The Storm

by K. C. Crowne

  “Fuck!”

  He was gritting his teeth so hard it looked as though his cheekbones were ready to pop as a thick vein pulsed in his forehead, tears and sweat streaming down his cheeks.

  “He's getting real cold,” Dylan said, placing his hand on his forehead. “We need to get an ambulance.” There was no way an ambulance could make it up through the snow. I looked down at Jared and could see the pain on his face, could see how close he was to slipping away. Swallowing hard, I tried to keep it together and gripped his hand tight.

  “You're gonna be okay,” I told him. “You can make it.”

  Dylan's eyes met mine, and the look on his face froze me to the spot. He knew help couldn't reach us, knew time was running out. He glanced away, looking at Lucas, who was dragging something solid and black over to us.

  “What you got there?”

  “The little fucker that shot Jared.”

  He shook him hard so his limbs rattled. Blood was pumping out of his arm where Lucas had hit him. As he hung off Lucas' arm, I saw how small he was and how young and fresh faced his frozen cheeks were.

  I wanted to fire a bullet into his skull for what he did, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Standing up, I stomped over and stared deep into his eyes. The top of his shaggy, blond head just about reached my shoulders, and his eyes were swollen with tears.

  “Jesus Christ, you're just a kid.”

  “I-I-I was just told to shoot anyone on sight. Uncle Benny told me so!”

  “Uncle Benny,” I repeated. “So he's getting his little nephews to do his dirty work now?”

  He looked down at Jared bleeding and began to shake.

  “Aw, shit. I didn't realize that...Oh, God. I've never shot anyone before.”

  He clapped a hand to his mouth, shuddered, and turned around to vomit in the snow. I should have hated him, should have wanted to enact revenge and shoot him dead, but he was just too pathetic.

  “What do we do with him?” Lucas asked.

  “Does he need a doctor?”

  “I shot him in the shoulder, but I reckon it's just a surface wound.”

  We looked at him heaving into the snow and crying.

  “What a real sorry sight,” Dax said. “Looks like his Uncle Benny was intent on giving him an internship to remember. I say we tie him up and put him in my truck.”

  “And his gun?” I asked.

  “I got that right here,” Dax grinned, pointing to the Armalite AR-50 slung over his shoulder.”

  “Jesus Christ, the thing's as big as he is.”

  Dax picked up the kid by the scruff of his neck and dragged him away like a naughty puppy.

  “Hey, Jared?” I said. “Did you see that sorry motherfucker? We'll need to teach him a lesson or two about...”

  The words dissolved in my mouth as I looked at Jared's face. Unmoving and pale, I saw the look of pain had subsided from his eyes, but so had any signs of life.

  “Jared!”

  I shook him hard, slapping his waxen face as my hand felt how cold he was.

  “Jared, wake up! Wake the fuck up!”

  “Shit! Quick, check his pulse,” Dylan said, falling to our side.

  Ripping off my gloves, I pressed my fingers to his neck and prayed to God I could feel something. For a long second, I felt nothing, and the terror grew in my gut.

  No, no, no! This can't be happening!

  But I wouldn't give up. Holding my breath, I pushed my fingers even deeper into his neck as we all gathered around. The fear in the air was palpable, the sense of loss already hanging over us like a black cloud.

  “Please tell me you feel something,” Lucas begged.

  For a moment, I couldn't feel anything but the cold of his skin against mine.

  He's gone...He's really gone.

  But just as I was about to pull away my hand, I felt it. A weak pulse fighting to be heard.

  “I feel something! It's barely there, but he's got a pulse.”

  Everyone gave a collective sigh of relief.

  “We need to get him off this mountain right now and to a hospital,” Dylan said.

  “But the nearest one is twenty miles away,” I told him, my voice breaking.

  Lucas began pacing up and down. “It's too far for Dax to drive. He needs help now.”

  Panic was beginning to set in. I could see from the terror in Lucas' eyes and the way Dylan's hands kept flexing in and out just how scared they were of losing Jared.

  “We need to think fast,” Dylan asked. “We need to—”

  He froze.

  “Did you hear that?”

  I nodded. We'd all heard it. The steps that echoed from the tunnel, the sound of someone climbing up the ladder. Looking over to the hatch, we saw a black figure climb out, looking like little more than a shadow, just a ghost of a thing creeping out from the ground.

  “Freeze!” I pointed my gun. “Don't move a muscle.”

  The figure raised its hands, the right one holding a pistol with a silencer screwed onto the end. As the moonlight shone across his features, I caught a glimpse of a face I’d seen before.

  “It's you,” he said with a mocking grin. “The hero from the bar. Let me guess, you've come to save your girl.”

  He grinned like a madman. Did he not realize we were all armed? Four against one, we could have shot him dead in a second, but he was standing there looking as though he was unfazed by us.

  “You're making a big mistake,” he said, his creepy grin widening. “Do you know what Benny's capable of?”

  “Turn around,” I ordered him. “Drop the gun.”

  But he remained still, almost amused at my anger.

  “I said turn around!”

  “Just one button...”

  We all looked at one another. What was he talking about now?

  “All I need to do is press one button on my phone and the carnage will begin. There'll be more men with guns crawling over you than you can count. And that boy of yours...” He nodded toward Jared. “He'll be the least of your worries.”

  Slowly, he reached his hand down toward his pocket.

  “Don't move!”

  But he ignored me and continued to push his hand down toward his pocket.

  “Just one button...”

  Quick as a flash, he thrust his hand toward his pocket, but before he could reach it, there was an explosion of light, a cacophonous bang that echoed across the mountain and the sound of a pained screech escaping his throat.

  He fell to the ground, clutching his stomach.

  “Oh, God!” he cried. “You bastard!”

  I looked down at my gun, but saw no smoke coming from the barrel. I hadn't shot him. So why was he lying there with a hole in him? I looked at the rest of the team, who looked just as confused as I did.

  “What the hell?”

  Behind us, the sound of tires crackling along the snow sounded, and we all turned around to see a silver Mercedes SUV glide toward us. In the back, the blacked-out window was down to reveal the barrel of a shotgun.

  “Who the fuck is that?”

  The car braked to a halt, the smoking barrel of the gun retracting through the window. Then I saw it. The license plate with the familiar letters that spelled out the unmistakable name.

  “Mario Gianni.”

  “I've been meaning to do that for years,” came a thick New York accent as the back door swung open.

  Out stepped a man no shorter than six-foot-three with a black, woolly hat pulled down low over his forehead. He walked to the guy he'd just shot to appraise his handiwork.

  “You son of a bitch, Larry, do you know the trouble you guys have put us in?”

  Behind us, his men jumped out the car, armed and ready to start a war.

  “Easy boys,” he said. “Lower your guns. I don't want no trouble. These guys aren't our enemies.”

  He looked at me, my gun still raised at eye level.

  “You guys must be Securicorp,” he said. “We've heard about you.”

 
; “Drop the gun,” I commanded.

  He dropped his gun into the snow without question and gave me a warm smile.

  “Relax,” he said. “I reckon we're after the same thing.”

  “Oh, yeah, what's that?”

  I doubted this gangster and me wanted the same thing. He was just a thug with a shotgun, a criminal in a fancy car.

  “We both want Benny gone,” he said, the warmth spreading across his face.

  “You're Mario?” I asked, looking at the shotgun in the snow.

  It was unusual for gangsters to do their own dirty work unless they enjoyed it, which based on what I was seeing, this guy certainly did.

  “You've done your research,” he said. “Mario Gianni in the flesh.”

  He acted as though I was supposed to be impressed by this, as though I was suddenly supposed to drop to my knees in awe.

  “I'm not interested in Benny,” I said. “I just want the girls back,” I told him. “And I need to get my brother to a hospital.” I waved my hand over Jared and watched his lifeless face. “As for Benny,” I continued. “You can do what you like with him.”

  Dylan flashed me a bewildered look, a look that said, what the hell are you talking about? I stared back at him and gave him a slight nod. I knew what I was doing. He just needed to trust me.

  “So we've all got something we need,” Mario said. “I want my brother dead and you want your girls back. It's a neat little package, right?”

  My hand was beginning to cramp from holding the gun so tight, but I was damned if I was going to lower it.

  “I think we can make a deal here,” Mario said.

  “We don't make deals with gangsters,” Lucas chimed in.

  “Not even if I can help you get your girls back? Listen. I crawled all over this place as a kid. Know where all the entrances are and what's inside. I even know where the medical facility is. We can help your friend there, can take him somewhere safe so he doesn't die out here in the cold.”

  Glancing down at Jared, I saw what little color was left in his cheeks had begun to fade. We didn't have long, minutes if we were lucky, and I would do anything to save him, even if it meant joining sides with a criminal.

  “What do you want from us?” I asked.

  “It's easy. You boys join my team and take over the bunker. With Benny out of the picture, it'll be mine, and so will everything inside it. And in return, I'll help you get your girls back and make sure your brother makes it out of here alive.”

  Looking down at him, Mario shook his head.

  “Brotherly love,” he said. “I never had it. Count yourself lucky.”

  “You can save him?”

  “My dad built a hospital wing underground. It's been abandoned for years, but it has everything he needs. I can take you there.” His eyes never left mine, and I saw truth in them. “Now can I lower my hands? I'm getting pins and needles.”

  “Sure,” I said, lowering my gun. “But stay where I can see you.”

  Behind me, his men were watching us warily.

  Can I really do it? Can I team up with a gangster?

  Right now you don't have much of a choice.

  “Let's go then,” Mario announced. “Follow me.”

  Dylan and Lucas huddled around me.

  “Are you sure about this?” Lucas asked. “Can we trust him?”

  “I don't trust him one bit, but we need him. Just don't let him out of your sight.”

  “Better keeping your enemies closer,” Dylan said. “And that way, we can turn him in once we get the girls and Jared safe.”

  “Agreed.”

  His men were congregating around him like a human shield. I took note of their shorn heads, their wide shoulders and confident postures. I noticed the way they carried themselves, the eagle-eyed way they surveyed everything around them and the nods of approval they gave us. They were obviously military men too, the kind who, just like us, had experienced things the average man in the street would never believe.

  They were supposed to be our brothers fighting for good. So why did they choose their path while we chose ours? Why did they decide to fight for crime rather than against it? I moved to Jared. “Show us to the hospital.

  Chapter 21

  Gabby

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Trying to find something to jam this door open with.”

  “If they catch you breaking into stuff like this, they'll go crazy.”

  “I think Benny's gone crazy already.”

  I was trying to kick a cupboard until it opened in a desperate attempt at finding anything. A gun or a knife would have been preferable, but anything would have been better than nothing. A fork, a spoon, a letter opener, hell, a hole punch would have been useful at this point.

  “I can't stand being cooped up in here. I'm going nuts.”

  “Even if we escape, we've got nowhere to go! They'll find us and then what?”

  “Then we'll take it from there.”

  “You're insane, Gabby.”

  “I'd rather be insane than a victim. Now come on, help me find something.”

  She stood gingerly and began trying to open a set of nearby drawers, but her eyes were always flitting over to the door as though she was certain at any moment, he was going to burst in.

  “I've got a real bad feeling about this,” she said.

  “Just look!”

  After exhausting all the doors, I began pulling back the furniture piece by piece until I was running my fingertips along the moldy wall.

  “There must be something back here. A secret door or a safe. Places like this are filled with secret passages.”

  “Have a lot of experience in them, do you?” Carly asked over her shoulder as she rattled a drawer.

  “Hey, I've seen enough movies to know these things.”

  My fingers felt the walls in the darkness, sticking themselves to cobwebs and dried up insect husks as the damp and mold caught my nostrils. Sneezing and coughing, I continued to feel my way around the wall. At last, something metal touched my fingertips.

  “Aha!”

  “You find a door?”

  “I have no idea what I found.”

  Pulling back the last of the furniture and boxes, I reached for my phone. There wasn't a single bar of signal, and the battery was almost dead, but at least the flashlight was working. I shone it into the corner of the room and saw a nest of spiders' webs and grime. But peeking out through the webs and dirt lay something small, solid, and metallic, and I was pleased to see the hinges were rusted.

  “It's a safe,” I said. “A really old one.”

  Crawling forward on my hands and knees, I touched my hand to the door, and it fell away easily, the hinges crumbling beneath my fingers.

  Carly was behind me, her breath hot in my ear. “What's inside?”

  “I guess we'll find out.”

  As I pulled away the door, my mind ran rampant with a hundred things I was about to see.

  A stash of emeralds.

  A million dollars in cash.

  Gold bars.

  Secret government documents.

  But what I wasn't expecting to see was a small, ordinary rectangular case.

  “What the hell?” Carly asked skeptically. “That's a pretty big safe for something so small.”

  I turned it over in my hand for clues as to what it might be.

  “Open it!” Carly demanded.

  “Hold onto your panties, Carly. I'm getting to it.”

  Flipping the lid open, I wondered what could possibly be so valuable it had to be hidden away down here for decades. A thin, elegant, silver-tipped fountain pen lay nestled inside the box.

  The onyx body shone beneath the meager electric light; the tip was slightly dotted with a splash of black ink as though it had only been used moments ago.

  “What's so special about some random pen?” Carly asked.

  “I don't know.”

  Holding it up to the light, I tried to get a closer look. As I
turned it, the onyx caught the glow from the fluorescent light and two engraved words came into view.

  “Lucinda Gianni.”

  “Wait, I think there's something in the box,” Carly said. “Looks like a note.”

  Her impatient fingers pulled at a strip of paper that had been neatly folded into a perfect square. She squinted as she tried to read it, her lips pulling themselves into a tight line with concentration.

  “My Darling Lucinda. Happy tenth anniversary. May this pen be the tool in which you create your most cherished poetry. Love you forever. You ever faithful husband, Benny.”

  “Benny Junior's mom.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. I was getting a picture of the woman behind the deadliest criminal family in American history. She was a beautiful woman, a sensitive soul who wrote poetry.

  Taking the pen, I walked up to the door and jammed the tip into the lock.

  “Whoa, what are you doing?” Carly gasped.

  “I'm getting us the fuck out of here,” I told her. “I don't give a rat's ass if this pen wrote cherished poetry or not. It's a weapon now.”

  The tip bent and twisted as I forced it in the lock, but gradually, I began to feel something give.

  “Wait,” I grunted. “I think I got it. I can feel it. Ah, there we go.”

  With one final twist, the lock turned, and the door creaked open. At last, when I thought it would never happen, we found ourselves staring out into the hall.

  “We're free,” I said.

  “Almost,” Carly said. “We've still got that tunnel to climb up.”

  Ripping the pen out from the lock, I held it behind my back, ready to wield it when I needed to.

  “Stay low and follow me.”

  I began edging back toward the living room, but Carly remained rooted to the spot and yanked me back by my coat.

  “No way,” she hissed. “We can't go back that way. They'll see us.”

  “You got any better ideas?”

  We looked in the opposite direction. Another door looked back at us.

  “Won't that take us deeper into the bunker?”

  “But further away from Benny.”

  From the living room, I could hear the noise of the television blaring, and beyond it, the sound of Benny's voice echoing up the tunnel.

  “Larry!” he called. “Larry, what's goin' on up there!”