Everyone Dies in the End #76

Zak

The stairs turned left at the next landing. The landing was typically sized, cleanly tiled, and well lit. Ahead and above someone shouted, and then the stairwell fell quiet. He held the M-16 in his left hand, with his right he motioned the woman to stay back as he edged along the wall. Zak had lifted a grenade from one of the bloody guards below. He drew the grenade from his pocket, pulled the pin, released the spoon, and counted to three. Three was pushing it. Zak knew that. The delay was typically no more than five seconds, but he didn’t want to give the shouting voice time to throw the grenade back, or the grenade time to bounce back on his own.

The grenade sailed to the landing above. Zak heard the metallic clacking as it rolled across the tiled floor above. Someone screamed, “Grenade!” and the palm-sized green globe exploded in confirmation.

“Now!” Zak ran, M-16 to his shoulder, boots thudding loudly against the stairs. Smoked swirled, two bodies lay still, another groaned as it writhed on the floor. Zak put a round in the groaner’s head, and then he surged into the foyer of the police station. Chaos reigned. Two partially nude women ran for the door, screaming. A bare-chested, teen jumped from a bench to his front, and grabbed for a pistol on his hip. Another three-round burst from Zak’s rifle stopped his grabbing. A tough rose from behind the duty sergeant’s desk to his left, rifle aimed at Zak. There wasn’t time to spin and shoot, but time wasn’t needed. Behind him the scattergun boomed, and the tough dropped dead. Zak looked back to see the woman, jacking two more rounds into the scattergun.

“Thanks.”

She shrugged. Two more of the guards fired from across the cavernous foyer, and ducked behind a row of seats. Their shots smacked harmlessly through the drywall behind them. Zak ducked and crept to the edge of the massive duty desk post. The desk sat on the deck of a raised, walled, station. He could feel the woman close up behind him.

“Fire a burst,” she whispered. “I’ll take them when they duck. I want one of them alive.” Zak nodded and returned the whisper. “On three.”

“One, two,” he sighted around the edge of the platform. He could just make out a bit of head hair behind the row of institutional chairs. Zak fired, and fired again. The hair dropped from sight, and the woman leapt. Not a normal leap, not a human leap. She flew over his head, landing on the seats of the chairs behind the head of hair. The seats held, the chairs were bolted to the floor. She fired the scattergun at something to the left of the head of hair, and the something exploded in a crimson mist. The head of hair raised its pistol to return fire, but the woman slapped the pistol from his hand, grabbed the man by the collar, and threw him against the wall. He hit with a thud and slid to the floor. In a flash she pulled a pair of shells from her bandolier and loaded the scattergun.

Zak swept the room with the muzzle of his gun, his eyes viewing the carnage through the sights of the M-16. Nothing moved. Dry wall dust, raised by the impact of tens of bullets, drifted through the air, writhing like a translucent snake. The smell of gunpowder and blood hung heavy, and the bare-chested teen moaned softly. Through the front door Zak could see the dark evening sky, stars hidden by the city lights. No one looked in the station. Zak guessed Philadelphians had learned that cats weren’t the only thing killed by curiosity.

The woman dropped to the floor, silent as death. Zak stood. The woman and he were the only things still moving.

She knelt and ran her finger through the blood oozing from the corpse in front of her. She smelled the blood, licked her finger, and spat. “Too much gunpowder,” she grimaced. “It ruins the taste.”

The man against the wall, the man she had thrown like he was no more than a five pound sack of sugar, groaned. “Ah, our future informant,” she grinned, her teeth still pink. She lifted the man to a chair and motioned to a glass of water on the duty sergeant’s desk. “Give me that.”

Zak complied and she threw the water on the man’s face. He came to, sputtering hard. The woman smiled at him, no more than three inches from his face, and the man blanched. Zak shivered. She glanced up.

“The door? Are you watching the door?”

Guiltily he walked toward the door and leaned against the wall, positioning himself so as not to be seen from the outside, rifle at the ready. Watching the door was okay by him. Zak didn’t want to see what would happen to the dude in the chair if he didn’t give the woman the answers she wanted. As it turns out, Zak had nothing to fear. The interrogation was anti-climatic; the woman only had to ask once.

“Where is Vader?”

Zak had no idea who Vader was, not unless she was talking about an evil lord from a science fiction movie, but the man did, and he eagerly told the woman. She thanked the guard, and then murdered him on the spot.