9th Circle

by Carolyn McCray; Ben Hopkin

  “That’s what I’m taking about!” Trey said, as he hopped out of the car.

  As the cars screeched to a halt, Darc exited as well. He opened the back door. Janey climbed out with Mala right behind her. The doctor put her hands on the girl’s shoulders.

  “We’re right here if you need us. You can…” She turned to Trey. “What did you call it? ‘Clear’ the area? We stay out here until it’s clear.”

  Trey yelled over his shoulder, “Yeppers!” as he ran over to the officers getting out of their squad cars, giving them high fives and slapping them on their backs. Darc had not seen his partner this animated in a very long time. He could not ascertain why. All Darc saw was the number of police officers they were putting at risk. From his quick calculations, if this slaughterhouse was the slaughterhouse, he determined fewer than 37 percent of them would get out without injury. The likelihood of deaths, he put at seventy-four.

  Darc looked down to the child. He could reach his hand out again. He knew that she would take it. Yet he could see pain chiseled into her features. Even he could see it. No little girl’s face should be so starkly fearful. Perhaps Mala was correct. The police knew the risk if they entered that building. Perhaps the girl could be spared the risk. Just this once.

  One of the uniforms approached, pointing to the exits located around the squat building. “Looks like the building is locked down.”

  Trey rubbed his hands together, barely containing his excitement.

  “All right, then! Let’s get the battering ram!”

  Mala spoke to Darc through the noise of the gathering posse. “Once it’s safe, we can see if she can narrow down the crime scene inside for you.”

  He could have calculated the relative risks to each and every person here depending on if the girl went inside or not. Then the doctor more than likely would have stiffened. She probably would have then called Darc’s captain, who invariably did not like to discuss logic. Instead, the captain usually talked about such things as “political correctness” and the “media’s take on things.”

  That rambling, useless discussion would take far longer than clearing the slaughterhouse and then bringing the girl inside. The lines of logic were not pleased, but even they recognized the exigency of taking action now.

  Trey trotted up, after having grabbed several officers with their battering ram in tow.

  “Yeah,” Trey said, waving the officers to the front door. “Shielding a kid versus reckless endangerment. No contest, Darc. Let’s do this the old-fashioned way.” He swung himself around, gesturing to the crowd that surrounded them. “Strength in numbers!”

  There was no further use in arguing. Darc could see that the likelihood of changing their minds at this point was as close to a statistical impossibility as existed. The lines surrounding Mala and the girl were a dull, throbbing orange. He knelt down before the girl.

  “We won’t be long.”

  Why he said that, he was not sure. Yet leaving Janey without a word seemed…illogical. Swiftly, though, Darc joined the other men at the first door. The men with the ram approached, swinging the full weight of the heavy metal cylinder into the steel doors of the entrance. It hit with a resounding thud. Two more strikes like that, and they would be in.

  With his peripheral vision, Darc watched as Mala dragged the girl to the nearest police cruiser, the girl fighting and protesting at each step. She stretched out her hands to Darc, her gestures a clear plea to take her with him. Once in the car, Mala locked the doors as the girl beat her palms against the window.

  Darc turned away from the sight, a strange twisting in his stomach causing him an unusual sensation. The second blow from the ram landed, causing the metal to screech and the hinges to buckle. The vibrations resonated alongside the bizarre knot in his center. It was not solely physical, although he felt it keenly deep in his gut. The bright lines of logic blurred with an unexpected wash of grey.

  He was not altogether certain, but Darc considered the idea that he might be feeling something. He shook his head, ridding himself of all distractions, as the ram landed a third time and the doors burst inward. Darc followed in the wake of the crowd rushing through the doors.

  And although there was no rational reason for doing so, he looked over his shoulder for one last glimpse of the girl. Their eyes locked for a brief moment, and then Darc was inside.

  Death awaited. And Darc felt a flash of another sensation. One of relief.

  He realized that he was glad the girl was not here with him.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Yes!” Trey said, pumping his fist. Darc frowned. But then again, Darc always frowned. “Now, this is what I call traveling in style.”

  Trey cracked his neck, feeling the vertebrae pop like the plastic pockets on a roll of bubble wrap. He was so amped up right now. He felt like a general leading an army into battle. Okay, he wasn’t really in charge, and his army was a bunch of overweight cops, but hey, there were lots of them.

  Bracing himself, he pushed into the slaughterhouse with the rest of the group, bumping into and then off of three different cops in rapid succession. It was like he was the pinball in his own personal arcade game. It might have bugged him at any other time, but now? He was on top of the world, baby.

  They all surged into what was probably the front office, but there was no light. One of the officers, using his flashlight, located the power switch and flipped it to the “on” position.

  Nothing happened.

  “Yep. This is the right slaughterhouse, all right,” Trey muttered to himself.

  Shining his light around, he caught glimpses of what looked to be a very depressing place to work. There was a main desk for reception with faux-wood fronting that was peeling off, one corner of it completely missing, showing the black plastic underneath. The carpet on the floor was worn down to the stitching in the major traffic areas. And although color was hard to tell with a flashlight, it looked to be some kind of puke brown.

  There was a smell of cheap air freshener in the air that didn’t quite cover over a deeper scent, one of copper and decay. Yeah, this place was the kind of business that would just suck the life out of you. Or sneak up behind you and put a bolt through your brain. You know, one of the two.

  Trey pushed his way over to join Darc. Wasn’t tough to figure out where his partner was. Every other cop was giving him a wide berth, making for a pretty wide circle pinpointing his exact location. It was like Darc’s own little bulls eye. As Trey stepped into the no-man’s-land, Darc pointed to one of the three exits leading out.

  “I will take—”

  “No.” Trey cut Darc off before he could go any further. That was not going to happen. “Nope. None of this ‘we’ll split up, cover more ground’ crap.”

  He glanced at the cops closest to them, gesturing for them to get closer.

  “It’s you and me, Darc, and four of my new best friends here.”

  Trey then swept his hand across the rest of the crew there, including everyone in the gesture. He didn’t want to leave anyone out here, did he?

  “The rest of you guys break into teams of at least three. You can cover the other passages.”

  Turning back to Darc, Trey spoke in the firmest tone he could muster. “Now, which one were we taking?”

  The reaction he got from his partner was pretty standard. It was the I’m going to stare straight into your soul until you quail before me look. Trey had a lot of practice handling this ploy, so he managed to hang on long enough that Darc got tired of waiting. His partner indicated toward the door right in the middle of the three. Trey turned to the rest of the team.

  “Gentlemen?”

  Making a gesture that felt very military-esque, Trey led them into the next room. As the flashlights of his compatriots lit up what was around them, Trey stifled the impulse to scream like a little girl.

  There on the table in front of them, and in every possible space on the walls surrounding them, was row upon row of sharp, gleaming instruments of butcher
y. Meat saws and bone saws, cleavers, hooks, clamps, and more knives than Trey had ever seen in one place before. It was a weapons smorgasbord. Trey spoke over his shoulder to the rest of the crew, trying to keep his voice from quavering.

  “Okay, so our suspect is definitely armed.”

  *

  Ah, Seattle. You could always count on the Emerald City when it came to precipitation. Mala had lived in the city since moving here after her doctorate program at Harvard…East Coast to West. There were days when it felt like the time she had spent here in the sun during those years was roughly equivalent to less than a week.

  A smell of ozone filtered in through the cruiser’s vents, the fresh-earth scent tingling in her nostrils. What was normally a pleasant odor took on menacing overtones in her current circumstances. Instead of smelling like life and growth, somehow now it was the scent of danger.

  The grey of the stormy atmosphere, added to the already bleak exterior of the abattoir, created an effect that escalated the sinister effect by a factor of ten. Shadows deepened, greys turned to charcoals, monsters and madmen lurked in the hidden depths.

  And the problem was, that could very possibly be the actual fact. The chances that their killer was holed up inside the slaughterhouse were high. This was the place. The way Janey stiffened each time she looked at it confirmed their worst fears.

  The temperature had dropped drastically, and a light rain had started, the drops beating against the roof of the police cruiser in a steady tattoo. Mala wiped a layer of steam from the inside of the window, the moisture cool against her warm palm. She was trying to keep an eye on the entrance to that troll of a building into which Darc and his partner had vanished. On a logical level, Mala knew that watching the building was doing precisely nothing. And yet here she sat, watching away with a vengeance.

  She glanced over to check on her young charge. Janey was busy drawing badge after badge after badge into the condensed mist on her window. There was not a square inch left that didn’t have at least a tiny replica of a detective’s shield. And every one of those badges was another reproach. Janey blamed her for not being able to stay with her hero.

  “Janey, could you please stop—”

  The look the little girl gave her over the seat could have curdled milk. Without even trying hard. Mala held up a hand in surrender, her tone gentle.

  “All right,” she conceded. “That’s not going to make Darc come back any faster, though.”

  Instead of the intended effect, Mala’s words just made Janey work that much harder. The beads of moisture collected together and ran down the window, cutting the badges in half on their way down. A chill ran down Mala’s spine, mirroring the path of the drop of water on the pane of glass.

  Mala found that she was no longer frustrated with what Janey was doing. She realized instead that she was just hoping that it actually worked.

  *

  Moving across the tool-filled room, Darc watched as the light reflected off the gleaming instruments from the flashlights crisscrossing the space and mixed with the glowing lines inside his head. There was a growing strand of yellow, blending toward orange, that was creating a knot of tension in Darc’s right shoulder and spreading up to his neck. He placed a hand on the metal table in front of him, feeling the slick chill spread from his hand up to his wrist.

  The uniformed police officer who had taken point lifted his cell phone up and lit up the screen, displaying the time, 4:34 p.m. Inside the building it might as well have been two o’clock in the morning. No light from the outside reached them here. The officer spoke to the general air.

  “I don’t think slaughterhouse employees have bankers’ hours, so….” The officer looked around the room. “Where is everyone?”

  The echoes from his question bounced around the room and back to the group. There was no softness here to catch and dampen the sounds. Each footstep, every ragged breath, bounced back at them, multiplying their numbers and confusing their sense of direction. With each echo, they envisioned the killer stepping out from the shadows that surrounded them.

  Darc knew from his experience with other individuals that this could be disorienting to them. For Darc, it was just part of what his daily experience always consisted of. He heard and processed everything around him. Every sound. Every movement. Every change in his environment. What others filtered out, Darc processed. Even wearing noise-canceling headphones and listening to music, he could hear someone whisper from across the room.

  The officer in the lead came up to a sliding door, Trey right at this side. His partner glanced at the group, making sure everyone was keeping up. He then placed his hand on the latch holding the door shut.

  “I think we’re about to find out.”

  Trey positioned himself on one side of the door, and Darc mirrored him on the other side. Once in place, Darc nodded his head once. Trey counted down.

  “Three, two, one.”

  He pushed down the latch and pulled toward himself, hard. As the door dragged open with a piercing scream of metal on metal, out of the opening poured a wash of blood and body parts, splashing over the shoes and up onto the slacks of the officer that had foolishly chosen to be right in front. He looked down at the gushing horror around him, just as a mass of intestines washed up against his ankle.

  “Oh…my…” Trey said, as he danced back.

  And then there were nothing but gagging sounds as the lead officer began to retch. He turned and ran back out the door leading to the entrance of the building. Trey watched him leave, shaking his head.

  “Lightweight.”

  The remainder of their party moved through the human soup, doing everything they could to keep the viscera from getting on their clothing. That endeavor was a spectacular failure. One of the officers muttered gulped hard before he spoke.

  “Is this…Are they…”

  No one answered the man, Darc assumed because the answer was so obvious. It was an answer to the previous question. Where are all the employees? Apparently, they were underfoot. Which fit in with Darc’s calculations. Would any of them survive this slaughterhouse any better than the employees?

  A sound from the far side of the room caused every gun to be jerked horizontal. Every eye was trained toward the opposite side of the darkness. Patches of light from the flashlights zigzagged across the empty space, seeking the source of the noise.

  One of the uniforms gulped, the sound loud in the sudden stillness. His eyes darted from the room to Darc to Trey in rapid succession.

  “We’re going in?”

  Trey glanced at Darc, his eyes asking the question. In answer, Darc stepped over what looked to be a kidney and moved into the adjoining room. Darc heard Trey let out a long breath before answering.

  “Yeah, we’re going in,” Trey muttered.

  Moving through the doorway, Darc found himself in a large, empty room. Connected tracks snaked across the ceiling, finally leading up to, and apparently extending beyond, the next three doors. Sharp hooks hung from the tracks where animal carcasses would normally be hung. But from each of them drooped the sad remains of what had once more than likely been one of the employees.

  This was the exsanguination room.

  Their throats had been slit, and then two additional cuts made just underneath both the solar plexus and the abdomen. Blood and bits of flesh rained down from above, splashing into the pool below with a sound that would almost be pleasant if it weren’t for the horror of the scene.

  The floor sloped down to the center of the space, where a large mass of something blocked what was almost certainly the drain. The smell of carnage threatened to nauseate even Darc. It was a scent of mixed metals and rotten meat, the heady mix enough to overpower lesser men. The sloshing of blood pulled at Darc’s legs with every step.

  And on the walls, the symbols perched, waiting for him. They were messier and more smeared than they ever had been before, seemingly rushed or done with an inexpert hand. The symbols came forth reluctantly, fighting Darc every st
ep of the way. They twisted and turned, eluding his grasp, refusing to fall into any recognizable pattern.

  As the group continued across the open space, keeping to the sides, where the pool of gore was more shallow and there were fewer bodies overhead, Trey turned to one of the uniforms and pointed at his foot.

  “Whoa there. Watch it, dude. You’re stepping on a”—he bent down, shining his flashlight to get a better look—”foot? And a hand. Oh, and a jaw.”

  Body parts raining down from above. An exact duplicate of Blake’s painting from the museum. The fifth circle of hell.

  At the other end of the room, the three doors crouched, a bloody symbol sketched on each. Trey glanced at the doors and then back to Darc, his flashlight flickering between the letters.

  “Which way?”

  But the symbols would not help. They evaded him, spinning out of the spaces where he tried to place them. None of this made sense. Darc glanced back toward the entrance, needing the input he could get only from the little girl. Trey noticed.

  “Do you see what you’re standing in?” his partner asked. “There’s no way Doc’s letting Janey in here.”

  His partner’s assessment was accurate, although having the girl present would save the lives of many of the policemen here within, very possibly including him and Trey. His partner stared into his eyes, seeming to read the expression he saw there.

  “Darc?”

  They could not stay here forever. The symbols were telling him nothing. He had to make a decision. Now.

  Darc nodded at the center door. One of the policemen moved to check it. The handle moved without resistance. The door was unlocked.

  Without speaking, the men arranged themselves around the door, ready to burst in as soon as it was open. No matter what they might think about Darc personally, it was clear they trusted his judgment and would follow him wherever he led. For the first time, he wished that were not the case.