The only thing I needed right now was my brother the badass mass murderer. Sappy memories of the guy who used to bring me candy bars and taught me how to throw a knife when I was ten was not going to help. My brother had been an adult when I was young. He had never treated me as if I was a freak because I had killed Mr. Callow. If anything, he had treated me better after the incident, like a princess, a dangerous princess, but a princess. The birth of my niece had not changed that. He had continued to treat me well.
We all started looking down the corridors that surrounded us. Someone wielding a sword was waiting for us. If he caught us off guard, he’d take a few of us down before we even knew what was happening. The thought made me look at the door. There were indeed two men lying next to it, very dead. One had an eye falling out of its socket and his lips were parted just to the left of his nose, vertically. The other had a piece of wire in his hand. The arm was nearly severed and a second gash started at his scalp and ran down his face as well. Our swordsman had killed the planters of the bomb. Blue handled tools were half covered by the body of the first man. If I hadn’t been looking for them, I would have missed it. I pointed them out to Eric. He nodded, his eyes still searching for any sign of movement.
After several moments, I decided I could not continue to stand there, inactive and waiting. Either he would come out or he wouldn’t. I moved around my brother’s arm. His gaze followed me as I moved. I could feel it weighing on me. I took off the bloody jacket I was wearing and set it down on top of one of the dead guys. Once the bomb was frozen, I would need to remove it, wrap it up, and send it as far away as possible. I doubted we had ten minutes like on MythBusters, but six would be sufficient, if there were no hiccups.
Kneeling down, I very carefully began to pour the liquid over the C-4 and cell phone that acted like a battery. The cellphone began to crack as it froze. I hoped that wasn’t a bad thing. Caleb joined me. He didn’t kneel, but he did pick up my jacket and get it ready. Some of the nitrogen hit the wires. They instantly broke, too brittle to hold their own weight. I heard someone suck in air and realized it was me. I didn’t exhale as the last of the nitrogen was poured onto the device. It fell from the door on its own, the tape that had held it breaking as it became hard and no longer pliable or stable. Caleb caught it.
The moment it hit the jacket, he took off. He was right. His stride was long, his legs moving swiftly. I was surprised that both Dominic and Eric kept up with him.
The door was opened from the inside. Malachi, Gabriel, and Patterson appeared, ushering the women inside. I stood back, watching one hallway. Patterson stared down the other.
Our killer appeared in Patterson’s hallway. He was tall, lean, and sturdy without being overly muscled. A long blade was held loosely in his left hand. His eyes were ice blue and completely void of life.
The sword looked like it should be heavy, but it dangled as if it weighed nothing. A scimitar was a blade of beauty, built with both function and form in mind. It was also incredibly deadly in the right hands and nearly unheard of in the US. His face was young, but unfamiliar. I didn’t know if he was another covert import or one of our own, I wasn’t sure it mattered either. What I was sure of was that we really had nothing to go against him with. Malachi stepped into the hallway. I started shoving the women inside, moving them faster than they wanted to move themselves. Malachi handed Patterson his machete.
Gabriel shoved the last few females inside and held the door open for us. Gabriel looked like he had seen a ghost. His freckles appeared to float over his paperish face. I stared at him. He did not even look at me, his eyes glued to the figure in the hallway. I walked over and jerked the machete from Patterson’s hands. My million-year-old serial killing grandfather was not a sword fighter. I didn’t care how spry he was for his age.
“Go, help Gabriel,” I told him.
“You go help Gabriel,” Patterson snarked back. “And respect your elders.”
“You are not going to start sword fighting at your age.”
“I have lots of skills you have no desire to know about,” Patterson jerked the machete back. “Lots,” he emphasized. I stared at him.
“You two got this?” Malachi asked. I glared at him. “Someone needs to help Gabriel, and frankly, we have enough problems inside that we need a decent psychopath in there. If you two can handle Turkish Jack, I’ll go deal with the serial killers on the inside.” For the first time, I realized that Malachi was not at one hundred percent.
“Is that his name?” I asked Patterson.
“No,” Patterson answered and pulled a small item from his pocket. I wondered why Patterson had a pocket, but decided to press that issue at a different time. I looked at the item he was slipping into my hand. It was a small stun gun, ergonomically designed, and a thumbtack. Why my grandfather got a machete and I got this junk was beyond me. The stun gun wasn’t going to do much, maybe piss off Turkish Jack. The thumbtack was absolutely of no use. It wasn’t like a thumbtack could fend off a sword.
“Are you going to tell me his name?” I asked.
“No,” Patterson answered. He took a stance similar to our opponent. The machete didn’t look like much of a match for the scimitar, even less so since Patterson was a good foot shorter than Turkish Jack, at least fifty years older, and had no hair. I tried not to giggle at this last thought. There was no reason for hair to matter in a sword fight, but for some reason, I seemed to think it did.
Twenty-two
Turkish Jack, because I had no other name for him, rushed us. His feet carried him swiftly across the distance that separated us. I ducked and moved to my left. Patterson stood his ground, the metal of the machete screeching as it hit the scimitar. The counter movement seemed to surprise Turkish Jack for just a moment. His footing wasn’t solid for an instant as he went by Patterson. I reached out, hitting him with the stun gun. I might as well have patted him on the back. The electricity arced between the prongs, disappearing as it touched the skin of his arm. His arm twitched once and then he was back into a stance, sword still firmly grasped in his hand. I would have had better results throwing it at him.
Patterson took a similar stance. I stepped a little further away. I knew when I wasn’t going to win a fight. My grandfather did indeed seem to have some skills. The machete was smaller, heavier, improperly balanced for swordplay, but he used it as if he knew exactly what he was doing. He was also patient. He was able to wait out Turkish Jack. The swordsman made the first move again. Again, Patterson moved with him, countering his attack with his own. Patterson drew first blood.
I actually knew more about swords than guns, which was odd in and of itself, but I knew less about how to use a sword. I was going to have to learn and start carrying one. Of course, if it were like my baton, people who I trusted would take it away from me, often.
Footsteps made me turn. Caleb, Eric, and Dominic were headed our way. Caleb and Dominic stopped about ten feet away. Eric picked up the pace. He slipped in under Turkish Jack and smashed the baton against his hip as he avoided the scimitar. Patterson got more into it, going on the offensive, keeping the sword away from Eric. Eric spun around the killer, the baton being held at a strange angle. He snapped it out and pulled it back in from this position with such speed that if it had not made noise, I would have thought I imagined it. The scimitar clattered to the ground.
Turkish Jack reached for it with his other hand. He swung it wildly, arching it up. It whistled through the air, just inches from Eric’s body. I moved forward and kicked out. The man was having trouble getting to his feet, and I intended to keep it that way. My boot collided with his chest, left exposed by the wild swing. His breath left him in an audible burst. The sound of something breaking could be heard with it. Turkish Jack fell to the floor. Blood ran from his mouth.
“You must kick like a mule,” Eric said to me. Turkish Jack was wheezing.
“I have steel plates in these things, it helps.” I shrugged.
“Why didn’t you kick him earl
ier?” Patterson asked.
“He had a sword. I had a thumbtack and a stun gun. Not to mention, it was just us. Adding Eric helped; three to one are much better odds.”
“A good psychopath knows how to work with the tools they are given,” Eric told me.
“Sociopath,” I pointed at myself.
“Same principle.” Eric looked down at Turkish Jack. I couldn’t tell if he was dying or not. “I’m fairly certain you broke a rib and punctured a lung. We should get him a doctor and a chest tube.”
“Fine.” I looked over at Caleb. Caleb came forward. There was a tremendous noise. The ground beneath us shook violently enough to knock me off my feet. I landed on Turkish Jack, who was changing colors. Caleb pushed me off. He did something, then grabbed the machete and cut a smallish slit in Turkish Jack’s side. He inserted a straw. The wound sucked around it. Blood began to pour from the straw. His color was improving.
“Help me get him inside!” Caleb shouted. I wasn’t sure who he was shouting at. The bomb had theoretically been further away, but it seemed closer than the one on the stairs.
“Where did you put that?” I asked.
“One of the towers,” Eric told me.
“Holy shit,” I said. It had obviously been a much bigger bomb. Suddenly, I was very glad it had not gone off on the cafeteria door. It might have brought the whole front down.
The men lifted the tall, lean swordsman. I avoided the pools of blood behind them, bringing up the rear with his fallen scimitar in hand. It was an amazing feeling to hold it. It was wonderfully balanced and beautifully crafted. Someone had put a lot of love into this sword. It might have to go home with me at the end of the day, if it wasn’t claimed as evidence.
“Hey,” Gabriel stuck his head out the door. He looked at the man we were carrying and opened the door for us. We carried him inside. Gabriel stopped talking and just stared.
“We are getting some kind of garbled signal. I don’t know what you guys did, but it seems to have given us some kind of reception,” Malachi said.
“You did not feel it?” I asked.
“Oh, we felt it,” Fiona answered. “Just not sure what happened.”
“If I had to guess, one of the end towers collapsed,” Patterson said. “If that’s true, we can get out, but so can all the crazies.”
“Including you,” I told him.
“I said we could get out,” he answered, ignoring my jab that he was actually one of the crazies.
“Reception good enough to talk to Xavier?” I asked.
“No, it’s there, but still garbled. We can’t understand what they are saying. I believe we would need to knock down one of these walls to get reception that good and I’m not sure how much I want to do that,” Malachi answered.
“Is he going to die?” Gabriel asked. We all looked at him. Caleb was still working on him, sticking things into his body that didn’t belong. He’d been an army medic at one time, not as adept as Xavier, but good enough to stitch up injured serial killers and VCU members when it was necessary.
“Probably not, but Aislinn did break a rib and puncture his lung. As long as he doesn’t drown in his own blood, he’ll be fine for a couple of hours with a tube,” Caleb answered.
“She has an incredible kick,” Gabriel told him. “She broke a guy’s tibia once with single blow and she’s known to dislocate kneecaps.”
“Done?” I asked. “Want to talk about your relationship with this guy?” I asked my team leader.
“No,” he answered.
“Okay then, I don’t believe Father Bell Schneider was among those planting the bomb, but he is dead in the hallway. The others, well, I’m pretty sure that was exactly what they were doing. So, where does this guy fit in and why was Father Schneider out in the hallway?” I asked.
“This is John Doe,” Caleb pointed to the swordsman. “We have zero information on him. He can’t talk and when we asked him to write it down, he broke his fingers to make sure that they couldn’t give away his secret. We have him because he killed both here and in Canada. Earned the nickname Turkish Jack because of his weapon of choice. We can only estimate his age, which we think is around 40. He’s been in here since they opened the doors, seventeen years ago. We know of 90-some victims, but there may be more.”
“Cannot talk?” I asked, thinking of the super crazy serial killers like Von Geldberg.
“His vocal cords were removed at some point when he was a child. The scar has healed nicely, but we have searched medical records and can’t find any surgery that fits with it. Our guess is that it was done on the sly and we aren’t sure why,” Caleb offered.
“To keep him from talking.” I looked at Gabriel. “Canada, huh?” I dropped it. Gabriel was convinced he had seen a wendigo as a child. It supposedly ate a friend of his. He’d been staying with his family in Canada at the time. I wondered if there was a connection between Gabriel’s pale face and the serial killer with a scimitar. If there was, I wasn’t going to get that information without a few stiff drinks very far away from the walls of this place.
“On to more pressing matters,” Malachi pointed to Deacon Priest. He was slumped in his chair, the blood no longer dribbling from anywhere. He had lost some of his color. I wasn’t an expert, but he was dead. Next to him was a Marshal, handcuffed to a bench, no weapons visible, with a scowl on his face. There was dried blood that ran from his fingers, down the palm of his hand, and across his forearm.
“Good, with Aislinn’s anticlimactic end to our sword fight, I could use a little distraction.” Eric set his eyes on the Marshal. A spark of something came into them, making them gleam a little brighter, making the deep brown almost green. I realized my brother had hazel eyes and that they changed with stimulation to the optical nerve. More blood flow required dilation of the vessels in the iris, which would cause them to accept more light, changing their color. It wasn’t so drastic one would notice, but it was enough to let me know that he was enjoying the thought of causing the Marshal pain. It would be possible for me to sit back, grab a good viewing spot, and let the psychopaths do all the dirty work. I wasn’t a huge fan of torture, in the sense that I wasn’t sure I would stop once I started. I was part monster and that monster really wanted blood, especially today.
Suddenly, I was overtaken by fatigue. It had been a very long day. It felt like it had been several days, perhaps even weeks since I woke up this morning or the sirens had started going off. I had no idea where my mother, my dog, my sister-in-law, or my niece and nephew were. They had slipped my mind in the melee that had consumed me for the last several hours. Without realizing it, the calm had broken. Possibly, as soon as I had kicked Turkish Jack in the chest, breaking his rib and nearly killing him. I didn’t believe him to be one of the bad guys. I just wasn’t sure he was one of the good guys either. My foot was starting to hurt and I was starting to feel like I had been blown up. Then I looked at Gabriel. His face was still pale, his freckles still floating over his skin as if applied with an orangish-brown marker. His baseball cap reading SCTU was digging into his skin at the back of his head. He was very stressed out and not just about the swordsman. My eyes followed the length of his body, at least, the backside. There it was; a small dark spot on the back of his calf. Blood still flowed from the wound. Some of it flowed over the boots he wore and the material was absorbing some. It looked wet. I slapped Caleb in the chest and pointed. He looked at Gabriel until he found it.
Caleb was different from Xavier in many ways, but not when it came to injured federal officers. He walked over, stuck a knife in Gabriel’s jeans, and sliced them open to inspect the wound without saying a word to the man. Gabriel protested, but Caleb just grabbed his leg to hold him steady. Malachi looked over Gabriel’s shoulder to see what was going on. There was a hole in Gabriel’s leg and it wasn’t clotting. Caleb told him to hold still and stuck his fingers in the hole. Gabriel screamed and tried to jerk away, but Malachi and Patterson stopped him. In a few seconds, Caleb had removed the offensive i
tem, a small chunk of metal that had made its way into Gabriel’s leg. It didn’t look like a bullet and I wasn’t sure how it had gotten there or why he hadn’t mentioned it.
What I did know was that the pale face was what had broken the calm. I had been too absorbed to notice his injuries. Once my rational brain had grasped that there was something more to it than just the swordsman, the calm had lifted so I could see with my humanity the subtle changes in Gabriel.
Gabriel and Malachi exchanged heated words over the metal fragment. I stayed seated and watched, waiting for them to stop their foolishness. We had more important things to deal with. The guy with glasses came to mind. It was a vague description, but we might be able to get a better one out of the Marshal.
Twenty-three
Some people crack under torture, some do not, and then there are a few that crack at the very mention of it. Parsons wasn’t happy with the plan, but she sat next to Fiona and I with bated breath watching. She needed just as many answers as we did.
Thankfully, she didn’t have to watch much. Patterson still had my baton. One strike against Marshal Fulton’s leg and Fulton would have given up the Pope.
Sadly, he didn’t seem to know much. The mystery man was a Marshal, but he was pretty sure he was just a middle man. He’d been ordered to smuggle in a few items, including the sword I had laid claim to. He hadn’t smuggled in any bomb materials. His payment was going to be three million dollars in an off shore account, but he didn’t know who was paying him. He’d received half up front, a good faith payment. A week ago, he’d been told that the day after the codes changed, the uprising was to begin. It was his job to get Alejandro Gui a weapon and instruct the large former Marshal to get rid of Eric Clachan. This morning, Marshal Fulton had gotten a message telling him to ensure that Yuri also died since he wouldn’t accept the contract.
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