The Academy

by Zachary Rawlins

  “That’s the problem with you,” he grumbled. “No sense of when to delegate.”

  Alice chuckled, and then they were silent for a while, watching the slow climb of the red numbers in the LCD screen mounted above the door.

  “And when we get to the top…” Chris proffered, looking at Alice warily.

  Alice smiled back at him smugly.

  “You kill everyone we find up there,” Alice said, her tone cheerful. “Don’t worry, I’ll be watching your back for you, so you can concentrate on convincing me that your little dalliance with our enemies was, in fact, accidental.”

  Chris stared back in horror.

  “You still don’t believe me? Why would I have approached you, then, I wonder?”

  “So I’d look to you to watch my back, silly, and then you could stab me in it,” Alice said, cutting him off. “And you’ve had your hand in enough black ops to do it, too.”

  Chris shook his head.

  “This is insane, Alice! I’m not like you! I can’t do this,” Chris pleaded. “You’re going to get me killed.”

  Alice took him by the shoulders and rested her forehead against his own, her eyes huge and, he couldn’t help but realize, quite mad.

  “No, I am trying to bail you out,” Alice said, her voice calm and firm. “You were dead the moment you set us up, Chris, no matter what your intentions were, and you know it. Now, I’m not just making an exception for you here, I am making a huge, once-in-a-lifetime, never again to be offered exception.” Alice lowered her voice. “This is the hugest favor you’ve ever gotten, Chris, like fucking and winning the lottery at the same time, you know? You are the luckiest man – or whatever – on earth. And I don’t want to hear any more bitching about it, alright? You’ll make me change my mind about giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

  Alice slapped Chris on the cheek lightly, and then released him. Chris rubbed his cheek, looking up at his sad reflection in the brass. The muscles of his fingers bent strangely, flexing at the first joint, the fingernails extruding to become something more like talons; five centimeters long and razor sharp, yellow as old bone.

  “What’s at the top, then?”

  Chris’s words were only a bit slurred through the fangs that poked out behind his upper lip.

  “For you?” Alice asked, opening the other bag and extracting an automatic shotgun. “Opportunity.”

  --

  When the elevator chime dinged on the thirty-fourth floor, the assembled security personnel were smart enough not to wait for it to open. As soon as the alarms had gone off downstairs, they’d been issued heavy weaponry and given the okay to use it, and truth be told, a number of them were eager to. It wasn’t like they were mercenaries, after all, so the opportunities to use the AR-15s outside the annual trip to the company range for recertification were few and far between.

  The actual mercenaries had seen more than enough automatic gunfire for a lifetime, and were a prudent distance back down the black marble hall, in cover or watching through rifle scopes.

  There were half a dozen guards clustered around the elevator bank, and they each put the better part of a twenty-four round clip into the thin metal doors, the door mechanism whining and the grinding to a halt, partially opened. After a moment’s hesitation, the guards emptied their remaining rounds into the smoky interior of the elevator.

  They were smart enough to reload. They were smart enough to wait until the smoke cleared. But from where Chris was standing, it looked like they didn’t notice the small pile of oiled cloth and foully smoking plastic that Alice had made him light in the front corner of the elevator, just to the side of the entrance.

  They certainly didn’t notice the shaped Octol charge that Alice had left, attached to the far wall of the elevator with a suction cup, in an innocuous plastic case resembling a light fixture. Chris had been doubtful when he’d seen it, both about the effectiveness of such a small charge and about the dubious housing.

  As it turned out, he was wrong on both counts.

  The security guards filed cautiously into the elevator, one at a time, two inside, the rest clustered around the doors. Several meters down the hall, concealed behind a bulky reception desk, Chris watched Alice muffle a giggle.

  The explosion was impossibly loud, even from a distance, and Chris had to fight the urge to cover his ears. It was like a wall, coming out of the elevator, concentrated into a column of flame and debris and concussive force, tearing apart the men, the furniture, and much of the elevator banks itself. The doors were torn off and hurled across the hallway, sending one of the partially concealed mercenaries scurrying backwards for better cover.

  Chris gave him time to scream. Why not?

  He stepped through the man as he tried to turn his gun in Chris’s direction, a look of confusion and fear on his face, his hand whipping out and across the man’s throat almost as afterthought. The man fell to his feet, clutching his throat as it came apart, the wound across his trachea opening like a deep red mouth. Chris could hear the man gurgle and hiss as he dove for the next two soldiers, his arms spread wide, moving impossibly fast, his feet barely even touching the floor.

  He hit the first one running, driving him into the wall behind him with his shoulder, and then tearing at his throat with talons on his left hand, stepping neatly to the side to avoid the spray from his severed jugular. He felt the shells from the HP-5 tear through his abdomen, each burning a hot channel through the flesh, agonizing even through his diminished nervous system, and ignored them. He knocked the gun out of the man’s hands with a swipe, and then grabbed him by the neck and squeezed until he felt his spine crack. Next to him, Alice emptied her shotgun into the other two soldiers, turning them into mincemeat before they could turn and shoot.

  Chris inspected the ruins of his jacket with an air of resignation.

  “They aren’t trying too hard,” he observed, wiping at the blood splattered on his shirt with a piece torn from one of the mercenary’s uniforms. “Why do you think that is?”

  Alice pumped fresh shells into the still warm gun, ejected the spent fat red cartridges with an expression of almost feral glee.

  “Only one reason I can think of,” she said, glancing down at the mangled bodies with a craftsman’s pride at a job well done. “They want us to get wherever it is we are going.”

  “Doesn’t that worry you?”

  “I’m an Auditor, Chris,” Alice said, hoisting the gun up to rest across her shoulders, behind her neck. “Cooperation always worries me.”

  They followed the main hallway, an expanse of patterned blue carpet stretching out for much of the length of the floor, sprouting adjoining offices, glass-fronted meeting rooms and any number of rooms filled with shoulder-height cubicles, each with an identical workstation, all showing an identical screen saver. Chris shuddered a bit, looking at it. He’d never been able to understand how humans could tolerate working in such places year after year, in such cramped conditions. Vampires are horrified by monotony as a general principle.

  Alice glanced down at the ruin of her Kevlar coat, mangled by the earlier explosions and a number of .223 rounds that had been pumped into it by one of the mercenaries, before she’d gunned him down. She shrugged out of the heavy coat and let it fall to the ground beside her before continuing on, her pace unhurried and her body language casual and loose. She wore a black tank-top with spaghetti straps, dense tattoo work stretching from the center of her back to cover both shoulders; the cabalistic tree of life in black ink, the furthest boughs curling around the pronounced line of her collar bone, Hebrew script interwoven in the design. It made Chris remember several cold weeks spent in Prague, almost thirty years before, when the ink had still been a fresh, vivid black, the skin still red and swollen where it had been abraded. He remembered what the little room they shared had felt like, what her hair had felt like when he ran his hand through it, her terrible fits of obscene laughter.

  Alice had been dangerous then, dangerous and alluring. Chris
had found her fascinating in a way that he never had with a human, Operator or no. She was no less lovely now, he thought, and perhaps even more dangerous. But still, something about the fragility of her inked shoulder blades, the way her hair always refused to stay tied back, even the sheer lunacy of her impossibly white smile – all of this, somehow, saddened him more than it frightened him. As he hurried after her, Chris felt the knife he’d been given as a tremendous burden, a mill stone around his neck, pulling him under water that he found increasingly cold. His fingers tightened around the knuckled and slick metal of the hilt painfully.

  He glanced around, at the thin walls and the acoustic tiling along the ceiling, and then cleared his throat, loudly, twice.

  She’d turned her back to him, he realized. Whether because she knew already (and she must know, he was certain) or because she’d forgotten, she’d turned her back to him. Perhaps the baring of her back had been a display for his benefit? Perhaps, he thought, perhaps Alice remembered more than she’d let on…

  He sighed and pulled the knife from his pocket.

  The Weir that he drove it into seemed surprised. Chris couldn’t blame him. Even as he batted away the pieces of splintered plywood that flew at him from where the beast had broken through the partitioning, a snarling half-ton of corded muscle and elongated canines, Chris had trouble believing that he was the agency behind what was happening, watching himself push the blade up through the creature’s jaw, piercing through the mouth and into the skull, as if someone else were doing it.

  He felt the disturbance in the air behind him, and heard the low growls and the sound of heavy padded footsteps on the carpet, and knew that the larger group had come from behind. He had time to activate the Thorns protocol before he felt the claws rake his shoulders, the stench of the beast as it carried him down to the ground, stinking of blood and rotting flesh, its teeth working their way inexorably towards his jaw. Chris grabbed the Weir, one hand pressed against its moist and slimy snout, the other scrambling for purchase on its lower jaw. As he tried to force the creatures head away from his throat, his hand slipped on the drool-slick rolls of hair and flesh that surrounded its mouth, the ends of his middle and index fingers slipping into the gaping maw of the Weir, and then disappearing almost painlessly in a flash of yellow teeth.

  Chris worked one leg out from underneath the crushing weight of the thing, hooking his toes underneath the Weir’s rear leg, pushing himself up, trying to work his head away from the snarling mouth. His mangled hand flailed uselessly around its lower jaw, too slippery with blood and saliva to find a grip. He managed to work his other thumb up and into what he hoped was the creatures eye, jamming it in and the pushing as far into the wet, gelatinous tissue as possible. The Weir’s howl, coming only inches from his face, was deafening. Chris thought that maybe his other hand, the wounded one, might have drifted back to the creatures mouth again, but he couldn’t feel it anymore, and all he could see above him was the struggling bulk of the Weir, its weight crushing the air from his lungs.

  He tried to breathe and couldn’t, unable to force any air into his chest. His vision was covered with brilliant white points, gradually expanding until he was half-blind, seeing only blurred movement and strange lights. Hot blood dripped down onto his face and neck, but he wasn’t sure whether it was his own or the Weir’s. He worked the thumb he had forced into the creatures eye, trying to widen the wound, tearing and pulling at the glutinous flesh. He could feel the Weir’s breath on his neck, and knew that he didn’t have much longer.

  The shotgun blast was like a bomb going off next to his head, a concussive sound that immediately deafened him, the flash of light and heat so close that it seared his hair and scalp. He watched Alice roll the corpse of the Weir off of him in the strange silence that followed, adding to the dream-like feel of the entire scene, the woman in black clucking over him and helping him sit up. Chris stared down blankly at the remainder of his right hand, of which there was little more than the palm, thumb, and a single, dangling finger left. The jagged wound that the Weir’s teeth had left behind bled freely, and for a short time, Chris wondered why Alice made no move to try and stop it.

  He felt Alice wrap her arms around him, pulling him backwards, leaning his back against her chest, her muffled voice telling him to relax. As his wits and hearing slowly returned to him, he glanced down at his chest, and realized with a sober, detached judgment that he was already dead. His chest was a hideous mess, gouged and shredded by the Weir’s scrambling forepaws, and in two places, fractured ribs jutted out from the torn skin, stark white and horrifying. But most of the blood pooling on his chest and running down his abdomen, he realized, was from the wound in his throat.

  “Fuck, fuck,” Alice said, and Chris was amazed to see that she was crying, her face contorted and miserable. She held him tightly to her from where she crouched behind him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, his head leaning against her chest. He thought briefly of asking her to not squeeze so tightly, and then realized with an abstract fear that it didn’t even hurt. “Why, Chris?”

  He tried to laugh, but it turned into a wet, racking cough. He tried a smile, his face too numb to be sure that he had accomplished it.

  “Prague,” he sputtered, his voice only barely audible. “You don’t remember it at all?”

  Alice sobbed and then shook her head reluctantly.

  “I know that you mean something to me, Chris,” she said simply, almost apologetically. “But, I can’t remember why. I’m sorry…”

  Chris tried to pat her on the arm, but his own arm wouldn’t lift up, and anyway he couldn’t see her much, now, since it had become so dark. Anyway, he remembered, there wasn’t much of a hand there now. He almost laughed again, but at the last moment thought better of it, and settled on trying another smile.

  “No, that’s okay. You remember the important part, at least.”

  “What?”

  He could taste the salt of her tears on his lips when he licked them. Chris wanted to tell her he felt cold, but he couldn’t seem to manage the effort.

  “Chris, I would have found a way to save you…”

  He tried to shake his head. He wasn’t sure if anything happened.

  “No,” he whispered, Alice pressing her ear to his bloodied mouth to try and make it out, “It’s better like this. I never liked you Auditors, anyway. But, Alice…”

  She held him, clutched to her chest, just like that, until he grew cold and heavy, until she was certain that he wasn’t there any longer, wishing desperately that she could remember this man that she had felt compelled to save, whose death drove her to tears. When she finally set him aside, she did so gently, laying him out a few feet from the corpse of the Weir, his arms folded over his wounded chest, his diminished hand tucked underneath his elbow.

  She looked at him, for a while. It looked as if she wanted to say something. The only sound was the moaning of the one Weir who had survived the Thorns protocol, pinned against the other members of its pack, impaled by half a dozen different spikes that had grown out of the walls and ceiling, both lungs punctured multiple times. She decided that she was pleased with its suffering, and left the Weir to it.

  She looked over at the Weir that Chris had stabbed with the knife he’d concealed, most of its body already rendered into a foul soapy liquid, pieces of hair and flesh floating across the top of the bloody gel.

  “Nasty,” she observed, kicking at the knife with toe of her boot experimentally. “So that’s what you had in mind for me, eh?” She said to no one in particular. “Such an idiot. Like he could have stabbed me.”

  After a moment’s thought, she collected the knife and her shotgun, absently loading cartridges from one of her belt’s pouches, not bothering to wipe the tears and blood from her face, her gait confident and unhurried, walking towards the great stained teak doors at the end of the hall.

  She met no further opposition, nor did she expect to. The door opened easily when she turned the tarnished silver
knob, as she had expected it to.

  The room on the other side was large, so large that she suspected that a number of interior walls had been knocked out to create the space. The acoustic tiling had been removed from the ceiling, and its place there was a tangle of exposed wiring and lighting rigs, only about half of which seemed to function. Someone had started the process of installing off-white carpeting in the room, but had been interrupted, and Alice could see rolls of unused carpeting and exposed floor boards all around the periphery, only a few feet from where the mob of Weir stood, slobbering and hissing in the relative darkness. She didn’t bother to count. What difference did it make?

  There was a single desk in the room, a great ancient thing carved from some kind of deep red tropical wood, empty apart from a single lit candle and an antique rotary dial phone. The man behind it rose when she entered and remained standing, the top of his face hidden by the excessive folds of the purple robe that he wore. He was clean-shaven, olive-skinned, and perhaps middle-aged, she guessed.

  “Purple?” Alice said skeptically, cocking her head to one side and grinning, the heavy gun again resting across her shoulders, one hand wrapped loosely around the grip. “That’s what you went with?”

  The part of the man’s face she could see smiled back.

  “Purple was once reserved for royalty,” he said softly. “Purple is also the color of magic.”

  Alice’s grin broadened.

  “You might want to go with something a bit more contemporary,” she offered. “These days, a guy in a purple bathrobe might seem a little gay.”

  When the man laughed, the silken folds of his robe flexed and bent, moving gently as if in the wind, the metallic thread that constituted the fringe catching the light in odd ways. When he spoke, his voice was little more than a whisper, but she had no trouble hearing it nonetheless, even from across the room. On the desk, the lone red candle guttered, little more than a nub, its flame buffeted by a wind that she could not feel.