Defender

by G X Todd

  ‘WHERE IS SHE?!’ Dumont screamed.

  Something struck the side of Pilgrim’s head. Hot and wet. It hit him a second time and the world blurred as a shock of agony blew out the back of his skull. Dumont hammered his pulped hand into Pilgrim’s face a third time, and Pilgrim did the only thing he could. He pulled the shotgun’s trigger.

  The thunderous blast sent white-hot needles lancing into his eardrums. Dumont’s cry of pain joined his own.

  Above them, the glass-vaulted ceiling exploded.

  Pilgrim shoved the shotgun into Dumont’s hands and had a split second to enjoy the man’s shocked expression before he bolted away, a clinking sound of giant ice-cubes chasing after him. The first bits of glass hit Pilgrim’s shoulders as he vaulted the nearest armchair and dropped behind it. Lacey crouched only a few feet away, eyes large, her rifle cradled in her arms. She was too near. Shards of deathly glass began to rain down around her, and Pilgrim scrambled from behind the armchair, larger pieces now smashing on to tabletops, shattering in glittery explosions, others smacking into leather with meaty slaps. Under the sound of mini glass-grenades detonating behind him, he heard a clunking, ratcheting sound and knew Dumont was pumping another cartridge into the shotgun.

  Pilgrim threw himself at Lacey, knocking her flat, covering her with his body. She curled herself into him. Her breaths blew hot against his throat.

  But no shotgun blast came; instead there was a heavy, solid thump, followed by a short, sharp crack like a small-calibre gun going off.

  And then the world, which had sounded like it was coming down around their ears, very quickly grew quiet. Small smatterings of chinking glass, accompanied by the odd thump or crack, were all that was left.

  Pilgrim raised his head. Glass sparkled everywhere: the stars that had glimmered above them in the dark skies had settled on every surface. Dumont lay stretched out on his front, a five-foot-wide sheet of glass laid over his head and upper body, split down the middle so it tented over him in two large sections. Through the transparent pane, Pilgrim saw the crushed side of Dumont’s skull, grotesquely flattened under the heavy window, as if it were a specimen under a large slide waiting to be studied beneath a giant microscope. Pinkish-white meat oozed from the crushed skull, pushing up against the glass.

  It’s not meat. It’s brains.

  One bulging eye stared at Pilgrim.

  It blinked.

  Lacey’s head twisted, turning to see, but he cupped his hand over her eyes and said, ‘No.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No,’ he said more firmly.

  The shotgun lay beyond Dumont’s outstretched hand.

  ‘Up,’ Pilgrim ordered as he climbed off the girl. Glass tinkled as it fell from him.

  ‘What happened?’ Lacey asked breathlessly. As she rose to her feet she tried to look again, but he stepped in front of her to block her view. He wasn’t protecting her from death; that was one aspect of her life now that she would have to get used to. But cracked skulls and exposed brains were a different kind of death altogether.

  ‘What happened? Is he dead?’

  ‘Yes. He’s dead.’ He gripped her shoulder and turned her to face the main doors. Boots crunching, he quickly retrieved the shotgun, hissing as all his pains flared when he bent to scoop it up, and then he hustled her ahead of him, not giving her a chance to ask more questions but firmly guiding her out of the lounge.

  The darkness was a welcome shroud when the door shut at his back, but one that was no longer necessary, so he asked for the flashlight and the girl handed it to him, her movements jerky and robotic. He turned it on and directed the beam on the floor. Like he’d thought – like he’d hoped – droplets of blood dotted and streaked the gleaming tiles at their feet.

  Alex’s blood.

  ‘I thought you said no noise. No shooting.’ The girl’s words were hushed, and even more breathless. Her eyes were still too big, her face pale in the white backwash from the flashlight.

  ‘Plans change. Let’s go.’ If he kept her moving, kept her mind occupied with action, she wouldn’t have time to think about what had happened in there.

  How many is it now that you’ve killed in front of her?

  Pilgrim didn’t answer.

  ‘But there’s blood all over you.’

  He glanced down at himself. His hands were covered in streaks of dark, wet blood. Attempting to wipe them clean would be futile: his shirt was a sopping, bloody mess, too.

  ‘It’s not mine.’

  The girl reached for his shoulder, and he felt a quick, sharp sting. She held up a sliver of glass two inches long, pinched between her fingers. A ruby droplet hung from its point.

  ‘Some of it is,’ she whispered.

  He met her eyes for a second. She dropped the glass and it clinked to the tiles, echoing prettily through the lobby. The drips of his own blood had joined Alex’s on the floor, and he stepped around the girl, tracking them back past the escalators and to the emergency door Doc had gone through. He checked to see if the girl was following and found her still standing outside the Lounge of Stars. In a low voice, he called her name. Even from twenty yards away he saw her flinch and shake herself off. She hurried over to him.

  With the girl at his heels, he pushed through into the stairwell and went down the steps, leaning heavily on the railing to prevent his leg giving out beneath him. His head continued to hurt from the blows he’d taken, and his left eye was practically useless now; not even a myopic blur muddied his vision, only a dark, dense fog, as if half of his body were readying itself for the grave.

  Not yet.

  ‘No, not yet,’ he muttered.

  The blood trailed from the bottom step and under the door, leading back into the second-floor lobby. The floor where the remainder of Dumont’s people waited.

  CHAPTER 7

  As she stood outside the Lounge of Stars, Lacey’s mind whirled. All the gunshots and crashing glass had made her ears ring, deadening all sound, as if she’d submerged her head in a tub of water. She’d jumped when the shotgun had gone off a second time, ducking instinctively as the ceiling above their heads exploded in a shattering crescendo. But before she could see what that falling storm of razor-like shards would do, the Boy Scout was pushing her to the floor and sheltering her with his body. He’d given her no time to ask questions or see the scene for herself but bullied her to her feet and manhandled her out of the room before her brain could scrabble to catch up.

  She didn’t know why he felt the need to protect her. She understood what had happened. In fact, she wanted to see.

  Muffled ears didn’t mute Voice – he came through loud and clear. No you don’t. You don’t want to see that.

  But she did! Dumont was responsible for hurting her friend. For torturing her. She wanted to see his face frozen in open-mouthed agony, the blank death-stare, the broken bones, the bleeding wounds. She wanted to see him get everything he deserved.

  No, Lacey. Someone deserving it and you seeing it are two different things. You learned that with Jeb. You don’t need to see the cracked-open skull, or his dead, bulging eyes, or the obliterated bones of his hand sticking out like snapped twigs.

  Lacey pressed a hand over her mouth, closing her eyes for an instant when Voice’s description conjured a gruesome scene in her head. When she opened them, the Boy Scout was scanning the ground, the flashlight sweeping the floor at their feet.

  She swallowed when she saw the dribbles of blood down there, some his, the rest not. Dabs and speckles and drizzles, as though someone had taken a treacle dipper, dunked it into a vat of gore and walked with it across the floor tiles. Something unlocked inside her at the sight – she almost heard an audible snick – and a flood of horror and dread surged out. So much blood. She’d seen pools of it in the last four days. A lake’s worth. From the siblings at the motel, to the Boy Scout getting shot and Jeb bleeding to death, to Lou taking a bullet to the chest, and now more blood at their feet, as if, everywhere she went, the spilling of blo
od either preceded or followed her. She was leaving tracks of it in every place she visited.

  Her hand had snuck to her St Christopher and she held on to the medallion tightly. ‘I thought you said no noise,’ she whispered, unable to take her eyes from a particularly heavy swirl of dark, viscous red. ‘No shooting.’

  ‘Plans change,’ the Boy Scout replied. ‘Let’s go.’

  She dumbly looked up at him. ‘But there’s blood all over you.’

  He dispassionately studied the mess. ‘It’s not mine,’ he said.

  Something glinted at his shoulder and before she knew what she was doing, she had released the St Christopher and was pinching the cool glass between her thumb and forefinger and pulling it free. It slid out of his flesh easily, like pulling fork tines out of a slab of steak. Blood welled up through the material of his jacket and she felt a hot tingle rise up the back of her neck and into her scalp.

  ‘Some of it is,’ she whispered to him, the shard of glass slipping from her numb fingers. She barely heard it hit the tiles.

  He dropped his eyes from hers, becoming alert again as he went back to investigating the floor. No more words passed between them. He headed off across the lobby, a hunter tracking his injured prey.

  She was left facing the closed doors of the Lounge of Stars, the light from the flashlight fading quickly as the Boy Scout moved away from her. Soon those doors would be in complete darkness, and what they’d left behind them would be in darkness, too, all that blood and death hiding in there like some grisly banquet waiting to be fed on. Evil things glut themselves on such bloody feasts, don’t they? If she listened hard enough, couldn’t she hear the slick and meaty chewing of something feeding in there?

  Let’s go, Lacey, Voice said, breaking into her thoughts.

  ‘Lacey!’ the Boy Scout called out simultaneously.

  She hurriedly turned away from the doors, fear quickening her pace as she ran to catch up. She followed the Boy Scout through the emergency door and into the stairwell. The atmosphere seemed to alter as the door clunked shut; it became cold, almost frigid, and the oppressive smell of spilled blood disappeared as if a mist had been lifted. Lacey breathed in deeply: once, twice, three times. The grey cement stairs led downward into darkness. Lacey could see the dribbles of blood swirling along the treads, black as oil. She shivered.

  As they descended, their steps echoing eerily, Lacey couldn’t help placing one hand lightly on top of the Boy Scout’s uninjured shoulder. She told herself it was to help guide her, the bright shine of the flashlight not sufficient to show every step. But that wasn’t the real reason. Not the real reason at all.

  CHAPTER 8

  After reloading the shotgun, Pilgrim held the door handle to the second-floor lobby for a beat of four seconds. He knew it was impossible to feel any transference of intent through an inanimate object, that there was no way he could interpret what was on the other side, yet he held the handle and tried to because what else could he do? Their time was up. Or, more accurately, Alex’s time was up. Whatever questions Doc wanted to ask her, she wouldn’t have the answers he sought.

  Go.

  He opened the door and swung the shotgun in a low sweep, the beam from the flashlight stabbing through the dark. The lobby and escalators were clear. He checked the floor, found the trail and, like a bloodhound, followed it to the right and into the corridor he knew led into the buffet dining hall.

  You can’t go in there. There are too many of them.

  Even with Dumont dead, Posy locked up and the two men out on watch, potentially, over twenty men and women were left between them and Alex. Too many to take on.

  ‘He locked me in the freezer,’ Lacey whispered from behind him. ‘Remember I told you?’

  The service and employee areas of the hotel-casino hadn’t been marked on the map, but he knew the kitchens must be vast in order to supply the large numbers of diners visiting the buffet hall. He only hoped they could access the kitchens without being spotted.

  ‘Keep your ears and eyes open,’ he told her.

  Still following the blood, he slowed them down to a walk, now more cautious, his ears pricked up, straining to hear. As they turned the third corner, there was a low, indistinct drone that steadily clarified into a number of voices, all talking at once. Pilgrim knew that the kitchens and cafés would have been the first areas to be plundered, that stores of food were their number-one priority. And now that they had left the kitchens and stockrooms empty, they had moved elsewhere to stockpile their stolen caches and to indulge in their findings. Indeed, all the voices sounded boisterous and jovial, with bursts of laughter and shouting.

  The gunshots from upstairs had gone undetected.

  Pilgrim turned off the flashlight when a faint, sallow glow lightened the corridor in front of them, the source of illumination coming from somewhere around the next bend. The voices became louder still, and Pilgrim guessed there must be at least seven or eight people. He cautiously edged a look around the corner and immediately pulled back. The last part of the corridor opened up into a huge canteen-style hall. In the short glimpse he’d had, there had been seven people sitting around the tables nearest to the hall’s entryway.

  A gunshot rent the air and Pilgrim jerked, dropping into a crouch so fast his stomach gave a weak flip, but the bang was followed by a wild braying of laughter.

  Fun and games.

  ‘They’re wasting their ammunition,’ Pilgrim muttered.

  It’s one less bullet to shoot us with.

  In his brief glimpse, Pilgrim knew there would be no way forward, not unless they wanted to walk in on the live-fire party going on in there. They needed to find another way.

  ‘What about Posy?’ Lacey said, her voice pitched low. The girl was strung tight with tension, obviously desperate to move, to get to Alex, her anxiousness notching up steadily the longer they stood doing nothing. For all they knew, the man known as Doc may have already started carving.

  Straight away, Pilgrim knew what the girl was getting at, and he baulked at the idea. It was too brazen. They’d never get away with it.

  There’s a chance it could work.

  ‘No,’ he murmured. ‘It’s impossible.’

  But the more he thought about it, the less crazy it seemed.

  Why is it impossible? They’ve never seen you before.

  ‘They’ve seen the girl,’ Pilgrim pointed out. ‘They’d recognise her.’

  He’d been talking to himself, but the girl didn’t comment. Instead, her expression closed down and turned mulish. He could see how much it killed her not to argue with his train of thought, but she simply stared at him. He wondered if Voice was advising her to hold her tongue and wait him out.

  If he was, it worked.

  ‘OK,’ Pilgrim said. ‘Let’s try it.’

  They backtracked swiftly, the speed of their retreat verging on reckless. The stool was still jammed under the door handle of the closet. When they pulled the door open, Posy drew his knees up instinctively and a low whine rattled from his throat, muffled behind his makeshift gag.

  With the explicit understanding that Pilgrim would shoot Posy’s spleen out of the side of his ribcage if he blew their cover, the two men walked side by side around the last bend of the corridor and casually strolled into the dining hall.

  It was a disconcerting thing to approach a group of unpredictable strangers armed with knives, cleavers and a scattering of firearms. Not one of them looked like a rational, civilised human being, which wasn’t a surprise, considering they didn’t live in a civilised, rational world any more. The three people who sat facing the entryway – one older woman and two stocky, bearded men – were the first to look up, and when the four remaining people who had their backs to Pilgrim saw the shift in their companions’ attention, they also turned around.

  Another group was huddled around a set of tables against the western wall. Only two of them bothered looking up when they came in. Lacey had told him she’d seen four people tied before she
left; now there were six. One man was slumped over the tabletop and didn’t stir when the woman opposite him shoved at his shoulder. Her dark eyes met Pilgrim’s. Distrust, anger, suppressed fear: it was all there. In the seat beside her an older captive in his fifties shook his head and murmured something. She dropped her eyes and stared angrily at her bound hands.

  The male-to-female ratio in the armed group was 5:2. Women didn’t last long in these types of set-ups, not unless they were as physically strong as the men or had something else to offer. The rest, if not abused and left bleeding in the dust, were kept alive for a protracted amount of time to be repeatedly used. You had to be a strong woman to survive. Or a strong enough woman to take yourself out of the situation altogether.

  An older female, grey-haired and weathered, any beauty she’d had long since faded, watched Pilgrim with canny eyes. Sitting across from her, the second female was younger, with a mass of dark, tangled hair and a puckered scar that ran from her eyelid to the corner of her mouth. It made the eye droop and her lip quirk up unnaturally on one side.

  Dumont’s cast-off maybe, his small voice suggested, and Doc’s handiwork.

  A bundle in a tatty blanket lay swaddled against her breast. She had her shirt unbuttoned down to her navel, leaving the entire left side of her chest exposed. A tiny baby suckled on one dark nipple, a newborn, no more than a few weeks old. It made soft snuffling noises as it fed. The woman sat very close to the man beside her – a gruff-looking, wiry guy of indeterminate age. He had narrow features and cagey eyes, and he scrutinised Pilgrim closely as he and Posy approached. Pilgrim reasoned that the woman and baby belonged to him, and that he was extremely protective of his property.

  The rest of the men were comparable. Beards, dirty, a coiled, wired energy barely restrained. The only one to stand apart was Buzzcut; he had a full, bushy beard as rough and coarse as the head of a broom and a closely shaven skull that revealed the silver nicks of many scars and a homemade tattoo behind his right ear: a black, spidery-thin spiral. He held a large hunting knife and was absent-mindedly sticking it into the table, levering it out, jabbing it in again. Thunk-snick-Thunk. He didn’t look at the knife while he did this. Instead, he eyed Pilgrim.