by Alex Moss
Andrey helps out Victor. He touches the exit door in a particular spot to slide it open.
Anna gets up, pushes on through the fog, and exits the room. She’s trailing the others. She quickly has to stoop–another tunnel with even lower ceilings and a T-junction at the end. The closeness of the space affects her, vision becoming blurred and distorted, judgment compromised. She can’t recall whether they turned left or right at the junction. She has to pause and steady herself against the wall. “Victor?”
No response.
Just the sound of hollow metal clanging, echoed in unseen chambers. She rolls on her left shoulder and stumbles that way, her forehead glossy with sweat, breathing heavy through her respirator. As she goes, she glances at her watch and squints and then pulls off her respirator and drops it at her feet.
“Six minutes. Six minutes is all we have, shit,” she mutters to herself. She’s out of her depth and she knows it.
Stelson also observes the time or lack thereof. The smoke is clearing on the shop floor and about twenty-five bodies are curled up in a combination of fetal and recovery positions with their mouths covered. He surveys the scene–some are unconscious, others are still coughing in fits–the stronger ones. One or two of them scope the state of play–the air inside the store gradually being refreshed by the long vented AC units at ceiling height. They shuffle to get a view of Stelson guarding the exit.
Others, some debased in just their underwear, crawl around the feet of display cases and lock eyes with Stelson, their spluttering coughs less frequent as the irritant dilutes away. Vengeance and escape on their mind. A wiry man with a sharp cruel face and shiny silk boxers rushes Stelson, crouching low, head out front like a drunken missile.
Stelson sidesteps and gives him space to lose balance and land face-first in a heap. He beats him hard with his fists then twists the man’s right arm back behind him and snaps it at the elbow joint.
It flails limp and lifeless.
The shock of it causes the man to vomit rather than scream in agony, then delirium sets in and he starts to garble some incomprehensible bullshit.
Stelson lifts his respirator and wipes the spittle from his mouth and turns to face other attackers. They all hold back. He looks inside his messenger bag and discovers a single smoke canister. He pulls it out while adjusting his respirator and displays it. “The deep shit you’re all in if you try to mess with me,” he says.
Anna turns into another short tunnel with a partially cracked open sliding door that looks jammed and slightly off kilter. Beyond is pure darkness. The space has no lighting like the last metal box room. It draws her in. She squeezes her body through the gap in the door, steps sideways, and immediately trips and stumbles on something and falls to the floor, knocking the side of her head.
The knock helped, restoring some focus. Her eyes adjust to the darkness and the horror. Face to face with a dead man, eyes closed, lids glued shut with crusty mucus, and a dark crucifix painted across his face.
Anna sucks in the scream she was about to bellow from her diaphragm. It fights back with a sharp pain to her abdomen. She draws some deep breaths and tastes the stench that her senses had masked from her in self-preservation mode. Now that she’s lucid, she knows where she is.
Bodies piled on top of each other, naked, and of all shapes and sizes. Most are men. The gullible.
“Andrey’s chickens,” Anna mutters to herself.
The room is full of the unlucky ones that didn’t survive the procedure to remove their dark souls. Perhaps they resisted, were weak, or just didn’t believe. Discarded like rotten meat and offal. The bodies recalling 20th century photos of genocide–in the dramatic fashion they wrap themselves around each other and reach out for the help that was never there.
So much desperation of all derivatives–to live, to be loved, to be good, to consume, and to get high; or just get by and be accepted by society. If they still had the eyes that they were born with, it would show, even in death.
Anna winces. She crawls out of the room the way she came in, ignoring the potent mix of human residue smeared on her numero dos bike courier get-up and messenger bag. She gets up and takes a right hand turn into the low ceiling corridor and follows it until it zigzags around a corner.
At the end of the zig of the zag there is a manhole cover. Anna slows down and examines it. The seals look airtight and flush with the floor and the arrangement of geometric key-holes suggests that it would take a unique tool to open it up. Her imagination starts to run wild–where does it lead?
The hollering ahead captures her focus again and she continues past the zig-zag and into the corridor that probably runs along the other side of the building structure.
At the second tunnel down on the right, she stops dead in her tracks and holds back as she spies the scene inside the moving safe that’s running between three box spaces.
Victor, Kenny, and Andrey are inside a brightly lit room with stocked shelves filled with jewelry. The metal box that contains the room they are in moves past the entrance and she has to shift her view to the next tunnel on the right.
There is a heated argument between Victor, Kenny, and Andrey. It’s clear to Anna that the product is not in the safe. The stress of unrequited greed is written all over Victor’s face and animated by his jarring body language. He is empty handed. He makes a fist and buries that hand into Andrey’s ribs.
“Anna!” Victor can feel her watching him. His head turns and she shifts her body between the tunnels to be out of sight. Inside, she’s blaming herself. All this effort for nothing and the stakes were set so high. The dream of fifty-five million dollars’ worth of product, evaporated.
She thinks about running to survive and all those that will try to chase her down. Her heart rate elevating, blood pumping through her ears, the pulsing sound becoming increasingly distracting and she needs to just calm herself down and get a grip. She peeks around the edge of the tunnel wall to get another look.
Kenny has beaten Andrey to the floor and he’s laying in a huge pool of blood caused by a cut below his left eye. The guy must be a hemophiliac–there is so much blood, and both Victor and Kenny are stunned silent for a moment, looking at each other incredulously. They then feel the need to talk him through his predicament.
“Andrey, you are going to die in minutes and we are not going to save you,” Victor says.
“No shit, Sherlock.” Andrey has accepted this, his body lying in a cathartic state.
“I’ll ask you one more time, where is the product?”
“I don’t know. It was here. Why would I lie when I wanted an exit?” He fades into oblivion, his head slumping sideways.
Andrey’s bleeding triggers a thought in Anna’s mind. The horrific photos of the thirty-five bloody Saints and their gouged out eye sockets. Something about the memory is bothering her. It doesn’t seem consistent with her grim encounter with the actual bodies a couple of minutes ago.
She moves back down the corridor as Victor starts calling after her. As she turns the corner, Victor and Kenny catch a glimpse of her. Victor hollers in her direction.
She bolts, returning to the tunnel leading to the pit of dead Saints. She squeezes her body through the gap in the door again, this time without any hesitation, ignoring the stench, and her eyes adjust and she urgently crawls up to one of the dead souls and studies his mangled face. She’s looking at his eyes. Unlike Andrey’s photos, there are no empty gouged out sockets. The eyelids have been sealed shut and they look bulbous, as though their eyeballs had ballooned in size.
She checks another body and another and they all have these froglike eyes. She starts to smile and then laugh aloud but the intake of breath just elevates the effects of the stench and she gags, nearly vomiting in her own mouth. Tears well up in her eyes as she stomachs the situation. She is alone in here and Victor’s calls have ebbed away, time running out for them both.
THIRTY-ONE
The hostages are getting their shit together. A dozen of them are now advancing on Stelson, inch by inch, crawling around display cases and across the floor like inebriated zombies. Some of them clutch jewelry or wear it–men look like cross-dressers adorned in necklaces and bracelets. The women are staring desperately at their zombie men to take control of the situation while they continue to recover their breath, coughing and wheezing like heavy chain smokers.
Stelson is nervously flicking the pin on the gas canister. He doesn’t want to release it. There are too many innocents suffering already. He considers the canister and its last resort status for a moment too long.
A mistake.
One of the hostages rushes him and tackles him to the ground and the canister is jettisoned from his palm, rolling across the floor like a barrel of raw nerves.
Stelson releases a few stunted power punches to the man’s kidneys, and shoves him away to recover somewhere else.
Stelson eyes the gas canister, still rolling, and he crawls after it and just when he thinks he’s within arm’s reach it rolls into someone else’s open palm and the pin is flicked out and the gas is released.
“Shit.” He looks up.
Victor is standing over him and holding out his free hand to lift Stelson from the floor. Stelson eyes Victor, standing there like some phony savior with his reaching hand and smoking canister in the other.
He searches for her, behind Victor’s legs, but he can only see Kenny. Stelson gets up and starts looking for ghosts in the fog. Is she one of them? “I can’t see. I can’t see her.” He glares at Victor and is all twisted up with a bubbling rage that stays capped, for now.
Victor shrugs and tosses the canister and moves toward the exit with Kenny, while hostages are breaking out into fits again. Stelson turns and goes after them, kicking Kenny’s legs from under him and ripping off his respirator.
“Stelson, no!” Victor is backing away toward the exit but Stelson circumvents him and blocks the escape route.
Kenny crawls after his respirator, distracted.
“You told me I shouldn’t let anyone leave, at all costs.” Stelson roars. “Well, I’m not letting you leave.” He’s so fucking angry that Victor could consider leaving the building without Anna. “Where is she?”
“You need to open the doors and let me go, Stelson.” Victor keeps looking at his watch.
“You got a plane to catch or something?”
Victor raises his fists. “I don’t want to fight you, Stelson. I don’t have time.”
“Is she…gone?”
Nothing.
“I asked you, is Anna okay? What the hell happened?”
Victor bows his head momentarily and closes his eyes, long enough to paralyze Stelson into a neutral, pensive haze to absorb the subtle but effective blow to a young man’s heart and developing soul.
Victor pushes him aside and releases the door while Kenny returns to the fold, coughing and spluttering, his mask in place now. He pats Stelson on the back. “No hard feelings, okay.” Kenny is insincere. He just wants to get out of this hellhole unscathed.
Stelson is flipping his head left and right, standing at hypothetical crossroads, observing bodies emerging on their hands and knees from the fog, while Victor and Kenny just leave him standing there to face the consequences. He shouts after them to get some clarity on his predicament. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“Come with us if you want. Help us?” Victor turns to him.
“Help with what?”
“Exploit the chaos your brother has started and get rich while you still can.”
Stelson is intrigued, but still, he turns his attention back to the inside of the Morning Star one last time in the hope that Victor is wrong. He can see the shadows and outlines of slow moving bodies, one convulsing, others writhing around disoriented, but none of them have the strength to jettison themselves toward him as he drifts backwards, the fear of what he might find and what may happen if he acts upon his foolhardiness.
But the fear is not enough to stop him. He reverses his momentum and edges back inside, the fog enveloping his determined figure, and then he sees the other figure standing there.
Another ghost.
It’s the young man that was intent on killing him the day he went to visit the commune of blind men in Redondo Beach. It’s all coming back to him now–how Kenny and Tilman ran their car over his body and now here he stands, unaffected by the toxic air.
Benjamin Koit.
Alive and well, it would seem.
He wears a smart business suit with pin stripes that makes him look older and wiser. He’s still very much alive and there is a fire burning inside of him that reeks of unrequited revenge, but he’s not interested in Stelson this time. He’s too late to see Victor and Kenny leave the building.
“They left with nothing of real value, but your friends have seen things they shouldn’t have seen,” Koit says calmly.
“I didn’t see anything.” Stelson is quick to retort because it’s the truth. Victor and Kenny seemed to be empty handed and desperate. Their plan had changed.
“Of course you didn’t see anything. Your eyes are always closed.”
Stelson frowns.
“You better leave before I decide killing you is the only thing that’ll make me feel better, but I would probably be wrong. That’s too impulsive. Like last time and look what happened. I still have tire tracks over my stupid legs. But you can’t keep a good man down.”
A desperate body in a staff issue black suit crawls over and grabs Koit’s leg, but he pulls out a pistol from his waistband and shoots the man through the head at close range.
Stelson is stunned. “A good man?”
“Go,” Koit commands without looking at him.
Stelson obeys and runs like hell.
Shots are fired. Koit is creating a heart-in-mouth dash to safety and Stelson has to weave and duck to avoid being hit by .38 caliber shells.
He’s now on board the escalator that’ll take him up to street level, and as he rises, he pulls off his respirator and listens, expecting some degree of peace as he leaves the aftermath of a failed heist behind him. But the air is filled with the staccato sounds of car alarms, distant gun-shots, police sirens, and a shock-filled void.
At street level, the city in close vicinity has changed. There is nothing. Figueroa is empty apart from the psychedelic armored van that’s now pulling away from the curb. No people, cars, or real signs of life.
That’s all somewhere else.
But there’s debris in the air. Paper. Shredded thick and fine and in whole sheets. Clean bright white and burned. Floating down, but also sideward, upward, on the currents and eddies of warm gusts of wind that seem accentuated and unnaturally strong. The earlier bomb blast has created a ricochet of hot air and gas that revolves around the glass buildings of downtown.
Stelson runs after the van at full stretch. He’s let it drift a good one hundred meters ahead of him, heading north up the center of Figueroa toward the epicenter of chaos downtown. All he can do is hope that the prospect of joining their efforts has lingered in their minds and they’ll be looking out for him.
Hope fades until he turns a corner onto Sixth Street where the van has parked up immediately on his right next to some newspaper vendors and a large red 888 sign corresponding to the adjacent building. Up ahead, fifty meters or so, the street has been cordoned off with tape and there is a swarm of cops, mainly focused on Flower Street where the City National Bank is located–the site of the earlier bomb blast.
The rear doors swing open and Kenny, sporting tactical SWAT garb, reaches out and grabs Stelson’s wrist and helps him inside and shoves him toward Victor, also dressed in the same get up and leaning against the partition to the driver’s cab in the dark. The doors slam shut and the lights go on ins
ide.
“Glad you could join us,” Victor says, coldly.
“I had no choice.”
Victor clocks the guilt, loss, fear & self-loathing in his face and dejected mannerisms. He squeezes his arm. “It’s okay. Keep calm. I need you to focus.”
Stelson eyes their SWAT uniforms. “You had this planned all along. Had every intention of going for the bank haul? It’s not just a distraction?”
Victor and Kenny look at each other. “Anna’s plan was a long-shot. Sorry,” Victor says.
“So why did you go for it?”
“Because I wanted to believe in her, and for her to see that I truly did.”
“And you wanted to be more than just bank robbers, which is what you are becoming.”
“We’re just taking our share from your brother, Bobby.”
“Which is?”
“All of it.”
Stelson’s mouth drops.
“We knew you would like that.”
“Anything to really hurt him I guess.”
“That’s why you are our fifth man. We can’t do this without you, buddy,” Kenny confirms.
Stelson frowns.
“What is it?” Victor asks.
“So where were the client’s guys? Didn’t we expect them to be there to intercept us for the items?”
“Expect the worst and hope for the best,” Kenny retorts.
“They could be true to their word and waiting for us at Olympic and Bixel, or they could still be out there watching our moves. The latter is more likely. They need to see Anna with the red bag. Right now, we’re running on borrowed time. If they don’t see Anna soon, we’re dead.”
“Well, that’s okay then. I’m not worried at all,” Stelson says with sarcasm.
Victor knocks the partition to the driver’s cab and Tilman starts the van and locks it into reverse, swinging it back onto Figueroa.
Stelson doesn’t mention the run-in with Koit. That seemed personal to him. They don’t need to know and it no longer matters. “Who owns the emporium?” Stelson asks.