by Vogel, Vince
Danny played about with the shotgun, looking down it and pretending to shoot. Meanwhile, Alex took his gun belt and placed it round his waist, adding his two silenced PPKs to each hip. Then came a black MO4 tactical gas mask that he placed atop his head, ready to be pulled down. After that, he strapped several gas grenades to his vest and lifted out the M4A1 Carbine semiautomatic. Danny couldn’t help turning his eyes to it as Alex slapped in the extended magazine.
“What is that?” the boy exclaimed.
“Death,” came Alex’s cold answer. “Now help me with the fence.”
They stepped through the continual beads of rain and into the woods. Only ten meters in, they came to the fence and Alex used his snips to cut it. There was no point bothering about the alarms this time. Once Alex had cut himself a gap, Danny held it open for him and he ducked inside. When he was about to storm off through the trees toward the house, Danny called his name and Alex turned to him.
“Please save her,” the boy said, his face trembling with worry.
“Just wait here.”
Alex turned and began marching off, the M4 held tight to his shoulder, his vision traveling down the sight, the rain blurring everything. The early evening sun was almost nowhere to be seen behind the bleary sky as it ducked below the horizon, streaking the ash-colored clouds with red and looking like blood in water.
Closer to the mansion, the sounds of gunfire crackled especially loud, and Dorring saw his first target, a masked man backing out of a door at the side of the giant house. He didn’t hesitate and sent several well-aimed bullets first into the masked man’s shoulder and side, causing him to sprawl back, and then, before he’d even hit the deck, Alex put another one through the man’s chin that came bursting out the top of his crown. About six meters in front, on the shingle, Alex saw three parked black vans with their back doors wide open, scattered constellations of silver bullet holes riddling the sides, the bloodied corpse of a masked man hanging out the back of one.
Reaching the door to the house, Dorring placed his back hard against the wall on one side of it. From the breast pocket of the tactical jacket, he took a three-inch square mirror with a telescopic rod attached to the back. He extended the rod and maneuvered the mirror across the open doorway, angling it so that he could see along the corridor on the other side. Immediately, he spotted the shapes of several men hiding in doorways all along, caught in a fire fight with men guarding a stairway at the end.
Alex pulled back the mirror and yanked down his gas mask, took one of the smoke grenades, flipped the pin, and tossed it into the doorway. The corridor immediately filled with thick white smoke, and everyone began coughing violently and covering their eyes, some of them shutting themselves in rooms. They hadn’t expected gas.
Alex burst round the corner and entered the corridor of smoke. One man was lying on the floor choking on it, foam bubbling from his mouth. Alex casually put several bullets in him as he passed by. At the end of the corridor, he saw movement near the stairs, the outlines of several people visible within the creamy fumes. Crouching low into the thick fog and thus becoming invisible, Dorring sent a barrage of bullets into them, some of them managing to get a few shots off but ultimately missing. When they were all dead, Alex stood up and continued onward. Upon reaching the stairs at the end, now covered in bodies, he heard one of the doors behind him open. He swiveled around, saw a shadow move within the smoke, and sent a bullet into it, knocking whoever it was down. Turning back around, Alex began ascending the stairs, where he found a badly wounded man leaning up against the wall halfway up, holding his chest and panting uneasily.
Alex flipped up the mask and took the man by the scruff of the neck, pressing the end of the M4 into his chin.
“Where is the girl?”
“What… girl?”
“The one Billy Doyle wants.”
“Upstairs. Room on the left… at the end. Please don’t—”
The back of the man’s head exploded up the wall in a Rorschach scatter pattern of blood. Alex let go of his shirt, flipped the mask back down, and moved on. When he reached the top of the stairwell, he was met with more chaos. Two men with AKs had their backs to him and were firing off down the hallway. With a burst from the M4, Alex tore them down, both men not knowing what hit them. He then took up a position at the corner of the stairwell and once again used the mirror to see what was going on. Men ran from room to room, spraying bullets about. At the far end, the Doyles’ men had formed a barricade. Alex folded back the mirror, took another smoke grenade, and tossed it toward them, the instant effect being that they all keeled over and began coughing. He burst out from the corner and began spraying their shadowy forms with bullets, the M4 rattling in his hand as it slotted one man after another.
Was this the end? Jerry Doyle thought as he lay in his chair. He was completely helpless, only a single man guarding the entrance to the room, not a girl in sight, and for the first time since he was a child when his father would come home drunk and angry, Jerry Doyle was genuinely scared. Never in his wildest nightmares had he thought that the Earles would send it all coming his way like this. He’d imagined it would run the way these things always did: tit for tat until peace was resumed.
The man guarding stood by the door with his pistol out, a nervous look on his face. There was a pause in the shooting, and Jerry urged the bodyguard to take a peek. The man opened the door and gingerly stuck his large head out. The moment it was but a few inches through the doorway, it exploded in blood and gore and he was thrown back into the room.
“Shit!” Jerry Doyle exclaimed, his eyes studying the fallen bodyguard heaped on the floor. The man appeared to be still alive and struggling for breath, his face now a tattered mess.
Through the wide-open door stepped Jacob Earle dressed in black combat trousers, long leather mack, and combat boots, a shotgun dangling from his leather-gloved hands. Jerry’s eyes dashed toward him, and he instantly cringed. Earle shut the door behind him, walked up to the man on the floor, who wheezed away through his broken face, aimed the shotgun, and sent another spurt of flame into him, finishing him off.
Earle now steadily turned to Doyle, whose eyes were bulging from his skull, his fat body prone. Jacob Earle was midforties, with black cornrows for hair, and bore a scar on his face that always reminded Jerry of pink barbed wire running along his jawline. It was apparently from a rather nasty bar fight a long time ago in which Earle had been glassed. Having looked upon the Fat Man for several seconds, Jacob’s face gradually grimaced into a mask of disgust.
“You should’ve died years ago,” he commented.
“I should have sent them after you the moment I heard Davey was dead,” the Fat Man snapped back, taking on an air of bravery and refusing to cower in the face of the Grim Reaper.
“But instead you blew my warehouse up and sent the pigs after me.”
“The pig went after you for his own reasons. I think he’s played us both, Jacob.”
Earle stood before Jerry and eyed him menacingly.
“Why did you kill Deck and all the others?” he asked. “We had a good thing going.”
“I nor Davey nor anyone else from us ordered their killings. It was your boys. They must have flown off on their own. I found out that there was another man there. A man in a mask. It were him that killed my brother. He wasn’t from my lot. So he must’ve been from you.”
Earle sighed for several seconds, his face going thoughtful.
“I guess none of it matters now,” he said, reaching into his inside coat pocket and pulling out a small plastic container that looked like a shampoo bottle. He held it up to his eyes in his gloved hand, and the Fat Man studied it dubiously. “Do you know what’s in this harmless-looking bottle?” Jacob asked him.
“Shampoo?” Jerry replied, trying to act nonchalant.
“Not quite. It’s fluoroantimonic acid. Do you know what that is?”
Jerry began shaking his head, eyes swelling from their sockets, fear gripping every sin
ew in his body.
“You bastard,” he muttered. His eyes flew to the door, and he shouted out for help.
“Ain’t no one comin’, fat boy,” Jacob Earle gently insisted. “So where was I? Oh yeah. Fluoroantimonic acid, which I’ve had mixed with hydrofluoric acid. They call it a superacid. The strongest known to man. It apparently eats through all organic tissue, but, as you can see, it does fuck all to plastic. Your face isn’t made out of plastic is it, Jerry?”
“Help!” came rattling once more from the old man’s mouth as he was overcome by blind panic. He turned back to Jacob Earle. “Please, Jacob. We can work this all out.”
“No, we can’t,” Earle replied coolly. “Now, here’s a bit of science for you. Do you know the reason the fluoroantimonic is mixed with hydrofluoric acid?”
“Please, Jacob. For fuck’s sake, please.”
“It’s because it comes in crystal form, a bit like salt. So in order to make it liquid, you have to mix it with hydrofluoric acid. You can’t mix it with regular water. No.” Jacob wagged his finger at the Fat Man. “It’s far too volatile in water and would explode. Ha!” He grinned widely here, showing off his two gold front teeth. “I just imagined one of your fellas runnin’ in here, findin’ you meltin’ and then stupidly throwin’ a load of water over it. Fuck, that would be hilarious. Watchin’ your head explode.”
“I’ll give you anything. Just don’t throw that shit on me. Please, Jacob.”
Jacob Earle brought his face right up to the Fat Man’s.
“Now this is gonna seem like an understatement in a second, but it may sting a little.”
“Help! Help!”
While Jerry Doyle screamed and thrashed about like a fat fish thrown on a ship’s deck, Earle began unscrewing the lid of the bottle with his gloved hand.
“I been thinkin’ about what this would do to someone,” he said as he carefully removed the top, holding it as far as he could away from his face, “ever since I first smuggled a load of it out the country for some nutter in Syria.”
Jerry Doyle immediately smelled the toxic concoction when the lid came off. Jacob stretched his arm out and held it out over his fat sweaty head.
“Here’s to you, fat boy,” Earle said, twisting his wrist and pouring the liquid straight down on to Doyle’s face as a rasping scream flew from his open mouth. White smoke began rising from the Fat Man’s face, the liquid eating into him. His nose began to collapse in on itself, the center of his face caving in. Jerry choked on the vapor that poured out of him, the liquid slipping into his eyes and instantly chewing through the eyeballs.
Jacob Earle simply stood there, watching him dissolve, the Fat Man’s stumpy limbs flailing about as he suffered unimaginably excruciating agony.
Alex moved on. There was hardly any gunshot now, only the odd bang a little farther on in the house where he guessed Billy and Chloe were. As he walked along the upstairs corridor, he checked the doors and found only dead bodies or empty rooms. The two sets of men had largely wiped each other out, though Dorring himself had killed at least fifteen in the assault. He came to a red door and opened it. Inside he found the tall leathered back of a man in a black mack standing over what appeared to be some writhing pink creature with stubs for limbs.
Earle immediately turned and raised his shotgun. But it was no higher than his waist when Alex sent a bullet into his chest and then his face. Earle fell back onto Jerry’s bulging midriff and then slid down into a crumpled mess on the floor.
A terribly acrid smell filled the room, and white smoke rose from the Fat Man’s face. Alex went over to him and found a huge cavity of red flesh where the top of his mouth, nose, cheeks, and eyes used to be, some sort of acid eating away at the wound. Jerry’s throat was visible within the cavity, half the tongue eaten off and twitching away. The rapidly decaying man struggled for breath, the chin waggling up and down while he choked on the acid’s vapor. The outstretched pink half limbs vibrated in convulsive agony, and Alex couldn’t even guess how much Doyle was suffering, or whether he was well past that now and had gone into total shock.
Alex leaned down to his ear and whispered, “For all your sins, Mr. Doyle. May you rot in hell as you have in life.”
Dorring turned and left the room, leaving the Fat Man to smoke and gurgle behind him.
Chloe was now all alone in the room, the guard having left earlier. She had spent the whole time on the floor with her back hunched against the wall in the corner. It was safer that way.
While she sat there, the red door flew open and a panicked-looking Billy came storming in, his suit and shirt spattered in blood, a pistol held in his trembling hand.
“We’re leaving,” he said, marching over to Chloe, crouching down to her, cutting the ties on her ankles with a knife and then hauling her up by the wrists.
Once she was standing, Chloe immediately headbutted him in the forehead and he sprang back. She stood scowling at him while he rubbed the top of his nose and glanced down at the blood on his hand. His own face suffused with a scowl, and he smashed her in the forehead with the butt of his gun, sending her crashing against the wall. He then viciously plucked her up again, her forehead cut open, and dragged her across the room to the open door.
But as he reached it, his back facing the doorway while he tugged Chloe along with him, someone came up from behind and rammed a stun gun straight into the base of his spine, sending him into immediate spasms and dropping unconscious to the floor.
When he fell, Billy revealed the figure of Alex behind him.
On finding Chloe, Dorring’s face lit up with instant relief. She threw herself at him, hooking her bound hands over his head, and in the rush of the moment, she pulled him toward her, tears cascading from her eyes, and kissed him rigorously on the lips.
He was slightly taken aback by this, but his own arms gradually made their way around her. She then parted her lips from his and shoved her head on his chest, holding on to him as though she feared he’d dissolve the minute she let go.
“I knew you’d come,” she wept into him. “I always knew you would.”
“We need to leave,” Alex whispered to her.
“What about him?” she enquired, nodding down at the unconscious Billy.
“He comes too.”
69
“I don’t get any of this, sarge,” Lange uttered while Jack drove them back to London through the rain like a bat out of hell, his eyes swelling from their sockets, fingers tightly gripping the wheel, a smoke pinched between two of them. “Why’d we need to get back to London so quickly?” Lange continued, his own petrified eyes stuck on the wet road, fingers gripping the dashboard. “I mean, Pierce said that something was kicking off with the Doyles and they couldn’t move on Billy until tomorrow. I don’t get why we need to kill ourselves getting back.”
“The bastard,” Jack muttered to himself, taking a long toke of his cigarette, his bulging eyes looking out through the corridor of rain, his foot charged down on the accelerator. “All along it’s been him.”
“Who’s him? Billy Doyle?”
“Don’t you worry, George. Don’t you worry.”
“What did the old lady say to you while I was on the phone? The moment I got back to you, your face was furious and you ordered us to leave.”
Jack shook his head and pulled in another plume of thick tobacco smoke.
“I wish I could tell you, George, but I can’t. I really can’t. Not until I’ve spoken to him and found out if it’s all true.”
“Who’s ‘him’?”
“You really don’t want to know that.”
When they crossed the M25 back into London, the sky was completely black and the streetlamps reflected dimly off the carpet of splashes that covered the road. At the junction he wished to turn down, Jack pulled up to the pavement and looked over at Lange.
“You need to get out here, George,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re a young cop. You’ve got your whole career ahe
ad of you. I can’t ask you to risk it coming with me now.”
“I can’t let you do that, sarge. We’re in this together. Whatever it is, I wanna be there.”
“It could all go very wrong. I have absolutely no evidence except for the word of an old lady. I urgently need to speak to someone and find out if this is true. If I’ve got this wrong, then I’m in the shit and it’s best you don’t follow me into the sewer.”
Lange looked at him and bit his lip.
“You sure you’ll be okay?” he asked Jack.
“Positive. The worst that can happen is I end up losing the last remaining shreds of my career. I’ve still got a little bit tucked away and a private pension.”
The detective constable continued to gaze across at him, his loyalty urging him to stay by Jack’s side.
“Please, George,” Jack pleaded. “I like you, mate, and I really can’t ask you to follow me in this.”
“Okay, sarge,” Lange replied. “But call me the minute you’re finished.”
“I will, George. The bus going your way picks you up from just across the street.”
“Thanks,” Lange muttered, opening the door onto the storm and stepping out into the soaked streets.
The moment he closed it, Jack sped off, Lange watching the car lights disappear in the thick rain.
70
Wearily opening his eyes, Billy Doyle was half blinded by the harsh electric light that he was cast in. The rain had dropped to a steady pace now and wasn’t lashing the ground so heavily. To Billy, it resembled innumerable moths playing in the headlights of the Hummer facing him several meters ahead. Outside the halo of light, he saw a field of shadowy trees and quickly realized he was in woodland. The next thing he noticed was that his body was tied with thick rope to a large oak, his arms stretched out across its wide trunk, a length of rope tied either end of his wrists and reaching round the back of the tree to pull them across.