Metro (5 page)

Mark, who turned into something awful.

Something made of iron and gunpowder.

Just like all the others, when it's all over.

Even worse than the others
 . . .

. . . no.

Don't think about that now.

Hold on to the years.

Hold on to what's good.

He tries so hard to do it, even as the pain sleets back in and chokes him bad and he drifts away from the details of his life. Until only impressions remain. The smell of summers in Austin, which are always the same, but each tinged with something new, as the phases of your life shift and modulate, as the drugs became purer and easier to get, the ladies who smell so sweet . . . so
many
faces . . . swirling in a cosmic shitter now, surging toward the moment . . .

When it all blows up in his face.

The next bullets—two in his right leg, another one scraping just across his right side, as he finally kisses the concrete floor, bathed in
grotesque glowing red from the bloody hanging lightbulb. The unstoppable killer in the center of the room, that THING that used to be his best friend, swiveling and firing again, never moving from that one place where he stands, like a statue sentinel given terrifying, cyclonic movement—bang bang bang bang BANG.
And as Jackie lies there on the floor, he feels the absurdity of his computerized mind cataloging the number of shots that happened, including the six that almost made him dead. Twenty shots in total, from two different weapons, one in each hand. Flashes and flashes.
Pain, seeping in from all sides, clogging backwash, making it so he can't get up at all. That and the shattered leg, throbbing and awful . . .

. . . and Mark is about to finish him off, standing over him.

The gun is aimed right at Jackie's head.

Mark is saying he's sorry.

He's a monster.

He's always been a monster.

But Mark doesn't ever fire that last shot—the mercy kill that would have spared him all this pain.

Mark doesn't get a chance to.

Because the door explodes open.

And more men run in.

And more shots happen and . . . and
. . . AND . . .

The bad lieutenant leans in again, and his voice is still low and almost distorted, but Jackie gets the gist—the kid's a smart one, even full of lead poisoning.

Mark, That wasn't you.

That was someone else.

A robot, a pod person—IT JUST WASN'T YOU.

The bad lieutenant asks again who did this, who hit us, where's the stuff?

And this time Jackie doesn't say anything.

Instead, he starts crying, just before the big black seeps in from all sides.

He sees the face of the monster.

That cast-iron Terminator in a room full of gangsters who never saw it coming.

Mark.

I love you.

It wasn't you who did that.

I'll never believe it was you.

Never.

He speaks the words.

He says them out loud.

At least that's what it seems like.

Mark . . . Andy . . . Jollie . . .

The bad lieutenant leans closer.

“Where are they?”

Jackie tells him.

And the bad lieutenant is punching a number into his cell phone before the words finish boiling over the poor kid's lips . . . and another very bad man is answering his call even before the kid passes out all the way.

17 minutes and COUNTING . . .

T
he other very bad man is Eddie Darling.

Eddie Darling is really pissed off.

And when Eddie Darling gets really pissed off about something, bad things tend to happen very quickly.

The cop on the other end of the phone gives him Mark Jones's name. Gives him Andy's name. Give him Jollie's name.

And an address.

Eddie looks at the men standing in front of him, blows smoke from a chewed-to-hell cigar, and says just four words:

“Hard search. No survivors.”

Marnie smiles at his boss, his heart jumping for joy. He knows his brother will be a little disappointed that he missed out on some fun hands-on action this morning, but Darian has been overworked this week, and Marnie is a night owl anyway.

Darian takes bad news well, after all.

Not like Eddie.

Who sits there, fuming, surrounded by smoke.

15 minutes and COUNTING . . .

A
t first, Jollie is scared for Mark, then she wants to know what the hell he's talking about, then she's angry because he won't say anything. Instead he repeats the same thing he's been saying for five minutes:

“I love you, Jollie. I've always loved you. Please come with me now.”

“Mark . . . what have you
done
? Did you hurt someone?”

“I can't tell you anything, Jollie. Not yet. But I can promise you that it's bigger than both of us. Bigger than anything you've ever imagined. I love you and I know you love me. Please . . .
please come with me
.”

His voice lulls her.

His voice always lulls her.

He's right—she loves him so damn much.

She takes a breath, feeling stronger, the warmth of Mark's room filling her with easy comforts: the Christmas-tree lights, twittering and blinking a multicolored galaxy of movie stars and cartoon cels, flyers for old eighties bands like A-ha and Mötley Crüe—everything that's classic and awesome, just because they say it should be. Johnny Depp scowls down from the ceiling in black-and-white, his eyes glowing like dull gray jewels, a poster for
Dead Man
she gave him for Christmas last year. This room is filled with gifts, like Mark's loving gaze, his desperate eyes. Like the
Star Wars
T-shirt on his chest, peeking out from under the flannel overshirt, also stained brown. All of this stuff will be nothing but reminders very soon. She can feel him going away from her, and it's terrifying.

“Mark . . . please . . . please tell me what's going on.”

He shakes his head gently.

And she clenches her teeth. “Dammit . . . stop being so goddamn
melodramatic
! Talk to me, Mark!”

He leans forward and kisses her. She pulls away before he gets very far with it. “Mark . . . you know I love you . . . But, I . . .”

“It's Andy, isn't it?”

Her mouth yaps open. “What? How can you say that now? You're pulling
that shit
on me?”

“Jollie . . . it's okay.”

“No, it's not! It's not okay! It's
not fucking okay
!”

He moves toward her as she starts to freak, and he gets slapped for his trouble. Then she breaks down and almost starts to cry, coming home in his arms. Giving up. She feels the passionate hammer of his heart in his breast, the moment like dull gray fireworks . . . and then she really
does
start to cry, looking up into his sad eyes, seeing nothing but truth there, the nerdy-classic world they made together with all their friends and lovers. This really is it. She will never see him again. The ring is still in her pocket and she knows he loves her so much. She could let him have her, just this once. It would be better than losing him forever.

And so she kisses him.

And it goes like this:

13 minutes and COUNTING . . .

T
he mad rush of the Molly floods back in again, making Jollie want him and fear him in the same moment, creating more of the safe illusion deep in her heart that this is just a loving trick to get her in bed, and she lets him get away with it and kisses him hard, and it's all a blur for her, as her hands grip his waist, and the waves slam into her heart again, and she is helpless in the riptide, powerless to stop herself, and her full breasts swell against his chest like throbbing fruit as the two of them press their bodies together, and the jangling of her belt buckle and the soft whizz of his zipper coming undone are like music that reaches her from very far away, but it also turns her on, and his hands are there, in that place she's gone herself so many times, thinking about him, thinking about Andy, all the free love and flower power and good vibrations of the entire world blossoming between her legs, and she slides out of her loose-fit jeans so easily, slides them right over her lace-up shoes, and she is naked from the waist down, and they are freefalling now, falling backward through space and time, back through the years, remaking everything, together in a temporal womb, caught up in the silent, endless spaces between spoken words, and she lands on him, and her mouth is in his, heaving sighs down his throat, gripping his head with both hands, moving across him mercilessly, using her entire body to make a good-bye, even though this is just a game . . . but it's the best game yet, Mark's most amazing game . . . and she knows it means he loves her, and his skin feels so amazing now, as she pulls his flannel shirt over his head, leaving his chest covered only by the faces of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, lost siblings breaking sacred trust in this amazing, terrible, ugly, desperate, passionate, perfect moment, and his fingers move under her blue blouse, massaging the creamy freckled terrain of her back and chest, and she's unbuttoning herself quickly, and his pants are off and her jeans are on the bed next to them . . . and as he pushes inside her, it feels so amazing, so absolutely right . . . and in the rush, she wonders with a shriek of sheer, white-hot amazement why in the hell she's never allowed herself this, and it all seems so romantic and girlie and just-like-a-poet to have waited all those years, just like that traditional lady who's always lived under the surface of her masked rebel self, and they are pressed so tight together now, blasting through each other so hard and so fast that it's like they are one person, one being, one idea, and ideas are invincible, eternal, bulletproof, just like they are in the movies . . .
and they
are the movies . .
.
they are
fucking so hard . . . and
I love you, Mark, please don't leave me, don't leave us, fall with me now, fall from grace with the entire world . . .

The climax blows through both of them.

It's the most intense feeling either of them has ever known.

It's better and bigger and badder than anything.

Jollie feels the weight of an entire life lift away from her shoulders and her heart, liberating her whole body, delivering a peace beyond peace. Mark feels the horror of so much death and deception and the strain of his trained muscles and mind snap like violin strings, and all he wants to do is die in her arms, forever. And so he
does
die.

And they both cry out and surrender to it.

Going straight down into nothingness.

Into a sleep that never seems to end.

5 minutes and COUNTING . . .

T
he sergeant kicks Mark in the ribs and tells him he's weak.

Get up, boy. Get up now, you weak little shit.

The smell of gun metal and the sharp sting of open wounds on his feet and face are like seething, evil insects.

His legs and his arms are like corded rubber, abused and throbbing.

Get up, now! The enemy never sleeps!
Get the hell up!

He realizes he is sleeping . . . realizes he is
dreaming
. . . realizes he's fallen deep into an abyss that has robbed him of all his strength . . .

Get the hell up!

Must wake up.
Must wake up NOW . . .

1 minute and COUNTING . . .

D
ull gray fireworks hit him hard as he comes back, the sound of glass breaking in the next room, a rough, open hand slapping his face. His eyes jerk wide awake so fast that it feels like something rips his skin and his brain all at once.

And then he sees the two men with guns and knows he's completely screwed.

 . . . 0:00

A
hot blonde girl in a Spider-Man T-shirt sits on her knees, six feet away from Mark, with an automatic pistol pointed right at her head.

The two men stand on either side of her, one of them aiming the gun, and he knows they aren't Razzle's people, just from a two-second look. They're wearing black suits, like spooks, and they have half-there faces that bleed into the dark room, white teeth like sharks, smiling and gnashing. The one on the left is a little taller, and his voice is like mud and rocks:

“Your girlfriend is cute. A little bit on the hefty side, but what the hell? In for a penny, in for a pound, right?”

He nods at Jollie, who still lies sleeping on the bed.

Mark tries to move, and realizes he can't. The Xanax oozes like a dull accusation in his system but he deals with that part easy—like a pro.

The real problem is far worse.

His hands are cuffed behind him with steel bracelets, and a blade is jammed into the small of his back.

Another two men back there, one holding the knife, the other holding a gun barrel to the side of his head—feels like a monster Desert Eagle automatic, with a silencer. He realizes he's on his knees, on the floor, facing the blonde girl. Four shooters, all in black, all cruel mad-dog professionals—and he closes his eyes again and curses himself, wanting to go back to sleep.

“Now
this
little lady,” says the guy with the mud-and-rocks voice, leaning in to steal a kiss from Spider-Girl, who recoils and shivers, her voice gagged back by a leather strap, her eyes giant like searchlights. “Now
she's
a piece of talent. Yummy, baby.”

He licks her ear and laughs a little.

Pulls a small device from his pocket—something that looks like a black pack of cigarettes, with a pulsing red light on it.

A camera.

“Time for the big show, lady,” says Mud Rocks, aiming the lens at Spider-Girl.

Mark can't really see his face—Mud Rocks is still just a dark outline in the room. But he sees the outline nod to his buddy with the gun, who crouches in front of Spider-Girl, putting the business end of the silencer against her chin.

And then, just like that, he blows her head off.

• • •

J
ollie is still sleeping when the silenced round explodes upward through Spider-Girl's lower jaw and keeps on going, shattering teeth and tongue, then punching a gory
poof
of her hair in a meaty plug through the top of her skull, finally putting a hole right in the center of Johnny Depp's forehead. The gun still makes a lot of noise because it's a Ruger SR9, loaded with high-velocity ammunition, the standard-issue semiautomatic sidearm that thugs use for showy work.

Mark knows that because he knows everything.

So he doesn't flinch when the girl dies.

He doesn't even squint his eyes shut when some of the blood hits him in the face, the meteor storm of Spider-Girl's head raining down in greasy, gory slo-mo. He only looks at Jollie and wonders why the hell she's still not awake. Wonders for a second if she's already dead. Then sees her breathing and sighs hard relief.

As he begins to map the room.

Mud Rocks wonders too: “Your girlfriend's a heavy sleeper, ain't she? Didn't flinch when we kicked in the door either. Come to think of it, neither did you—at least until we started slapping the shit outta your ugly fuckin' face. You two must have really screwed each other's brains out. Way to go, buddy.”

“Who are you people?”

“I think you know the answer to that. And it don't matter none anyway. What matters is that we're
serious
people. You're smart enough to know that too. So I'm gonna ask you
one question
, and you're gonna tell me the answer, and maybe we'll let Sleeping Beauty walk outta here with all her parts.”

“The package is not in this house,” Mark says calmly, evenly. “I hid it someplace secure before I came here. If you kill either of us, you'll never find out where I stashed it.”

“So I guess you're gonna tell us where it is
right now
.”

He sticks two fingers in his mouth and whistles.

The door to Mark's room opens and another big guy comes in, this one wearing a jogging suit.

He's dragging Andy with him.

Jollie stirs in her sleep, smiling deeply.

• • •

A
ndy is crying, his hands cuffed behind his head. Jogging Suit throws him on the floor next to Spider-Girl. The Boy Prince gags when he sees she has a giant bloody hole in her head, and he comes up with a noise that almost sounds like begging—
please don't kill me
, something like that—but Mark can't tell. Jogging Suit presses the Ruger 9-mil into the back of Andy's neck and tells him to be quiet, and Mud Rocks giggles like a clown, panning his little black camera around:

“Blondie was just an appetizer. Now the
main gang's
on the firing line. The ruling class of the Kingdom itself. We're talking
royalty
here!”

He nods silently to the faceless thug next to him, who takes his cue and leaves the room, gently shutting the door. Jogging Suit takes the faceless thug's place in the action, uncapping a butterfly knife, keeping the gun in the Boy Prince's neck. The blade almost glimmers in the low Christmas-tree lighting.

“This one is your best boy,” says Mud Rocks, looking at Andy, then at Mark. “Everyone knows it, and
you
know it too. We're gonna cut his fingers off. Savvy?”

Andy starts to says something and Mud Rocks slaps his face again.

“Don't hurt him,” Mark says, choking. “He had nothing to do with this.”

“Nobody's innocent,” Mud Rocks says. “If you wanna get truthful with us anywhere along the way, please feel free to do so.”

He aims the camera right at Mark, who starts shouting.

“It's not in the house, I'm telling you! I'll take you
right to it
—just don't hurt him! He doesn't
know anything
!”

“That's not good enough, kid.”

Mud Rocks steps over the corpse of Spider-Girl. Comes right over to Mark. Bends down and gets in his face with the camera. Up close like this, Mark finally sees that Mud Rocks is a beautiful man on the surface, even though he's much older than his flunkies. Blue eyes and hard chin—that elusive Clooney-esque comeliness. Telltale wrinkles carved at the edges of his eyes, shoots of gray in his thick black hair. The way he speaks doesn't match up with his face at all. He's destroyed his voice with too many cigarettes.

Mud Rocks sees him staring.

And winks.

“Gotta say, kid, my brother would love you. He's into the frumpy ones. All that peace and love and hippie shit, looking down deep where a dude like you has
inner beauty
stored up for a rainy day. Never really understood it myself. Some people are just
ugly
, man.”

His
brother?

Oh no.

Oh fuck me.

“See, buddy,
you're
an ugly guy. And ugly guys have nothing to barter with when their hands are tied. You're in what we call a zero-point-zero strategic position. Someone has to save your sorry ass now, and by the looks of things, that ain't gonna happen. There's three cars full of cops out front making sure we aren't disturbed while we work. All of your little party friends in the living room? Took care of them all. Does that surprise you?”

Not really
, Mark wants to say.

And then he wants to kill himself.

Because this is none other than
Marnie Stanwell
talking to him.

Which means Darian Stanwell is not far behind.

Which means we're all dead, regardless of anything I tell them.

“Hello? Pay attention, ugly! We're down to the one percent ruling class here!”

Marnie Stanwell slaps him again.

The sting bites hard.

“When we're done with your boy here, we'll go to work on Sleeping Beauty, and then if that doesn't move you, we'll go to work on
your
hands. But I have a feeling we're gonna be the best of friends before that happens, right?”

Marnie Stanwell motions to Jogging Suit.

The big guy grabs Andy's cuffed hands, leveraging the blade between his thumb and forefinger. Mark sees blood appear instantly from the deep cut, drizzling down the Boy Prince's knuckles like a little river. Andy winces, then almost screams, and then the sound chokes way back in his throat.

In the same instant, Mark curses himself again—this time for not moving faster.

But he gets there anyway.

Just in time to save Andy's thumb.

And the four men in the room never have any idea what hits them.

• • •

Y
ou think three-dimensionally, that's the key.

And these guys really
aren't
trained professionals—they gave themselves away when they shot the girl. Only young sadistic cowboys do stuff like that—which gave Mark all the time he needed to finish mapping the room, measure the seconds, create a layered diagram of the shitstorm that breaks out now.

It starts with the handcuffs falling away from his wrists—because escaping from over-the-counter bondage-shop trinkets is less than a joke to a guy like him, just takes a few seconds—and his hands are suddenly snapping into deadly talons, forcing the blade dug into his back to do something else, jerking it away from him in a powerful reverse-fulcrum thrust. That creates a chain reaction in the goon's arm which delivers the knife directly into his own throat—and Mark is whipping around with his entire body as the sound of bone and soft tissue starts crackling like bacon in the air, and he throws an elbow into the other goon, making him drop his Desert Eagle. The one with the knife in his throat tries to do something else with his hands, but he ends up killing himself, stumbling on his feet, the blood blasting out in a deep-red arterial geyser while his buddy takes Mark's hard right fist to his face, bones shattering with explosive force, firing nose fragments and sinus particles into his brain—basically, the guy
sneezes
himself to death.

This all happens in just another few seconds.

And then the Desert Eagle is in Mark's hand and it's a heavy weapon made heavier by the long muzzle of the silencer, but he manages with it, and he's firing at Marnie Stanwell and Jogging Suit, and those smug smiles are still frozen permanently on their faces as hushed-down bullets hack into both of them. Blood and pink stuff blows out and they lose their train of thought (forever) as the next two rounds stop their hearts—optimal placement, dead center. The bullets shatter their ribcages before they blow vital organs, and the bleeding is mostly internal. No exit wounds. The silenced muzzleblasts are still incredibly loud in the tiny space, making his ears ring. Mark loves the movies, but this obviously ain't the movies, and even as the men in the room all fall down dead, even as he thinks about the difference between real life and
reel life
, he's charting his run through the door and back up the hall.

At least five more men in the house.

Four or five cops outside.

Mark hopes to hell that Darian Stanwell isn't out there with them, because he just made Darian's brother deader than dogshit.

Jollie stirs again, smiling, and almost wakes up.

• • •

A
ndy looks at all the pieces of brains on the wall, sees the death-twitching, muscle-spasming forms of the four blown-away men in the room, and feels the terrible overpressure of everything slam into him like something living—a shock wave in the form of a ten-ton deadweight descending in his heart—and it hurts like hell.

His hand hurts like hell too.

Dripping blood from the deep gash between his thumb and forefinger.

It throbs badly as Mark works Andy's cuffs with a bobby pin and gets them off fast. Holds up Andy's bloody hand and inspects it quickly, shaking his head.

“This is pretty bad. You're gonna need stitches.”

Before Andy can say anything, Mark grabs a T-shirt off the floor, and then he's wrapping it tight around the Boy Prince's wound. “Keep pressure on it. We'll get you patched up later.”

“Mark . . . what . . .”

“Wake her up,” he says, pointing at Jollie. “We have thirty seconds before it gets hairy again. There might be someone really serious out there.”

Andy just sits on his knees, his hand throbbing, damn near paralyzed. “These guys
weren't
serious?”

“No time to explain. Wake up Jollie. Stay in this room. Get under my bed with her and don't move a muscle.”

“Mark . . .
who the hell are you
?”

“I can't tell you that, not now. Just do as I say.”

He pulls his pants back on and buckles up, reaches for his flannel shirt because it's still cold outside. Grabs the tiny black camera from Marnie Stanwell's dead hand and smashes it on the floor hard, shattering the flash memory card to smithereens.

Moves for the closet and pulls out the Black Box.

It's been hidden in here under the comic books for ten years.

• • •

I
n the meantime, the Kingdom has never looked worse.

There's blood everywhere.

From the front door to the kitchen are hunks of charred and blasted human debris and dozens of dead bodies—all of them young, all of them terrified in the remaining seconds of their lives. The two shadows who were making out against the wall are now permanent shadows, headless and twitching. Platinum Lizzie is dead on the floor of the hall, frozen in a running pose, her bleached white hair spattered with crimson dots and flecks of pale pink panic-thoughts. She lies in a lake of her own blood. She never saw it coming. None of these kids did. They were all normal people. And normal people aren't action heroes. They freeze and die when this stuff goes down—they look it right in the eye and have no idea it's even happening.