The Damned (17 page)

She breathed a great sigh of relief when she reached the deserted lobby and started toward the lounge. Each step she took brought her closer to freedom, or did it bring her closer to her death, or maybe something worse than death—and there
were
things worse than death; the bleached white bones in that carnage-laden pit had shown her that. Each step could be her last, each hallway she passed could be the one she was dragged screaming into. She was scared to death, and she hadn’t even reached the street yet. She kept her head down and kept her feet moving.

Loud, raucous laughter came from inside the lounge, the merry sound of drunken revelry. No one was standing at the entrance as she hurried past it and made her way quickly outside, onto the sidewalk. The curb, which earlier had been lined with motorcycles and trucks, now stood virtually deserted: an SUV, a couple of bikes, a pickup truck with someone passed out in the driver’s seat. Passed out or dead, she didn’t know which and she sure as hell wasn’t going over to find out.

Even though a left would lead her away from the city, Karen took a right because she knew what lay in this direction, that if she followed it she would eventually find her way back to those deserted warehouses. Once there she could lie down and sleep, maybe hold up for a while and make a decision on where she actually
should
go. She turned a corner into an alleyway, and a hand reached out and grabbed her.

“Well, well,” somebody said, and she knew it was Jet.

He forced her further into the alley and slammed her back against the wall. A calloused hand grabbed her throat and she dropped her bag to the ground; the hand tightened and she clawed at it. He relaxed his grip and Karen began to cough. Then she said, “Thought you were turning in early.” She dropped a hand to her side and a self-satisfied smirk spread across his face.

“Still got your sense of humor, huh?” He tore at her blouse and a strap broke free, lifted her bra and her breasts popped out. They were round and firm and perfectly formed. “You know what comes next, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” She slipped a hand from her pocket, raked it across his throat and said, “This.” Blood spurted from a razor-thin slit that yawned wider and wider as he staggered sideways, one hand still gripping Karen’s throat, the other flying up to cover the wound, yelping his surprise and dragging her along with him. The hand tightened and she drove the scalpel into his neck; he released his grip and fell to his knees. “Gaaah,” he said. “Gaaah.” And now the blood was flowing, across his hands and onto his chest, drenching the sleeveless jacket he wore. He looked up. He tried to talk but he could only gurgle. It was over and he knew it—she could see it in his eyes. She bent over, picked up her bag and stood, turned back to the street and saw three dark shapes moving up the alley toward her. She turned to run, the bag in one hand, the scalpel in the other.

“Hey!” somebody shouted. “Wait up! We won’t hurt you!”

Laughter rang out behind her as she raced up the alley, followed quickly by the hollow echo of feet pounding on asphalt. Gunfire erupted, one shot, two, three; the buzzing of angry bees as one bullet whizzed by her ear and another pinged off the concrete wall beside her. She ran to her right into another dark passageway, legs pumping, arms swinging. Her hand whacked something and the scalpel flew out of it.

“Hey, don’t
shoot
her!” it was a cheerful voice; one that didn’t want her hurt, didn’t want her dead until they were through with her. Karen wondered who they were. They didn’t seem very concerned with the gurgling biker—they didn’t even pause to check him out.
Maybe that’s why they were laughing.
Maybe they were a bunch of renegade Q’s who liked what they saw, a psychotic bunch of scumbags who liked what they saw and liked what was racing up the alley away from them. They wanted the same thing Jet had wanted, and they’d get it if they caught her.

“Hey, wait up!”

The voice was gaining ground, the collective huffing and puffing growing closer. Soon they’d be on her. She ran through another dark opening and saw light up ahead. She was racing alongside the Ambassador, running hell-bent for her life when she looked over her shoulder and saw them rounding the corner. One of them stumbled but the other two kept coming. Her lungs were aching and so were her legs, but she couldn’t stop now—she wouldn’t.

“Fuck it, shoot her ass!”

A roaring volley of gunfire sent her zigzagging up the alleyway, the metallic
click
of the empty chamber told her she was going to make it. Her heart was in her throat as she emerged onto the sidewalk and ran for the hotel’s entrance, down the corridor to the silent lobby. She stopped at Ben’s hallway and looked over her shoulder, and knew they
were
Q’s, because if they were bikers they’d be racing through the hotel after her. She hurried down the passageway, fumbling in her pocket for the key Tina had given her. When she got to the suite, she opened the door and went inside, slammed the door shut and locked it behind her. She was back where she’d started, back where she didn’t want to be. And she knew now that she would stay. Like Tina, she was a prisoner here, too frightened to ever venture outside these walls by herself.

She walked into the room and let loose a gut wrenching scream, a scream of anger, of fear and frustration, a primal scream of outrage and anguish. Then she hurled her tote bag through the liquid crystal display of the big screen television and screamed again.

They were crouched between a couple of dumpsters, both men gazing out at the dark landscape through their night vision goggles, Dub in front, Teddy kneeling close behind him. Teddy couldn’t believe the look of shocked disbelief on Ben’s face, the fear in his eyes and the horrified shriek as he plummeted through the night. Not to mention the sound he made when he landed: the hollow thump of a human watermelon splattering against an unyielding pavement. And that’s what he looked like with his stomach split open and his insides coiled onto the sidewalk, his long black hair matted into a nasty gruel of blood and brain and fragments of skull. He didn’t deserve to be tossed over that wall. It didn’t make any sense. He was a good dude who had always come through for them, someone to be counted on.

“Why’d you do it, man?”

“Shhh.”

“C’mon, man. Why?”

“He killed a brother. It pissed me off.”

“You don’t think he was telling the truth about how fucked-up the guy was?”

“Do you?”

“Well, yeah, I do. He was a straight-up dude. If he said his leg was wrapped around the bike like a broken pretzel, it probably was.”

“That’s not what Jet said.”

“You believe that back-stabbin’ cocksucker?”

“You don’t?”

“What,
that
jack-off?
Hell
no.”

“I didn’t like what I saw in his eyes, Teddy. Back at the Ambassador when I was laying out the Prime Directive, he thought I was full of shit or something. He didn’t want any part of it.”

Teddy looked over his shoulder at a couple of rats staring back at him from the edge of the curb, eyes black as death in the infrared light. They were fat and he wondered what they’d been feeding on. He turned back to Dub and said, “How do you know that? Jesus, Dub. Ben was a good dude.”

“Like you, Teddy? A good dude like you?”

“
Fuck, man,
what’re you saying?”

“I saw something in your eyes, too, something I didn’t like.”

“I thought we laid that to rest this afternoon.”

“I did, too, but now I’m starting to wonder.”

Teddy didn’t say anything. He thought about reaching for his gun and putting an end to this bullshit once and for all, but Dub was already turning to face him.

“I sent him over the edge for you, Teddy, for you and anyone else who might doubt me. You think I don’t know what’s been going through your head? You think I’m crazy, that I’m leading you to your ruin. It was you or him, brother. You saw those guards up there, the look on their faces when he went over. They know if I’d do something like that to Ben, then
nobody’s
safe. Them, their brother bikers, the stragglers we’ve picked up—the Q’s for damn sure—ain’t none of them safe if they don’t go along with the plan… You too, Teddy. Unless I have your undying support…”

“You do, man.”

“Yeah, well, I do now. Know how I know that? I saw it in your eyes back on the roof. You saw
yourself
going over.”

Teddy looked up the alley, away from Dub, as if the guy might see into his eyes through the infrared goggles he wore, see in his eyes that he was right, that he thought Dub was crazy, a lunatic hell bent on leading them straight down the tubes; so he could do what, run the whole fucking world? Tossing Ben to his death didn’t have anything to do with the injured biker. Dub would’ve shot the guy, too—not to put him out of his misery, though… to shut his ass up. No, that wasn’t why he slaughtered Ben; he did it because of what he’d seen in his goddamn eyes. And now Teddy had to worry about what the fucker might see in
his
eyes?  Crazy bastard threw Ben off the roof just to show everybody he could, and now anyone who looked at him wrong could get the same treatment… or worse. And Teddy knew that with Dub, worse was always an option.

“What do you think, man?” Dub nodded up the alley. Then he said, “C’mon… quiet-like.” He stood up and so did Teddy, and both men trekked deeper into the green phosphorescent corridor. They walked slowly, silently, easily avoiding discarded tin cans, busted bottles and various pieces of trash strewn about the place, weapons drawn and held ready along their thighs.

Teddy hadn’t served his country. He didn’t have that experience to fall back on. To him, the dark and deserted alleyway backlit through the infrared goggles was an eerie alien landscape where anything could happen to anyone foolish enough to traverse it. And that was what they looked like with those goggles strapped in place, two aliens walking across a barren wasteland searching for the inferior life forms they had come to destroy, which was what Dub and his two behemoth sidekicks seemed to do on a nightly basis: stalk the dark corners of the city, three deranged monsters traveling through a bizarre theme park created explicitly for them. Teddy knew what they did when they went out because Dub loved to talk about it. It wasn’t the killing that bothered him—after all, he’d been party to many an atrocity himself, both in and outside the can. Murders, rapes and beatings had been his calling card well before that cold night in the woods had sent him on a collision course with the executioner. Sure, he’d helped torture those kids, but they’d had it coming. He wasn’t a thrill killer—they broke the rules and they paid for their sins. He didn’t stick them on a spit and roast them over a roaring fire when it was over and done with, and he damn sure didn’t eat them. And he didn’t want to do anything like that now. But he knew he would if Dub told him to—he’d do it then, all right, because he didn’t want to die out here tonight. If Dub found someone hiding in the dark, found them and decided to… Jesus. The guy had a taste for it now, Teddy had seen it in his eyes, heard it in the timbre of his voice. Those nightly exploits had turned Bert and Ernie into a pair of subhuman troglodytes, and Dub was following them right over the edge. And now Teddy seemed poised to chase after them whether he wanted to or not.

Halfway down the alley, Dub’s arm came up. The sharp
crack
of his pistol drew a startled yell from Teddy, brains and bloody flecks of meat painting his neck as a body crumpled to the ground behind him. He turned to see a man stretched out on his back alongside a dumpster, one leg folded awkwardly beneath the other, the cratered remains of his ruined skull pumping blood like a busted water main. Teddy’s gun-hand was outstretched, sweeping back and forth over an empty loading dock behind the trash bin, his nerves as raw as the wound leaking in front of him.

“Fuck,” Dub said, and Teddy said, “Jesus Christ!”

“They’ve heard us now.”

“Who?”

Three shots rang out, rapid fire, three in a row—Dub’s personal brand of Morse Code: two shots ‘they’re over here’, three ‘we caught ‘em’.

Both men took off down a narrow cross street, running side by side along the back wall of a warehouse marred by busted glass and boarded-over windows. They had parked their bikes a couple of blocks away, two streets removed from this dingy row of warehouses. Bert and Ernie took one side and Dub and Teddy the other, both parties searching the darkness for a woman to ravage, a man to scourge, something to humiliate. Dub and his crew had intercepted a midget coming out of a block of warehouses just like this on another side of town this afternoon, and now they were trolling this place hoping for another such encounter. They came to a halt at the corner of the warehouse and looked out at an empty parking lot. Seven weeks ago there would have been cars in the lot, lamps burning in the streetlights and the occasional traffic moving along the roadway. Now there was darkness and Bert and Ernie, and the desperate-looking woman who stood between them. She was tall and thin, her long hair a tangled mess. One of the straps from the billowy, loose-fitting halter-top she wore had slid completely off her shoulder, exposing an underdeveloped breast more befitting a child than a grown woman. They were playing a game of cat and mouse with her, each giving just enough room to allow a faint hope of getting away, something that would never happen, because even if she did somehow manage to twist and squirm, put some distance between them and take off running, they’d just pull their guns and take her legs away from her. She had that look of stark terror Teddy had seen many times before, one he himself had initiated more times than he could remember. And now here he was, staring out across the parking lot hoping she’d find a way out. Because with all his crimes, the robberies, the rapes and murders, he sure as hell didn’t want to be involved in what was bound to be coming at the end of this. She made an evasive move and the two behemoths made a corresponding one to keep her boxed in between them—that was the game they had played, laughing at her all the way across the parking lot while she worked her way to the far edge of the thing, over the curb and onto the street. Beyond them lay the sidewalk, and a steep drainage ditch, a dry canal that wound its way through a densely wooded field Dub and his gang had traveled through after leaving their bikes behind them.

Teddy followed Dub across the parking lot. They were a few feet away when Bert grabbed a fistful of the woman’s top and began swinging her around in a circle, he and Ernie laughing while the woman cried out for him to stop. But he didn’t stop. He kept turning her, twirling her and laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

“Goddamn moron,” Dub said. He stepped up behind them and the top ripped away, sending their captive flailing sideways across the curb, turning and stumbling backward until her pale white form disappeared over the edge of the ditch. All of which made Bert and Ernie laugh even harder. But they didn’t laugh when she rolled to a stop and bounced up and took off like a jackrabbit at the bottom of the forge. And they sure as hell weren’t laughing when she disappeared into the heavy brush while Dub ranted and raved and emptied his .9mm in the direction she seemed to have been heading in. “Get the fuck after her!” he shouted, and then took off down the steep incline, Bert and Ernie following, Teddy right on their heels.

Part of Teddy wanted her to make it, the other part wondered what kind of crazy shit Dub might pull if she did. He could hear her crashing through the bushes ahead of them, and even though they had picked up their pace and were now racing down a twisting path toward her, she seemed to be putting more distance between them.

Teddy thought they should have had an advantage. After all, they could see in the dark and she couldn’t. But she had raced away like a Nigerian marathon runner, and though they had started out like gangbusters, they were now huffing and puffing their way along the trail. Teddy had heard her crashing through the brush. Now he couldn’t hear her at all, and his mind went back to Ben and his nurse, how the pint-sized brunette had found the wherewithal to get the upper hand on a gang of burley bikers just like
them.
He wondered if this wraith of a woman was crouching just off the trail with a weapon she’d found, hiding in the heavy brush, waiting for just the right moment to strike out at them. A large, jagged rock could come out of nowhere, a sharp stick to the eye or throat. But neither came as they emerged from the woods, onto the sidewalk they had crossed earlier in the night. Teddy could see the outline of the bikes they’d left parked along the curb twenty or so yards to the right of them, the long road stretching off to the east. He paused for a moment, staring out into the distance, and then he saw her. She was sitting perfectly still, well off the roadway with her back against the broad trunk of a tree. He wouldn’t have noticed her at all if not for the night vision gear. “There she is,” he said, and they hurried over to her. Her eyes were closed, her head slumped forward, her forearms and hands covered in blood that had leaked from a ragged hole in her side—the blood looked like oil in Teddy’s phosphorescent field of vision.

“I’ll be damned,” Dub said, then, “Hey, you all right?” He got no response by nudging her leg, so he put a foot against her shoulder and shoved her sideways to the ground, where she lay motionless, her eyes still closed, her arms limp beside her.

“Goddamn moron,” Dub said, and then slammed the butt of his pistol against Bert’s ear, drawing blood and a surprised yelp from the stunned giant. But Teddy wasn’t surprised. He knew something had to be coming, some act of violence. They had traveled all the way across the city and spent a considerable amount of time sorting through that alleyway, and when Dub finally had what he wanted it was gone.

Dub ejected his spent clip, pulled a fresh one from his pocket and slammed it in place. Teddy wondered for a brief moment if he might shoot his gigantic sidekick, but he didn’t. He slid the gun behind his back and said, “Fuck it, c’mon.” He started back to the road, and Ernie said, “What about her?”

“Fuck her.”

“Aren’t we gonna—”

“Shut the
fuck up!”

And he did. He shut up and followed Dub, Teddy and Bert back to the bikes, where Dub slipped off his goggles and hung them on the bike’s handlebars. He turned on his headlight and stepped in front of it, pulled out his canister of coke and twisted off its lid. Then he tapped some on the back of his hand. “Here, dumbass,” he said, and held his hand out to Bert, who shed his goggles and greedily snuffed it up his nose, all his indiscretions seemingly forgiven as a sheepish smile spread across his face.

Dawn was nearing and Teddy had been up all night. He was ready to go home and get some shuteye. The last thing he wanted was to snort up a nose-full of coke and follow Dub across this dismal Hell of a landscape looking for some poor, unfortunate soul to torment. But he didn’t want to end up like Bert, slapped silly with the butt of a .9mm, or dead like Ben. And who could know what might set Dub off now. He’d been frustrated, and now he was determined to find someone to bear the brunt of that frustration. Teddy didn’t want that somebody to be him. So even though he was tired and weary, when his turn came he slipped off his goggles, snorted his coke and climbed onto his bike and said, “Hell yeah!” when Dub said “Let’s go see what we can get into.”