by Mark Allen
Like blood from a slit vein, Kane felt the kill-lust bleed out of him. Taking Paul Dunkirk’s life for the sake of avenging Luna was one thing, but taking it because a dirtbag drug lord told him he could left Kane feeling cold and empty.
Kane knew he might be signing his death warrant, but he refused to dance to a cartel king’s cutthroat tune.
He rose to his feet, letting Paul’s head fall from his hands.
The crowd hushed into stunned silence.
Nazareno stood up and pointed at Paul. “Kill him!” he commanded.
“He’ll never walk again,” Kane replied. “He’ll never rape another woman. It’s enough for me.”
“I don’t care if it’s enough for you, cabron. I said, kill him!”
Kane turned and spat, then looked at Nazareno again. “Not gonna happen.”
Someone in the crowd shouted, “Reaper’s a pussy!” and everyone laughed. Then they began chanting his name again.
“Reaper! Reaper! Reaper!”
They continued chanting as Nazareno descended into the octagon. Stepping close to Kane, he snapped, “Enjoy the glory while it lasts. Tonight you’re a champion. Tomorrow you’ll be a corpse.”
“Maybe,” Kane said. “But you’ll always be a piece of shit.”
Sheriff Dunkirk appeared, face twisted with fury. “You son of a bitch,” he snarled. “What did you do to my son?”
“Turned him into a crippled eunuch,” Kane replied. “You’re lucky I let him live.” His lips peeled back from his teeth in a cold, wolfish smile. “When your turn comes, I won’t be so nice.”
“I’d say let’s do it right here and now, but I need to get my boy to the hospital.” Dunkirk looked at Nazareno. “You mind?”
The drug lord nodded and gestured to the body-removal crew, who darted in, picked up the unconscious Paul, and carried him out. With a baleful glance that brimmed with all the hate in the world, the sheriff followed them out.
“You fight again tomorrow night,” Nazareno informed Kane. “Four on one. They will have weapons, you will not.” He smiled, all shark-like and toothy. “Sleep well tonight, Reaper. Tomorrow, you die.”
“Been hearing that for two days now,” Kane said. “You guys suck as prophets.”
“Everyone’s clock runs out eventually.”
“You’d do well to remember that, asshole.”
“You talk a lot of mierda, and frankly, it bores me,” Nazareno said. “Time for bed. Enjoy your breakfast tomorrow.” He turned away with a chuckle.
Leaving Kane to wonder what the hell he meant.
Chapter Fourteen
Black Bog Federal Prison
The next morning, Kane woke up when he heard the metallic clang of the brass key hitting the lock. Usually, the unit officer unlocked the door and rambled on down the tier, releasing the inmates from their cells.
But today, his cell door swung open and Goatsack rolled in, accompanied by three of his men: Red Cent, Happy, and Goodbye.
“Up and at ‘em, Reaper,” Goatsack growled. “Time to rise an’ shine.”
Pedro rolled over in his bunk, took one look at what was going on, and faced the other way again. He was smart enough to know that whatever was going down, he wanted no part of it.
Kane threw off his blanket, swung out of his bunk, and stood up. He towered over Goatsack like Goliath looming over David. Of course, the black, pump-action, synthetic-stock Remington 870 Tactical Express shotguns all four SORT members carried served as twelve-gauge equalizers.
Goatsack looked relaxed, but his boys seemed jumpy, fingers tense on the triggers. Wouldn’t take much for them to start blasting. Kane knew the Remington 870 Tactical Express featured a two-round magazine extension, upping the shotgun’s capacity to seven, meaning there was a whole lot of buckshot for them to blast. Inside the cell like this, they wouldn’t even need to use the XS Ghost Ring sights. It would just be point-and-shoot close-quarters splatter.
So Kane kept his movements slow and his tone agreeable. “You boys here to take me out for breakfast?”
“Oh, you’re going out,” Goatsack said. “But not for breakfast. In fact, no breakfast for you today.”
“Unless you like dead meat,” Red Cent snickered.
“Pretty sure most meat is dead before you eat it,” Kane said.
Red Cent stopped snickering and frowned. “Shut your smartass mouth before I make you deep-throat a twelve-gauge.”
Kane got dressed, and the SORT team took him outside. No flex-cuffs this time, but they did put him in leg shackles. They lifted his pant legs and slid down his socks to slap the cold steel directly against his skin. They were tight, grinding painfully against his ankle bones when he walked, but he said nothing. Complaints would just get the shackles cranked down even tighter. Better just to shut his mouth, grit his teeth, and suck it up.
The early morning sun was just cresting over the mountains that rose above the prison to the north and east, the rays not yet heating up the autumn briskness. The men’s breaths plumed in the crisp air like dragon smoke.
The team led Kane through the compound guard shack, bypassing the chow hall, and took him down a long, dingy corridor by keying their way through two steel doors. The last door opened onto the loading dock area, and Kane saw they were approaching the sally-ported rear gate of the prison.
Goatsack keyed his radio. “Control, open the slides.”
The first gate of the sally port rumbled into motion, retracted by a concealed winch-and-track system, sliding open wide enough to let them enter the rear gate. There was a small guard shack converted from a Conex shipping container, but it appeared unmanned, the windows dark.
The first gate closed behind them, then the second gate powered open just enough to let them through, reaffirming that they were being monitored by cameras, presumably from the control center. As soon as they had exited, the gate shut again.
Kane found himself standing on the potholed, frost-heaved, asphalt road that circled the perimeter of the prison. He knew heavily armed patrol trucks roved the road twenty-four/seven year-round, but right now, either by accident or design, there was no sign of them.
But there was another truck, a Toyota pickup that had seen better days. On the ground behind the vehicle were two dead bodies.
Kane recognized them because he had killed them both.
Lumberjack and Tommy Gunn.
The fallen opponents of the Pit.
He turned to Goatsack. “What the hell is this?”
“Body disposal detail,” the SORT leader replied. “Load ‘em in the back of the truck.”
“That’s it?”
“Not by a long shot. But that’s the start.”
Kane shrugged and got to work. With four shotguns trained on him, it wasn’t like he had much choice. Firepower was always a great persuader.
Grunting with effort, he grabbed the cold, stiff corpses and chucked them into the cargo bed. No reason to be gentle; they were dead.
The task completed, he looked at Goatsack. “Now what?”
“Now we take them down to the bog.” Goatsack gestured with the muzzle of his Remington toward the back of the truck. “Get in.”
Accompanied by Goodbye, Happy, and Red Cent, Kane climbed into the back of the truck, not an easy thing to do while wearing leg irons. The three SORT operators kept wary eyes—and weapons—on him. Kane pointedly ignored them and stared at the nearby mountains. He would have stared at his feet to express his disinterest, but he didn’t feel like looking at dead men’s faces. Especially when one of those faces had a giant axe-hole in it.
Goatsack climbed behind the steering wheel. After a short quarter-mile drive down the perimeter road, he veered off to the left, tires rumbling onto a gravel drive that snaked down an incline before flattening out to reveal the prison’s firing range.
To the left of the range, Kane saw the black waters of the bog lapping at the eroded banks, where exposed tree roots tangled together like a nest of hibernating copperheads. Bri
ght sunbeams struck the water but failed to penetrate, ricocheting off it as if they had struck some kind of force field. The surface looked like an oil slick.
Kane wondered how many dead bodies rotted beneath those strange waters. Dredging up the bog’s secrets would be like dragging a horrible nightmare to the surface, all decaying flesh and algae-stained bones.
Goatsack cut the engine and exited the truck, slapping the side panel. “All right, Reaper, move your unlucky ass and haul those two stiffs down to the water.”
“Then what?” Kane asked. “Your guys gun me down?”
“Pretty much. Fill you full of buckshot and toss you in the bog.”
“I appreciate the honesty.”
“I like your style, Reaper, so I’m just keeping it real with you. Besides, you knew it had to end this way, right?”
“Thought Nazareno wanted me to fight in the Pit again?”
“He changed his mind,” Goatsack replied. “You challenged him, and Nazareno knows the best way to deal with challengers is to put ‘em down hard and fast. Sure, he’d like to play with you in the Pit some more, but he can’t afford to have you beat the odds and survive another night. People might start thinking you’re a bigger badass than he is, and we just can’t have that kind of crap floating around.”
“Yeah, that’d be a damn shame.”
“Not gonna lie to you, Reaper,” Goatsack said. “Nazareno wants you to die hard. Said to hold you down, shove a shotgun up your ass until the barrel disappears, and then pull the trigger.”
“Sounds unpleasant.”
“Hardcore unpleasant, and frankly, it’s not my style, so I’ll make you a deal. Take care of these bodies for me—basically, we just cut ‘em open and dig out the guts so they don’t fill up with gas and bob to the surface—and in return, I’ll kill you quick. No twelve-gauge enema. Just one shot, back of the head. You won’t feel a thing, I promise.”
“How the hell can you promise that? You ever been shot in the back of the head?”
“You know what I mean, man.”
Red Cent griped, “For god’s sake, let’s get this show on the road. I hate dead-body detail.”
“I second that,” Goodbye agreed. “This sucks donkey balls.”
“I’ll third it,” Happy chimed in.
“No, what you’ll all do is shut your damn mouths,” Goatsack snapped. “For the money Nazareno pays us, you’ll eat the snot out of a dead man’s nose if that’s what the boss wants.”
“Uh, yeah, that’s gonna be a big negative,” Goodbye said.
“Yeah, ten-four on what he said,” Happy agreed. “That ain’t happening.”
Red Cent shrugged. “Guess it would depend on how long the guys’ been dead. I mean, as long as it wasn’t extra crunchy…”
Goatsack looked at Kane and shook his head. “See the morons I have to deal with?”
Kane ignored the banter and said, “I need a knife.”
“For what?”
“Those bodies aren’t gonna gut themselves.”
Goatsack’s arched eyebrows showed his surprise. “Thought you’d put up more of a fight, Reaper.”
“A man’s got to know when the fight is lost.”
“That makes you a wiser man than most.” The SORT leader gestured toward the bog. “Drag them down to the water, and then I’ll get you a knife.”
Kane hopped off the truck, stumbling slightly, ankles numb from the shackles strangling his circulation. He reached into the cargo bed, grabbed Lumberjack’s ankle, and dragged him out of the truck. The dead man landed in the dirt with a thud. Kane hauled him down to the edge of the bog, then repeated the process with Tommy Gunn’s corpse.
Standing over the human carcasses, Kane pointed at his leg irons. “Any chance of getting these bracelets off? Make it easier to work.”
“Bet it would,” Goatsack replied. “Also make it easier for you to jackrabbit.”
“You’ve got four guns on me,” Kane said. “How the hell am I going to run?”
Goatsack shook his head. “Nice try, but not happening. Leg irons stay on.”
“Gonna take me longer.”
“We’ve got time.” The SORT leader pulled a folded Spyderco from a sheath on his belt and tossed it to Kane. “Get to work.”
Kane gritted his teeth and buckled down to the gruesome task at hand. He worked slowly, not because he wanted to linger over what basically amounted to field-dressing a human, but because he needed his captors to get bored. People who were bored tended to grow complacent and lower their guards, and that was his only chance of surviving the next thirty minutes.
He gutted Lumberjack’s corpse first, feeling no shame for retching as the vile odors roiled out of the abdominal cavity when he slit the body open from pelvis to sternum.
Even Goatsack backed off a few meters, taking his left hand off his shotgun to press it over his mouth. “My God, that’s foul.”
“Dead man’s guts,” Kane said, taking shallow breaths through his mouth to minimize the stench. “They’re not supposed to smell like roses.”
He rolled the body onto its side to let the internal organs slide out, taking his time. Goatsack didn’t even waste time telling him to pick up the pace. Probably figured he was simply in no hurry to get to his own execution.
Goodbye hopped up and perched on the Toyota’s lowered tailgate, letting his legs dangle. “That’s some nasty shit right there.” He set the shotgun down next to him and waved a hand in front of his nostrils.
Happy slung his shotgun over his shoulder and hopped up next to him. He took out his cellphone and began playing some game that sounded like an electronic slot machine. He wasn’t paying Kane a lick of attention, solely focused on hitting the jackpot.
Tommy Gunn’s corpse proved easier to butcher since Kane had practically disemboweled him in the Pit the night before. By the time he was done widening the slit, Red Cent was sitting on the ground, ankles crossed, leaning against the truck’s rear tire. His shotgun laid on the ground beside him.
Yeah, Kane thought, these guys might have been top-tier operators at one point, but easy living and victims who didn’t fight back had rendered them soft and careless.
He dumped Gunn’s guts out and swiped the back of his hand across his forehead to flick off the beads of sweat dappling his brow despite the cool morning air. “You want to do an inspection before I toss these guys in the water?” Kane asked Goatsack.
The SORT leader ambled over, oblivious to the fact that he was walking to his death.
The whole time he had been desecrating corpses, Kane had kept his movements deliberately slow and nonthreatening, lulling his four guards into a false sense of security. When people see slow-moving objects, they subconsciously anticipate the object will remain lethargic. They do not expect them to suddenly explode into high speed.
But that was exactly what Kane did.
Goatsack was smart enough not to walk within arm’s reach, but even that turned out to be too close.
Kane burst into fast, violent motion. He leaped forward, shackles biting into his ankles. His left hand swept out and knocked aside the shotgun. At the same time, his right hand drove the gore-stained knife up under Goatsack’s chin. The point punched through the windpipe, severed the jugular, and stabbed through the back of his tongue.
The SORT leader didn’t even have a chance to cry out, silenced by cold steel and the hot blood clogging his throat.
Kane left the knife stuck in Goatsack’s neck. The attack had taken less than three seconds. It took him just one more second to flip the Remington 870 around so that the muzzle pointed at the other three SORT boys clustered around the Toyota.
Red Cent reacted the fastest to Kane’s sudden attack.
He also died the fastest.
“Oh, shit!” the SORT operator yelped, grabbing for the shotgun on the ground beside him.
Kane pulled the trigger and sent his first blast of buckshot right into Red Cent’s face, blowing it to mush. His instantly-dead body
slammed against the truck tire as his soul discovered that Nazareno’s blood-money didn’t spend in Hell.
With his leg irons on, Kane couldn’t run and seek cover, so he didn’t even try. He just stood there, right out in the open, a pissed-off giant with a hot-blasting shotgun, and dumped the remaining rounds into Goodbye and Happy as fast as he could pump the slide.
Both men died hard, chunks of flesh and bone exploding everywhere as a half-dozen shells of double-ought buck ripped them to shreds. The savage impacts blew the two men off the tailgate and into the cargo bed. Their heads, necks, and chests looked like crimson confetti.
Kane refocused his attention on Goatsack. The SORT leader was on his knees, spasming fingers grasping the knife handle jutting from beneath his jaw like an obscene growth.
Kane thumped the butt of the shotgun into his forehead, knocking him flat on his back. Staring down at Goatsack’s terrified gaze, he felt nothing. The man deserved to die. Black Bog Federal Prison was hell on Earth, and Goatsack was one of the demented demons who allowed the devil to thrive.
“You should have let me go,” Kane rasped, reaching down to grab the handle of the Spyderco. “Told you I wasn’t someone you wanted to fuck with.”
He ripped the knife sideways, slashing Goatsack’s throat wide open. Blood jetted into the bog to stain the black water red. The murderous SORT commander died far more quickly than he deserved.
Kane knew he had to move fast. Even in a prison as deeply corrupted as Black Bog, that many shotgun blasts were sure to draw attention. It wouldn’t take long for people to come down to the firing range to investigate. He needed to make his escape before they showed up.
He patted down Goatsack’s twitching body, found the cuff key, and ditched the shackles. His raw, abraded ankles hurt like hell, but they would hold.
He slung the Remington 870 over his shoulder and stripped the bodies of all their shells. The Spyderco went into his pocket. Next, he helped himself to Goatsack’s duty belt, complete with its holstered Sig-Sauer P228 9mm pistol and two spare magazines. They were topped off with hardball ammunition rather than the hollow-points he preferred, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He just hoped the guns and ammo would survive the coming baptism because he needed to get out of here fast, and the fastest way to freedom was straight across the bog.