“What are you doing?” the man asked. “I said I would—”
“Only what is necessary,” Sebastian replied.
The former leader appeared shocked. “No. Please. Don't. You don't have to do this.”
The slack was slowly pulled from the ropes, and he was lifted from the stage. A mixture of fear and anger filled his face.
“You,” he said accusingly, “you sick bastard. You—”
But before he could finish, the ropes pulled tight and spread him into a giant X.
“I can't. I can't. I can't,” he pleaded as he lost control of his bowels in a noise loud enough to be heard by those on the stage.
Sebastian spun to face him and watched the ropes pull tighter and tighter. As they stretched and twisted, the man's wails rose in volume until becoming loud enough to overcome the chanting of the crowd.
When the screaming had intensified to a crescendo, the ropes suddenly slackened and set the leader down onto the stage with a thump. There, he panted, writhing in pain. He clumsily tried to free himself, but his arms flopped uselessly against the stage.
The crowd continued to chant, “Death! Death! Death!”
Sebastian nodded once and shot his arms up above his head. The man again was yanked into the air. This time he shrieked as his muscles ripped and tendons popped. His right forearm detached at the elbow, and his entire left arm ripped at the shoulder joint and tore into three rubbery pieces. The detached limbs followed the whipping ropes up the steel poles. When the knots that bound them reached the pulleys, the ropes slackened, and the useless limbs dangled at the ends of the ropes, twisting back and forth.
On the stage, what remained of the man's body dropped with an audible thud.
Sebastian smirked.
Cheers and whistles erupted from the audience. Those cheers nearly drowned out the horrid shrieks coming from the still living armless leader as he flailed about onstage. Tendons and frayed meat slapped wetly against the subfloor like soggy noodles as the man frantically tried to work his one remaining arm. Red lifeblood pumped out of him in thin streams until he lost consciousness.
Sebastian turned to the audience to complete the closing part of his performance, his 'curtain line' so to speak. He had accidentally started the ritual two years earlier, and now it was expected of him. Once done, he would retreat to his private quarters with the girl. He licked his lips in anticipation of what he would do with her, what he would do to her.
The cheers of the crowd morphed again into a single, synchronized chant.
It was no longer for the man's death. They were repeating something he loved to hear above all other things, something that pleased him greatly.
“Cyrus! Cyrus! Cyrus!”
Sebastian Cyrus moved to the front of the stage and dipped his finger into a spot of blood that had reached his clean white T-shirt.
He tasted it. It tasted salty, just as it had so many times before.
-9-
CHASING CORY
JESSE'S FLASHLIGHT PROBED the blackness of the elevator shaft. As the beam swung up and down, it seemed obvious that Cory had used the rope to descend and escape.
Smart bastard.
If he hadn't used the rope, the traps set on the access ladder on the opposite side of the shaft would have wrapped him in razor wire and left him lying at the bottom of the shaft in a pool of his own blood.
Jesse smirked and brought the flashlight up to touch his well-worn baseball cap. He pushed the brim out of his eyes. Then he checked again, figuring Kate must have taken the same path when she fetched the shotgun. How though? How had she known to do that? He made a mental note to watch her more closely. Worse, they had both left the rope dangling in the shaft. Anyone who found the other end could have climbed up and attacked his shelter. Normally, he kept it hidden from view and accessible by pulling on a string to release it.
Not good.
Given the injury to his shoulder, he considered how he would make the descent. While doing so, Eve crawled up beside him on her hands and knees. She steadied herself against the elevator door jam and peered over the edge.
“See anything?” she asked nervously.
“Nope.”
“This is really the only way out?”
Jesse grunted an affirmation and shined the light up the shaft. The beam spotlighted the elevator car two floors above where it hung like an oppressive weight. Wires dangled below it. While it might seem sturdy now, he worried it could drop at any moment. Months earlier, as an additional precaution to protect his shelter, he'd rigged a system of levers that would disconnect the brake plates on either side of the elevator car and allow it to drop. The trigger to set it off was located two floors above. With a creeping suspicion, he questioned if someone could have possibly tampered with the trigger mechanism, that someone being Cory.
Eve bumped into him. “There's no other way? You sure?”
“Well, you could jump,” he said. “The fall won't kill you, but the sudden stop at the bottom might.”
Silence.
She slid up the side of the door jam and drew herself to her full height. She took three steps back from the edge.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You sure? I can't have you backing out now.”
“I'm sure.”
Jesse wasn't so sure. He'd seen something in her reaction, but didn't know what. Must be heights, he thought as he fetched a pair of worn leather gloves and tossed them at her. “Put these on and haul up the rope. I need to prep some things.”
The gloves bounced off her and landed at her feet. She looked at him angrily, as if he should be doing it, then she stooped to swipe up the gloves. While she tugged them on, he went to the backpacks and began tying them into a single bundle.
She huffed as she went to pick up the rope. She started to haul up it up, hand over hand, coiling it up on the floor beside her.
“Good. Thank you,” he said encouragingly. “Now, keep coiling it up so it won't tangle.”
“I know what I'm doing,” she said. “I'm not stupid, you know. I mean, come on. Who builds a place you can only get to by sliding down a wire or climbing a rope in the dark? What kind of person does that?”
She kept talking. Jesse shut his mouth. His inner sense told him that he needed to be cautious with her and avoid saying anything that might provoke her. She was just nervous about the climb that was all. If he in any way set her off, she could get them all killed, so he let the rest of what she said pass through him without comment.
With the packs now bundled, he waited until she finished pulling the rope up and had it coiled neatly on the floor beside her. He nodded at the rope, then the bags.
“What?” she asked with a touch of anger in her voice.
He waited. She stared at him blankly.
“What?” she repeated, hands opening, fingers splaying.
Kate scrambled past Eve. She snatched the end of the rope, went to the bags, and started tying the entire bundle to the loose end of the rope.
“Oh,” Eve said.
Once Kate had tied everything off, Jesse checked her work. She had tied the bundles to the rope with a simple, well-formed hitch knot. He nodded his tacit approval and pushed the bags to the edge with his foot.
After wrapping the rope around his forearm, he braced a foot against the elevator door jam and shoved the bags over the edge.
“Doesn't your shoulder hurt?” Eve asked.
“It does. A little.” He wanted to add, like being repeatedly poked with a hot stick, but didn't.
The bundle descended the shaft. He occasionally winced from the pain but found it hurt less than he would have thought. Soon, the rope went slack. He leaned over the void and probed it with the flashlight, checking to make sure nothing below came and attacked the packs.
Eve brushed against his arm. “What about raptors? It's too dark down there to see hardly anything. You sure there isn't another way out?”
“No,” h
e said then made a show of leaning out past the elevator doorway again and sniffing the air. “I don't smell anything or see anything, but I'll go down first. Then Kate. Then you.”
Eve sank to her knees and again peered over the edge into the darkness.
“Stop looking down,” he said. “And, yes, you do have to climb down there on your own.”
Earlier in the day, Eve had helped him fashion a linen sling to hold his arm immobile and not rip the stitches in his shoulder. Now that he had to climb down, he would have to take the chance that those stitches might rip. He removed his arm from the sling, balled his hand into a fist, and worked at extending his limb to its full length. A sharp needling pain rippled up and down his torso, but the arm was working as expected.
He was also feeling a little flushed, which he shrugged off as something left over from the burns and cuts on his arms and face. What he needed most was a few more days of rest. Fat chance of that. It might take days before he got any rest. The plan was to go down the shaft, through the city, into the dead zone, to the outskirts, then finally to meet up with Rose. Not the smartest thing to be doing, he figured, especially injured, but the sooner he handed Eve over to Cory the better. But what if they didn't find the guy? What then? Did he really want to have her around?
“What?” Eve asked.
“Huh?”
“You were shaking your head.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Sure you can handle this?” she asked.
“No problem.”
Although he'd made the climb up and down the rope many times before, he'd never done it as injured as he was now. The going down part was easy. It was the coming back up part he worried about.
He twisted the baseball cap around so the brim covered his neck and clipped the flashlight to a mount on the shotgun. Using a carabineer, he attached the shotgun to his belt, leaving both hands free.
Ready.
The rope leading down into the elevator shaft was anchored to the wall opposite the elevator doors by a thick eyebolt he'd attached to a metal stud inside the wall. Plastic tubing, meant to keep the rope from fraying, encased the top section where it contacted the edge of the shaft. He rechecked everything one final time. All secure, he thought, but he tugged on the rope again just to be sure. Too often things had gone wrong for him, and the only way to ensure they didn't, was to double, triple, then quadruple check everything. The last thing he needed today was for the rope to fail.
It would be just his luck if it did.
Since Kate had made the climb before, he figured she knew what she was doing and did not need him telling her how to do it. Eve, though, she would need to be coached on every aspect of the climb.
He put a hand on her shoulder. “Use the gloves when you descend, or the rope will eat the flesh right off your hands. You'll need to wrap the rope around your arm like this.” He demonstrated what he wanted her to do. “And then wrap it through your legs like this.”
She glanced at the gloves. She was shivering. He could tell she was more than just nervous. If he stayed near her much longer, it might become contagious. He looked away. He hoped her attachment to Cory was enough to keep her from freezing up halfway down the rope.
If it wasn't, then what?
He sucked back the edgy thoughts and yanked the makeshift sling up and over his neck. He needed gloves of his own, so he made some by tearing the material from the discarded sling into strips and wrapping those around his hands. He saw that Kate had simply pulled her jacket over hers. He winked at her then looped the rope around his arm, through his legs, and pulled it tight.
“Here goes,” he said and stepped over the edge.
-10-
DOWN WE GO
AS LONG AS Jesse kept his legs wrapped around the rope and braced against the wall, he found he could use his left arm to hold himself in place while shifting his right hand to a lower position along the rope. Doing so did not put too much stress on his injured shoulder, so he continued the shifting and sliding motion until he reached the bottom of the elevator shaft.
Standing there, he let the pounding in his chest subside and listened for movement. Listening was not the best way to tell if raptors were near, but with the city being so silent, even the tiniest of movements made noise. Normally, when out hunting or scavenging in the city, he went by scent. Raptors were pungent enough that their mere presence in the area left a lingering odor. He'd developed a keen sense of smell over the years, and today, aside from the dust in his nostrils, he could have smelled a mouse fart from half a block away.
There were no raptors nearby. He was sure of it.
A sliver of the building's lobby was visible through the opened elevator doors. It showed drooping wires and fallen chrome railing pieces crisscrossing each other. Tiny bits of debris hung in the air and glinted there like fireflies.
Kneeling, he pointed the shotgun-mounted flashlight at the floor. The beam spotlighted patches of accumulated dust that had been disturbed, and judging by the telltale footprints, Jesse saw that Cory and Kate had been through here, but no one else. Those footprints led into the hallway and out toward the building entrance. The walls on all sides of the shaft had scrapes and scratches from the various raptors that had tried to claw their way up it in the past. On the floor, dried blood, bones, and desiccated scat were clumped together in piles that gave off a musty, dank odor.
Sighing half in relief of knowing that Cory and Kate had indeed gone through here, and half in knowing that no raptors had come to investigate their transit, he left the elevator shaft behind and went into the lobby area. There, he moved through the patches of alternating light and shadow and stopped to trace a sunbeam back to its source, the broken windows of the second story.
He proceeded through the lobby. Mold-spotted carpet dampened his movement and squished wetly under his boots. He searched for the spot where he had killed the raptor a few days ago, but when he found it, the thing's body had gone missing. All that was left was a score of three-toed tracks and a squiggly brown trail leading up a two tread high set of stairs then across a marble tile floor. The trail finally disappeared through the doorway leading outside.
Kneeling again, he touched the bloodstains on the carpet with his fingertips. He then held his fingers to his nose and sniffed. The trails were evidence that the raptors had taken the corpse. He wondered where they had all gone. He also realized the past few nights hadn't been filled with those god-awful discordant howls that starving raptors made. He'd grown so accustomed to the sounds that the lack of hearing them seemed like it should be telling him something. Had he put a serious dent in their population?
He sure as hell hoped so.
Standing, he rolled his injured left shoulder in an expanding circle. The motion produced pain, but the more he rotated and stretched it, the better it felt. He continued to check the lobby, scanning all the way to the recessed corners. Encountering nothing, he returned and entered the elevator shaft.
He coughed into his hand to clear his throat. “Okay, Kate, your turn.”
She swung herself over the edge and clutched the rope. She began scrambling down with a fluid grace. He held the rope steady with one hand and tracked her progress with the shotgun-mounted flashlight. When she was about six feet from the bottom, she let go and landed on all fours like a cat.
He whistled dryly in approval.
She stood without the slightest acknowledgment of the climb's difficulty and brushed dust off her hands.
Looking up again, he shook the rope and pulled it tight. “Okay, your turn.”
“I can't,” Eve said from above.
“Sure you can. Grab the rope. Climb down it. Simple.”
“I'll fall!” Her words reverberated from the walls.
He traded glances with Kate. The mixed light coming from the lobby shadowed her eyes, but there was still a pensive sadness hiding there. Her pain seemed both tangible and real, a deep pain, but still as visible on the surface as the pain he felt inside. She twisted
away and went into the elevator lobby. There, she sank to the floor against the far wall and sat with her arms wrapped around her knees. He wondered what she had seen in her short life, what horrors she'd been exposed to. One day he would have to find out but expected it might take some time for her to open up, if she ever did at all.
“Hey,” Eve said. “Up here.”
He grunted and focused on her. “Let's go. Remember, this was your idea.”
“But, I can't!”
He considered climbing back up the rope so he could lower her down some other way but realized that would be impossible.
“She's the crazy one, Hannah,” he said aloud then caught himself. Hannah was gone. Remember that. He had to remember that. He then raised his voice loudly enough so Eve could hear him clearly. “Let's go! Now!”
“I can't! Please.”
“You have to. Do you ever want to see him again?”
“There's no other way?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Now, go.” He let the rope go slack and then shook it once. He watched the ripple climb upward until it reached the edge where she stood. She leaned out again.
“Come on,” he said. “Let's go.”
She didn't say anything for nearly a minute. He waited silently. Finally, she said, “Don't let me fall.”
“You won't. Trust me.” He watched as she slipped over the edge and kicked to get her legs around the rope. It wriggled away from her. He stepped on it to hold it steady and started aping her movements, as if by doing so he would help her to succeed.
“That's it. You're doing fine.”
The rope stopped swinging, and she began her descent.
Then she screamed.
Jesse pulled the rope tight and tried to hold the flashlight steady. The beam went wild in the shaft. She screamed again, holding on with only her hands. Her legs thrashed, and she struggled to get them back around the squirming rope. Jesse lost his grip, and the rope slipped out from underneath his booted foot.
“Kate,” he said sharply. “Here.” He held the shotgun out for her to take. He kept watching Eve, hoping Kate understood what he meant. “Hold on!” he yelled up to Eve. Risking a glance, he saw Kate coming at him. She had her hands out. He flipped the shotgun to her, widened his stance, and planted his feet. He reached for the rope with both hands. A faint light above silhouetted Eve, still flailing on the rope.
Red Asphalt: Raptor Apocalypse Book 2 Page 6
