by Andy Remic
Carter popped his head around the car’s protective shell; bullets screamed from the edge of the woods, eating into the stone and metal behind him with showers of dust. Carter dropped to his belly and slid along to the edge of the Mercedes which clicked and hissed with the sighs of cooling, stressed steel—
Legs, sticking out from behind a tree.
He opened fire, heard screams, saw blood erupt from feet and shins.
One last man—
Carter squinted but could not see the assassin. Where had he gone? He had been by the side of the trees, down near the low stone wall that needed serious repairs which Carter kept putting off until the eternal ‘next summer’...
Boots thudded on the Mercedes bodywork and Carter looked up - too late - as the man leaped on top of him with a growl. Carter caught a glimpse of tanned features and a bushy black moustache. He smelled garlic before he was grabbed, his Browning knocked easily aside. He brought up his knee, but missed - the large attacker rained down blows on Carter’s head and face and he was momentarily stunned, blinded by multiple impacts—
The weight lifted. Carter lay on his back, on the ice, tasting blood and a sliver of tooth. He glanced up—
Into a boot.
Stars flashed across his vision and he was smashed backwards against the Mercedes, grunting, blood flowing down his chin, his nose broken. He might have screamed, he wasn’t sure—
His fingers slipped on the ice beneath him as he tried to push himself up.
‘Now, I kill you,’ came the heavily accented voice.
Carter’s eyes flickered open - everything seemed to be in slow motion,
‘Let me take his fucking soul,’ whispered Kade.
Carter dodged left as the boot connected where - a split second before - his face had been. Carter’s fist smashed a heavy curling hook against the man’s groin and then—
The man screamed.
Carter dragged himself to his feet, suddenly aware of the snarling; the man was on the ground, Samson’s teeth clamped on and through the attacker’s collarbone, tearing at his neck and throat. He was squirming, trying to punch the dog but the compression and snapping and tearing was making him wail, there was a crack of collarbone, and the man struggled manically to get away from that awesome crushing bite—
Carter staggered against the Mercedes. He gave a quick glance to Natasha - she was down and out of the game. He scanned for the Browning but could not see the weapon through the blood in his eyes; he felt a warm stream down the back of his throat and he spat stark red against the snow.
He moved forward and met Samson’s eyes; they were smiling.
‘Good dog. Off.’
Samson retreated, lips up baring evil blood-stained fangs—
Carter kicked the man in the head several times, until he was sure the killer was unconscious. Then he knelt, and slammed the heel of his hand into the man’s nose, breaking it in a return favour and making doubly sure the bastard wouldn’t get up.
Covered in blood, Carter skidded across the snow and ice to Natasha. Gently, he eased her legs from the embankment and rolled her onto her back. She was breathing, raggedly, her eyes open, her Berghaus soaked in blood. ‘Can you feel your fingers?’ he asked.
‘You look a fucking mess,’ she smiled, her voice hoarse.
‘You’re not so beautiful yourself.’
‘I can’t move...’
Carter lifted Natasha into his arms and staggered, despite her lack of weight. His head was spinning, pounding after the blows from the large man. She was still as light as he remembered ... from better, happier times ...
Carter lurched towards the house.
Nat’s eyes grew large and her fingers clawed his arm—
Her tongue protruded. Carter cursed, and dropped to his knees in the snow, amongst the droplets of raining blood. Natasha could not breathe ... the bullet had triggered an adverse reaction inside her, fucking with her central nervous system to inspire anaphylactic shock—
Natasha’s windpipe had closed.
Her own body had become the Enemy.
She spasmed, back arching as if in a fit of epilepsy; Carter pinned her down with his own body weight and fumbled in his clothing, searching, hunting—
Natasha squirmed beneath him, as if in some bizarre act of love. She was strong, incredibly so. Carter dug a pen from his pocket, a cheap plastic biro, and, grunting, he held her spasming heaving body in place, clamped her arms under his legs and grabbed her short hair tightly in his fist, pulling her head back swiftly—
He could not look her in the eye, because he knew she could see and feel and hear and understand—
The ballpoint pen looked suddenly so innocent in his fingers. Carter pulled the cap free with his teeth and spat it into the snow. Natasha was going blue, her eyes so wide he thought that they would pop—
He made the stroke with one quick movement.
Down, just above the sternum ... at the base of her throat—
Punching a hole through her flesh ...
Through her oesophagus—
There was a sudden whoosh of intaken air through the ragged, improvised mouth. Carter withdrew the pen, releasing a tiny squirt of blood that hit him in the face and mingled with his own. Carter stared down into Natasha’s eyes, unable to speak, and the unhealthy pallor gradually faded from her flesh as the air flowed into her lungs.
Her eyes closed, blinked. She could not speak.
Carter lifted her, limp now in his arms, and crawled wearily over the bonnet of the smashed BMW which was partly blocking the entrance to his home. He slid across the buckled surface, then kicked open his front door. He climbed the steps, suddenly weary, suddenly aware of a million pains screaming through his battered and bruised body. Stars danced in front of his eyes and he had to pause halfway up the steps, leaning, heaving and panting, against the wall. He continued, and felt elation when he reached the top.
He carried Natasha through to the living room, kicked the leather couch over in front of the open fire and laid her out. Blood had soaked her clothing, seeping through the fabric.
There was a repetitive blipping coming from a control panel on the wall: proximity-sensor alerts triggered by the assassins. Carter reached over, disengaged the alarms and welcomed the silence.
Carter threw a few logs on the glowing fire, then moved into the kitchen. He removed his coat, groaning, then his own jumper. Cuts and bruises appeared across his body and shoulders, across his throat and face and when he glanced into the mirror—
A battered shell gazed back. It grinned through damp glistening blood.
Carter ran off a bowl of hot water, grabbed a knife from the cedarwood rack and returned to the living room. He knelt, and carefully cut away Natasha’s clothing, her sopping silken shirt and bra. Her flesh was pale under Carter’s appraising gaze. He realised that she had, thankfully, taken only a single bullet but he still cursed, leaning over her to analyse the wound. It had entered high through the shoulder - tearing flesh, just missing the lodestone of bone within and exiting in a tight hole from the back of the muscle. An inch lower and it would have caused serious damage ... the hole was slick with fluid nestling like stagnant crimson rainwater in a tiny shell hole.
‘Shit.’
Carter limped to his study and grabbed a leather medical case; he returned to Natasha and pulled out a syringe, injecting her intravenously with a morphine-based sedative. He checked her pulse and BP, using the medscan on the ECube. Then he pulled free a sterile solution and cleaned first the front of the wound, and then, rolling her mumbling over onto her belly, the exit wound. Carter cleaned the hole, using a scalpel to shave free friction-burned flesh and cut out alien particles of metal and cloth. Using sterile wire, he finally stitched the fresh sliced skin together.
Stitching the front wound, Carter checked Natasha’s pulse and BP once more, then applied a sterile dressing to her tightly stitched flesh and also to the improvised hole in her throat. Then he linked her to a tiny mobile monitor,
which checked on heart rate, oxygen-saturation levels and blood compositions. He pulled down her trousers, checking for other wounds he might have missed. He checked her blood group and haemoglobin level, but her Hb was 8g/dl - dangerous, because the oxygen carrying capacity of her blood had been seriously reduced and she was in need of a transfusion. He strapped a tourniquet around her forearm, tightening it gently, then pulled free a cannula and tore off the sterile packaging. He inserted the thin needle into a vein of her hand, then eased it free, leaving the plastic sheath in place. Working quickly, he secured the cannula with a dressing and moved to the kitchen, removing a pint of his emergency store of universal O-negative; he grabbed a small folding metal stand from a low shelf, shaking free the dust, and returned to Natasha. He erected the stand, hung the O-neg from the narrow frame, and from his case removed a sterile blood-giving set. This he connected first to the unit of blood, being careful to prime the line before connecting the other end of the cannula, ready to commence transfusion. He flicked up the dial on the blood-giving set, and watched the drip rate in the chamber for a moment in order to establish a steady flow.
Content with his work so far, Carter considered wrapping her in foil, but decided against it - foil kept the cold in, and Nats was very cold. Instead, he merely wrapped her in blankets and piled more logs on the fire, giving her a final injection of antibiotics and another dose of sedative before stumbling to the bathroom himself.
He removed his torn, bloodied clothing, switched on the shower and stepped into the steam, wincing as the water lashed his broken face like a whip. Slowly, he lathered his body, washing free the dirt and sweat and blood -his own and that of others.
His brain hurt, his mind a whirlpool of confusion—
There were too many questions to answer, and a broken nose did nothing to calm his thoughts.
He stepped free and towelled himself gently, his movements lethargic now as the adrenalin left him. He looked at his face in the mirror and cursed. Heavy bruising, cuts and scrapes. His nose was a mess, twisted and deformed. He dragged the medical case over and, with some difficulty, injected himself with diazepam and waited for his flesh and soul to go numb and provide him with that sickliest of sweet sensations.
He pulled on shorts and a T-shirt, feeling a little groggy as the drugs ate his system resources. Then, taking his nose between his two thumb-heels, he counted to three and wrenched the bone and cartilage back into some semblance of position. Everything went black and he screamed, despite the anaesthetic. He vomited into the sink and stood there, leaning over the bowl, drooling and panting.
Carter glanced up.
His nose was straight once more, but buckled, like corrugated iron that had been beaten with a lump hammer. He grinned weakly, brushed gently at his teeth - avoiding the broken one - to remove the sour vomit, and splashed water on his face to carry away his pain-fuelled sweat.
He moved, checking on Natasha who was breathing more regularly now, the colour having returned to her face. He pulled on a heavy coat and gloves, and a set of boots unstained with blood, and trotted down the steps.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
‘I didn’t need you.’
‘You could have been killed; I would have wiped them from the face of the fucking earth ...’
‘I didn’t do so bad myself.’
‘Don’t trust Natasha.’
‘I don’t need your fucking advice, Kade. I never even asked you to come, so fuck off to whatever hell you inhabit and leave me with my thoughts. Life is hard enough without you sticking your spiritual nose into it…’
‘Ooh. Tetchy. The broken nose hurt, did it?’
‘Kade. Go.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘You are driving me mad!’
‘Good, isn’t it? I believe I have found my true vocation in life.’
Kade left, suddenly, and Carter felt even more lightheaded at the abrupt - unexpected - withdrawal.
He stepped out into the snow. Flakes were falling, heavier now, from a grey sky that cast silver shadows across the landscape. The world was silent, an oil painting of stillness and serenity: except for the intrusion of Samson who was worrying the corpse of one of the attackers, tearing at the stomach and chest, bloodied strips of flesh in his teeth—
‘Whoa. Sam, get the fuck out of here, you dirty little bastard.’ He chased the whining dog away, and Samson retired across the turning circle, lying under the trees and rubbing his muzzle between his paws, licking free the remaining blood. Carter located his Browning HiPower 9mm, checked the mag and the state of the weapon, and used a rag to wipe it free of blood and dirt. He checked the unconscious man, and then moved around the battered Mercedes and towards the edge of the woods. There were pools of deep red on the ground where the man whose legs he had shot had been standing; the blood led away and Carter followed for fifty paces until he found the man curled into a ball, dead. Carter checked him, then, taking him by his feet, dragged him deeper into the woods and rolled him down a small embankment into a snow-filled ditch.
He worked slowly, watched by Samson’s bright eyes. He pulled the corpse out of the Mercedes, and gathered the other bodies, dragging them all into the woods and laying them to rest in a line like some grisly murder scene from a horror novel. He rinsed the red stains from his hands with snow and returned to the final man, who was making low moaning sounds. Carter rolled him over onto his belly and pulled wire from his pocket, binding the man’s hands and feet so tightly that the wire cut deep. Then he dragged the tanned man to the porch, propped him against the foot of the stairs and placed a coat over him.
‘Don’t want you to die of exposure, my little flower,’ he muttered.
Night was falling fast with the snow, the heavy flakes tumbling through the darkness like leaves from some great tree. Carter moved to the cars and stood, hands on his hips, chewing at his lower lip - which began to bleed, forcing him to curse, head lifted into the darkness.
He got into the Mercedes, brushing shattered glass from the leather upholstery. The keys were in the ignition, the dashboard still illuminated. He turned the keys and the engine rattled into life, vibrating the buckled bonnet. A squealing - probably from the fan belt -emerged like the cry of a strangled cat. Carter pushed the automatic gearstick into reverse, shivering at the icy breeze and flakes of snow peppering through the shattered windscreen. He eased the accelerator. There was a groan of buckled steel as the Merc dragged the BMW back and then released it suddenly, leaving a twisted wing in its wake. Carter reversed the battered Mercedes, then turned it around to face the lane exiting from Carter’s own little world. He turned off the ignition and dropped the keys into his pocket. The front of the Merc was smashed to oblivion; no headlights, no grille, only an exposed and severely leaking radiator and a buckled shock strut. Carter moved to the BMW, eyes scanning the twisted coach lines. Two side windows had been smashed, a tail light was shattered and bullet holes had peppered the bodywork. The front end was OK, and Carter climbed in and started the engine. The 4.0-litre straight 6 kicked into life and rumbled steadily, fumes pluming from the wide twin-piped exhaust. Carter eased it into first gear - then cruised the BMW away from his house and out onto the snowbound road. The car ran reasonably smoothly, a few rattles and creaks and excessive noise from the shattered windows betraying its recent abuse. Carter turned the vehicle in the entrance to a field, then drove it back to his house, revelling in the still-powerful handling of the damaged motor.
He parked up the car. The central locking had become defunct - probably a stray bullet. He pocketed the keys and, re-entering the Merc, drove the long black car into the woods and out of sight of the road. Then he limped back to the porch and stared down at the would-be assassin; the man was big, much bigger than Carter and quite fearsome-looking. He was dark-skinned, almost Arabic in appearance. He had an oiled black moustache and was squinting up in pain - Carter gazed down at the man’s savaged shoulder and his broken nose and the wires biting into his skin. Cart
er crouched down. ‘Who are you?’
The man’s lips went tight.
‘Are you here to kill Natasha, or me?’
Silence. He looked straight ahead.
Carter’s fist slammed into his prisoner’s broken nose, and the man screamed, saliva and blood drooling from his mouth. His head hung, and then lifted slowly to stare at Carter. He spat into Carter’s face and grinned, deep red globules staining his teeth.
‘If that’s the way you want it.’
Carter grabbed the man’s hair, shouted for Samson, who was sniffing at the edge of the woods, and dragged the man up the stairs, wailing and bumping. He had to stop halfway up when a clump of hair finally came out in his fist, but he wound a larger portion between his fingers and dragged the man up the final steps, across the floor and into the kitchen. Moving to the back of the house he opened a door that led into a stone-floored utility room, mostly bare except for a washing machine and drier. It was terribly cold, and dark. Carter rolled the man down the three steps, and closed the door.
He returned to Natasha and slumped by her side. Her breathing was deep, her colour good. Samson trotted in and jumped into his basket in the corner, curling up and dropping asleep almost instantly.
Carter armed the house defences with the remote IR, placed his head on the sofa beside Natasha and wearily flicked on the TV. Keeping the sound low, he watched without interest as images danced in front of him. Carter hated the TV; the Americans called it the ‘dead-eye’ and he could understand why. But he acknowledged begrudgingly that it had its uses as he flicked through the news channels, eyes searching, brain working on maximum despite his weary state.
And then he saw it, like some incredibly bad coincidence ...
The camera swept across the devastation in London, across the huge circle of the explosion zone where once Spiral_H had nestled in its secret enclave. Carter did not listen to the reporter’s hysterical monologue because he did not need the commentary, and he did not care what the man had to say; instead his widened eyes watched the amateur camcorder footage, as filmed by a Japanese tourist. The sudden annihilation, the sudden disintegration, the sudden extinction of Spiral_H.