Beverly was all he needed to know she was dead and he’d have to find the girls himself. Wincing as he moved, really feeling the arrow in him now that the adrenaline of the gunfight was subsiding, he opened the bullet-riddled library doors and headed into the hall.
The Man-in-Charge—recovered from his cowardly instincts, armed with a combat shotgun, and backed up by a dozen men—was waiting for him. Nobody spoke. There were no demands that Brennachecke put his weapon down. There were no questions about whether or not Beverly lived.
The MIC smiled a gleeful smile.
There was no deal to be made anymore. Brennachecke would teach them to fly or he would die where he stood. Neither one of them had to say this out loud. The only real question was what would happen once he’d trained enough of the pirates as pilots.
But it really wasn’t a question, was it? The old soldier laughed to himself. He was dead either way in the end, so there was no way he was going to teach these degenerates how to fly. This too went totally understood between him and the MIC without either one of them speaking a word.
The old soldier slowly brought his weapon to bear on the Man-in-Charge and mentally prepared himself for death.
“Brennachecke?” the MIC asked, stunned the man would choose death at this point in the game.
* * *
The Kessler girls opened the door to their room expecting to be confronted immediately by armed men, but instead found just over a dozen of them standing with their backs to them, completely preoccupied by whatever was happening down the hall.
Bam!
The single gunshot after such a pregnant silence made everybody, the sisters included, jump. Then suddenly somebody stumbled out of the library and into the hallway. The dozen or so men with their backs to the girls raised their weapons as though they were all arms of the same organism, but nobody fired.
The moment stretched out. The girls were not sure what to do. If nobody turned around, they could get to the emergency stairs at the end of the hall and get out without anybody being the wiser, but that was a big if. Still, it was a better option than just turning back to their room and trapping themselves inside. So, as the silent standoff went on behind them, they softly slinked down the hall one secretive step after another. Jen had her hand on the stairwell door when suddenly one of the men spoke. His words fell out of his mouth the way a man would say the name of a dog he knew was about to snatch food from the table, right in front of his eyes.
“Brennachecke?”
Fuck. Jen turned and looked back. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Bobby-Leigh read her sister’s mind—well, not really, not in any kind of mystical sense, but in the way all sisters who are close do—and swallowed, unable to believe that Jen was even thinking about doing what she was thinking about doing.
“No fucking way,” she whispered. “Let him die.”
“I can’t,” Jen whispered back.
“You have to,” Bobby-Leigh pleaded. “There’s nothing you can do.”
Jen smiled.
“No,” Bobby-Leigh said, the blood draining from her face as she realized what her big sister was about to do.
“Wait in the stairwell for it to be over.”
“Jen!” Bobby-Leigh hissed, but it was too late. Her older sister was already turning away and running down the hall toward the small army of men who were seconds away from killing the man who had every intention of murdering her. In her head, Jen grabbed the mental image of the lens and switched off the autofocus control she had thus far so successfully used to keep the berserker inside subdued.
A heartbeat later the monster awoke.
Chapter Ten
The Old Man Staring into the Abyss
Brennachecke didn’t have mixed feelings about dying. He was tired. Too many people he loved had died. Eric was more than capable of carrying on without him. He probably should have told him more often that he was proud of the man he’d become, but he had told him, and more importantly he’d shown him. At least, he was pretty sure he had. Eric knows, he thought. He has to know. Leaving his only remaining son was pretty much the only thing that would hurt. Not the impending hail of bullets. He knew he wouldn’t feel those.
Leaving Jimmy’s death unavenged stung his ego a little, but in Brennachecke’s mind, the universe’s scales would be equally balanced w
ith the weight of his soul in lieu of Jennifer’s, maybe even more so. At the end of the day, he was responsible for his son. Jen may have been the weapon that killed him, but as far as Brennachecke was concerned he had allowed the boy to play with that weapon unsupervised. He was all too aware of the potential dangers that came with allowing the boy to spend so much time with Jen. Dangers that were significantly worse than the girl’s potty mouth. A berserker could be lying in wait inside anybody. Anybody. Jen was just a kid, and obviously both Kessler girls had known Jen had the demon inside her, but he could hardly blame them for not wanting to tell anybody. He didn’t understand the biological mechanics of how the whole berserking thing worked. He didn’t know what triggered it. He didn’t know what, if anything, could stop the demon or whatever it was from taking over and destroying all it touched. In light of that, it was hard to really be angry at the girl. But you didn’t need to be angry to hold a person responsible for the consequences of something they did. It was complicated.
The old soldier felt his son’s death was on his own shoulders as much as anybody else’s. But, on some level, he knew it was all just a part of an impossibly complicated cosmic equation that for reasons he’d never understand had needed Jen to take his son’s life before it could be solved. The universe wasn’t malicious. Brutal and cruel at times, sure, but never malevolent, and in turn he’d never had malice in his heart for the girl. Years of violence before and after Fairfield went dark had numbed him to the point that very little emotion made it through anymore, and malice was a hard emotion to maintain. It had to be nurtured and fed regularly or it would shrivel up and die.
As his mind danced with these thoughts, the coldly efficient automation that was now a part of his body moved of its own accord. The AR-15 he’d just killed his friend Dan Patterson with swung up in his hands. That murder, which was done more or less in self-defense, Brennachecke had not had time to process yet. Its aftermath was hanging just out of reach of his consciousness like a sword on a string. And as he pulled the trigger and bullets popped out of the submachine gun, it seemed pretty unlikely that he’d ever get a chance to process it.
Bam!
The Man-in-Charge took the first bullet, but the arrow piercing Brennachecke’s chest threw off the effectiveness of his aim, and the wound was only superficial.
Bam!
Bam-bam!
The two pirates to the MIC’s right were not so lucky and died before their bodies hit the ground.
The others returned fire and Brennachecke instinctively dodged left, evading the shots, but the move put him on his side and he felt the arrow tear at his chest in a way that set alarm bells off somewhere deep inside. Thankfully, he was pretty sure he’d be shot to death long before whatever had just torn inside him had a chance to turn into a life-threatening development. As his body gave out and toppled to the ground, trapping his gun underneath his own weight, he knew this was it.
Bam!
The shot took a sizable chunk out of the wall. A couple inches to the right and the chunk would have been out of his head. Close, but a miss. Brennachecke was surprised to find himself more than a little frustrated by the ineptitude of the adversaries who were going to lay claim to his life. The only thing more pathetic than not being able to put a bullet in a man’s head when he’s prone on the floor, stuck through and through with an arrow, and less than fifteen feet away was being the man who was prone on the floor, stuck through with the arrow, and waiting for a bunch of brute idiots who couldn’t hit the side of a barn, much less his incapacitated bulk, to finish him off.
“Do not kill that motherfucker!” the Man-in-Charge shrieked from where he was lying, bleeding, on the floor. “He gots work to do!”
As his pirates started to lower their weapons in compliance with his orders, the MIC caught a glimpse of Jen out of the corner of his eye just as she reached them. He almost managed to get out the word what, before all hell broke loose.
* * *
With each contact her feet made against the floor as she ran toward the armed men, Jennifer Kessler felt the undertow of the fugue state that blocked out all her senses, pulling her deeper and deeper into its murky blackness. She heard Brennachecke fire his weapon, but the sound was muffled and faraway. Her vision was so clouded she couldn’t even make out individuals anymore; everything was just a single fuzzy shifting mass of light, colors, and dark. In her mind’s eye, she reached for the lens and tried to adjust the aperture to let more information in, but the ring was stiff and hard to move. Her success at keeping the demon asleep by controlling the focus of her experience didn’t seem to work nearly as well when her and the monster’s roles were in reverse.
Bobby-Leigh was out of sight, and thus out of Jen’s berserker mind (or what mind existed in the berserk state anyway). So . . . my sister . . . is . . . safe, she thought, feeling the fugue digging its fingernails into her and dragging her further and further down. She tried to grasp the mental image of the lens for one last desperate attempt at making an adjustment, but it was too late. As she saw herself reaching for it, it was suddenly just gone. Then, a split second later, so was she.
* * *
The pirates had a lot of experience with berserkers, but their experience almost universally came from situations where they were in control. Like duck and deer hunters of old, they’d sit in their blinds and reap the advantages of surprise and superior technology, only picking their prey off when circumstances were most favorable to them. A loose berserker catching them by surprise was outside of their realm of expertise. Armed and used to dictating the terms of engagement, the pirates attempted to fight back, but failed spectacularly.
Jen tore into them. Grabbing the first body she came into contact with—a seasoned felon who had earned his vicious and violent death many times over—she twisted and yanked so savagely at his arm that she tore it off at the shoulder. As he screamed in shock and sprayed blood all over the walls, she used the dismembered arm as a flesh-and-blood club to beat the two men standing nearest to her to death. Her impossible strength and savagery was only surpassed by her speed and agility.
Bam!
One of the pirates got a shot off, but true to Brennachecke’s assessment of the blood pirates in general, his aim was wild. His AR-15 was shoved through his eye for his trouble, splitting his head in half.
The Man-in-Charge’s cowardly true nature is what saved him in the end. He squeezed his eyes shut and lay frozen in fear, pressed so tightly against the floor and the adjoining wall that berserker Jen didn’t even know he was there. The rest of his men were not so predisposed to playing dead, which was really the only effective strategy for dealing with a berserker under the circumstances, so they continued to die for real.
The demon wearing Jennifier Kessler’s skin leaped onto one man’s back and kicked off of him, sending him stumbling down and allowing her to launch herself into the air. She landed on the head of another man who was trying to get up, her knee crushing his face and breaking his jaw. Reaching down between her legs and into the mess that used to be his mouth and nose, she grabbed his head and twisted, snapping his neck.
A heartbeat later, she bit into a new adversary’s forearm as she absorbed the punch he’d tried to land. She tore a chunk out of it before grabbing his other arm and leaping over him, catapulting his body like a rag doll into the wall.
Jen moved so fast that blood sprayed off her like water off a wet dog. A head was snapped back so hard it was almost torn completely off. Two skulls were crushed against each other, sending brains and viscera all over the scrambling remaining men.
Bam! Bam-bam-bam!
Bam! Bam-bam!
As effective a weapon as an AR-15 was, in close quarters it was easier to use it as a club than as a machine gun. As two more men were torn apart and not a single bullet found its way into the intended target, this fact became painfully apparent, but the two remaining pirates didn’t bother trying
to use the guns that way—they just turned and ran as fast as they could for the main stairs, almost tripping over Brennachecke as they fled.
Berserker Jen didn’t pursue the runners. Her attention was drawn to the man with the arrow stuck through him as he desperately tried to drag himself out of harm’s way. Panting heavily and quickly losing steam now that nobody was actively trying to hurt her, she dropped to a squat and snarled at Brennachecke, then grabbed him, whipped him up like he was made of paper, and pinned him to the wall.
The old soldier didn’t move, he just met her eyes and looked deep into the abyss behind her green-rimmed, extremely dilated pupils. He saw the reflection of his own face staring back, but nothing more. No recognition. No consciousness. Not even rage. And certainly not Jen. Just emptiness.
A second passed.
Then another.
Jen’s breathing was now becoming painfully labored. Her whole body was heaving. Her muscles, taunt with overexertion, twitched and spasmed, the way a horse’s skin does when it’s trying to shake off flies. She took one last deep breath in and used it to scream. Then she dropped to her knees, leaving the old soldier to half slide, half fall off the wall and land beside her. In a last burst of violence, berserker Jen put two holes in the wall with her fists where Brennachecke had been only moments ago, and then tore angrily at the drywall until she collapsed from exhaustion in the blood-soaked hall of horrors.
Movement at the far end of the hall caught Brennachecke’s attention out of the corner of his eye, and he looked up from Jen’s blood-covered unconscious form to see a little girl slowly approaching.
“Six one-thousand. Seven one-thousand. Eight one-thousand . . .”
Suddenly, he realized the little girl was Bobby-Leigh, just without her usual makeup and costume—though he did notice, to his dismay, that she still had the dog collars on. It’d been so long since he’d seen her look like a little girl that it somehow now felt inappropriate, like watching her shower or undress herself.
“Eleven one-thousand.”
Transcendence: Chronicles from the Long Apocalypse: Book One Page 27