Under the Bones

by Kory M. Shrum

  She put the Beretta under his chin, watched his eyes double in size and pulled the trigger. The silencer kept the report from ricocheting through her head, splitting her ear drums. But the sudden explosion of brains and blood was unpleasant. The smell was gamey to her, like a deer skinned and gutted, ready for processing.

  His body dropped like a sack of concrete and she released his elbow. One look at the crumpled body and a cursory glance at the endless wilderness to ensure she hadn’t been seen, and she was off again, squeezing herself back through the darkness.

  She emerged on the upper level of the fish house. She cursed her compass and the darkness. Hadn’t they learned their lesson? Were they looking for a second dramatic entrance?

  The gulls certainly hadn’t. Squawking, they took flight in a flurry of white and gray, causing a whirlwind of feathers and bird shit to rain down on the commotion below.

  All eyes turned skyward, but the birds offered surprisingly good cover. After all, no one wanted their face pointing upward as shit and feathers rained down.

  She spotted Cam immediately. He had his pistol out and pointed upward, a phone pressed to his ear. No matter who he was calling, it was likely in Lou’s best interest that she end that call.

  Lou had a chance to press herself into the corner of the upper loft, finding darkness again and slipping down to shadow cast by the processing machinery to his right.

  What she hadn’t realized was that the foreman had his back.

  She registered the gun only a second before it went off. She moved, but not enough. It tore through the side of the Kevlar jacket, no doubt skimming the vest beneath. A second bullet bit into her upper arm. She didn’t have time to consider if the artery there had been severed before he was taking aim again. The third bullet hit her square in the gut. It was like a fist to the stomach, knocking her back into the machine. The vest absorbed the bullet, but it hurt like hell. A big, ugly bruise would sit purple over the bone tomorrow.

  She swore, fury rising in her like a pissed off snake.

  Cam, startled by the chaos was raising his own gun. His face a twin expression of the defiant and frightened foreman beside him.

  Lou came to depend on the fact that men rarely aimed for a woman’s face, at least straightaway. But they would eventually, when enough bullets to the torso didn’t seem to slow her down.

  If she didn’t do something, she would lose her brains all over this machine.

  She seized both the foreman and Cam by their shirts and yanked them toward her. An overzealous tug that sent both men crashing into her, pulled off their feet in surprise. The three of them slammed into the side of the machine. Its metal duct popped and creaked. Lou felt the force of it ripple through her back and set fire to her wounds. She pinched her eyes shut for an instant against her burning arm. But the darkness swallowed the groan bubbling up between her lips.

  As it opened its mouth and swallowed the trio, she wondered what would happen to the men if she were to let go in this infinite dark. Would they simply cease to exist? Or exist forever? Perhaps reaching for her, grabbing at her like phantoms each time she tried to pass through the in-between.

  The world opened again and she hit the dirt on her hands and knees. Panting.

  Lou was losing blood from the arm. The Kevlar was sticking to her skin. But she couldn’t tell if it was a superficial blood loss, or if the artery had indeed been sliced. One was a flesh wound. The other could end her life.

  With two men against her, she couldn’t stop to remove the jacket and inspect the wound. She could only hazard a guess. She was losing blood and her arm was going numb. Neither sign was good.

  She couldn’t keep both men alive—and herself. The first thing she did was take Jason’s gun from the dewy grass three inches from his hand and put two bullets in the back of the foreman’s head before he could recover from the slip. The shock of the sudden night and calm pool stretching out before him had been distraction enough. He hadn’t even seen the bullet coming.

  He fell beside Jason, another heap of gore.

  Cam still had his gun.

  “Fucking shit!” His mind was obviously divided. It didn’t look like he could decide if it was better to stare at the two bodies on the ground between them, or to keep his gaze trained on Lou. A third factor snatched at his mind too—the sudden and bewildering change in scenery always baffled her prey.

  Lou trained her Beretta on the man. He took a step back, the heel of his combat boots catching on Jason’s limp, outstretched hand. He stumbled and fell. His ass hit the cold, hard ground.

  It reminded her instantly of Castle, one of Konstantine’s mules who she’d brought to a similar lake.

  But this man wasn’t the squabbling, squealer that Castle had been. He was ready for her. At last, Cam seemed to realize he had a gun too and lifted it, pointing the gun’s black eye right between her own.

  She slipped through the shadows and reappeared behind him under the cover of the giant oak. A swift kick to the back pitched him forward onto his hands and knees. His face inches from the two bodies. She went to pull the other gun with her left hand and found she couldn’t. It was cold and limp at her side.

  Bad news.

  Cam vomited onto the bodies. A pile of brains inches from your face will do that. She let his stomach run its course, taking the precious moment to run her own inventory. Darkness crowded in on the corners of her vision and the cold in her arm was spreading toward her chest.

  She’d better make this quick. She pressed her gun to the back of Cam’s head.

  “Who do you deal to?” she said. Her voice was as cold and flat as ever.

  “Fuck you.”

  She pressed the barrel of the gun to his right shoulder, wedging it between the shoulder blade and spine. She pulled the trigger.

  The bullet blasted through the shoulder muscle, beneath the clavicle and hit the foreman’s skull cap on the other side. Something was spit into the water. Bone fragments possibly. Or a chunk of brain.

  Cam howled.

  He rolled sideways, instead of on top of the bodies. The bullets weren’t a particularly large caliber. She suspected she could get as many as five in him before the cause was lost. Especially if she stuck to the outer fringe of the extremities. Fingers. Toes. The meat of the upper arm and thigh, assuming she didn’t hit any arteries. He wouldn’t talk if he bled out.

  Lou spoke over the howling and cursing. “Your shipments come through Miami’s ports. You process them and hand them over to who?”

  “Fuck you!”

  Lou’s teeth began to chatter. She clenched her teeth to stop it which only caused her whole jaw to tremble. She shot Cam both in the right arm and the right foot. “It’ll be three bullets next t-time.”

  Embarrassed by the chattering teeth, she pressed the barrel to the side of his face.

  “This one will be in your cheek.”

  “Fallon!” he screamed. “Bruno Fallon.”

  “W-who else?” Because she knew he had two distributors that took in the Miami port shipments.

  “What the—”

  She shot the gun into the air and he bleated like a sheep.

  “Paulie Kraninski! Bruno Fallon and Paulie Kraninski.”

  “Where d-do they send it?” A tremble in her left arm joined the tremble in her jaw. She lowered the gun. She hoped he thought her lenient rather than suspect the truth. She couldn’t hold up the gun anymore. All feeling had gone out of that side of her body.

  Hurry Lou-blue, her father warned. You’ll black out in two minutes. Three tops. Get somewhere safe.

  “Kran sends his shit up through Atlanta. And Fallon through Dallas.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  And then shot him through the head.

  “Thank you?” she murmured to herself. She laughed, a bewildered, off-kilter sound.

  It was hard to drag the men into the water with one hand. And she didn’t want to make multiple trips. So there was a stupidly comic moment when she h
ad three men in the water, but was trying to get a hold of each while they slid beneath the surface.

  But she managed to pull them beneath the nighttime waters and find blood-red water rushing in.

  When she broke the surface of Blood Lake, Lou found she couldn’t hold all three men. She released two of the water-soaked corpses and lifeguard dragged the third toward the shore.

  Dragging a wet corpse was even harder than dragging a dry one.

  She didn’t even have the corpse out of the water when the leaves rustled. Something thrashed through the thick jungle foliage on her right. It would be here in seconds.

  She dropped the body, which turned out to be Jason’s, onto the soggy shore and surveyed the nightmare landscape.

  The two moons hung in the purple sky and apart from the ripples she’d created swimming to shore, Blood Lake was still in the quiet evening.

  Of course, it was always a quiet evening in La Loon. Every time Lou had visited this strange place, the sky was the same color, the moons hanging in the same position. She had no idea if some version of the sun rose and set on this place. She often wondered if this part of Jabbers’ world was like Alaska. For months at a time, everything traveled the sky in the exact same arc.

  The beast emerged through the trees liquid fast. Her lithe, black body contracting and expanding, like an enormous cottonmouth snake. But she was no snake. Not with her body as big as an elephant’s, her six legs, and taloned feet. Nor with the terrifying mouth that opened and released a blood-curdling screech. The air vibrated with its assault.

  Jabbers darted forward, and once upon a time Lou would have pulled her knife or her gun then, anything to remind the creature that she wasn’t prey. The mangled scar tissue on her shoulder showed just how indiscriminate the beast was when it came to fresh meat.

  But Jabbers only bounded past her, playfully pouncing on Jason’s limp body the way a fox pounces outside a rabbit hole.

  Dizziness overtook Lou. The world tilted and she went down, her knees hitting the soggy earth at the water’s edge. Her hands hit the mud.

  She wasn’t sure if it was the exertion of dragging the men, or if the seeping bullet wound itself—I must’ve hit the artery after all—but now she understood she’d overdone it.

  Bloody water lapping at her backside and hips. She struggled to breathe.

  A large black head rubbed against the side of her face. It struck Lou as very cat-like gesture. The way felines will rub their heads against a leg.

  Another nudge, harder this time and then the sound of sniffing. Nostrils as large as a dragon’s, inhaling the scent of Lou’s bloody arm. A tongue the color of vanilla ice cream licked the wound, blood smearing across its surface like strawberry syrup.

  In this way, apart from the deceiving black fabric she wore, Lou realized just how much blood she was losing. And how incredibly appealing a fresh kill must be compared to the soggy corpse several feet down the bank.

  She’d been stupid to lower her guard. Stupid to think that her own bleeding body on the shore wasn’t enough to tempt the beast. She should pull her gun. She could protect herself but her limbs were so heavy and darkness crowded in on the edges of her vision.

  And the beast was fast.

  Another hard nudge and Lou hit the water with her back, sinking. Blood red water overtook her.

  And then she was through the other side. Breaking through the starlit waters a galaxy away.

  She dragged herself to shore, feeling the breath tighten in her chest as if a belt were being pulled tight against it. She couldn’t seem to get enough air into her lungs. Or blood into the heart.

  What just happened?

  Had the beast really shoved her back into the water? And she hadn’t crawled in after her. Hadn’t gobbled her up like a wonton in some sweet and sour soup.

  If not to eat her, why?

  She couldn’t follow this train of thought very far. Her mind blurred at the edges and her arms shook violently as she hauled her torso onto the blood-soaked grass where bits of brain and remnants of skull dried in the lakeside grass.

  She’d have to clean that later. If there was a later.

  There was only the briefest experience of grass. Of cold earth and the scent of dirt. But it was quickly replaced by wooden walls and a hard, flat stone against Lou’s back.

  No, not stone. Wood. A wooden wall, wooden bench. A closet? What kind of closet has a bench?

  All she could do was sit in the dark, breathing. She wondered if she would die like this. Would someone open a closet and find her rotting corpse. She hoped it wasn’t a child.

  “You may begin whenever you are ready,” a man said.

  Lou caught the scent of his aftershave.

  “Begin what?” she croaked. It was hard to speak. She realized straight ahead was a curtain, not a wall like the panels surrounding her. But the box itself was too dark to make out more. Except there was a voice coming through a small hatchwork window, the pattern too intricate to reveal who was on the other side.

  “Is this your first time?”

  “My first?”

  “It isn’t a problem. You simply begin by saying ‘forgive me father, for I have sinned. And then tell me what you did wrong.”

  “There’s no such thing as sin,” Lou said into the dark, her eyes fluttering closed.

  The man laughed. “There is no evil in your world?”

  “More than average, I think.”

  “If you have nothing to confess—”

  “Confess,” she whispered, her voice rasping. Then she realized where she was. Her mother Courtney had been an ex-Catholic. And while Lou had only gone to the stone church in their hometown on Christmas and Easter, she knew about confession.

  She asked the compass for somewhere safe. Somewhere quiet. And this is where it brought her. Like the universe was offering her a chance to ask forgiveness before she departed this world.

  She smiled, laying her head back against the unforgiving wood.

  The priest misinterpreted her swelling silence.

  “Sometimes it is difficult to know where to begin. Maybe we simply feel that something is wrong or—”

  “I know what’s wrong,” she managed. All feeling left her hand and the gun slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor of the confessional. “I’m bleeding to death.”

  “What?” The priest’s alarm was instant.

  But Lou couldn’t worry about that now. Her body was so cold that she couldn’t move her fingers or her arms. Nor could she break her fall as she pitched forward, careening through the curtain.

  15

  Nico entered the large warehouse, his bootsteps reverberating up to the high ceilings. His men, because who was left was his now, stood against the walls, out of the way of center floor.

  Eight men sat on their knees with black sacks over their heads, their hands tied behind their backs sat center stage. Nico had learned this technique from his captors in Russia. In the work camp, they used all manner of intimidation to lord over the men kept there. They stripped them naked, whipped them, starved them, blocked out their vision with blindfolds. Restrained them with ropes or suspended them in the air. It might seem counter intuitive, but Nico understood there was something especially cruel about blindfolding. The darkness heightened the fear.

  It was warfare of the mind. No one could torture a man like the mind itself could. And the blindfold was only the first step in unleashing that tethered mind. Without the outer world to distract it, the mind turned on itself.

  So he was not surprised that two of the eight men were openly weeping as they sat on their knees, head hung.

  Only three were perfectly still, listening and waiting as their training had instructed. The other three were near hyperventilation. The sacks over their faces compressed and expanded with each panicked breath. Nico wouldn’t let them suffer for long.

  He crossed the large space to the man standing in its center. A camera tripod set up before him. This man, Jonathan, wasn’t
one of the ones that Nico trusted implicitly. There were several such men, hanging around in the dark of this warehouse two kilometers outside of Florence, further down the bend in the Arno than Ponte Vecchio.

  Nico had killed those who were openly loyal to Martinelli’s bastard. He’d put a bullet between every pair of eyes. But the silence was contagious. Quickly, they’d stopped fighting him and fell in line. That was how it should be. But Nico was certain that was for the sake of their own lives or families, and not out of any true loyalty to Nico.

  If he was lucky, Konstantine was dead now. Bled to death in the arms of the bitch who tried to save him. Nico had pumped enough bullets in his guts to have done the job. And if not, that knife in the back should’ve done the job. But Nico had lived in the labor camps a long time. He understood that some men were simply harder to kill. And he was open to the possibility that Konstantine was such a man. And perhaps also the bitch.

  If they lived, and if Konstantine intended to return with his dog to reclaim the Ravengers, he had a plan for that too.

  “When are we going live?” Nico asked the cameraman. He repressed the urge to put his thumb to his mouth and chew on the meat of it. It was a habit from childhood and one that had always risen with his nervousness. But this was no time to show weakness.

  All eyes followed him around the room, assessing him. After all, if one mutiny could be pulled off, so could another. If any heart in this warehouse had such ambitions, Nico’s assault might be encouraging rather than a deterrent.

  The man paused, drawing on this thick cigar. “Six minutes before the broadcast is up and running.”

  “And you’re going to seize their stations. I want this live.”

  The cameraman only nodded, silver smoke pouring out of his nostrils the way smoke pours from the mouth of a dragon.

  “Everyone into position!” he shouted over the soft conversation that had steadily grown with his back turned. Eight men from the wall crossed the concrete floor and came to stand behind the black-sacked captives.

  “Four minutes,” the cameraman murmured, fidgeting with the black machine on top of his tripod.