Silence In Numbers: File One (7 page)

The smell was as bad as the sights, things he’d never wanted to recognize the scent of assailing his senses. It was all he could do to keep from curling up and crying right there, forgetting the people around him and trying to ignore the horrific reality.

But that was before he heard the laughing.

The cops who were on the ground around him were good people, mostly. Sure, there was the odd bad egg, but they had all chosen to make protection their profession. Most had families, children, wives, husbands, homes they wouldn’t be going home to at the end of the day. And Sano could accept that, he could; he already knew from personal experience that life was unforgiving and harsh. Not cruel, but harsh. People died, he knew that.

But he couldn’t accept that the people who were killing them were laughing about it. Those lives meant so little to them that the brutality was humorous. That was when something new triggered. That was when Sano stood up.

It wasn’t like his fear and horror disappeared; they just didn’t matter anymore. Anger rushed through him, a tidal wave of rage that made thinking about little details like personal danger or fear impossible. At that moment all he wanted was to stop the laughter and the slaughter, he wasn’t thinking about the future at all.

They fired of course but he moved as they did, returning fire with his handgun as he swooped down to pick up another from a fallen officer. He remembered screaming though he didn’t remember starting to. He moved from cover to cover, always moving forward, bringing down target after target. They couldn’t get a real shot at him, he moved too much and they were too confident to do the same. Their confidence faded once they realized just how many of them he’d brought down, but by that point fear and anger clouded their judgment instead.

It was strange, Sano thought, how his anger enabled him to cut through their numbers while their anger prevented them from winning. The few surviving officers moved forward behind Sano, working with him towards victory, and soon enough the entrance was clear. Sano didn’t stop there, though the killing mostly did. He pushed forward into the building towards the government officials, working with his allies to bring the rest down, and it got easier as it went. Many gave up without even firing, knowing the majority had been taken care of downstairs.

Sano had walked into the official’s office without hesitation, the end of the road. A terrorist stood with a gun to the official’s head, demanding he drop his weapon. Sano had complied; he knew it was the best course of action even as the terrorist took the opportunity to shoot him in the chest.

As Sano had stumbled back another officer had swung around the edge of the doorway, shooting the now-open terrorist dead. Sano remembered hitting the wall and slumping down, others coming to his aid and calling for medical attention. Sano had just smiled. He’d never expected to get out of there alive; he’d forgotten about that back in the lobby.

Later, as he recovered after surgery, another officer had told him that was the point when he became a real protector, when he’d forgotten about his own safety. Sano never forgot that, and ever since he’d never put his own safety before another’s.

Sano smirked as he was snapped out of his reverie by a loud beeping. “Yeah, I’m a hero alright.” He checked in and dropped his phone back in his pocket, looking up at the sky once more. “A big damn hero…”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Wind howled over a rooftop as it picked up for a moment before settling down again. The weather seemed to be reacting a bit oddly, but maybe that was just his mind reading too much into things. Nature didn’t care what was going on with humans; it never had.

Rufus adjusted his shades, appreciating the protection they offered his eyes from the wind at this altitude. It was night so his shades were on a light night vision setting, bathing the world in a faint green glow. He could pick out any detail of the street below, but right now all of those details were boring. A few people walking, some cars, a bus every now and then. Rufus shook his head as he thought about how few people he was seeing. It wasn’t normal, but that was no reason to assume it was because they were somehow “sensing” possible trouble in the air.

He blamed Captain Samakura for these stray thoughts. He could tell he was trying to have the same “sixth sense” she seemed to have. Ridiculous. He’d seen too much to ignore hers, of course - that was why he was on this rooftop - but no one else had the same ability as far as he knew, even himself.

His thoughts logically went to his Captain as he sat against a raised vent on the rooftop with his sniper rifle resting on a tripod beside him. He’d always preferred lone work before her, but she was the first person he’d worked for that he was truly able to respect. He respected M of course, but he rarely dealt with M, and he didn’t trust that man enough to work to change that fact. Samakura was different; she’d been in enough different situations to understand how things worked in different walks of life. She’d even understood his own. After another glance at the street below Rufus sat back, allowing himself to follow that line of thought to an examination of his past:

It was seven years ago. Rufus, thirty years old at the time, knocked on a door, smiling before kicking it in. A knife slipped from each sleeve into his hands as he stepped inside and ducked. A shotgun blasted apart the wall over his head and he turned to the right, one hand knocking the barrel upwards and the other gutting the offending criminal. He yanked the shotgun from the dying man’s hands, tossing it behind him and stalking further into the hallway.

Criminal organizations were always going after each other; after all, they had to compete just as much as any legitimate company, they just sometimes did it a little more brutally (or at least they were more forthcoming about their brutality). For those times when his own organization decided a more violent solution was required, Rufus was often the answer.

A door in the hallway burst open as an attacker rushed out but Rufus just stepped past him, jamming a knife into his eye socket as he did and leaving it there as he continued on, knowing the man’s screaming was making his targets nervous. He found a doorway at the end of the hall and entered, finding himself face to face with a veritable armory of guns. The criminal he was after stood against the room’s windows; between them were eight armed guards who immediately opened fire.

Rufus stepped out and pulled the door shut behind him, letting it take the hail of fire. He kept hold of the doorknob and kicked the door off the hinges, rushing into the room with the door as a shield. He slammed it into two men, pushing them further until they smashed through the window, falling with a scream to the streets far below. Rufus shot his left hand out to catch one of the bars that had held the windowpanes together and shot his right hand out to grab one of the falling guns.

He swung around to the left, narrowly dodging more fire, and opened up on the others who all dived for cover. It was risky, but it worked. Then things got a lot more chaotic.

Rufus ducked as he heard fire behind him and looked back to see, surprisingly, a woman swinging towards the room on a rappelling wire. He dived to the side as she swung in, landing between him and his target. She had violet hair, strong lavender eyes and a skintight black military combat suit, which to him meant she was quite out of place in this fight between criminals. He aimed the gun but she moved faster, her pistol shooting it out of his grip. He flung his remaining knife and charged as he drew another.

She sidestepped and slapped the thrown knife away with the flat of her free hand, bringing up her pistol to block his stab attempt. In the next few seconds their limbs were a blur as she avoided stabs, he avoided shots and they both tried to get the upper hand, punches, kicks and grapples being countered. They wouldn’t know who’d come out on top, though, as the other criminals in the room had recovered and both opened fire. Rufus and the woman instantly dropped below the table, but noticed as Rufus’ target took off out of the room.

The woman vaulted over the table, gunning down two guards and chasing the man into the hallway. Rufus flipped the table, kicking it into the remaining guards, picking up another gun and following. He fired on both people in the hallway; the woman rolled into a side door, the man wasn’t that lucky. His legs were caught by a few bullets and he went down heavily with a loud cry. Rufus tossed the empty gun aside and readied his knife for the kill but the woman came out firing to stop him. Fortunately for him, he managed to avoid both shots, and that must have been the last in the weapon since she flipped it around in her hand and came at him with melee strikes once more.

Rufus did his best, and after several hard strikes it seemed he was the stronger, but she was faster. He stabbed at her stomach and she jerked to the side, catching his wrist. She ejected the magazine from her pistol and, as it fell to the floor, kicked it back up into his face, which only stunned him for a second, but in that second she jammed the empty pistol on top of the knife so the blade went inside the magazine chamber, twisted hard and ripped the knife out of his grip, struck him hard in the stomach with the hilt and kneed him in the chin sending him to the ground.

She dropped her knee into his stomach and pulled the knife from the gun, holding it to his neck and speaking in an even voice touched by a hint of breathlessness. “Don’t move. I need him alive, but not you.”

Rufus sighed, following her directions as he heard someone else coming from further down the hall, probably more of her unit. “I can tell when I’m beaten.”

“You’re still planning a way out of this.” He was surprised at her intuition, and more so when she knocked off his shades, looking into his eyes. “What’s a professional like you doing with these thugs?”

Rufus smiled. “I was trying to kill them, obviously.”

“Not the answer I was looking for.”

He shrugged. “This is what I’m talented at, and what I enjoy.”

After watching him for a long moment, the woman nodded and stood up, sliding her pistol into her belt. “We could put your talent to a much better use. If nothing else it’s a free out.”

Rufus still remembered the swirl of thoughts in his mind as he watched his knife thud into the ground next to his head followed by her last three words. “Think about it.”

The beeping reminding him to check in brought Rufus from his ruminations. He sent his in, looking back at the street below. It’d turned out to be a good choice, he couldn’t deny that.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Reno casually guided his helicopter around the Kitsuine Tower. He was probably one of the only pilots who casually flew a multi-million dollar war machine around between skyscrapers, not to mention thought of it as his. Then again he might be the only one with the talent to do so.

With non-action flight like this, he was always able to sort of half-focus on it, knowing he wouldn’t make a mistake. He glanced back at Katsumi but she seemed distracted herself, paying him no attention, her eyes raking the ground below. He felt for her, knowing how much she wished she knew what would happen, where and when. He hated to admit it but he himself didn’t have much faith that they’d be able to catch the guy before more damage was done. He’d never say it out loud, but he already knew everyone else felt the same way. That was certainly what was eating Katsumi so much.

None of them wanted a bunch more civilian deaths, and if the next attack was anything like he’d heard the last one was, it’d be bad. He’d complained at being called in, but really he had no regrets being out here. He wished he was with his family but he knew there were more families than his and he had a job to protect them if possible. After all, if his own family died…

He shook his head, knowing that was a bad line of thought to go down. He’d go insane if he thought about that happening. Instead he backtracked, smiling to himself as he thought not of his family
dying, but simply of his family:

“I’m getting fat.”

“Oh come on, you are not fat.”

“I’m fat,” Lenora pouted, frowning.

Reno laughed, turning to look at her. Her frown turned into a glare aimed in his direction. “Are you laughing at me?”

“No, at what you said. That’s ridiculous. It’s like you don’t even realize you’re still more beautiful than anyone else in the world.” He shrugged. “Maybe pregnancy messes with memory, too.”

Lenora was unable to prevent a smile, patting the seat beside her on the couch. “Okay, that was a good line.”

Reno grinned and sat on the couch beside her, dropping his arm around her shoulders as she leaned against him. “That wasn’t a line. You know my lines. You want a line?”

“Oh, good gracious, no.”

“Hey baby, did they just take you out of the oven? Because you are hot.”

Lenora groaned, resting her head on Reno’s shoulder.

“Falling for you would be a very short trip.”

“What does that even mean?”

“If I could rearrange the alphabet, I’d put U and I together.”

“We are together.”

“You’re ruining my lines, dear.”

“They were ruined before you even said them, honey.”

Reno chuckled, kissing her head. “Fine. How about ‘I love you’?”