Danse Macabre

by Kory M. Shrum

  * * *

  Lou woke the moment Konstantine grabbed the knife. Had he shifted toward her, rather than away, she would have snapped his neck. But only a heartbeat later, he was sawing clumsily at the leather strap binding him to the bed.

  She hadn’t meant to fall asleep beside him. Not that it was their first time sleeping side by side, but she thought it suggested a certain intimacy. She didn’t want him to get the wrong idea.

  When he slipped from the bed to check his phone, a sound caught her attention. Downstairs.

  The front door creaked open, and she detected the muffled scuff of boots on a stone floor.

  She strained, listening harder. Three, maybe four men had entered the apartment. They brought the cold morning air with them. The frosty air traveled up the stairs and licked the side of Lou’s face, since she was closest to the landing.

  Konstantine slid a hand around her waist.

  She turned, and saw immediately he meant to speak. He had the look that men got when they wanted more of her. Sex, of course, but also answers to their questions: Who are you? What’s your name? Can I see you again?

  Konstantine already knew these simple answers. So what did he want from her?

  She placed a hand over his mouth before he spoke. Let the assailants think he was asleep.

  Then he cocked his head, and his eyes slid toward the stairs.

  So his senses weren’t totally useless, she thought, though a hair slower than her own.

  She reached down and grabbed the top of the cover bunched at her knees. She pulled it up and over her head, positioning Konstantine so that they lay face-to-face, her knee between his. She wrapped her hand around the blade, the one she’d made him hold between his teeth. It would have a very different job now.

  She shrouded them in darkness, holding tight so that they could both bleed through. Konstantine piggybacked on her own talent.

  The warm bed gave way to cold stone.

  She felt him stiffen, his body wedged between mattress and floor. It was harder for him to be beneath the bed. It gave her a momentary appreciation of her compact frame. Sometimes hiding under beds was simply useful. Konstantine slid to one side and gave them both room enough to move.

  She rolled away from him, positioning herself as first line of defense. She wrapped her hand around the handle of the knife until the grip felt good.

  Lou caught a glimpse of a jaw and throat before the torso appeared, black-clad. Then legs, and boots with a thick rubber sole.

  A phone rang, and Konstantine stiffened behind her.

  The last man coming up the stairs hesitated, eye-level.

  He peered into the dark under the bed.

  He saw the blade, she thought. It must’ve caught the light.

  He raised his gun, pointing it at her.

  Lou launched herself out from underneath the bed and plunged the knife through the slats in the railing. The blade struck home, slipping into the man’s left eye socket and scraping bone.

  He howled. The man wrenched himself away, the blade still buried deep in the socket. He missed a step and crashed backwards out of sight. Something shattered at the base of the stairs, but Lou had no time to worry about that collision. Already she was rolling onto her back, looking for the other two attackers.

  She heard boots scuff stone.

  But before they appeared, the mattress exploded suddenly, popping upward away from its frame. This made it easier to stand, and Lou was on her feet in two heartbeats. Someone cried out as Konstantine shoved the mattress against the wall, slamming that man into the plaster behind it. Konstantine produced a gun and fired two shots through the mattress into the man.

  The half-suffocated man returned three reflexive shots, ejecting cotton and fluff into the bedroom. It was like snow falling around them.

  Konstantine hissed, pulling back.

  He brought the mattress with him, exposing a third would-be assassin. Lou kicked him hard, and he sailed into the bathroom, lost his balance, and fell. The back of his head knocked against the toilet seat.

  Konstantine was over him, firing a shot into his unconscious face before Lou fully recovered.

  Lou went downstairs to find it empty. The front door to the apartment stood open, revealing the entryway and part of the courtyard below. But if there had been a fourth man, he had fled at the sound of fighting above.

  She crossed to the open door. She shut it, locked it, and peered out the curtained window. She saw no one.

  At the base of the stairs was the man she’d stabbed in the eye. His ankle was bent in the wrong direction, and he lay on a pile of glass. Lou couldn’t tell what it was he’d landed on. A sculpture perhaps? Some piece of art? Whatever it was, it would never be whole again. The shards shimmering in the first specks of morning light were too small to reassemble, even with glue and a steady hand.

  She checked this man’s pulse. Nothing. She was unsure if the blood loss or fall had finished what she’d started. It didn’t matter.

  Mounting the stairs, she half expected to get attacked herself. But no one was left. There was a dead man on the floor of the bathroom and another slumped against the wall.

  Then there was Konstantine himself. He stood in his bedroom, fingers inspecting his left hip.

  He was naked, head-to-toe. The right buttocks and thigh were bright red with his blood, as if a broad stroke of a paintbrush had licked up the side of his leg.

  She had the sudden urge to lick the side of his leg and taste the blood herself.

  He met her gaze. “I’m fine.”

  “I can see that.”

  “It only grazed me.”

  “You’ll live,” she agreed, eyebrow arched. She wasn’t sure what else he wanted from her. There was an anger in his voice she hadn’t expected.

  She wasn’t sure if his irritation was the result of the flesh wound, or if he was angry to have had his bedroom so carelessly destroyed.

  He flipped the mattress back into place.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You aren’t killing,” he said. No, he accused her.

  “The man at the base of the stairs would disagree. And Clyde Baker, I’m sure.”

  Konstantine waved his hand. “You know what I mean. You aren’t wearing your vest or your guns, and you aren’t even trying.”

  He pointed at the man in the bathroom as if the sprawling corpse were evidence.

  “Whatever you want to say, say it,” she said. She had no patience for feelings or games.

  He bent and lifted a plastic case from the floor. He popped open the lid and began riffling through its contents with impatient fingers. But slowly, she saw the transformation happen. He composed himself.

  “How do you intend to kill Petrov without a gun?” he asked. His voice was even now, almost devoid of emotion.

  She had no answer for this.

  He wet gauze with antiseptic and began wiping at the wound. She hated to see him do it. He was only widening the cut. It was stupid but she wasn’t going to help him. Not now.

  “Come on,” he said, his face practically sneering. “Petrov wants to kill you. How do you intend to stay alive?”

  She thought of the boy again. The way he looked with his back in the snow. The bright crimson in his cheeks, his eyes shining in the moonlight.

  Please, he’d said. Whatever my father’s done, that’s not me.

  Is that what he’d said?

  Lou felt her mind couldn’t be trusted. It seemed to embellish the scene with more detail every time she revisited it.

  This time he looked even younger than possible. His face was as round as a boy’s face with no hint of facial hair.

  She knew this was a lie. She knew this was a trick her mind played on her. This didn’t matter. What mattered was why? What was her mind trying to tell her?

  She didn’t have time to consider the possibilities because at that moment, the compass inside her whirled to life, throbbing with shrill alarm.

  King. Piper. Mel. Three di
fferent pulls, but magnified because they called to her from the same place. Desperate pleading threefold—it was the most compelling cry for help she’d ever received.

  “I have to go. They need me,” she said.

  “Yes, Petrov is making his move,” Konstantine agreed. He snapped his supply box shut and bent to retrieve his pants from the floor.

  Lou moved toward his closet.

  “Wait,” he cried out. He grabbed her wrist before she could fade.

  She tore herself from his grip.

  “Please don’t go unprepared,” he begged. “He will be ready for you.”

  She thought of her own arsenal. Of the small hidden chamber beneath her kitchen island and all the guns and grenades she kept there. A flamethrower and pipe bombs, not to mention enough artillery for a small war.

  None of it would help her. She needed that familiar fire. The righteous rage that would well up and overtake her, carrying her through the battle. But her fire was as cold as a snowcapped mountain. Just as silent and desolate.

  “I want to come with you,” he said, and pulled a shirt down over his head. “Especially if you aren’t—well.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “I can still help,” he insisted. “I need to make one phone call. Maybe two.”

  The pleading cry in her chest deepened. She felt their fear. All three of them were very, very afraid. Fear was usually the precursor to pain. They didn’t have much time.

  “You have one minute,” she said. “Then I’m leaving with or without you.”

  27

  “Russians?” Piper asked, and swallowed the vomit rising up the back of her throat. She realized her decision to drink three hurricanes on the night of her impending murder was the worst decision of her life. Man, she really was stupid.

  Mel locked the door before pulling a chair over to wedge under the handle. “How should I know? But I don’t need to be psychic to see they came to hurt somebody.”

  King pulled the .357 and held it up, pointing at the ceiling.

  “Wow,” Piper said, trying to steady herself by widening her stance. “That’s serious.”

  “Let’s go down the fire escape,” King said.

  Piper gave him a pleading look.

  “You got up here,” he said. “You can get down, too.”

  She couldn’t argue with that. Of course, her urge to puke on herself was much stronger now than it had been before the adrenaline spike. The idea that she was going to have to fight her way out of this wasn’t helping her nerves one bit.

  “Or we could call the police?” Piper said with a shrug. “They might skedaddle?”

  Something slammed into the front door of King’s apartment. The chair bounced. The frame bucked in place. A crack split the white plaster above the frame, raining dust onto the kitchen floor.

  “No time!” King hissed. “Go.”

  Piper fumbled with the balcony door latch before she managed to get it open. She inhaled cold winter air. It cleared her head.

  “Go!” King shouted again but she thought he was talking to Mel, who seemed unwilling to leave his side. She’d taken up a kitchen knife.

  Leaning over the balcony railing, Piper eyed the fire escape suspiciously. She placed one hand on the cold metal and shifted her weight so she could throw her leg over the ledge.

  But it began vibrating.

  The iron bar in her grip shook and rattled against her palm. Piper wondered if it was some trick of her inebriated mind. It wasn’t until the man looked up, his pale face full of moonlight, that she realized someone was climbing up the fire escape. The vibration she felt in her palm was his ascent.

  Terror sparked through her. And she vomited.

  Her stomach convulsed once, twice, and ejected all its burning contents onto the climber.

  He screamed. The fire escape rattled louder than ever, and Piper was fairly certain he’d crashed to the pavement below.

  Had she killed him? That drop was no joke. Oh man, death by vomit. What a way to go.

  If they were lucky, the climber cracked his head open on the pavement and cleared their path to escape. The cold bar in her grip was still. She dared to peer over the side again.

  In the dim light, she barely noted the dumpster opposite the alley and the pale outline of a door leading into another shop.

  Then the rung was vibrating again, the cold bar warming. Another pale face turned up toward the moonlight, grimacing at her.

  “If you fucking puke on me,” he said, calling up to her in accented English. “I will slit your throat.”

  Piper grabbed one of King’s patio chairs and threw it over the side of the balcony. It connected with the man square in the face, and he fell back off the railing, but didn’t lose his grip entirely. One hand still latched tightly, he resumed his climb, murmuring a lot of words that Piper didn’t understand. She was fairly certain she understood the meaning though. He was probably promising her a slow, painful death.

  “In that case, I’ve got nothing to lose,” she said, and grabbed the second chair. She pitched it over the ledge into the dark.

  The man cried out, wailing during his descent as the chair clattered in the alleyway.

  But then a third man mounted the escape.

  “Man, you guys are like a barrel of monkeys,” she groaned, abandoning her post.

  She pried open the balcony door and wedged herself into the warm apartment. “There are more of them on the fire escape, and you’re out of patio chairs.”

  Whatever thought she meant to say next evaporated. King and Mel were not holding the door closed. In fact, the door had been kicked inward off its hinges and lay in the middle of the kitchen floor. A spray of wooden shards littered the tile.

  A man with a bleeding forearm had a gun to Mel’s head. Beside him, another intruder had his gun pointed at King.

  Upon Piper’s entry, a third man pulled his gun and pointed it at her.

  “Whoa,” she said, taking a step back.

  “Now it is impossible to sacrifice yourself and save both of them,” the man said, apparently speaking to King.

  “This is twice”—Mel grumbled—“that I’ve had a gun held to my head in this kitchen.”

  “Toss it to me,” the man instructed. His blood dripped onto the white checkered tiles. Mel must have slashed him good with the knife at least once.

  “No,” Piper said, when King thumbed on his safety and lowered the gun.

  “Be quiet,” King said.

  And while being quiet was the last thing Piper wanted to do now with so many guns in the room, she obeyed.

  The balcony door snapped open behind her. She hadn’t even fully turned around before a swift kick in the back of the leg dropped her. Her knees hit the floor, throbbing. She didn’t need to know who was behind her. The stench of vomit was sickening. She was going to puke again.

  King was the second to hit his knees as his hands were wrenched behind his head.

  “Call for help,” King said.

  “Call for help, and we will kill you,” the man holding Mel said.

  But King was still looking at Piper, his gaze boring into hers.

  Then she understood. He wanted her to think of Lou.

  Seeming to sense her thoughts, King turned those desperate eyes on Mel.

  “All of us,” he said. “Now.”

  Piper thought she saw a flicker in Mel’s expression, some sort of knowing comprehension. Then the man behind her threw her to the ground. Her bangles clattered against the tile, and the scarf around her head loosened, falling free.

  “Tape their mouths shut,” he said.

  Lou…Lou…Lou…Come on. We need you.

  The familiar stretch and rip of duct tape sounded somewhere behind her before a rough hand squeezed her mouth so hard her jaw ached. The tape was slapped over her puckered lips.

  King was next before the roll was tossed to Mel’s captor. He pulled her head back by her hair and slapped the metallic strip over her mouth.

 
Piper hated this, every single second of it. They were the good guys. And King and Mel were the nicest people in the world. They didn’t deserve this. None of them deserved to die.

  Lou, we need you.

  Piper braced herself for what she knew was next.

  It was only two breaths before a sharp strike connected with the back of her neck. A jolt of electric pain rocketed down her spine, and the darkness rose up to meet her.

  * * *

  King woke first. He suspected it was the murderous throbbing of his dead leg that woke him. The bullet that tore through his lower back three months ago made its lingering presence known. Never mind the months of physical therapy and the hard-fought healing behind him. A wound like that, no matter how old, couldn’t tolerate hours on a concrete floor.

  If it had been hours. King wasn’t sure.

  His eyes fluttered open once, noting only distant, nebulous light. Then again as his mind fought for consciousness. Objects swam in and out of his vision. It wasn’t unlike shaking off the mantle of a particularly thick sleep.

  But then the light brightened. The shapes sharpened. He pushed himself up to sitting and took in the room. A concrete floor made bright by an overhead light. Red tool boxes lined one wall. Overhead he saw four strange platforms.

  It took him several moments of considerable staring before he realized what he was looking at. The strange pivots overhead were the platforms that would launch a car into the air for an oil change. They were in a garage. The stench of oil and grease made sense now.

  The concrete floor stretched long and unbroken between pillars. It wasn’t a quick lube place then. No one was running around down below. There were four bays, each capped with a white metallic door that no doubt rolled up to let the vehicles in.

  Fitting, he thought, knowing they would tune up on him sooner or later.

  But he preferred that to the alternative. Should this go south faster than it already had, he didn’t know what he would do. He couldn’t watch Mel and Piper endure the violence.

  If that happened…

  A metal chair scraped across the concrete floor. The wretched screeching split his head in two. Both Mel and Piper stirred on the floor beside him. Mel was closest on his left side, Piper beside her.