Meera:
I wake up leisurely, curled on an unyeilding surface. I must have fallen out of bed at some point, judging by the grit under my cheek. My first thought is that my hands and feet are tingling. Why? Attempting to wriggle my fingers confuses me. My consciousness trickles further out, and I realize that my shoulder hurts from my position of repose.
Why? I would have moved in my sleep if I had...
Waking a little further, my throbbing temples greet me, as does my extremely sore nose, cheek, and a sting in my neck just under my ear.
Why? Did Yang come over and practice with me and Barney...
My mind is sluggish, like a thick wet towel is draped over it inside my skull, dampening my thoughts. Why?
Why can I not move freely?
Why are my eyes open, but my vision dark?
Why do my ribs feel bruised?
Why...?!
With a feeling like a sudden fall into icy water, I jerk hard against my bonds. My legs and arms are tied. Panicking, I try to scrabble my head against the floor to rid it of the cloth bag drawstringed over it. My breath and heartrate are trying to outpace each other, like I am running a marathon.
Where am I?
What happened...?
My brain finally clicks into gear and starts playing catchup, and I remember...
I keyed the code into the door and smiled to myself at the memory of feeling of Tool's ballpoint pen tickling on my back. "Here's what I'm thinking. Be brutally honest, this shit is permanent when it's said and done," the grungy artist had cautioned as he snapped a digital photo of my back and handed me the camera.
I had chewed my thumb and looked over every line, every stroke of washable ink. "I think it is my vision come to life, Tool."
Now, pushing open the inner door, I slide out of my leather jacket and toss it to my bed. Maybe if I turn right in the mirror before my shower, I can see the two-dimensional beauty beginning to come to life on my back. I walk down the hall to the closet to grab a towel.
Stepping into the small room had given me a staggering shock.
A black-gloved fist had flown from behind the hanging clothes, catching me squarely in the cheek. As I reeled from the force of it and landed awkwardly on the floor, I cried out in sudden pain and instant fear and suprise.
My brain extended me the option of fight or flight. The owner of the black fist emerged from the clothes and narrowed my choice.
Instinctively, I had kicked from the floor at the closest and quickest option available: the man's knee. My foot caught him behind the knee, and he grunted and fell to a kneel.
I chambered my leg again for a kick that would hit him in the torso, but was blocked by solid forearms. As my boot is captured and pressed into a joint lock, my terror grows as I look at the man's face. His head is bald, and his eyes are dead.
The joint lock makes me snarl with pain, and I try to roll out of it, and the motion reminds me of my gun, pinned under my side, in the holster. I have to roll into the painful hold to get to it, and I manage to get my fingers on the grip.
The man sees my motion, and his snake-flat eyes spark with something that makes my gut twist in horror. It is the expression I saw on every one of my rapists' faces: the look of a man who enjoys inflicting pain. The bald man drops my shrieking ankle, and stuns me with a jab to my nose that makes me see stars. Through tear-blurred eyes, I dazedly see him reach to his waist faster than I can draw my gun, and comes out with a black device with two short metal prongs.
He jabs the device into my gut, and searing agony locks all my muscles, then causes them to twitch. A tazer! My teeth feel like they are trying to leap out of my mouth as electricity burns along my nerves.
The tazer stops for a split second, and just as my body starts to unlock, I feel a sharp, tiny stab in my neck. I yell, and lash out with one ineffectual and misguided right punch, but I am too late. The syringe's plunger depresses, and something ice cold enters my bloodstream. I swing again, with my left fist, and graze the man's chin. He responds with a brutal and methodical beating of my stomach, leaving me breathless and tunnel-visioned from the syringe's contents.
The tazer clicks back to life, rotting my bones. I manage to choke out, past my clenched teeth, "Bar-...ney..."
The last thing I hear is the man's chuckle, low and dark, and that scares me more than anything else.
Barney:
It is extremely early morning, with the moon still hanging and the sun vying to rise enough to chase it away, casting ever-so-faint dual shadows from the boulders scattered around the clearing where we pitched the tent. Ceasar is quiet and still outside, on watch, I know, from a perch on a rock that radiates slight heat from the previous day. Peaceful.
Not even the wind is blowing when Something nudges me awake. I am not being touched by anything but my sleeping bag, which is warm and comfortable, but that Something nudges me yet again and voices itself: Something is wrong.
I know this Something. And hopefully, I have acknowledged it in time to save my life.
My good eye flies open to the sound of Ceasar's yell from outside. The sound is warning, pain, and channeled fear all in one, and it wakes everyone in the tent at once. In nanoseconds, we mercs are leaping out of our bags and laying hands on our guns.
Ceasar hollers again, this time in concentrated, landing-a-blow way. I hear his huge fist make contact with someone as I rip open the tent's zipper door. For a split second, we are all clustered at the entrance, each trying to get out first in our haste. Ceasar's gun goes off, and a man dies with a scream.
"Christmas!" I bark, knowing he'll understand my meaning. My friend backs away and tears back the divider sheet between us and Nadia, and I see him push down her surprised form and cover it protectively with his own.
Finally, having wasted three crucial seconds, Toll, Gunnar and I spill out of the tent and start to rush in different directions. The space we had been milliseconds ago is perfortated by automatic fire, which I return, aligning gun, shoulder, and sights in one solid movement.
Ceasar is struggling with two men, and they are keeping him too busy to use his gun. The dead one is on the ground in a spray pattern of blood. Three more are advancing on the tent, their steps tactically measured and their guns unwavering.
My insides darken. It feels like black ooze starts to weep from my cells and saturate my very soul like oil, covering my lungs and sinking into the crevasses of my heart. It feels like my heart has grown an extract ventricle to accomodate my rage. I want to kill them. I want to kill them dead, spatter their blood on the snow, because they fucking threatened my men and me. The Schizo rises...
I slide into home base behind a boulder that barely covers me, and crouch down beyond the spark of rock fragments spewed by ricocheting bullets. In the next pause, I rear up and return fire, catching one man in the chest and another in the shoulder. They both scream and topple, but I can tell by the way the chest shock affected the man that he is wearing Kevlar. It'll still take them both a moment to get back up.
"They're wearing vests!" I roar into the night, knowing my men would hear me.
Gunnar pops up from his own cover and yells as he returns fire to the one who is left standing, who ducks to cover. Ceasar manages to push back his assaillants long enough to level his souped-up shotgun at the belly of one, and his highly doctored round blasts out the guts of the man onto the pristine snow, Kevlar be damned. My teeth bare as the blood shows black under the bright moon, and my visceral lust is enflamed. Just as the second one brings his gun up, aiming at Ceasar's head, Toll springs out and nails him in the head with a three-round burst from thirty feet away.
Three men are dead, and the two I shot are getting back up. I aim to remedy that.
The four of us dash to converge on the two men alive in the snow with coordinated intent. Gunnar and Ceasar step on the hands that hold the guns, and Toll and I follow up with synchronized strikes to their heads with the butts of our guns. Without communication, we all know to take them alive, so as to get answers out of them.
I take a second to shut my eyes tight and forcibly shrink the imaginary extra ventricle into nothing, tamp down my rage, shut away the Schizo. When I need him again, he'll be ready and waiting. When I open my eyes back up, the men are allowing themselves victory.
With marginal relief and a coping grin, Gunnar fist bumps Ceasar. "Like champs," approves the Swede.
"See my rounds?"
"Really sweet, C," I agree. "Patent those bitches."
Toll's eyes suddenly harden again. "Six total."
I do a mental head count. "Five here," I say, and my stomach drops. Fuck, I lost track of one when he ducked for cover. I whirl around, and he already has one foot in the tent, some fourty feet away.
"FREEZE!" commands Toll, whipping his gun to bear, closely followed by the rest of us.
The man turns just his head to look at us, and seems to consider the word, as well as the guns trained on him. In that second, with the cold wind taking a swipe that is not registered by adrenaline-steeped skin, my finger tightens on the trigger. Make a move I don't like, go on, try it... He drops his gun. Raising his hands and pulling up his ski mask in one motion, he shows he is American, with a paramilitary crewcut. "Do not shoot," he says cooly. "I have a message for you."
I process the mild surprise quickly. "From who?"
"Mr. Church. I believe you two are acquianted."
I stiffen with much heavier shock. Church? What would he take so much effort to say? What about? Something at the back of my mind tickles at me, trying to get my attention, but I am occupied.
"How about you get acquainted with my Mark VIII rounds, bitch?" challenges Ceasar.
"What's the message?" I ask, glancing down at the two men with pinned weapon hands. They are out cold, but Gunnar is taking no chances. He still has his weapon pointed at them, because pros are pros and there is no safety unless your enemy is dead (and even less if somebody kills them for you).
The American is disconcertingly unafraid. It's starting to piss me off. "I have a satellite phone in my pocket," he continues.
"Don't you fucking move," snarls Christmas, appearing from the tent. I can hear Nadia whimpering faintly, but she's alright or Chirstmas would not have left her. Christmas reaches around the man and puts a wicked knife to his throat, even as he deftly pats down the man everywhere within reach, feeling for the phone. I know without doubt that the knife is sharp enough to cut a dropped hair, and that if the American sent by Church so much as twitches, he'll suddenly find himself into two seperate pieces.
Christmas uses two fingers to procur the phone. "This is a CIA-grade phone," he announces, tossing it around the man and across the distance to me.
"You're CIA?" I ask, snatching the phone out of the air. "Church sent CIA to assualt us? Why? To try to assassinate Nadia?"
The American shrugs. "Hardly. Nadia tethers you here. We threw a party to get your attention." He glances at the device in my hand. "That should ring in about ten seconds. You'll definitely want to answer it."
I look down at the phone contemplatively. "Is it rigged?"
The American just smiles.
Asshole. I hate playing Jeopardy with bombs. "Everyone, back up, just in case," I tell my men, and they backpedal about twenty feet. Sure enough, the thing rings. I tense, expecting to be blown away. The American chuckles at my expression, earning a brisk cuff from Christmas.
"This is Barney Ross," I answer the phone. That Something nags at me, like I have forgotten...
"Hey, Barney, buddy," says Church merrily. Even the distance and faint static cannot disguise his smugness.
"Lot of effort, Church," I reply evenly. "Care to tell me why I had to put down three of your boyfriends?"
The son of a bitch starts to laugh. "I have Meera."
And with a feeling of evisceration, I finally understand what has been nagging me. "Oh God." The words slip my mouth without my bidding, and all the blood drains from my face.
"You have twenty-four hours to deliver evidence of Miss Kresh and Mr. Kresh's deaths to me," says the CIA operative. "Or I start taking serious liberties with Meera."
"Let her go," I whisper. I wonder if the words carried over the signal until he answers.
"Not a chance. I have lots of questions for her that I so...desperately...need answered. That should keep us occupied until you kill the Kreshs." The drag of his tone sends cold shivers up my spine. He's trying to fuck with me, and it's working. "I'll be waiting, Barney," he cooes. The line goes dead.
The device drops to the snow. The men are staring at me with deepset worry. "What is it?" asks Christmas.
I gingerly lower myself to the snow beside the phone, my knees indenting the cold powder.
"Barney?"
"Barney!"
A cold hand grasps my shoulder, and I realize it's Ceasar. "What is it? Answer, Ross!" insists the huge man.
"Church has Meera," I rasp. "And if we don't kill Nadia and her father in twenty-four hours, he kills her."
The only movement is the solemn mountains breeding swirls of snow across the frozen campsite. "But if we kill the Kreshs," says Gunnar. "Yang dies."
"So we're screwed," concludes Toll.
"Indeed," interjects the American with a laugh. "You are."
Red and white rage flood my body and mind, washing away every gram of sympathy or morality I might have had. The Schizo lends a parting gift. "Kill them."
Three shots ring out under the cold white moon.
It took all of the guys to hold me back, and Christmas to talk me out of attempting the hike, hopping into the plane, and hell-flying Stateside to kill Church and rescue you myself. They finally let me up once they'd gotten me to see straight and stop shouting at them. As Christmas detailed, from his prone position to better see my pinned face: One: I would not make it in time. The hike is at least two days. I'd freeze, starve, and/or get Yang murdered and dumped in a ditch. Two: I have a cell signal here, which is necessary if I want to coordinate your rescue, because we can't fucking leave, thanks to Kresh.
So I dig up a modicum of calm, ask to be let up, and get to work.
Day has fully come, and I have never been more alert, awake, active - or in so much agony. My very bones feel like they're white-hot with urgency. The loom of my time constraint taints my every thought, motion, action. I am so afraid that I will lose you, I literally cannot allow the emotion to come to bear. It would paralyze me, and you don't need a paralyzed savior right now. But I have a loose plan.
I have to get ahold someone I trust, someone really, obscenely good at slinging lead. I have to speak to this person, and put him on the trail of you and Church, and give this person enough monetary incentive to exact every deliciously horrible thing I want done to Church, up to and including a painful death.
I have a list of people who might fit the bill. None of them seem to want to answer their damn phones. I leave messages. I pace and wait for my phone to ring. I strangle the air with a free hand when someone on the other end shits all over me.
To a Vienna-based FBI agent in deep cover: "I need to get in contact with...hello? Hello?"
In German, to a tavern owner: "When was the last time you saw him?"
To an illegal arms fencer, through his landscaping business front: "If you tell me where he is, I'll make sure he pays you."
I'm losing patience. I'm losing time.
So I watch with disjointed interest as Nadia starts to walk around with a first aid bag. I'm losing my grip, so I dial her father on a very long shot. "Mr. Kresh."
"Mr. Ross," comes the reply in a thick, stuck-tongue accent. "How eez my daughter? I trust all eez well."
"Not as well as you might think," I say, pushing my balaclava up to run my hand through my hair. "I need to return to the States. Something bad has happened."
"Out of ze question," replies Kresh. "My daughter's work eez not just critical to her career. In my line of work, this trip means much money to me."
"Just what do you do?" I snap, fingers going white on the receiver. "Sell guns? Child soldiers?"
"Information, Mr. Ross, is more valuable than either of those."
It clicks for me with a resounding snap. Kresh refused to sell Church intel: on what, I don't know or care. It doesn't matter what the intel was about, only that it was good enough to make Church shit himself when he couldn't have it. Now, Church has a gun to your head, to get me to kill the only two people who have access to this mysterious information.
"You intend to sell the rebels out to each other," I murmur incredulously. "That's why you're so eager to have Nadia on this trip. You want to play every side against each other. Hundreds will die!" The asshole played me from the start, feigning reluctance and disproval, like this trip was all Nadia's idea.
"Do not pretend to have a conscience, mercenary," snarls Kresh. "My answer is no. If any of you five men leave my daughter's side, I will kill de Asian in my care, without hesitation. I have eyes on you all de time."
The line goes dead. I have the strong urge to chuck the phone at the nearest boulder, and maybe follow up with a few rounds.
"Geeve that back!" shouts Nadia, trying to retrieve something in Christmas' hand. She overreaches and falls to the snow, dropping gauze pads like fat snowflakes.
"Barney, look at this," Chirstmas says, holding out the thing in his hand. It is about eight inches long and silver, shaped like a cigar.
I suck in a cold breath. "Laser pointer?"'
"The kind used to signal aircrafts."
"And strong enough to blind me from the ground," I finish angrily. Striding across the frozen tundra, I lift Nadia by the front of her jacket with both hands. "Why did you blind me?!" I shout in her face, spit flecking.
Christmas puts a hand on my arm, not trying to stop me, but keeping me in check. The Schizo howls for violence, but not before I get answers.
Nadia flinches and tries to break my hold with weak hands. "I didn't- I- "
I shake her, and watch with pleasure as her head lolls. "Answer me, girl!" My vision starts to go red.
"Barney!"
"Chill out, man!"
When I regain my senses, Nadia is coughing hoarsely and sitting on a rock, and I'm on my back in the snow. The guys are in various states of anxious waiting: sharpening knives, cleaning guns, eyeing me with watchful distance and considerable concern. They're waiting on something to do: for their damn leader to get his shit together enough to lead.
They can't do anything about Yang, or Meera, or me. And I can see it constricting them on the inside like pythons.
Christmas is rubbing his split knuckles, which match the throb in my jaw. "Had to, mate," he says without judgement. "You're losing your shit."
I stare up at the pale blue sky with my one good eye, and exhale. A single tear freezes to my cheek. "Meera's being tortured by that sick bastard right now, Lee."
"Your anger is misplaced. Meera's situation has got nothing to do with Nadia blinding you."
"I didn't (cough) blind you!" insists Nadia.
The edge of my vision goes pink in response, and Christmas nonchalantly leans on my shoulder, keeping me on my back. "Stay there for a minute. The snow is lovely," he says to me. "You have ten seconds to explain yourself, Miss Kresh," Christmas says coldly.
Every hard stare in the clearing turns to her, and the young Russian woman rubs her throat nervously. "I did not blind you, Mr. Ross."
"I think that the chances of you having a green laser and me being blinded coincide pretty snugly," I retort.
Christmas pushes me down again. "Misplaced anger," he hisses.
"Check the color of de light, Mr. Christmas," begs Nadia. "Please. It will prove my innocence."
Christmas digs the laser out of his pocket and clicks it on, pointing it at the side of a nearby rock. The beam and dot projected are red. "Not green," he states.
"No shit, Sherlock," I huff. "Okay, okay, can I get up, now?"
"If you're calmed down." My friend gets up and offers me a hand to my feet. "If you didn't blind Barney, who did?"
The entire group is quiet, thinking. Toll snaps his fingers. "I got it!" He gets off his rock and jogs to the snowdrift that covers the bodies of Church's six dead CIA agents.
"I think I get his drift," says Gunnar excitedly. He starts to help Toll go through the men's pockets. In a minute, the Swede utters a triumphant cry and procures a silver cigar-shaped device from the American messenger's pocket. When it clicks on, I recognize the green dot all too well.
"Son of a bitch," I marvel. "The CIA has been on us since we hit Russian airspace."
"And ever since," concludes Ceasar. "But that still don't explain why you've got a laser, Nadia."
"I wanted to blind my father's UAV drone," says Nadia.
All of us mercenaries stiffen, glance at each other, then look up in quick succession. "Son of a bitch." This time, Christmas voices the group's sentiment. "An unmanned arial vehicle?"
"My father uses the drone to watch me, to keep me safe, and make sure my protection does what they are supposed to do," details Nadia, looking at me with a measure of fear. "I bought the thing to attempt to get his eye off of me, but the drone eez too far up for me to see, much less laser."
"And why would you want daddy dearest's loving eye off you?" queries Gunnar sarcastically. Any hint of attraction he might have had for the girl is gone.
"Because I don't want to do this anymore!" cries Nadia, tearing up. "I hate that he takes my art, my job, my life and uses eet against others! I hate that he steals my information and sells eet to the highest bidder!"
Untouched by her emotion, even though the answers put some worries to rest and give us solid problems to work on, each man mulls this over for a few minutes while she cries herself out.
"We've got a clock running out on us," I say with hollow heaviness.
"Have you gotten hold of anyone yet?" asks Ceasar softly.
"No one." I stare hopelessly into the mountains, a prison for my body and my soul.
Christmas stands next to me, his gun at an easy ready across his body. "There is one guy. Two, in fact."
"Name 'em," I say, pausing with my fingers over the buttons of the satellite phone.
He does. And I chock it up to my ground-down spirit that I find his suggestion sensible.