“Oh my goodness!”
Sarah reached out with her free hand and clamped his lips closed with a finger and thumb. “No talking. Understand?” she whispered.
He nodded, eyes as wide as a doper’s pupils; lips still trapped.
“Go out to your car; lock the doors, and wait for me, understand?”
He nodded again. She released his lips and pointed to the exit. He straightened his black, leather coat then turned and ran for the door.
Sarah ignored him and traced back to the beginning of the blood trail. Now that morning had broken, she could see more of the interior. When she’d first arrived, the stars had winked at her from a bruise colored, dawn sky, and she could only see the contents confined within the cone of her flashlight’s beam.
The large room held a mess of scattered tools, bags of cement, buckets, sawhorses, and drywall. Wires and cables hung from the ceiling and snaked along the cement floors. White plaster-dust coated everything like a blanket of December snow. Drills and power saws, nail-guns and levelers, tool-belts and leg-extensions littered the floor like pieces of shrapnel on a battlefield.
And blood — everywhere.
The sawdust and plaster had absorbed some of it, but small puddles, still thick and shiny and too fresh to be hidden, dotted the scene. Sarah found small pools in nine different spots, along with spray patterns that stitched the walls and ceiling with crimson graffiti. The trail led to an open doorway at the far, east end of the big room. She listened, standing to the side of the doorway. The chirping of the early birds outside mixed with the awakening roar of rush-hour traffic, lending a surrealistic feel to the already bizarre landscape.
And something else.
From inside the room came a scraping. Not much, just a shifting of debris, but something had caused it. She keyed her shoulder-mic, gave her call sign and requested a cover car. Dispatch confirmed her request, but Sarah knew dayshift would still be in briefing and it would take a few minutes for anyone to get to her. She should wait.
The scraping sound again.
It had been a rough year for Sarah, one thing after another. It started with the death of her father which left her parentless. Then came the hail storm that trashed her car and her roof in one fell swoop. Next came the twenty-three year old college punk busting her across the face with his beer mug. Add to that her dog, which she had gotten for her twelfth birthday, getting crushed by a car, and her boyfriend dumping her, and just how much could one woman take?
Well, at least she could say adieu to the old year and hello to the new. This one had to be better. Didn’t it?
Holding her gun in a two-fisted grip, she carefully pied the doorway, clearing a wedged shaped section with each sidestep until she passed to the opposite side. Plenty of blood and tools and building materials, but little else. Sarah darted into the room, checking her blind spots with a quick turn of the head, then stopped with her back to the wall, surveying the rest of the expanse. She saw more blood than in the other room and something on the floor next to a cardboard box by the far wall. It looked like a mitten or a glove, but some inner sense told her otherwise. Not as much sunlight made it in here so she took out her flashlight and held it under her gun hand as she advanced. Slowly she walked up on the object, her eyes continuing to scan the room and taking note of the doorway, again at the far east, leading into yet another room. Stopping, nearly on top of the item, her hackles raised another notch and the cold dread of panic beat at her temples.
A human hand sat in the dust, severed at the wrist just below the white outline of a watches’ resting place. A single drop of blood balled neatly on the ring finger.
A crazy thought struck her. What time is it? Well, the big hand is on the floor and where the little hand is…I don’t know.
A laugh born of hysteria tried to bubble up her throat but she fought it down.
The box moved.
Sarah covered it with the muzzle of her pistol. With her lead foot, she tipped the top of the box. A tabby, long and lanky, its fur ratty and matted, one ear torn and a ragged scar bisecting its glowing, almond eyes, jumped out at her.
She almost screamed.
She almost pulled the trigger.
She almost wet herself.
But her training and experience paid off and she did none of those things. Heart racing she watched as the cat left the room in three bounding leaps, a long screech; half wail, half growl streaming behind it.
It sounded hungry.
Forcing herself to breathe, she trained her light on the far doorway. The body would be in there. Sarah had no doubt of that. Whoever did this had had a fight on his hands. They must have battled all through the place; blood stained everything, everywhere and Sarah felt certain that anyone losing his hand, his manhood and most of his blood, must also have lost his life. The victim would be in that room. Sarah owned an exceptional sense of spatial dimension and knew, having seen the place from the outside, that this was the farthest reach of the building. So the trail ended there.
In the distance, she heard the lonely wail of a siren; help on its way, and it wouldn’t take long. Nowhere in Gunwood took long to get to. The city spanned only one point six square miles in its entirety.
For the second time she considered waiting, but there might be someone alive in there. She might be able to save him; seconds could mean the difference between life and death.
Of course, the suspect might be in there too.
Still, she had a gun, a baton, pepper spray, a Taser and a bulletproof vest. What did the victim have? Nada — less than nada — being shy a hand, his manhood and most of his blood.
A few months ago her boyfriend, Daniel, ex-boyfriend now she reminded herself, had brought over the DVD of No Country for Old Men. She thought of how Tommy Lee Jones’ character had faced a similar dilemma when coming up against true evil. In the movie he had chickened out and retired in shame because of it.
The dark hole of the room gaped at her like a hungry mouth waiting to swallow her.
She shrugged her shoulders, easing the tension building there. Tommy Lee was a wuss.
2
The Marine
* * *
Khost, Afghanistan
* * *
Dominic Elkins, Staff Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps — outfitted in desert cammos and Interceptor Body Armor which were torn and fractured in several places by both bullets and shrapnel — gritted his teeth, clutched his M4A4 stubby nosed rifle close to his chest and allowed his body to fall, head first, down the air conditioning shaft. He’d rather have climbed in the other way around, but he didn’t have the energy and was losing blood fast.
Cool in here; almost cold. So different from the desert heat of the Afghanistan afternoon outside, a small pleasure he hadn’t expected — but dark and close — claustrophobic. The frightening feeling in the pit of his being as he fell — that light slightly dizzy stomach floating feeling he always got on an elevator or on the downhill slope of a roller coaster — washed over him. He ignored it as just another unpleasantry, one of a thousand that Marines had to endure in combat, and steeled himself for the jolt of impact that awaited him at the bottom. A joke from the past flitted across his mind, ‘Nobody ever died from falling — it’s the sudden stop at the bottom that gets you’. He almost laughed. Pain stopped him — pain and the thought of his men dying.
I have to save them, I have too. It’s my fault they’re in this mess. I should have seen the danger. That’s my job.
His shoulders and back brushed against cool sheet metal, a whisper at first that quickly changed to the loud crinkle and clang of denting and flexing metal as his weight shifted swiftly from one point to another on his downward glide. The angle turned and curved subtly until he was no longer free falling but instead zipping along on a long fast slide that ended smoothly with a gentle upturn that allowed friction to bring him to a stop. Turning to the side, he made out the empty hole where a grate had been, but now rested eight feet below on the flo
or of a lighted room.
Smoke hung heavy in the air and from his location Dominic could hear the frantic chatter of machine gun fire punctuated by grenade explosions.
Someone’s still alive and fighting; at least there’s that.
Dragging himself a little way farther down the shaft, he swung his legs out the hole and let gravity do its thing. He landed on his feet, but his knees buckled and he crumpled to the shrapnel strewn floor. His Kevlar helmet cracked hard on the tiles making the room spin before his eyes, jarring every wound on his body and tearing open clotted holes and tears. But this wasn’t the time to rest and bleed out. He used the butt of his rifle to help gain his feet, staggered to a wall and used it for support as he made his way toward the gunfire. Pulling his M4 to his shoulder, he scanned the way before him with the fitted EOTech sight that painted a perfect red dot showing him his bullet’s exact placement should he fire. He left the room through a pulverized doorway and entered a long dark hall. Bodies littered the way. Civilians. The hostages he and his men were here to save. Throats slashed, others shot through the head and a few decapitated. Dominic almost tripped over a woman staring up at him. A bloodless hole decorated her forehead above the right eye. Her burka sagged, veil-less; her Perahan Tunban torn and pulled up showed her ankles and calves. Alive this would have been considered a shameful act according to Sharia Law, but in death pride and shame lost all power leaving only the naked brutality of wanton violence.
The sounds of combat grew steadily louder. Blood loss and fatigue made him sloppy. He let his tactics slip and staggered across an open doorway. Splinters of wood scattered across his face as bullets ripped apart the doorframe. Dropping to one knee he fired a three round burst into the chest of a Taliban terrorist who ran; shooting at him from the hip. The man’s chest exploded and he jerked to the side and fell twitching. Dominic thumbed the weapon back to single shot.
Dragging himself back to his feet, Dominic saw his own blood spatter big drops on the floor. He took several deep breaths and moved forward through the room. More bodies littered the scene; some civilian, some Taliban and one of his men; Corporal Jarrod Black. Most of Jarrod’s face was gone and his arms and torso were scorched and black. Dominic reached down and pulled off one of his dog tags. He tucked it into a pocket and continued on.
Equilibrium shot and energy nearly depleted he staggered on. Dominic sent up a silent prayer asking God for strength and endurance. A sneaky voice from his subconscious spoke up telling him that God didn’t listen to murderers. He shoved the voice aside and pushed through the next two rooms. He rounded a corner; coming up behind a wall of screaming, shouting, shooting men.
They were the enemy and they had his men trapped at the far end of a large, open room, maybe thirty yards long and twenty wide. His men were laying down a steady barrage of gunfire, hiding behind a haphazard barricade of thick wooden tables and toppled metal file cabinets. The Taliban were lined up behind several doorways along a curved hallway that fed into the large room. Dominic waited less than twenty feet behind the closest of the enemy soldiers. They hadn’t noticed him yet.
Time for that to change.
3
Sarah Hampton
* * *
Evidence
* * *
Sarah re-gripped her gun and approached the room as she had before, carefully wedging it off piece by piece. She spotted a shoe sticking out from behind a pillar, its rounded toe pointing toward the ceiling. The man sat with his legs straight out, the pillar hiding him from view.
Controlling the urge to charge into the room, she forced herself to finish clearing as wide an area as possible. A light sheen of sweat slicked her forehead despite the cold of December. Sweat tickled at her nose beneath the splint. She ignored it. She licked her upper lip tasting her salt, her fear.
She entered the room.
This part of the building was more finished, making her flashlight the only source of light. Dust rolled through the beam, dancing like mote-sized fairies invited to a waltz. The empty walls bounced sound back and forth, echoing in on themselves so each step sounded loud and clunky. Workbenches and toolboxes took on the shape of hooded figures ready to pounce. Snapping the light to all points of the compass she searched, left and right, high and low, adrenalin pumping through her system, constricting her vision and enhancing the senses needed for survival. Her major muscles received an extra boost of oxygenated blood, while her fine motor skills, like dexterity, were blunted. But Sarah, old friends with the primal dictate of fight or flight, knew well the effects of “adrenal dump”. Her ears scanned for the slightest sound from the room. Her nostrils flared, her head moving in tight little jerks, resembling the antics of a hound, air scenting. Her eyes roved, fast and constant, her vision tunneled, but needle sharp.
No sound from the room in front of her except the sigh of the early morning breeze slipping through the un-calked housings of recently set windows. The thick, clumpy smell of drying blood made her gag, its stench overwhelming in here, much worse than the other rooms. Her quick eyes, round with excitement and a touch of fear, searched out every corner and hiding place in the long, narrow stretch of the room, finally coming back to rest on the foot behind the beam. It hadn’t moved.
I should wait for backup.
I should wait. I’m being stupid.
Sarah took two careful steps to the left, her eyes moving constantly, the eagle searching out danger even as it closed in on its prey.
In this moment she forgot about the nose splint; no longer cared that her boyfriend had dumped her; forgot she even owned a house or car that had been plagued by hail from heaven; overlooked the reality that she was a thirty-seven year old orphan, and couldn’t even remember the name of her beautiful, but dead, cocker-Spanish girl.
That shoe glued itself to Sarah’s attention and held on with a death grip.
Another step to the left and a section of sock-covered ankle, hooked to the shoe, became visible. Then a denim clad shin, knee and thigh. She continued moving to the left, tethered to the beam by an invisible cord. From the knee up, the jeans were nearly black in the darkness of the room — soaked. And beneath lay a bubbled pond of red.
Impossible that one body could hold so much blood. But Sarah had been surprised before by just how much fluid the human form could contain.
She had prepared herself for the waxy-blue look that shined the young man’s cheeks and forehead; the purple color of dead lips, traced in a ring of red deeper than any lipstick. Even the angelic look of peace, accentuated by closed lidded, long lashed eyes, didn’t affect her. What she couldn’t prepare for was the electric chainsaw embedded in his throat, just under his chin. The obscene power tool looked as if it had grown from his neck, and Sarah’s eyes took in the blood spattered blade and handle.
Up until this point Sarah really thought she had control of herself; thought that all the events of the past year had been cataloged and carefully stacked away at the back of her subconscious, allowed out only at her say so. Painful yes, of course, but held in reign by her strong will and the knowledge that life must go on. But as she stared at the man; mid-twenties, long and lanky with curly brown hair, she felt her hands shaking. Her bottom lip quivered and she had to tuck it beneath her upper teeth to keep it still. A jittery feeling flitted in her lower belly, and an unaccustomed panic sent clutching tentacles of ice-cold terror snapping and wrapping themselves along her chest and throat so that she could only get air by consciously forcing herself to breathe.
The cat meowed from the other room and she almost shot the dead man in front of her. A giddy feeling of unreality crashed over her and she took a step closer, seeing the blade, splashed red, and clotted with bits of chewed flesh, sticking into the wooden column the man rested against. The chainsaw had cut half way through the man’s throat, sinking the same distance into the beam without coming out the other side. The wood kept him upright in a seated position despite the weight of the saw.
A waterfall of blood had drenc
hed the man’s white tee shirt, but its flow had stopped, having exhausted itself from the source. The chainsaw’s power cord lay pulled from the wall outlet.
The siren sounded so close now that her ears hurt with the racket. Someone would be with her in minutes. Her heart slowed its pounding pace and she felt the pressure at her temples relax. She wouldn’t be alone with this horrible mutilated man anymore. The barrel of her gun dropped low and she let out the breath locked in her lungs. The panic slithered away like the crafty serpent it was, allowing relief to sweep through her. Sarah released her lower lip from between her teeth, the quiver having stopped on its own.
From outside she heard Chuck Creed’s rough, deep voice calling her name. She turned toward the other room, her eyes dragging past the face of the dead man as she moved, making it almost all the way, but then stopped cold. All the pressure and terror of the last year crushed back in on her in an instant. The death of her father; the pain and shame of being cast away by someone she thought loved her; the death of her sweet doggy — all of it, smashing into her at the speed of thought as the dead man opened his eyes — and smiled.
“Nnn…nnnn…no…” bumbled out from numb lips. “Nonono — it can’t be,” the gun had magically come back in line with the smiling corpse’s face.
It tried to speak, a bloody spit-bubble blowing out round and wet from that horrible red-rimmed hole, until it popped sending frothy crimson spray toward her. Sarah jumped back, her finger moving from the slide of her semi-automatic handgun to pad the gentle curl of the trigger.
The dead thing’s eyes rolled up into its head and the smile grew wider. A sound gurgled thickly from its mouth and fresh blood broke over the jagged teeth of the saw blade to trickle down his front.
Gil Mason/Gunwood USA Box Set Page 69