Brink of Extinction

by Nicholas Ryan

  The man’s first instinctive emotion came as a wave of relief. It was not the boy. It was the body of a stranger, his dark facial features sinister even in the tranquility of death. One of the victim’s cheeks was covered in the whorl of a tribal tattoo.

  In the semi-darkness vibrated a low murmur of sound that rose from a hive-like hum into a loud swarming buzz. The man felt something crawl across his cheek. He swatted the fly away and forced himself to stay standing exactly where he was as he ran his eyes carefully over the ground. There was a story to be told in the disturbed dust and bloodied footprints. He saw the blood-dulled blade of a knife and he nudged it with the toe of his boot. Frowning, the man tried to piece together the puzzle, but the prints were too confused, the blood spread too far and the interior of the building too ruined to faithfully recreate the events leading to the stranger’s death. The only fact the man remained certain of was that the boy had been in this building, and he had seen the body. His footprints were stenciled in blood upon the ground.

  The man backtracked out through the door and stood, once again, in the face of the swirling snowstorm. Night had fallen, the world quickly turning to darkness. He turned in a slow circle until his eyes settled on the row of abandoned and ruined shop fronts, black and forbidding, on the far side of the parking lot.

  The man snatched up his bag and began to run.

  * * *

  For fifty feet the man ran across the exposed ground of the parking lot, driven by his desperate urgency – and then instinct and experience tempered his impetuousness and he slowed to a stalking walk. There was something menacing and brooding about the dark strip of low buildings, something indefinable that made the man falter. He paused in the knee-deep snow and stared ahead into the darkness. The night was utterly black, the storm at last abating so that the snow now fell as a fine dusting, and the wind had died away to just pluck gently at his clothes.

  He thought he heard a sound in the night – a scrape of noise, cut abruptly short, that could have been anything, but he felt himself bending at the knees intuitively as though to make himself a smaller target.

  He went forward again, lifting up each foot with deliberate care, and laying it down again, stepping lightly, trying to keep his body weight evenly spread on each foot so as not to fracture the ice crust.

  His breathing was deliberate, each exhalation measured and controlled, and beneath his heavy clothes he could almost feel the beat of his heart slow down as the long-forgotten instincts of the prowling hunter came back to him. His senses seemed to heighten. The biting cold was forgotten. His entire body became attuned to the telltale signs of danger.

  He had made it halfway across the parking lot when another, more distinctive noise, suddenly ripped the night apart. It sounded like a cry – a high-pitched human yelp of pain and anguish. It rip-sawed along the man’s strung nerves, and he flung himself down into the snow and lay still and huddled for several long seconds. He heard the sound again; loud enough to pierce the sudden drumming beat of his blood at his temples. It was another angry shout, this one somehow harsher, almost bitter. The man cocked his head to the side and closed his eyes, listening into the after-silence with intent concentration.

  “Was it the boy’s voice?” the man felt the alarm swell in his chest and roar in his head like crashing surf. “Was he in a fight? Was he hurt?” The man clenched his fists and fought the urge to break cover and sprint forward. His hands shook, his jaw clenched. “Was the boy dying?”

  His panic came upon him with a roar, and he lay flat in the snow clawing at the ground as if to hold himself down; as if to anchor his body against the great wind in his mind that compelled him to run forward. It lasted a long time and then slowly washed away. The roar became muted, replaced by something cold and clinical and merciless.

  “If it is the boy and he’s hurt or in danger, then me getting caught won’t help him,” the man’s thoughts cleared. “If he’s dead I can get revenge, if he’s in trouble I can rescue him – but not if I walk into a trap.”

  Holding the Glock in his right hand he began crawling forward through the snow, stopping every few minutes to listen carefully for more sound. He heard nothing. He reached a framework of steel rails that had once held rows of shopping carts, and in the small shelter of the snow that had drifted around the upright posts, he slowly raised his head.

  The night was dark, the storm clearing but heavy cloud obscured stars and moonlight. Yet within the inky blackness loomed the deeper, more solid structure of the shop fronts, bulky without distinct shape, darker but without definition. The man lay thirty yards from the corner building. He slithered towards the foreboding structure and at last the snow thinned as he came under the sagging shelter of an awning.

  The man rose up slowly onto his haunches. The pervading dampness of the snow had soaked through the leather of his jacket so that his shirt felt wet and clinging to his chest, and the side of his face was so cold that it felt like a raw wound. The man drew himself upright and crept to a brick wall directly ahead of him.

  Now, at last, shape took on detail as all of his senses seemed amplified and enhanced to offset for his strained sight.

  He was standing out front of some kind of an abandoned diner or restaurant. He could see old bench seats around the walls and a long serving counter. The floor looked to be tiled, and the huge piece of shop front glass had been cracked into a spider’s web of fissures, but not broken. The man studied the dark interior for long seconds, with the gun clenched in a double-fisted grip, ready to swing on target. The shapes along the far wall were indistinct mounds that might have been old serving equipment, but could just as easily have been the still and menacing silhouette of a guard. He took two dancing, quick steps towards the restaurant doorway. There was no actual door, just a yawning wide mouth like the entrance to a black cavern. The man ducked down low and went through the opening in a rushing crouch, the Glock covering his dash, until he felt his hip crack against a countertop. He was sweating. He stayed frozen for a long moment, giving his eyes every opportunity to adjust to the darker gloom. The building looked dilapidated. The walls were grey with dust and the floor spattered with the droppings of birds and the vermin who had made their homes in the crumbling ceiling.

  There was no sound, no sign of movement.

  The man crept forward, each step like a carefully balanced footfall through a live minefield, as the silence settled over him. He could almost taste the tang of darkness in his mouth – a dank mustiness that was dust and dirt and suffocating blackness.

  Beyond the serving counter he discovered a commercial kitchen area, the stainless steel of the hotplates and exhaust ventilation system coated in thick grime. The floor was littered with bundles of old cardboard boxes, rotted into a stinking pulp. The man went back out to the restaurant doorway and stood in the threshold. He peeked out through the opening, looking to his right. The adjoining shop had been another restaurant – he could see the shattered plastic of a neon sign swinging in the gentle breeze – and beyond that appeared to be the vast frontage of an old department store. The man pressed his ear to the nearest wall and thought he could feel a vibration – not quite a distinct sound, but some kind of humming tremor, like the murmur of many voices, or the far away sound of running feet. He blinked the sweat from his eyes and then felt the hair on the back of his neck suddenly come erect. He could smell tobacco smoke.

  The man shrugged the heavy canvas bag off his shoulders and flattened himself inside the doorway of the ruined restaurant with just the side of his face showing along the fascia of the shop fronts. A figure appeared from one of the wide department store exits; the dark bulky silhouette of a man carrying a rifle, lumbering towards him with a peculiar Neanderthal kind of gait. The man saw the tip of a cigarette glow bright orange, and for an instant the little flare of light proved enough to highlight the stranger’s dark heavy brow and angular features.

  The man shrank back inside the doorway and listened to the heavy crunch of the
approaching steps. As soon as the dark hulking silhouette blocked the doorway, the man’s hand lashed out, quick as a striking snake, and latched around the stranger’s shoulder, dragging him into the utter darkness.

  Without conscience, the man drove his fist into the stranger, guessing where his face would be and throwing all his weight behind the blow. The punch hit like a steel hammer, but instead of breaking the figure’s nose and snapping off teeth, the man felt hard bone beneath his knuckles and the socking impact of the blow jarred back up his arm to his shoulder. He had aimed too high, probably caught the man on the forehead. The stranger went reeling backwards and the man felt an electric shock of pain numb every finger in his hand.

  The man followed the stranger as he fell backwards, giving not an instant for respite. He kicked out at the writhing figure and the stranger thrashed away. The man dropped onto his chest with his knees and heard the great whoosh of air explode from the stranger’s lungs. Then he had his clawed hands around the other man’s throat, digging his fingers brutally into the exposed flesh that stiffened and then squished beneath his grip. The stranger made a high-pitched wheezing sound and a final gust of stale fetid breath escaped from his wide open mouth. The man was close enough to see the stranger’s face now, even in the heavy gloom. He was snarling; squeezing the man’s throat as his fingers inexorably moved closer together to the point of complete strangulation.

  Beneath him, the man felt the stranger’s body begin to thrash in desperate panic. His heels drummed against the tiled floor, his arms flailed at his eyes, and then slowly lost their co-ordination. The stranger’s movements became lethargic, as if he were drowning in a deep sea. The man tightened his grip, felt the life force draining away from the body beneath him, and at the very last minute he released his strangling hold and drove the cocked point of his elbow into the stranger’s face. The hard bone hit flush in the mouth, crushing the cartilage and gristle of the stranger’s nose and splitting his lips open. Warm blood gushed across the stranger’s face and he let out a stifled groan of ragged pain.

  The man took a fistful of greasy hair and hammered the back of the stranger’s head hard against the tiled floor until at last the resistance went out of him and he lay, prone in a spreading pool of his own blood, wheezing and gurgling from the back of his throat as if teetering on the precipice of death.

  For a brief moment the man allowed himself to relax. He stayed hunched over the body, like a vulture perched on his chest, and listened carefully. He could hear no other sounds, no rushing noise from beyond the restaurant’s doorway. He took a long moment to steady his breathing, then dug his fingers back into swollen flesh of the stranger’s throat, his fingers now slick with sticky blood.

  “Where is the boy?” the man snarled with a hoarse and menacing edge to his voice. His jaw locked clenched, his lips drawn tight. Anger surged through him in hot waves.

  The stranger made a choking noise and tried feebly to claw at the fingers seized around his throat. The man slapped the stranger’s hands away contemptuously and tightened his grip.

  “Where is the boy?”

  “What boy?” the stranger grunted numbly. Little drops of his blood, like spittle, flew from his mouth.

  “Thirty minutes ago. The boy.” The man snapped. “He came from the gas station back on the corner.”

  The stranger started choking on his own blood. It erupted from between his lips like bubbles of lava and ran in rivulets down along his face to clot in the hair at the back of his head.

  “The auction,” the stranger wheezed. “They caught him for the auction.”

  “Is he alive?”

  No answer.

  The man growled, drew back his lips into a vicious snarl, and bared his teeth. “Is he alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “The… the auction.”

  “Where is the auction?”

  The stranger lapsed into another gurgling fit of coughing. The man relaxed the digging grip of his fingers and seized a cruel fistful of hair. “Where is the auction?”

  “The store,” the stranger grimaced. His eyes were fluttering in his head as though he were on the verge of unconsciousness. The man shook the stranger. “How many men?”

  The question seemed to confuse the stranger. He frowned as though the words were reaching him through a heavy mist of background clutter.

  “How many guards?” the man asked again and his voice filled with renewed menace. “How many of you are there?”

  “Nine… ten…” the stranger tried to form the words around the mess of his bleeding mouth. “Ten, and some clients.”

  “Clients?” the man scowled. “How many of them?”

  The stranger rolled his head from side to side in his own blood. “Don’t know. Maybe another ten.”

  The man searched the stranger quickly and found a knife tucked inside the man’s boot. It was six inches of glinting tempered steel. The man set the blade aside and out of reach, and then found the double-barrel shotgun the stranger had been carrying. It had skittered beneath a countertop table. The man patted down the stranger’s jacket pockets and found a handful of spare cartridges for the weapon. He stood up over the prone body, and suddenly did not know what to do.

  “Should I kill him?” the man had no moral objection; it was merely a question of necessity. He could simply cut the stranger’s throat and let him bleed out from the jugular. Or he could tie the man – but there was no time. There was one other option.

  The man swung the butt of the shotgun like a golf club, and the heavy wood cracked hard against the side of the stranger’s face. The body went limp, unconscious, and the man grunted as he rolled the heavy weight onto its side.

  “You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance,” he muttered. “Maybe you live, maybe you choke on your own blood.”

  He tore several long lengths of cloth from the prone stranger’s shirt and then went back through the wreckage of the restaurant again, searching every cupboard and storage area in the kitchen until he found a discarded glass soda bottle. He rummaged through his canvas bag of meager possessions and found one of the hip flasks that had been filled with gasoline. He emptied the contents into the bottle and then wadded strips of cloth as a wick for the Molotov cocktail.

  With the bottle wedged carefully upright in his jacket pocket, the shotgun in his hand, and the Glock and knife tucked inside the waistband of his jeans, the man crept out into the night, past the empty ruin of the next restaurant, and finally paused before the closest set of glass doors that opened into the vast warehouse-like space of the department store.

  His hands were trembling and sweaty. He could smell his own sour body odor mixed with the sickly sweet smell of fresh blood that coated his hands and his clothes. His eyes felt inflamed and raw and there was the taste of his own fear and anxiety in the back of his throat.

  The man eased a glass door open, crept inside, and flattened himself against a wall. He was struck by the vastness of the building. There was a sense of huge cavernous size and of echoing sound, and he stood frozen for a full minute with his eyes never still. Ahead of him he could just make out the dark immense shapes of tall dark shop fixtures, set against the side wall. He crept towards them, measuring each step, lifting each foot and placing it down carefully before bringing the weight of his body forward. He felt loose papers underfoot, the crumbled grit of plaster and crunching shards of glass. He went forward stealthily, frowning at each little noise, yet aware also of a sound in the background – the murmurs of voice and movement that he had only sensed and suspected when he had listened against the wall of the restaurant. Now those sounds were amplified, still without definition, but modulated into highs and lows, like a far away hiss of the sea against a desolate shore.

  The man reached the barricade of fixtures and explored them carefully with his hand, running his fingers over grimy and dust-layered shelves like a blind man until a lighter gap appeared as a doorway. He stepped through and felt his body seize int
o sudden nerve-jangling alarm.

  Far away in the rear of the store he could see wavering yellow and orange light, playing against the walls and for an instant he thought the building was ablaze. But the fire was controlled, not raging – casting a soft glow throughout the building and giving him enough light to better understand his surroundings. There seemed to be carpeted laneways throughout the interior, each leading past clusters of broken steel shelves and high wooden case-like fixtures. Everything he touched was strung with spider webs and peppered with dust. The paths wound past wooden service counters and fly-spotted mirrors. The man edged deeper into the heart of the warehouse, his footfalls jarringly loud in his own ears.

  Hugging the deep shadows, the man at last reached the last of the shop fixtures, and he stood peering at a cleared expanse of floor space that looked like a scene risen up from Hell.

  Fire lit the area, burning from blazing torches against the walls, and from within the dark mouths of iron drums. Thin wisps of grey black smoke rose from the flames and roiled across the ceiling in spreading fingers of haze, as though feeling for a way to reach the night’s frigid air. The walls were soot-covered, and little feathers of black ash rose and drifted on the gentle heated up draughts.

  Against the back wall, beside a set of closed double doors labeled ‘Loading Dock’, stood an elevated dais, and a set of steps. It might once have been the kind of platform where in-store fashions were paraded. Now it was being used for something much more sinister.

  In the foreground, the man could see a dozen people all sitting before the stage, their faces lit shiny and glowing by the flickering orange glare of the fires, and around the edges of the walkway stood dark-faced men carrying weapons. Two more armed guards were standing by a closed side-door. The air was thick with the smell of smoke, but also with an odor less tangible but more potent; it was the acrid stench of fear and misery.

  Above them all, postured on the platform, stood a man – a hideously deformed creature with a monstrous head devoid of hair and ears, the patchwork of gruesome cicatrix scarring across his face and neck bloated and inflamed so that he looked demonic. He was wearing a jacket and an open-necked shirt, gesturing to the gathered audience like a circus ringmaster with his hand stretched out, imploring them.