A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  She wiped the tears from her face. He’d never made a woman cry with just a question. “Please, love me,” she said, staring, trembling, makeup running.

  The trap he sensed opening up seemed to be her love for him, her determination to make him need her. She was setting him up for what would come after the target was dead.

  He’d warned her.

  She took his hand. Pulled him, again with surprising strength. He could have stayed rooted against the windowsill. The Beast sent pins and needles through his legs to make him jump, but he didn’t.

  Think.

  “I can’t die,” Max told her, squeezing her hand, hard. Sending the last warning, the final message. A sign.

  She blanched. A bone snapped in one of her fingers.

  “Nothing can kill me,” he said.

  In her eyes, he saw that she believed his lie. She was not betraying him.

  But she wanted him to take her, despite all his warnings.

  How much was he willing to sacrifice in order to satisfy his appetite? Had pretense weathered the Beast down to a primal husk blind and deaf to Max’s guidance through civilization’s traps? Had they both finally been reduced to prey for a predator greater than either of them, the target, even Mr. Jung and his associates?

  Amanda placed her hand over his crushing fist and pulled at him, first with the weight of her body, then putting her back and legs into hauling him closer. “If you can’t die, then what will happen to you when you love?”

  The question brought him back into the moment. Of all the problems he’d had to face growing up and moving into the greater world of manhood, love had never been an issue. He could not even conceive of love.

  “Come on,” she pleaded. Her perfect skin furrowed at the brow, casting her face into a reflection of what she’d look like in ten years. She gave him a slight pout and turned her head toward the hall. It was a quieter form of begging than he was accustomed to, but then, her desperation flowed from a different source. He’d never had anyone want to come closer to him; he’d only ever known people eager, sooner or later, to run away.

  “It’s the price you have to pay for reaching your target,” she said, low and hoarse. “Come with me. Let them drown in the wine. You hear me,” she shouted at the kitchen wall. “Suck it all down and drown.”

  The Beast leapt at the chance, and Max rolled up on to his feet, carried away by the Beast and its unwitting co-conspirator, Amanda.

  She grinned. Her teeth were perfect pearls. In the rawness of his youth, he would have worn them in a string around his neck.

  They went to the bedroom. Max grabbed two of the threesome entwined on the bed by the hair and dragged them out. The third followed, lapping eagerly. Amanda applauded.

  The Beast scratched at the inside wall of his scrotum, angry that Max had not kept the three for its entertainment. Four were better than one. Numbers only added to the feast.

  Numbers.

  Three.

  Max shook off sign. The windows had proved to be innocent, as unlikely as that was in the city. He was here for Amanda. For the target. For the Beast. For now.

  After Max closed and locked the bedroom door, Amanda’s guests gathered outside and called out erotic suggestions like a disembodied pornographic chorus. The sweaty stink of their lust nearly overpowered the scent of Amanda’s desire rising from between her legs.

  He felt certain the chorus would soon be invited to spend their desire on the Beast.

  Amanda was on him before he knew what he wanted next. The Beast had him by the cock, but he still had the mission, Mr. Jung, and the vast monster of civilization on his mind. He teetered on the edge of a crumbling cliff, waiting for the ground to give so he could at last throw himself to the doom of his unrestrained hunger.

  She undressed him, and he let her. Something about their interplay felt familiar, even comforting, though he couldn’t remember ever feeling a woman’s hands gliding over his body as hers did, teasing and touching him in ways that stoked his appetite and yet made him want to yield to their fulfillment rather than strike out and consume to his satisfaction. She whispered to him as if her words could slip through the barrier of his skin, infiltrate his organs and muscles, turn his heart and mind to her will. Her eyes gazed into his as if searching for an elusive fluttering insect, so tiny and fragile it could easily be lost in the jungle’s wild colors, its dark pits of shadow. She sang, slowly and gently, the warmth of her breath carrying her voice deep into him until the rhythms of life resonated within his beating heart.

  The Beast stumbled in the strange domain of her soothing touch.

  Like Max, it seemed to remember another time and place in which tenderness had a place in its world.

  The room spun in Max’s mind. The horizon tilted, his legs shook. Drugs. She’d slipped something into him, just with a touch. Fool. He’d been a fool.

  But the Beast didn’t rise to the bait of an assault. There were no chemicals coursing through his body. He wasn’t hallucinating. He was only paying the price for keeping two monsters at bay—his own, and the one that had trapped him in this apartment, with this woman, carrying the burden of a mission driving him insane. He was falling, along with the Beast, into a part of themselves that no longer existed, perhaps never had. But Amanda’s touch had sent them both tumbling into the space left by the memory of experiences they once might have shared somewhere else, in another time and space.

  He should never have sacrificed his need. Nothing, not even survival, was worth the torment of this strange sensation of unfamiliar emotions enveloping him.

  “It’ll be all right,” Amanda whispered as she steered him to the bed.

  The Beast listened, felt her body, tasted the blood ready to burst from the artery in her throat. It remembered its hunger for her, and in that hunger returned to what it was.

  Max took a deep breath as Amanda climbed over him, taking in his hard cock, moaning as she rode his hips, gasping, huffing, as if racing to reach an ending before she herself was consumed.

  The Beast, first to land standing on its hooves, waited for Max to remember what they both were, taking the moment to enjoy the reversal of the roles it was accustomed to playing. It savored the weakness it found carved in her grimace and the gleaming of her eyes, her desperation to believe that she had somehow won, like it had discovered a new flavor of cruelty.

  Max and the Beast became one another once again in the gushing wound of Amanda’s desire for Max. There was something bracing and fresh, almost intoxicating, in the position they found themselves in. Prey never offered itself to the hunter, much less worked so hard to seduce its killer.

  Max wanted to laugh at the sheer madness of the situation. But he also needed to take her, no matter what the consequences. He’d finally been driven beyond caring what Mr. Jung and the rest of his secret masters might do. All that mattered was now and the flesh before him.

  Max threw her off, slammed her back down on the bed. He kneeled over her, and she stared at his cock, lips moving as if offering silent prayers.

  Her gaze shifted for an instant. The Beast never noticed as it lowered itself to feed on her breasts.

  But Max held back, catching the sign.

  Windows.

  Three.

  She’d looked up. At the ceiling.

  Why?

  Amanda caught his instant’s hesitation, wrapped her legs around his hips, pulled herself up to him by hanging on to his shoulders. Her hips rotated until she caught his cock between her thighs. She thrust herself up, arching her spine, letting her head flop back, hair hanging in a wavering cascade to the mattress, taking him in as deeply as she could, giving herself to the thrusts her body demanded from him, croaking as if she’d been thrown dying of thirst into a desert ravine with no hope of escape.

  The Beast gave her what she wanted, and her croaking turned to startled cries. But Max felt a tingling at the back of his neck that made him look over his shoulder, at the ceiling.

  Nothing there.


  Men and women breathed against the bedroom door, which seemed to bulge under their weight as they huddled so close, licking and snapping at scraps of pleasure tossed in their direction.

  If they all rushed in armed with knives, even guns, he wouldn’t die. As soon as that door opened he’d be among them, taking their weapons, and then their lives. They were ordinary. He was not. The Beast was with him.

  “Please,” Amanda screamed, driving her nails into his neck. Another trap yawned beneath the snare of her love. The points of sharpened stakes pricked at his heart.

  Max slapped her once, hard enough to stun her, shut her up. She collapsed back on to the bed, and he pulled out of her. The Beast ballooned in his chest and behind his eyes, swelling with frustration. Max grunted, rolled off of the bed, slammed his fist into a wall several times, breaking dry wall and scratching his knuckles. The Beast relented just enough to give him the space for a thought.

  Max grabbed a perfume bottle, shattered it against the dresser, picked up a piece of broken glass and squeezed it between his fingers. He let the sharp edges draw blood as a reminder of what he was missing.

  Amanda moaned, raised her hand as if looking for her face.

  Max scratched the door with the glass shard, like a cat testing his claws. Behind the door, the secret listeners shuffled as they recoiled.

  Max stood, slowly scanned the bedroom, skipping past the obvious places—lamp, telephone, mirror, jewelry cases. He focused on the empty spots on the carpet where something missing might have left a dust-free circle, patches of bare wall revealing a fresher shade of paint in the outline of a small bookshelf or painting.

  He found it.

  Went to the near corner, just below the ceiling molding, and dug out the pinhole camera with the glass shard.

  The window.

  Non-military. Wireless hadn’t trickled down yet to the security equipment wholesalers. The wire didn’t go left or right, or down and around the room to the apartment next door. It went straight up.

  Max’s masters had picked the right entry into their target’s life. Amanda may have moved on, perhaps, tired of the target’s fetish for secrecy and stealth. Not enough excitement with a man who preferred the power he found in invisibility.

  But as Mr. Jung had hoped, the target hadn’t moved on.

  Amanda put her hand to her face at last, then ran fingers through her hair. With the other hand, the one he’d squeezed and broken at least one joint, she played with herself, seeking out what she hungered for more than life as she mumbled, and then called out, “Max, Max, I’m here, please …”

  Max held the camera out to face her, to let the man who loved her see what he was paying for. The Beast strained to show him more, to grant her wish and accept her sacrifice. Anticipating the target’s pain in watching her die served only to further instigate Max’s demon.

  The target was upstairs. Steps away. The reality gave Max the edge in regaining control. He came back on mission. Survival ruled his passion, at least for the moment.

  But the temptation to let the Beast have her burrowed through him like a thousand maggots marching through his body to conquer his heart.

  She looked directly into the camera. Licked her lips. Laughed. Stretched her arm to a reach for a cigarette lighter on a side table.

  Signs.

  Three.

  She’d known about the camera. The trap was hers, for all three of them.

  The Beast strained to tear her apart, enraged by the betrayal of her role as prey. Max felt the sting of being tricked but insisted: she wasn’t the target.

  Signs.

  What was the trap supposed to trigger?

  No more time.

  He burst out of the bedroom, smashed through the waiting crowd, ran naked into the hall, up the fire stairs, to the apartment on the floor above.

  The Beast snarled, ravenous for Amanda, the target, revenge. Max promised the both of them he’d go back after the job was done. Amanda had proven herself a hunter. She’d wanted Max, everything that he was, all that he would do to her, so badly she could never share him with anyone. But she hadn’t been able to shake off the target. So she’d given both men what they wanted: to the target, the pain of her rejection in the flesh; for Max, an offering for his appetites. She’d lured both men to her with the promise that they’d get what they wanted, just as she reached for her moment of fulfillment in self-annihilation.

  She’d seen the Beast inside him, but counted on Max to get rid of her ex-lover once and for all, and then come back for her. And her friends.

  She was kind, in that way. And thorough, tying up the loose ends of her life, down to the crowd of sycophants panting at her door like dogs in heat,

  But something was missing. He felt the empty beat. The way she held her head told him she was waiting for another kind of terrible moment.

  But what was that moment supposed to be? Something to do with the lighter.

  Maybe she’d hope her lover would come down and try to save her, and in that way release everything that was Max on them all.

  He’d have to ask her when he finished the job. Right now, her erotic triangle was broken. She was no longer the fulcrum on which two men could exhaust themselves getting to or away from each other. Max had his target tagged, he didn’t need her, had no use for the sacrificial altar she’d made of her body.

  He kicked in the door to the apartment directly above hers.

  A slim, bald young man in a hooded sweatshirt and pants was sitting before a set of computer monitors. He was too young for her. What had she been thinking? He couldn’t give her what she was looking for. Money must have been the attraction, or genius.

  The young man whirled around to face the broken door, startled, and stared at Max. He didn’t get up or reach for a weapon. Not used to confrontation. Didn’t even realize he was looking at his assassin. Or that he’d been caught in his ex-girlfriend’s bizarre pit fall. A kid. Yet so important to Mr. Jung and the rest of the secret masters, and to Amanda, once.

  On one of the screens, the camera was looking up from the floor where it had fallen, offering a view of Amanda sitting naked on the edge of the bed, head cocked as if listening to something.

  Anticipating the sounds of violence over her head.

  The other two screens displayed scrolling financial information. The kids were some kind of fiscal virtuoso, Max thought. Or a hacker. Keyboards lay stacked one on top of the other at his feet.

  Didn’t matter. The boy was the target, and so he was dead. But Max couldn’t move.

  Signs.

  Had Amanda really planned to manipulate Max into doing her killing? Or was she truly a hunter, with her own plan to kill everyone she wanted dead.

  Instincts told him to run. The Beast laughed at his fear. Max felt the demon turn its attention to him, through the lens of Amanda’s self-destruction. What would Max taste like, to the Beast and Max?

  Something terrible.

  Amanda put a cigarette hanging between oddly bent fingers in her mouth, flicked open the lighter.

  Fire.

  Max jumped back. The dull thump of an explosion lifted him as the floor rocked. He sailed, fell, rolled into a tight ball against the wall. A wall of fire and debris smashed against Max’s exposed flesh. A thousand fiery pricks lanced his back, butt and legs, the fingers laced over the back of his skull.

  The shock stunned the Beast and shriveled Max’s cock. Dust and debris rained down, covering him in a pale blanket, though blood from his wounds seeped through to color the dust.

  He lay in the wreckage, echoes hammering at his head. No broken bones, though a number of deep and ugly cuts. There were going to be sirens. Police. It was almost too much to ask to be whisked away by a standby crew of cleaners. Mr. Jung had to be seething somewhere nearby, watching another Max assignment gone spectacularly wrong.

  Not my fault, he wanted to say.

  Some kind of bomb had gone off in Amanda’s apartment, the force of its detonation bursting t
hrough to the target’s apartment.

  Amanda’s doing, though that was going to be hard to prove. Already, pieces were slipping into place. Hunter to hunter, he circled the trap that had nearly caught him, sifting through details and finding nothing so crude that it might easily be exposed in the subsequent investigation.

  His mind leapt through variations of the set-up that would not involve his death but take out not only single targets, but clusters of enemies. There were so many in need of killing, and Mr. Jung grudgingly admired a certain amount of creativity in getting the job done. Once the mission was analyzed and Max’s suspicions proved correct, he was certain he’d be given clearance to use variations on Amanda’s idea. He’d developed a few new skills. There were many places in the world where bombs served far better than bullets in delivering messages.

  And explosions always left survivors, stunned bystanders, desperate responders. Enough prey to satisfy the Beast.

  But explosives also drew attention. He couldn’t believe Amanda would have allowed all the secrets of her life exposed to strangers, or to her enemies.

  The air was clear of the smell of chemical explosives. Of course. But a trace of gas still lingered. She must have had professionals rig the utility lines, set up hollow spaces behind the walls and in the ceiling for pockets of gas to build-up, making the subtle but necessary architectural modifications during the apartment renovation she bragged about to her friends to channel and direct the blasts.

  Amanda known all along that her ex-lover was spying on her, that he was so close all she’d needed to do was point. But she’d been planning for a long time, waiting for someone like Max to come along to take her where she needed to go.

  A little patience was all that was needed to make Max do what Amanda wanted done. Hadn’t he proved he could wait, sitting in the blind of a false life to be with Amanda for so long?

  The Beast shook itself out of its stupor. This wasn’t the first time it had been surprised by an explosion. It was learning, too.

  Max let the emergency crews carry him out. The EMS technicians performed the first aid he needed. He let them live, in a civilized show of merciful gratitude, though took the clothes from the man closest to his size.