by R. B. Schow
“Does anyone find it funny that the guy with no tactical experience is the one writing the playbook?” Atlas asked.
“Shut your asshole already, Atlas,” Esty said. “He’s good at this.”
“We’ll see,” Atlas said.
Cira headed back down the hill while Yergha closed in on the two guards in back. Leopold, Esty, Kiera, and Atlas moved toward the cement wall while keeping an eye out for tripwires, booby traps, and any kind of low-brow security measures these Muppets put in place.
They reached the concrete wall then turned and waited for Yergha. When he fired a couple of three-round bursts, two guys went down hard. Yergha gave them the thumbs up, indicating their clearance to move.
Atlas boosted Kiera onto the thick concrete wall while Leopold gave Esty a lift. Both women dropped down the other side without any sign of awareness from whatever guards remained.
Leopold and Atlas jumped up on the wall, struggled a bit pulling themselves over, then dropped down inside the compound. Leopold landed funny, stepping like he’d rolled his ankle.
“Walk it out, Sunshine,” Atlas said.
“Is this how you ran ops in SWAT?” Leopold grumbled.
“Exactly how,” Atlas said. “Head around back, don’t leave Esty exposed.”
Leopold took off about the time two of the four remaining guards rounded the corner. Before Atlas could respond, Kiera and Esty gutted them with knives. Atlas looked to the left and saw two more men turning the other corner of the house. They ran right into Leopold.
The second they made contact, Atlas decided to abandon the plan to cover his boss, but Yergha was already managing the situation. The first guy’s head snapped sideways with a spray of red, but Leopold made it impossible for Yergha to shoot the other. Their boss had already rushed in and drilled him in the snotbox with a stiff jab. The minute the guard’s head rocked back, Leopold had his Glock out.
“No, no, no!” Atlas growled low enough for Leopold to pause. The last thing they needed was for Leopold to discharge his weapon and spoil their tactical advantage.
Yergha fired twice, hitting the man in the shoulder and blasting out the side of his cheek. He was still alive when he hit the ground. One more shot from Yergha finished the job.
Atlas turned back to Kiera and saw she was looking back at him with her hands up as if to say, “What the hell are you doing?”
He caught up with her, ready to go in hot. They reached the front door as Esty turned the corner of the house, heading into the backyard. Atlas tried the door and found it open. This was to be expected considering the tight patrol of armed guards.
He and Kiera tiptoed inside the foyer but realized they no longer had the tactical advantage because a pack of men was hustling down a hallway toward them.
“Video surveillance,” Atlas guessed out loud.
The second he saw bodies rushing into the foyer, Atlas opened fire. The men did the same, causing Atlas and Kiera to scramble for cover. One of the guys Atlas shot went down, but a round caught Atlas high in the vest, the same one that Yergha had worn in his last gunfight. He spun sideways, twisted his ankle, and considered it instant karma for the jab he took at Leopold just minutes ago.
In that second, through a large wall of windows, Atlas saw one of the guards tackle Esty, the two of them going into the pool.
Kiera put a bullet into one of the faces of the approaching guards, but she let the other man through, leaving him for Atlas.
Atlas dropped down and fired twice, but the bullet that hit his vest had rattled him harder than he thought. Somehow, he missed both shots. The guy shooting at him wasn’t a marksman by any regard—certainly not when he was running—but by the time they both figured that out, he was already on the attack.
Atlas dodged a wild punch and sunk a knee into the man’s gut. He blocked out the man’s inside arm enabling him to wrap the man’s neck and pull him into a headlock. Atlas then dropped down hard, driving the man’s head straight into the tile floor. The tile split with a loud crack where the crown of his head hit, making his recovery slow and sloppy. Atlas spun off of him and put a bullet in his head.
He started to get up and that’s when he saw this giant of a man facing Kiera from across the wide-open space. Two more guys followed this beast in the foyer, but Atlas put two in each of them. They weren’t kill shots. The next three shots did the job, however.
Atlas performed a quick reload then turned the gun on the big man. Kiera already had him dead to rights and he knew it. Slowly, the man put his gun down and held up his hands. Then he pointed to Kiera and changed his hands to boxer’s fists that he lowered in front of his chest. Was he actually challenging her to a fistfight?
“Shoot that big bitch,” Atlas barked.
Kiera shook her head.
The man must be six-foot-eight with two-hundred-and-eighty pounds of lean muscle. Kiera was less than half that but she put her guns down and walked toward him anyway
“What the hell, Kiera?” he said. He raised his weapon to shoot the man but then he caught a stern look from Kiera.
This was what she’s been training for, he told himself.
The second the two of them got close enough for contact, Kiera moved in on him in ways he’d never seen a person move before. She was fast, her strikes precise, her body a finely-tuned weapon. She worked the outside of his legs with kicks, the insides of his knees with more kicks, and then his ribs and gut with clean, ferocious strikes. Even though she landed the shots, and even though they were on point, this brute wasn’t going down easily.
He was actually smiling.
He lashed out at her a few times, quickly for someone his size, but she was still on him. Then he caught her with a glancing blow to the head that had her staggering backward.
Atlas’s heart dropped into a lower gear and he ached to get in there and help. He wouldn’t intervene, however, not unless Kiera asked for it. He knew the rules on these sorts of things.
The beast blocked a weak punch, then kicked her into the floor-to-ceiling window, spider-webbing it where her back struck the glass. He moved in fast but she parried off him, checked a punch then barely managed to get out of the way of another big kick.
She looked winded, but the fight was wearing on the big guy, too.
Two more men rushed into the foyer, but Atlas’s body recovered enough for both shots to find their marks. One of the downed guards was still breathing so he broke away from the fight to put a bullet in his skull. He did this while keeping an eye on Kiera and the giant.
The beast of a man was dead no matter what. He seemed to know this, so he worked on Kiera like she’d be his last fight, the one he wanted to win before the coward spectator—NorCal State Prison’s finest—shot him in the back like he was a prison bitch.
Beyond the windows, in the pool, he saw Esty drowning the guard who tackled her. The look on her face was purely homicidal. The guard started to get loose, then Esty jammed a thumb into his eye and once the orb popped, he was done for.
Kiera seemed to regain her balance but she was shaken and unnerved. An inside kick to the knee hobbled him, but he managed to get that long reach far enough to backhand Kiera right in the mouth. She took two awkward steps sideways; the beast drove in hard and tackled her.
She fought him with all her might, but he still managed to get his hands around her throat while taking punch after punch from her like it was nothing.
Atlas moved in from behind. Kiera was on her back, unable to pull some kind of guard, and though she was driving her heels into his hips in an attempt to push him off, he merely widened his base, impervious to her frivolous attempts to free herself.
With the beast’s hands still wrapped around her throat, she was turning red, her eyes starting to bulge. When Atlas saw her slowing down, he knew it was all over now.
Moving in fast, Atlas bent down behind the man, jammed his pistol into the man’s butthole, and pulled the trigger. The fight stopped instantly. Oddly enough, something unexpecte
d happened. This hulking psycho didn’t fall; rather he seemed to have been put on pause.
“What the hell?” Atlas asked aloud.
The brute didn’t move and he certainly didn’t fall. He just remained on his knees and elbows, his hands still circling Kiera’s neck. Fortunately, the shot loosened his hands enough for Kiera to push herself free. When she was finally out of his grasp, she leaned forward and started coughing, her throat raw sounding and raspy.
Atlas was about to get up and see what the deal was when he saw the man’s ribcage expanding and contracting. Instead of putting one more bullet into the poop shoot, Atlas lowered the weapon to the bulge that was the back of this guy’s balls and pulled the trigger again.
That was when the tower that was this mammoth man collapsed. He toppled over onto his side and lay curled into a fetal position, his face beet red. Not a single word left his mouth, only the soft sounds of a man in excruciating pain.
Kiera walked over to him, looked down at his face, and then stomped on it with all of her might. His head lolled to the side, but it didn’t fall. She stomped it again, and this time it fell on the ground. But then his eye creaked back open and he took a shallow breath. Kiera stomped on him a third and a fourth time and that’s when he stopped moving altogether.
“Why not do a fifth time?” Atlas said sarcastically.
Her only response was to go and pick up her gun, walk back to the fallen giant, and fire three rounds into his skull. When she was done, she looked up at Atlas and nodded.
Outside the large window, Atlas had been keeping an eye on Esty. Leopold was now helping her out of the pool. Behind her, there was a body floating face-down, the pool water now clouding with red.
“Let’s clear this place, see if we can find the family here,” Atlas said.
She nodded and they took two separate hallways. At the end of the hallway and coming from one of the rooms, Atlas heard loud music playing, almost like club beats turned up to an obnoxious level.
He went to the door, turned the handle, found that it was locked. Rearing back, he kicked the door open only to find a naked man on top of a nude baldish woman. He was thrusting in and out of her while she just lay there taking it.
He whipped his head around, firing Atlas a look. When he did that, Atlas recognized the woman’s face immediately.
Sydney Fox.
“Santiago Cardenas?” Atlas asked, aiming the weapon at him as he stalked into the room.
“Jose!” Santiago screamed.
“Jose is dead in the foyer,” Atlas said, turning off the music. He was sickened by a great many things these days, but this was one of the worst. “All of your men are dead.”
Santiago glanced around to the nightstand farthest from the door and lunged for it. Atlas shot him in the butt cheek. He cried out in pain as he collapsed onto Sydney. Atlas closed the distance between them as Santiago reached for the nightstand once more.
Atlas fired a second round, the bullet catching this scumbag just below the scapula. Santiago stopped moving but his hysteria was now accompanied by an onslaught of profanity.
Atlas grabbed his knife, cut the ropes binding Sydney’s arms and legs to the bed, and then he sheathed his blade and helped her up off the bed. Unfortunately, there was nothing he could find to hide her nudity so he just acted as if it was no big deal.
She sat up in bed, looked across the room at the dresser, and then gingerly stood and went to Atlas. She hugged him tight, which seemed very strange and rather mechanical.
He felt a slight pressure at his side, but by the time he looked down, she’d slipped his blade out of his sheath.
She locked eyes with him and said, “I need to borrow this.”
“Where are the girls?” he asked.
“Gone,” the woman replied. She walked over to Santiago who was moaning in pain. “Help me with him, please.”
“What are you doing?”
“Moving him.”
“Why?”
“Just help me, please,” she said.
She pulled him off the bed with her free hand then looked up at Atlas. This woman with butchered hair was more of a mess than he was. Looking like she’d taken multiple beatings over the last couple of days, her body was marred with bruising and lacerations, and she had a black eye and a swollen lip. Whatever she was doing now, Atlas was determined to help her.
When they pulled the pervert into the position she wanted, Sydney Fox walked up to the dresser where a camera had been filming them all along. She aimed the lens down at Santiago just as Atlas stepped back out of the frame.
She then turned and walked back to Santiago with purpose. The woman who was taking a pounding earlier was not the same woman Atlas was seeing now. This woman had somehow transformed. It was almost like all of hell had crowded into her body and it was now about to unleash itself upon the earth.
Kneeling down, Sydney touched the knife to Santiago’s side, leaning on it slowly and methodically. Then the skin popped and the knife slid into his side. The minute Santiago started to scream Sydney grabbed his dirty underwear off the floor and shoved it into his mouth, really stuffing it in there.
Atlas watched her with a sense of awe, of fascination. It wasn’t every day you witnessed the victim becoming a sadistic aggressor, and quite frankly, this was the kind of justice this cruel world needed.
She slid the knife out, wiped the blade across his face to clean it, then reached down and grabbed his parts. One dick, two balls, and a firm pull. Atlas knew what was coming next, and though he couldn’t watch, he felt like he needed to, like this was the journey intended for him.
Swiftly and without hesitation, Sydney see-sawed her way through his meat, taking all of it clean off. She tossed the bundle aside like garbage, then sat back and—without a word—looked right at him. Santiago was reduced to a shrieking, blubbering mess. His eyes were watery, his nose was snotty, and he now had bloody saliva strings hanging from his mouth. In between his legs, there was nothing but a deep red circle where his manhood used to be. It was gushing blood like a geyser.
When he had bled enough but wasn’t yet dead, Atlas helped Sydney up. Instead of going for clothes, she grabbed his dick and balls off the floor and threw them in his face, the effort so savage, she lost her balance and almost fell. Fortunately, Atlas caught her. When she could stand on her own again, it was to watch the last light wink out of Santiago’s eyes.
After that, Sydney thanked him, then turned and walked to the camera, shutting it off for good. She then headed for the master closet, presumably to find some clothes.
Kiera arrived only a moment later, saw the bloody mess, but did not see Sydney Fox.
“I found her,” he said. “The wife. Did you find the girls?”
Kiera shook her head, then looked back down at the man’s crotch and winced.
When Leopold rushed in and saw the carnage, he turned away and started to dry heave. By this time, Sydney emerged wearing a pair of Santiago’s sweats and a sweatshirt.
“Was that Santiago?” Leopold asked with a weak, anguished voice.
“Yeah,” Atlas said.
“We needed him alive,” Leopold growled.
“No we don’t,” Sydney Fox said. “There’s a private airport out by a cement plant just off Mexico 45, whatever that is.”
“That’s a highway,” Atlas said.
“We have to hurry,” Sydney said, unashamed and driven. “Santiago just arranged for my two youngest daughters to be taken out of the country.”
Parked in the garage with several exotic cars, they found Santiago’s S560 Mercedes-Benz and the keys on a nearby keyboard. Rather than run down to the Audi, they all piled into the Benz and drove down to where Cira was waiting in the Easter egg. Esty and Yergha got out of the Benz with Esty saying, “We’ll follow you in the Audi.”
“What about the Spark?” Cira asked.
“We’ll come back for it,” Leopold said. “The kids are heading to a plane that’s taking them out of the country.
We need to go, now!”
Atlas was in the driver’s seat and needed no prompting. The second Leopold picked up his phone to call Codrin he stepped on the gas and roared out of there. They made it down the hill in record time.
When they reached the paved road, Atlas waited for the Audi to catch up, and then he took off like a bat out of hell heading toward the private runway’s remote location.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
SCOTTY CHASE
With no immediate flights available, the trip to Queens in their rental car went slower than expected. Even though they ended up getting into town too late to pay a cordial visit, they managed to drive by the house enough to get the lay of the land.
“It really is too late,” Scotty said, disappointed.
“We can go in quietly,” Jackson suggested. “Do a quick sneak and peek.”
His instincts warned against that. “We should wait until morning.”
“You’re the boss, boss,” Jackson replied with a deep sigh.
They waited until morning then they went to the house, knocked on the front door, and got nothing. No answer, no barking dog, no pulled curtain.
“Can we find out if this lady has a cell phone?” Jackson asked.
“Do you know anyone at the NYPD?”
Jackson shook his head.
“Me neither. It looks like we’re on ‘sit and wait’ duty. If we don’t get anywhere by tonight, we’ll call Leopold and see what’s what.”
They sat on the house all day and into the night. When he went to call Leopold to ask if he could use his hacker as a resource, he found that his cell phone was dead.
“Really?” Jackson said, fishing his phone out of his pocket. He handed it to Scotty, but Scotty said, “I don’t have the number memorized and I forgot the charging cord.”
“Man,” Jackson said, disappointed, “you used to be on top of things so much better than this.”
“Times change, people change,” he said. “Quit busting my balls.”
They sat on the house throughout the night and the next morning Scotty woke up to the obnoxious sound of a car with a loud muffler passing by.
