by Blake Banner
I braced my feet again and gave another push. My fingers touched the blue plastic handle. I eased it gently into my hands, then slowly pulled myself back to where they had left me on the floor.
I turned the tool over so the blade was facing in, resting on the duct tape, nudged the tip under the edge of the tape, and pressed hard. It bit, resisted and then split. I groaned loudly and made an incoherent noise. Ape Man turned to look at me. I groaned again.
He dropped his cigarette and trod on it, then shambled back toward me.
“You ready to talk?”
I gazed at him with unfocused eyes and made pasty noises with my mouth, like I was trying to say something. He bent down to hear me. I leaned toward him. He came closer. I had the screwdriver up my right sleeve. I grabbed his lapel with my left, yanked hard and rammed the screwdriver through his windpipe. It wasn’t enough to kill him, but as he began to choke on his own blood, it was enough to incapacitate him while I staggered to my feet and found a tire iron. I put a lot of rage into the first blow. It knocked him on his face, but he was tough and he was still alive. I had to stamp twice with the blade of my foot on the back of his neck before he finally let go and died.
If a job is worth doing, I figure it’s worth doing well, so I stamped again twice, just for the sake of completeness.
Outside, dusk was closing in. I took a couple of seconds to breathe deep, then made my way to the small office on the other side of the truck. My knife, my Sig and my phone were on the desk, which was a bit odd. Just how stupid were these guys? Maybe they weren’t stupid. Maybe they were over-confident.
I took a moment to think about what to do next. I needed to retrieve the ledger, a sample of the pills and a sample of the bugs, and get them all to Marni so she would know exactly what had been going on here, and how far they were distributing it. But that wouldn’t satisfy me. Not by a long chalk. Before I left, I wanted them to know they had a problem. I also wanted to keep them busy while I found Marni and got her somewhere safe. And I knew exactly how to do that. I went to look for a blow torch.
Fourteen
I had three-quarters of an hour to wait before Ape Man’s replacement arrived. That gave me time to recover my strength and work out the details of what I had to do. I was waiting, sitting behind the door when he arrived. He was whistling a jaunty tune. He’d obviously been having a good day up to that point.
I shot him in the left hip. He gasped, like somebody who has stepped into a really cold shower. Then he folded over to the left and kept saying, “Oh God! Oh shit! Shit…!”
I went and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him over where we wouldn’t be seen by passers-by. I frisked him and found a Glock 19. It was a girl’s gun, but I stuck it in my waistband and picked up the blowtorch. He saw it and began to panic, holding out his hands and saying, “No, no, no…”
I looked him in the eye. “I am going to burn your face off.”
“No, no please, anything, what do you want? I’ll cooperate.” He had tears in his eyes from the fear and the pain. I almost felt sorry for him.
“Where is Maddox?”
“In the main office. In the factory. Mister, I need a doctor.”
“Where they make the pills?”
He nodded.
I said, “What about the guy in the suit and the shades?”
He knew who I meant. “He’s with him.” He was whimpering.
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know his name. They don’t use names. They just call him Tau.”
“Tau?” He nodded. It made sense. Tau was the nineteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. “What else?”
He shrugged. He was crying now, his face creased up. “He’s from the Omega Corporation. They say he’s Maddox’s boss, please Mister, it really hurts.”
“OK, what about Dr. Weitz? Where is he?”
“He’s always in the labs, just out here on the left. You can’t miss it. Please let me get a doctor. I ain’t nobody. I am just…”
I cut across him. “You’re just the guy who was going to torture me for the next four months.” I shot him in the head. Like I said, I hadn’t completely lost my humanity.
I took the blow torch and lit it. Then I carried it over and placed it a couple of inches from the barrel at the middle of the stack of diesel drums. Diesel is not flammable, it’s combustible. That means it won’t burn, but when it gets hot it releases gases that are explosive. I didn’t know how long it would take, but eventually that drum would blow.
I was mad as hell by now, and in no mood for creeping around. I walked up to the nearest hut and kicked the door in. There were three lab technicians. They looked at me in surprise. I shot two of them between the eyes and kicked the third in the nuts. As he went down wheezing, I put the Sig to his head and said, “Where is Weitz?”
He looked up at me and pointed toward the next hut. I shot him and moved on.
I found Weitz with one of his colleagues poring over some graphics on a computer. I shot the colleague and his brains made a mess of the screen. Weitz gave a scream like a woman and tried to stand. I came up close, grabbed his hair and smashed his face against the bloody screen. Then I dragged him backward onto the table and stuck the silenced muzzle of the Sig in his mouth.
“I am going to blow a hole through the back of your neck and sever your spinal cord. Then I am going to set fire to this place and leave you to burn, you mother fucker, unless you tell me right now what this fucking operation is about.”
He gurgled and I removed the weapon from his mouth. He started burbling. “You can’t! You don’t understand! It’s…”
I blew his kneecap off. He screamed hysterically, clawing at my shirt. I put the muzzle on his other knee and spoke quietly. “If you prefer I can ask somebody else.”
“You don’t understand. You can’t do this. It goes beyond…”
I blew his other kneecap off and threw him on the floor. I picked up a jar of bugs and pushed my way out. I’d be back to deal with him after I got my kit bag. I found the ledger in the next hut and made my way toward the big hangar doors.
There was a truck unloading and I slipped behind it. My bag was where I had left it, under the conveyor belt. I dropped the ledger and the bugs into it and pulled out a cake of C4 and tore it in half. I shaped one and stuck it to the bottom of the conveyor with a remote detonator in it. The other I stuck under the cab of the truck with a universal firing mechanism, which I attached to the edge of the conveyor frame. When he tried to reverse out, it would be the last thing he ever did. I slung the bag over my shoulder and started across the hangar floor toward the factory. It wasn’t the foreman’s lucky day. He saw me and shouted.
“Hey! Who the fuck are you? Where the fuck…?”
He didn’t get any further. I shot him between the eyes and kept walking. I kicked in the office door. This time the guy at the computer looked up. He shouldn’t have. I shot him through the eye.
In the big hall with the assembly line, I stopped and looked around. The only people I could see were at a table packing the bottles of pills into boxes. I dumped my bag on the floor and shaped six charges with remote detonators. It was enough to blow the whole damn hangar to hell. Then I pulled the Smith & Wesson 500 from the bag with a spare box of 500 grain slugs. These things will smash a cinderblock to dust. I was feeling pretty mad.
I climbed the stairs. Maddox’s office was the first. I blew out the lock and in the process ripped the door off its hinges and shattered the two plate glass windows. Maddox and Tau were sitting around a coffee table drinking whiskey. They stared at me the way people do when their brain is telling them something is seriously wrong with reality.
The 500 has a kick like a mule on steroids. You need to hold it with both hands. I took a whole second to aim. They both goggled in horrified fascination. I pulled the trigger and Maddox’s head exploded like a watermelon all over the wall behind him.
Tau said, “Oh, Jesus!” and made to stand.
I
said, “Don’t.” He froze. I went on, “I didn’t need him because I have you. Don’t make me regret my decision.”
“OK, take it easy, we can talk about this…”
“Don’t patronize me or you’ll make me mad. I lose my sense of proportion when I’m mad.”
“What do you want?”
“We are going to the limo. You’re going to drive.”
He nodded and stood up. I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him out of the office. When we got to the top of the stairs, I threw him down, following him at a run and kicking him every time he tried to stand. At the bottom, I dragged him to his feet. “Which way?” He pointed toward a steel roller blind that stood open. I shoved him. “You’ve seen what this baby can do, Tau. Don’t try and run or I swear I’ll cut you in half.”
The limo was parked just outside. He pulled the keys from his pocket and opened it. I gestured at him with the gun and said, “Turn around.”
He did as I said and I knocked him out cold. I took the keys and his shoelaces and tied his ankles together and his wrists behind his back. Then I shoved him in the trunk. I had a couple more things to do before I was ready to leave. I took four more cakes of C4 and eight remote detonators, and returned to the huts. I distributed them evenly, but pretty much at random. Weitz was unconscious. I made a point of leaving one a couple of feet away from where he was lying.
As I was returning to the limo, I heard the reverse gears of a truck grinding in the hangar. A couple of seconds later, the whole place was rocked by the explosion and black smoke started to billow out of the hangar doors. I climbed in the car and started driving west toward the fields. After thirty seconds or a minute, streams of guards on foot and in Jeeps started passing me on the way toward the hangar. All their focus had been on the outside, to keep people like me out. While the security on the inside, where I was, had been negligible. The two guards at the gate saw the limo speeding toward them, recognized the car and opened up to let us through.
I skidded to a halt on the outside as the gates closed behind me. I pulled the Heckler and Koch from my bag and stepped out into the glare of the spotlights. The two guards frowned, uncomprehending. I put three rounds into each of them.
After that, I took one more cake of C4, molded it and stuck it under the gas tank, then I drove the limo into the nearest sunflower plantation, climbed out and dragged Tau from the trunk. I threw him on the ground and pointed the Smith & Wesson at his right knee. He was sweating and shaking badly.
“I have very little time, Tau. You get one chance. Don’t blow it. What are you doing here?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. He hesitated. I cocked the revolver and he shied away. “No! Wait! It’s complicated. This is just part of it. The beetles, they contain a natural acid, like LSD, only in small doses it isn’t hallucinogenic. It triggers dopamine production in the brain, but it also inhibits the activity in the frontal cortex.”
“Plain English, I’m running out of time.”
“OK, it makes people obedient and stops them from thinking, plus, they enjoy it.”
“Are there other plants like this?”
He shook his head. “No, this was experimental.”
“The pills you’re shipping out…?”
“We are testing them on the population as a whole, to see how people react. It’s tied in with social media and…”
He heard it at the same time I did. Jeeps speeding back. The gates were closed and that would delay them. Tau was still tied up. I grabbed my kit bag and sprinted for the nearest fence.
It took me thirty seconds of hard running to get there. I blew a hole in the wires with the Smith & Wesson and scrambled through. I looked back and saw two Jeeps pulling up near Tau. I couldn’t see him. I pulled my cell from my pocket, pressed speed dial 9, counted one and a half seconds, and watched all hell break loose. The hangar shuddered and belched fire. The diesel that had been heating was ignited by the shock wave and erupted like a volcano, spewing fire, black smoke and spiraling drums across the enclosure. The laboratory huts erupted in flames, sending shattered wood spiraling into the air.
Closer, the fuel tank in the limo exploded, sending the car somersaulting and spraying burning fuel over the forests of giant flowers. They caught and the flames started to roar. A wave of heat washed over me, making me shield my face with my arms. I didn’t know if the fire would destroy them all. I could only hope.
I headed back, leaving the wild conflagration behind me, the flames reaching high up into the night sky. I looked south and east, up into the hills, knowing that Marni was looking down at the fire, knowing I had done what she had wanted me to do.
Fifteen
I desperately needed to rest, but I couldn’t. Not yet. Instead of retracing my steps south and east toward Turret and the diner, I followed the road in a roughly easterly direction, making for Marni’s cabin. I knew the fire would be spotted, and before long choppers and planes would be flying over, attempting to stop it spreading. But I figured the road would be safe for at least another couple of hours, probably more.
I was walking in a kind of trance. As the adrenaline boost wore off, every inch of my body was beginning to ache from the beating I had received. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep going, so I just focused on the next step, and then the next, and somehow I made it to the track that led up through the woods to her cabin.
Climbing was harder, and I had to stop several times to rest. The thought that she would be there, waiting, kept me going. I hadn’t allowed myself to dwell on it since I had left my father’s house, but now I wondered, as I climbed, why she had left that photograph pinned to the board. A photograph she knew only I could recognize. What was the message she was trying to send me? On the surface it was a cry for help. But on a deeper level, it meant more. It must mean more. It meant that she knew I would come. That she trusted me and believed in me.
The trees closed in and the darkness grew more dense. Sounds became magnified: the rustle of small animals in the undergrowth, the flutter of wings of an owl, the distant cry of a coyote, my own footsteps, too loud over the dead leaves, tramping on the path.
The track finally leveled off. My legs were shaking and my breathing was ragged. Over to the right I saw the cabin. There was no light in the window, but I didn’t expect there would be. I moved toward it and a shape stepped out in front of me, about ten or twelve feet away. Automatically my hand slipped behind my back for the Sig. Then I heard her voice.
“Lacklan…?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
I moved toward her and we clung to each other. But after a second, she was grabbing my hand and pulling me. “Come inside, quick!”
I pulled her back. “Marni, it’s over. They are all dead.”
She shook her head. “No, they are not.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There are hundreds of them. Please come, quickly! We haven’t much time.”
I followed her up the porch steps and we slipped inside. She had a fire burning and one lamp turned low. But she had heavy drapes over the window, so the light was not visible from the outside.
She closed the door and slipped the bolt, then turned to face me. I smiled. It had been a long time, and I hadn’t realized how much I had missed her. She looked drawn and put a hand to her mouth.
“What have they done to you?”
“It doesn’t matter. I told you. They are all dead.”
“They hurt you. I am so sorry…”
“Don’t be.” I looked her in the eye. “I’m glad you left the message, the photograph.”
She smiled and took a small step closer. “I knew you’d recognize it.”
The exhaustion was getting to me and I was beginning to feel weak. She saw it and reached for me. “Come and sit. I have some fresh coffee brewing.”
I sat on the sofa, and while she went to get coffee, I pulled the ledger, the bugs and the pills from the bag.
“I brought these. I tho
ught you could use them.”
She approached, frowning, carrying the coffee pot and two mugs. I poured while she looked at them.
“What are they?”
“I’m not sure. I couldn’t get a lot out of them. Apart from Maddox and Tau, there was some kind of nutty professor, a guy called Weitz. What I put together from what they told me was that it’s marketed as a health supplement, but what it does is to reduce the function of the frontal cortex…”
“The part of the mind involved in intellectual processes, critical thinking…”
“Exactly. It also stimulates dopamine and the processes in the brain that make people obey authority.” I pointed at the jar of bugs. “Apparently whatever this chemical is, they derive it from that bug.” I picked up the ledger. “And this lists all the places where they have been distributing it as part of a field test.”
She took the ledger from me and leafed through it. After a bit she sighed and put it down again.
“Lacklan, this is so much bigger, more complex, than you can imagine.”
“What are you telling me?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t time to tell you anything. You have to go.”
I frowned. “Now?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t get it. Did you not see the fire? I burned the crops. I destroyed the factory where they were making the pills. I destroyed the lab where they were carrying out their research. I killed Maddox, Tau and Weitz.” I shrugged. “It’s over.”
She sat forward and took hold of my hand. “Lacklan, Maddox was not part of the organization…”
“Omega.”
“You know about Omega?”
“My father told me.”
She was pensive for a moment, then sighed again and went on, “Maddox was not Omega, he was being used by Omega. The only Omega representatives there were Professor Weitz and Tau. If you have killed them you have done the world a great service. Those men are pure evil. But they are hard to kill, and the Omega organization is much, much bigger than that farm, or those two men, believe me.”
