Weapons

by Matt Rogers

  ‘Everything okay, Victor?’ King said.

  ‘Fine, sir. Just … some personal problems. I’ll be okay.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You’ve never called me sir.’

  ‘Sorry, Jason. Got a bit of bad news. Family matters.’

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Right. Well, I hope everything’s okay.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  King nodded and tapped a palm on the hard shiny surface of the counter, wondering what else he could say.

  But there was nothing.

  And he figured, Shit happens. Loved ones die. Terminal diagnoses are made. Life goes on. It wasn’t right to be inherently suspicious about everything. Victor was acting jittery as hell, but what could it have to do with anything that had happened earlier that night? Unless news of the slaughter was already doing the rounds.

  Maybe that was it.

  Chaos on the streets of New York.

  Victor, worried that gunmen would stream through the revolving doors and riddle him with bullets where he sat.

  King said, ‘It’s okay, Victor. You’re safe here.’

  The man looked up. ‘What?’

  ‘You’re safe.’

  ‘Okay.’

  King shrugged, at a conversational dead end, and moved past the reception desk. ‘Have a good night, buddy.’

  ‘You too.’

  King stepped into the private elevator for the upper floors, swiped his keycard, and punched in his floor number. The doors whisked closed, and he shrugged off a feeling of discontent. It had been a long night. The crash had smashed him to and fro, bruising and bloodying him under the shirt.

  He needed the isolation and protection of his apartment, to unwind and take stock of his injuries, and figure out their next move.

  The elevator shot upward.

  26

  As soon as the elevator doors closed on Jason King, Victor hyperventilated in the lobby.

  He hated this. He’d never been put in a position like this in his life. Every morsel of fear in his body was thrumming inside his head, making conversation impossible. He’d been told to act normal. He couldn’t do it. It was the simplest request in the world, and he still couldn’t do it.

  He wondered if they would kill him too, at the end of this, for his abysmal failure.

  Because maybe now King knew.

  Victor wiped sweat off his brow, straightened his creased suit, and tried to control his breathing.

  And thank God he did.

  Because ten minutes later Will Slater stepped into the lobby, suspecting nothing awry.

  He rehearsed the lines in his head.

  I haven’t seen King yet.

  Then he said, ‘Hey, Will. You okay?’

  27

  King immediately knew something was up.

  The elevator doors opened, and he stepped out quietly and looked around.

  He and Slater had their own private corridor running from one front door to the other. It was architecturally superb, with an angled ceiling and one-off art pieces adorning the walls, and imported Egyptian rugs, and a muted minimalistic colour scheme. They’d modelled their own penthouse suites after the building’s style. Whoever had developed the structure had meticulous attention to detail.

  But it wasn’t right.

  There was a different vibe. He couldn’t pinpoint it, but even with a raging headache and an aching body, even deep in the throes of an adrenaline crash, he could sense someone had been here that hadn’t belonged. Call it intuition, call it a subconscious eye for detail. Call it whatever you want. But as he crept toward his front door, he listened to the insulated silence and knew nothing was at it seemed.

  Victor had been hiding something.

  King knew it instantly.

  Everyone can be bought.

  He reached his door, and laid a hand flat on it, then knocked three times. He kept it subdued, as if he was embarrassed to be disturbing the owner.

  Like he was staff.

  He took the Glock out of his jacket, and pressed the barrel to the peephole, and prayed that whoever was on the other side was that stupid.

  He counted to three, and pulled the trigger.

  There was a dull explosion of fragments as he shattered the thin membrane of glass. Someone on the other side of the door let out a primal grunt. It was uncontrollable — they’d been hit by a hollow point bullet, and it must have blown out the back in an explosion of blood and muscle and tissue. King figured he’d hit them in the shoulder.

  He slammed his other palm down on the handle and shouldered the door inward.

  He hit someone on the other side.

  The guy was smart, but King was overwhelming him with offence. Most people, after taking a hollow point round to the shoulder, fell to the floor in unimaginable pain. This man had thrown himself at the door in a last-ditch attempt to stop King forcing his way in.

  But King was two hundred and twenty pounds of fast-twitch muscle fibres, and he was angry as hell.

  So he floored the guy with a single shove, using the door as a battering ram, and he aimed the Glock through the narrow sliver of space and put another hollow point round through the man’s head. He took in crucial details — the guy was big, muscular, wearing combat attire, and had a balaclava over his face.

  All King needed to see to understand his life was on the line.

  Then he reached out and gripped the handle and pulled the door closed again, and he waited with bated breath and his heart in his ears.

  Sure enough, dull reverberations sounded on the other side of the door — thudding impacts, but without the accompanying roar of unsuppressed gunfire. The penthouse suites were fully soundproofed, and both King and Slater’s front doors were bulletproof. They valued their privacy, and it helped them sleep at night if they knew they were sleeping in a fortress in the sky.

  But that hadn’t stopped the building’s staff from betraying them.

  King decided to wait. He held the Glock at the ready, one hand underneath his wrist, the other fixed on the door.

  He had endless patience.

  It turned out that the enemy didn’t.

  They must have thought he’d ran away, which proved their lack of experience in live combat situations. You could simulate the real thing all day long, but it wasn’t the real thing. Maybe in theory they’d told themselves they could wait it out, but now they were stuck staring at their comrade’s corpse in the entranceway, wondering how to proceed.

  So, before long, someone came and hurled the door open.

  King put one in his forehead.

  28

  The balaclava exploded, and the guy collapsed before he could even get a shot off.

  King stayed right where he was.

  No-one else materialised. King looked past the two bodies, to the luxuries of his penthouse and the sweeping view of Central Park at night. Nothing looked out of place. It wasn’t a robbery. It was too calculated for that.

  Icy awareness trickled up the back of his neck. He knew there were more. But they weren’t showing themselves. He’d bought a ticket to a waiting game, and he couldn’t stay out here in the corridor for long with the knowledge that Victor had betrayed him. It wouldn’t be difficult to send reinforcements up in the private elevator by overriding the security protocol.

  No, King had to go inside.

  Like a warped haunted house walkthrough.

  Danger at every corner.

  With his heart rate spiking he stepped over the threshold and gently pushed the door shut with a boot. It got quiet. Real quiet. The penthouse was soundproof, and there wasn’t a peep from the bustling New York streets below.

  There wasn’t the din of traffic, or the ambient murmur of pedestrians, or even the soft whispering of the elevators moving up and down in their shafts.

  There was nothing at all.

  And he couldn’t hear anything important — espe
cially not the subtleties of a trained hostile trying their best to wait in silence. Gunshots in an enclosed space were ruinous for your hearing — he was surprised his eardrums were still somewhat intact after a lifetime of neglecting his senses.

  So with a high-pitched whining in his head, and a pounding ache behind his eyes, and the overall fatigue pressing down on his body, he moved forward.

  Into the unknown.

  There was a slight reaction to his left. He twisted that way and had the Glock trained on the corner of the wall before he’d even registered what he’d heard. He spotted the toe of a combat boot sliding back out of sight — there was a man there, lying in wait, and he’d begun a reckless charge before realising King was too close. Then he’d retreated.

  King lowered his aim and shot the guy in the foot.

  The hollow-point round exploded, and blood sprayed, and an involuntary wince sounded.

  King froze, plagued by indecision.

  Push forward? Throw yourself into the open?

  This might be the best chance you’ll get to capitalise.

  But he waited, and thank God he did, because a guy in a balaclava with an automatic rifle — some sort of carbine — reared around the right-hand corner. They’d been waiting there, one on each side, for him to come barrelling in. When he hadn’t, they’d been forced to improvise.

  King almost jumped out of his skin, but he controlled his instinctive responses and pivoted in that direction, smoothly lining up his aim.

  He fired.

  The bullet struck the throat, and went right through.

  There was too much unfolding at once. King hadn’t been keeping track of the number of rounds left in the clip. That thought distracted him as the guy went down, and prevented him from doing what he should have done immediately, which was to pivot back in the other direction.

  So when the guy on the left-hand side charged, King didn’t adjust his aim in time.

  The guy barrelled out into the hallway, operating on pure adrenaline. It must have been coursing through his veins, because his combat boot was a downright mess. A few of his toes no longer existed, and the hollow-point round had speared a jagged hole in the top of the boot. But he charged all the same, and swung his identical carbine around to put a few rounds through the top of King’s head.

  King saw this, and panicked, and lunged forward himself, and they met at close-range like a clash of titans.

  Skin met steel and flesh met bone, and no-one got shot in the chaos.

  The carbine fell from the man’s grip, and King raised his Glock to plant the barrel against the guy’s forehead, but a meaty forearm cracked him in the mouth and he tasted warm blood and felt his head rattle on his shoulders like a bowling ball. He tried to readjust his aim but his equilibrium was all off.

  The Glock was no longer in his hand.

  He didn’t know where it was.

  He was dizzy.

  Nausea rose up in his chest.

  The guy in the balaclava ducked down, wrapped his arms around King’s mid-section, locked his fingers together behind the small of his back…

  King knew exactly how to take a man to the ground. He knew all about wrestling technique, and single-legs and double-legs and proper leverage and technique.

  He wasn’t used to being on the receiving end.

  The guy in the balaclava picked him up — all two hundred and twenty pounds of him — and lifted him high and slammed him down.

  King felt dizzying vertigo, followed by the crunch of the back of his head against the ground.

  Now there was an angry hostile on top of him, straddling him, raining down punches.

  If one got through, it’d knock his brain into Neverland.

  King pressed his forearms to each side of his head, adopting a defensive posture, and protected himself as best he could.

  And terror rippled through him as knuckles crashed down against his face.

  29

  Slater gave himself a rudimentary medical examination in the elevator.

  He figured he’d be okay. His headache was a little worse than usual. He was a seasoned veteran of knocks to the brain, but the way his skull had been smashed to one side in the car wreck unnerved him. He had a deep ache running down each side of his neck, and a dull throbbing in the temples. His ribs hurt when he inhaled, but they weren’t broken. There were cuts and gashes on his arms and face, but they were superficial. Overall, his condition would have put nearly anyone in the hospital for a few days, but to someone like Slater it was nothing out of the ordinary.

  He needed a drink.

  And he needed to rest.

  Then he needed to figure out what the hell he and King had got themselves into.

  The elevator reached his floor and the doors whispered open. He made straight for his place, but before he went in he stopped and glanced at King’s closed door a few dozen feet further down. It was closed, but he could only see a sliver of it from this angle. He paused for a second, and listened out for anything awry, but the corridor was dead silent. Besides, his ears were ringing from the skirmish earlier.

  He unlocked his door, and picked up something on the edge of his hearing.

  Like the muted grunts and impacts of a fistfight.

  But it was barely above a whisper, and he chalked it up to his own imagination and stepped into his penthouse.

  He stood inside the threshold and let the door swing shut. The sudden isolation, coupled with the luxury, threw him off. He wasn’t used to this. Most of his prior combat experience took place in harrowing, desolate locations across the globe. He usually had no resources to rely on, no comrades to operate with, and no backup to call in. He had to fight, and bleed, and win. Then the real battle started. Because he had to extract himself from hostile territory, often relying on ration packs and water purification tablets to survive.

  Now he stood in a fifteen million dollar penthouse and tasted clean air, and he had cold water in the tap and healthy food in the fridge and a memory-foam mattress to sleep on. He strode over to the glass and pressed his palms against it, taking the weight off his feet. He stared out at the city lights.

  He smiled.

  Maybe this was the life for him.

  He’d cheated death, and fought for his life, and overcome the odds for the millionth time…

  … and now he could recover optimally.

  He went to the fridge and pulled out two plastic containers filled with pre-prepared food. He ate chicken and braised beef and smoked salmon and avocado and spinach and salad. No dressing. Nothing unhealthy. He washed it down with thirty ounces of water and stumbled over to the Eames chair by the window. He sat down, put his feet up, and sunk into a deep meditative trance, visualising his cells healing themselves, repairing his body, preparing for the fight to come.

  Because there would be a fight to come.

  Without question.

  There always was.

  And he continued sitting there without making a sound, unaware that on the other side of the soundproof wall his closest friend was battling for dear life.

  30

  King absorbed most of the punches across his forearms and wrists, but the guy hit like a truck.

  He had considerable technique, and a muscular athletic frame to boot, so there was a certain savageness to his strikes. He wasn’t blowing all his energy in the first few seconds, unloading everything in wild looping haymakers. Instead he was dropping fists like pistons, trying his best to split the guard, but King was equally as talented at defending.

  King caught a mouthful of knuckles as the guy drilled a punch straight between his forearms, ricocheting off his front row of teeth. He grunted in unrest, and realised he’d need to try something drastic to escape the position or risk getting beat to death where he lay.

  He couldn’t roll onto his stomach, because the guy was practiced in jiu-jitsu — King could tell from the way his adversary utilised leverage. The guy would reach down and slip an arm around King’s throat and choke him out
in less than a minute.

  But in a flash, King realised that was his only option.

  There was nothing else.

  He had to accept the choke, and hope to salvage the situation as his enemy’s arms were busy choking him unconscious.

  It was possibly the most terrifying experience of his life.

  With a racing heart he rolled onto his stomach, and the guy adjusted to straddle his lower back. Then it was a simple matter of slicing the arm around King’s throat and pulling tight.

  King felt the crushing pressure of the forearm against his trachea.

  And the devastating squeeze that followed.

  He gasped and opened his mouth wide and clawed for air, but he knew it was useless. Not only couldn’t he breathe, but the damage being inflicted with each passing second was obscene. His face turned red, and his eyes felt like they were set to pop out of his head, and the muscles in his neck screamed for relief, and his windpipe begged and pleaded for mercy.

  Amidst all that, King clambered to his feet, wearing a two hundred pound backpack that was simultaneously choking the life out of him.

  Ten seconds.

  He gave himself that long before it all went dark.

  Claustrophobia reared its head — he couldn’t shake off the grip, and they both knew that whatever happened now would lead to the end of the fight. Either King would go to sleep, or he’d manage to pry the hostile off his back, whereupon the guy’s arms would be so fatigued from squeezing that he would be helpless to defend himself.

  King stumbled a few steps, testing the weight of the guy on his back, and he realised he could handle it. Anyone else would have slumped to their knees, but King had unnatural strength forged from a lifetime of powerlifting.

  So he thundered out of the hallway, into the open-plan living area, and spotted a spiderweb of cracks spreading in all directions across the floor-to-ceiling glass.