Metro (6 page)

There were six shooters when they first arrived.

There are two left now—one in the hall, and one taking a piss in the bathroom.

Big, dumb bastards in cheap black suits.

Who have no idea what they've just gotten themselves into.

• • •

T
he Black Box has this stuff in it:

Six thousand dollars in cash.

Four loose diamonds.

Two Markos 6G smartphones.

One fully loaded field pack first-aid kit.

An ounce of uncut cocaine and a quarter ounce of high-grade hydroponic marijuana in watertight plastic bags.

One Herstal FNP90 compact submachine gun.

One Korth .357 Magnum revolver.

One Vestika 9mm slide-action pistol—a high-tech job made from plastic and carbon poly-fibers, developed in a very secret laboratory.

Four hundred rounds of ammunition in three plastic boxes, set in Styrofoam blocks—twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-four, and nine millimeter—plus a box of caseless tri-fiber ammo for the plastic gun.

And, of course:

Five Mark II fragmentation grenades, three five-pound C-4 custom packages, prewrapped with detonators, and one M18 Claymore anti-fucking-infantry mine.

• • •

J
ollie feels the comforting warmth of her one true love as he moves closer to her in the dark chamber. And then the chamber becomes infinite, and her heart explodes in it. She feels rain on her face in the dream as Andy reaches out for her . . .

. . . and pulls her to the shore, which is washed in blood.

• • •

S
he sees the war paint on the bed—deep red in the half-dark of the room—and then she sees the exploded bodies and she hears Andy speak her name in some sort of desperate fit as he grabs her from the bed and pulls her to the floor.

Just as Mark kicks open the door and blows away the man in the hall with a machine gun.

She sees it happen in one amazing second and a half before Andy pulls her under the bed, and it looks like a screaming silhouette standing in a strobe-blast, thundering ahead of her—a neon dinosaur at the all-you-can-eat brunch, ripping her waking world to flash-fried embers in a
BOOM-CHAKA-BOOM-CHAKA-BOOM
that cancels out every other sound in the known universe.

She doesn't really know what's going on.

Just sees and hears the flashing dinosaur.

Knows Mark is somewhere in the mix.

Senses Andy, pulling her further into the dark under Mark's bed.

And meanwhile, the world and the universe are ending.

• • •

M
ark fills the hallway with automatic fire and keeps on moving, shredding the thug like paper, his finger jerking quick-time Morse code that turns into maximum destruction. White flashes blow strobe-bombs and blood-bursts all across the collaged walls and ceiling as the enemy target staggers back in herky-jerky stop-motion, twitching and convulsing and coughing up a death rattle that sounds like choked curses run through a meat grinder. The last man still in the bathroom catches no less than five stray shells, all from the gun of his pal in the hallway as he slam dances backward, firing all willy-nilly into the walls and through the bathroom door. One of the bullets removes the last man's right eye as he turns away from the toilet and faces the chaos, his fly still open, piss drizzled down the front of his pants, and then the door to the bathroom detonates in jagged explosions of wood and plastic and he flies apart in meaty chunks, painting the big porcelain megaphone with visceral glory. It's all over for the last man real damn fast.

Out in the living room, Mark scans the dead faces.

None of them are Darian Stanwell.

Not that it would have been easy to kill Darian—Mark's just damn relieved that the big guy ain't out here. There is still that deader-than-dog-shit issue with Darian's brother. It
will
be a problem for them later. If there
is
a later.

But first things first.

Mark thumbs the Herstal to semi-auto, ejects the spent clip, and loads a new fifty-round magazine from the largest pocket in his cargo shorts as the cops outside finally get their act together and decide to storm the living room.

• • •

J
ollie doesn't see what happens next, trapped in the dark under the bed, but she hears guns go off at the front of the house—pistols that remind her of popguns.
Pap pap pap!
And then she hears the monster roar again, drowning the hell out of them.
BOOM-CHAKA-BOOM-CHAKA-BOOM!

And then she thinks about Senator Bob.

Peanut Williams and his nutty boys in Washington.

The terror of a target in the crosshairs of a lone gunman plunges into her.

Assassination
, she thinks.

Shit, they're here to kill me finally
.

Aren't they?

• • •

M
ark's last target is the remaining dirty cop on the front lawn—the one retreating for his squad car, who wasn't dumb enough to charge into a war zone. Mark steps over the corpses of the other three unfortunate law-enforcement officers—they've been shredded like all the rest, damn easy with this tiny little assault monster he's carrying—and his shoes crunch through glass shards as he heads across the front porch toward the labyrinth of cars and trucks parked outside. There are several dozen different vehicles, all shapes and sizes, some brand new, some beat to hell, all of them belonging to the dead people inside his house. Damn shame, that. The shapes of the Mazdas and Volkswagens and 4x4s create a series of bizarre, ghostly afterimages, each vehicle lit up in split-second flashes by the rolling red and blue cherries on top of the cop cars idling in the street—it's like burning neon hell and frozen ice bathing the whole world, some apocalyptic splash-art canvas strobing eerily in a nightmare.

Mark admires the artistry of it, the terror of it.

He admires it for less than half a second.

The cop spins with his revolver, almost to the squad car, and fires—but he's not aiming at anything, or using his brain like Mark is. The shot blasts out loud across the lawn, shatters a window in the front of the Kingdom, then strikes home and destroys the TV in the living room. The air is filled with the sound of crystal dynamite.

Mark raises the assault monster and sights down carefully.

He rides the last wave of the Xanax in his system, using it, focusing just like they trained him to.

It all comes easier than breathing.

The cop tries to fire again, but his finger freezes as Mark's three shots chew the guy to hell, the modified rounds playing pinball with vital organs before chumming everything inside him into a living paste. The cop is gutted in this moment, and two of the bullets ricochet
off metal and rubber when they leave him. As he falls forward, just one goddamn foot from the open door of his squad car, the cop opens his mouth, and what's left of his stomach evacuates up his throat in a meaty splatter, right into the concrete at his feet. The guy actually pukes up his own guts as he dies.

Mark scans the lawn for Jackie's Chevy Impala.

Turns out it's blocked in by the cop's ride—and one of the Impala's front tires is blown out too. What are the odds? Mark hears the air still hissing and sees the bullet holes stitched across the wheel well and driver's door: what's left of the barrage that killed the last cop. And other unfortunate law enforcement officers have already been summoned. Red lights are blowing up on panic boards all across the goddamn city.

Mark's got three or four seconds to make his call.

It's the squad car or nothing.

Fuck.

He suddenly looks up and sees two of his neighbors staring at him from across the street, standing just in front of their open front door. It's the ancient hippie couple who always walk over in pajamas and buy his dirt weed—the non-hydro stash he keeps aside for the old-schoolers living off food stamps. Their names are Franklin and Toni. They are good people.

They are looking at him like he is the devil right now.

“Go back inside,” he says to them. “You want none of this.”

• • •

J
ollie hears footfalls coming back in their direction.

She shifts her great weight in the enclosed space, and Andy grabs her tighter, pulling her farther back. She resists him, feels trapped, naked in the dark. Because she is. Everything coming down so fast, so brutal. She wants to scream.

“Jollie? Andy?”

Mark's voice.

She breaks free of Andy and scrambles out from under the bed, the air on her bare skin a chilling horror. She sees Mark slamming a long steel box closed. She smells the gunpowder and blood. And she sees the gory body of Spider-Girl. It doesn't really register—like silly gross-out makeup and fake fangs on Halloween night. None of it seems real.

Mark throws her clothes at her.

“We have thirty seconds to get the hell out of here.”

Andy sticks his head out. “What the fuck just happened?”

Mark looks at both of them, more seriously than he's ever been about anything.

“It's the end of the world,” he says.

He grabs the Black Box by its long metal handle and grabs Jollie's hand with the other. She gets dressed as he yanks her out the door and down the hall, Andy right behind them, the whole world a blur now, moving faster and faster. She never even has time to scream at the bodies in the living room—only clocks the pooling blood and the dead eyes and the smell of gunfire in tiny dreamlike bursts. It still doesn't seem real at all.

Andy sure as hell gets a damn
good
look at those bodies.

He doesn't scream either.

• • •

P
olice cars don't have backseat safety belts for some insane reason, and Jollie thinks that's just fucking absurd.

Somewhere just outside of everything that is happening now, the screaming-activist reactionary that lives in even the most panicked version of her brilliant, overworked mind starts composing a long open letter to the mayor's office about such dangers, which she plans to post at Wildcat River,
STAT
—and then she's trying to untangle herself from Andy, caught up in his reeking clothes and beating heart and cursing voice as they are bounced around in the back seat of the police car, sealed off from Mark behind bulletproof glass, the Black Box on the floor at their feet. Sirens blare and the radio squawks. It's all complete chaos. Mark hits the cherries, lighting up the world in a red-and-blue disco inferno, screeching down South Lamar, just missing a woman in a restored 1979 Ford Pinto and three college kids in a frat-slob megatruck. The lights of the main city street almost blind him, long traces of the storefronts and restaurants on either side making a hyperspace blur—Maria's Taco Xpress streaking into a Walgreens streaking into an intersection with red lights, and everybody gets out of his way because he's the Law, by God, and he's coming right at them with full cherries spinning, shrill noise flooding the world, and Andy is frozen in a near-fetal knot against the seat, Jollie starting to get her shit together in just one instant before she realizes again
—

—
that they're
in traffic now
and going really, really fast.

Three other cop cars come blasting in the other direction.

They don't slow down or figure out that they may have just passed the bad guys—but in a matter of just minutes,
somebody
will
figure it out, and they'll be all over the problem like super-ripe stink on a big-ass ape. State-owned vehicles are worker bees in a giant screaming hive, all tagged back to HQ on a very high-tech series of computerized switchboards—Jollie knows all about it. She screams the words “
Slow the fuck down!
”
And then she screams it again because Mark clearly isn't listening.

She's right about that.

He's closing out everything but his own train of thought.

First order of business is escape and survival, and there's a big red target painted on them right now. Have to change cars. Have to get hidden.

The world is ending as the seconds tick off the clock.

He swerves fast off Lamar and into a dark series of side streets, finally killing the sirens and the cherries. He tells Jollie and Andy to calm down and they just get louder back there. Mark floors the accelerator, ignoring the bad noise. It all happens so fast for them. It's all just an incredible series of blurs, coming on and on.

• • •

A
nd then the car stops.

They are deep inside a nice-looking neighborhood when that happens, about six blocks between Lamar and South Congress, near the Saint Edward's University campus.

Sirens in the distance, where the Kingdom is still being invaded.

Jollie has stopped being hysterical. The ecstasy in her system is almost gone, and she rides the last strange waves, wondering if Peanut Williams and his crew aren't also running for their lives in Philly. She burns through what she knows, what she's seen and heard—the gunshots, the cop cars, the dead bodies back there in the room (if they really
were
dead bodies)—and puts together scenario after scenario, connecting the dots:

Mark is a
multiple-personality psychopath with some weird death wish, he has been all along, and he's been operating for years just under my radar—like some self-styled Dexter wannabe masquerading as a small-time dealer with big dreams.

No. Too grim. Too Hollywood.

Mark is an undercover cop with friends in low places, and it all went bad somehow, all in just ten minutes, all while I was asleep, and it only happened because I'm on drugs and ha
ve been on drugs for years, and it's all been so fun.

No. Too obvious. And drugs
are
fun.