Resonant Son

by J. N. Chaney

  As the perp placed his foot half a meter from my knee, I slashed with my spear, gouging a trough through his throat. Blood flew out in a wide arc as the man dropped his knife and pitched forward. My spear, however, was braced vertically against the ground, and Steranko fell straight into the blade, neck skewered by the blade. I grabbed his head and pulled it down, further impaling him on my weapon. He tried screaming but only muted gurgles emanated from his mouth, blood leaking down the shaft toward my hand.

  “Steranko!” Mier yelled, spinning toward the commotion. Oubrick followed with his beam, spotlighting Steranko with a pole arm protruding below his head. I could see Mier making a move toward me.

  “Lars,” I said. “Phase three.”

  No sooner had I said the words than the room blacked out. Oubrick’s flashlight was the only source of light in the hangar for about three seconds. Mier closed the gap, knife held high.

  That was when things got nuts.

  The loudspeakers blared the most aggressive dance track I’d ever heard. The low energy frequencies made my intestines vibrate—I swear to gods it made me have to piss. After the song’s first four beats, lights strobed, making every movement look like it was in slow motion. The pulsing lights were then joined by holo-vids projected across the room. They were at least twenty of them, each several meters wide and just as tall, twirling and rotating, with scenes depicting everything from wild cats in nature and stars going nova to women in dance clubs and extreme space sports.

  Had I not been hopped up on whatever Lars had given me, I would have been in a spasm. Instead, my brain seemed to make space for all the sounds and scenes, separating them from one another and drawing me to the two remaining men in the circle.

  Oubrick must’ve realized his flashlight was utterly worthless. He discarded it and threw his arms around Heather, using her as a shield. He searched the room for me, but I was far too fast, using the chaos as cover, darting around the room under the power of my stimulants.

  I circled to the opposite side of the circle, seeing Mier move away from Oubrick. Oubrick seemed to be calling for the man, but he was oblivious, thanks to Lars’s spectacle.

  It was the last mistake Mier would ever make. He took a final step toward the crate I hid beside, and I lunged, driving my spear into his belly. The performance enhancers had given me far more strength than I’d anticipated. Instead of stabbing him, I impaled him, driving the spear’s shaft so deep that my hands slid up to his gut.

  The man tried to scream, but no sound came out. Instead, his mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. His knife fell to the floor as he clutched the shaft in his gut. Oubrick screamed something, but to no effect. Mier was mine.

  I stood, staring the goon in the face, and used the spear to drive him toward the hangar’s edge. His legs struggled to keep up, so I helped him along. I focused all my strength into the shaft and swung the weapon in a wide arc. The momentum forced Mier off his feet as he lost his footing and started to slide down the shaft, away from me. By the time he reached the bloodied end, his hands slipped free and he let go. His body fell free of my weapon and directly into open sky. His arms and legs flailed as the black of night swallowed him whole.

  When I turned back around, it was only Oubrick and Heather, standing in the middle of the hangar.

  “Lars,” I said. “Kill the music.”

  24

  The music died and the hangar filled with bright white light. Heather winced, but Oubrick kept her from pulling away by pressing his knife into her neck. The blade drew another drop of blood against her skin. She whimpered from beneath the gag.

  “That’s far enough, Mr. Reed,” Oubrick said, pulling Heather’s chin up with his free hand. The knife blade glistened in the flood lights.

  “Let her go, Oubrick,” I demanded, spear twirling in my hands.

  “So you know my name.” He tilted his head. “Then you have been listening this whole time, haven’t you.”

  “I said, let her go.”

  “Now you know I can’t do that, Mr. Reed. You, of all people, understand the position I’m in. I’ve lost most of my leverage, no small thanks to you, and I’m not about to give up my final piece on the chessboard just because you ask me nicely.”

  “Then I’ll just have to ask differently,” I said, circling slowly to my right. His neatly trimmed mustache annoyed me. It seemed like a perfect target for my spear.

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure you’ll try,” Oubrick replied. “But I wonder, aren’t you curious about how I found you?”

  I tried not to react to the strangeness of his words, but he must have seen my momentary look of confusion.

  “Or should I say, how I found both of you?” Oubrick tilted Heather’s head back even more—far enough that I thought it might snap. How I wanted to kill this man. “Of the three security guards on the night roster, only two bodies were accounted for.”

  My mind flashed back to Polski and Hoss. They were just kids. And Oubrick had their lives snuffed out—for what? The sick bastard.

  As if reading my thoughts, he pouted with his lips and added, “I am so sorry about those two young security guards, gunned down in the prime of their lives. Were they close to you?”

  “Oubrick, I swear to gods—”

  “Ah, ah, ah. Stay where you are, Mr. Reed. My knife-hand is extremely twitchy, and I wouldn’t want anything to happen to your wife’s beautiful neck, would you?”

  This lunatic clearly wasn’t just going to let Heather go. And the longer this went on, the more I feared it wasn’t going to end well—for her. “What do you want?” I asked.

  “So many things,” Oubrick replied wistfully. “How does anyone decide on just one?”

  “Easy, pick one and run with it.”

  “Yes, but when you have enough credits and enough power—” he squeezed Heather for emphasis— “you can’t settle for just one. Not when the wonders and pleasures of the galaxy await you. Now, where was I?”

  I ignored the question, growing more impatient by the second. I needed a window to strike, but I didn’t doubt for a second that Oubrick would cut her throat in an instant if I wasn’t careful.

  “That’s right, the night roster,” Oubrick said with a sniff. “Imagine my surprise when I looked more closely at the building’s night roster to read the name Mr. Flint Reed.” He paused, as if expecting a reaction from me, but I gave him the pleasure of none. “Oh, who am I kidding!” he said in a sudden outburst. “I already knew you worked here! Killing two birds with one stone? It was an opportunity I just couldn’t pass up. I mean, did you ever consider how easy it was for you to pick up this extra shift?”

  I squinted at him.

  “And did Mrs. Reed ever think to consider just how easy it was for her to get a job transfer to Psylon Five? No,” he said, teeth drawn tight. “No one ever does.”

  “You’re saying you’re behind our employers’ actions,” I said, trying to follow this madman’s logic.

  “In a manner of speaking. But managing them directly would be too tedious, too messy. Instead, the people I work for… we make things happen. And no one’s the wiser. Why should they be? People don’t think things through for themselves. They just live their lives, believing each new opportunity is a matter of chance, looking to see how they can take advantage of it for their own gain, and never once considering what it might have cost others in the process.”

  “Sounds like you’ve lost something, then,” I said, circling back the other way, looking for my moment to strike. I just had to keep him talking. He’d slip up somewhere—every perp did.

  “Funny you should say that, Mr. Reed,” Oubrick said. “Or should I say, former Detective Reed.”

  I slowed at the sound of my old title. It didn’t mean much, of course, as anyone could find my name on the Gal-net and do a background check. Hells, the news footage of the famous incident were still easy enough to find. My old partners sent me the clips on my birthday or when they were drunk. But something about the way Oubrick
said my name sounded odd. Like he had a secret.

  “Why’s that funny?” I asked. I was willing to play his little game if it kept him talking. All I needed to do was get him off balance.

  “Because the thing I lost is the thing you took,” Oubrick replied.

  “It was all your henchmen, wasn’t it,” I said. “Well, that’s what you get for hiring your cousins. Ugly sons of bitches too.”

  Oubrick laughed. “I see why you got fired now, Detective Reed. Belligerent, independent, problems with authority. Your file had it right.”

  My file? I didn’t like how close to home this guy was getting. Maybe he really had done background checks on me and Heather. Hells, he probably did on everyone in the building—he seemed sadistic enough. The man probably enjoyed all his voyeuristic snooping.

  “Your file also said you—how did it go again?—posed a threat to the safety of others when placed in high-intensity situations. Now why would they say that, Mr. Reed?”

  Who was this son of a bitch? And how in the hells had he gotten ahold of the chief’s confidential report on me? “You’re going to let Heather go now or else—”

  “Ah, ah, ah, Mr. Reed. You asked what I lost, and that’s a question worth answering.”

  I took a step toward him.

  “I’ll slit her throat,” Oubrick said, his tone suddenly dark. “Just as easily as you shot my son.”

  “Your son?” I echoed.

  “It was a spring night on April nineteenth,” Oubrick said as if beginning a child’s bedtime story. The date stabbed me in the heart. It was the night of the Sunset Street raid. The night that Devin was gunned down. “There was a raid—”

  “On Sunset Street,” I finished.

  “Oh, so you do remember,” Oubrick said, glaring at me.

  “Not really.” I waved my hand with dismissive air. “We killed plenty of thugs that night.”

  “Including a kid who you thought was packing a weapon. But what was he holding?”

  Godsdammit. He was talking about the kid that Lessard shot in the alley. Oubrick was the kid’s father?

  “I’m talking to you!” Oubrick screamed. “What was he holding, Chief Detective Reed?”

  Heather writhed as the blade flicked across her skin, drawing blood. I looked between her and Oubrick, both their faces contorted for very different reasons.

  “He was carrying a bag of groceries,” I said. Was my wife really about to pay with her life for something that Lessard did? Gods, I despised that man.

  “That’s right. Just a bag of groceries. He was the new kid, sent on an errand, trying to find his place in the world.”

  I shrugged. “Eh, he could have found a better place than Sunset Street,” I said.

  Oubrick’s face went beet red. “What did you say?”

  Why, hello little nerve. Mind if I pinch you?

  “I said, he must not have been the brightest kid in the school yard if the place in the world he chose was Sunset Street,” I said. “Or maybe it was just bad fathering.”

  Oubrick pushed Heather forward a step. “You’d best watch your tongue,” he seethed.

  “Of course,” I said, acting like I was talking to myself, “his mother could have been a real bitch too.”

  “Shut up! Shut up!”

  “Easy, Oubrick,” I said, feeling that I’d regained control of the situation. “I don’t want anyone else to get hurt. Let me put my weapon down.”

  The man’s eyes were wide with rage, and the veins on his neck engorged. This guy really needed a therapist. I knelt slowly, making a grand gesture of laying my spear on the hangar bay floor. I repeated my last sentence again, placing special emphasis on the fact that I was laying my weapon down. Neuro-linguistic programming was more real than the general public cared to admit.

  I stood up slowly and placed my hands behind my head. When I did so, however, my fingers wrapped around the handle of the sword lying down my spine.

  “Back, back,” Oubrick said, nodding his head toward the edge of the hangar’s opening.

  I began walking backward and Oubrick followed with Heather. The wind outside had picked up and whipped at my hair. I almost chanced a glance over the edge but thought better of it; the last thing I needed right now was a sudden bout of vertigo. But I am on Lars’s special juice, I thought to myself and wondered if it would make a difference.

  “This must be really satisfying for you,” I said. “Getting to kill the cop who gunned down your son while stealing stuff from Mr. Oragga. Seems you have everything you want.”

  “Don’t forget killing your wife,” Oubrick said, strengthening his grip on Heather. He pushed her closer to me.

  Just one more step, I thought.

  “We can add that in too, sure,” I said.

  Oubrick looked puzzled, tilting his head slightly. “You seem calm for a man who’s about to lose everything,” the man said.

  “Lose everything?” I let out a short laugh. “I thought you’d already have guessed it by now.”

  “Guessed what, Detective Reed?”

  “I’m a divorced security guard working the graveyard.”

  “And?”

  “I have nothing to lose.”

  My hands tightened around the sword’s handle. I pulled it over my head, unsheathing it, and brought it down on Oubrick’s head in a single motion. The man raised his knife and barely parried my blow. But the sword’s edge still managed to graze his skull and produced a spout of blood.

  Oubrick cursed and released Heather. To her credit, she dropped to the ground and let her knee slam into Oubrick’s foot. Definitely on purpose. She’d done that to me once during a tussle and I’d limped for a week. Oubrick backhanded her and she fell to the side. The blow made my blood boil, but at least Heather was clear.

  I swung again, stepping away from the open air, and pressed Oubrick back. He blocked a blow to his left and another one to his right. While he had the quicker weapon, I had the longer one. I pushed him back toward the crates where we had started, hoping to make him stumble among the items. Instead, he stepped clear of my thrust and spun down to the floor, retrieving my spear.

  Well, that sucks.

  Oubrick leaped from the ground, spear twisting in his hands. He feigned left, then right, then left again, and then jabbed toward my torso. I stepped aside, parried the lunge with my sword, and then spun away from the blow. My sword continued in a full circle and came around behind Oubrick.

  Our weapons clattered together as he blocked my blow, and then he leaned in, face mere centimeters from mine. The punk growled as the blood from his head wound made its way over his lips.

  “Gods, your breath stinks,” I said, grunting. “No wonder your son left home.”

  Oubrick roared, shoving me away. Then he whirled the spear around and swung the tip at me. I leaped back, arms raised, the point barely missing my midsection. Oubrick continued with the spear’s momentum, turning in a circle, and then brought the weapon in tight. He lunged again.

  This time, I grabbed the flat of my sword and dropped to my knees, pushing the spear over my head. I was under him now, but I wouldn’t have time to stab him. Instead, I drove the cross guard into his gut.

  Oubrick let out a breath and gasped, doubling over. As his head dropped, I met it with an upper cut from my sword’s handle, but most of the force was deflected by his spear shaft getting in the way. Oubrick recovered quickly and drove one of the ends down at me. I rolled away, still feeling the energy from Lars’s magic juice. Gods, he needs to market that stuff.

  The spear blade rang as it hit the floor where I’d squatted a moment before. I brought the sword around and chopped at Oubrick’s lower back. But he moved to the other side of his shaft just as my blade struck the wood. Splinters shot out from the blow as I heard a loud crack! I’d cut the weapon in half.

  Oubrick held two short shafts, each with a blade on the end. He moved them in small motions, much like a boxer readied his fists. We circled one another for a few seconds as we bot
h caught our breath. Then I came in fast, swinging from the right. But Oubrick parried my blow with one shaft and followed through with the second, smacking me on the shoulder. The wood met bone and sent a bolt of pain down my arm. That was the first real discomfort I’d felt since injecting myself with the performance enhancers, and I hated to think how bad I’d feel once I came down from the high.

  I turned to face Oubrick and swung again, this time ready for his counter. His second shaft came toward my head. I caught the shaft with my left hand, but he wasn’t letting go either. He lunged at me with his left spear, but I parried the strike. I brought my sword around the inside and flicked my wrist, but he, too, blocked my attack.

  I applied pressure on the shaft over our heads, trying to twist the weapon out of his hand. If I’d learned anything in the academy, it was how to leverage the limits of the human body’s joints and manipulate pressure points to subdue assailants, skills I’d used many times over the years. I rolled my wrist forward and pressed toward Oubrick. This, in turn, caused his wrist to roll back and twist at an unnatural angle, producing a short cry of pain from the man.

  He let go of the shaft but immediately swiped at it with his other weapon, knocking it clear of my hand. The strike jarred my hand and sent a shock up my arm. I took advantage of his exposed flank and lunged, the tip of my blade slicing a small cut through his business suit.

  He grunted and stepped back, pulling off his jacket and undoing his tie. “So, that’s how it’s going to be?”

  “Pretty much,” I said, looking at the red stain leaking through his shirt. “Although you don’t need to take your clothes off if you want to feel my sword. I save that for the ladies.”

  That was when Heather leaped onto Oubrick’s back and bit his ear. Judging by the blood around her wrists, she’d found a shard of something to cut her restraints. She always was a resourceful woman.

  25

  Oubrick screamed as Heather tore his flesh away. Blood poured down the perp’s neck as he spun around, poking at Heather with his spear blade. She cried out as the point found her ribs then let go of his neck. Oubrick flung her aside, throwing her into the crates. She toppled over them and fell onto the floor. Other than what I hoped was a minor cut to her side and some general bruising, she’d be okay. But she had to stay out of this fight—she was no trained combatant. She’d just get hurt again. Or worse.