by Matt Rogers
They entered the grid of roads leading into Market Street, and reached the edges of the crowd they’d been preparing for months to slaughter, and the nightmare became reality.
98
Ruby threw caution to the wind.
She didn’t care whether she lived or died.
They’d entered a bustling stretch of central San Francisco with gridlocked traffic. A couple of lanes had been cordoned off to pave the way through the crowded city centre to the Chinese New Year Festival. Long shadows fell across the scenery, elongated by the rising sun drenching the single-storey buildings. There were cafés and souvenir shops and grocery stores, all open for business, all thriving because of the uptick in pedestrians.
And there were hundreds of pedestrians, moving in swarms down the predetermined pathways, all happy and smiling and jovial, because there was joy in the air that morning. Later that evening there would be the parade, featuring dragons and dancers and performers on stilts and endless firecrackers, and it would be a spectacle to behold. For now they could gorge on traditional cuisine and enjoy the cool crisp morning air and hold their loved ones close.
They were collectively carefree, if only for a few days.
Then the beat-up pick-up truck screeched to a halt. Its doors popped open, and sweaty livid men in balaclavas piled out, wielding death in their hands. The sun glinted off the automatic rifles, and in unison the five mercenaries raised the barrels toward the crowds and took aim.
A couple of bystanders screamed.
They knew this wasn’t a drill.
Given the national climate of fear, they knew what they were witnessing before the first shot had even been fired.
Then Ruby struck the back of their vehicle with the Raptor’s hood.
The airbag detonated in her face and masked all sight and sound, and the impact rattled her bones, and she nearly lost consciousness as the dull thwack nearly crippled her, but she found a way to override her basic motor functions and throw the door open and leap out of the truck before the Raptor had even come to a standstill.
Her chest hurt, her head hurt, her bones hurt, her muscles hurt.
Everything hurt, and her vision wavered.
But, still, she persevered.
The pick-up rested at least a dozen feet from its original location, smashed forward by the concussive impact. Two guys were on the ground, either dead or crippled — they hadn’t been able to get out of the way of the open doors in time, which had smacked them like fly swatters.
The other three were standing.
And angry.
One of them had his rifle halfway raised toward Ruby’s face. Luckily, he was mere feet away. She leapt at him — despite not being able to see straight — and somehow tackled him successfully. She would never win a strength battle with a two hundred pound man, but she didn’t need to. As soon as she was within arm’s reach she slashed hard with the blade and ripped his forearm open from elbow to wrist, crippling his ability to pull the trigger.
She didn’t even think about delivering the killing blow — there wasn’t enough time.
She needed every gun pointed away from the crowds that instant.
But there wasn’t enough that one person could do against three.
She was never going to protect them all.
She shoved the first guy aside as he dropped the rifle, his arm torn to shreds, and she sprinted at the second man. But he wasn’t focused on her. He was focused on the crowds. Half had decided to flee, but half stood transfixed, watching the scene unfold like they were the live audience of a macabre theatre production.
They’d be the first to fall.
And they did.
Ruby pushed herself faster but she couldn’t defy the laws of physics, and she watched in slack-jawed horror as the second man pointed his carbine rifle at a horde of innocent bystanders and pulled the trigger.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
The sound of hell.
It was hard to see the impacts from a distance, but Ruby figured she saw two or three people collapse under the gunfire. Then everything truly went to shit, and the bystanders all fled like rabid dogs, running in every direction at once, and the second gunman kept firing until—
Ruby seized him from behind and wrenched the blade across his throat and he fell, stone dead.
She felt sick to her core.
The third guy wasn’t interested in killing more civilians. He was focused on Ruby.
And he was nihilistic, recognising he was the last survivor, and that made him terribly angry. He aimed low and shot her through the thigh.
She felt the bullet pass through, and in that instant there was no way to tell whether it had nicked an artery or not — she’d find out when she bled out in five minutes, if she made it that far.
No, in that instant, she felt nothing.
Which enabled her to lunge feebly at the guy, but she missed with her half-hearted knife swing.
He battered her hand away and struck her in the face, sending her toppling to the asphalt.
She was bleeding everywhere.
Amidst the screaming crowds, the guy knelt down and pressed the barrel to her throat, nearly crushing her windpipe with it, and he looked her in the eyes and paused for a single second to gloat over his victory.
To savour what little he’d accomplished.
She closed her eyes.
And felt the pressure alleviate as the barrel came away from her neck.
She opened them again and saw a man had peeled himself away from the panicking crowds and bullrushed the lone gunman, and tackled the guy off Ruby, and now they were brawling wildly against the side of the pick-up truck.
And the mystery man won.
He smashed a fist into the gunman’s face and the guy went limp.
He wrestled the gun off the gunman and shot him in the head.
Then he turned, panting, to check if she was okay.
Her heart stopped in her chest.
She hadn’t seen him in a long, long time.
But she knew the face.
She’d recognise it anywhere.
Through bloody lips she said, ‘Dad?’
99
It had been years since she’d seen Frank Nazarian.
Over a decade, in fact.
It felt, still, like more than that.
Like a lifetime ago. Like a separate universe. Like a remnant of a fantasy world that couldn’t possibly be reality, because reality was bloody and violent and cruel, and a middle-class family in Brooklyn couldn’t possibly have stayed together amidst all that carnage.
But, she reminded herself, she’d initiated that downward spiral. She’d been the one to run away from home at ten years of age, and, yes, she might have intended to go back after a day of pouting, but as fate would have it her dad’s old military buddy Russell Williams had picked her up and put her straight in the Lynx program before she knew any better. Then her old family was just that — an old family, a memory she could detach from. And she’d detached from it well — with the help of psychological conditioning, of course — and it had taken Slater’s fateful arrival in her life a little over a year ago to break her out of the way she’d been neurologically wired and slowly start to realise that she’d been brainwashed.
But she hadn’t been able to go back and show her face to her father or mother or sister after that.
There was too much shame.
Too much guilt.
Too much horror at what she’d become.
She knew they’d probably understand, but although she was strong in some aspects, she was terrifyingly weak in others. She hadn’t been able to do it. She knew Slater had met them, and she knew they’d asked about her, and wanted to see her, but by that point they were little more than faint memories and she preferred to keep them at an idealistic distance so they didn’t have to see the truth of what their precious daughter had become.
Frank said, ‘Oh my God,’ and ran over to her.
He pressed his palms down o
n her leg, trying to stem the bleeding.
She lay on her back, staring up at him.
She didn’t know what to say.
Frank said, ‘It is you, isn’t it?’
‘It’s me.’
‘I thought I was seeing things.’
‘Y-you’ve still got your old reflexes.’
Frank had served.
That’s how he’d met Russell Williams.
He said, ‘That stuff never dies.’
Then he looked around, and for the first time they seemed to notice their turbulent surroundings. There were bodies everywhere — mostly gunmen, thankfully — and sirens in the distance and people were still screaming and shouting and wailing and running.
But all that seemed inconsequential, because Ruby was looking at her dad, and she wanted nothing more than to stand up and hug him. Hold him tight — never let go. Underneath the hardened exterior, she was still the same scared kid. No-one ever lost that part of themselves.
Then she noticed something unique. Amidst the mass panic, amidst the hysteria and the craziness and the palpable terror in the air, there was a child standing still as a statue as everyone around her lost their minds. She was small, with straight jet black hair falling over her forehead, and a confused look on her face. But she wasn’t scared.
Because she’d been taught, albeit briefly, how to control her emotions.
Ruby knew her from the Lynx program.
And from what Slater had done to rescue her.
She said, ‘Hi, Shien.’
The child stepped forward.
And said, ‘Hi.’
Frank rested a hand on the little girl’s shoulder.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘They’re all dead.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re bleeding, Ruby,’ he said.
He didn’t seem to be paying attention to the words floating out of his mouth. They were cool and detached, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He couldn’t believe it. There was no protocol for such an unlikely, complicated situation. Such an odd twist of fate.
She lay on her back, panting. Then she said, ‘Hard to find the right words, isn’t it?’
He nodded.
Tears in his eyes.
Because what could you possibly say?
What neat package of syllables could make up for what had torn their family apart?
It was no-one’s fault, besides Russell Williams and his misguided intentions. But how did you heal the bridge after such irreparable damage?
You didn’t.
Ruby knew that. She looked at Shien and she saw everything she hadn’t been. A small, kind, compassionate, caring soul who’d experienced the worst that life had to offer. A pure spirit in a catastrophic world. A vestige of hope. She’d seen the Lynx program and its horrors, and she’d seen the child sex slavery scene in Macau, and she’d been ripped from her own family and Slater had given her a de facto foster home and she hadn’t complained a single step of the way.
That night Ruby had spent with Slater in New York … he’d told her everything.
He’d told her how special the little girl was.
And, Ruby realised, she’d filled the void left in the Nazarian family after her disappearance.
They could now raise the daughter they’d never had.
And that was when it happened.
Shien got an odd look on her face, and she looked past Ruby, over her shoulder, and Ruby already knew what she was looking at. That’s where the two mercenaries had been struck by the doors (either dead or unconscious, as she’d recalled at the time), and it seemed one of them had lost the “unconscious” label.
Ruby rolled onto her stomach — every movement hurt — and she saw the guy standing there on wobbly legs with blood in his beard and both cheeks torn up from where he’d hit the asphalt face-first. But he was awake, and he had a Glock in his hand, and an empty holster at his belt.
Ruby put it together.
Frank and Shien were frozen behind her, and it all clicked, and she knew what she had to do.
She scrambled to her feet and sprinted directly at the guy.
There was no way he was going to miss from that distance.
He shot her five times before she reached him — three bullets smashed into her chest, and the other two went through her stomach. But momentum was on her side, and she collapsed into him with enough force to knock them both off their feet, and as chance would have it the Glock spilled from the mercenary’s hands when his head lashed against the ground.
She picked it up, and emptied its contents into his head.
Then she collapsed.
100
Darkness swelled at the edges of her vision.
She didn’t have long.
Not long at all.
She couldn’t feel her hands, or her feet. She was cold. So, so cold. She somehow managed to roll onto her back, but her circle of vision grew smaller with each passing second. She coughed blood, but she couldn’t taste it.
She thought she saw Frank, watching in horror. She understood. He wouldn’t be able to process this in real time. A chance encounter with his long-lost daughter, and now … this.
But Shien could process it.
Ruby watched the little girl walk over and take her hand. Shien crouched over her, and sobbed, even though she was fighting to put on a brave face.
Ruby said, ‘It’s okay.’
She sobbed harder.
Ruby said, ‘Be good to them.’
‘I will.’
‘They deserve you. Not me.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It’s true. It’s not pretty. But the truth never is.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Shien said.
‘For what?’
‘That you got wrapped up in this world.’
Ruby smiled through a mouthful of blood. ‘Don’t be sorry. I met you. You met them.’
‘It should be you here.’
‘But it’s not. That’s life.’
Shien bowed her head.
Ruby said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m happy. I did good with this life.’
Shien found the composure to keep her tears at bay, and she looked Ruby in the eyes and said, ‘I’ll make your parents proud. For you.’
Ruby Nazarian died with a smile on her face.
101
Three days later…
Will Slater came out of the induced coma the same way he did everything.
Stoically.
He simply opened his eyes, and blinked as he scrutinised his surroundings.
He nodded with satisfaction when he realised he was in a hospital bed. He wasn’t getting shot at. He wasn’t in a war zone.
Nothing else mattered.
So he lay patiently, covered in medical apparatus, and waited for lucidity to return. It wasn’t a public hospital — it was probably a military installation somewhere in California.
Doctors and nurses came in and out of the room, but they were floating on clouds. He was in a dream world, drifting merrily through blissful obliviousness. He figured he was on a cocktail of drugs, up to his eyeballs in pain medication, and he certainly didn’t mind.
He lay there for what could have been hours, and waited for sanity to return. There was a nurse with him for the majority of the time, making sure the drugs brought him back to reality without incident. She took a tube out of his throat, and checked his vitals.
He tentatively sat up in bed and croaked, ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re safe,’ the nurse muttered. ‘And you’re stable. There’s someone that needs to speak with you.’
She walked out, and Violetta stepped into the room a minute later.
Violetta was a hollow shell of her former self, with deep bags under her eyes and pale, clammy skin.
Sleep deprivation would do that to you.
Slater said, ‘You look worse than me.’
She managed a half-smile.
Silent, she crossed to the chair by the bed and sat
down.
She put her head in her hands.
‘Everything okay?’ Slater said.
‘I guess.’
‘Tell me everything.’
She sighed. ‘I don’t know where to begin…’
‘From the start. I remember … the woods. And not much else.’
‘You were half-dead when EMTs got to you. You had cracked ribs, a broken sternum, and serious internal bleeding and inflammation. You’ve been in a coma for three days.’
‘But I got them all, right?’
She nodded. ‘You got them all. Not a single cartel hitman made it out of those woods. It’s indescribable what you’ve done for your country, and you’ll be rewarded with a Medal—’
‘I don’t care,’ Slater said.
Straight to the point.
He said, ‘Let’s cut the official shit. Tell me about the fallout, okay?’
Violetta looked at him.
She was gaunt.
She said, ‘Ruby didn’t make it.’
Straight to the point, too.
He thanked his lucky stars he was still numbed by the pain relief.
It allowed him to keep his composure.
Inwardly, he collapsed.
But out loud, he said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘I can give you some time.’
‘No,’ he snapped. ‘Tell me the rest.’
She didn’t say anything.
He said, ‘What?’
She said, ‘Are you sure, Will?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you understand what I told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think you need some time.’
‘For what?’ he said, and now there were tears in his eyes. ‘To think about how fucked up my life is? To consider the fact that no-one I get close to stays alive? Is that what you want me to think about? Trust me — that’s been the case for years. A decade, even. Ever since I got involved in this mad world. So what’s one more to add to the pile? I mean, really? Why did I expect anything would ever work out?’