Part Nine
Jane was silent in the passenger seat. If she kept up that habit for the next few hours, then Alex thought that he might even come to like her. He noticed that his hands were clenched around the steering wheel only when his fingers began to ache, and even then it was difficult to stop. Jane watched every move that he made without pretending that she was doing otherwise, which Alex found that he in a strange way appreciated. The others made moves to hide it when he caught them. Even then, only Burrows watched him as if he understood that Alex was still someone dangerous, while Scofield and Tancredi alike pretended that everything was settled now and that Alex was on their side as a matter of course.
He wasn't. God help him, even after all of the words that he had snapped at Scofield about living up to his own rhetoric, even knowing that a redemption thrust aside was not likely to be offered again, it all depended upon what he found at the house.
In the passenger seat, Jane stirred abruptly. Given how chill and strange she had been thus far, Alex would not put it past her to be able to read minds. He glanced over. "What?"
"Nothing." Jane started to turn back towards the passenger side window, then made a liar out of herself a mere second later by adding, "I was thinking that you make a strange acquisition for the Company to pursue. They have been able to grow so large because they do not take foolish risks. They would not have approached you unless they were sure that they could at the very least keep you from going to the authorities with what you knew."
Alex ordered himself to stop gripping at the steering wheel so hard, or else he was going to have to allow Jane to drive the rest of the way to Durango and ask Tancredi to reset his fingers upon their return. "And I don't seem like enough of a thug?" he asked without turning his eyes away from the road. He could feel a tight smile beginning to hurt his face as he did so, a behavioral warning flag. Up to Jane now to decide whether or not she was going to heed it. He could feel her gaze against the side of his face.
"You don't," Jane stated calmly, either missing the thunderclouds that Alex was sending out or else deciding that she could weather whatever happened as a result. "Which means that you've hidden it well."
The SUV swerved alarmingly towards the shoulder as Alex remembered how the lye had burned the inside of his nose, how the sweat that had collected along his shoulders and down the line of his spine had felt cold even though it was already one of the hottest summers on record. Alex righted the SUV's course with a muttered curse and met Jane's wryly arched eyebrow. "Not so well as you think," Alex said.
Jane turned in her seat so that she could view the long streaks of rubber that Alex had left on the road before they disappeared over the horizon. Alex almost thought that he was seeing a hint of humor there. "Clearly," she said in a neutral tone as she settled back down again.
They passed the Durango city limits sign. Alex's foot came down harder against the gas pedal. At Jane's sideways glance, Alex gritted, "If we're pulled over, I'll show them my badge. It still means something." To anyone who did not know what he had spent the previous few weeks doing with it. Jane made a small and noncommittal sound from the back of her throat and continued to fix him with that chill and infuriatingly knowing stare. It made Alex feel a streak of the old viciousness that had plagued him during his trapped and claustrophobic adolescent years, visiting him so swiftly and so furiously that he might have been troubled by it if he had not already had so much else on his mind. He glanced Jane's way, made note of the cool plastic exterior that desperately needed to be shattered, and said, "And you? What nasty corpse did they use to drag you into this?" He had buried his beneath the birdbath in the backyard, but Jane looked more like a wood chipper and running water woman to him.
Jane started to flinch and turned the gesture into a tilt of her head at the last moment. Alex was gratified that he had even received that much of a reaction, and a little disturbed that he had even been driven to reach for it. He blew past the donut shop where he had taken Cameron for breakfast before school sometimes at a speed that made several people lay on their horns. Jane took all of this in as if she were watching something on television. If had not been traveling within the same SUV with her for the past few hours, then Alex would have missed how her face had gone marginally paler when he had snapped at her about corpses.
"I fit a series of psych profiles," Jane answered finally. She reached out so that she could brace herself against the dashboard as Alex took a corner so hard that the SUV was for a moment balanced on two wheels. She pressed her lips into a firm line, recovered, and went on, "All of my bodies were hidden by people other than myself."
"Must have been nice," Alex said. Even though his voice was so thick with sarcasm that he thought he tasted bile, Jane answered in all seriousness.
"It was not." Jane straightened and looked out at the houses that were flying by them. "You should slow down before you hit someone's child." It was only the second time that Alex had ever heard her express genuine concern, for anyone or any situation. He would have glanced over at her if he had not been so heavily occupied with keeping them on the road.
"There aren't any kids in this neighborhood," Alex replied, and barely grazed at the brakes as he came very close to displaying a few laws of physics, namely those concerning mass, to someone's Hyundai. A raised middle finger was his reward. The houses were all clean, professional space. Doug and Stacy had never been inclined towards reproducing.
Though he would not turn his head to look at her, Alex could feel her watching him. "Then why are we here?"
"Pam's phone was tapped." Alex did not like explaining even that much, even as he understood that if Jane was untrustworthy she would already know this. "I told her to go to her sister's."
Jane cringed as they took another turn at a speed that such a large vehicle was absolutely not meant to go when driven by someone of perhaps dubious sanity. "Then won't the Company be waiting for us, anyway?" The third time that she had betrayed concern. Jane sounded as if she was starting to wonder who she had gotten into a vehicle with, and how quickly she could get out again.
"Pam is an only child." And here Alex took a breath and stared out the windshield, because if Jane was not truly a member of the Company's opposite number, then what he was telling her now was jettisoning every chance that he had of getting Pam and Cameron out safely. "About a year and a half ago, I was pursuing an escaped prisoner named Oscar Shales. Rapist, murderer, really sadistic piece of work. This would not have made him all that special if not for the fact that he was also smart. Most criminals aren't." Alex could feel his fingers clenching yet again, and this time they did not want to obey his command and unclench. "He threatened my family, and I took him seriously. Pam and I worked out this signal, where if I called her and told her to go to her sister's, she was to pick up Cameron and go stay at the house of an old partner of mine, no questions asked." Alex could not feel Jane's expression but still did not think that he needed to glance over in order to know what her face must look like. It I had /I been a paranoid decision. Shales demanded that.
"Alex," Jane said abruptly. It was the first time that she had addressed him by any name at all, let alone his first one, and for a few seconds Alex was so startled that he was not sure what she was referring to. A sleek dark car, scarily similar to the one that Alex himself was currently driving, was parked in front of the house of the man that Alex had known since the both of them were at Quantico. Doug had never in his life driven a car that was not already at least five years old by the time that he bought it, and more often than not was covered in rust that looked like the spots on a dog. Alex slammed on the brakes so hard that he would have sent the both of them through the windshield if not for their belts. The car was well made and scarcely created a sound as the brakes locked and the vehicle came to a halt.
Alex knew that there was no way that Doug could be driving that car based upon many years of knowing the man. How Jane know, outside of a nearly miraculous burst of instinct, he could not say. Alex cast Jane a glance and found that she was already focused and intent, unbuckling her seatbelt and staring out the windshield with a hunter's expression. Alex supposed that he had no other choice but to take a leap of faith. If only he had not been getting such diminishing returns on those lately.
"Come on," Alex said abruptly. He grabbed for the gun that had been sitting on the center console for the duration of the trip, unspoken of but certainly not unnoticed, and exited the car. Jane's own gun was in a shoulder holster, but there was no around to see it. In broad daylight, she still moved like a ghost. Alex shut his door quietly when he wanted to slam it and instructed her, "Take the back."
Those gray, indifferent eyes could probably drive a person mad if they had already been given a few nudges in the right direction. Alex only gritted his teeth. "If we are too late," Jane inquired of him, "will you be all right left alone?"
Alex bared his teeth, decided to call it a smile, and again saw Jane flinch back before she was able to control herself. "If we are too late, then I won't be interested in hiding my bodies."
Jane inclined her head in understanding and disappeared around the side of the house. Even in the gathering dusk that should have been bringing professionals home from work, Alex doubted that she was seen. He took a breath and walked up the steps that he knew nearly as well as his own with the taste of bile sour in the back of his throat. The gun was an extension of his arm, and he could hear his own blood roaring through his ears.
Alex had felt like this, like a tether was being slipped off of him while he was half-rabid already and getting worse by the second, when he had had Shales in custody and the bastard had started whispering of all of the things that he would do to Pam, to Cameron, when he escaped again. They had both known that he would. Felt the same, knew what the consequences would be, and still could not bring himself to care. Alex's hand was steady as eh reached for the door and found that it was unlocked. Doug and Stacy were both highly attentive to security. It was a consequence of Doug's job.
Alex did not call out as he entered the house. It looked the same as it always did, a combination of the files from Stacy's law practice scattered over every available surface and the equipment from the sports that Doug played on weekends thrown into the corners. They were both indifferent housekeepers, but there was a subtle method to the madness that Alex had grown used to, and that did not appear to be disturbed now. Alex held his breath for several long seconds in the doorway, listening, even though he heard no sound. It was not until he was forced to exhale that he realized he could smell burning meat.
Gun drawn, Alex walked slowly towards the kitchen and the source of the smell. His mind was filling with dark possibilities that he could not dismiss, urging him to sprint even though he knew that it would be foolish. Oscar Shales would have used the full extent of his imagination to come up with the most creative and painful method of death possible. The Company would likely not. Death alone would be enough to send a message to their misbehaving pet without adding any embellishments. Alex was not in a mood to quibble about degree.
He placed his feet carefully and made no sound as he walked across the threshold of the kitchen. It was beginning to fill with smoke from the stove and the alarms would be going off soon, but none of Alex's darkest fears were proved true. No bodies sprawled across a stove that had been turned on high. No parts of bodies, either. Alex did not realize how tense he had been until he released his breath on a long exhale. He did not relax as he reached out to turn off the stove and remove what looked like it had been ground hamburger before it had been forgotten and allowed to turn into charcoal. The act was purely reflexive; Alex doubted that Stacy was in any kind of position to care about the state of her kitchen.
As Alex was stepping out of the room, his eyes stinging and tearing from the smoke, he heard a thump from the direction of Doug and Stacy's bedroom that immediately sent a dead man's finger trailing down his spine. Could be Jane, he supposed. If all of the forces of the universe that had been aligned to come down wrong on him ever since that day last June suddenly decided to reverse direction at once, sure, it could absolutely be Jane. Alex touched again at the safety that he had disengaged before entering the house, just to be sure, and walked back into the living room with every hair on his body prickling at once. He was overdue for one of his pills; he heard Cameron crying and took a moment to realize that he was imagining the sound within his own head.
Alex's eyes were still burning and his vision was still clouded from the smoke when his shoes touched the living room carpet again. He saw the blurred figure from the corner of his eye, recognized it as male, and spun. Alex was raising his own gun to fire when he heard a clicking noise and threw himself to the side. His opponent must be new at the whole killing people thing, to not have disengaged the safety on his weapon from the moment that he had realized that he was not in the house alone, but Alex was not going to look a gift salvation in the mouth. Much better that the bullet slam into the couch than his own body. Alex struck the carpet hard and rolled behind an armchair to provide him with some cover, raising his own gun as he did so. Two more bullets struck the place where Doug had once tended to get pleasantly drunk watching football on Sunday afternoons, usually with Alex doing the same on the couch only a few feet away. Alex had no problem with throwing a few bullets back. The smoke had still not managed to entirely clear from his eyes, and Alex was realizing that the hours since he had entered the house had in reality been only minutes. One of his bullets struck the plaster wall only a few inches from his attacker's head. The second one entered the man's shoulder with a wet and somehow satisfying thunking sound. The man dropped down to the carpet with a cry.
At both of those sounds, Alex's legs needed no further command from his brain in order to leverage him back to his feet. Now, Alex noted in a clear and detached way, his gun hand was finally starting to shake.
Two women screamed his name. One shouted in a clear, authoritative voice, while the other's cracked and was cut off halfway through. Alex ignored Jane and turned towards the sound of the second, towards Pam. Gasping and struggling to staunch the bleeding in his shoulder with one hand, the same man who had tired to kill Alex only a few seconds before tried to kill him again. Alex was faster. His gun boomed in his hand at the same time that Jane's did. One of their bullets took the man through the wrist, nearly severing the hand, and the other went directly into his temple. Alex had no idea which one of them fired the fatal shot. His mind was so filled with a black, buzzing mixture of rage and panic that he would later not be aware of having point the weapon at all.
"Come on!" he finally bellowed at Jane in a voice that he hardly recognized, and did not wait to see if she would obey. For that matter, neither did he care that he was announcing his exact location in the house to anyone who cared to shoot him through the door. Alex kicked it open so hard that it rebounded off the far wall. The only thing that kept it from coming back on him was that one of the hinges broke from the force of the impact. He did not remember doing that, either; when his foot ached later and his ankle was swollen, he would stare at his limb in faint amazement.
Pam was on the bed. Alex's eye found her almost immediately, ignoring the three others in the room, two men and one woman, and the guns that were being thrust into his face. He ignored the way that he could see Stacy's foot, sans shoe, sticking out from one side of the bed, could see Doug on the other side with most of his brains lying outside of his head, but Pam was on the bed.
Pam was on the bed, and she was lying down even though this was the last possible time in which someone would want to take a nap. Alex had known Doug for twenty years and Stacy for fifteen and neither one of them had owned a set of red sheets in their lives, but it was Pam, Pam was so still and so small, and Alex could not breathe.
The spell broke with an audible popping noise in Alex's ears. He did not wait until he had drawn to breathe again, not even sure that he could, before he raised the gun. Three gun barrels were as large as eclipses in his line of fire, and Alex did not care. There was a booming noise from behind him. Alex swore that he could feel the heat of the bullet leaving a mark against the side of his neck as it flew past him, before the forehead of one man developed a neat hold in the front while the back exploded like a ripe melon. His male partner flinched away before he could stop himself, sending his shot wild and into the wall. Possessed as he was by this sharp and terrible/beautiful rage that was making everything appear crystalline and clear, Alex's aim stayed true. The man dropped to the carpet with a gurgling hole opened up in his throat. The woman decided then that the purchasing power of her courage was not nearly enough and spun towards the window. Jane dropped her before she could get more than two steps.
Alex glanced over his shoulder and saw that Jane still had both of her arms extended out in front of her, as if she did not know how to lower them again. Alex was slowly relearning to breathe, and each attempt whistled in his throat. He stepped towards the bed and got halfway there before he abruptly doubled over and dry-heaved so hard that he tasted bile and was sure that he would spit out his own fillings.
"Don't drop your weapon," Jane said behind him in a sharp voice as Alex braced his hands against his knees.
"I wouldn't dream of it." Alex made it to the bed without collapsing and then leaned heavily against the mattress once he got there. Pam's face had not even started to go pale yet. They must have killed her mere seconds before Alex had entered the room, when there had been so many gunshots flying about that to pull the sound of one alone out the fray would have been impossible. The bullet hole in the center of her forehead was very neat compared to all of the blood that was spreading out beneath her.
Alex was breathing very hard, aware that he was on the verge of hyperventilating and not anywhere near a state of mind where he would have been able to care, hearing his own pulse thundering so hard that it hurt within his ears. He had not felt like this when he had killed Shales, and he wanted that feeling back, desperately. He was going to need it. He had agreed to join Scofield's cause grudgingly, understanding both that his Pam and Cameron were never going to be truly safe while he consented to have the Company boot pressed upon his neck and that he could only continue to tear his soul into pieces for so long before there would not be enough left to constitute a person any longer, but it had been a choice born of calculation rather than passion. Alex fisted his hand through the sheets that his ex wife was lying on and thought that this was no longer going to be a problem.
Jane's footfalls sounded softly on the carpet behind him. After watching her slip off as quietly and unobtrusively as a ghost-God-less than ten minutes before, Alex thought that she was doing it deliberately, so as not to startle him. He was in no mood to appreciate. "Alex," Jane said.
While the use of his first name had rankled before, Alex now only said in a dull voice, "My son's not here." Neither was a body, but Alex was in no mood to take small comforts.
Turning, Alex saw that Jane looked uncertain for perhaps the first time since he had met her. "The police will be arriving shortly," she began.
"I don't care," Alex snapped back. Jane's eyes narrowed, and for a moment it looked as if they were going to waste the small window of time that they had by having an argument, until Alex heard the sound of a snuffing sigh from beneath the bed. He had dropped to his knees before he even remembered giving himself the command to do so. One leg of his trousers was immediately soaked in blood. Who it actually belonged to, Alex could not say. He leaned down, lifted the bedcover to the side, and found the stricken and tear-streaked face of his son. Cameron was too far away to be reached immediately, which was the only reason that he was not seized and held against Alex's chest.
He swallowed hard to push the buzzing aside and said, "Hey, Cam. Listen, buddy, we have to leave pretty quickly now, so how about you come over here?"
"Where's Mommy?" Cameron asked without coming any closer. It had been years since had last sucked his thumb, but Cameron had shoved his entire fist into his mouth and was gnawing on his knuckles so hard that he would soon be drawing blood.
Alex glanced upwards towards the bed before he could stop himself and cursed inwardly as he saw Cameron follow the gesture. "She had to go away," he told Cameron, and struggled not to be sick. "She didn't want to." Cowardly, perhaps, but now was not the time to find out how much his son really understood about death. Maybe he would have a better idea if he had been around for the past year. It was not the time to think about that now, either.
Jane made an impatient sound from the doorway. Alex threw an ugly look over his shoulder and then said to Cameron, "It's okay, buddy, I'm here now."
It was the breaking point. Cameron made a strangled noise and wriggled across the space that separated them, hurling himself into Alex's arms as soon as he was clear. Alex clutched his son to him harder than he had ever thought of gripping the steering wheel and rose to his feet. There was someone else's blood sliding down his shin. Alex lowered his lips to Cameron's hair while Jane discreetly looked away to give them a moment of privacy.
Cameron started to look towards the bed, but Alex grabbed his face and turned it quickly against Alex's own neck. "No, Cam. Don't look."
"May we leave now?" Jane asked. There was no malice in her tone. It did not stop Alex from glaring at her and wishing, just for a moment, that he could strike her dead.
"Yes," he said. "We can go." He took a final look behind him at the bodies of Pam and of two of his closest friends and felt again that rage rising inside of him, strange that it should be so hot and so black at the same time. Only the fact that he had Cameron in his arms kept it from boiling over.
They reached the lawn and the SUV as the first sirens could be heard several blocks over. Jane held her hand out without speaking for the keys; that Alex would not be driving was not even a question. Alex handed them over without saying anything and climbed into the passenger seat with Cameron in his arms. His son was shaking so badly that if it were not for Alex holding onto him he would have tumbled to the floorboard. As he lowered his lips to Cameron's hair again, Alex realized that his own hands were none too steady.
Jane began to murmur to herself as she pulled the vehicle away from the curb. It took Alex several moments to realize that she was praying, and even then he could not tell whether she was requesting grace on behalf of the living or the dead.
End Part Nine