“So what’s the plan now, Master Dorigan?” Jessie asked, disappointment coating her words.
“Well, Jessie, much as it may pain you, it seems that the only course of action left to us is to simply wait for Jin Sakai to come to us.”
“Aww,” Jessie whined. “But that’s no fun.”
Dorigan had to suppress a frustrated growl. Though she had always been this way, Dorigan had always been slightly irritated by Jessie’s tendency to play with her prey, even at the best of times. Now, with so much at risk, it was a tendency that ground harshly on Dorigan’s already fraying nerves.
“Well then,” Dorigan began, voice ever so slightly tense. “Perhaps a new development will arise that will prove more fun for you.”
Jessie sat back, subdued. She heard the tiny edge to Dorigan’s words and knew that she had overstepped her bounds.
“Well, my fellow Dragons,” Dorigan sighed. “It is late and the developments of today have left me…drained. You are dismissed.”
Jessie, Mark, and Victor rose from their seats and bowed to Dorigan. Dorigan inclined his head in kind and watched the three of them walk out of the meeting hall. When they were gone, Dorigan rose from his seat and walked across the hall to a wooden door on his left. Pushing it open, Dorigan began to swiftly descend the long spiral staircase that waited on the other side.
Though this had been the outcome he’d expected and prepared for, it didn’t give Dorigan any pleasure, for it was not the outcome he’d desired. In truth, the whole situation was beginning to wear on him. If it wasn’t for the fact that his new powers hadn’t fully taken hold, he would simply leave his mansion, track Jin down himself, and crush the man with his bare hands. But until his powers did manifest, Dorigan was stuck hiding in this castle-like prison and playing these ridiculous games of cat and mouse. Even in his weary, yet highly frustrated, frame of mind, Dorigan couldn’t help but find the irony in his situation. In his effort to escape the meaningless games of human existence, he had unintentionally begun the largest and most complicated game of his life, with an opponent just as smart and just as skilled as he was.
At the bottom of the staircase, Dorigan was faced with thick steel door, which he pushed through absentmindedly.
On the other side of this door lay a chamber of roughly the same spacious dimensions as the meeting hall above. The only significant differences between this chamber and the meeting hall were the lack of windows and the balconies set into the rear wall directly to Dorigan’s right and the far wall to Dorigan’s left. To Dorigan’s left sat a staircase leading down to the chamber itself.
In that chamber, around forty men worked on various projects. Some were testing and fine-tuning batteries of computer consoles, others assembling a quartet of massive generators on the far end of the chamber, still more men were laying cables over the floor, tying all the machines together. The final group of men was working around a massive, twisted hulk of metal and wire.
This was the beginning of Dorigan’s hell machine. The device with which Dorigan would rip open a hole between Earth and Hell.
The device Dorigan would use to begin the apocalypse.
I am so sick and tired of playing these games, Dorigan growled to himself. Once this project is complete, I will deeply enjoy destroying this world!
--<(0)>--
Inside of Mark’s living room, Jin flopped down on his friend’s black leather couch and heaved a massive sigh of relief.
“You know,” he said. “I can’t even begin to put into words how good it feels to be able to relax for once.”
Mark chuckled. “Do you even remember the last time you relaxed?”
Jin shook his head as he closed his eyes, enjoying his newfound peace.
Mark smiled and looked up at Leah and Will, who were sitting at the table about six feet behind the couch Jin was sitting on eating a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs that he’d had prepared.
“How’s the food?” he asked.
“It’s…great!” Leah said, swallowing her mouthful of food.
“Really, Mark, this is excellent.”
“Well don’t sound so amazed,” Mark teased.
Leah chuckled. “I’m sorry. I’m just not used to guys being able to cook.”
Now it was Mark’s turn to chuckle.
“Well, with the lives we lead,” Mark began, nodding at Jin, “we have to be as self-sufficient as possible.”
“Makes sense,” Leah nodded.
“How ’bout you, Will?” Mark asked, turning to Leah’s son. “You like it?”
“It’s alright, I guess,” Will mumbled begrudgingly.
“Okay.”
Mark could easily hear the mutinous tone in Will’s voice, so rather than continuing to play the gracious host, he turned back to Jin to get a few ‘business’ things sorted out.
“So, Jin, what’s the plan now?” he asked.
“Hmm?” Jin asked from the couch, not opening his eyes.
“What’s the plan?”
“Sit back and wait for my arm to heal,” Jin answered simply. “Don’t really have a choice in that. Once it does though, it’s back to business as usual.”
“You mean back to murdering people,” Will interjected with a hostile edge.
Leah flicked her son sharply on the forehead – earning an affronted look from him – Mark stared curiously at him, and Jin rolled his eyes.
“Call it what you will,” he replied.
“Speaking of your arm,” Leah said, swallowing another mouthful of food. “We really should get you to a hospital. I did the best I could with the splint and the sling, but if we don’t get your arm professionally set, the bones may not heal properly.”
“Which would not be good,” Jin added.
“No, it wouldn’t.”
Jin hummed thoughtfully. While going to a hospital would put him back on the grid, if only for a moment, he would be in even worse shape if the bones in his arm healed wrong, and he couldn’t risk being at such a disadvantage.
“Mark?”
“Well, you certainly can’t risk leaving your arm untreated,” Mark answered. “That’s just that. I think you could even chance Adam & Eve Hospital. I mean, with the show we put on for Dorigan, he’s not going to expect you to go somewhere so close to home.”
“Okay,” Jin nodded. “Sounds good.”
“Speaking of Adam & Eve Hospital,” Mark continued. “Did you by any chance have any business there the night you went after the Informant?”
“No,” Jin answered, perplexed. “Why?”
“Well, I didn’t find out about it until after you left, but apparently the same night you took out the Informant, there was some kind of explosion at the hospital. Tore through three floors of the place and killed half a dozen people.”
“Did they say what caused it?” Jin asked.
“The official explanation is that it was one of the orderlies. Story says his mother passed away last week and that he went nuts when the doctors didn’t try to save her. They fired him, and he came back three nights later and set off a homemade bomb.”
At that statement, despite the morbid topic, Mark chuckled.
“I gotta say, that was one hell of a night for the police. Between your shooting up the Informant’s place and this mess at the hospital, they didn’t know what to do!”
“You think the explosion has some connection to Project Hellbound?”
“I don’t know. If it weren’t for the fact I don’t believe that the orderly could have built a bomb that powerful, regardless of what he could have found on the Internet, I would have bought it. Still, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Nothing like it has happened since, and I honestly think Dorigan is too paranoid to try anything like that just yet. He wants to wait until you’re dead.”
“Lucky for Pine Lake.”
“Yeah, really.”
“So,” Jin said, changing the subject. “Can I bum a ride to the hospital?”
“Sure,” Mark smiled.
Jin smiled back
and the two of them began to walk toward the staircase. But they’d only taken a handful of steps before Will’s angry voice entered the air.
“Wait a minute!” he half-shouted. “What are we supposed to do?”
“Calm down,” Mark said. “We’ll only be gone for… what do you think, Jin? Couple hours, at most?”
“At most,” Jin assured. “Take it easy, Will.”
“Oh yeah, take it easy,” Will fired back. “Take it easy for a few hours while your whacked out terrorist-assassin friends come busting in here to kill us!”
“Will, they don’t know we’re here,” Jin said with forced patience.
“Yeah, says you!”
Jin sighed heavily. “Will, what do you want from me? I’m doing everything I can to keep you and your mother safe, isn’t that enough?”
“No, it’s not,” Will spat. “And if you really wanted to keep my mother and I safe, you never would have landed on our roof.”
“Will, how many times do I have to say I’m sorry for all of this before you believe me? I’ve said over and over again how I wished circumstances were different, but the fact is that they’re not. We are where we are, and we all need to deal with that.”
Will ground his teeth and growled with fury, glaring at Jin with hateful eyes.
You, Will hissed inside his head. If it hadn’t been for you… I was almost there you bastard! I almost had my life back and then you come along and ruin it all!
Will curled his hands into fists and took a step toward Jin, half a moment from charging him full out. Just before he could take that final step, however, Leah stepped in front of him and grabbed his shoulders.
“William, William please, calm down,” she implored her son, looking him right in the eye.
The soft, pleading look in his mother’s eyes somewhat disarmed Will’s anger, and, disgruntled, he jerked free of his mother’s hands.
“You cool?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m cool,” Will grumbled in response, walking over to the kitchen to be alone.
As Will did that, Leah turned to face Jin and Mark.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I don’t know wha…”
“It’s alright, Leah,” Jin said, waving her off. “I hate the situation too.”
With a small shrug, Jin walked away towards the stairs.
“We’ll be back soon,” Mark assured Leah. “I’ll call a friend of mine to come keep you guys company until we get back. He can be trusted, don’t worry.”
Leah nodded, and Mark briefly laid a comforting hand on her shoulder before walking away after Jin while pulling his cell phone from his pocket and quickly dialing a number.
“Hello?” a voice with a slight Latin American accent answered after a pair of rings.
“Hey, Carlos,” Mark replied. “It’s Mark. Listen, I need a favor of you.”
--<(0)>--
Half an hour later, Mark pulled his bright red Ford F-150 into one of the many open parking spaces in the lot outside of Adam & Eve Hospital.
“So exactly how did you manage to fall off that ladder?” Mark asked as he parked his truck.
“Carelessness,” Jin answered. “I’d gone up and down it so many times that I just stopped thinking about where I was putting my feet.”
“That’ll do it.”
Jin and Mark smiled at each other and then slid out of the truck, closing the doors behind them.
Though Jin and Mark were both excellent liars (it was a job requirement after all), they also knew that if they were both going to lie effectively, they had to be telling the same lie. Otherwise, the hospital staff would begin to ask some awkward questions, and that was just bad news all around.
As they approached the hospital, Jin looked up and saw a massive black tarp covering a large section of the building’s façade.
Must be where the explosion occurred, Jin thought as he walked.
They approached the emergency room doors; Jin looked down from the tarp and returned his attention to the matter at hand. Mark pulled the door open for him, and Jin nodded his thanks. Mark followed him through, and together they walked up to the front desk.
Sitting at the desk was a bored-looking, twenty-something, young woman who was chewing gum and playing absentmindedly with a lock of her blond hair. When she saw Jin and Mark approach her, she immediately straightened up and spit her gum into the wastebasket next to her chair.
“Ah, hi,” she said. “What seems the be the problem?”
Mark sighed heavily. “My friend here was helping me do some work on my roof when he fell off the ladder. Broke his left arm.”
Jin stepped forward and ever so slightly moved his left arm, wincing in real pain as he did so.
“Yikes,” the receptionist said. “Let me get your names and info, and I’ll get a doctor down here as soon as I can.”
“I’m Michael,” Mark lied smoothly. “Michael Dorigan.”
Jin twitched his left arm again; letting the pain bring a grimace to his face so he didn’t grin or laugh at Mark’s choice of a fake last name.
“And you, sir?” the receptionist asked, looking at Jin.
“Jacob, ma’am,” he replied. “Jacob Williams.”
“Okay, Mr. Williams. Can I get your insurance information?”
“Of course,” Jin said, reciting the information for her.
In truth, Jin was surprised he remembered it. It had been years since he’d needed to use it, and he counted it as a minor miracle he could recall it now.
“Alright,” the receptionist said. “Now that’s taken care of, you can take a seat in the waiting room and someone will be with you shortly.”
Jin and Mark nodded and walked over to the waiting room, where they took seats a fair distance from the desk.
“Infiltration complete,” Mark whispered jokingly to Jin, who chuckled.
“Begin stage two,” Jin replied in an equal whisper. “Inspection.”
Mark sniggered and then sat back in his chair, looking around the room.
The waiting room itself was fairly unremarkable. Boring gray chairs, boring blue carpet, and the obligatory coffee tables piled with magazines. Still, one of the marks of a good assassin was patience. A virtue that Mark and Jin both possessed in spades. So even though it took the doctor a good twenty minutes to arrive, it made no difference to either of them.
“Hello,” the doctor said as he walked up to them. “I’m Dr. Carlisle. I heard someone had a broken arm?”
Dr. Carlisle was a tall man, in his mid-thirties with short blonde hair he kept slicked back, and gentle brown eyes.
“Me,” Jin answered him. “Fell off a ladder.”
“Ah. Well let’s see if we can fix that arm for ya,” Dr. Carlisle replied with a smile.
--<(0)>--
Two hours, an x-ray, and a friendly reminder to take it easy later, Jin walked out of the hospital with his entire left arm encased in a cast, folded firmly across his chest.
“You know,” Jin said to Mark as they walked out. “I get that I’m not supposed to move it, but having my arm stuck in this position is a lot more uncomfortable than I thought it would be.”
“I can imagine,” Mark replied, unlocking the truck and getting into the driver’s seat.
Jin followed suit in the passenger seat, though it took him a bit longer to get his seat belt fastened, having only one arm to work with.
“You in?” Mark asked.
“Yeah,” Jin said as he clicked his seat belt into place. “It’s gonna be great fun being stuck with this cast for three weeks.”
Mark chuckled at Jin’s sarcasm and pulled the F-150 back out of its parking space and then forward out of the lot.
--<(0)>--
After a peaceful twenty-minute drive back, Mark finally pulled his truck back into the garage beneath his shop.
“Home sweet home,” Mark said as he pulled the keys from the ignition.
“Mm-hmm,” Jin agreed. “Thank you for doing this, Mark. I know that shelter
ing me, not to mention Leah and her son, puts you in a nasty mess of a situation.”
“What else would I want to do?” Mark asked. “I told you before, Jin, my loyalties lie with you, and no one else. You saved my life once, and now it’s my turn to save yours.”
At that, Mark flashed Jin his goofy, lopsided grin and Jin couldn’t help but laugh.
“Alright, fair enough,” Jin said after a moment, still chuckling. “Let’s go up and see how the Lawsons are doing.”
Jin unbuckled his seatbelt as he spoke and opened the truck door to get out.
“I’m sure they’re fine, Jin,” Mark replied as he followed Jin’s lead. “Carlos is reliable, you know that.”
“I know. I’m not worried about him or his ability to keep Will and Leah safe. I’m worried about Will.”
“Why’s that?” Mark asked as he walked up the stairs back into his shop.
“I don’t know what it is,” Jin explained as he followed Mark into and through the store, “but he has something brewing within that head of his. He’s angry as hell, and I’m worried that he’s going to do something very stupid because of it.”
“Well, can you blame him?” Mark asked, standing still before the door. “I mean, you did kinda uproot their lives.”
“Yeah, but his mother is handling things much better than he is, which makes me think that something else is going on.”
“You could always ask.”
“That I could.”
Sensing that the conversation was momentarily over, Mark opened the door just in time to hear Will’s angry shout.
“Jin can go fly a fuckin’ kite for all I care! I’m going for a walk.”
Will whirled around at that point, only to look up and find Jin standing right before him. A moment’s tense silence filled the room, and then Jin’s voice broke through.
“Did I miss something?”
In the sparse few seconds before anyone replied, Jin fully took in the sight before him. Will was standing perfectly still, Leah stood about ten feet behind him with a look of shock on her face, and then Carlos Valero, Mark’s Enforcer, lay curled on the floor halfway between Will and his mother in obvious pain.
Chronicles of the Apocalypse: Revenge, Everything is Nothing Page 16
