Sole Chaos

by William Oday

  Marco swallowed the last of the bite and knocked back half the can in a single go.

  Charlie pulled out another for himself, turning the can around and looking at it. “What do you think about all these new style fancy beers? The double IPAs and the sour stouts and all that?”

  Marco glanced up at him trying to figure out if he was for real. His stomach grumbled at the interruption in food delivery.

  “I’m serious. Me? I’m partial to an ice-cold, full-bodied Coors, but a dark oatmeal stout will do in a pinch.” He cracked it open and took a long, slow drink that killed the can.

  Marco watched like a gazelle being circled by a lion.

  Obviously, this wasn’t about sharing a meal and knocking back brews with the boys.

  What did this maniac want?

  Charlie grabbed another, cracked it open and extended it toward Marco. “A toast. We may not have won that million dollars, but maybe we won something better.”

  Marco set his can on the table, notably without returning the gesture. “What do you want from me?”

  Charlie’s jaw tightened as he realized Marco wasn’t going to reciprocate the toast. “You know, maybe it’s the uptight southern gentleman in me, but it’s not polite to refuse a toast. Especially after I’ve invited you to a sumptuous meal.”

  Marco wolfed down the rest of the salmon while he could. He had no interest in chatting about beer or anything with this madman. And that lack of interest was likely going to get him forcefully removed in short order.

  But hopefully not before he had time to down a few pieces of bacon. He reached over to grab a handful.

  A flash of movement and an iron grip locked around his wrist.

  He tried to pull away but the lanky man held firm with surprising strength. The grip on his wrist pinched like a steel vice.

  Charlie placed a serving fork in Marco’s trapped hand. “In times like these, good manners are more important than ever.”

  Marco accepted the fork and the grip on his wrist released. He transferred a large helping to his plate and began eating.

  Charlie gave him a sad smile. “I don’t wish to be unpleasant with you. In fact, that’s why I invited you here.”

  Marco made a point to swallow his food before responding. No sense antagonizing a murderer with an odd peculiarity for table manners. “What do you want?”

  Charlie’s smile perked up as he steepled his fingers together. “Yes, that is the point, isn’t it?”

  Marco took another bite and waited for his captor to continue.

  Charlie sat back in his chair and took a drink of beer. He surveyed everything on the table, ending with Marco. “I like you, Marco. You are a survivor, just like I am. We both entered that contest expecting to win. I believe one of us would have if we’d been given the opportunity to finish the game.”

  Marco scooped a helping of scrambled eggs onto his plate, being careful to use the serving spoon. If this idiot wanted to wax philosophic while he filled his belly, that was fine. Just so long as it didn’t have to be a conversation.

  “But a new game is afoot. And we must adapt our idea of what it means to compete and to win. Do you understand?”

  Marco nodded, more because he was happy to have a mouth full of eggs than because he actually understood what this maniac was getting at.

  “Good. Then you understand that winning now means a great deal more.” His expression darkened. “As does losing.” The shadow passed. “And I’d like you to be on my team, Marco. The winning team. I could use a man of your skills and determination.”

  What?

  Marco’s fork fell from his fingers and clattered to the plate. “You’re trying to recruit me? To be part of your gang of thugs?”

  The shadows gathered in Charlie’s face. “They are admittedly crude tools for the purpose, but I utilize the resources that are available. You could be an important person in my growing organization.”

  Despite himself, despite the smart thing to do, Marco burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it. This petty tyrant wanted Marco’s help in running over the people of Kodiak.

  He’d never been offered something so strange, something so antithetical to who he was at the core of his being.

  Charlie’s face flushed deep red. He slammed his fist on the table so hard the plates and utensils and serving dishes jumped. His fingers closed around the handle of a steak knife. “Do not take me for a fool!” He lifted the knife and pointed the sharp point across the table at Marco. “That would not end well for you.”

  The laugh bubbling up Marco’s throat popped.

  A knock at the door broke the silence.

  “Come in!” Charlie shouted in a fury.

  It opened and Red stuck his head in.

  “This better be important!” He accented the words with the knife jabbing in the air.

  The enormous man looked like a beaten dog as he stared at the floor. “I’m sorry. It’s just that the old man and the fat kid have escaped. They somehow got the drop on our guy. I thought you’d want to know immediately.”

  Bob and Rome had gotten away?

  Marco tried to hide the smile turning up the edges of his mouth. He almost felt sorry for whoever had let them get away.

  Almost.

  Charlie’s fury turned silent and edged with steel. His chair scraped across the floor as he stood. “Bring him to me.”

  34

  The door opened wider revealing the man responsible.

  “Brewster!” Marco said with as much surprise as confusion.

  The soldier that he and Emily had run into at the crashed helicopter out in the wilderness. The man that had suspiciously been with the pilot before she died. The man who always made it clear he cared about his own hide more than anyone else’s.

  “Marco?” His eyes flitted to Marco’s plate and the table filled with food.

  Red marched Brewster into the room and stood beside him, looking ready to throw a beating on him if he tried anything. That wasn’t likely though as the mass of black duct tape encircling his wrists had them locked together and kept him from doing much of anything.

  “You two know each other?” Charlie asked.

  Brewster jumped in. “We had each other’s backs out—”

  Charlie cut in, “You shut your mouth.” The venom accompanying the words stung Brewster to silence. Charlie turned to Marco.

  Marco shrugged. “Yeah, I know him. I wouldn’t say we had each other’s backs.”

  “I saved your girlfriend’s life!”

  Faster than seemed humanly possible, Charlie darted the few feet over to Brewster and yanked his bound hands up. The blade of the steak knife flash through the air and a single thumb fell to the floor.

  It hit the vinyl tile and bounced to a stop. A tiny pool of blood leaked out from the severed end.

  Brewster screamed in pain. He tried to pull away but Charlie held him fast.

  “I said ‘Shut your mouth’.” He pointed the tip of the knife at Brewster’s mouth to emphasize the point.

  Brewster’s mouth clamped shut, even as he continued whimpering in pain.

  Marco pushed back in his seat, a mouthful of eggs half-chewed and going no further.

  He cut off Brewster’s thumb!

  Like it was nothing.

  A blur of blade and suddenly a man was missing a thumb.

  Marco gripped the arms of his chair to ensure he stayed seated. Everything inside him urged him to move. To attack the threat while its focus was elsewhere.

  He’d been a sheepdog his whole life. Doing his best to protect his family’s land, doing his best to protect the endangered ferrets that called it home, doing his best to guard tomorrow by introducing children to the wonder of today.

  And a wolf stood a few feet away.

  A beast bent on destruction and predation.

  If you were a part of its pack, maybe you had a chance. But nobody else did.

  He was more than a simple killer.

  He was elemental. A bein
g that disrupted the natural order of things. Violence and destruction walked with him. Sorrow followed like a dark cloak.

  There was only one way to deal with something like that.

  Destroy it.

  Without mercy.

  Without thought.

  The chair lifted off the ground as he unconsciously started to stand. He sat back down as the edge banged into the back of his knees.

  No.

  Not now. Not yet.

  Not with the ogre of a man that was his lieutenant. And not against a man that moved so fast he seemed to move between the seconds.

  It would do no good to end up gutted by that same knife, his intestines spilling out onto the worn tile.

  Charlie turned to Marco, his eyes registering the tension and indecision in his posture. He paused an instant and then smiled. “I do believe there is some difference of opinion on the depth of that relationship. What do you say, Marco?”

  Marco forced his eyes down to the table. To lock eyes with this madman would’ve sent his body into action. The urge to destroy him would’ve overpowered everything else. “He’s not my friend, but that doesn’t mean he deserved that.”

  “You bring up a fair question,” Charlie replied. “He let an old man and an overweight boy get away.” Charlie spun back toward Brewster and the man recoiled in terror. “What does failure like that deserve?”

  Marco didn’t answer.

  Red grinned while holding Brewster by the arm, keeping him from stumbling backward. “He deserves to be punished, boss.”

  Charlie sighed and Red’s grin melted like a snowflake in front of a flamethrower. “I wasn’t asking you,” he said through gritted teeth. He turned back to Marco and extended the knife to within inches of Marco’s chest. “I was asking you.”

  Their eyes locked as a war raged within Marco’s soul.

  Charlie waited while Marco remained silent. He tilted his head and his eyes widened as if he’d actually expected a response. “Nothing? Okay. We’ll go with what I had in mind.” Still staring into Marco’s eyes, he slammed the knife point first into the wooden table, and then swept his arm across knocking Marco’s plate, beer, and a couple of serving bowls to the floor. He stepped aside and bellowed, “Alexei! Put him on his back!”

  Red did as instructed, picking up the smaller man and slamming him down onto the solid table. He pinned Brewster down by the shoulders as the condemned man started screaming, pleading for mercy.

  Charlie jumped onto the table, whirled around and landed straddled across his chest, with the knife again somehow in his hand.

  Marco’s jaw dropped open.

  The inhuman speed. It didn’t seem possible for a man to move so fast. Like a blur of realized intention.

  Charlie screamed like a banshee as he dropped forward and brought the knife down.

  The tip of the knife stabbed into Brewster’s eye.

  He wailed in agony.

  Marco’s stomach clenched so tight he almost lost the meal he’d just eaten.

  Charlie raised a flash of silver in his other hand. “This is the kind of shit I live for!” He howled with ecstasy and then plunged the spoon into Brewster’s eye socket. A quick flick of both hands and the eye came out stuck to the tip of the knife.

  Covered in gore with a bit of the optical nerve dangling off. Blood gushed out of the empty socket, spilling over Brewster’s cheek and down into his ear.

  Even Red looked uncomfortable. He gulped and kept glancing away every time the magnetism of the horror drew his eyes back.

  Charlie leaped off the table and retrieved the severed thumb from the floor. He stood up and held his hands raised. The thumb in one hand and the shish-kabobbed eye on the end of the knife in the other. “Alexei, get him out of here.”

  Red looked like he couldn’t wait to leave as he yanked the shrieking man off the table.

  Charlie’s eyes burned with malignant light. A darkness that illuminated the evil in his soul. “And Alexei, I want that old man found! Kill the boy. But bring the old man to me.”

  “Yes, boss,” Red said as he disappeared into the hallway.

  Charlie strolled back to his chair, sat down, and set the severed thumb onto his plate. He opened his mouth and popped the eye inside. With a careful bite, he pulled it from the blade and bit down.

  A sickening pop and clear juice spurted out of his mouth and onto the table. He retrieved the napkin by his plate and dabbed at the fluid dribbling down his chin, looking embarrassed like he’d farted at a formal dinner. “I apologize for the unpleasantries.” He carefully spread the napkin in his lap, swallowed, and smiled. “So, what do you think?”

  Marco’s mouth finally closed, but only because it was preparing to speak. “I think you’re insane.”

  Charlie grinned and winked like they were best friends sharing a juicy bit of gossip. “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

  35

  DR. YONG lifted the bottle of bourbon with trembling hands and watched the golden amber liquid slosh around inside the glass. While searching through Hari’s desk last night, he’d found the mostly empty bottle tucked away at the back of a desk drawer. He took a sip and pinched his eyes shut as the liquid fire burned down his throat and added to the warmth already suffusing in his chest.

  The first drink, now seven ago, had barely made it to his mouth, so badly shaking were his hands.

  The images from the massacre yesterday played through his mind.

  An entire team wiped out.

  A pack of Megalania roaming the island.

  He took another sip and observed the jitters still coursing through his fingers. There wasn’t enough booze in the world to wipe out the memory of that horror.

  Zhang sat in his mentor’s chair and scanned the mess of papers, coffee cups, and other detritus that proved Hari had once existed. The evidence of a life that now was so much garbage waiting to be swept clean and forgotten.

  He would not forget their last few minutes together.

  The tragic way they ended.

  Not for the first time, Zhang cursed fate for putting him in this position. He was no leader. Ever since he’d raised his head above the masses back at Tiannenman and just as quickly destroyed the lives of those he loved, he’d made it a point to stay away from the limelight.

  That had always been Hari’s world.

  Leading the project.

  Dealing with the brass that held the purse strings and were forever wanting more value for their dollars.

  Hari had been a genius at keeping all the plates spinning and the project moving forward.

  Zhang took a gulp and grunted at the fire singeing his throat. He unscrewed the cap to the bottle and was about to pour out what was left when something caught his attention.

  Something in the bottle cap.

  A crinkle where he expected the smooth metal underside.

  He set the bottle on the desk and peered inside the cap. There was something there. A small square of plastic stuck to the bare metal. Perhaps it had fallen in during the bottling process at the plant and quality control had somehow missed it. He was about to set it aside when a shift of his wrist made the light glance off it in a different way.

  In a way that caught something that sent a quiver up his spine.

  Almost like a tiny letter H.

  He rotated the cap and brought it closer and turned on the desk lamp.

  It was the letter Z!

  Written in the precise script of Hari’s own hand.

  Zhang shoved his index finger in to pry it off but he couldn’t get his chewed down nail under the edge. He yanked open the desk drawer and snatched out a paperclip. A couple of scrapes with the bent end and it popped out and landed on the wooden desk.

  A tiny piece of paper with clear tape that had held it in place inside the cap. He scraped at the backside and it unfolded into a rectangle of white paper half an inch long.

  Written in miniature print, and yet unmistakably by the same hand he’d read countle
ss notes, observations and directions over the last several decades was a string of random letters and numbers.

  There was no question what it was.

  Zhang smacked the spacebar on the keyboard and the monitor blinked on. With hands shaking worse than before, after several mistakes due to his lack of accuracy, he punched in the long code.

  He stared at the asterisks at the login screen and took a deep breath. He slowly blew it out and hit ENTER.

  His jaw flinched as he expected the failed login screen to appear.

  It didn’t.

  The cursor briefly turned into a circling comet and then Hari’s personal desktop screen appeared.

  And there, right in the middle, separated from dozens of folders and shortcuts and application icons was a simple text document. Below the icon said Z.txt.

  Zhang’s hand shook like a minor earthquake as he moved the mouse to position the arrow over it. He doubled clicked and the file opened.

  He was right!

  Hari hadn’t left him all alone.

  Not completely, anyway.

  He read the words of his dead mentor. Of the man who had become a father to him.

  My dearest Zhang,

  If you’re reading this, then I am dead. I know that must distress you, but it must also mean that you are alive. And for that, I am grateful. Wherever we go after leaving the flesh, whatever happens when brain and heart cease to function, know that I am happy. For the last ten years, I have wanted nothing more than to see you alive again.

  What I have to say next won’t be easy to hear. It wasn’t easy to write. It is a shame I’ve held in my heart since the day you disappeared into the time gate.

  It was my fault you were there that day.

  It was I that left a message hidden under your pillow. It was I that wanted you to get our research out to the wider world.

  I was an idealistic fool.

  I never meant for it to turn out like it did.

  I never meant for you to be harmed.