Two lunged forward, reaching for the man’s gun. His fingers locked around the handle. Before he could draw the gun from its holster, Reynard seized his wrists and slammed him against the wall.
His head snapped back from the force of the blow, striking the bricks so hard that sparks swarmed across his vision. The darkness seemed to bulge toward him, inches away from engulfing him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Reynard snapped, raining bloody spittle upon his face. He was close enough that Two could smell him—unwashed clothes, rancid breath, skunky smoke. “You wanted this.”
Though his thoughts were muddled from pain and smoke, his disorientation wasn’t great enough to engulf him. Before Reynard could shove him against the wall again, he drove his forehead into the man’s nose.
Reynard’s nose splintered under the headbutt with a sharp crunching sound. Giving a shrill cry, he dropped Two to the floor and wheeled back, cupping his hands over his gushing nostrils.
With his balance compromised, Two landed awkwardly against the pile of scrap metal, spare bricks, and pipe sections. A sharp piece of metal tore through his shirt, opening a nasty cut on his stomach. As he rose to one knee, his fingers closed around a brick.
Reynard cursed inarticulately, his throat congested with blood. His hand fell off his crooked nose to reach for the gun on his belt. As he fumbled to undo the button-snap that held the holster shut, Two lunged to his feet and slammed the brick into the side of Reynard’s skull.
He had intended to stage Reynard’s death as a suicide or freak accident, but his plan fell through his fingers with the first blow. As Reynard collapsed, he threw himself atop the man and brought the brick down a second time, then a third. Ragged, frenzied gasps exploded from his lungs. His vision narrowed into a pinhole as hatred consumed him, filling his brain just as the cigarette’s smoke had. He lost himself in the jarring reverberations that travelled up his wrist, the feel of flesh giving way, and the hot splatter of blood.
Finally, the brick slipped from his numb fingers and clattered to the floor. Blood dripped down his face. He could not stop trembling, and when he looked down and caught a glimpse of how he had obliterated Reynard’s facial features, he began gagging.
He pressed his palm against his mouth to hold back the wave of vomit. A split second later, he flung his hand away with a horrified gasp, realizing his skin was coated in sticky blood. Blood that was in his mouth now, thick and coppery, so horrible.
Dry-retching, he spat onto his shirt to avoid scattering even more DNA evidence across the floor. He wiped his tongue on the fabric, but it did little good to cleanse his palate.
This was nothing like what he had seen in the videos, or even what he had witnessed with D-12. He had thought he would be ready for this, but he wasn’t. The tacky warmth on his hands, the shards of bone stuck to his clothes, his uncontrollable shuddering, the taste of blood and bile in his mouth—this was what it felt like to murder someone.
And yet, past his fear and horror, he felt a surge of righteous triumph, like the violence had cleansed him. Awakened him. He would never let Nine be in danger again.
I did it for you, Nine, he thought, sinking against one of the thrumming machines. He wiped his mouth with the bottom of his shirt and stared at the ooze of blood inching across the concrete floor, black in the dim light. All for you.
Disgust and terror gave way to numb regard. He began to feel like he was back in the movie room, sitting by the purring projector and watching scenes of bloodshed play out on the screen before him. Even with a fresh corpse within reach, he felt detached from the violence now.
The machine’s steel hull rested nice and cold against his back. Closing his eyes, Two listened to the water rushing through the pipes and imagined Nine’s beaming smile, her hands as delicate as dove wings. He remembered how earlier that day they had practiced their Arabic and Russian in preparation for their upcoming tests, and her clear, melodic voice had turned mundane phrases into music.
He wondered if he’d ever hear her voice again. How long would it take before he was executed for his crimes? Would they interrogate him first? Would he be made an example of?
No, he refused to accept that. He wasn’t going to sit here and feel sorry for himself. It wasn’t in his nature to wait and fret about things when he might be able to change them. Worrying would just be a waste of time, and right now, time was everything.
Assuming that another guard didn’t take over Reynard’s patrol, Subset A’s male barracks wouldn’t be visited until shifts changed at four o’clock in the morning. Even then, Two’s absence might easily be overlooked by a sleep-deprived guard. If everything worked in his favor, he had roughly six hours to deal with the body, clean up the crime scene, and sneak back to his bunk.
Once the shuddering in his legs subsided enough that he could walk, he removed the flashlight from Reynard’s tactical belt and climbed to his feet. He turned on the flashlight, guiding its bright beam across the rumbling machines.
Maybe he could find a place to hide the corpse. He could steal bleach from the kitchen and use the chemical to clean up the crime scene.
He searched the cabinets against one wall, but none of them were large enough to conceal the corpse unless he dismembered it. In one of the storage spaces, he came across containers of chlorine and algae killer. Another drawer contained rags and a folded tarpaulin.
As he turned away from the cabinets, he spotted a metal door across the room. By the time he reached it, he felt calmer and a little more in control of himself.
The metal door was unlocked, and on the other side he found a flight of concrete stairs that led into darkness.
He propped the door open with a brick and walked slowly down the stairs. Even though he was in a rush to find out what was at the bottom, his balance was still compromised from the cigarette that Reynard had given him. The last thing he needed was to lose his balance and bust his skull open on the concrete below.
The stairs led to a room much like the one above, filled with filtration systems and a network of pipes. The walls were made from roughly-mortared cinderblocks. As he swept the flashlight beam across the room, the light splintered off a metal disc embedded in the floor.
Drawing closer, he realized that the large iron circle was a door of some kind. A slide-bolt locked it in place, as if to prevent something on the other side from breaking free.
His mouth went dry, and some of his calm practicality dissolved into primal fear. Maybe this place was a prison after all, just like the childhood stories the subjects in his subset used to tell each other.
Setting the flashlight next to him, he slid open the slide-bolt and tried to pull the cover from its base. It was so heavy, he hadn’t raised the panel more than an inch up before his grip wavered and it slammed shut again. On his second try, he succeeded in lifting it all the way, and eased the disc onto the concrete floor.
A metal ladder led into darkness even greater than that which surrounded him. Peering into the hole, a foul odor assaulted him. Gagging on the reek of raw sewage, he shone his light into the hole. He was surprised to find that it went down only eight feet or so.
Deciding that he had nothing to lose, he shoved the flashlight into the waistband of his pants and stepped onto the ladder’s top rung. The metal bar was spotted with rust and damp with condensation, but the structure held. As he descended, the rungs produced only soft protests, creaking beneath his weight.
The stench intensified once he reached the bottom of the hole. As he touched the floor of a corrugated steel pipe, his boots slipped in a half-inch of muck.
He identified other odors inside the foul miasma—not just crap, but decomposing leaves, stagnant water, and decaying flesh. He realized that this pipe must be part of the Academy’s filtration system, and probably channeled rain runoff in addition to raw sewage.
Where did it go?
Though plenty large enough to crawl through, the pipe was too small to stand upright in, and he was forced to squat
to look into it. Breathing through his mouth, he withdrew the flashlight from his waistband and pointed it down one side of the tunnel, then the other.
The beam failed to reach the end of either route, but as he stared down the pipe, he realized that it wasn’t entirely horizontal. There was a downward tilt. Leading somewhere.
He took a deep breath, gripped the flashlight in his teeth, and sunk onto his hands and knees. Muck squelched between his bare fingers and soaked through his pants. Not as bad as the stickiness of drying blood, but still pretty awful.
He lost track of time as he crawled. Slimy leaves clung to his body. When his jaw grew tired, he was forced to carry the flashlight in one hand, though it quickly got filthy. Once, he glanced down at his wrist watch to check the time, only to discover that the glass was obscured by a dark, dripping film. Gross.
Smaller pipes branched out from the main one, but they were too narrow to crawl through. When he shone the flashlight into one of the holes, insects scurried from the glow.
After what felt like hours, the flashlight beam glinted off a series of crisscrossing metal bars. He scooted up to the grate, peered out, and felt his heart race at the sight beyond.
A glistening black pond waited on the other side. He could see very little of the scenery beyond it, just the pale sandstone walls of a cliff or ravine, but he knew for a fact that he wasn’t inside the Academy’s gates anymore. This was someplace else.
Seized by awe, he dropped the flashlight, grabbed the grate, and tried to wrench it open. The bars refused to budge, and he quickly discovered why. The other side was padlocked shut.
Two knelt there for a minute, his face pressed against the grate as he took in grateful breaths of sweet, cool air.
He would have liked to stay there for hours, staring out into a new world that was so similar to the one he knew, and yet extraordinary different. But there was no time to waste. Sooner or later, his absence would be discovered, and he needed to finish what he had started. He picked up the flashlight and began the long crawl back, his brain churning with ideas.
Disposing of Reynard’s body turned out to be easier than he had imagined it would be. As soon as he returned from the sewage pipe, he relieved the corpse of its gun belt and keychain, dragged it downstairs, and shoved it into the hole. Though the pipe’s angle was minor, the momentum carried the body several feet down the pipe.
Considering the amount of dust in the room above, he figured that there was a very minimal chance of the body being discovered. The tunnel was so big, he doubted that the corpse would cause a blockage. Anyway, insects and pests would make quick work of it.
He thought about discarding Reynard’s possessions as well, and then decided against it. He had beaten Reynard so severely that the man’s facial features were unrecognizable, but if found, the gun belt would be used to identify the body.
He stowed the gun belt underneath one of the machines after wiping off his fingerprints. He kept the key ring so that he could lock the building’s door behind him.
Two mopped up the blood with rags and chlorine from the cabinet. Water from a spigot on the wall washed most of the stains off the sealed concrete. He undressed and cleaned off the filth encrusting his clothes and limbs. By the time he was finished, midnight had come and gone. As far as preliminary measures went, he decided that he had done all he could do for the night.
After redressing in his wet clothes, he used a clean rag to wipe down every surface that he might have touched. He could do nothing about the fingerprints he had left in the pipe, but he hoped that runoff would eventually wash them away. He didn’t know much about how fingerprints worked, even though his instructors had touched briefly on the subject during previous lessons. Still, taking these precautions made him feel a little better.
He made it back to the barracks without incident and exchanged his clothes for a clean pair housed in the trunk beneath his cot. He stowed Reynard’s key ring in a hole in his mattress, wedging it between a pair of bedsprings. Tomorrow, he would find a better hiding place for Reynard’s belongings, where there would be no chance of anyone discovering them.
Though exhaustion crushed down on him like an anchor, Two forced himself to trudge to the bathroom. At this hour, the communal shower was deserted. He turned the water on as hot as he could tolerate and stood under the steaming flow. He scrubbed at his body until the coarse brown soap rubbed his skin raw, trying to wash off the memory of the kill even after all the evidence had swirled down the drain.
The patter of water against the white tile floor calmed him, and his tense, aching muscles slowly loosened. His breathing steadied, and his eyelids sagged under the weight of soothing exhaustion.
The scrap metal he had fallen onto had opened a cut several inches from his navel. Wiping at the blood, he was relieved to find that the wound was less serious than it looked. It was about two inches long, and thin enough that he doubted it would require sutures.
His vaccines protected against tetanus, but he took care in washing the incision. The last thing he needed was a bad infection.
As he combed his hands through his hair, tracing the throbbing bump the wall had raised on the back of his head, he conjured Nine’s face in his memory. Her warm smile and sky-blue eyes. The wisps of flaxen hair near her ears that she had a tendency to twirl around her fingers when she was deep in thought. So lovely.
I will always protect you, he thought, turning off the faucet. As he toweled off, he studied the grate over the drain to make sure that he hadn’t left any evidence ensnared in its hair-clogged holes.
Nothing. Unlike in the plumbing below.
As dawn approached and he listened to the snores of the boys around him, his mind drifted to the sewage pipe and the secret it harbored. Not once did it occur to him that the only thing separating him from his freedom was a single measly padlock. Desertion was unfathomable to a proud soldier, a born leader.
That revelation would come later in the summer, and it would change his life forever.
Case Notes 5: Subject Nine of Subset A
Three weeks after Reynard left his job, Nine returned to her barracks after her morning lessons. Her American society class had let out early, and she decided to take a nap before lunchtime. Subset A’s female barracks would be empty at this time of day, which meant that she could finally have some peace and quiet after enduring her sick bunkmate’s coughing for the last week.
She stepped through the doorway—and froze. Her bed was located near the front of the room, and from where she stood, she saw an unnatural lump beneath the covers of the bottom bunk. Just as it crossed her mind that her bunkmate might have mixed up their beds in a feverish stupor, her gaze slid to the pillow.
Her bunkmate had brown hair, not ink-black, and it wasn’t sheared into a militaristic crewcut.
She sighed and walked over to the bed. “Two, what are you doing here?”
The moment she said his number, he rolled over onto his back and looked up at her.
“Hello, Nine,” he said, a pleasant, dazed smile playing on his lips. He looked a bit ill himself. His pupils were dilated, and a light flush colored his cheeks. Had he caught the flu, too?
“Shouldn’t you be in class?”
“It was a movie day today. They gave me something good this time.”
“You mean like food?” Nine asked. Sometimes, when she watched videos in her American society class, the teacher handed out cups of popcorn. She wondered if his instructors did the same.
He chuckled. “No.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked, since he hadn’t answered her question the first time. She sat next to him, the bedsprings groaning beneath their combined weight.
“I just wanted to see you.”
This wasn’t the first time he had visited her in the barracks, but usually that was after lights out, when all the other subjects were asleep, and they could cuddle in peace.
“Were you going to wait here all day?” she asked.
His drow
sy smile faded as a veil of confusion passed across his features. “What time is it?”
“It’s only around eleven-thirty.”
“Oh.”
“Did you think it was later?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I think I might’ve fallen asleep. I’m so tired.”
He laid a hand on her knee that was closest to him. As he massaged her leg, her gaze lowered to his arm.
She frowned.
A swollen, ruddy bruise marred the skin in the crook of his elbow. In the middle of the mark, a small amount of blood had formed a fresh scab. The bruise hadn’t been there at breakfast that morning, and it didn’t look like the kind of injuries he came back from wargames with.
“Did you get a shot?” she asked, wondering if that was why he was acting strangely. Maybe he had been drugged and that was what he meant when he said his instructors had given him something. But why? If he was just watching military training videos, what would be the purpose of giving him a substance that induced sleepiness?
Instead of answering, he just traced his fingers over her knee, his eyes half-closed, a look of drowsy euphoria bright upon his face. Then his hand slid up her thigh. She caught him before he could reach his target, entwined her fingers through his, and lowered his arm to the mattress. He didn’t put up a fight, just laughed softly and cozied up against her.
This was so unlike him, but that didn’t prevent her from savoring the warmth of his touch. There was a part of her that wanted more than anything for him to kiss her and caress her, except she just couldn’t turn a blind eye to his behavior. Ever since he had started attending those movies, he had changed. She didn’t want to ignore it any longer, praying he became like the boy she remembered. Not when he was drifting further away from his old self with each passing day.
“What sort of videos did you watch?” she persisted, hoping that whatever substance now flowed through his veins had also clouded his brain enough to lower his defenses.
“Mmm. Doesn’t matter.”
Over the years, she had realized that he liked to hide himself behind different masks. One day, he might be playing commander, and the next he would just be Subject Two of Subset A, a loyal subject respectful to his superiors. He was constantly on guard, afraid that the moment he confided in others, he would be giving away precious leverage that could be used against him.
Hades Rising Page 5
