School's Out Forever (The Afterblight Chronicles: The St Mark's Books)

by Scott K. Andrews

  She was on her own. There was no cavalry coming.

  Worse than that, Spider would know by now that she had betrayed him. He might react in a number of ways. He could kill her outright, but she thought at the very least he’d want her to examine the new intake first. Alternatively, he could disappear her into his system, send her to some dank cellar or a dungeon somewhere to be kept on ice ready for a client who fancied a girl who’d put up a fight. That seemed most likely. After all, she was a resource he could use to turn a profit.

  She told herself to stay calm and clear headed. As long as she was alive, there was a chance she could find a way to alert Cooper.

  The wild card here, she knew, was her brother. What might Spider do to him?

  She didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

  The internal door swung open and Spider entered. He was wearing a different but equally well cut suit, this time of dark purple. His face was impassive and he moved with controlled, almost robotic precision. He walked behind the bar without acknowledging her, took a glass from beneath the counter and poured himself a whisky before looking up at Kate.

  “Drink?” he said.

  Kate considered for a moment before nodding. “Red wine, please.”

  He took a wine glass down from a shelf and began to open a bottle.

  “I thought we had an understanding, Miss Booker,” he said as he pulled the cork out with a soft pop.

  Kate thought it best to stay silent.

  “I thought that you understood the consequences of betrayal,” he continued, pouring the wine into the large glass.

  “My lieutenant thinks I should give you to him. He thinks it would be fun to rape you while strangling you. Although he enjoys fucking them, I think he does not like women very much. He likes to cut them with the bayonet his grandfather used in the Second World War. He keeps it very sharp.” The glass full, he put the bottle down, walked over to Kate and handed her the drink. “Does that sound like an appropriate punishment to you, Miss Booker?” he asked.

  She took the glass and had to put it down immediately, as her hands were shaking too badly to hold it steady.

  Spider remained standing, looking down on her. “I worry, though, that if I were to let him have his way with you, you would not learn your lesson.”

  The internal door swung open again and Kate stifled a cry of fear as she saw her brother being led into the room by the giant.

  He saw her and smiled. “Hi Kit,” he said. Then he registered the fear on her face and the single minded focus with which Spider was regarding her, and his step faltered.

  “I think,” said Spider quietly, “that a different punishment would be better.” He turned to James and smiled. “Hello, Booker.”

  “Hi Boss,” said James, giving the most unconvincing smile Kate had ever seen.

  “James, how long have you been working for me?”

  “Ooh, six months now, I reckon.”

  “Six months.” Spider nodded. “You have been a good worker.”

  “Er, Boss,” said James, trying not to let his fear show. “What’s up?”

  “Your sister has betrayed me to the police. She tried to bring a transmitter here with her.”

  Kate met James’ eyes and she saw all the hope vanish in an instant, replaced by total despair. Spider reached into his jacket and pulled out a huge hunting knife, shiny and sharp. He turned and walked over to James and caressed his cheek with the sharp edge, tenderly.

  “I like you, James,” said Spider.

  “I, I like you too, Boss,” James stammered.

  “You have kept me amused far longer than most lovers, but I don’t think you do like me. Not really,” replied Spider, who was now standing close to James, pressed up close to him. “I think you are scared of me. And that is how I like it. The one thing my lieutenant and I have in common is that we both know there is no enjoyment to be had from fucking someone who is not scared of you.”

  Kate found her voice at last. “Stop this. Please,” she said, rising to her feet. “He’s done nothing wrong. It’s me you’ve got the problem with, Spider. There’s no reason to hurt him.”

  “What do you think, James?” asked the Serbian, standing behind the terrified young man, chin resting on his shoulder, knife pressed up against his temple.

  James had nothing to say.

  “Do you think I should kill you? Or perhaps your sister?” There was no reply. “Petar wants her. You know what he would do to her.”

  Tears began to stream down James’ cheeks but still he stayed silent.

  “You still need me to examine the new shipment of girls,” said Kate, desperately.

  Spider shook his head. “Once I learnt of your betrayal I diverted that container. To the bottom of a river.”

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” said Kate, using the only bargaining chip she had left. “I know the policeman who’s running the operation. I can lead you to him.”

  “Do you mean DI Cooper?” he laughed. “We know all about him. What else you got?”

  Kate had nothing else.

  “Thought so,” said Spider.

  Then he pushed the knife through the thin bone plate on the side of James’ head, straight into his brain.

  SHE DOESN’T REMEMBER what happened next. All that survives is a sound; a low keening that goes on forever and ever. The second the knife went in, the world went black and her mind stopped creating memories.

  The woman who gradually became aware of her surroundings however many hours later was a different person. Someone as yet unnamed. Someone at whose very core nestled a cold, hard knot of calm determination and resolve. Someone with only one thought in her head.

  Vengeance.

  THE WORLD CAME to the woman a piece at a time.

  First it was the faint smell of burning hops. Then the sound of her own breathing. She floated in a dark void, examining the smell and the sound for a long time before her body began to send back signals that told her she was lying on a bed. Then there was a taste of stale wine and bile. Finally, she opened her eyes.

  The world looked... different. The room was monochrome – black walls, white nurse’s outfit hanging from the white hook on the inside of the door, shiny grey buckles on the straps that adorned the sturdy black wooden cross, white trolley with black implements strewn across it – whips, dildos, clamps and catheters. But even despite the lack of colour, the woman who awoke on that bed (and was it a waking, truly? Had she been asleep or just comatose? Had she really opened her eyes or had her optic nerves instead rebooted themselves after a long shutdown?) somehow knew that even had the room been painted in fluorescent colours they would have seemed muted.

  The way she saw the world had literally changed.

  The bed springs creaked as she sat up. She had been expecting a headache, but her head was clear and her senses were sharp. There were no windows in this dark place. The only illumination came from four uplighters, one in each corner of the room.

  She stood up and checked the door, knowing it was locked but determined to be thorough. She then turned to assess the room, methodically cataloguing its contents in her mind searching for a means of attack or something she could use to defend herself.

  She noted the absence of panic, but did not think it worthy of further examination.

  The trolley offered the best hope, but there was nothing there that could be of genuine use. The cat o’ nine tails lacked the sharp stones that would have rendered it really painful, and she did not think beating a man around the head with a giant black rubber cock would do anything but provoke laughter.

  Perhaps if she pushed the trolley itself at whoever entered, it would unbalance them long enough to give her an opening. But when she tried to move it forwards the wheels squealed alarmingly and refused to move.

  She made no further progress before she heard a key turn in the lock. She stepped away from the trolley and into the only really clear area in the centre of the room. If she was going to fight, t
his was all the space she would have to do it in.

  The door opened and the giant stepped inside. The woman who was no longer Kate abandoned all thought of fighting.

  He closed the door behind him, not bothering to lock it. He knew there was no way she was getting past him.

  She stood there, impassive, as he removed his jacket and hung it on the hook, covering the nurse’s outfit. He then removed his shirt, revealing an acreage of tattooed chest that was twice the woman’s width from shoulder to shoulder. He hung the shirt over the jacket.

  He stepped forward and reached out his huge right hand, wrapping the fingers around her throat and lifting her off the ground with a single outstretched arm. He brought her face close to his as she choked. She felt his warm breath on her cheek as he examined her closely. Then he relaxed his grip and she collapsed in a heap at his feet, gasping for air. He turned his back on her, stepped to the door and removed a huge bayonet from the inside of his hanging jacket.

  “Stand,” he said. The woman did so.

  He stepped forward and inserted the bayonet under the bottom of her t-shirt. He ripped the blade upwards and the cloth parted before it like butter meeting a hot knife. The bayonet was so sharp, she thought, you probably wouldn’t realise you’d been stabbed until you looked down and saw the hilt sticking out.

  The blunt edge felt cold against her skin as it rushed up from her belly to her throat.

  When the t-shirt had been split from waist to neck, it fell off her. She stood in her bra, facing this enormous man, knowing exactly what he intended to do to her, and still she felt no fear.

  She remembered the dojo, she recalled the moves she’d been taught in a draughty hut in Camden, and she knew that all that training was useless. If he came at her with some momentum, she could perhaps have used it against him. But the room was too small; he had no need of speed. If he had been smaller, she could have tried to throw him from a standing start, but she hadn’t been able to throw Sanders who, big as he was, was slight in comparison.

  Her best chance, she realised, was the bayonet.

  “Rush a gun, flee a knife,” Sanders had told her. “If you run at a person who’s trying to shoot you, you force them to fire quickly and without time to aim properly. You have a better chance that they’ll miss you than if you turn and run. But a knife is different. It’s only lethal in close quarters and once you’ve got a hand to it, it can move both ways. You’d be amazed how many stab victims are killed with their own blades.”

  The woman focused all her attention on the blade. This man was too strong to wrestle with, but even so she had a slim chance of turning his weapon against him. To do that she had to know exactly where it was, how it was angled, where it was pointed at all times.

  He reached down and unbuckled her belt, pulling it out in one fluid movement, cracking it like a whip, and tossing it over his shoulder into the corner.

  He angled the knife down, inserting the point inside the waistband of her jeans, directly below her belly button.

  Then something distracted him. A distant rumble. The floor shook briefly. There was a scream somewhere far away. He glanced over his shoulder instinctively, even though the closed door and windowless walls offered no vantage.

  When he turned his attention back to the woman he noticed she had taken a step backwards. He looked down and registered that she had something in her right hand. Something long and thin. Something dripping.

  He took a step towards her and felt his centre of gravity shift in an unsettling way. There was a soft wet sound and he felt pressure on his foot. He looked down to see his entrails spooling out of his belly and falling to the floor like a coil of steaming, lumpy rope.

  Still looking at his feet in wonder he saw a hand enter his field of vision and felt it punch him on the breast. The hand withdrew and he opened his mouth in astonishment as he realised there was a black metal handle sticking out of his chest.

  How the fuck had that got there?

  He reached down and grabbed the handle, pulling it and exposing the blade of his grandfather’s bayonet. It emerged from his heart smoothly, without a sound. The room spun and he felt something hit him on the back of the head. He wasn’t conscious long enough to realise that it was the floor.

  The woman reached down and took the bayonet from twitching fingers, then stepped over the giant corpse and opened the door. Somewhere in the distance she could hear gunfire.

  She walked out of the room, blade in hand, spoiling for a fight.

  As she moved down the corridor, she could still hear occasional bursts of gunfire somewhere below and ahead of her. She didn’t know how, but Cooper and his men must have found the warehouse. This mean that time was not on her side. She had to find Spider before Cooper did.

  The corridor ran the length of the building along its external back wall. Tall metal framed windows ranged to her left, a collection of doors to her right. A quick glance outside told her that it was late evening and she was at least one floor above the lobby bar.

  The door at the far end of the corridor burst open and the man with the yellow teeth came running through with a submachine gun in his hands. Without noticing the woman, he turned and entered the first door. The woman heard a girl’s scream and then a burst of gunfire.

  She began to run. The man stepped back out of the room, the barrel of his gun smoking. He turned to walk towards the next door and then stopped in amazement as he registered a woman in a bra running towards him with teeth bared. It took him a second to react, but he soon brought the gun to bear.

  “Rush a gun, flee a knife,” the woman muttered to herself as she barrelled forwards. The sound of the shots was deafening in the enclosed corridor, and she felt hot air stream across her right shoulder as the distance closed. Then there was a sharp sting in the same shoulder but she ignored it as she crashed into the gunman, flinging him to the floor. The bayonet clattered out of her hands as they fell. She wrestled with him for a moment and then, realising the madness of this, sat up, straddling him like a lover. Again he took a moment to react to this unexpected move, a moment in which she reached down, grabbed his gun, reversed it and used the butt to send the bones from his nose shrapnelling into his frontal lobe.

  She leaned across him, grabbed the bayonet again then stood, blade in one hand, gun in the other. She checked the gun once, recalling Sanders’ tuition, recognising the vital parts. She pointed it at the chest of Yellowteeth and squeezed the trigger. A stream of bullets thudded into him.

  The woman nodded, satisfied.

  She heard a door open behind her and she spun around, raising the weapon. A teenaged girl peered out at her, eyes wide with fear. The woman lowered the weapon.

  “You speak English?” she asked.

  The girl nodded. The woman handed her the bayonet, and the girl looked at it in wonder.

  “Take this,” said the woman. “Stick it in any man you meet who’s not wearing a uniform. Understand?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Good, now get everyone in these rooms into the dungeon at the far end. Lock the door. The keys are in the pocket of the dead man you’ll find in there. Don’t come out until the shooting stops. Can you do that?”

  Again the girl nodded. “You’ve been shot,” she whispered.

  The woman looked at her shoulder and registered a small hole at the top of her arm. She fingered it, and found the exit wound. The bullet had gone straight through and missed both bones and arteries. She didn’t feel any pain, though she knew that would not stay the case for long.

  She turned, jumped over the corpse of Yellowteeth and ran out the door. She had wasted enough time.

  She emerged onto a darkened dance floor with swing doors at the far right. She ran diagonally across it. As she reached the halfway point the doors swung open and three men ran in. All were in civvies and all carried guns.

  Their eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness, so by the time they realised they were not alone it was too late. The woman sprayed the
doorway with bullets and the men jerked and dropped. She kept running, jumped over them and flew out the swing doors, ready to fire.

  Behind her, in the corridor where she’d killed Yellowteeth, she heard shattering glass as Cooper’s men came in through the windows. So now they were ahead of her and behind her. She gritted her teeth.

  She had to get to Spider first.

  She ran down an empty staircase keeping the gun aimed at the bottom in case anyone else came running through. There was another soft explosion on the far side of the building as she reached the bottom and turned to find herself facing another corridor and another row of rooms.

  These doors were open. One, about halfway along, had a single bloodstained hand stretched across the threshold.

  The woman walked down the corridor checking each room for survivors. Despite her focus, she knew she would have to help any wounded girls she found, even if that meant letting Spider escape. But Yellowteeth had been thorough. Each room held at least one dead girl, some as many as three. No-one was to be left alive who could testify against them. No witnesses, no descriptions. The woman reached the end of the corridor with something approximating relief and pushed through into the lobby bar.

  A patch of darkness on the carpet was the only evidence that someone had been stabbed in the head here not so long ago.

  There was a burst of gunfire from somewhere close, beyond the opposite door, then heavy footsteps on the stairs behind her. She scanned the room in desperation. Had they already captured him? Had the bastard escaped her?

  Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of something that didn’t seem right, so she turned and realised that there was another door, slightly ajar, behind the bar. It was flat and featureless, disguised as part of the wall, which was why she had not seen it earlier. She ran to it and pulled it open, squeezing through and closing it firmly behind her. Cooper and his team would probably not see the door on their first pass, especially if they were still encountering resistance. If Spider had come this way, she would be the only person in pursuit for now.