False Positive

by C. Ryan Bymaster

  Kasumi needed to get this girl on the same level as she was. If Theresa was going to sit there and cry, they wouldn’t have a chance. They may not be able to take out a group of gunmen, let alone one, but if they could hold them off, give Dent a chance to do what he does best, then they might live through this.

  Theresa’s eyes bounced back and forth, looking into Kasumi’s. A few steadying breaths later, the girl nodded.

  “Good,” Kasumi said, making her voice lighter, encouraging even. Things would be much easier if she could force her emotions on Theresa, but whatever she was, whatever had been done to her, it somehow nullified Kasumi’s influence.

  So she’d do this the old fashioned way.

  “Are you with me, Theresa? Are you aware of what we need to do?”

  Theresa’s shoulders lifted. “Yes, I’m with you. But I don’t know what we need to do.” Her gaze flicked down the hallway to the backdoor.

  “We do what we do best. We make those bastards out there ours. We use what we have. We survive.”

  Theresa nodded and without having to be told, stepped to her side of the hallway and raised her knife. The blade shook and wavered, but at least it was a start.

  Kasumi went to the other side of the hallway, lifted her own knife. And if her blade shook and wavered, at least it wasn’t as much as Theresa’s did.

  “I need you to focus on what you do, Theresa,” she said.

  “How will elevating their emotions keep us alive?”

  She had a point. In this instance, Theresa was practically worthless. Kasumi realized she’d probably have to do this on her own. She could force the fear she was feeling onto the men about to break in, but she knew from past experiences that fear could cause men to do stupid things. They’d just as likely start firing into the house as run away.

  Maybe she could get them to waste all their bullets. But then what? If they broke down the door they could still overpower her and Theresa. And they’d have other weapons with them. Suddenly, the knife in her hand seemed about as dangerous as a spoon. Doubt started to take hold of her.

  And the way Theresa’s knife trembled, Kasumi had to assume the girl was feeling close to the same as she was.

  “Get ready,” Dent’s solid voice shot through the house, breaking through her thoughts like a hammer through glass. “They’ll be coming in in less than a minute.”

  Theresa gave an audible gulp.

  The girl wasn’t cut out for this. She hadn’t been through the fire like Kasumi had. Kasumi fought the urge to go to her, to comfort her.

  And it hit her. She knew what had to be done.

  Muffled voices came from outside. The men were approaching.

  “Theresa,” Kasumi said, drawing the other girl’s eyes from the door, from the imminent death waiting beyond. “I have a plan. But you have to trust me. Can you do that? Above all else, trust me?”

  A hesitant nod, but a nod nonetheless.

  “They’ll break down the door in a few seconds,” Kasumi said, stepping across the hallway.

  Theresa eyed the knife Kasumi held before her. “What … What are you going to do?”

  “Those bastards want to see you dead. I’m going to give them what they want. I’m so sorry, Theresa, but there’s no other way.”

  Kasumi was astounded by how steady her hand was as she brought the knife up. Maybe Dent was rubbing off on her a little bit.

  “This is going to hurt ….” Kasumi said.

  Theresa’s knife clattered to the wood floor.

  ---

  “Give us the girl, Dent, and we’ll let you live.”

  A few things about that statement, Dent thought.

  The man just outside the front door and issuing the order didn’t specify which girl he spoke of. The man and his team had surrounded the house, leaving Dent no chance to make it out of this alive, therefore the offer to let him live was no doubt a lie. And the most important thing about the statement was that Dent would see that man and everyone with him dead before he gave up Fifth.

  If he wasn’t so spare on bullets, Dent would have fired through the front door in response.

  Instead, he called back through the house to the girls, “Get ready. They’ll be coming in in less than a minute.”

  Two voices called back to him to say they were ready. Only one of them mattered to Dent.

  And, like he’d predicted, in less than a minute he heard one man outside call out, “Go, go, go!”

  The front door was kicked open, and before the splinters had even hit the floor, Dent sent a bullet into chest of the man who’d done the kicking. That man fell back, and two more men rushed past him, guns blazing. Dent dove to the left, managed to fire once more, and rolled into the living room.

  His injured side flared in protest, his wounded leg joined in, but Dent kept rolling, angling so when he came back up, his back was to the front windows. One man tried rushing deeper into the house. Dent dropped him with a bullet that penetrated his side just below his armpit, sending a small spray of blood as he dropped.

  As that man screamed in pain, a second man came around the small dividing wall in a crouch, his barrel swinging around, on a level with Dent.

  Dent squeezed the trigger, though his aim had not yet been adjusted. The man flinched, unharmed as the bullet missed by a good half-foot. But the man’s slight pull to his right had kept him from hitting Dent when he returned fire.

  A heartbeat later, his aim adjusted fully, Dent sent a bullet into the man’s chest, the largest target offered. The man fell to his ass, slid, and flattened out on his back. Dent registered the fact that there has been no sight of blood from the man he’d just dropped.

  And too late did he realize that the first man to kick in the door hadn’t bled when shot, either. That man staggered around the entryway, alive but likely bruised beneath his bulletproof vest. His gun was raised in expectancy of Dent standing and the split-second it took for his mind to register his mistake, Dent was on him.

  Saving precious bullets, Dent lunged, swiping his knife across the man’s lower leg. There was a flash and retort as the man fired, either blindly or out of shock and pain, and Dent knew if he’d been a second slower he’d have been a dead man. Before he gave the man a second chance, Dent buried the knife into the back of his thigh, deep enough to strike bone.

  Screaming, the man got off two-rapid fire shots, one shredding into the couch, the other tearing into the carpet of the living room.

  Using the knife as leverage, Dent pulled himself up, brought his Glock around, and put in a bullet up and into the back of the man’s head at a sharp angle. The screaming stopped and the body dropped, allowing Dent to hear the second man coughing.

  Still on his back and without warning, that man kicked out at Dent, striking him under the chin and sending him stumbling to fall flat on his back. Both on their backs now, Dent and the man kicked out at each other in uncoordinated movements, both wishing to bring their gun up and around, both vainly keeping their feet flailing.

  The man managed to get off a shot, the bullet narrowly missing Dent’s shoulder. The Glock in Dent’s right hand was at a bad angle so he dropped the knife in his left hand, scooped up the fallen Beretta from the man he’d shot in the skull, and kicked off against the man on the floor. Dent went into a small spin on his back, rotating just enough to get his left gun around. Angle correct, he squeezed the trigger. Blood, flesh, and bone erupted from his target’s head and Dent caught his breath as the dead man’s legs ceased kicking at him.

  Chest heaving, eardrums pounding, Dent scooted across the floor to the first man he’d shot in the side. For good measure, he put a bullet into the base of his skull.

  As Dent sat there in the brief interlude amid the three dead bodies, two things came slamming in to him. First, the pain. With his adrenaline dropping, the pain in his side came back two-fold, this time accompanied by the warm wash of blood pooling at his beltline. And second, following the series of gunshots throughout the house, was the startli
ng silence.

  Fifth!

  His worry for her safety made the pain in his side seem like a splinter, driving him to his feet.

  XXXV

  The back door slammed open, kicked in by one of the gunmen. That man fell back as two others rushed in, guns scanning the narrow hallway, left and right. And then down, as the closest man noticed and shouted at Kasumi to freeze. Just behind him, the second man to enter also aimed his gun at Kasumi.

  Kneeling on the hardwood, Kasumi saw this all while trying very hard not to look their way. She was too busy focusing on the sprawled form of Theresa, whose neck and arm were coated in blood. Her shirt was ripped in places, stained in crimson blotches, and her chest rose and fell with ragged breaths.

  Kasumi slowly turned to the men in the hallway, the knife she still held dripping blood. Her own arm was cut in three places and she knew half her face was painted in the stuff. The two gunmen in the narrow hallway hesitated, their jaws hanging at the sight before them.

  “She wouldn’t stop crying!” Kasumi screamed to them. “I just … I wanted her to stop crying! But … but … oh, God, what have I done? Help! Please, help!”

  She turned back to the bloodied girl on the floor and tried performing CPR, pushing on Theresa’s chest, blowing into her mouth. She put a hand to Theresa’s neck, trying to find a pulse, and when she leaned back up, that hand came away sticky. Kasumi wailed and presented her bloody hand to the gunmen, a testament to how badly she’d handled the situation.

  Gun lowering to his side, the first man whispered a prayer, stepped forward, then pushed Kasumi aside and began to tend to the girl that he’d been sent to kill. The second man came forward, watching, waiting.

  “What’s going on?” a third voice called from somewhere behind them near the broken door. “Why did you stop?”

  “Shut up!” the first man yelled, his hands carefully cupping Theresa’s chin and moving her head this way and that. “One of them tried killing other.” His voice was strained with worry.

  The second man came fully into the hallway, pushing Kasumi even further aside. “Oh, man, what do we do?” he said to his kneeling buddy.

  “Hold on, hold on,” the kneeling man said. “I think I can help her, I think she’ll make it.”

  From the third man came the voice of reason. “Help her? What’s going on? We’re here to take her out!”

  Kasumi, all but forgotten, smiled.

  Theresa’s forced elevation wasn’t as useless as she’d first thought. All Kasumi had to do was cut them both several times, just deep enough to get the blood flowing — as painful as that had been — and then make it look as terrible as she could using their blood.

  Focusing on the elevation that Theresa was sending out, Kasumi did her best to amplify it, bolster it enough that when the men intent on killing them busted through the door and saw the sorry state the girls were in, they were compelled to do nothing else but help as Kasumi supposedly tried to save Theresa’s life.

  Hard enough as that had been, that had been the easy part. Now came the truly difficult part of her plan. One palm slick with sweat and gripping the knife, the other sticky with her and Theresa’s blood, Kasumi took a tentative step forward.

  Then another.

  Her target was the second man, Theresa’s job was the man kneeling over her, examining her wounds. And if they didn’t act fast, the kneeling man would soon discover that the cuts were all superficial, that this all had been a sick ruse.

  Another step, and the knife in her left hand came up. The second man, her target, was looking over the kneeling man’s shoulder, oblivious to the blade nearing his back. She could wait no longer.

  “Now!” she said, spurring Theresa and her own body into action.

  Kasumi drove the knife home. It should have been a stab to take her target out of the fight for good, should have been deadly as she only had the one chance. But Kasumi wasn’t Dent. At the last possible moment, she changed the angle of the knife’s tip. Instead of driving it into the man’s back, Kasumi chickened out, and plunged it into the meat of his butt.

  He screamed, just before the other man screamed. Both men fell back away from where Theresa lay on the floor. Both had a knife stuck in them. Theresa had chickened out as well, Kasumi saw. The girl had a clean shot to stab the man’s neck, but she went for his shoulder instead.

  Kasumi’s target fell to the floor as his friend jerked back into him and screamed all the louder when he landed right on the hilt of the knife in him. Before they could retaliate, Kasumi reached down, yanked Theresa up by the hand, and together they ran for the stairs.

  The men in the hallway cursed and screamed, and Kasumi thought they were in the clear with the foot of the stairs only five feet away, when the wall ahead of them exploded from a gunshot. Both girls dived to the narrow rug, sliding a few feet before coming to a stop. The bottom step was just within reach. Kasumi could reach out and brush it with her fingertips, it was that close.

  “You bitch!” one of the men said from behind them.

  Kasumi twisted around so she could look back the way they’d fled.

  The man Theresa had stabbed loomed over them, his gun trained on Theresa. Another man came up behind him, his gun on Kasumi. It wasn’t the man she’d stabbed. Must be the one who stayed back when the other two rushed in.

  Theresa, on the ground next to Kasumi, started to squirm back and away from the men. She was crying again, a near-soundless whimper, the type of crying that sounded like a dog that was afraid of getting kicked. Kasumi found she preferred the old-fashioned crying. It was less disturbing.

  With a gun pointed at each of them, there was nothing for them to do. Dent better get there quick or they were screwed.

  “Quit moving!” the same man barked at Theresa.

  She did, but only after Kasumi scooted in between the gun and the girl. Hell, she already had one gun pointed at her, might as well make it two.

  “It’ll be okay,” she whispered to Theresa. She didn’t know if her words were comforting or not as she kept her focus on the men in front of her.

  Behind her, Theresa continued her awful crying.

  “Should have killed you the minute I came in,” the man said. “Now I’ve got this,” he jutted his chin towards the blood soaking his shirt at his shoulder, “as my reward for trying to be nice.”

  “You came in to shoot us,” Kasumi said. “On a niceness scale of one to ten, you score an ass-hole!”

  The man shifted forward, his gun coming in closer to Kasumi’s head.

  “Let’s be done with this,” the uninjured man said. “Kill them before there are any more mishaps.”

  “Yes,” an amused voice said from behind the two men. “We wouldn’t want any more mishaps, now would we?”

  Like a scene from a horror movie, the third man’s eyes went wide and he was dragged back down the hall, as if some monster’s tentacle had reached out from the shadows behind him. The man screamed, his gun fired twice, and the man pointing his gun at Kasumi turned to fire at the monster in the hallway.

  Whatever it was, it gave Kasumi the chance to turn and push Theresa. “Get up! Run!”

  With Kasumi’s help, the girl scrambled to her feet and ran for the living room. Kasumi wanted to yell at her to go upstairs, but she had herself to worry about, because the remaining gunman started firing down the hallway at whatever had killed his friend. Her breath caught in her throat as she froze where she was because in those muzzle flashes, she saw that it truly was a monster.

  Noman, a sick grin on his blood-spattered face, spun, pressed his body up against the wall to avoid being shot, and then lunged at the gunman. She saw Noman’s hand pump in and out at the gunman’s stomach, three, four, five times.

  There was thump, the man’s gun hitting the small rug.

  With a heave, Noman twisted and tossed the body back down the hallway. Kasumi saw it land on top of the other body that Noman had left lying there. When he turned back and looked down at Kasumi, he wore
that wicked grin. His eyes seemed to be glittering.

  “So, here we are, Kasumi.” His voice was friendly, calm, nothing hinting at what he’d just done, at the bodies lying in the hallway a few feet from him, at the blood splattered across his body and face.

  She wanted to spit at him, curse him and scream at him. But her mouth wasn’t working. Thankfully, her legs and arms were. Still on her butt, she scrambled back away from this monster, this abomination that had been haunting her for months.

  He tsked her, reaching down and grabbing hold of her ankle and dragging her back towards him. She fought back, struggled and kicked and punched and slapped, but within moments he had her up and twisted around, her back and shoulders to his chest. One hand cupped her chin, putting pressure against her neck in a promise of what was to come. Then the bloodied knife in his other hand came up, solidifying that promise.

  “You have been quite the rascally rabbit,” he said.

  “Well you can go Elmer Fudd yourself,” she replied.

  Noman laughed.

  And it scared her to death because it sounded sincere.

  XXXVI

  A sudden patter of small feet came from the rear of the house as Dent took his first step that way. And when the girl covered in blood rushed past the stairs his way, he actually felt a sense of relief wash over him, evident in how his body momentarily disregarded every single bruise, ache, and injury he’d been feeling.

  Until a rapid heartbeat later, when the girl crashed into him, all tears and incoherent babbling, and Dent found this girl clinging to him to be the wrong one. That brief respite from his injuries came crashing back, going so far as to tighten his chest and seemingly constrict his very heart. He roughly pushed Theresa aside and, without a word, rushed the way she had come.

  Glock in right hand, Beretta in left, and Theresa at his side, Dent rushed to the rear of the house. Just before the stairs on his left, he came to abrupt halt. Theresa bumped into his side, but not hard enough to jostle his right hand, which at the moment, held the Glock reflexively sighted between Noman’s eyes.