by I.B. Holder
Chapter 63 Anonymous Monster
Legacy growled to a stop under a flagpole, metal clips rattled against the hollow pipe in a nervous titter. He ignored the welcome sign, instead drawing his weapon and moving quickly to the large central building. The satellite dish mounted on the shallow rake of the roof gave away the fact that this was the central command area. Everything that came into or went out of that compound dialed in through that aging iron monster pointed anonymously out into the night sky. He wondered if the man who’d invented the technology understood what kind of sick doors it would open up? Of course by those standards, the person who invented rope deserved to hang many times over for the permutations of torture that he invited into the world.
Legacy slipped silently into a side window. He needed to concentrate on silence. He hadn’t been that careful on the way up, in his haste he’d made no efforts to veil his approach. His first commander had told him that quick actions led to immediate mistakes, and he completely agreed. Only the imminent death of Laura pushed him into the mode of a strike force, no time for the luxury of deliberation. His fingers brushed the chair rail that lined the reception room about halfway up the wall. The hum of electronics in the next room carried through the solid wood.
He changed course, he didn’t want the control room, he wanted the studio. A small side door marked “commissary” caught his attention. The doorknob had been repaired recently, and he could see no reason why this bunch would repair anything they didn’t regularly use.
A click put him into a dark area filled with black curtains hung from the ceilings and weighted at the bottom with chains. He rushed down the length of the curtain, the force of the moving air making it ripple. At the end he was met with a pool of white light. A body hung from restraints. Legacy knew the characteristics of a dead body. He’d been a dead body once. Thirty seconds of stillness – it was the one stunning punctuation in his life and it was what made him keenly aware of the full stop of another.
“Laura.” He inwardly sighed. He raced around and came face to face with the body. What he saw was unexpected. It was wrong in so many ways that his senses didn’t know where to start. Blade hadn’t savored this death, it was quick and ugly. This in no way resembled the kind of ending that Blade wanted to present his viewers. Her young and curvy body was encased in dark satin that deepened in color where damp. Blood soaked the front of her dress, it stuck against her skin. Her face was tear stained, dark lines ending at her chin then reemerged, as mascara stains became visible dark oases below the surface of the blood. It seemed like the makeup streaks won the race to the ground but were then quickly flooded over.
A low growl brought Legacy back to reality. He looked off to his left at what the scent of blood had brought out to prowl.
Legacy looked off camera, left. Wilkes watched the strange pantomime from headquarters as he examined the body. They had, of course, been studying the gruesome picture when all of the sudden, Legacy had entered. Wilkes showed his frustration openly, slamming his fists into his pockets. If only Legacy had arrived ten minutes earlier. Wilkes asked himself if he had put ten minutes of roadblocks in front of Legacy some time during the investigation that they were all now paying for? Wilkes was not one who second-guessed himself, yet all he found racing around his desolate synapses were doubts. He was going to have to stop that immediately if he was going to be of any use.
This mission had turned into a mop up operation, and now Legacy’s presence there could push the group they were hunting to immediate flight, melting into the darkness. What else could possibly go wrong? Wilkes could only hope that Legacy had it under control and that there wouldn’t be any surprises.
Legacy braced his body and stared into the camera’s lens. Wilkes didn’t see the danger until it entered the screen. A wolf or a dog, some kind of savage beast, leapt into frame and Legacy went down, twisting in what looked like a very specific kind of embrace.
Legacy spun with the fluid movements of a bullfighter. He jerked upwards, his forearms framing the throat of the dog as it thrashed wildly, feet looking for some kind of solid ground. His mouth moved like he was talking to it. What the hell could he be saying? Wilkes thought, instantly admonishing himself for the question.
Legacy felt the muscles heave beneath his locked arms. He had the dog firmly in a ranger grip he’d learned to subdue children. It was not the kind of memory that disengages a person from past reality, rather one that brings it all flooding back. With a quick effortless move, he dug into the well-defined musculature of the dog’s neck and made a quick turn, rolling the head like his forearms were conveyor belts moving in opposite directions. Snap. The rage and fury that had been coursing through the dog’s body moments before drained, lagging only slightly behind the physics of consciousness, before finally flickering out.
