Orphan X

46 Pyrotechnic Horrors

The blinking dot of Katrin’s GPS had long since vanished, but Evan had it locked in the RoamZone’s memory. In his Ford F-150, which he’d taken for muscle, he’d looped several times past the unrented building off the 101. After killing his headlights, he found a spot past the edge of the dark parking lot where he could observe the place through a head-high hedge of night-blooming jasmine. The accent lighting in the halls threw enough glow to turn the faintly tinted windows transparent, though it was hard to make out anything but shadows from this distance.

Somewhere behind those windows, Katrin White waited, held against her will.

He played the Fourth Commandment in his head until he felt a healthy tactical remove.

A few minutes past eleven, a pair of midnight blue SUVs pulled in to the lot and four men spilled out of each.

The field teams returning to base, as he’d hoped.

Above all else, Evan had two things going for him: He’d separated Slatcher, the greatest threat, from the rest of the crew. And no one was expecting him here.

In his lap rested a Benelli M1 combat shotgun, black as night. It had more robust internals and faster cycling than an M4, the higher capacity giving him seven shells plus one in the chamber, a bonus round ghost-loaded on the lifter. He eschewed the trendy pistol grip, the classic stock better for going around corners. The first three shots were seven-eighth ounce shells, each holding a single solid lead slug, the better to focus the total energy dump on wiping out a door hinge. Beneath those were nine-pellet buckshot loads, ready to go once he’d breached the building. The pellets would inflict multiple traumas, expanding into a blow radius that could turn a rugby scrum into pink mist. A Jack-ism sprang to mind: You don’t want all the holes in the same place.

Given the numbers he was facing, Evan had gone with the Benelli over his Wilson pistol, choosing brute power over precision. A shotgun was a fight-stopper, a hit even to an extremity usually proving fatal.

Evan shouldered through the jasmine hedge and did a surveillance pass around the building’s perimeter, noting the layout of rooms and halls. The men had substantial firepower — Glocks and AK-47s — but they weren’t patrolling in any formal fashion. They milled around in the lobby and meeting rooms, eating and bullshitting. Candy McClure kept her distance, tending to something in what looked like a utility room in the western hall, emerging from time to time to take a breezy lap through the admiring men. Slatcher, nowhere to be seen, was likely teed up in a sniper’s nest somewhere above Universal CityWalk. But he’d be back once it was clear that Evan had no-showed.

With his back to the hillside, Evan crept along the rear of the building. Five or so rooms down the corridor from Candy’s utility closet, one window had been blacked out. Risking a closer peek, he saw that it had been fortified from the inside.

Katrin’s cell.

He’d counted eight men and Candy. To get in and out cleanly, he needed them spread throughout the bird-in-flight V of the building. He located the breaker box near the terminus of the eastern corridor. Through an atrium of some sort at the juncture of the two hallways, he watched the guns-for-hire comparing weapons in the lobby. He wanted to get some of them moving down the eastern corridor — away from Katrin’s room.

He’d brought only stun grenades, not wanting to risk the collateral damage caused by frags. He lifted the metal lid of the breaker box and let it clamp back down over the body of the flashbang, an upside-down alligator clamp that held the grenade in place. Slotting a finger through the pin, he pulled it. Then he sprinted across to the rear of the western corridor.

He raised the shotgun, aiming it at the top hinge, and waited. The night breeze blew slow and steady. In the side of his neck, he felt the pulse of his heartbeat like the tick of a clock’s second hand.

Across the way the flashbang detonated, the building going black.

Evan fired the three hinge-removers—boom, boom, boom—the door sagging open, and then he was inside, barreling along the corridor. Down by the junction of the lobby, four of the men appeared, heading toward Katrin rather than toward the explosion, a savvy tactical move.

Though Evan was out of range, he shot a warning blast up the hall to push them around the corner. He sprinted for the utility closet, each jarring step rocking the doorway back and forth.

He was ten meters away when Candy burst out, her raised fist firing muzzle flares. With no time to lift the shotgun, he slid onto his back, rocketing forward on the slick floor, on a collision course with her legs. He scissor-kicked for her Achilles, but she leapt over him, her hand swinging to aim as he popped to his feet. He lunged inside her reach, grabbing the gun as it grazed his cheek. Her hand blocked the rising shotgun. For an instant they were nose-to-nose, locked up, and then her lips pursed in a smirk and she yanked the trigger, the pistol report sounding inches from Evan’s head. The noise filled his skull, his field of vision tilting violently out of frame, a painting knocked askew. He jerked back, and she drove her face forward, hammering his temple with a head butt, her teeth-clenched screech laced with the scent of strawberry bubblegum.

He spun away from her, barely holding on to the shotgun. Her stainless-steel pistol shimmered as she raised it for the kill shot. Rather than fight his momentum, he threw himself into the rotation, whipping his leg up and around, his shin striking her square in the sternum. Her gum ejected from her open mouth as she flew back through the doorway into the utility closet.

The utility closet, filled with plastic jugs.

They broke her fall.

Liquid flew up around her, sloshing freely from the cracked jugs, and she gave a piercing scream. Evan heeled the door shut, firing again down the hall to drive the men back into the lobby. The spent case ejected from the Benelli, spinning to the floor. With the side of his boot, he swept it across the tile, wedging the plastic end beneath the utility closet’s door, trapping Candy inside.

Her screams continued, rising to inhuman decibel levels. She banged on the door, the sounds getting wetter. Vapor crept from beneath the door, not wood smoke but the smell of sulfur and flesh.

At the corridor’s end, an AK held in a gloved hand made a puppet appearance, firing rounds off the walls and ceiling. Blind cover fire as the field teams readied to make their charge.

Evan would not give them that chance.

Combat shotgun cinched between his shoulder and cheek, he sprinted toward the lobby.

This was not going to go well for them.

The corridor sounded like a hall of pyrotechnic horrors — blasts and shrieks, splintering wood and bellows of pain. Katrin fought to press herself up against the wall, though the zip-tie around her ankle held her leg straight out in front of her. It was impossible to separate her own shuddering from that of the building.

The bloodbath continued in sound and vibration only.

Boom.

A warbling cry torn off midstream.

Boom.

A heavy thump and then a death rattle of leaking air.

She covered her ears, closed her eyes. Even through the walls, she could smell smoke, the scent burning the back of her tongue.

A sob-warped pleading penetrated the walls. “Hang on — just hang on, let me—!”

Boom.

One kneecap pressed into her chin. Still she tried to draw her other leg to her chest, but the plastic tie sliced the flesh of her ankle. She was crying, but she couldn’t hear herself.

A thunderclap of the door being kicked in. Her mouth opened, and this time she heard herself screaming. When she opened her eyes, the upper hinge was already knocked clear of the screws, the lower one snapping free as the door cartwheeled inward.

A black boot materialized from the dust-filled haze of the corridor, and then Evan melted into sight.

“We gotta move,” he said.

She looked a mess, her choppy bangs sweat-matted to her forehead, her face blanched, her lips dry and cracked. Wearing a thin tank top, she curled forward as if striving for the fetal position, her collarbones pronounced. Evan moved to her, letting the shotgun drop to the carpet, his hand in his pocket, digging for the Strider knife. The black-oxide blade flicked up with a snap, and he sliced through the plastic zip-tie, her freed leg retracting into her body as if spring-loaded.

He’d killed five of the eight operators and taken Candy out of commission. Which still left him outgunned.

Deep in the building, he heard running, shouts, bursts from radios. For now the remaining men were diverted to the eastern wing near the breaker-box explosion, bracing for a second-front attack. He let out his breath. The first moment of respite since his entry.

“Katrin, listen to me.” He cradled her face in his hands, one fist still gripping the Strider, the blade sticking up next to her cheek. “We have to move quickly.”

“Did you kill the big guy?” she asked.

“No. He’s not here. But other men are.” He sensed he was talking too loudly over the ringing in his ears. “Stay behind me, touching distance. We’re gonna head to the hillside, then loop back around.”

She nodded, tried to stand, her legs failing her.

In his pocket the black phone vibrated. After an instant of frozen shock, he yanked it free, tearing the lip of his cargo pocket. He glanced at the screen, expecting Slatcher’s untraceable number. Instead the screen announced a pay phone with a 702 area code. Las Vegas.

Morena Aguilar.

Had Slatcher gotten to her, claiming another hostage even as Evan freed Katrin?

Still in a crouch, he snapped the phone to his face. “Morena? Are you safe?”

“Yeah, no thanks to you.” Her voice came rushed and angry. “Why can’t you all just leave me and my sis alone? You said we’d be done.”

From the eastern corridor, he heard doors banging open, the men searching room by room. It wouldn’t be long until they realized that their western contingent had been demolished.

With his free hand, he dropped the locked-open Strider and grabbed the shotgun, training it on the doorway. “I have to go. Call back. Leave a number. Your life depends on it.”

As he pulled the phone away from his ear, he heard her fading voice: “—did what you said, okay? I found a guy. That was the deal.”

The ringing in his head amplified. Everything decelerated — the throbbing at his temple, the dragon swirl of smoke in the doorway, the guttering blue of the emergency light from the hall. The phone drifted back up to his ear, also in slow motion.

“Guy?” he said.

The realization was still rattling through him, making its way to his brain. Awareness hit, and he whipped around in time to see Katrin slip his own knife into his abdomen just beneath the ribs.