Souls At Zero (A Dark Psychological Thriller)

by Neal Martin

  The guards didn't care if they died. They only cared about killing anyone who threatened their master, Gabriel Mason.

  The huge knife came down fast, hurtling towards Edger's face. He managed to get both hands up to block the ascent of the blade before it pierced his skull, and he grunted with effort as he tried to hold the knife away from him, but the guard was strong and was leaning all of his weight down on the knife, and within seconds it seemed, the point of the knife was almost touching Edger's forehead. The guard clenched his teeth, looking like a wild animal as he put more effort into forcing the blade down another half an inch so that the cold tip of the steel blade pressed into Edger's forehead, breaking the skin, until Edger felt a trickle of blood run down his face, putting a coppery taste in his open mouth as he strained to stop the knife going any further.

  Shots were still being fired in the background, and Edger half hoped that one of those shots would hit his knife wielding attacker, although the guard was so determined, so full of blind fury, that Edger doubted a bullet would even stop him.

  The knife pressed further into Edger's forehead until he felt the tip scrape against his skull. If he didn't do something quick he would be dead soon.

  A wave of adrenaline charged up Edger's system as he clenched his teeth and strained against the massive force coming down on him. As his adrenaline peaked, he pushed up and jerked his head to the side, the tip of the blade slicing along his forehead as he did so, but he didn't care about that. What mattered was that he had gotten his head clear of the knife, and that the blade was now buried to the hilt in the soft earth as the guard continued to push down on it for a moment, one massive rounded shoulder and half his chest now pressing down on Edger's left side, leaving Edger only with the use of his right arm. Which was all he needed. He reached down and grabbed the butt of the Beretta strapped to his right leg, pulling the gun out and jamming it into the guard's ribs just as the guard managed to pull the knife out of the ground and raise himself up again. Edger's vision distorted then from the blood running from his forehead and into his eyes, but he didn't need to see to know what to do. He pulled the trigger on the Beretta four times while pulling away to his right. There was a loud grunting sound from the guard as he fell off Edger and thumped down to the forest floor.

  Breathing heavily, Edger wasted no time getting up. There was still shooting going on around him. Falling in behind a tree for cover, he wiped the blood from his eyes to clear his vision and aimed the Beretta out in front of him, just as another guard came crashing through the trees. A double tap to the chest put the guard down.

  "Black!" Edger called out, as a burst of gunfire hit the tree he was taking cover behind. He looked to his left, but couldn't see any sign of Black, so he called out again. "Black!"

  "They won't stop fucking coming!"

  Black's voice came from Edger's left, sounding about twenty yards away. At least he was still alive.

  Edger looked past the tree to his front. A line of guards stood at the crest of the slope, firing shotguns and machine pistols to where they thought Edger and Black were positioned. Edger pulled his head back behind the thick pine tree as a shotgun blast exploded into it, followed by a volley of 9mm rounds.

  Fuck this!

  Blood ran into his eyes and he wiped it away again, blinking rapidly to regain his vision.

  Then he looked down at his vest and saw the grenade hanging there. With a bloody hand he clutched and pulled it, the safety pin remaining on the vest as he detached the explosive device.

  Alright you's fuckers…

  As the incessant firing continued from the edge of the trees, Edger swivelled around the side of the pine tree he was crouched behind and tossed the grenade towards the crest of the grassy slope about twenty yards away, hoping it wouldn't hit any trees on its trajectory.

  The guards' gunfire continued unabated.

  Then several seconds later, there was a huge explosion that caused Edger to flinch behind the pine tree as dirt rained down on top of him.

  A few seconds after the shock of the blast had passed, Edger burst out from his position behind the tree and fired at the two remaining guards, one of whom was just getting to his feet, having been knocked down by the explosion. Edger shot him in the head just as a bullet from Black's gun hit the same guard in the chest.

  Edger moved to the start of the grassy slope and looked out towards the house. A single guard was running from the house towards him, firing a machine pistol. Edger dropped down, about to fire, when the guard's chest exploded with blood, and he went flying back. Black came running out of the trees behind Edger, a pistol in his hand. "So much for covert," he said, sweat and dirt running down his face, his expression pained as he struggled to maintain his breath.

  Edger looked around at the bodies lying everywhere. A few feet to the left there was a large crater in the ground where the grenade had went off. Two guards lay dead around it, both with missing limbs.

  "Are you alright?" Black was staring at Edger's face, at all the blood there.

  Edger wiped a hand across his eyes. "Fine," he replied. "Let's get into that fucking house before anymore guards come."

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Upon entering the back of the Mason house, Black and Edger stepped inside a fairly large room that appeared to be a utility room. Black, breathing heavily, his lungs feeling like they were full of burning acid, closed the door behind them.

  "Lock it," Edger said, his face covered in blood and dirt, looking like he had just risen from the grave.

  Black turned the key in the back door, hoping that no more guards would come from outside. "You need a bandage on that cut," Black said to Edger. "What the fuck happened?"

  "A knife happened." Edger went to the large tumble dryer against the far wall and hoked out a black top of some kind, which he proceeded to rip a wide strip off that he tied over the wound on his head.

  Maybe it was the adrenaline, but Black couldn't help laughing. "Now you really look like fucking Rambo."

  Edger shook his head. "You look like you're about to collapse, Black."

  "I feel like it as well." He put a hand against his chest and tried to take a few deep breaths but he couldn't move his breathing beyond shallow. Any deeper triggered a coughing fit. He spat a dark gob of blood onto the white tiled floor.

  "Stay here if you want. I can go on alone."

  "You think I'm just going to sit here and wait for some guard to burst in and shoot me? Fuck off. There's people to save, remember?"

  Edger nodded, then put a fresh magazine into the Beretta he was holding. "Let's go then."

  Black took a fresh magazine out of his coat pocket and slammed it into the Glock 17 he held before following Edger through a door that led into a massive kitchen. "How the other half live, eh?" Black said, taking in the expensive granite work tops and state of the art kitchen equipment.

  Edger said nothing as he moved on through the kitchen to the next door. Black stood just behind him, as Edger opened the door a crack to peer through to the other side. A second later, he pulled the door fully open, and they stepped through into a narrow hallway with wood panelled walls that seemed to lead into a large, open foyer. Just as they came to the end of the hallway, Edger said, "Shit!" and pulled back as a burst of automatic gunfire sounded. Bullets powered into the wood panelled walls beside them, the noise from the automatic weapons deafening inside the house.

  Edger returned fire quickly, getting off four shots before he had to pull back as another volley of rounds exploded into the wall beside him.

  "How many?" Black shouted.

  "Two!"

  Black crouched down low until he was level with Edger's knees, then he moved himself out of the hallway, just enough that he could see two black suited security guys standing at the left side of the foyer near the staircase. One of them was reloading his machine pistol. Black fired two shots and hit the guy square on the chest. The other security guy returned fire immediately at Black. As Black went to pull back
, he felt a massive impact hit him in the chest that slammed him against the wall, the breath, what little he had left, knocked out of him. As he lay groaning and exposed on the wood floor, he heard another burst of gunfire, this time from Edger, then Edger was down beside him, helping him sit up against the wall. "You alright, Black?"

  It was like being hit in the chest with a sledge hammer. His sternum felt shattered underneath the body armour he wore. His breath kept catching until he ended up hyperventilating. "I can't…" he said, struggling to breathe.

  "You're okay," Edger said. "Just get your breath back. Breathe, Black, breathe."

  "I…I'm fucking…trying."

  Christ, the bullet might has well have gone through the vest. He doubted it would have hurt any less.

  A minute or so later, he managed to get to his feet, just barely able to breathe again, his cancer filled lungs still feeling like two failing balloons filled with too hot air.

  "Can you move okay?"

  Black nodded, though he wasn't sure if he could. Not that he had a choice. It was move or die. He forced air in and out of his lungs. "I'm okay."

  "We need to find wherever those people are kept," Edger said, continually looking around him in case more security guards appeared. "My guess is that they're in some basement level."

  Black nodded. "Let's go find it then."

  They moved out into the grand foyer, which had a red and black tiled floor and a huge glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling high above. There were two doors to their right and another one to their left. There also appeared to be another hallway running along the other side of the ornate wooden staircase. While Edger moved to the left, Black moved to the right and opened the two doors there. The first door led into a library room that was filled floor to ceiling with old books. A musty smell hung in the air. Black surveyed the room for a few seconds. Under different circumstances, he wouldn't have minded indulging his curiosity and checking out the books on the shelves, but as it was, he left the room as soon as he realised there was no one in it.

  He glanced over at Edger as he moved to the next room. The ex-Legionnaire was just coming out of the room opposite. "Clear," he said, his gun held in a ready position.

  Black opened the door to the other room on his side. A reception room of some sort. No one inside.

  Edger stood next to the staircase, looking down the hallway. Black frowned, wondering why the man looked so spooked. "What is it?" he asked Edger as he came up beside him.

  "That door down there." Edger pointed down the hallway with his gun to a black painted door with some sort of red symbol on it. Black had to admit, the door looked ominous.

  They both moved down the narrow hallway. Before they came to the door, he wrinkled his nose at the strange smell that hung in the air, an almost nutty aroma mixed in with the smell of rotten eggs. "What the hell is that smell?"

  Edger turned his nose up as well. "Not sure. Smells like sulphur or something."

  The smell got stronger the closer they got to the door. Both men instinctively covered their nose and mouth.

  The symbol on the door was the now familiar Red Falcon symbol. They stood at either side of the door as Edger tried the handle, and then pushed it open.

  Both of them recoiled from the noxious fumes that wafted out at them as the door swung open. The gaseous atmosphere in the room caused them both to choke as it hit their throats. They knew that whatever the cause of the smell, it wasn't good, especially when they recovered enough to see what was inside the room.

  "Fuck me," Black said, one hand still covering his nose and mouth.

  The large candle lit room was filled with bodies, all wearing long dark robes, although some of the people had ripped their robes off to reveal flesh underneath that was a bright pink colour, adorned with dark red and green spots.

  Both Black and Edger stood back from the doorway as they gazed in horror at the mass of bodies inside the room. After another moment, they couldn't take the smell anymore, and moved back down the hallway. Black doubled over and threw up on the floor, retching until there was nothing left in his stomach. Edger stood gagging as well, like he was trying to get the smell and taste out of his throat.

  "Those were all the cult members in there," Edger finally said.

  "Yeah," Black said, his throat on fire, his stomach muscles aching from all the vomiting. "Looks like someone saved us a lot of bother."

  "I think we know who. Why the fuck would he kill them all like that? It seems like he gassed the whole lot of them."

  "Who the fuck cares? The cunt's are all dead. Good riddance."

  Edger said nothing. He was looking past Black at the wood panelling on the side of the staircase. "What's that?"

  "What?" Black turned his head to see what Edger was staring at, and noticed an outline in the wood. "Might be a door, although I can't see how to open it."

  Edger started pressing around the outline in the wood panelling. As he pressed near the middle left edge, a section of the panelling sprung out a few inches from the rest and then slid across to reveal an opening and a staircase leading down to a lit corridor. "I think we've found a way down to the basement."

  Black spat blood onto the floor and wiped a hand across his mouth. "After you."

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Edger pointed his Beretta down the concrete staircase, and then proceeded to head down. Black followed close behind him.

  The stairs led to a narrow hallway down below, which in turn led onto a wider corridor that was lit with strip lights. The phosphorescent lights on the ceiling kept blinking off and on, like the power going to them was cutting out for seconds at a time. Coupled with the silence, it gave the place an eerie feel. The air was also cold down there, with a strong smell of disinfectant to it, but also another smell, one which Edger recognised immediately.

  The smell of death.

  On both sides of the corridor there were a number of rooms. The top rooms appeared to be laboratories of some kind, and Edger remembered Rankin talking about the rumours of experiments supposedly being conducted by Mason.

  "I guess this is where Dr Frankenstein does his work," Black said, as he peered through the windows into the labs.

  Edger walked on down the corridor, the silence of the place unnerving him. He was half expecting more guards, but there were none.

  And then he looked through one of the large windows on down the corridor, and couldn't believe his eyes when he saw what appeared to be a boy sitting in the middle of an empty room, naked it seemed, and covered in what looked like excrement. The boy raised his head slowly to look at Edger through the glass. Despite the muck all over the boy's face, Edger noticed what was in the boy's eyes. The same thing that he saw in his brother Declan's eyes. A deadness, an emptiness brought on by forced trauma and abuse.

  Edger went to the door that lead into the room. It was a metal door, electronically locked. You needed a key card to open it.

  "Jesus Christ," Black said when he joined Edger and looked through the glass at the boy in the room. "Is he covered in his own shit?"

  Edger moved down the corridor to the next room and looked through the window. In the brightly lit room was a naked girl who looked younger than his own daughter. She was standing in the very corner of the room, against the wall, while a pack of large brown rats sat around her. The rats were sniffing at the blood on her feet, caused by the cuts on her legs and body. Occasionally, one of the rats would try to bite the girl, and she would scream and try to kick the rats away from her. The rats hardly moved. They knew they had the girl trapped, that she had nowhere to go.

  Banging on the glass, Edger said, "Hold on!"

  He stepped back to the middle of the corridor and pointed his silenced Beretta at the window. When he pulled the trigger the bullet merely bounced off the glass. He fired another round and the same thing happened, the bullet bouncing off the fortified glass and ricocheting of the concrete wall behind him.

  "We need a key card," Black said. "Before you
shoot yourself."

  "Fuck. Check those labs up there. I'll go this way."

  Black went to the labs while Edger moved deeper down the corridor, his sense of horror increasing as he came across more and more rooms, each room holding a naked girl or boy in it, some of them plainly injured in some way, blood running off them, others so defiled in unspeakable ways that they just lay in their prison cells curled up and overwhelmed by the trauma they had underwent. Edger counted over a dozen rooms before he came to another corridor that led to the left.

  This corridor also had doors on both sides, but no windows. Every door was electronically locked except one. The metal door was open. Raising his gun, Edger entered the room, almost gasping when he saw the array of torture implements hanging on the walls and spread out over the top of a large steel gurney. In the centre of the room there was something like a dentist's chair with straps hanging off the side of it, obviously designed to keep whoever was in the chair from escaping. The concrete floor around the chair, although scrubbed clean, was still stained with red patches, like the blood from the victims had soaked permanently into the porous concrete.

  A chill ran through Edger as he realised his brother had been in a similar room in the video he and Black had watched. These were the rooms the Red Falcon members came to in order to have their sadistic fun. Cunts like McGinty, Rankin, all the others.

  At least their all dead now.

  That was something at least.

  All but one anyway.

  Mason.

  Edger walked out of the torture room just as he heard a loud scream echo down the other corridor.

  Black.

  He sprinted up the corridor to see the ex-cop go stumbling out of one of the labs, no gun in his hand, holding onto his side like he had been injured. A split second later, a woman in a white coat rushed out after him, holding what seemed like a very long knife in her hand, screaming like a banshee as she went to attack Black.

  Throwing the Beretta up as he ran, Edger fired at the knife wielding lab assistant, hitting her four times in various parts of her upper body, the last shot going through her skull and splattering her brains all over the wall next to her.