Kill Switch: A Vigilante Serial Killer Action Thriller (Angel of Darkness Suspense Thriller Series Book 1) (3 page)

Tess quickened her pace to move in as the couple passed through the arch.

At the other side of the archway, the Barbican lurked in the gloom. With seven turrets clawing the night sky, the circular structure had probably witnessed more bloodshed than any other part of the city, having showered invaders with arrows and molten tar.

Tess’s heart pounded in anticipation and nervous energy surged through her body. She wiped her palms on her jeans, then balled her fists.

As the couple strolled along the path through the trees, a figure loomed out of hiding.

A stocky man in a motorcycle jacket shouted at them, “Hey, America.”

The couple stopped. Turned.

Two young Polish men strutted towards them.

“America,” said Motorcycle Jacket, “why you come here for Polish woman?”

His tall skinny friend shouted, “Because America women all hundred-kilo hamburger ass.”

Motorcycle Jacket laughed and patted his friend on the back.

“Sorry,” said the boyfriend, “but I’m not American; I’m English.”

Motorcycle Jacket shrugged as if anything the boyfriend said wouldn’t make any difference.

“England. America. All same – come to Poland, take our rich job, take our beautiful woman.” He thumped his chest. “But Poland our country. Our!”

The girlfriend shouted something in Polish.

Two other men stepped from the park’s tree line and blocked the path behind the couple. One of them, in a hoodie, shouted at her in Polish.

The boyfriend looked around, his gaze flying in all directions. He was obviously searching for an escape route. There wasn’t one. He pulled his girlfriend behind him and backed away to the side of the path, bushes blocking any chance of them running.

The boyfriend’s timid stare flashed from one threat to the next and back again. “Look, we don’t want any trouble. Leave us alone, please.”

“You no want trouble?” Motorcycle Jacket sneered and shook his head. “Then fuck off home, fucking America.”

As Motorcycle Jacket swaggered over, the boyfriend put his hands up submissively. “Please. Just leave us alone.”

Motorcycle Jacket pushed the boyfriend’s arms aside and smacked him in the head with a haymaker.

The boyfriend fell and sprawled on the asphalt. In the dirt, he threw his arms up and cowered. “Please. Please, don’t.”

Motorcycle Jacket spat on him. “Fucking mommy boy.”

He kicked the boyfriend in the gut.

The boyfriend screamed and hunched over, clutching his midriff.

Tess sprang from the darkness. She hammered a kick into the back of Motorcycle Jacket’s knee. As he slumped backwards, she ripped him back by his hair and slammed the side of her fist down onto his collarbone, eliciting a satisfying crunch.

Motorcycle Jacket shrieked and clutched his broken bone with his left hand while his right arm hung useless at his side.

Frozen, the tall guy who’d been standing next to him stared wide-eyed.

Tess was never one to turn down a golden opportunity – she whipped out another kick. Her shin bit into his thigh, deadening the nerve, which took away his mobility to keep him an easy target.

She crashed in a flurry of punches ending with a massive right hook.

Two of the guy’s teeth hit the asphalt path a fraction of a second before he did.

The guy in the hoodie ran at her, while his friend, a pudgy guy, hung back.

Tess waited for Hoodie. There was little point expending energy going to him when he was coming to her.

He heaved his right hand back and flung a giant of a haymaker at her.

Hoodie telegraphed his attack so clearly, Tess could have dealt with it blindfolded.

His fist thundered at her.

Confronted by explosive violence, the average person backed away, threw their arms up, or cowered to hide. And that was why the average person got the crap beaten out of them on the street.

Tess did not back away.

Did not shield herself.

Did not cower.

Instead, she moved closer to the danger.

She guided the punch harmlessly past with her left forearm while grabbing him around the back with her other hand.

She spun around.

Bent forward.

Flipped him over her hip.

Splattered him into the sidewalk.

Still holding his arm, Tess immobilized it in a figure-four armlock, then levered it that little bit further, bending what should never bend.

Hoodie cried out as his elbow cracked loudly.

Tess glared at the pudgy guy, the last of the four targets standing.

Backing off, he held up his open hands and spouted Polish.

Tess couldn’t understand a word, but she understood the waver in his voice.

She took two bounds toward him, then stopped and watched him hightail it into the blackness.

She turned and glared at the three men she’d put on the ground. Warily, they each clambered to their feet, cradling their injuries.

Without saying a word, she strolled towards them.

They backed away. Not one able to fight.

With a nod of her head Tess motioned toward the archway back to the Old Town.

As quickly as they could, they lurched away, regularly glancing back to check where she was.

No, Tess hadn’t been looking for trouble tonight. However, she hadn’t exactly gone out of her way to avoid it. And it wasn’t like she’d killed anyone. A few months of hospital treatment and they’d all be fine. Meanwhile, the streets would be a little safer. Plus, now that these goons knew what could be lurking in the shadows watching them, hunting innocent people for kicks might lose some of its appeal.

Tess turned to the couple who’d been ambushed.

Sitting on the ground, the boyfriend stared at her openmouthed, holding the side of his face where he’d been hit. His girlfriend clung to him, her fingers clawed into his shirt. They both flinched as Tess stepped toward them.

Finally, Tess spoke. “Are you two okay?”

The boyfriend stared. “Huh? Er… er… yeah. Er, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Tess reached down a hand to him.

He looked warily into her eyes, as if not knowing whether he was going to be pulled to safety or have his shoulder wrenched out of its socket. After a second, he clasped her hand and she hauled him up.

She said, “You haven’t heard about the gangs targeting English speakers who have Polish girlfriends?”

He shook his head, looking at her blankly. “We’ve only been in Krakow a couple of days.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow. After we’ve visited Auschwitz.”

“That’s probably wise. There are more of those assholes around.”

“Okay.”

“Hey, and don’t go wasting your money booking a special tour to Auschwitz. It’ll cost you five times more than just getting a local bus yourself.”

“You’ve been?”

“No. Actually, I was planning on going tomorrow too. Can you make it back to your hotel okay?”

He pointed to the street on the other side of the Barbican. “It’s only a minute or two.”

“Good. But be careful.”

“Yeah. And thanks again.”

Tess watched them totter down the path, then turned to leave.

She shivered, though it was a warm evening. The fight was over, but something didn’t feel quite right. A tingling sensation all but ate away her spine, the way it always did whenever something was wrong but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Was someone watching her?

She heard a rustle behind her.

She spun.

Pulled her fists up.

Scoured the shadows.

Nothing but blackness stared back at her.

Squinting to catch the tiniest of movements, Tess surveyed the clawing darkness.

Nothing.

Strange. Her instincts were rarely wrong.

She prowled along the path.

But the hair bristled on the back of her neck.

She stopped.

Peered into the shadows again.

This wasn’t over. There was something wrong here. But what was it?

Auschwitz. The name conjured all manner of nightmarish visions, yet few lived up to the real horrors unveiled to its visitors.

The spring sun blazed outside, but a deathly chill crawled up Tess’s spine. Alone, she stood in the center of the room, enclosed by nothing but grungy concrete walls, a concrete floor, and a concrete ceiling. No windows. No furniture. No decoration. But why would there be? A gas chamber needed no such finery.

Enveloped by an eerie silence like that of a church crypt, she scanned the room.

The Nazis slaughtered over a million people here, in this room and others like it. Over one million people.

However, there was no smell of death.

No sounds of death.

No sight of death.

There was nothing. Nothing but concrete.

Yet…

Tess shivered, colder than she should be, as though everything – everything – in the room had died, even the very air, leaving nothing but an icy void which sucked the living warmth out of anyone foolish enough to enter.

Like the room, Tess had known death. A lot of death. So much it would have broken most people. As it almost had her.

Over a five-month period in Shanghai, she’d killed fifty-three people.

Fifty-three lives. Gone.

The first six had been in self-defense. That made them easy to justify. Easy to live with.

But the seventh?

Sometimes, when she closed her eyes at night, she could still see that look on his face as she pinned his throat to the floor with her foot, about to push down. Horror mixed with resignation. Maybe even a flicker of relief. It was as if, even though he’d fought to go on living, he knew he deserved what was about to happen and had been waiting for it.

Afterward, she’d stood over him looking down. Trembling. Crying. Lost. For how long, she didn’t know, but a voice in the back of her mind screamed, ‘What have you done? What have you done? What the fuck have you done?’

She didn’t eat or sleep for three days after that night. Despite having verified everything she’d been told about him as being true, questions had haunted her like a migraine she couldn’t shake, torturing her every waking moment. Had he truly deserved to die? Had she had the right to judge? To sentence? To kill?

Tess reached out and ran her hand over the concrete wall. It was cold and smooth. Like a corpse after all the muscles had relaxed. Cracks ran through the concrete and mottled stains clung to it as if desperate not to fall to the floor and be swept away like garbage.

Fortunately for her sanity, killing had become easier. It had had to – she knew it was the only way she’d be able to make it through what she had to do back home.

So, week after week, she’d sought out targets. They’d all deserved it – she’d made damn sure of that – so she felt no shame, no guilt, no regret.

Consciously.

Subconsciously?

Hell, the dark corners of the human mind could create nightmares for even the purest of hearts.

And then came that night with Su Lin.

Everything changed that night.

Everything.

Tess strode out of the gas chamber and back outside, where she squinted at the bright sunshine flooding the crystal blue sky. Warmth once more caressed her, yet she again shivered. It was as if her subconscious wanted to shake off the horrors it had just experienced the same way a dog shakes off water.

At the entrance, she passed a tour group waiting to go into the chamber, their group leader explaining in Japanese over wireless headsets what they were about to see.

Turning left and then right, Tess cut between the two barbed wire perimeter fences and back into the primary part of the complex. There, she ambled along the main tree-lined avenue into the heart of Auschwitz.

On either side of the avenue stood two-story red brick buildings in which the prisoners had been housed. These had been a shock – she’d expected wooden shacks like she’d seen in old prisoner-of-war movies. But the luxuriousness of these buildings’ construction belied their purpose. It was in one of these buildings that the genocide had started, where the Nazis had first tested the pesticide Zyklon B to see if it killed people as easily as it killed bugs.

Yes, the killing had all started here.

Just as it had all started for her in Shanghai.

That was where it had almost ended too.

It was Cheng Chao-An who’d saved her. He’d taught her not just how to go on functioning in society, but how to see what she had to do and know exactly how to do it – all without tormenting herself with questions for which there could be no satisfactory answer to a ‘civilized’ mind. If not for her time in the mountains, her thoughts would have haunted her, paralyzed her, brought her crashing to her knees mentally, if not physically.