by Joe Corso
“Hold on a minute Karl. Mickey, is the car available?”
“Yes, gassed up, had a tune up. Ready.”
“Okay. I’ll be there in an hour,” Lucky answered.
“Great. Meet you in the lounge.”
Lucky could have created a portal that would take him to Karl and save traveling time, but Lucky needed the time to talk to Mickey.
Chapter Twenty – Six
Lucky entered the hotel and headed straight for the bar. This time the professor wasn’t hovering above him, invisibly in his saucer, and Lucky was comforted now by the fact that he could now create a portal, at will, to remove himself from dangerous situations. Karl, after spotting Lucky, placed down his drink, rose from his chair and rushed to greet him. The wait had been the longest sixty minutes of Karl’s life.
Lucky wasted no time.
“Talk to me Karl. What’s so urgent?”
“I cannot do it Lucky. You suggested that I take control of the Koros Empire, which I have done, but to be honest with you, I’m not doing a good job. It is falling apart. The problem is that I’ve always been a soldier, an enforcer, one who has taken orders his entire life, and one who never questioned those orders. I was never the one making the decisions. I only carried out the decisions of others, and now, I find that I am simply not qualified to run his empire. The Koros Empire will collapse if he does not return to take control.”
“He? He who?” Lucky asked. “You want the man who tried to kill me to return to his position of power so he can try it again?”
Karl put a hand up to stop him.
“Lucky, you may not like Koros, but he employs tens of thousands of people across the world. If his business collapses, it would have worldwide repercussions. Understand me. I’m not a sentimental fool. I could care less for these people, but selfishly I care about me. I like what I do and because of that, I do not want the Koros regime to fall. Let us have things return to normal, get back on course, and try not to rewrite history.
Rewrite history. There it was. Those words. They echoed in Lucky’s ears.
Karl kept on talking, something about wanting to continue doing what he was good at, being the Koros head of security, following orders, being treated well, Koros making him a rich in his own right, but Lucky faded in and out as he spoke.
“I know you don’t like him,” Karl was blabbering on, “and you have little reason to go back for him, but before you make up your mind, listen to me for one minute as I am sure that he has never experienced anything like what he must be going through right now. If you were to go back for him and offer him a second chance, you could suggest that if he does not do as you say, then you will return him to his ancestor and then he will spend the rest of his days in a cell or be tortured or killed. On the other hand, if he accepts your offer, then you will have a friend in a very high place that will be there when you need him . . . . “
“Karl, enough,” Lucky said.
“Lucky, I feel strongly about this.”
“And so do I”, Lucky replied. “Perhaps you’re on to something. If I can turn this fanatical sociopath away from his goal of world domination, through the fear of returning him to his beloved ancestor, Vlad the Impaler, then he may in fact become sufficiently convinced by this experience to turn into a more useful person.”
Karl was quiet. It was not the reaction he had anticipated. This was to have been a heated, long fought debate in his mind.
“What you say has merit, Karl. I’ll return there to see, first if Koros is still alive, and if he is, after a heartfelt chat and some deep understanding, I will consider bringing him back. But I should be clear. He must be in total agreement about changing his radical ways. And as for now, you’re going with me so let’s go to your room, where I will use my energy to create a portal that will take us to him, to Vlad in his dungeon cell. I need backup and you’re it. Do you have a solid black uniform?”
Karl shook his head no.
“No problem,” Lucky said and he walked to his car, popped open the trunk and returned with Mickey’s suit. Karl was a big man. Mickey’s shirt was tight on him and the pants did not fit him at all.
“Looks like you’re gonna have to wear your own pants on this trip Karl, but take the black ski mask. You’ll need that. We need to look absolutely terrifying to the men we meet.”
Lucky strapped his gun into his shoulder holster and asked Karl if he had a weapon. Karl nodded and pulled his jacket aside, revealing a nine-millimeter Makarov.
“Take an extra clip,” Lucky said, “and if you have to shoot, do not shoot to kill. Do you understand Karl? This is a non-negotiable condition. You may not kill anyone in another time, as the repercussions could be vast, affecting our own time, possibly even affecting you and me standing here right now. You could even perhaps kill one of your ancestors and never be born. Shoot if you have to, but shoot to wound and not to kill. Is that absolutely clear?”
“Understood,” Karl replied.
Lucky then gave Karl the game plan.
“I think it’s best if we just return to the same cell where we were originally placed and work our way up from there. There’s no activity in that area and only one guard. If we were to appear in Vlad’s main rooms with all of his advisers and men standing around, it might become an outnumbered situation – better to work our way up from the cell area and have surprise on our side. So, if you don’t have any better suggestions then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll return to the cell and if he’s not there, I’ll transport us into the area outside the cell and we’ll work our way up from there. Are you ready?”
Lucky took a moment to breathe deeply and concentrate in order to create the portal. Within minutes, it manifested itself. He was getting pretty good at this. Both men stepped inside. Immediately, Karl felt the stifling pressure surround him, bearing down on his chest, and he almost panicked. He wasn’t used to not being in control. His breathing’s tempo began to pick up as he began to hyperventilate. It was too constricting and the pressure was getting to him and it seemed to be taking forever. Just seconds later, they stepped out into a dank, smelly cell.
Two men were seated on bundles of straw, scratching incessantly; probably from lice, Lucky thought, but neither one was Koros. The prisoners’ faces froze in terror as they watched as two apparitions materialized, without warning, into their cell. Their terror intensified and they began to scream out, but no one came to their rescue. It just wasn’t unusual for prisoners to scream in a dungeon. The two scared souls fell to their knees imploring the two devils, standing before them, for mercy.
Karl, who appeared to be a giant to the two prisoners compared to the men in that time period, leaned into them, listened to their words and spoke first. He specifically asked if the man had been taken from this cell alive and if so, where could they find him? The men revealed that Koros was indeed held here until just this very morning when Vlad ordered that the madman be taken to the torture chamber in an attempt to excise his demons. Karl asked them about the location of that room. They men explained in great detail it’s whereabouts and how best to reach it.
“Hold on to my belt, Karl. We’re getting out of here,” Lucky said and just like that, they disappeared from the cell and reappeared in the room outside of the cell, causing the men to once again drop to their knees and wave their arms up and down in the air all the while uttering words incomprehensible to Lucky.
Karl and Lucky tiptoed up the stairs until they came to a sentry guarding the entrance to the dungeon. Lucky reached inside his pocket, pulled out some sort of spray,
and spritzed it all over the man, catching him directly in the face. The man slumped against the wall and fell to the floor. Lucky then reached into a pouch on his belt, took out a hypodermic needle, and injected something into his arm. Lucky and Karl carried the guard down the steps and into an empty cell.
“That’ll do it for several hours,” Lucky whispered to Karl.
The torture chamber was only one level above the dungeo
n. They climbed up a short flight of stairs, ran down the hall past empty cells, but stopped dead in their tracks at the sound of piercing screams. They pressed their bodies flush against the wall and listened for a moment. Another scream. The men began to move forward, stealthily, inching closer and closer toward the sounds emanating from the room, making their way to the entrance. Lucky leaned around and slowly peeked inside. At the bottom of a stairwell, he saw holding cells surrounded by devices, disturbing contraptions obviously designed to cause pain and eventual death. Three men were busy at work, seemingly unaffected by the men’s screams and unmoved by the torture they were inflicting upon their victims. Lucky motioned to Karl and pointed toward an area where a man was writhing in pain. He was strapped inside an iron maiden. Dear God, Lucky thought. This was something that did not seem real, even in history books. In front of the torture box was a fire pit with irons of varying sizes, leaned into it, fiery hot, ready for use. One man, chained to a post, was being whipped mercilessly. His back looked like strips of rawhide, cut into narrow bands, crisscrossing into patterns. Blood poured down onto the mangled rags that once were his pants.
Lucky had seen enough. He reached into his holster, drew his automatic and fired a shot directly at the hand holding the whip. The bullet passed through the hand. A starburst of blood exploded like a firework. The wounded man screamed, grabbed his hand, and fell to the floor. The other two men first stared at their friend’s hand and then at Lucky and Karl, the two men dressed all in black, two devils sent from the underground to do battle, now slowly making their way toward them. There was no attempt to grab a weapon, no attempt at self-defense, and no conversation. They dared not move.
Lucky yelled for Karl to release the two prisoners as he trained his gun on the men, moving from one to the other, staring and daring. It was hard to make out the prisoners’ faces as each was coated in blood and filth. First, Karl approached the man tied to the post, his face swollen and covered in red. He would be the easiest to rescue. Methodically, he set about releasing the man by cutting the straps. The man struggled to lift his head and his feet dragged beneath him as Karl carried him to a chair, next to a small table where the punishers ate their meals. The man managed to utter a “thank you” for helping him. And then it hit them. Both men at the same.
“Karl?” the man asked, weak and weary and wondering if his eyes had seen properly or was this man a figment of deliria.
“Yes, Koros, it is me, Karl.”
“Thank God, you have come. Take me from here. Please, I beg you. Take me from here. I can no longer bear it.”
“Yes, I will but first we must talk. But before that, I must help the other man,” he said.
Karl made his way over to the man trapped inside the iron maiden. Blood oozed from the punctures that coated his body. The man was at death’s door yet Karl could not imagine how he could remove the man from this elaborate, primitive, torture device.
“Karl,” Lucky said, “not trying to tell you how to do your job but maybe you can use some of those irons as sort of a crow bar. Whatta ya think?”
“Good idea,” Karl replied. “Great thinking.”
“Yeah, well, I used to get paid for thinking like this and to be honest, I really wanna get out of here, so if we can hurry this along, that would suit me just fine. ‘Damn’, he thought, ‘where was Mickey when he needed him’?”
It took Karl what seemed to be an eternity to get the man free from the iron maiden. He had to keep switching off the different sizes of irons and it seemed to take forever to pry the thing open. Finally, something snapped and the door to one side of it fell off and tumbled to the floor with an ear-piercing thud. He placed the man onto the floor. In the corner was a pail of water. Karl reached under his uniform, grabbed his undershirt and ripped off several pieces from it. He took two cloths, dunked them into the water then he held one cloth first to his boss’s mouth and then to the other man.
In the interim, Lucky busied himself with chaining Vlad’s torturers to the same post that once held Koros. He then walked over to Koros, grabbed his cheek in his hand and turned it to face him, until both men were staring directly into each other’s eyes.
“Have you had enough Koros?”
“Mr. Campo, please take me out of here. Please bring me back home, I beg you. Anything, anything in the world is yours for my freedom.”
Lucky’s cold, hard eyes met his.
“Look around you, Koros,” he said, “and know this. I can take you back home and I can bring you back here anytime I wish. Do you understand? So which ‘h’ will it be? Home or here?”
“What is it that you want?” Koros asked. “What do I need to say to end this?”
Lucky smiled at that statement.
“Well now, there are some things that you can say. Look at you now. You see how powerless you are even with all of your wealth? Your obsession with your ancestor has almost driven you mad. You must now return back home and help society instead of instigating unrest and division. Forge bonds, not perpetuate divisiveness, help instead of harm, make history but in a positive way. You wanted the Koros way at the expense of others. All of it stops right now, right here, or there will be no return home.”
Koros, a broken man, a weak man, nodded and uttered, “I will change. It is finished.”
Chapter Twenty – Seven
Lucky, Karl, and Koros were now in Karl’s hotel room in Queens. Karl sent one of his security men out for medical supplies. Lucky sedated Koros in order to give him medical attention and tended to him as he lay on the bed, completely battered and weak from loss of blood. The waiting provided many idle moments, ones that allowed Lucky and Karl to engage in some pretty raw, honest discussions.
“I never felt guilt over killing anyone,” Karl said. “I was prepared to kill you, Lucky, if you refused my request to bring Koros home. There were times when I even enjoyed hurting people, watching their eyes fill with fear, the uncertainty of what would happen next. Will it be pain or will it be death? Either way, I didn’t care. If Koros told me to make someone go away, he went away. That happened more times than I care to admit, but then, when I witnessed a version of myself in that torture room, I didn’t like what I saw. Don’t get me wrong – I will always honor Koros, and the orders he gives, but only now, the order must make sense to me.”
Lucky sat. He listened without interrupting.
“You know,” Karl continued, “I never really believed that you could travel into the past. I thought it was just a bunch of lies that the CIA put out there to confuse the enemy. Even though I witnessed you disappearing right before my eyes, I thought it must be a trick or hypnosis, possibly some hallucinogenic drug. And until today, I could not remember the last time something scared me. That portal scared me. I felt helpless in there – the pressure, my breathing – and when we stepped outside into another world, all I could think was what if something happened to you and I got stuck in this nightmare forever. You picked the right guy to back you up, Lucky, because you were my only way back to the present and I was going to make sure that nothing happened to you as long as I was there and I could do something about it. You have no idea how I felt when we stepped out of that portal and back into this room. I felt like I was reborn. I knew then that the man that left this room earlier was not the same man who returned here later. I would never be the same. Life will never be the same. I’ve heard of people having an epiphany, well, this was mine.”
Lucky nodded.
“I understand.” And he did understand. Lucky’s gift had caused him to rethink life as well but before he could get into that, there was a knock on the door. The supplies had arrived. Lucky mixed a compound of sulfa powder and aloe, which he squeezed directly from the fresh plant that Karl’s assistant had purchased, mixed it with an antibiotic powder and began treating Koros’s wounds. First, he cleaned the ones on his stomach, face and the front of his body and slowly turned him over to address all the other wounds on his back. He purposely left the area un-bandaged s
o air could circulate around it and expedite the healing process. By keeping him sedated, Lucky hoped that Koros would remain on his stomach the entire time. Tomorrow morning he would apply the bandages.
The following morning Koros awoke to find Lucky sitting on the edge of his bed. Koros began looking down at his body and checking the bandages enveloping him. He moved around a bit and each time he did, there was a wince, and once in a while, he let out a slight groan of discomfort. Slowly he brought himself up from the bloody sheets and pillow to a sitting position as Karl worked quickly to place pillows behind his back and head for support.
“Are you feeling any better this morning?” Karl asked.
“Better, much better. My back hurts like hell, but I will not complain, knowing that I’m away from hell itself.”
“Well,” Lucky said, “your back is pretty chewed up. I can’t promise how it’s going to look when it’s healed, might be some bad scarring, so there’s a possibility that you won’t be so pretty anymore,” he said half smiling.
Koros grabbed Lucky’s arm.
“I couldn’t help overhearing what Karl told you last night. I was not quite asleep and I heard what he said to you. I understand it because I, too, share his feelings. I was so anxious to see my ancestor that nothing could have bothered me. No, not until I was alone in that cell thinking that I would be there for the rest of my life did I get on my knees and start to pray to a god I’ve never known. Then I began to pray for you, Lucky, but in a selfish way, not for good things to happen to you, but for you to come and get me. It was, once again, about me. Absolute terror. Lucky, I don’t know if there is a heaven or a hell with fire and such, but I will no longer take those chances. I am preparing myself. I will live my life in a way that heaven will accept me and hell will reject me. There is a quote I remember. I don’t remember who said it but it says: