Not pretty, but it would do.
Grigor backed away from me. He was missing the pinky and ring finger from his left hand, and there were long gashes on his arms and chest and face. Ghost had tried his best.
He flicked a look over his shoulder. The exit door was fifteen feet behind him. If he made it into the refinery I had no chance to catch him. He had backup there, I didn’t. Even hurt, he could outrun me.
He should have run.
Instead he pointed at me.
“I saw you pick up the code scrambler,” he said. “Thank you for bringing it to me.”
“You want it, asshole,” I said, shifting my weight to run or fight, “come and take it.”
He really should have run. He would have won. Vox was still out there. Vox could give him another trigger device.
But Grigor’s hate was too intense. In that one way, we were alike. In that way, in that moment, hate mattered more to us than anything.
He rushed at me, once more swatting the knife from my hand with shocking speed. He punched me in the face. I tried to duck under it but the blow caught me on the forehead. The shock ruptured something in my neck and broke a bomb inside my skull. The air was filled with red fireworks that burst and did not fade.
I staggered backward, suddenly blind in one eye. Blood poured from my nose and I could feel it in my ears. Grigor came at me again, clamping his mangled hands around my throat. Even with fingers missing he was immensely powerful.
And yet … it was the wrong thing to do.
I dropped my chin as hard as I could, pinning his thumbs against my sternum. It wasn’t enough to stop him—he was way too strong for that—but it was enough to slow him down, to buy me maybe ten seconds more life. My heart was banging around all wrong, so I figured ten seconds was probably all I had left.
I only needed five.
I whipped both arms over his and boxed his ears with full-power blows of cupped palms. The sudden inward pressure burst his eardrums, and he screamed and let go, reflexively grabbing his pounding head. I kicked him in the groin as hard as I could, channeling everything I could muster into the blow. I thought of Lilith and the Mothers and every wretched thing they had endured. I thought of the threats he made against my sister-in-law, Jenny. I thought of all the women the Upierczi had tormented. I took all of that and kicked him with the tip of my steel-toe shoe. Over and over again. Without mercy. Without stopping. The impact shattered the underside of his pelvis, pulping any tissue that was in the way. His shriek went ultrasonic and he froze, eyes goggling in their sockets.
Nice targets.
I used my thumbs on those.
He fell screaming to the floor. I stood swaying over him. He was blind, broken. But as deeply as I looked inside myself I could not find a single splinter of mercy. Inside, a black voice howled from the cold furnace of my soul. The sounds of gunfire and screams echoed down the hall.
I bent close to Grigor and whispered in his ear. “A bunch of
women
are chopping your master race to pieces. Bet that really fucking stings.”
I straightened.
“This is for the Mothers of the Fallen.”
And I stomped him to death.
* * *
Somewhere along the way I went crazy. Broken things inside me shifted and there were bursts of color and walls of darkness. I could hear myself laughing every time a bone shattered under my heel. While I was in that bad, bad place, the damage in my chest and the damage in my head caught up to me. I coughed and spat blood on the wall.
I reeled away from Grigor and went toward the sound of the battle, but I kept hitting the walls.
I heard a woman’s voice. Familiar.
“Grace!” I yelled.
That’s what I thought I said, what I tried to say. But my words came out slurred as I wandered sideways on feet that no longer understood their purpose. I made it as far as the metal stairs, but when I tried to step down I forgot how my feet worked. I fell. Rolling, tumbling, hitting the metal, spilling and sprawling as the cavern swirled around me.
I don’t remember landing.
I thought I heard voices. More knights? No … was it the cold voice of Mr. Church speaking in the meaningless language of the knights?
My dead mother smiled at me from behind the stacked crates, her eyes weeping blood.
Rudy whispered in my ear, “I was so sorry to hear that you died, Joe.”
I said, “No!”
But the darkness said, “Yes.”
I fell forward into its embrace.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Four
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 6:43 a.m.
I heard someone calling from the other side of a wall. The wall was a million miles high and made of darkness.
I thought I heard a woman speaking. She was close, kneeling beside me, whispering in my ear, but her words made no sense.
Then silence.
A moment later …
“Cap’n? Jesus, Cap’n … are you dead?”
I knew that voice. Male, gruff. Filled with emotion. But I had no label to hang on it.
Dead?
“No,” I thought, or perhaps I said it aloud.
Then there were hands on me. Another vampire? I screamed and tried to fight them off.
“Watch!” barked another voice. “Hold his arm. Hold him.”
My wrists were caught. One, two. Held, though I fought against it.
“Hold him!”
“I am holding him, Farmboy!”
“Christ, he’s a mess.”
I tried opening my eyes, but the world was filled with lights that were too bright to look at. Then someone forced my eyelids open and let the burning sun blast me.
“Look at his eyes!”
“They’re hemorrhaged. Concussion … might be a skull fracture.”
I wondered what that was. I knew that I should know.
More hands on me, under my arms, lifting. Pain was a defining characteristic of the whole universe.
“Watch his head.”
I heard a dog barking. Funny. I used to have a dog when I was a kid, but he died. How could he be barking now?
“He’s coming out of it … watch, watch!”
“Top, hurry the fuck up. They’re coming!”
A rattling sound. Loud pops. Some screams too. I wondered what movie we were watching.
“Warbride … get those cocksuckers!”
Pop! Pop! Pop!
I had the weirdest sensation, like I was floating along on just the toes of my boots. Gliding.
More pops and bangs.
“Go—
go!
I’ll hold them here. Get him out of here.”
No
, I tried to say. I wanted to see the movie. I tried to pull away.
“Don’t let him go!”
“Juice him, damn it. Give it to me. I’ll do it, give it to me.”
There was a pinpoint of cold heat on the side of my neck.
And then nothing again.
This time the nothing was wonderful. If it was death, then I liked it.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Five
Aghajari Oil Refinery
Iran
June 16, 7:49 a.m.
I woke up in a truck that smelled of diesel oil and fertilizer. The first thing I was aware of was pain.
Everything hurt.
Every.
Single.
Thing.
The worst was my head. It felt like the Hindenburg after the fire started. Even my eyebrows hurt.
I opened my eyes but everything was a pale and uniform white. No details at all.
My neck didn’t hurt as much, but I couldn’t move it. I couldn’t move anything. When I was able to separate the painful things that were my ankles and wrists from the bigger painful thing that was my body, I realized that they were held fast.
I was tied down. I could feel bindings across my chest, my waist, my thighs.
Panic surged in my chest.
Who had me? The Iranians?
The Red Knights?
My mind hit a wall going eighty miles an hour.
The Red Knights. What
about
them? Why was I afraid of them?
Sure, there was the goon back at the hotel, but he was dead. Had I met another Red Knight? If so … where? Everything was so—detached. I fumbled for pieces of my mind but they were slippery and they rolled away.
Where had I been? If I could remember that maybe I could figure out where I was now.
I told myself not to move. My inner voices echoed this.
Don’t let them see that you’re awake
, cautioned the Warrior.
Remember your training
, whispered the Cop.
Observe first, gather intel. Process it, evaluate it. Assess the situation and determine your tactical position.
Position? Up shit creek without a paddle.
Then I felt a presence near me. It wasn’t exactly a sound; more of a sensation of awareness, as if someone was watching me and noticed that I was awake.
A voice said, “Cap’n?”
I had to concentrate to identify the voice. “Top…?” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he said and squeezed my shoulder very gently.
My eyesight came back slowly, slowly. It was dim and blurry, but I could see Top sitting beside me in the back of the truck.
“Where’s the team? Is everyone okay?”
“We got out,” was all he said. A few moments later he added, “Got a stealth helo coming for us. Be here any minute.”
I licked my lips, and Top put a straw to my lips and let me drink.
“Top…?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I move?”
There was a pause.
“Come on, First Sergeant … tell me.”
Top said, “You’re all messed up. You took a lot of—”
“Christ! Is my back broken? Is that why I can’t move?”
“No,” he soothed. “No. It’s your head. Lydia thinks you might have a skull fracture. Definitely a concussion, and a mother of one.”
“What does Khalid say, goddamn it? He’s the frigging doctor.”
Top’s face was filled with pain. “Khalid’s gone, Cap’n. You know that. You were there.”
But I didn’t remember.
“Gone? Christ, what happened at the refinery?”
“We got the scrambler. You did, you and Khalid. But…”
“But what? Stop screwing around and tell me.”
“Those knights. They killed some of the staff and took their places. They were rigging the whole place. C-4 charges on wellheads, charges all over. Looks like once the nuke was active they wanted to bury it under a couple million tons of flaming debris. Wouldn’t stop the nuke down there in the subbasement, but if we were an hour later we’d never have gotten to it. Not unless we knew the tunnel system, and we didn’t.”
“We stopped it, though, right?”
“The nuke? Yeah. Nobody’s going to set it off. Not now.”
I didn’t like the way he said that. “What’s wrong? What are you not telling me?”
Top sighed. He nodded to someone, and I slowly turned to see Bunny sitting at the back corner of the truck. There were tear tracks on his cheeks.
“Good to see you awake, Boss,” he said, but there was no life in his voice.
Top said, “Open the door.”
Bunny cut a worried look at me and back to Top. “Sure you want to do that?”
“Open it, Farmboy.”
With a heavy sigh, Bunny pushed the door open so that I could see the bright noonday sun.
Except that it was early morning and the sun was still behind the mountains.
The big smiling face of the sun was not that at all. It was the leering demon face of a mushroom cloud. Many miles distant but massive, and it seemed frozen against the darkness, like a brand burned onto the flesh of night. Not a nuclear blast, which is a mercy, I suppose. This was the entire Aghajari oil refinery curling upward in a fireball five hundred feet high.
I said the word that I didn’t want to say, asking it as a question.
“Violin?”
Top sighed.
“She and the Arklight team tried to stop the knights from setting off the charges. She … never made it out, Cap’n.”
I could feel all of the horror and outrage and fear of the last couple of days sear that image onto my soul. I knew that I would never forget it. I would never be able to forget it.
We had won, but we had also lost.
Epilogue
(1)
I was out of it for a long time.
Church was there when I opened my eyes. He looked haggard and old.
“Christ,” I said. “If you look that bad, I must be a frigging mess.”
He didn’t smile.
“What do you remember?” he asked.
I had to think about it, and I fell asleep a couple of times.
When I opened my eyes again it was morning and there was sunlight slanting in through the windows. Rudy was gone. Instead it was Mr. Church in the chair beside my bed.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“The trauma center at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.”
“In?”
“New York.”
I thought about that. My body was swathed in bandages and, although there was pain, it was buried under a heavy layer of something. Morphine. My head felt like it was stuffed with bubble wrap.
“What do you remember?” he asked,
“Rudy asked the same question.”
“When?”
I couldn’t answer that, and I realized that this wasn’t the same room. “I don’t know.”
“Do you remember the raid on the refinery?”
It took me a long time, and the memories were sluggish and reluctant. “Some of it. Maybe. Did we … did we win?”
Church nodded. “You had the code scrambler. All eight of the devices have been secured.”
“Eight? I … don’t remember eight.”
But then I did. And that memory brought other memories. Church watched my face as each came tumbling downhill at me. Grigor. The army of Upierczi. Everything else.
“My team,” I asked. “John Smith?”
“No,” he said.
“Khalid.”
“No.”
We sat in the silence of that for a long time.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Church said eventually. “They were good men.”
“They were family.”
“Yes,” he said. “They were.”
“What about the others?”
“Everyone else took some hits, but they will all recover.”
In body, I thought, but in spirit? In heart? I had my doubts. There was only so much loss a person could take.
“Ghost?”
“He’s recovering. He needed some work. He had cracked ribs and lost a couple of teeth. I arranged for dental implants. Titanium.”