The Doll

by Taylor Stevens

  He connected with her chest. Knocked her back several steps. With the pain and the loss of air, she laughed again. Shifted before he could follow through and traced his breathing and footfalls, fingered the makeshift blade.

  Taunting and singsong, she called to Arben in the same Hungarian he had used to her. “Gyere ide,” she said. “Show yourself a man.”

  He spun toward her voice, struck out.

  His fist connected with her cheekbone, as did her blade to his forearm, a long jagged cut while her head rang from the blow.

  Arben bellowed, the fury carrying loud in the night. He lunged, fists swinging and finding air. Training pushed her to incapacitate by any means necessary, to force him into a defensive position.

  Arben swung again, and where she should have taken him down with a joint break, she backed off and cut the other arm.

  He spun to face her and, swearing, reached for the weapon he should’ve known better than to draw. Munroe shifted in toward him, but before his hand returned, and before she connected blade against throat, the report of Lumani’s rifle cracked against the night, creating an instant pause to a fight barely begun.

  IRVING, TEXAS

  Bradford navigated the streets toward Veers Transport, head in the zone, that place where the plan of action and the action itself joined into a single point of focus.

  Jahan and Walker followed in the Trooper several blocks behind and out of sight. As a team, they knew nothing more at this moment than they had when Bradford had first moved off the sofa to the whiteboard and followed the tenuous thread of logic from parking lot to security cameras to trucks.

  The trucks were all they had left.

  They’d strategized, stretched possibilities, prepared for the worst, and abandoned the Capstone office for this Hail Mary foray. Punctuating every decision tonight, every move, was the knowledge that if they failed here, Logan was lost forever and, by implication, so was Munroe.

  Reflections from amber street lamps dotted the roadway, light mirrored on streets still slick from a downpour that had blown through, typical of Texas weather: in, out, and gone, with only the aftereffects as evidence—a feat Bradford planned to mimic tonight.

  Another intersection and the transport depot would be within spotting distance, and then there it was, on the right, with the lot lit up in a way it hadn’t been before. The smaller trucks had been rearranged to accommodate a semi backed into the middle. Two men strode across the pavement from the rig to the warehouse door, one leading, the other following like a hungry dog, and another two pairs of legs sprouted toward the rear of the truck.

  Battle strategy churned and muscle memory amped in anticipation.

  If fortune smiled, he would find Logan still alive, would bring him safely home and in his place leave behind a mess of untraceable destruction.

  Just like the weather.

  Bradford passed the depot, pulled into the office complex next door. Parked in shadows, turned off the ignition, grabbed the overstuffed backpack, and stepped into the night.

  Strategy for tonight had amounted to two very general scenarios: If there wasn’t any activity on the lot, they’d slash tires, knock down doors, and cut into truck bodies until they found what they were searching for, and if there was activity on the lot, they’d go after whatever target was the most highly guarded.

  That meant the eighteen-wheeler.

  He continued through shadows in its direction, skirting between buildings to the back of the complex, where one series of offices abutted the darkest side of the transport depot. Wire cutters were Bradford’s key through the chain-link.

  On his own soil he worried less about bad guys and things blowing up in his face than he did about being destroyed by those at whose side he served. His own country would crucify him if they traced tonight’s events back to him, and yet Bradford felt no qualms about taking the matter of Logan’s kidnapping into his own hands. Years spent navigating shithole situations, years surrounded by poverty and corruption in countries where life and death were ruled by the law of survival and justice was arbitrary at best, of never knowing if this was the day life would be cut short, had a way of changing how a person viewed the world.

  He paused. Listened. Continued on.

  Flattened along the windowless length of warehouse wall and measuring off paces, moved in the direction of the prefab office. Knelt and pulled one of the bricks of C-4 from the pack. He formed the explosive on the wall and jabbed a charge into it. Without enough primer cord to sufficiently run the building, he was limited to the handful of remote-activated detonators he’d taken from the armory.

  The plastics had been Walker’s call. He hadn’t planned on blowing up a building, on drawing a big arrow above his head that said Hey, guys with the power to lock me up, look here, but now that things had come to this, he wished he’d taken more of everything: more explosives, more det cord, more charges, enough to make a proper job of the destruction instead of merely providing distraction.

  In Bradford’s earpiece Walker whispered, “Big guy, you coming?”

  “At the party,” he replied.

  Jahan said, “Wingman at the party.”

  And then Walker again: “Music is ready.”

  Bradford crept forward another several yards and worked the next block of plastics to the wall. Set the detonator and headed on. No matter what happened tonight, he’d blow the charges. A little parting gift and an up-yours to the assholes who, a bit too comfortable on American soil, had failed to fully think through the repercussions of stealing from a group of trigger-happy gunslingers who got depressed if they went too long without an adrenaline kick.

  And maybe that was part of the Doll Maker’s plan: entice and destroy.

  The eighteen-wheeler could just as easily be sitting on the lot as a trap as it could be a target—or something else altogether. But there was only one way to discover if Logan was there, and that was to take the bait.

  Another several yards forward, Bradford placed the last of the explosives and Walker said, “I think the engine on the wheels is running.”

  Bradford said, “Wingman?”

  “Two minutes,” Jahan replied.

  Two minutes before the phones and the Internet went down and Walker killed the street and security lights. They would have taken out the electricity and saved the rest of the hassle if they could have gotten to the connections without drawing attention, but for that they had been out of luck.

  Bradford moved faster now. If the truck engine was running, whatever was here wouldn’t be staying long. He was at the corner of the warehouse, rounding onto the lot itself, when Jahan said, “Ready to party.”

  So came the spit-pop of the sniper rifle and the beginning of the carnage. Cameras on the warehouse went first, mini-explosions of glass and metal that sprinkled the area with sparkling confetti, followed by the halogen security lights, and finally the streetlights, one after the next, in a steady pattern that eventually plunged the entire lot into relative darkness.

  The Veers response came swiftly. The men toward the rear of the eighteen-wheeler, in an automatic reaction to the gunfire, dropped and reached for their handguns. They twisted and shifted in a hunt for the direction of the firing—not the response to ambush or rapid deployment but of those who’d been warned against potential activity and not really believing, had only halfheartedly prepared.

  The moment following darkness brought total silence. No weapon reports. No shouting. No cars on the roads. No movement at all. As if in acknowledgment of the attack, the entire world had frozen to regroup. And then the warehouse door opened, and one of the two men who’d gone in came out again, as if he’d been the one to draw the short straw and been pushed out. The man was in jeans and T-shirt, heavy in the middle, maybe in his early thirties, and because he was the only one without a weapon, Bradford pegged him for the truck driver.

  Bradford skirted from the cover of one truck to the next in another surge toward the eighteen-wheeler. Tires on the perimeter
vehicles hissed, flattening, in a steady procession, the way the lights had blown prior.

  Beside the rig, shadows on the ground, with accents thick and foreign, yelled for the man at the warehouse door. They wanted him in the truck. They wanted the truck gone now.

  At the near end of the warehouse a bay door slid partially open. Two men rolled from beneath and dropped off the platform to the ground. The escaping light stretched their shadows against the pavement and added the silhouette of assault rifles to lengths of limbs and distorted heads.

  Walker said, “Big man, party guests coming at nine.”

  Sniper on the roof with an infrared scope meant that had they been willing to take life, this sequence would have been over in minutes. But the conundrum within vigilante justice was differentiating between employees and criminals. The immediate goal was to grab Logan without killing innocent people or tacking homicide charges onto everything else. Cold-blooded vengeance could wait.

  Across the lot, the men on the other side of the truck continued to yell for the driver, and Walker took potshots at his feet every time he moved. To Bradford’s left, the men with the rifles crept from the warehouse toward the perimeter, slipping out of sight and presumably continuing in the direction of the sniper fire.

  With five enemy on the ground, breaching the eighteen-wheeler and getting inside would be noisy, messy, and risky, but whatever was in it clearly mattered most to the Veers people, and Logan or not, the contents could be used as a black eye and a bargaining chip.

  Within the blind urgency of the Doll Maker’s people to get the eighteen-wheeler on its way, Bradford formed an alternative scenario, and set out strategy change in clipped commands.

  The sniper fire stopped.

  The driver, still rooted to the spot and afraid to move, refused to respond to the men on the ground and so his own people turned on him, shooting in his direction to force him into doing what they wanted.

  Bradford crab-walked around the last of the trucks to the open space between him and the rig. Inched forward, and the crack of a rifle split the night. The windshield above his head shattered, and the sides of the truck dinged with hits of metal on metal.

  Ignoring the instinct to dive for cover, he rushed the cab.

  Each step brought another series of rifle reports, short bursts fired in his direction, interrupted by a scream, then silence, and finally strafing from both rifles in the direction of the property next door.

  Introduction of the automatic gunfire created confusion on the ground by the truck. Bradford didn’t pause when he reached the semi, didn’t climb so much as jump the laddered steps, yanked the cab door outward, and threw himself forward.

  In the open hole of the door opposite, the truck driver, seeing him, froze.

  Bradford leveled his weapon at the man and said, “I’m your best friend right now, just get in the truck and get us off the lot and I swear to God I won’t hurt you.”

  The driver’s mouth opened as if to say something, but he didn’t move.

  OUTSIDE MONTEBRUNO, ITALY

  Neeva stared out the car window. Struggled to make sense of the shadowy movements, arms and blows and strikes that blended into one another while slipping farther away from the car, until, in the darkness, she couldn’t tell who was who or what was what.

  Her palms were damp and heat prickled at her hairline.

  Everything had happened fast. Stunned by the speed of the violence, she strained to see outside the car and then, in a rush of panic, closed the windows, locked the doors, and checked the ignition in the hope that maybe, just maybe, in the hurry, Michael had left the keys.

  But she hadn’t.

  In the terror of the moment, Neeva had lost time, and now her heart beat heavily, urging her to flee on foot. Fear alone kept her anchored to the seat. Down the road, in both directions, was only darkness punctuated by pinpricks of light, almost as if someone had chosen this precise location for a stop exactly because it was as far away from anything as Neeva could remember since they’d started the trip, and out there, somewhere in the empty night, was the big creep from the cell.

  She didn’t know which direction to run to stay away from him, but she knew his type—the kind to get his kicks from hurting other people. If he was the one to find her, there was no telling what he would do. Visual possibilities danced inside Neeva’s head, fodder for a slasher film, while the image of the dead man and Michael’s vomiting played out in a background montage, heightening her fear.

  That man was dead because Neeva had run. If she actually escaped, what would they do? For sure they’d kill someone she loved, maybe they already had.

  Her heart hurt.

  Her stomach hurt.

  Neeva swallowed back the pain and strained to see out the window. Saw nothing but black and then a blur of movement. She would have to run. Hands shaking, she reached for the dome light and moved the switch so that when she opened the door, the light wouldn’t turn on, then eased from the passenger seat to the driver’s, head low, movements small just in case. Someone outside yelled.

  Neeva twitched.

  Gunfire shattered the silence and Neeva fumbled for the door lock.

  Michael was the only one without a gun, which meant Michael was the only one who could have been shot, which meant Michael was dead and now the creep would come for her.

  Door unlocked, Neeva tried for the handle. Missed it and then like magic the door opened of its own accord.

  Neeva stifled a scream.

  Her eyes tracked up from the ground, searched out the face of whoever stood outside, and like some miraculous apparition, Michael spoke from the darkness. Said, “Get out of my seat.”

  Fear and relief and tension, and anger mixed into an emotional cocktail so overwhelmingly powerful that Neeva laughed. Nervous laughter. Crazy laughter.

  Michael squatted so that their faces were level and close. From here, even without the dome light, Neeva could see Michael’s eyes and the way they scanned her as if searching for evidence of damage; she could also see that Michael’s lip was swollen and cut, and the skin on her left cheekbone split and bleeding.

  “You’re not dead,” Neeva said, and her mouth felt as if it was stuffed with cotton.

  “Not dead,” Michael said, and reached for Neeva’s hair. Neeva flinched, deflected Michael’s hand with a smack, and then, realizing in horror what she’d done, braced for a retaliatory strike that never came.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Michael said. “Put the light back on, will you?”

  Neeva paused.

  This wasn’t the same Michael from before the dead man’s picture and definitely not the Michael who had dragged her screaming into the road. The voice was the same monotone calm, but something was different in a scary sort of way. Wary, and keeping her face forward, Neeva reached behind, felt for the nub, then found and pushed it, and the dim light came on, painful against the darkness.

  This time, when Michael moved her hand toward Neeva’s face, Neeva kept still, guarded and cautious, while Michael reached for the hair at her neck and lifted it, examining the area where the creep had slammed her into the window. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “No,” Neeva whispered, body still rigid, eyes searching Michael’s in a desperate attempt to discover what was different—something about the face, the eyes—a glaze, maybe, or hollowness, like Michael saw without seeing: alive on the outside but dead behind the eyes.

  Michael let the hair drop and nudged her gently. “Move over,” she said, and Neeva, her mind juggling between the danger of Michael in front of her and the creep in the darkness, worked backward to the seat she’d just crawled from.

  “If you’re alive,” Neeva said, “is the guy out there dead?”

  “Eventually,” Michael said, and reached behind the seat for the blanket.

  “So he’s still alive? Still out there?”

  “For now,” she said.

  “I heard a gun fire.”

  Michael nodded again, an
d dabbed at the blood that trailed beneath her chin. “A warning,” she said, and slid in behind the wheel. She shut the door and the light turned off. Then tipped the seat back as far as it would go and closed her eyes.

  “What do we do now?” Neeva said.

  “We wait.”

  “For what?”

  “I want to know that my friend is alive,” Michael said, and those words burned hot up the back of Neeva’s neck. The friend was the reason Michael was here, and even a fool would know that if the friend was still alive—Neeva shut off the thought. Michael’s head turned and her eyes, open and unblinking, stared at her with that same scary-dead gaze, like there were a hundred years of things to say and she had no life left to say them. Neeva said, “I thought maybe, you know. I mean, realizing you’re a woman, I just …”

  “I don’t want to do it,” Michael said. “I have to choose. I don’t know how many people will die by me not doing this.” She faced the ceiling again and closed her eyes. “It’s not just the ones I love. I’m surprised they haven’t threatened you with your family, too.”

  “They have,” Neeva said, “but I didn’t believe them.”

  “You don’t strike me as stupid.”

  “My parents are powerful people,” Neeva said. “They’re hard to get to, and they’re looking for me, they have to be.”

  “They are,” Michael said, “and these guys”—she ran her finger in a circle in the air—“they know that now. I doubt they did at the beginning, which is why I’m here.” She paused and opened her eyes. Looked directly at Neeva. “You pulled a fast one on the world, what with changing your name and burying your past. That’s probably what has saved you now, everyone speculating about you and why you did it. But none of that makes much of a difference anymore. If you don’t do what they want, they’ll still find someone to kill. Maybe not your mom or your dad, but your sisters, your cousins.”

  Neeva tried to push back all the nightmare and the crazy, the confusion and the words that made no sense. “Saved me now?” she said. “Saved me?” Her voice went up a notch. Then, even more bewildered, she added, “You know about my family?”