((Hi, everyone. Its been a while since I've updated this story. Between stressful issues in real life, moving, work, family demands and etc., I wasn't planning on finishing Call & Respond. I appreciate you still following here, and your kind and enthusiastic comments about wanting to see the ending have convinced me to try to wrap it up. I may not update the fastest, but I will try.
I noticed I didn't put the latest chapters up here that were on AO3. Here they are, and I'll return sometime soon with new work. Appreciate you all.))
Disclaimer: Call & Respond hasn't been short on action, gore, or blood. This chapter goes a little further than canon in terms of brutality re: person-on-person violence. It might unsettle some of the more sensitive readers in the audience, so if you're squeamish around that sort of thing, I would consider skipping this one. If you're not, enjoy.))
"I've got a corner at my back
I've nowhere to go except over you."
— Henry Rollins
A droplet of blood slipped warm from the corner of Carlos' mouth and tickled into the wiry brush of his beard. His hands twitched in habit, moved to wipe it away. The chain of his cuffs rattled and scraped against the pipe. A sharp bite of metal on skin reminded him his hands were no longer his own.
Carlos' head felt too light, like a helium balloon tethered to his chest through the dark collar of his shirt. The room moved a split-second behind the scrolling of his eyes.
We'll see what I do to her when she shows up, Mr. Babyhands' voice was needling and abrasive, even from the inside of Carlos' brain. And you've got a front row seat.
When she shows up. Carlos waited until the man across the room made noise, a rattling clink-clink-clank of fallen equipment and a frustrated curse, to twist the massive nut on the radiator pipe with the chain between his manacles. The nut pushed back against him, stuck. He took a breath in and strained against it. Who knew how many years it was misused or neglected, caked with rust under the thick, chipping paint. But Carlos could fight, brute strength his one advantage.
The sharp edges of the cuffs, not built for comfort but security, bit into the skin at his wrists under the wide span of his hands as he twisted and forced the chain against the metal, links gripped onto the flat edges of the nut. The chain wasn't long enough to do it clean. They slipped and clinked, made noise. Suddenly, there was silence from the other side of the room. Mr. Scrubs was no longer messing with his glassy, shining tubes full of dark purple blood. Carlos' blood.
Footsteps approached, quiet and shuffling. Mr. Scrubs stood over him, tall and skinny like a power pole, his face all cool condescension as a man might stare at a panhandler begging for money. If only you'd made better choices, that face read, only the eyes visible above the border of the paper mask, you wouldn't be in this situation.
"What are you doing?" Mr. Scrubs asked. His eyes were pink. Bloodshot.
Carlos paused, shrugged his large shoulders. "Uh... well, my ass kinda fell asleep, so I had to... you know, shift. Sorry."
Mr. Scrubs' expression didn't change save for a microscopic tightening around his eyes. After a long, tense moment, he said, "Well, stop it."
"Sure. Sorry man."
Mr. Scrubs scoffed under his breath, mumbled something Carlos couldn't hear. Carlos saw a weak spot, and waited until he heard the clinking of equipment to lean around the radiator again.
"Hey, uh… can I get a drink of water? I'm kinda feeling dehydrated. My pulse is going crazy."
Mr. Scrubs ignored him. He ripped open a paper package with a testy yank, the back of his green uniform toward Carlos and the radiator he was chained to.
"I mean, like—tank is totally on empty, you know? Mouth's all gummy and my lips are pretty uneducated right now. I figure if you're taking my blood, if I don't got water in me it'll make it harder for you too. Right? Seein' as you're having to find my veins and all."
The man put his hands down on the table and paused before he replied over his shoulder. "You're a hostage. Not a guest. This isn't the Hilton, alright? Shut up."
"It's pretty hot in here. Well, not hot, but sticky. I don't need to tell you, though, considering you're standing up, right?" Carlos laughed. "Kinda like the Hilton getting to sit down all day. You know, I stayed at the Hilton, back in '96. Not as nice as everyone says it is. They don't even give you those little complementary bottles of shampoo or nothin'. Kind of cheap, right?"
The man jammed his fingers at the corners of his eyes. Who knew how long he'd been standing here, squinting at the equipment.
"I don't care. Shut. Up."
"I don't need much man, just a little. You know how it gets, right? You know, you're a doctor."
"I'm not a doc—"
"Human body gets all weird and shit when it's dehydrated, especially when you been taking water out of it. Hey, speaking of, you think I could use the bathroom?"
"If I get you some water will you please shut up?"
"'s all I want man, swear I'll fuck off after. No problem."
Mr. Scrubs returned with a small plastic cup full of water. It looked like pure tetanus to Carlos, tinged light rust-brown. Carlos glanced back and forth between the man and the cup, wiggled his fingers to illustrate he couldn't move his hands. Mr. Scrubs placed the cup on the ground within reach.
"Thanks." Carlos said. "Sorry, you know how it is."
"If you say another... fucking... word... I'm going to give you something to make you shut up, you understand me?" With that, Mr. Scrubs was gone, stalking back toward his bench.
Carlos strained again. With the movement and the flexing of his muscles the bruise on the inside of his elbow throbbed and protested, sore and hard like an egg. Aren't you pissed? It seemed to say. They put something into you. Took it out of you. What are you going to do about it?
In truth if Harris told him what it would have taken to secure safe passage for Jill... to ferry her safely across the river... maybe they could have struck a deal. Maybe. But they didn't ask, did they? They simply did. No ask involved.
What else do you think they're going to do to you without asking? What else do you think they did to her? You think those scars she's got are just for show? How much time do you think you have before the other asshole comes back and puts a bullet in your brain now they don't need you?
All at once the paint broke along the seam of the nut's threading and it turned. Carlos twisted as fast as his arm would allow. The nut fell off, clanged to the floor. He held his breath, grunted a quiet curse. Mr. Scrubs' silence felt pointed and alert.
Carlos extended a hand, pushed the nut back behind the radiator, sat back as quickly as he could. Mr. Scrubs appeared, standing over him, his feminine eyes once again unimpressed. Devoid of pity. He held a length of yellow tubing, a clear plastic case containing a variety of tubes with different colored stoppers. In the other hand, a large syringe, filled with clear fluid.
"I need another blood sample from you." He said, slightly muffled behind the mask. He shook the syringe in illustration. "Do you know what's in this?"
Carlos shook his head.
"All you need to know is I've got orders if you try anything, this goes in that big, juicy vein in your neck. I'm tired, though, and tired people make mistakes. I can't promise I drew a safe dose. So unless you want to risk it," Mr. Scrubs continued, "you hold out your arm nice and slow. I tie you off and take more blood, and you sit there until we need you again. We clear?"
Carlos' blink was slow. Understanding. "We're clear."
"Good." Mr. Scrubs drew near, edgy and halting like a man approaching a wild animal. He crouched between the fork of Carlos' thick legs. "Give me your left arm."
Carlos hesitated. "It's all swollen and—"
"I'm not asking. Give me your left arm."
"Alright." Carlos leaned his shoulders to expose the juncture of his inner elbow. A goose-egg hematoma was cresting, a bruise of pale sickly yellow and deep eggplant purple spreading over the curve of his bicep. As he leaned Carlos drew closer by degrees, closed the distance between he and the man in the scrubs by an inch. Maybe two. Mr. Scrubs looked at him with a note of warning, eyes alert. Carlos forced himself to look calm, and raised his eyebrows, as if to ask what all the fuss was about.
"This is as close as we're gettin'," Carlos said, "'less you wanna unhook me."
"Good try." Mr. Scrubs looped the yellow tubing around the corded muscle of Carlos' upper forearm. He tied it tight, tight enough to pinch the skin. Carlos made a muffled noise of pain. He was dehydrated, apparently; his skin wrinkled and tented under the rubber, felt like it was going to tear.
Mr. Scrubs pushed two gloved forefingers against Carlos' inner forearm in a few different spots, testing for a vein which hadn't yet protruded. The latex of his gloves was thin and warm. A vein puffed, slow and thick, snaked from the center of Carlos' arm to his wrist. Mr. Scrubs' eyes drifted to the side, toward the radiator and its missing piece.
"Guess it's good I never got into smack, huh?" Carlos forced himself to laugh. "Doctor once told me they 'roll', whatever that means. My veins. Nobody's ever really been able to get a good lock on 'em when I go to-"
Mr. Scrubs looked back at him and said nothing. He simply tapped the syringe in indication. Carlos was quiet.
"Right," Carlos swallowed. "Got it."
Mr. Scrubs unstopped the tube with a flick of his thumb. The plastic cap clinked and skittered across the floor. He laid the bevel of the needle's point against Carlos' vein and pushed it in; a squirt of garnet blood, so red it was almost purple, jetted into the clear container attached to the end of the needle. They waited, Mr. Scrubs' eyes on the syringe, and Carlos' on him. As if remembering where he was, Mr. Scrubs looked at Carlos' face. Carlos winked at him.
Somewhere in the distance, a person yelled, "I'll buy an A, Pat!" Bing. Bing. Bing. Bing. Lots of As.
"What a dumbass," mumbled a voice over the applause, barely loud enough to hear. "Those cost money."
Mr. Scrubs capped off the first syringe and swapped the containers with speed and boredom suggesting extensive practice. Carlos watched the blood. He wondered what sort of chittering, multi-legged thing was swimming around in it—would they be big enough to see, like some sort of mutant amoeba? Like a bug, crawling on the elastic walls of his vessels?
Mr. Scrubs' eyes drifted to the side. His eyebrows knit and he blinked slowly, like he was trying to remember if he'd left his oven on or locked his front door upon departing for the day. He was looking at the radiator... and its missing connector.
"Wait…" He said.
He was close enough for Carlos to lean in and kiss him if he wanted. And Carlos did want. Carlos' forehead cracked off the hard curve of the man's cranium with a sickening hollow noise, so hard his own teeth rattled together and ached in their roots. The man bobbled, stunned, and Carlos hit him again, this time hard enough to draw blood. A tender half-moon of pink flesh appeared on the man's forehead, split apart along its seam and poured blood into his face, his eyes. He opened his mouth to scream for help but managed only a stunted, muffled wordless cry, all the air sucked away into the injury currently pouring from his forehead.
Carlos looped the chain of his cuff through the place where the nut once connected the length of pipe to the accordion of the radiator. The syringe hung from his forearm, bobbling from side to side, now overflowing with blood which spilled from the injection site. Carlos shook it and it fell to the floor, end-over-end with a plink, smashed into glittering pieces over a Rorschach of his blood.
The man in the scrubs could see enough to be afraid; he wheeled back on his hands, tried to put space between them, the syringe forgotten.
"I'm not who you want." He pleaded on quivering breath and tried to swipe the blood from his eyes. It dripped over his chin, his narrow throat, pattered onto the teal paper of his uniform like rain. "I'm just a nurse, I swear. I swear."
"You want a blood sample? I got one for you." Carlos followed him, scuffed dress shoes tapping against the carpet of dust. His tone was light, jocular. From the look on the man's face, it struck fear into his heart as deep as screaming might have. Deeper. "You just gotta come a little closer."
Jesse was thinking about a few things. Primarily, how fucking much he hated both of those assholes back in the clinic area. Oliveira was obvious: he was a traitor, the kind of douchebag who had no loyalty to anyone or anything, but still clearly thought he was the good guy in everyone's story. And the nurse… he treated Jesse like an idiot. Jesse wished he could have five minutes alone with both of them, no referees, no stoppages. He wasn't sure he would win, but he would feel a whole lot better about the entire situation.
Jesse was also thinking of how he shouldn't have worn a pair of new shoes to a job. His heels were getting raw. But all of these paled in comparison to the most important consideration of the moment; how much he did not want to ask the man in the office at the end of the hall anything, now faced with it. He shouldn't have volunteered.
At least HUNK was gone.
Jesse scratched the back of his head as he walked—a nervous, deferential habit. The closer he got to Harris' "office" the more unsure he became of this plan. He made it about three-quarters of the way through the stinking, dusty hallway, with its browning paint and banging pipes before he realized he was the bearer of bad news. An expendable one.
Maybe Jesse would go back and get the nurse, make him do it. They wouldn't kill him—there was only one nurse, but there were twelve soldiers left out of the original twenty hired for this job. Two were found murdered at the hotel construction downtown, one trussed like a pig with a new mouth carved in his throat, the other shot in the head, left to rot where she fell. Six were still missing or laid up in the ICU, their faces mangled, teeth missing and limbs broken. The war was one of attrition on both sides, pieces getting eaten with no real progression. Well, none until now.
Jesse was almost Lucky Number Seven if the cops hadn't shown when they did. Oliveira joked and giggled like an idiot, but he wasn't slick: Jesse could see murder on the man's face, clear as crystal. Oliveira convinced his new friends of his mercenary-with-a-heart-of-gold act, but they were the same, he and Jesse. As soon as you donned the red-and-white you agreed to the same things. Wallowed in the same muck. The difference: Oliveira was a traitor, unable to stay loyal to even the hands who fed him. The idea of showing that prick what Umbrella did to those who tried to flip made Jesse's mouth water. It was what convinced him to walk the last few steps to Harris' door.
It felt good being the one standing over him when it all came down.
Jesse's eyes drifted into the doorway where four other men were lounging on a couch, watching the single black-and-white TV. Prison taught Jesse to not look into doorways or cells, even invited. But here they were all equals. He couldn't show fear or deference to them, or he'd be the next meal on the food chain.
Jesse stopped. He knocked on Harris' door. His hands seized and trembled, the sudden bark of pain sharp.
"What?" Came the voice from within.
"Hey, uh," said Jesse, "it's… September." His callsign. Nobody used their real names, of course—they all adopted months of the year—and it was a fight to get someone to take April, May, and June. These shitheads didn't want anything to do with anything even remotely female, took it as a sign of weakness. But take it they did, eventually. "We got the samples done. I gotta talk to you."
A long silence. "Fine." Jesse let himself in.
Harris looked like shit. He was an ugly bastard at the best of times, squat and rough with a face like a bulldog, but there was a new haggardness that suggested a bone-deep exhaustion of spirit. The light on him from overhead cast deep black reliefs under his eyes, circular shadows against his gaunt, sagging cheeks. Harris' eyes tracked him, and Jesse closed the door as he entered.
"Well?" Harris asked. Jesse realized he'd said nothing for a long few seconds.
"It's uh..." Jesse's words ended in a weak, upward inflection. "...it ain't exactly good news?"
Harris stared at him. He blinked, once. "I'm all out of patience for bad news."
"The uh, nurse. He said it was... you know. Gone."
"What is gone?"
"The uh… the… virus."
Their eyes remained locked for what felt like minutes. The man behind the desk might have missed his calling as a professional staring contest champion, or a statue impersonator. Harris reached into his desk. The lowest drawer squealed as it was pulled out. Harris lit a cigarette, squeezed the bridge of his nose between his eyes. "It's what?"
"The virus. It's... still there, you know, there's signs it was there but the nurse said it was... uh, digested. It's gone." He added, hurried, "I guess."
Harris was still. It was as if he were a frame on a paused tape, or a television broadcast frozen somewhere between its home base and the set receiving it. The only sign this was life and not a motion capture were the twirls of smoke wafting towards the dim, flickering ceiling lighting.
"The mutagen." He said.
"I—er, yeah."
"Gone."
Jesse stood by the door. He resisted the urge to cower like a child being berated by an abusive parent, his eyes shifting back and forth.
"...yeah."
Harris closed his eyes for a long, stilling moment. "So you're telling me he... what? Fought it off? Like a cold?"
"I... I don't know. He said it was encapsulated." Jesse was vaguely proud of himself for remembering the word.
Harris drummed his fingers against the top of the desk. Then, he began to laugh.
"It's been for nothing." In a flash, Harris threw down his cigarette, grabbed the telephone from his desk and hurled it against the wall. The cord tethering it to the wall broke at its clear jack; the phone smashed into a variety of plastic moldings, broken chipsets and circuit boards. "Nothing! All of this was for nothing!"
"Jesus!" Jesse recoiled, ready to shield his face. "Take it easy!"
"Don't tell me to take it easy, you fucking peon. I owe more than the GDP of small countries to your boss. And the only trade I could afford was for combat data—they know the curtain's coming down, so they've been trying to field test an unnamed mutagen that makes super soldiers. And that jackass—" he indicated the direction of the room Jesse just left, with an emphatic point, "—is one of two hand to hand combat specialists I've got on my team. You know what that means? If the mutagen isn't even active, now none of the data is any good. A year's work."
"So what about the girl? She's got the superbug too, I guess?"
Harris stared at him, glassy and vacant, his face a shade of angry, shining red. His small, dark eyes flickered back and forth, lips parted, like Jesse plucked him from a delusion and Harris was still reeling at the sudden change in scenery.
"No, she's political. You saw how she ripped your dicks off on national TV. They were trying to stop it from happening before she talked." With the gusto of the single-minded, Harris returned to his previous topic, as if Jesse's question was a momentary distraction to be swatted away like an insect. "Do you know what I've been through in the last year to get that combat data? It is worth millions of dollars. They've been fighting bioweapons, cleaning Umbrella's messes for months under the table. Japan. Africa. South America. The fucking ARCTIC CIRCLE, for Chrissakes."
"You're uh… you're with the Marines, right?" Jesse said. "Why don't you get them to do it?"
"You think I didn't think of that already, idiot? How do you think I got in this position in the first place? We'd been using the Marines for years, cleaning up the caches and collecting combat numbers under the guise of intervening in civil wars. Nobody gave a fuck, either, until Umbrella's bioweapons started getting stronger, and I started losing more Marines than I came back with. I got sloppy and sent in FORCECOM once. Once, and then..." he spread his hands to indicate the entirety of the situation.
"…oh. Uh… well…"
Harris stopped himself and took a breath. "Wait. The girl… her. She's the payday. She'll come for him. They're joined at the goddamned hip. Five-hundred thousand for proof of death, one million alive. If we could bring her in… we don't need the combat data."
"Wait, uh, what? Hang on. You sure about this? You saw what she did to Reynolds and Sullivan." What she did to ME, he started to say, before his pride intervened. His hands still hurt, even to this day. The bones fused, but the muscles and tendons hadn't gotten the message they were supposed to grow straight; on good days they twitched and hummed in the background, a dull ache he'd learned to ignore. On bad days, days like this where he ended up using his hands for more than driving or operate a phone, it was a deep, nested pain. Hearing her name made it radiate, like someone had struck a tuning fork on his bones.
"Together, her and this asshole. They're worth enough. They have to be. You're telling me you're afraid of a woman half your size?" Harris said. "A pregnant woman half your size?"
I ain't afraid of women, half my size or not, Jesse thought, one of the first times he'd been truly honest with himself about anything since he could remember. But I AM afraid of Jill Valentine. And if you were smart, you would be too.
Talking shit was one thing, but actually inviting her down here, knowing her track record?
To Jesse's silence, Harris' lips pressed together and disappeared into a line. He reached under his desk and produced a pistol, a rubber-gripped 9mm Taurus with a matte gray slide stop. For a long moment Jesse thought Harris was going to level it and pop him straight in the face. Harris didn't; he pushed his roller-chair back, stood from his desk, and tromped toward the door. He stopped long enough to rattle off a nine-digit telephone number.
"She'll come for him. She will." It sounded like Harris was trying to convince himself, once again lapsed into a thousand-yard stare, one that made Jesse's blood run cold. "Call her and tell her the address. Now."
"Are you sure—?"
"NOW!" Harris bellowed.
"Fuck. Fuck. Okay, okay. Give me the number again."
Harris did.
"I'm going to go tell them to move to the target. Before word gets out. And you're going to go look at the samples again."
Jesse moved to protest. Coming in here made the situation worse, a talent which, if considered a superpower, might have rendered him a part of the fucking Avengers. But after taking a long look at the redness of Harris' face, the desperation in his bulging eyes… Jesse did not protest.
He dialed the number.
Carlos dove for Mr. Scrubs and wrestled him to the floor. The nurse groped, blindly, and found the syringe of clear fluid at the very edge of his fingers. He grabbed it, point-end out, like a knife. He was wiry-strong, the kind of strength summoned from true desperation, from fighting for your life. He fought Carlos back, enough to drive the syringe's gleaming bevel close to Carlos' eye. Carlos raised his hands and grabbed the plunger on the end, pulled it free. The fluid inside poured out of the back, spilled over the man beneath him in a great glut, over his face, into his mouth, his eyes. He dropped it, tried desperately to spit it out, clear it from his face, blinded. He rolled onto his hands and knees and tried to scamper away, stumbled to his feet and held out his hands as Carlos approached.
"I'll solve the puzzle, Pat," said the voice in the distance, "A - House - Divided - Against - Itself - Cannot - Stand." Riotous applause. Theme music under the ragged cadence of breath, of scuffling, of whimpers of pain and panic.
Carlos cocked back a fist, drove it into the soft part of the man's stomach. He clutched into a protective posture and fell limp in Carlos' arms, eyelids fluttering, their lashes wet with clear drops of fluid.
"Just take a nap, asshole. Jesus." Carlos laid the man on the ground. He was light, the weight of some women, despite his impressive height.
His hands still shackled, Carlos clamped them around the pipe, yanked it free of its moorings. It squealed in rusty protest, hung on by an angle of paint. He yanked it again and it came away in his hands. Quietly, he moved in a half-skipping step to the side of the door, laid his back against it, and waited, his breath rapid.
Mr. Babyhands came tearing in like a bat out of hell. He planted his feet, skidded to a stop, and kicked up a puff of plaster dust. The nurse lay, eyelids twitching and breath slowing, his scrubs and face streaked and splashed in a spreading blot of crimson, limbs spread on the floor like he was making a snow angel in the grime. Carlos could see the smaller man's greasy wheels turning, even from behind. His hostage was missing.
So was a part of the radiator.
Mr. Babyhands breathed, heavy, and looked to each of his sides in a shocked jerk of his head.
"Fuck," he whispered, and unholstered his gun. "I know you're in here. Come out and—"
Carlos took a quiet step forward. He reared the pipe back like a baseball bat, swung it with all the force he could muster. The dank air whistled through the hole in the metal. It smashed it against the side of the man's knee with a sound like a breaking root vegetable; his leg bent inwards toward its twin at a sick, unnatural angle. The man opened his mouth, swooped in air to scream in agony. Carlos dropped the pipe. It clanged against the floor. He looped the chain of his cuffs around the man's throat from behind. The sound cut with a wet, guttural choke, and they toppled to the floor.
"Did you hear that?" Asked someone, far away.
Carlos gave brief thought to letting him go. To not killing him. But he'd chosen to place himself in Carlos' path, time after time. He had chosen this. He could have left; made a new life somewhere else. But instead, this man drifted toward them repeatedly. Toward Jill. It was the excuse Carlos' brain accepted; it wasn't for him. It was protection, not vengeance, and it was out of his control.
"So fun to play mercenary, isn't it, fucker?" Carlos didn't recognize his own voice. It was quiet, malicious, close to a whisper. He planted one knee against the man's lower back, pulled back with all his force, gritted his teeth against the resistance of the man's windpipe, his spine. "You get cool guns. Get to chain people up like fucking animals and threaten their women. After she was nice enough to let you go. Don't look so shocked—you got between another contractor and his payday. That's one-oh-one."
Mr. Babyhands choked, sputtered. The skin of his face reddened, thickening to a sick purple and he tried to work his fingers under the chain.
"It's okay, man. I got no problem teaching newbies. Sometimes we just gotta learn."
On the last word, the crunch of the man's windpipe finally giving way paired with a sudden lack of resistance against the chain. His rabid desperation faded, the clutching and pawing now ceased, hands limp. His head laid against the floor at an angle slightly askew and the dim, flickering lights overhead reflected off the pink skin at the center of both of his hands.
Carlos looked around. A ragged bend of metal where he'd twisted the pipe free of its attachment poked into the air like a wisdom tooth. He hooked the center link of his cuffs over the point, twisted until the link locked at an angle and could move no more. The cuffs pressed against his skin in a white line where the blood stopped. His hands turned a faint shade of purple.
Carlos took a deep breath, gritted his aching teeth, and pulled again. The metal sliced into the skin of his wrists, this time. Blood ran in thin trickles, into the dark hair on the tops of his hands, pattered onto the floor at his feet. Carlos kicked one foot against the wall. Pulled with all his strength, pulled until his arms shook and trembled, until his shoulders ached and protested in their sockets. With a shimmering jingle the chain broke away at its center. The links flew and clinked against the wall, the floor. Carlos stumbled back and almost slipped on the pool of the nurses' blood. He caught his balance at the last possible moment.
He unknotted his silk necktie, shrugged off the vest of his dark gray suit, unclasped his belt, yanked it out of the loops of his slacks. Anything they could choke him with or would restrict his movement was a bad idea, especially if it might make it tight around his torso, where his punching power came from. He'd gotten sloppy with the necktie—one of the first things you learned was both they, leather belts, and shoelaces were good for nothing but strangling you or trussing you to something, weak enough they couldn't be used to reliably tie something shut but hard to get out of. He should have known better. Civilian life was making him soft.
Carlos bent and retrieved the man's revolver from where it tumbled into the dust, a piece of long, ostentatious chrome theater, surely compensation for something. A .44 Magnum, of course; he'd never fired this fucking thing in his life, or he'd know it'd most likely deafen him anywhere but out on a range.
"Real tough guy. Dumbass." Carlos folded open the cylinder. Six rounds, fully stocked. He clicked it closed with a flick of his wrist, thumbed the hammer to its resting position. As close to a safety as he'd get on a cowboy piece of shit like this. He tucked the gun in the back of his dark dress pants, under his belt.
With the gun tucked into the back of his pants and the pipe in his hands, Carlos departed the room and its humid stink of mildew and blood, his eyes forward, determined to not focus on the bodies sprawled on the floor.
The hallway was dim, the only lights cast from the rooms on either side; some of them were dark and unused in a great while, from the looks of things. The floor, while sturdy enough to walk on, bore an uneven keel Carlos didn't trust; it seemed the entire building was slightly askew like quick sand, appeared solid until you planted your body in the wrong spot and were sucked under. The hall extended to both the right and left, both directions stretching into shadowed perspective points. The place was a fucking maze, the kind they'd drop rats into to see which one could grab a hunk of cheese first. The distant laugh-track and tinkling game show music floated on the stagnant, humid air. He couldn't tell which direction it was coming from. But Babyhands came from the right; it was why he didn't see Carlos when he'd screeched into the room like the Roadrunner, kicking up a plume of dust as he skidded to a halt. HUNK also came from that direction, and continued to the left. Most likely heading toward an exit. As loathe as he was to be anywhere in HUNK's presence, including following in his footsteps, this meant Carlos was also going left.
Rooms were named on plastic plaques but with such generic conventions it was easy to forget their names and hard to tell them apart: Conference A through D, Conference II A. All the hallways looked the same. It felt like he was roaming for hours, when, after turning a corner, a clear plastic sign with dark red lettering appeared on the ceiling:
EXIT
This was also when the footsteps sounded behind him, down the hall.
Carlos dove behind the first doorway he saw, pressed his body against the space between the doorless jamb and a large picture window which gave a vantage into a room with a long conference table and a few scattered chairs, all caked with dust and mold. Carlos' hands tightened on the pipe's reassuring hardness, now slippery, damp with sweat from his palms. The muscles in his arms and shoulders tensed and he raised it over a shoulder like a baseball bat, readying to swing as soon as someone presented themselves, rocking back and forth on anxious, nervy feet.
The footsteps drew closer. Before the doorway, a high-pitched, electronic jingle played. The footsteps stopped. A rustle of fabric. The person heaved a world-weary sigh, and the footsteps receded a few feet away. The person cleared their throat.
"Hey, baby!" An unmistakable New Jersey accent. "What's up?"
A long pause. Carlos swallowed; a drop of sweat ran from the point of his nose, fell to the dust below. He twisted his grip on the pipe, readying it.
"Aww, come on. You know I'm at work."
Another pause.
"Look, I know—" the man said, "I—Marcy, would you let me—?! I'm at work. You know I'm at work."
Carlos stopped and hazarded a slow, halting peek around the corner. The man's back was turned and he gesticulated with one hand as if trying to convince someone in the dark with him.
"Look, I already said I'm sorry about that. Okay? It was a one-time thing. I was drunk. We're not gonna get past it if every time I leave for work, you bring it up again." A pause. "Look, the rig is gonna come back to shore next Wednesday, then it's the off-season. No more work for at least a month, maybe two. Okay?"
Carlos cocked an eyebrow. Oil rig? He mouthed to himself. It was as good an excuse as any, he supposed, but it could be traced back too easily—most "legit" work could, if a spouse was jealous or suspicious enough, as it sounded like Marcy here had reason to be.
"August!" Came a booming voice from the hall. It shocked Carlos back into present time—he straightened with a bolt, hid behind the doorway. "We're rolling out! Let's fucking move!"
"Alright—look. Look, I gotta go, okay? I'll—right. I'll call as soon as I can, but I gotta—okay. Okay. I love you too. Bye." The man clicked the phone shut. Footsteps sounded in the direction from whence they came, the strides quick and agitated. Soon there was no noise; no footsteps, no marital arguments, only the heavy, moist air and a blanket of deafening silence.
Carlos ducked out from the doorway and headed in the other direction, toward the EXIT sign. He rounded the corner, watching over his shoulder, the soles of his dress shoes tapping against the tile floor toward a set of restrooms marked by blue squares; one displaying a naked white stick figure, the other sign hanging at an angle from a single remaining screw. The figure on the broken sign was wearing a skirt. Men and Women.
Like it was happening in a dream, too quick to react and too slowly for him to do anything but watch, the door to the Women's bathroom opened. Into Carlos' path stepped a massive man with skin as dark as night and a bald, slightly pointed head. His hands—which he dried on a thin, tan sheet of paper towel—were the size of bear's paws. He looked straight at Carlos, and the two shared a moment of struck silence and shock before the man's brow furrowed in confusion.
He asked, "What the fuck?"
Carlos recognized his voice from the car ride.
"Look," Carlos put out a hand. "We don't have to do this, man. Say you didn't see me, and we can…"
The answer came in the form of the man reaching into his suit jacket, under his lapel. With a frustrated curse, Carlos shook his head and launched himself at him, smashed the pipe directly into the man's upper arm, under the meat of his shoulder. He dropped his gun and cried out in pain, but there was no reassuring sound of breaking bone; this man was too large, with too much natural padding for a one-hitter quitter like the one that took Babyhands out. Carlos swung again, this time, at the man's immense stomach. His intended victim caught the other end of the pipe, yanked it out of Carlos' grip and flung it somewhere into the room behind, where it reported off something hard with a metallic echo. Carlos dove at him, shoulder-first, football-tackled him back into the bathroom until the man braced his feet and skidded them to a stop. He was so large he most likely didn't move anywhere unless he wanted to.
The man pushed Carlos off and punched him, direct contact. The world blinked out into black and white and tilted on its side; when it came back into focus he was pinned against the wall, his feet no longer on the floor, a pair of massive hands wrapped around his throat. He tried to pound his fists against the man's arms and met nothing but solid resistance, like pounding on cement.
"You UBCS assholes think you're so big and bad," the man said, his deep voice laced with a malicious chuckle, "you die like anyone else, though. You just took a little longer. That's all." The man squeezed. Something in the architecture of Carlos' throat creaked, resisting the outward force. Shadows pressed in on the edges of his vision, and colors swam, became less vivid. Carlos' hands found the wall behind him, flat, and slid along it to his lower back.
"Just try it," the man said, "go ahead. Try to move me again, bitch."
The man's expression went blank when the barrel of the gun pressed against his chest. Carlos pulled the trigger; this enclosed, the magnum crashed like a cannon. Blood splashed onto Carlos' torso, was thrown in a warm shower onto his face. A high, squealing, pulsating shriek filled the room and there was no sound other than the rushing of blood in his ears and the metal-on-metal, tinny noise, like someone was playing a saw with a violin bow.
The man dropped Carlos and he landed in a crumpled heap, fighting for breath, one hand on his throat. The man stumbled back and the floor shook under his footfalls. He dropped, sudden and limp, like a great redwood tree crashing to the forest floor.
Carlos wiped one hand over his face. It came back glistening with sweat and blood, and he was unsure how much of either was his. He stared at that hand for a long, long moment; the way the blood sat thicker, darker in the lines of his palm. Blood that once was inside this man's body, now all over him, making his black shirt glisten in the diminished light. All over the floor in a gradual drumbeat march. The screaming in his ears stopped, eventually, now only a low-grade, throbbing whine.
"…uh… June?" Came a voice from outside. A banging on the door. "June, you in there? Harris said we're rolling out."
The door cracked open. An Asian guy with a sharp suit and a sharper haircut, a very, very young face. Carlos aimed the gun at his head.
"Not polite to come in on a guy when he's indisposed. Now it's a party and you're invited, asshole." Carlos said. "Why don't you come make yourself comfortable? Quietly, or you might scare my friend here." He indicated the barrel of the gun with an upward tilt.
The kid held his hands aloft in surrender. "O-okay man, chill out. I'm coming in."
"They were talking about troop movements," Carlos panted, "tell me where they're going."
The kid said nothing for a long moment. His eyes were wide, flickering back and forth over Carlos' face in an expression of terror at what he saw there. He swallowed.
"I—it's 4863 Chamberlain Circle. It's just a politician, man. Not—not personal. Please let me go, man. I was gonna retire after this job, and—I swear I was gonna retire. I don't even wanna—"
The adrenaline pumping through Carlos' body shouted. Residual ringing pierced the membranes in his ears; made it hard to hear, hard to think.
"Please," the man repeated, weakly. "Please. You don't have to."
"Who's giving your orders? HUNK?"
The kid shook his head. "Oh, fuck no. It's the crazy motherfucker, the one with the Marines. Harris. He's in charge."
Just at the name, Carlos' knuckles hungered for blood. But something deeper, something in his bones and in the crawling interlocked molecules of his DNA took one look at the kid's eyes and released, like a fist uncurling. He thought of the EXIT sign, dead and still, and then of Harris' face.
Dead… both he and his partner. They were being ordered by someone in the FBC. I know —
—you've got a front row seat—
—it's hard to win a war from the high ground.
Give us your answer—but I'd suggest you do it soon.
"Harris is here?"
"Yeah. Y-yeah, I think he's still here."
"Empty your pockets and go," said Carlos, his voice strangled and strangely defeated. He let the gun drift away from its target. "Leave your shit and get out of here."
The kid didn't need to be told twice. He offloaded his pistol, his knife, his phone, emptied his pockets so fast he left them turned out, got to his feet and slammed against the exit outside, and was gone.
Carlos dialed a number on the discarded phone. The large man's blood pooled on the tile beneath his feet, crept toward the dark, burnished leather of Carlos' shoes. He let it approach while he waited for the line to connect.
After the fourth ring, a click, little more than static. Kevin's voice, always straddling the line between a Midwestern accent and a Southern drawl.
"Yeah," he said. "This is Ryman."
"Kevin, I don't got much time to talk. Write this down, read it back."
"Uh—shit—uh, uh… hang on. Okay, go." A mild sound of Kevin shushing someone on the other end.
"4863 Chamberlain Circle. That's where they're going."
"4863 Chamberlain Circle. Got it."
An excited voice on the other end murmured something Carlos couldn't hear.
"Kennedy says that's Graham's place."
"They did say it was a politician. Shit. I gotta go." Said Carlos. "They're heading that way now. I'll meet you there if I can."
"If you—Heavy, what the fuck do you mean if you can? Where are you?"
"Listen—take care of Jill." Carlos remembered the glimmer of red eye pieces in a black helmet; the way the air seemed to gust cooler when HUNK walked past, like he carried the mist from a graveyard in his wake. "And be careful, man. Please."
"Heavy! Heavy, wait—"
Carlos hung up the phone and collected the kid's gun, his knife. He walked outside, to the hallway. The EXIT door called to him. A few steps from freedom.
Carlos shook his head and walked toward the noise, toward the sound of footsteps and clattering equipment and Harris' voice.