by Hart, Callie
Contents
COPYRIGHT
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
WANT MORE?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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FREAKS
Copyright © 2018 Callie Hart
FREAKS
Copyright © 2018 Callie Hart
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written consent of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted bye copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at [email protected].
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to peoples either living or deceased is purely coincidental. Names, places and characters are figments of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. The author recognizes the trademarks and copyrights of all registered products and works mentioned within this work.
PROLOGUE
CARVER
I had never killed anyone before.
There had been times when the desire had been there, of course. Plenty of times when the rage and the pain inside had demanded justice. This was the first time I’d taken action, though. And once the task was done, once the girl was dead, I was sure the knot of anger that roiled inside me would finally subside. That finally there would be peace, if only a tarnished, impure kind of peace that maybe wouldn’t eradicate all of the suffering and the trauma but might bring with it a shadow of rest.
That would be enough. Maybe then, there would be some way forward out of the darkness that had obscured the world for so long.
As I stood in front of the laptop on the otherwise empty desk, the words appeared almost by themselves on the screen. Another email, this time severing the contract that had been put in place. Marcosa had seemed like a solid bet. A man who would carry out the job he’d been hired to do without pause. There’d been no way to know he would fall for the girl. So fucking stupid. Lafferty was beautiful, there was no denying that, but the assassin had come with the highest of recommendations. Had never once quailed at the hardest of jobs. So why, now, had the man allowed his morals and his dick to get in the way? It should have been easy. Should have been a quick, clean kill that took up no more than thirty minutes of his day.
My fingers hammered at the keyboard.
M,
Disappointment doesn’t cover it. I trusted your colleague to be a professional. Now, I’ve discovered your services to be unreliable. I’ve entered into an alternative contract to take care of the matter. This new individual’s methods are questionable at best, but he will not waiver until the work is complete. Please convey my dissatisfaction to Mr. Marcosa. Tell him, whereas before he could have saved SL considerable pain and misery, he has now guaranteed that she will suffer.
Carver
Closing the laptop and stowing it away, I considered the stack of drawings sitting in the bag beneath the desk. The images depicted on those countless sheets of paper were as graphic and sexual as could be. They’d been in that bag, carried from pillar to post, from one side of the country to the other, for years now. They’d become a focus of intrigue and hate, a fascination and an obsession, but now they were no longer needed.
Sera Lafferty would soon be dead, and this whole, messy saga would be done with. No more need for sneaking around. No more lies and deception. Tendrils of spite and fury would no longer choke the very air I breathed.
Those drawings wouldn’t be carried back home this time. The bag would stay down here to rot, just like the disgusting piece of shit lying on the cot on the other side of the bunker—the same piece of shit who hadn’t stopped sniveling and whining since the needle had pierced the crook of his arm fifteen minutes ago and the poison had slowly entered his sluggish bloodstream.
“Don’t. Don’t just fucking leave me down here. I can help you. I know what to do. I won’t mess it up, I swear!”
I sneered. “There is one way you can help me.”
“How?” Anderson’s eyes were already bloodshot and bulging, the toxins getting to work inside him.
“I could really use your sneakers.” Kicking the polished leather shoes off was easy; the damn things were three sizes too big. I began unlacing Anderson’s dusty, filthy New Balance running shoes, tugging them from his feet, first the left and then the right.
“Why are you doing this?” he moaned. “I ain’t done nothing to deserve this.”
I almost laughed at that. “You know all too well what you did.”
The sneakers stank to high heaven and were trodden down at the back where he’d jammed his feet into them without undoing the laces, as I had just done. I set my jaw and slipped my own feet inside, fastening them up tight. Anderson’s car was parked a mile away and it was dark outside—there was little chance of being seen—but still. I’d run back to the car just to be safe, and I didn’t want to end up tripping over my own feet. The sneakers were still too big, but better than the dress shoes had been.
I turned, ready to leave this godawful place behind forever, but Anderson grabbed the hem of the shirt I was wearing, fisting the material tightly. “What happened to you?” he whispered.
The man lying on the cot had gone by another name once upon a time. Just as I had, he’d changed his given name in order to build a new life for himself. He’d wasted the opportunity, though. He was old now. Fat. Useless. Another ugly sneer contorted my face; I felt it molding my features, setting there permanently. “I am merely a product of my surroundings.” I tilted my head, studying him with utter contempt. “But you, Anderson? What happened to you?”
His mouth flapped open and closed a couple of times. It must have been getting pretty hard for him to breathe. Hard enough that he couldn’t reply.
I didn’t think twice as I ripped the shirt from Anderson’s hand. There had been a time when I might have felt a twinge of remorse for shooting him up with formaldehyde and leaving him to die. But not now.
No.
There was no guilt left inside of me.
I didn’t feel anything anymore.
ONE
FIX
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.
A lot of shit had happened since then.
Light. The Aztecs. Pompeii. The Marie Celeste. Hitler. Dunkin’ Donuts. Celine Dion. And, now, this Zeth guy…who looked like he was primed to beat the shit out of me.
Unlike the other two guys I’d just fought at the behest of Oscar Finch, the madman who ran The Barrows, this Zeth guy radiated not only violence, but intelligence, too. His dark eyes flashed steel, and his body hummed with power. Here was a true fighter. Here was the end level boss, designed to beat me into a bloody pulp and send me packing with my tail between my legs. He was strong. Looked light on his feet. By the way he prowled toward me, his eyes scanning my own stance and build, he was assessing me, getting a measure of me, too.
When he pulled up in front of me, eye-to-eye, we were exactly the same height. I rolled back my shoulders, rocking my head from side to side, cracking my neck. “Zeth? Doesn’t sound like a real name,” I said.
“And Fix does?”
My
mouth curled up at the right, lifting into a smirk. “Got me there.”
“I got you everywhere,” he fired back. “I have no idea how the rules in this place work. Don’t you just want to hit the elevator and make your way downstairs, though? You get to keep your teeth. I get to finish the really good scotch I have waiting for me on the roof.”
He didn’t know how this worked? What the actual fuck was that supposed to mean? “You came down from the roof?” I asked.
“What of it?”
“You didn’t have to swing a few punches on the way up?”
The guy’s smirk was just as twisted as mine. “I climbed up the fire escape.”
I just blinked at him. You have got to be fucking kidding me. He climbed up the goddamn fire escape. Completely avoided Falco and Foster. Avoided the basement, and all the other floors in between, and headed straight for the roof? Motherfucking genius. I attempted to conceal the grudging respect building inside me, right alongside my annoyance. Why the fuck hadn’t I thought of that? “How did Oscar take your unorthodox arrival?”
“I believe this fight with you is supposed to be my penance.”
Yeah, that sounded about right. Actually, it sounded like he was getting off fucking light. “Well, I hate to break it to you but whatever you came here for, whatever reason had you scaling up the side of The Barrows like Spiderman, you’re not getting back up on that roof. I have a damn good reason to get up there to Oscar, and there’s nothing like an incentive to make a man swing hard.”
“If you say so, Padre,” Zeth growled. “Win or lose, I’ll be leaving with the thumb drive I came here for. Honestly, you look like you’re gonna put up a good fight. I’m looking forward to it.”
The soles of my boots felt like they were suddenly glued to the floor. Thumb drive? He just said thumb drive. Had I heard him right? What were the chances that Oscar had two mystery thumb drives? And I just so happened to be here for one of them, and Zeth was here for the other? Basically zero. Fuck. Come on. This just wasn’t fucking happening.
Even if I won this fight, I was probably going to have to kill the bastard to make sure he didn’t try and take the damn thing anyway. He didn’t play by the rules—Oscar’s or anyone else’s by the sounds of things—and I didn’t have fucking time for this. I needed to get back to Brooklyn, back to Sera, and the sooner the better.
“What’s on the drive?” I demanded. Blunt and to the point.
“You’re not supposed to be having a nice chat. Fucking hit each other,” the floor boss yelled from over by the board.
My lip curled back. Zeth’s lip curled back. We traded identical irritated looks. Both of us ignored the guy. “What do you care what’s on it?”
“I was hired to come here and collect it for a client. Must be pretty fucking important, if it’s garnering this much attention.”
Zeth was a wall. No expression. No movement. Nothing but cold, assessing judgement in his dark eyes. I hadn’t been back to New York in well over six weeks, but I kept my ear to the ground. I made it my business to track and monitor the rise and fall of power in the city. I would have heard of this guy if he’d been picked up by one of the gangs or the mob. And I definitely would have heard of him if he’d been attempting to build an empire of his own. So, he was from out of town. His accent was clean, no hint of any twang, drawl or lilt that would identify his place of origin. His eyes narrowed a fraction—the only indicator that he wasn’t paralyzed from the roots of his hair down. “Trust me,” he rumbled. “If you don’t have any personal ties to this thumb drive, then you’re better off keeping it that way. Whatever your client’s paying you, it isn’t enough. Walk away.”
I didn’t have the time to explain to him that I wasn’t getting paid at all. That I was locked into a trade with Rabbit—the thumb drive, for the identity and location of the guy who was intent on having Sera killed. Plus, it was none of this fucker’s business. “You’ve said you’re going to beat me more than once in the past two minutes. But for someone so sure of victory, you sure do seem to want me to walk away,” I observed.
Zeth’s flat expression didn’t falter. “I fight people when I have to. I fight for exercise, and to protect those I care about. While I don’t have a problem with knocking a hole right through your face with my fist, I don’t like being told I have to fight someone for the sheer spectacle of it. I’m not a fucking gladiator. And that fat fuck up there on the roof isn’t my boss. I don’t owe him shit. I tried doing this the nice way. I asked politely. Oscar didn’t feel like obliging me. So now, all I want to do is get back up there and beat the fucker to a bloody pulp.”
“I’d love to do the same. Sounds like we have more than one common goal.”
Nostrils flaring, Zeth stepped forward. “Then perhaps we can work together. We fight. You go down after a couple of hits. We fool that asshole by the board into thinking you’re unconscious. When he comes over to check, we lynch him and steal his access card to the elevator.”
His mind obviously worked in a similar way to my own. I’d been about to suggest the same thing. “Sounds great. There’s only one problem, though, Zee.”
He just arched his brow questioningly.
“I never go down in a fight.”
His response was an earthy, deep rumble of laughter that echoed around floor fourteen. “I suppose I admire that.”
“You’ll go down, then?”
“Fuck no.”
A burst of static ruptured out of a small set of speakers mounted on the closest support column; a crackling, popping sound splintered through the air, followed by a blast of sharp, grating, high pitched feedback. Oscar’s aggravated voice followed after it. “If one of you doesn’t make the other bleed in the next five seconds, I’m going to send someone down there with an AK47 and enough rounds to kill you both fifty fucking times. Get on with it!”
Zeth shrugged a shoulder, sighing under his breath. “I guess we’ll just figure this thing out as we go, then.” I’d figured before that he was quick, but I hadn’t realized just how quick. The pain hit me first—an explosion of white light that filled my head silently, like the blast starship blowing up in a science fiction movie, the light calmly washing over everything before the chaos of the detonation actually took hold. The annoyance hit me shortly afterward, and for a brief, unpleasant, fucked up moment, I couldn’t tell which stung more: the fact that he’d hit me without me seeing it coming, or the fact that it actually just really fucking hurt. I allowed myself a single step back. Just one. I bent my leg and braced, stopping myself from reeling. From toppling over like a felled fucking tree. Now that would have been seriously embarrassing.
My vision swayed, colors returning, too bright, bleeding together in a mess of yellows, and oranges, and blues and reds, and then it sharpened, bringing Zeth back into focus; he was fucking close. Closer than he should have been, and his fist was flying toward my face for a second time.
Oh no, sunshine. No, no, no. Not again. Not ever again. I ducked to the right, my hips twisting, and the bastard’s fist sailed on by, buzzing my nose. The strike would have broken the damn thing if it had connected. I clenched my teeth, hissing between them, and I reacted without a second’s thought. I raised my own fist, but I didn’t jab directly. I lifted my whole arm, locked my elbow out, and I brought the back of my fist crashing down on his temple. I’d always known how to defend myself. When I was a teenager, I’d enrolled in three different kinds of martial arts, purely because I knew how badly it pissed my father off. After I’d joined the church, there hadn’t been much time for training, though. I’d managed body weight work outs in the rectory when I got up each morning, but the sparring? The actual art of defense and attack? I’d grown rusty over the years. I’d become slow and sluggish. It had taken a long time after I walked away from my position to get back to where I was before. But after months and months of training, sweating, bleeding, gasping for every single breath I managed to drag down into my screaming lungs, I finally did it. And then I got bett
er. Better still. Working out, training, fighting, running…it became an obsession.
And now?
Now I was fucking lethal.
The blow landed perfectly. The guy’s head rocked to the right, his neck compressing. Had to have fucking hurt. He skipped to the side, distancing himself from me and my now primed fists as he shook his head, obviously trying to quiet the bells that must have been clanging around the inside of his skull.
When he righted himself, angling his body toward me, a slow, strange, slightly deranged smile spread across his face. “Nice,” he said. “Looks like that’s a point each then.”
“Oscar doesn’t count points. He counts pints. Of blood. He won’t call the match until we’ve both spilled at least three between us. Or one of us concedes.”
Slowly, Zeth touched the side of his head, his temple, where my blow fell. He wiped at his skin and then held up his fingertips for me to see. They were slick and red, glistening under the florescent lights. “Well, we have our first taste right here. I’m not afraid to bleed a little more, Priest. Are you?”
Dementor and old Jackie boy downstairs did their best to put the fear of god into me, but at the end of the day, their taunts and jeers had been pathetic. Zeth wasn’t trying to scare me into submission. He simply opened his mouth and said the first thing that came to him, and I was fully willing to admit it; the guy was a little intimidating. There was nothing wrong with recognizing when an opponent was dangerous. It was fucking smart to recognize that. What wasn’t smart was letting them know you saw them as a threat. Once they knew they had you spooked, the fight was generally over. These vicious, violent bouts weren’t just played out with fists; they were played out in your head, too. And I was keeping mine in the motherfucking game.
I didn’t flinch as I stalked toward him, raising my fists into guard. “If you’re in, then I’m in.” I could see why Oscar sent the guy down here to teach me a lesson. He was huge, and he was clearly a highly-trained fighter. But Oscar was forgetting one thing: I was huge, too. I was highly trained. All he’d done was set two meteors hurtling toward each other, sending them on a collision course, and the impact when Zeth and I finally clashed was going to leave a crater in the middle of New York City, a mile wide and a mile deep.
