The Beast That Was Max (47 page)

The knife sang in his hand, in his mind.
 
And yet, it was disappointed.
 
He was not the same.
 
He had no art.

The Beast protested, as well.
 
Too fast, too soon, it felt.

There was more to come, he told himself.

The counter sales clerks and customers were screaming, shouting, moving for the exits.
 
Behind the walls, more voices were raised.
 
Footsteps pounded rickety floorboards.
 
Max pushed through the opening, made his way through a narrow hallway lit by naked neon tubes.
 
The Glock was out, the suppressor on.

Max sank into the urgency of the fight’s moment.
 
He forgot what he was here for.
 
An assignment, perhaps.
 
Or maybe those four women had been prey the Beast had targeted.
 
It didn’t matter.
 
Counting the guards he heard coming, he fired off one shot, another, taking down two over-eager gangsters rushing around a corner and down the stairs in their shiny suits.
 
The noise of their falls was louder than his shots.
 
But the Beast boiled his heart with its lust for the ones who had sent the signs.
 
The knife yearned for its master.
 
Max remembered.

This way, he heard, from the blood spattered on the floor and wall.
  
Here, a door.
 
Max
   
smashed the butt of the knife into a blank wall.
 
A mechanism clicked, a crack widened, an opening grew.
 
Stairs.
 
Down.
 
The door closed behind him.
 
Darkness, broken by a faint glow a couple of stories further down.

He descended, nearly blind, the rickety wood frame swaying.

Max didn’t need the Beast to tell him there was more blood, deeper in the bedrock, freshly shed.
 
And below, people crowded together, quiet, their breathing steady, as if gathered in a shelter to wait out a storm, or in a church, expecting an angel to appear.
 
The knife felt like it was almost home.
 
Upstairs, the voices of outraged Tong quieted.
 

“I’ll tell them you’re one of us,” someone said, above and behind Max.
 

“Who are you?” Max asked, tracking the speaker’s motions in the darkness.
 
He was good, a trained op, hiding in the support structure and piping for the building above them.
 
Their words echoed in the hollow space in the rock.

“You know.”
 

The Beast reared back, eager to push on, angered by the delay.
 
The knife burned Max’s palm.

“They said you wouldn’t like us.
 
You don’t like anyone, really.
 
But you wouldn’t mind offerings.
 
”

The man landed on the stairs.
 
Max had him.

“You weren’t supposed to come here,” the guard said, with a trace of annoyance.
 
“We would have made arrangements.”

“Who told you about me?” Max asked.

The door above them burst open.
 
The guard shouted in Chinese.
 
A few shots were fired, stopped quickly as numbers were shouted, back and forth, payment for damages, lost lives.

Max didn’t see the advantage for him in controlled scenario and put a round in the guard’s back.
 
Curses rang out from the doorway, a few shots were fired randomly into the blackness.
 
Cautiously, the gangsters descended.

Max moved ahead of them, feeling as if he was chasing the Beast already imagining itself in a feast of slaughter.

At the foot of the stairs, two men blocked a steel door lit by a single light above it.
 
The air was hot, humid, stinging with gun smoke.
 
Max showed them the gun and the knife.
 
The stairs creaked behind and above him.

A third man came out from a corner, half-dressed, as if he’d been changing clothes, and Max pressured the Glock’s trigger. He didn’t recognize him from the park or the streets, and concluded he’d found one of his stalkers.
 
Only the man’s eyes stopped Max.
 
His gaze was on the knife Max held in his other hand.

“You brought it back,” the man said, tears streaming down his face.
 
Hair peppered with gray, wrinkles gathered in corners of his mouth and eyes, the man was still trim and fit, a solid package, perhaps ex-military, though Max didn’t read the hardness of a combat vet in his voice or stance.
  
Max found, instead, a brittle, broken quality to the man in his voice, in the need to change as if compelled to perform some kind of ritual before going through the door.
 
But the predator’s coldness was there, beneath the tears and in the shifting lines of his face, already turning an offense Max could not understand into a reason for murder.
 

The knife told him it had come home.

Max held the knife out, approached the man.
 
Someone called out in Chinese from above.
 
One of the guards looked up, answered.
 

The other guard moved to intercept Max.
 
“Sir, please, we mean no harm, if you want to join us we would be honored, you mean so much—“

“You didn’t think it was worthy?” the salt-and-pepper haired man asked, wiping his face.
 

“But they said you’d appreciate offerings.
 
To feed the Beast.”

 
Max froze for an instant, stunned by the revelation of his most closely-guarded secret.
 
No one knew about the thing inside him.

But then, he remembered, there were two who did.
 
The threat was not what he’d thought it might be.

Max felt as if the Beast was ripping through his ribs and chest to get at the man, understanding only that it had been exposed and made vulnerable.
  
The knife seemed to be skinning the flesh from his hand in its effort to free itself from his grip.

 
Max returned the knife, burying it in the owner’s throat through the spine.
 
The man staggered back, grabbed the hilt, reached back to finger the tip protruding from the back of his neck.
 
He stared down, eyes wide, at the thing that had been returned to him, blood pulsing from torn flesh.

Max shot the closest guard, fired a few quiet rounds into the shadows of the stairs.
 
Chinese curses were cut off by a barrage of gunfire.
 
Patience had run out and automatic weaponry had been deployed.
 
The other guard fell.
 
The Beast took a taste of the blood coming from the killer’s throat before Max pushed through the door.

The sound of gunfire at Max’s back made everyone in the room turn to face him.
 
He ducked to the side, taking in the scene while looking for cover, and for confirmation of his suspicions.

The Beast, already picking out prey, pushed him deeper into the crowd.
 
Max didn’t resist, preferring action over thinking about betrayal.

There were over fifty people in the high-ceiling chamber, which appeared to be the shell of a three storey concrete structure under construction in an abandoned excavation site for a water or subway tunnel, or perhaps a shelter.
 
The abandoned municipal project must have been discovered by the local gangs and re-opened for use as a drug processing plant or housing for illegal workers.
 
In the structure’s upper reaches, next to the banks of work lights illuminating the chamber, half-a-dozen men and women had been nailed to the wooden framework, stripped, gutted, their blood and viscera slowly dripping to the floor and anointing the gathered men and the few women clustered below the bodies.
  
Not all the sacrifices were dead.
 
The Beast was torn between pursuing its prey and climbing into the super-structure to pick over the offerings.

At the back of the space, on a partially built second storey, a young man stood, arms upraised in mid-exhortation.
 
He’d stopped speaking, and his gaze shifted from Max to the door.
 
Wearing a white shirt was soaked with sweat, strands of his long hair stuck to his forehead and cheeks, he looked like proletariat worker statue about to be toppled.
 
Behind him stood Kueur and Alioune.

“Tonton Bébête!” Kueur shouted.
 
Alioune raised a hand and, to his surprise, laughed.
 

Max froze with the moment.
 
The Beast, as it always did in their presence, shrank to a corner in the emptiness within him, mewling and whining in frustration.
 

He’d known, as soon as he’d heard the knife owner mention the Beast.
 
But knowing and seeing the reality were two very different things.
  
Heart racing faster than even the Beast could tolerate, Max faced the reality of their betrayal.
 
Even more surprising to him was the depth of his instinctive trust, as if the simple act of being drawn to and caring for a pair of predators could somehow protect him from becoming their prey.
 

In a reflection of his shock, the twins appeared older than the last time they’d visited New York, only a two months ago, as if they’d stolen years and inches from their teachers at the boarding school.
 
They were dressed in the latest Paris fashions, bright and clinging to their lithe bodies, but their eyes were brighter, their teeth longer, sharper.
 
The burning feral fire he remembered from the first time he’d seen them in the Bois de Boulogne, finishing their prey, had returned.
 
 
The fire was bolder, wilder, possessed by an experienced savagery that was new to him.
 
He never thought of them as innocent.
 
But he’d never considered they could be closer to the nature of a demon like the Beast than even he might be.
  
In the harsh construction light, even their beauty appeared withered, as if what they kept inside them had finally consumed them.
 
He should have remained an anonymous benefactor, a mystery they might have hunted but never found, rather than indulging whatever pathetic need had driven him to become involved with them personally.
 
The need showed weakness, and predators could not resist vulnerability.
 
The Beast had been right all along.
  

 
“We did all this for you,” the young man said, addressing Max, his eyes pleading, his words clear and frail in the tense quiet.

The twins stayed behind him, ignoring Max, their gazes resting here and there, as if picking out their first and second kills.
 
In that moment, they seemed so much like the Beast made into flesh.

The moment shattered when the gangsters burst through the doorway, waving guns and screaming at the assembly in a mix of English and Chinese.

Max scanned the crowd again, noticed some slipping out through gaps in the construction toward the rear of the structure.
 
He recognized some from old ops as they turned for a final backward glance to assess the situation.
 
They were the experienced hands, too savvy to be caught in a pointless firefight.
 
But they were also flawed, to have participated in whatever had been going on here.

He stood a little taller, wary of becoming a target, trying to draw the twins’ attention.
 
If they’d wanted him, then he was here to answer their challenge.
 
They ignored him, as if they did not consider him a threat.
 
The Beast found no traction for its rage in the insult.

Sporadic gunfire erupted from the crowd.
 
The Chinese returned fire, and a thunderstorm rocked the chamber.
 
Max dived to the floor, crawled toward the back as the assembly surged forward.
 

Bullets filled the chamber for a mad minute, whining through the air and kicking up dust and debris.
 
Bodies fell as the sound of guns and screams and moans rose like a tornado’s roar.
 
When the last clips had emptied, the fighting came down to hand to hand as the two groups closed.
 
The sides seemed uneven, with gangsters cut down from nearly twenty to half a dozen still standing while the assembly had a little more than half their number remaining.
 
But not all the men and women who had enjoyed the drippings from sacrificial victims were eager for a direct fight.
 
The Chinese gangsters held their own against the initial rush, giving their more reluctant opponents even less motivation to join the fight.
 

Max circled the crowd, heading for the back and access to the second storey to settle with the twins.
  
He recognized the crowd, now.
 
These were not true hunters.
 
They were not the kind who reveled in their own strength and skill and power, fighting
 
for territory and answering challenges as well as preying on the weak.
 
These were the lonely killers, broken men and women, dependent on the power they stole from others with tricks and subterfuge.
 
Weak people, careful to stalk only those even more vulnerable than them, like the man who’d watched the children outside Tompkins Square Park.