Hell Ship

CHAPTER 24

The firefight in the empty treasure vault had been a war of attrition. Cowboy, the first man through the door had been the first to fall. Viper, who had been right behind him, just as quickly followed him into the hereafter.

The attack was completely unexpected, and for a moment, Scalpel wondered how Maddock had managed to procure weapons. It quickly became apparent however that the foe they faced was not Maddock, or at least not just Maddock and his two companions. For a few seconds, Ray, Scalpel and Paycheck had returned fire, taking down several of the gunmen, but each time they did so, they exposed themselves to the enemy guns. When Paycheck caught a round, Ray had signaled for Scalpel to stop firing.

It was not a surrender. Outgunned as they were, there was no way for just the two of them to win by staying on offense. But Scalpel knew Ray well enough to divine his meaning.

Play dead. Wait for them to come to us.

The ploy had worked. After a minute or so, two of the gunmen came to investigate. Ray and Scalpel waited until they were fully through the door then took them out. Capitalizing on the fact that the remaining enemies were holding their fire to avoid shooting their own men, Ray had used one of the dead men as a shield and bulldozed his way through the door, dropping the last two before they could get off a shot.

Despite their losses, Scalpel was savoring the victory, but Ray flew into a rage.

“Where in the hell is it?”

It took Scalpel a moment to realize what his employer was talking about. There was no treasure in the treasure vault.

There was also no sign of Maddock and the others, but Ray didn’t seem concerned with that. He snatched up something up from one of the dead men; a beret, adorned with a Templar Cross. He threw it to the ground with a disgusted snarl and shone his light around the room, catching motes of dust and whorls of smoke, until he found the back entrance. “That way. Hurry.”

Ray took off at a full sprint. Scalpel breathed a curse of his own, and struggled to keep up, but every step was an ordeal. He reached the doorway, saw the stairs, and groaned again.

Suddenly he was yanked backward. His flashlight and pistol went flying as he flailed his arms, but there was nothing to arrest his fall and he slammed backward onto the stone floor. An immense figured loomed out of the smoke and dust. In the ambient glow of scattered lights, he saw the Indian, Bonebrake, advancing toward him with murder in his eyes.

Scalpel crabbed away, scrambling back to his feet. His pain had vanished momentarily, overwhelmed by a surge of fight-or-flight endorphins, though for the veteran soldier, there was only one choice: fight. He whipped his combat knife from its sheath and reversed direction, charging Bones and slashing the blade ahead of him.

Bones ignored the attack, side-stepped a slash would otherwise have struck home, and planted a kick squarely in Scalpel’s chest. Scalpel was driven back, stumbling but not quite losing his footing this time. Before he could recover, Bones hit him again, harder.

Scalpel realized an instant too late that this last blow had not been designed merely to knock him down. Bones had lined him up like a billiard ball and knocked him squarely toward the main door to the vault. Scalpel stumbled over the fallen slab that once blocked the way, and landed in a tangle of dead bodies — fallen Templars and his own teammates.

Bones was on him again before he could recover. He plucked Scalpel up like a sack of dog food and heaved him away one final time. The hard landing Scalpel braced himself for didn’t happen immediately. Instead, he felt his body accelerating, his guts leaping up as he went into freefall.

Bones had thrown him off the stairs.

His next memory was of pain. His breath was gone, driven from his lungs by the impact with the floor. He lay there unmoving, unable to move, hardly able even to believe that he was still alive…but he was.

His breath caught and with that gasp came another jolt of pain. He knew he had broken something, maybe a lot of somethings. He could almost feel shards of bone slicing into his organs.

But…still…alive.

Maybe he wasn’t as badly injured as he thought. He saw a light at the top of the spiral staircase and tried to judge the distance of his fall… thirty feet? Forty at the most?

The light was moving. Winding around the corkscrew stairs, descending. Bones was still coming.

The fight had gone out Scalpel, but there was still a little bit of flight left in him. He heaved himself onto his side, ignoring the crunching noise that could only be parts of his own skeleton grinding together, and then got to hands and knees. He couldn’t seem to get his feet under him, but thought he might be able to crawl, and so he did.

The passage out of the stair chamber lay just ahead and he plunged into its dark depths. He measured out the journey in a rhythm of grunts; after about twenty such agonized exhalations, he saw a light behind him.

Bones made no sound as he walked, but Scalpel could judge the pace of his pursuit by the increasing brightness.

He’s playing with me, Scalpel thought angrily, but there was nothing to be done about it. He had to keep going, keep moving.

He reached another of the round chambers, and was confronted by a choice of paths. Which way? He had been following Ray during the ingress and while he vaguely remembered that his employer had said something about making the Sign of the Cross, the significance of the statement eluded him.

Don’t stop. Keep moving.

He crossed the chamber to the opposite arched opening and kept going. Bones was only a few steps behind, but made no effort to close the remaining distance. Instead, after taking only a few steps into the passage, he stopped.

It took Scalpel a few seconds to process this change. He kept going, deeper into the tunnel, then finally turned. “What are you waiting for?”

Bones shone the light in Scalpel’s face, blinding him momentarily. “I want you to understand why this is happening.”

Scalpel knew why. “What? The girl? Is that it?”

“Her name was Gabby.”

“She sold you out.” Every word was an effort, forced out through teeth gritted together against the pain.

“Then that was between me and her.” The light got brighter, closer. “This is between me and you.”

Some part of Scalpel wanted to get up, stand his ground, face death on his feet…but the reptile brain controlled his body now. He shied away from the light and squirmed further into the passage. If Bones wasn’t going to come after him, maybe he could get away.

It did not occur to him until he heard a heard a loud click followed by a strange noise that seemed to come from behind the walls, that there might be another reason why Bones was holding back.

Bones looked on impassively as the fires took Scalpel. He felt no deep satisfaction or solace in the man’s immolation. He wasn’t even sure why he felt such a compulsion to avenge Gabby, especially if the accusations against her were true, as they seemed to be. He had liked her, and maybe it was the fact that he had let those emotions make him vulnerable that troubled him the most. Maybe if he hadn’t been distracted by her advances….

Doesn’t matter.

The only reason he lingered to watch Scalpel burn was to ensure that, this time, the man stayed dead. When the supply of oil in the Templar trap finally ran out and the flames surrounding the smoking corpse flickered out, he turned away and struck the image forever from his memory.