The days ticked by.
It was a Monday, and the only thing on Dell's mind at the moment was the work on the top-secret machine he'd had to keep pushing further and further back due to the arsonist's presence. Still didn't trust her alone with his tools; definitely couldn't trust her around that.
He was in the garage, alone for once. The arsonist—well, he didn't know where the arsonist went. She'd been here a little while ago, until he'd given her the boot because damn, he really did need to work on that thing. Oh, she'd put up a bit of a fuss, dragged her heels some, but she left without much else.
Now, the doors shut and locked, he found himself looking at the sentry. "'Scuse me, darlin'," he told it, picking the whole thing up with ease. He set it down some five feet away with its nose pointing outward, where it beeped and did nothing more.
Where the sentry had stood was plain cement floor. It looked like it, anyway, until Dell tugged his wrench out from his overalls, knelt down, and tapped the floor in three places. A seam appeared where there had been none before, a five-by-five square. It was heralded by a hiss and whir of some hidden mechanism. The disguised flooring (for that was all it was) sank down, and Dell now looked at a stairway that led into the floor itself. He spun the wrench in his hand, tucked it back into his pocket, and went down.
Deep it went, a story's worth of steps. Then the steps stopped being steps and started being floor. A wide, windowless hall of steel and brick stretched out before him, hazed blue by the lights that fuzzed to life at his passing. Workbenches and shelves still lined the walls, but the tools on them were fewer, more specialized. It was nearly silent, almost every sound blocked out by thick cement walls. And there, at the other end of the hall and on a round platform covered in mounted lights, stood the machine.
It wasn't much to look at, really. Came up to about the chest, wheel-mounted for easy transport. Looked a little like a cartoon car, come to think of it. Bars separated a clear acrylic bowl filled with a gently-simmering blue liquid from the outside world, and half-a-dozen wires spilled out amid its many rivets and buttons. A tube thick as his leg snaked down from the back, and lay like a tail on the ground behind it. The black wires that hung from its end were unattached, waiting. It hummed, not quiet but not loud either, and the liquid in the bowl burbled softly.
Blutarch Mann's new immortality machine, pieced together from the very blueprints his grandfather—who was also in the pay of Blutarch Mann—was a pretty vast improvement over the old one, if Dell thought so himself. And he did.
He ran his hands over it, inspected it. Nothing had been disturbed, no dust had risen since his last trip here. Good. The damn thing really was nearly done, but the arsonist's sudden appearance had thrown all his plans out of kilter. And he couldn't very well saunter down to his secret basement with her in there fixing her flamethrower.
Dell let himself have a private sigh of relief, and in the same instant came a sound he knew too well, one that threw every last nerve in his body alive with lightning. It was the crackling-whisper of a cloaking device deactivating, just inches away, the sound of someone invisible becoming real again.
He was painfully aware that he didn't have his gun. Instead he ripped his wrench from his pockets and whirled, ready to slam it into the jaw of the intruder. What happened instead was a startlingly strong hand catching his wrist and twisting it hard. His only weapon clattered to the ground, and the feel of something narrow and metal jabbing into his gut stopped him from trying anything else.
"Bonjour, laborer," said the man Dell knew only as the spy from RED. He smelled of smoke this close, even without the signature cigarette both this man and Dell's own teammate loved, acrid and overpowering. He was grinning like a shark. "Fancy meeting you here!"
Dell grit his teeth. "Finally come slidin' outta your hole, snake?"
"Oh, come now. Give me some credit, Engineer," the spy chuckled. "We both know I'm better than that. Though I must say, I was not expecting all this secrecy." He gestured to their surroundings as a whole. "I'm impressed. Truly."
Dell said nothing. The revolver dug into his hipbone, and the spy said, "Would you kindly step away from that machine?"
"How'd you get in here," Dell answered, and his words were roughshod iron.
In reply he got a husky laugh, and the spy driving the gun harder against the bone until he moved. Hands up in surrender, Dell edged to the wall. "Thank you. And I never left, obviously."
"Mind tellin' me how you got away with that?"
The spy smiled, the corners of his mouth bunching the edges of his balaclava, but said nothing. He stepped away from Dell, gun yet trained upon him, and lay a gloved hand upon the inert machine. "I suppose this is it, then?" he said, unimpressed. "Smaller than I'd imagined." He rapped it lightly with his knuckles, and then kicked it over.
It hit the ground with a terrible crash and a terrible roar as the delicate mechanisms were disrupted, and Dell jumped toward it without thinking, a shout caught in his throat.
There was a bang. Then another. Very soon after he found himself on the floor, his back to the wall and lead in his gut. He got one glance back up at the spy and his smoking gun before the pain caught up with him. "Calm yourself!" the spy said. "Goodness, man. I'm sure it's salvageable for someone of your inclinations. Or it shall be, if you will be so kind as to give me the location of its blueprints."
On the floor, the machine rumbled and growled. Dell clutched his stomach, fighting to draw breath. The spy seemed entertained; he eased back and leaned against the overturned immortality machine, watching. "Just one bullet and you go down? Fascinating! For some foolish reason I had expected better out of you."
"Go t'hell," Dell hissed through grit teeth.
The spy chuckled and tugged a silver cigarette case out from a pocket in his suit, a twin to the one Dell's ally carried. The next time Dell managed to raise his eyes (head swimming with pain and fire), the spy had lit it, put it to his mouth, and returned the tin box to its home. He puffed out smoke, like a dapper red dragon, and said, "We can do this all night, Engineer. It will be much simpler for everyone if you only cooperate. I ask very little, do I not?"
Blood seeped through his overalls, his clothes, painted the floor. It sent fragments of memories bubbling to the surface: the smell of gunpowder, the mottled shouting, the electric tang of the dispenser beam. He'd been shot before, he'd been shot plenty, but generally he was running on enough pure adrenaline and caffeine that it was a lot easier to ignore—
The spy sighed and put another bullet in him, this time in the leg. Things went fuzzy and dark around the edges.
By the time he could see straight again, the spy was halfway through his cigarette. His gun had been replaced by a sleek, beautiful butterfly knife. There were drops of blood on his suit, and Dell wondered if somehow they were his, but they looked old and dried.
"I'd rather not do it like this, you know," the spy said. "I am not a psychopath. Not like some of my colleagues. I'm simply here on business, from above, surely you understand. We can end this here and now if you tell me where the blueprints are."
Dell said nothing. It wasn't too hard, all things considered. He'd been through worse, sure—much worse, comedically worse—but getting shot never really starts to hurt less. The spy sighed, and shook his head. A minute or two later, his cigarette a burning stub, he pushed off from the growling machine and dropped it to the ground, where he burnt it out with one patent-leather shoe. "All right," he said, voice flat with boredom as he knelt down in front of Dell, "then I suppose we'll start with your fingers."
It wasn't hard for the spy to seize up Dell's hand and lop off the last third of his ring finger. Dell howled, tried to rip his hand away, to no avail. The spy hummed to himself, and then severed Dell's thumb. Various parts of the rest of the fingers of his right hand followed.
Finally he stopped, wiped the knife off on the bloodstained overalls. Dell was curled into a ball of agony, scarcely aware of anything. "Your odd little friend has been a thorn in my side," the spy said, conversationally. "It was most inconvenient for me that he survived. Carelessness on my part, though—I assumed the sentry would do my work for me. Really, I should have had the blueprints and been gone days ago. But such is life, I suppose."
He got no response, and so lit another cigarette instead.
The next time Dell opened his eyes, he felt like he'd stumbled into a funhouse. Everything was warped and startling. The machine seemed louder. Someone was speaking, but he couldn't really hear it, not yet. Blood soaked his clothes. Something dark was moving behind the spy.
He managed to lift his head up, and he saw a demon—he saw two, the first in red and spitting smoke. Behind him stood a thing with a silicone head and boiled skin and a green garden rake in its hands.
"Campfire?" Dell said, thickly, in the same moment that the arsonist brought the rake down onto the back of the spy's neck.
There was a wet crunch and a choked shout. The spy's knife made a ringing sound as it flew from his hand and bounced off the wall.
Dell watched the spy fall. He was laid out on the white tile, and the tines of the rake had scraped down his body until they found purchase in his back. Until the arsonist ripped them up and away, anyway. The spy screamed.
Blood fell from the rake, dripping to the floor. Dell stared in silence as the spy slowly, agonizingly pushed himself up. The arsonist watched, too, until the man in red had managed to get to his hands and knees.
She brought her weapon up, high over her head. It hung there for a moment as she stared down at him, suspended in the space between seconds. The spy stared back. Then the teeth of the rake scraped the ceiling as she slammed it on the spy's back again.
Dell had never heard anything quite like the sound the spy and the rake made together. Neither had he realized how far the drops of blood could fly from a wound like that. It smeared his goggles, his cheek. His lips tasted of iron, and he couldn't be sure where it came from.
The arsonist let the rake touch the floor, watching the spy. Again he tried to get up, and succeeded once again in getting to his knees. In a surprisingly fluid movement he rolled onto his side, so close Dell could feel his body heat. He reached into his jacket, and whipped out the revolver.
The arsonist rammed her foot into his gut the instant he moved, and he curled up with a gurgle of pain. Then she did it again. The gun fell from his fingers.
She tightened her grip on the rake, and lifted it a few inches from the floor, like she was going to swing again. But instead she let it clatter back down, shoulders dropping. Dell could hear her ragged breathing even over the roar of the immortality machine.
"Get out," she said.
The spy glared up at her, his breath coming in haggard bursts, his face and mask streaked with blood. She met his gaze. "Get out," she repeated, louder, "get out, or so help me God, I will break both your fucking legs and light you on fire."
Dell watched as the spy shakily got to his feet. The arsonist stepped out of his way, watching silently as he staggered toward the stairs.
Everything was hazy under the pain, but Dell groped at his side with his good hand until his fingers curled around the smooth ivory grip of the revolver. It seemed heavier than it should be as he lifted it up, and his hand shook when he took aim.
He squeezed the trigger as the spy turned to look over his shoulder, one bloody gloved hand reaching for his watch. There was a bang.
The spy's head splattered blood on the wall.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the arsonist startle, jerking backwards as the man in red fell forward. He hit the ground, and did not move.
Dell let the gun drop, and slumped back against the wall. "Good riddance," he said, and blacked out.
The cigarette was burning out. Dell could smell it, the smoke wafting up to him from where he sat.
Stirring, he lifted his head. He regretted it instantly as the world veered at a sharp diagonal. He could have sworn he was underwater. Nothing would hold still.
A hum as old and familiar as his bones was boring into his aching head, and as he inhaled he got more than just stale smoke. A crackling ozone scent hit him, followed closely by blood.
Hnng. Blood. Right. Dell tried to look around. Not much had changed. The toppled immortality machine still rumbled nearby. He shifted, and his arm bumped something cool and metal.
"Conagher?" said a voice.
"Yeah," he grunted, trying to sit upright. Dear God, everything ached.
"Did it work?" the voice said, sounding a little unsure. "The, the thing. The box."
He blinked, and tried looking around again. A little ways away he found the arsonist, crouched with her back to the wall, clutching her lighter. She was watching him, stock-still. He looked from her to the dispenser, and back again. "You, uh," God damn it, he couldn't think, "you bring this down here?"
"I couldn't exactly carry you up the stairs."
Breathlessly, he nodded. He wet his lips and looked down at himself, his blood-soaked clothes. He raised his right hand in front of his face, and counted five fingers, whole and undamaged. "Guess—guess you went an' returned the favor," he managed, dropping his hand into his lap. The arsonist, still watching, said nothing.
He laid eyes on the immortality machine, and winced to see it still grumbling on its side. Gotta lift that back up, he thought, and was surprised to watch the arsonist pause, and then move to do so. He must have spoken aloud. He couldn't remember doing that.
The pain was slowly being replaced by something approaching dementia. No wonder the arsonist had acted so strangely—she'd been on it for hours before she woke up, and judging by the still-burning cigarette he had only been out for a few minutes. "Thanks," he said as she hoisted the thing back onto its wheels. "It still working?"
She shrugged. "I guess. What is it?"
"S'a—jus' a project. … not somethin' you oughta know 'bout, really," he said. "Say, how—how'd you get in here, anyway? Thought I locked that door…"
"I heard yelling. Gunshots. So I broke a window." She cast a sidelong glance at the thing on the ground. "Thought you were coworkers."
Dell shook his head, mostly to himself. He shifted slightly and said, "No. Not that one. One I work with's got a blue mask."
"Oh. That's the one I saw, I think."
"In here?"
"No, in the living room." He could just make out her furrowed brow. "The one that gave me the cigarettes and disappeared."
Dell grimaced, and tried to sit upright. He nearly made it, lost his balance, and wound up slumped against the wall again. He was going to have to have a talk with the good doctor.
He watched as the arsonist wandered aimlessly through his hidden room, touching nothing, but her very presence here made him uncomfortable. Couldn't've felt more uneasy if she'd gotten into his bedroom, probably. But she moved past the stacks of rolled-up blueprints without looking at them, the dozens of secret prototypes without lingering. Then at last she stopped, in a corner sort of, mostly obscured by a freestanding rack of shelving. The dispenser blocked most of his view of her, but he could tell she sank down to sit with her back to the wall.
A minute or two passed. Dell checked his leg, his gut. He still felt woozy with blood loss (or maybe it was just the healing rays), but they were slowly closing. The bullets had already been expelled from the flesh, a bizarre sight that never got any less unsettling.
He was pulled from his thoughts when the arsonist said, "Dell?"
"Yes'm?"
"The body." She hesitated. "What's it look like to you?"
Dell blinked, and looked. His lip curled a bit: he saw gore and blood, all a shade fuzzy under the tint of the dispenser. He would have sworn parts of the flesh were crawling with maggots, if he didn't know exactly what might be making him see that. "No-good dead rat. Why?"
"Oh," she said, quietly. "No reason."