And then, just like that, he blows her head off.
• • •
Jollie is still sleeping when the silenced round explodes upward through Spider-Girl’s lower jaw and keeps on going, shattering teeth and tongue, then punching a gory poof of her hair in a meaty plug through the top of her skull, finally putting a hole right in the center of Johnny Depp’s forehead. The gun still makes a lot of noise because it’s a Ruger SR9, loaded with high-velocity ammunition, the standard-issue semiautomatic sidearm that thugs use for showy work.
Mark knows that because he knows everything.
So he doesn’t flinch when the girl dies.
He doesn’t even squint his eyes shut when some of the blood hits him in the face, the meteor storm of Spider-Girl’s head raining down in greasy, gory slo-mo. He only looks at Jollie and wonders why the hell she’s still not awake. Wonders for a second if she’s already dead. Then sees her breathing and sighs hard relief.
As he begins to map the room.
Mud Rocks wonders too: “Your girlfriend’s a heavy sleeper, ain’t she? Didn’t flinch when we kicked in the door either. Come to think of it, neither did you—at least until we started slapping the shit outta your ugly fuckin’ face. You two must have really screwed each other’s brains out. Way to go, buddy.”
“Who are you people?”
“I think you know the answer to that. And it don’t matter none anyway. What matters is that we’re serious people. You’re smart enough to know that too. So I’m gonna ask you one question, and you’re gonna tell me the answer, and maybe we’ll let Sleeping Beauty walk outta here with all her parts.”
“The package is not in this house,” Mark says calmly, evenly. “I hid it someplace secure before I came here. If you kill either of us, you’ll never find out where I stashed it.”
“So I guess you’re gonna tell us where it is right now.”
He sticks two fingers in his mouth and whistles.
The door to Mark’s room opens and another big guy comes in, this one wearing a jogging suit.
He’s dragging Andy with him.
Jollie stirs in her sleep, smiling deeply.
• • •
Andy is crying, his hands cuffed behind his head. Jogging Suit throws him on the floor next to Spider-Girl. The Boy Prince gags when he sees she has a giant bloody hole in her head, and he comes up with a noise that almost sounds like begging—please don’t kill me, something like that—but Mark can’t tell. Jogging Suit presses the Ruger 9-mil into the back of Andy’s neck and tells him to be quiet, and Mud Rocks giggles like a clown, panning his little black camera around:
“Blondie was just an appetizer. Now the main gang’s on the firing line. The ruling class of the Kingdom itself. We’re talking royalty here!”
He nods silently to the faceless thug next to him, who takes his cue and leaves the room, gently shutting the door. Jogging Suit takes the faceless thug’s place in the action, uncapping a butterfly knife, keeping the gun in the Boy Prince’s neck. The blade almost glimmers in the low Christmas-tree lighting.
“This one is your best boy,” says Mud Rocks, looking at Andy, then at Mark. “Everyone knows it, and you know it too. We’re gonna cut his fingers off. Savvy?”
Andy starts to says something and Mud Rocks slaps his face again.
“Don’t hurt him,” Mark says, choking. “He had nothing to do with this.”
“Nobody’s innocent,” Mud Rocks says. “If you wanna get truthful with us anywhere along the way, please feel free to do so.”
He aims the camera right at Mark, who starts shouting.
“It’s not in the house, I’m telling you! I’ll take you right to it—just don’t hurt him! He doesn’t know anything!”
“That’s not good enough, kid.”
Mud Rocks steps over the corpse of Spider-Girl. Comes right over to Mark. Bends down and gets in his face with the camera. Up close like this, Mark finally sees that Mud Rocks is a beautiful man on the surface, even though he’s much older than his flunkies. Blue eyes and hard chin—that elusive Clooney-esque comeliness. Telltale wrinkles carved at the edges of his eyes, shoots of gray in his thick black hair. The way he speaks doesn’t match up with his face at all. He’s destroyed his voice with too many cigarettes.
Mud Rocks sees him staring.
And winks.
“Gotta say, kid, my brother would love you. He’s into the frumpy ones. All that peace and love and hippie shit, looking down deep where a dude like you has inner beauty stored up for a rainy day. Never really understood it myself. Some people are just ugly, man.”
His brother?
Oh no.
Oh fuck me.
“See, buddy, you’re an ugly guy. And ugly guys have nothing to barter with when their hands are tied. You’re in what we call a zero-point-zero strategic position. Someone has to save your sorry ass now, and by the looks of things, that ain’t gonna happen. There’s three cars full of cops out front making sure we aren’t disturbed while we work. All of your little party friends in the living room? Took care of them all. Does that surprise you?”
Not really, Mark wants to say.
And then he wants to kill himself.
Because this is none other than Marnie Stanwell talking to him.
Which means Darian Stanwell is not far behind.
Which means we’re all dead, regardless of anything I tell them.
“Hello? Pay attention, ugly! We’re down to the one percent ruling class here!”
Marnie Stanwell slaps him again.
The sting bites hard.
“When we’re done with your boy here, we’ll go to work on Sleeping Beauty, and then if that doesn’t move you, we’ll go to work on your hands. But I have a feeling we’re gonna be the best of friends before that happens, right?”
Marnie Stanwell motions to Jogging Suit.
The big guy grabs Andy’s cuffed hands, leveraging the blade between his thumb and forefinger. Mark sees blood appear instantly from the deep cut, drizzling down the Boy Prince’s knuckles like a little river. Andy winces, then almost screams, and then the sound chokes way back in his throat.
In the same instant, Mark curses himself again—this time for not moving faster.
But he gets there anyway.
Just in time to save Andy’s thumb.
And the four men in the room never have any idea what hits them.
• • •
You think three-dimensionally, that’s the key.
And these guys really aren’t trained professionals—they gave themselves away when they shot the girl. Only young sadistic cowboys do stuff like that—which gave Mark all the time he needed to finish mapping the room, measure the seconds, create a layered diagram of the shitstorm that breaks out now.
It starts with the handcuffs falling away from his wrists—because escaping from over-the-counter bondage-shop trinkets is less than a joke to a guy like him, just takes a few seconds—and his hands are suddenly snapping into deadly talons, forcing the blade dug into his back to do something else, jerking it away from him in a powerful reverse-fulcrum thrust. That creates a chain reaction in the goon’s arm which delivers the knife directly into his own throat—and Mark is whipping around with his entire body as the sound of bone and soft tissue starts crackling like bacon in the air, and he throws an elbow into the other goon, making him drop his Desert Eagle. The one with the knife in his throat tries to do something else with his hands, but he ends up killing himself, stumbling on his feet, the blood blasting out in a deep-red arterial geyser while his buddy takes Mark’s hard right fist to his face, bones shattering with explosive force, firing nose fragments and sinus particles into his brain—basically, the guy sneezes himself to death.
This all happens in just another few seconds.
And then the Desert Eagle is in Mark’s h
and and it’s a heavy weapon made heavier by the long muzzle of the silencer, but he manages with it, and he’s firing at Marnie Stanwell and Jogging Suit, and those smug smiles are still frozen permanently on their faces as hushed-down bullets hack into both of them. Blood and pink stuff blows out and they lose their train of thought (forever) as the next two rounds stop their hearts—optimal placement, dead center. The bullets shatter their ribcages before they blow vital organs, and the bleeding is mostly internal. No exit wounds. The silenced muzzleblasts are still incredibly loud in the tiny space, making his ears ring. Mark loves the movies, but this obviously ain’t the movies, and even as the men in the room all fall down dead, even as he thinks about the difference between real life and reel life, he’s charting his run through the door and back up the hall.
At least five more men in the house.
Four or five cops outside.
Mark hopes to hell that Darian Stanwell isn’t out there with them, because he just made Darian’s brother deader than dogshit.
Jollie stirs again, smiling, and almost wakes up.
• • •
Andy looks at all the pieces of brains on the wall, sees the death-twitching, muscle-spasming forms of the four blown-away men in the room, and feels the terrible overpressure of everything slam into him like something living—a shock wave in the form of a ten-ton deadweight descending in his heart—and it hurts like hell.
His hand hurts like hell too.
Dripping blood from the deep gash between his thumb and forefinger.
It throbs badly as Mark works Andy’s cuffs with a bobby pin and gets them off fast. Holds up Andy’s bloody hand and inspects it quickly, shaking his head.
“This is pretty bad. You’re gonna need stitches.”
Before Andy can say anything, Mark grabs a T-shirt off the floor, and then he’s wrapping it tight around the Boy Prince’s wound. “Keep pressure on it. We’ll get you patched up later.”
“Mark . . . what . . .”
“Wake her up,” he says, pointing at Jollie. “We have thirty seconds before it gets hairy again. There might be someone really serious out there.”
Andy just sits on his knees, his hand throbbing, damn near paralyzed. “These guys weren’t serious?”
“No time to explain. Wake up Jollie. Stay in this room. Get under my bed with her and don’t move a muscle.”
“Mark . . . who the hell are you?”
“I can’t tell you that, not now. Just do as I say.”
He pulls his pants back on and buckles up, reaches for his flannel shirt because it’s still cold outside. Grabs the tiny black camera from Marnie Stanwell’s dead hand and smashes it on the floor hard, shattering the flash memory card to smithereens.
Moves for the closet and pulls out the Black Box.
It’s been hidden in here under the comic books for ten years.
• • •
In the meantime, the Kingdom has never looked worse.
There’s blood everywhere.
From the front door to the kitchen are hunks of charred and blasted human debris and dozens of dead bodies—all of them young, all of them terrified in the remaining seconds of their lives. The two shadows who were making out against the wall are now permanent shadows, headless and twitching. Platinum Lizzie is dead on the floor of the hall, frozen in a running pose, her bleached white hair spattered with crimson dots and flecks of pale pink panic-thoughts. She lies in a lake of her own blood. She never saw it coming. None of these kids did. They were all normal people. And normal people aren’t action heroes. They freeze and die when this stuff goes down—they look it right in the eye and have no idea it’s even happening.
There were six shooters when they first arrived.
There are two left now—one in the hall, and one taking a piss in the bathroom.
Big, dumb bastards in cheap black suits.
Who have no idea what they’ve just gotten themselves into.
• • •
The Black Box has this stuff in it:
Six thousand dollars in cash.
Four loose diamonds.
Two Markos 6G smartphones.
One fully loaded field pack first-aid kit.
An ounce of uncut cocaine and a quarter ounce of high-grade hydroponic marijuana in watertight plastic bags.
One Herstal FNP90 compact submachine gun.
One Korth .357 Magnum revolver.
One Vestika 9mm slide-action pistol—a high-tech job made from plastic and carbon poly-fibers, developed in a very secret laboratory.
Four hundred rounds of ammunition in three plastic boxes, set in Styrofoam blocks—twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-four, and nine millimeter—plus a box of caseless tri-fiber ammo for the plastic gun.
And, of course:
Five Mark II fragmentation grenades, three five-pound C-4 custom packages, prewrapped with detonators, and one M18 Claymore anti-fucking-infantry mine.
• • •
Jollie feels the comforting warmth of her one true love as he moves closer to her in the dark chamber. And then the chamber becomes infinite, and her heart explodes in it. She feels rain on her face in the dream as Andy reaches out for her . . .
. . . and pulls her to the shore, which is washed in blood.
• • •
She sees the war paint on the bed—deep red in the half-dark of the room—and then she sees the exploded bodies and she hears Andy speak her name in some sort of desperate fit as he grabs her from the bed and pulls her to the floor.
Just as Mark kicks open the door and blows away the man in the hall with a machine gun.
She sees it happen in one amazing second and a half before Andy pulls her under the bed, and it looks like a screaming silhouette standing in a strobe-blast, thundering ahead of her—a neon dinosaur at the all-you-can-eat brunch, ripping her waking world to flash-fried embers in a BOOM-CHAKA-BOOM-CHAKA-BOOM that cancels out every other sound in the known universe.
She doesn’t really know what’s going on.
Just sees and hears the flashing dinosaur.
Knows Mark is somewhere in the mix.
Senses Andy, pulling her further into the dark under Mark’s bed.
And meanwhile, the world and the universe are ending.
• • •
Mark fills the hallway with automatic fire and keeps on moving, shredding the thug like paper, his finger jerking quick-time Morse code that turns into maximum destruction. White flashes blow strobe-bombs and blood-bursts all across the collaged walls and ceiling as the enemy target staggers back in herky-jerky stop-motion, twitching and convulsing and coughing up a death rattle that sounds like choked curses run through a meat grinder. The last man still in the bathroom catches no less than five stray shells, all from the gun of his pal in the hallway as he slam dances backward, firing all willy-nilly into the walls and through the bathroom door. One of the bullets removes the last man’s right eye as he turns away from the toilet and faces the chaos, his fly still open, piss drizzled down the front of his pants, and then the door to the bathroom detonates in jagged explosions of wood and plastic and he flies apart in meaty chunks, painting the big porcelain megaphone with visceral glory. It’s all over for the last man real damn fast.
Out in the living room, Mark scans the dead faces.
None of them are Darian Stanwell.
Not that it would have been easy to kill Darian—Mark’s just damn relieved that the big guy ain’t out here. There is still that deader-than-dog-shit issue with Darian’s brother. It will be a problem for them later. If there is a later.
But first things first.
Mark thumbs the Herstal to semi-auto, ejects the spent clip, and loads a new fifty-round magazine from the largest pocket in his cargo shorts as the cops outside finally get their act together and decide to storm the living room.<
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• • •
Jollie doesn’t see what happens next, trapped in the dark under the bed, but she hears guns go off at the front of the house—pistols that remind her of popguns. Pap pap pap! And then she hears the monster roar again, drowning the hell out of them. BOOM-CHAKA-BOOM-CHAKA-BOOM!
And then she thinks about Senator Bob.
Peanut Williams and his nutty boys in Washington.
The terror of a target in the crosshairs of a lone gunman plunges into her.
Assassination, she thinks.
Shit, they’re here to kill me finally.
Aren’t they?
• • •
Mark’s last target is the remaining dirty cop on the front lawn—the one retreating for his squad car, who wasn’t dumb enough to charge into a war zone. Mark steps over the corpses of the other three unfortunate law-enforcement officers—they’ve been shredded like all the rest, damn easy with this tiny little assault monster he’s carrying—and his shoes crunch through glass shards as he heads across the front porch toward the labyrinth of cars and trucks parked outside. There are several dozen different vehicles, all shapes and sizes, some brand new, some beat to hell, all of them belonging to the dead people inside his house. Damn shame, that. The shapes of the Mazdas and Volkswagens and 4x4s create a series of bizarre, ghostly afterimages, each vehicle lit up in split-second flashes by the rolling red and blue cherries on top of the cop cars idling in the street—it’s like burning neon hell and frozen ice bathing the whole world, some apocalyptic splash-art canvas strobing eerily in a nightmare.
Mark admires the artistry of it, the terror of it.
He admires it for less than half a second.
The cop spins with his revolver, almost to the squad car, and fires—but he’s not aiming at anything, or using his brain like Mark is. The shot blasts out loud across the lawn, shatters a window in the front of the Kingdom, then strikes home and destroys the TV in the living room. The air is filled with the sound of crystal dynamite.
Mark raises the assault monster and sights down carefully.
He rides the last wave of the Xanax in his system, using it, focusing just like they trained him to.
Metro Page 5
