by S A Gardner
Now to grab Jake and get the hell out of here.
Even in the sound-absorbent setting, the gunshots must have been heard. There could be hidden surveillance cameras. A deluge of minions could be on the way.
Had Damian done his part? Where was Jake, anyway?
I faced the vicious-looking militant I’d left awake. Rage and fear twisted on his face. But mostly incredulity. Having a hard time reconciling the woman he’d ogled for weeks with the one who’d just crushed his superior’s windpipe, huh?
“Where is Dr. Constantine?” I hissed.
He blinked. “I don’t know.”
I rammed my head into his nose.
His head swayed like a pendulum with pain and dizziness as he spluttered blood from the nose I’d broken. “H-he never stays in one place.”
Oh, for God’s sake. This guy was useless.
I nodded to Matt. He stabbed him with the injection and said, “Next move?”
I took my jacket off, gave it to Ayesha to cover Megumi’s bloody outfit. “Aram, get Megumi out of here. Say I sent you to get supplies. The rest, get those leaders back on the gurneys. We may still bluff our way through more militants.”
Megumi and Aram got out. The rest of us made it to the first sentry point within the base. Finding us alone and asking for Jake got them suspicious.
Those we had to kill outright. The one we kept alive didn’t know where Jake was either. We still took him with us to show us the possible places Jake could be.
We were in the next passage when dozens of muted footfalls resonated from the adjacent one. The sentries must have contacted others before we eliminated them.
“Smoke bombs now, napalm as soon as they show up,” I hissed. “Keep behind the gurneys. I’ll take down the first ones, you follow through.”
The militants rounded the corner among the burgeoning smoke and the others swung their blazing projectiles. They fell in their midst, shattering and spewing fire at the same moment I crashed my gurney into them. The comatose leader flew in the air, his flaccid weight taking down three under its impact and spook factor. A domino effect followed.
Shooting, getting another three through the smoke, I catapulted behind the other gurneys to give the napalm bombs a wide berth. My head filled with the cacophony of rabid screams and the stench of burning flesh.
But many were still standing and more would come. No matter what, we’d end up with losses.
All my fault. All Damian’s fault. He’d put me in the position where I could no longer trust him. Not with Jake’s life. I wanted to beg my friends’ forgiveness for dragging them through this situation. This kind of life. To berate them for letting me. To scream for them to leave me to my insanity.
Jake is my problem, my guilt. My debt.
Our opponents were retaliating. But with us in hiding behind their leaders, it was them they got. They didn’t care about killing them now to get to us. Good to know.
I continued to fire, killing one with each bullet, even through the thickening smoke, yelling for my team to retreat.
They did. Must think I was retreating, too, or they wouldn’t have. But even if I couldn’t get to Jake, I had to cover them. More militants were pouring in. I still got one per shot, but they were too many, firing haphazardly. Getting their colleagues. But bound to get me, too.
So this was it. I’d cause them heavy damages, before they took me out…
I found myself facedown. It was as if God’s hand had taken hold of the mountain and shook it like a rattle.
Earthquake.
No. Explosions.
Oh, God no. Damian. The final phase.
He’d initiated it. He didn’t realize we were still inside. Were the others still inside? The whole place could collapse.
No…it was already collapsing.
Masses of false ceiling and mountain crashed down between me and my opponents. A shield that could become a tomb in seconds.
Run.
Before impulses fired up my synapses, a boulder was coming straight for my head. I launched into the air, lodged myself in the space between the two levels of the gurney. The bed almost caved under the impact, compacting me on the storage box. Compared to crushed, compacted was good.
Move.
Pouring all my strength into my legs, I pushed. The laden gurney creaked an inch. I pushed harder, started to make headway. More rocks fell on my shelter. On my legs.
Pain tried to shut me down. As my consciousness flickered, I shoved against the ground harder. Agony leapt through me, hot, viscous, blinding. Left leg gashed. Bad. Still connected, though. I added my hands, crawling, clawing, advancing the increasing weight of my shelter-prison an inch at a time.
Too slow. Too little. The possibility that I was in the process of being buried alive flashed in my mind.
At least I gave everyone a chance to get out.
Smoke and dust of a dozen pulverized materials filled my lungs, my vision, distorted moving shapes. Who…?
My team. Coming back for me.
No!
The morons. Thought I needed company in live burial, too?
Among the thunder of destruction and the roar of blood in my skull, an order cracked like a whip. Ayesha.
“Get your arms out the front!”
Her shape and Matt’s materialized out of the debris. Pain was severing my volition, but I still did as ordered. Each of my saviors latched onto one of my forearms and pulled. Agony gashed through me, out of me. I really envied men having no breasts to be sheared off in situations like this.
Everything happened at once. I was free of my impending burial contraption, on my feet, running between my friends. I couldn’t feel one leg, the other had lava coursing through it, and everything was caving in behind us. At one point, all the input of my senses coalesced into a realization.
The mini Armageddon was expanding outwards.
The explosions had come, were still coming, from inside the base.
That translated to a conclusion.
Damian had made changes of his own to the plan.
Daylight approached, the entrance zoomed in. Then there were only angry clouds above.
We were outside.
After swinging around my axis, making sure no one was coming after us or at us, I sagged onto my back, stared at the sky. Not with pain or depletion. I could no longer feel either, everything suspended in an impenetrable medium of relief. After that near-miss entombment experience, I was establishing an open-air appreciation cult.
Then I was on my feet, agony and nausea frothing to the surface again. The whole world churned around me.
“The others?” I gasped, got reassuring nods from the doubled over Matt and Ayesha.
Then militants were pouring out of the base. The moment they shoved past us, they dropped like flies.
Damian’s team. Cleanup duty. Mission accomplished then.
Time to rush back to our convoy. At least my team would. I had unfinished business. Damian. Had to find him. Find out if he’d gotten Jake out.
For once Matt and Ayesha didn’t object to my order to leave without me. I had weapons and full coverage. Matt threw me his backpack. It had all I’d need to deal with any injury.
As they ran down, I tended mine first. I would have put it off, but any more blood loss and I’d be out of commission.
I bandaged the gushing wound after approximating its edges and filling it with a sealing gel, on the verge of fainting with the pain all through. It would need sutures. Maybe debridement. Later.
After gulping down a fluid and electrolyte replacement concoction, and injecting myself with a powerful analgesic that wouldn’t interfere with my clarity, I ran up the mountain.
I reached José in his sniper’s position. He’d seen me coming, still flinched. Had to be my exhumed look.
“God, Cali. What were you doing in there?”
I kneeled beside him. “Where are Jake and Damian, José? Don’t say you don’t know, or I swear I’ll…”
He cut me off. “I don’t know for real. After we left you, thinking you’d get out, he disappeared. Then after the first explosion we ran out. I haven’t seen him or heard from him since.”
I couldn’t hear more.
Damian had left his team behind, had set off explosions with them inside.
I started running. From the horrifying suspicions.
Suddenly something impaled me from head to toe. Not a realization. Something that felt like…an invocation.
I stumbled under the inexorable pull, the sickening sensations. With every jarring footfall, the feeling got stronger. I was getting closer.
Then I heard it. A resounding bellow.
Jake’s.
Dread hit my bloodstream like an arterial shot of methamphetamine, launching me over the rocks.
God no, please. Don’t let it be—don’t let it…
Another roar pinpointed his location. A hidden cavern twenty feet away. Then I heard him.
Damian.
“…can do better than that. Scream for me again. Like you mean it this time.”
A ghastly sound reverberated through me. I knew it well. Flesh being pulped, bones splintering. Jake’s deep voice curdled mid-roar.
“Ow, what did I break now? Don’t worry, your precious surgeon’s hand is next. I’ll break every remaining bone in your body by the time I’m done with you.”
Damian. Oh, God, Damian. His voice. The sheer pleasure in it. The inhuman glee. As he beat Jake up.
No. He was doing far worse than that.
He was killing him.
Forty-Four
The realization blasted in my mind like Damian’s explosions had through the base. Tearing apart its tethers, demolishing its pillars.
“C’mon, you filthy son of a bitch. Give me more excuses to make it an excruciating death.”
I almost crashed to my knees.
He’d left me without a shred of doubt. Damian was killing Jake. A breath at a time. Loving every second.
No paranoia could have taken me that far.
“She’ll hate you for this…” Jake’s agonized gasp carried to me on the frigid air, tinged with…amusement.
Amusement?
“Who’s going to tell her?” Damian countered, as paradoxically amiable. “You, from beyond the grave?”
“She’ll work it out. She’s too intelligent—for you, Damian. She’s a—genius. Like me. That’s—why we belong together.”
“Over my dead body, bitch.” That flowed from Damian with that same hair-raising mirth. “No, let’s make it over yours.”
I had no idea what propelled me forward. I was pulped, paralyzed. Shock had eaten through me. My soul wretched with betrayal.
God—I let myself love him, believe in him, so totally…
I found myself at the cavern’s mouth, saw the scene I’d already projected in my head. Seeing it solidified the horror, made it a crippling blow.
Damian circled Jake, a big, sadistic cat torturing its kill for kicks. Never thought he had it in him. To be cruel to those weaker than him. Had always thought the reverse. That he was a knight in darkest armor.
Seemed I’d only been right when I’d thought I knew nothing about him.
His lazy prowl let Jake drag himself to his feet, stagger away, throw himself on the ground again. At a gun. Damian let him pick it up, then launched in the air from a standstill, spun, his formidable leg cutting the freezing air in a swooshing arc, striking the side of Jake’s head with another nauseating sound.
He’d pulled his kick. He could have snapped Jake’s neck had he wanted to. He didn’t. He still wanted to play.
Jake slammed to the ground in a heap, still groping for the gun. Damian let him pick it up again, then clamped his hand, what I knew was as inescapable and painful as a steel vice, made Jake shove the gun into his own jaw.
A gunshot from this angle would exit Jake’s skull at the anterior fontanelle. On its path of destruction, it would decimate the framework of Jake’s face, would leave the brainstem intact, while mashing the corpus callosum, the connection between the two hemispheres. Jake wouldn’t die instantly. He might even survive. With a caved in face and a disconnected brain. It would destroy everything he was.
I bet Damian knew that, had angled the shot with surgical precision for maximum, survivable damage.
He smiled at Jake, such a genial, demonic smile. “I’m giving you a way out. Go ahead.”
Jake grimaced a grin, as eerily unperturbed in spite of his clear pain and present danger. “Go ahead yourself. Go back to her with my blood all over you. She’ll know it’s mine.”
Damian twisted the gun out of Jake’s hand, snapping a few metacarpals, fulfilling his earlier promise.
“I have a better idea.” He hauled Jake up, so powerful even Jake with his physical upgrades flopped like a ragdoll over his knee. “I’ll break your back. This way you’ll have plenty of time to despair before you starve to death in a pool of your frozen piss and shit.”
Jake roared as Damian started applying inexorable pressure on his mid-vertebral column. I knew with his strength and expertise, he could easily shatter it. He was picking the worst kind of paraplegia to give Jake.
A full spinal avulsion at the mid thoracic level would rob Jake of the use of his legs, his urinary and anal sphincters’ control, and compromise his breathing muscles. This was far more merciless than a broken neck. Instead of quick suffocation and death, Jake would lie there soaking in his excrements, breathing only enough to survive. Until he died as Damian had planned. In torturously slow debasement.
Just imagining it, just knowing that Damian was depraved enough to do this, even to his worst enemy, tipped the scale of horror. It slammed down, jogging me out of my paralysis.
I burst into a run, launched in the air. Damian spun his head around, startled, dismayed, his eyes slamming an instant entreaty into mine. I landed with both feet in his back. He staggered forward, let go of Jake.
Jake crumpled to the ground, groaning, holding his ribs, his arm. Must be what Damian had broken.
Without losing momentum, I somersaulted over both of them, landed on bent knees, snapped the gun up.
Then I swung back to them.
“Calista…”
“Cali…”
“Shut up,” I screamed. “Both of you. And start talking.”
Damian rose to his feet, Jake to a sitting position. Both reached out a beseeching hand and gaze to me. I could feel each trying to drag me, through everything he knew about me, everything that lay between us, to his side.
Men.
“Calista, this isn’t what you think…” Damian started.
“You mean you weren’t in the process of killing me?” Jake scoffed.
I stormed closer, stopped an equal distance from both. “That’s not the talking I want to hear.” Feeling about to collapse under the weight of this hideousness, I took off my backpack. “I swear I’ll knock you both out, tie you up and sit and wait until you both cough up the truth.”
“You saw the truth, Cali,” Jake groaned, eyes wounded. “You saw for yourself what kind of monster Damian is.”
“Excuse me, establishing motives here. I don’t believe even he would kill you just for fun, Jake. And not for me.”
Damian reached for me again. I knocked his hand away with the gun. Hard.
Knowing him, the grimace wasn’t one of pain but at my rejection.
His gaze grew feverish on my face. “You’d be wrong there, Calista. I’d kill for you. Myself or anyone else. I did before, and I’d do it again. No hesitation. You know that.”
My heart tried to tear the vessels tethering it. Yes, I knew that. If anything I knew about him or anything he’d ever told me was true.
“Are you telling me this is over me? You’re eliminating the competition? Do I look stupid to you?”
“I told him you’d get it, Cali. But don’t bother interrogating him. He’ll only continue misleading you. I’ll tell you why he wants to kill me. Why h
e was after killing everyone in the base, hostages and all.”
“There are no hostages,” I yelled.
“Who told you that? Damian?”
“The militants. They said…” That there were no other medical personnel.
Jake’s eyes followed my thoughts, read them. “You were asking the wrong question. I’m the only one left of my team. They died one after the other years ago. But there are two dozen others in the base, scientists, kidnapped, too. And Damian is here, not to save us, but to eliminate us all.”
I swung to Damian. I’d find his denial written all over him.
I only found confirmation.
“But why?” I choked on my confusion.
It was Jake who answered. “Because it’s what he does. When he’s sent to treat an infected limb, he doesn’t only tear the arm out, he puts a bullet in the patient’s head.”
“I’m hanging by a thread here, Jake. Say one more metaphor and snap it.”
Damian approached me again, took another ram in the chest, spread his arms. “I won’t trade accusations with that deranged piece of shit, Calista. I want you to trust me. You know you can.”
“Can I?” Until minutes ago, against all evidence, I’d still trusted him. Faith still demanded I gave in. I couldn’t. Not about this. Not when Jake’s life literally depended on it.
“Trust you to do what, Damian? Kill Jake? Without even asking why?”
“There’s the best reason why, Calista.”
“According to whom?”
His golden eyes flared his deadly wrath and intent. “According to the nine thousand refugees he’s experimented on and killed.”
Forty-Five
I experienced something new.
Nothingness.
Everything that made up my mind and being stopped.
Cessation seemed the only sanity-saving measure.
Yet even in the vacuum, I still heard Damian.
“This base is the chemical/biological weapons facility in the region, Calista. And Jake is the mastermind behind it all. This has always been a search-and-destroy mission. PACT gave GCA manufactured proof of their operatives’ survival so we can come this close under their legitimate cover. The rest you know.”