by Matt Rogers
“You’re already here?!”
“We had a feeling you would change your mind.”
“Incredible.”
A pause.
“Okay, we’re in position. Now, one last time, I need to hear it again. Are you in or are you out?”
“I’m in.”
“Then get down on the ground.”
From the receiver, Jake heard an engine revving. The sound grew louder and louder until it was all encompassing. It filled the room. He realised it was not just coming from the phone anymore. He could hear it outside.
“Now!” Wolfe roared through the receiver.
Jake burst into action. He dropped the phone, kicked his chair out from underneath him and threw himself backwards, away from the table. He landed on the cold floor and skidded along until the back of his neck bumped into the rear wall.
A second later, the side wall exploded. Chunks of concrete and debris went flying across the room. He covered his face with his hands and prayed that nothing substantial hit him. The sound was deafening. The impact shook the room.
He opened his eyes to find two men standing above him. At first glance, they looked like bank robbers. They both wore balaclavas that masked their features, leaving nothing but their eyes exposed. They were the same height, roughly six foot, and even under their leather jackets he could see their huge muscles pressing against the fabric.
And they had been lightning quick.
Jake looked past them to see what had caused the chaos. Parked with its front half inside the police station was a heavy-duty four-wheel-drive. The entire vehicle had been painted black. There was a thick steel plate attached to the grille. It was modelled in the shape of a bulldozer’s blade. The plate had ploughed straight through the concrete wall, striking the table in the centre of the room and cleaving it in two. Dust hung thick in the air. Jake coughed after inhaling some.
The door to the interview room flew open. The racket must have attracted the attention of every person in the station. Bryce had been waiting outside for Jake to finish his phone call. He had reacted fast, bursting straight in.
The men in the balaclavas were faster.
Jake watched as Bryce, in his haste, ran straight into the barrel of one of the men’s shotguns. The superintendent froze.
That was all Jake saw before the second man hauled him to his feet. He was wordlessly shoved towards the four-wheel-drive. He didn’t need anyone to explain what to do. He threw the back seat door open and clambered in as fast as he could. The second man followed him in.
The first – the one holding the shotgun to Bryce’s forehead – retreated and climbed into the passenger seat. With all of them in the car, the driver flicked a switch on the dashboard. The bulldozer blade dropped from the grille and clattered to the floor, crushing what remained of the table. The driver stamped on the pedal as soon as the blade was detached.
Jake was thrown forward in his seat as the wheels spun and the four-wheel-drive reversed out of the hole it had created. Through the windscreen, he saw Bryce shakily unbuckle a pistol from its holster at his waist and aim it at them. A second later, a shot ricocheted off the windscreen.
“Don’t worry, my man,” the driver said. “Bulletproof glass.”
Jake took a short breath of relief before he was thrown down into the footwell. He hadn’t had time to put his seatbelt on, and as the vehicle swung round in a one-hundred-and-eighty degree arc across the lawn outside, the momentum forced him off his seat. As soon as the spin was complete, the driver floored the accelerator and the SUV sped away from the police station at a hundred kilometres an hour.
*
Inside the demolished interview room, Superintendent Bryce swore viciously as he watched the vehicle fade into the distance. Rubble cascaded down off its roof as it jumped from the grass to the road.
The door crashed open behind him. He wheeled around to find a man and woman standing in the doorway, observing the hole in the wall with wide eyes. They were both young junior officers fresh out of the academy. Bryce recognised the woman as Officer Shukla, a new recruit with a fiery temper. It was now in full swing.
“What just happened?!” she shouted.
“See that truck?” Bryce said, pointing to the vehicle that was rapidly shrinking from view. “It just knocked down the wall and stole a suspect. Put out an alert for a black four-wheel-drive. We need to get after them.”
The three ran back into the corridor to raise the alarm.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Shukla said as they moved. “Are you sure we should go after them straight away? We should inform someone.”
Bryce turned. “This is on us. How do you think people are going to react when they find out a truck simply drove into our station and grabbed a sixteen-year-old boy? For all we know, that was a kidnapping. Now get in the car.”
*
It was only after four sharp turns and a full minute of nerve-wracking silence that the two men took their balaclavas off.
The man in the passenger seat tugged off his mask to reveal the familiar long brown hair and five o’clock shadow. It was Wolfe. The man sitting next to Jake was black and sported a goatee. He looked to be the same age as Wolfe. The driver was concentrating on the road. All Jake could make out from behind was a mop of thick blond hair.
So Wolfe wasn’t lying. There are others.
Jake took a moment to reflect on Wolfe’s story. These three were Delta Force soldiers, and they sure fit the part. He felt a little safer, knowing Wolfe was sane.
Wolfe turned in his seat and stared intently out the rear window.
“What are you looking for?” Jake asked.
“We just broke you out of a police station and you’re wondering what I’m looking for?”
Jake gave a nod of understanding and turned his eyes sheepishly toward the floor of the car. The words had come out before he realised how stupid they were. He bit his lip and quashed a mixture of excitement and terror at being free. He felt safe in Wolfe’s hands, despite the fact that he had just been forcibly extracted from a police station. After seeing Wolfe single-handedly dispatch two slayers, any other matter seemed almost petty in comparison.
But they weren’t safe yet.
At six in the morning, the roads were deserted. The sun hadn’t fully risen yet, nothing more than a streak of orange across the horizon. The sky was a dark shade of blue. Jake sat in the gloom, feeling the beat of his heart against his chest wall.
“Crank, left,” Wolfe said.
Reacting immediately, the driver tugged on the handbrake and swung the wheel around in a controlled arc. Tires screeched against the asphalt. Jake reached desperately for a handhold as the entire vehicle swung sideways. He swore as he missed. The skid sent him tumbling across into the man next to him. As soon as the car pulled out of its drift, he clumsily shimmied himself back across to his seat.
“Put your seatbelt on, kid,” the man said, half-smiling. Jake had no idea how someone could smile in a situation like this, but nonetheless he obeyed, pulling the leather tight across his chest.
“We’ve got company,” the driver said matter-of-factly.
To the tune of sirens, a white sedan pulled around the corner behind them.
“Guys, do something!” Jake exclaimed. He struggled to suppress a panic attack. The air had suddenly become very cold.
Even Wolfe looked a little concerned.
“There’s only one of them,” he said. “The others must still be leaving the station. Alright, Crank, you’re up.”
With a subtle nod, the driver unbuckled his seatbelt and released the steering wheel. Jake noticed Wolfe reach over and grip it one-handed, keeping the car on track. Crank tugged a pistol from the holster at his waist. It was identical to the gun Wolfe had used on the slayers the night before. He cocked back the safety and lowered the driver’s seat window.
“Uh … what’s he doing?” Jake said, but he already had an inclination as to what was about to happen.
In one motion, Crank stood up in his seat, leaning his entire torso out the open window of the speeding vehicle. His right foot remained firmly on the accelerator.
Jake turned in his seat and saw the police car closing in on them. He could make out the features of the driver. Bryce. Briefly, the two made eye contact. Jake gulped back fear. He reached out for a handhold and gripped until his knuckles turned white.
Crank had now fully extended himself out the window, resting against the sill. He raised the pistol and pointed it at the pursuing police car. Despite the wind buffeting his body and the tarmac rushing past below him, his aim didn’t falter.
Two shots spat out of the chamber. Jake saw the gun cough twice, but barely heard the sound.
He did hear the bursting of tires.
He twisted around just in time to see the police car career violently off-course. Its two front wheels were nothing more than loose, flapping rubber. Bryce had lost control. It pitched left, mounted the kerb, then slammed into a row of dustbins lining the footpath. Jake saw the airbags deploy as it came to a sudden stop.
Crank slipped back inside the car just as it was approaching the next turn. He implemented the same tactic as before, ripping the handbrake and drifting the vehicle around the corner in a flurry of smoke. This time, Jake was strapped in.
“Here!” Wolfe shouted, just as they straightened out into the next street. This street seemed more deserted than the last, a little more derelict, the shops clustered a little more tightly together. It was devoid of traffic. Wolfe had pointed to a small entrance in between two shopfronts. There was a concrete ramp leading down. Crank had to turn sharply once again, but he was accurate. The bonnet swung into the ramp, barely missing the walls pressing in on each side. The rest of the car followed. Then they were shooting down the ramp. Jake felt his stomach drop.
They swung into a small underground car park, a cramped, concrete space with two industrial-sized dumpsters against the rear wall.
“What is this place?” he asked, suddenly unsure, hit by the feeling that these three men were completely in control of his fate.
“A car-park,” Wolfe said. “You’ve probably seen them before, in shopping centres and airports and what not.”
“Ha,” Jake said.
“It did take us a while to find one without security cameras though.”
The only other vehicle in the car park was a red Holden Astra. Crank pulled to a stop in a space at the end. Before Jake had time to ask what they were doing, the three men were out of the car, wasting no time. He followed suit.
The men worked in a tightly organised unit. While Crank pulled a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the Holden, Wolfe and the other man ran around to the front of the four-wheel-drive, one on each side. They both tugged sharply and ran along each side of the vehicle, peeling off a sheet of black material as they went. The sticky cover sheet peeled off to reveal that underneath, the car was in fact a light shade of burgundy.
By the time they balled the black sheet up and tossed it in the dumpster by the rear wall, Crank had fired up the Holden and reversed it out into the middle of the lot. Wolfe flung the door open and clambered into the back seat, motioning for Jake to follow. The other man stayed behind, fiddling with the front of the four-wheel-drive. Jake’s vision was obscured, but after he climbed in he saw the man lift off a false set of number plates and throw them into the same dumpster. Then he jogged over to the Holden and slipped into the front seat.
Crank gunned the engine. The Astra took off across the car park. It mounted the ramp and pulled out into the street, heading in the same direction they had been travelling before.
The whole ordeal had taken less than a minute.
Behind them, Jake thought he saw a figure turn the corner. His heart skipped a beat, but by then Crank had turned left and they were out of sight.
*
“They’re gone,” Superintendent Bryce yelled as he sprinted into the next street.
In the distance, a small red hatchback was coasting down the road away from them. There was no sign of the perpetrator’s vehicle.
The two junior officers caught up to him, breathless. Two hundred metres behind them, their smoking sedan rested against the brick wall. The bonnet was crumpled and there was nothing left of the front tires.
“What do we do?” Officer Shukla said.
“Get every available squad car out searching for a black SUV. For now, we need to control the media. Reporters are going to be here within half an hour. Keep them away from the hole. We have to come up with a press release before this thing blows up in the newspapers.”
While the junior officer briefed the police station, Shukla turned to Bryce.
“Do you think the manhunt will work?”
Relucantly, Bryce shook his head. “They were professionals. I’ve never seen anything as smooth as that before.”
He sighed and turned once again to look down the street.
“I doubt we’ll ever find them.”
*
Jake stared in awe as the Astra pulled into an enormous estate. In the middle of the grounds lay the same mansion he had woken in last night. He was sure of it. No other building in Melbourne could be so large. From the outside, the place looked even more impressive.
The building was modern, complete with a snaking gravel driveway that led from the entrance gates to the front of the house. From there, the path branched off in two separate directions. One led to the garage attached to the side of the mansion, and the other led to the circular courtyard in front of the porch. Crank dropped them off in the courtyard, then drove the Astra into the garage, out of sight.
Jake took a moment to breathe in the fresh morning air. He needed it. The sun had now risen, providing a sky full of vibrant colours. Birds chirped morning calls in the trees surrounding the property. It was then that he realised how tired he was. The adrenalin of the past twelve hours was finally wearing off. He was on the verge of collapsing. He hadn’t slept all night and was struggling to keep his eyes open.
He followed the two men up onto the patio. It was made of smooth concrete and ran the full length of the house, past the floor-to-ceiling glass windows on each side of the double doors. Wolfe slipped a key into one of the doors and swung it open.
Jake stepped into a colossal entrance hallway. Its white marble floor shone beneath the grid of halogen lights. A set of double doors on each side led off into different rooms. Both were closed. The hallway ran on before opening out into what looked to be the dining room. On either side of the entrance to the kitchen were dual staircases, made of marble just like the floor. They ascended up to a balcony overlooking the hallway. Behind the balcony was an upstairs corridor, trailing off into the distance. The house was quiet. The morning sun shone through the windows, casting a warm glow over everything.
The black man pushed open one set of double doors. “I’m off to bed.”
“It’s six in the morning?” Jake queried.
“We stayed up all night waiting for your call,” the man said. “I’m a little tired.”
Jake thought for a second. “You knew I would call –”
The man nodded. “We assumed you would. No-one gets a glimpse of a slayer and then opts out. You wouldn’t have been able to live with yourself if you never found out any more about them. It would have plagued you for the rest of your life. Knowing that they’re out there, but not knowing anything else.”
“That’s exactly why I called. How did you know?”
“It’s human instinct. You can’t ignore curiosity.”
With that, the man pushed open the doors and walked through. Jake caught a glimpse of a bedroom the size of his old house before the doors slammed shut in his face.
Wolfe, who had until now remained silent, led him through into a dining room equally luxurious as the rest of the house. Floor-to-ceiling windows on either side gave views of the surrounding grounds, lending the room an open, airy atmospher
e. On the left was a dining room with a broad oak table set up as the centrepiece, and on the right was a kitchen complete with state-of-the-art appliances and a full-sized bar.
“You knew I would make the call,” Jake repeated, still in disbelief. “Are you psychic or something?”
“It’s like Felix said –” Wolfe started.
“Felix?”
“The man you just talked to. It’s like he said, nobody can walk away from a discovery like that.”
“I couldn’t. I sat there in the cell, and I just thought, how can I go back to my old life when I know these things exist? You know … to be honest, the whole family situation had pretty much nothing to do with the decision I made. It just helped that I had no-one to say goodbye to.”
“When you realise that there is a breed of monsters living on earth, it’s hard to care about anything else,” Wolfe said. “That’s what the five of us realised after we were rescued all those years ago. We could have returned to base, told them what happened. No-one would have believed us. We could have kept quiet, and carried on with normal missions. But we decided to hunt them.”
A realisation dawned on Jake. “You … you never went back. Everyone thinks you’re dead. Your whole team doesn’t exist anymore.”
Wolfe nodded imperceptibly. “We all needed to know more, Jake, just like you do.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Good man. You’re going to learn everything about them. First, though, you need some rest. Come.”
Jake followed him through to the same living room he had woken up in twelve hours ago. It was surreal to think that during the space of time between leaving and returning to this house, he had been arrested and subsequently broken out of a police station.
And now he was back.
Wordlessly, Wolfe took him through a corridor that snaked around the swimming pool. Jake looked out through the huge windows and saw an identical corridor across the yard, forming a U shape as they both branched off from the living room. The pool lay outside, in the middle of the U.
