Shudder (30 page)

“Time, gentlemen,” shouted Deus and raced towards the corner of the mall, the sound of his shoes on the wet pavement suddenly the only audible thing in the world.

Dave and Anton raced with him. As they turned the corner a fantastic flower blossomed with a roar above the big red brick building in front of them. Windows shattered from the blast.

There was a moment of silence in which the echo of the explosion pulsated, and then thousands of small shards of glass rained down. There was a total absence of alarms going off anywhere in the vicinity.

Four guards stood in front of the entrance, peering up with gaping jaws. Deus mowed them down with his Peperuda without slowing his run.

In ten more seconds the three men were inside the building.

Inside, to their right, was a bulletproof Plexiglas box in which sat two dazed two security guards behind a desk, one of them twiddling with the monitors in front of them, which had gone quite dead. No lights were working in the corridors.

“Go for the legs,” Deus shouted and shattered the Plexiglas with a burst of armor piercing bullets.

Dave and Anton went for the legs as well, the flow from all three machine guns suddenly converging in one area. In a moment both security guards were lying on the floor, their legs torn and bleeding.

Dave battered the cracked Plexiglas with his gun to enlarge the hole.

“I'm covering the corridor,” shouted Deus and took his position at the threshold to the building's interior, “you take the entrance, Tony.”

Anton went to the door through which they had just came. He scanned the parking lot. No one was running towards them.

A burst of machine gun fire came from Machini's side. He waved at Anton, “All fine—got two down.”

Dave finally managed to make the hole in the Plexiglas big enough. He crawled through, with pistol in hand and looked at the two wounded guards. He chose the more demoralized looking one and shot the other in the chest.

“You're coming with me, he shouted at the whimpering survivor, who was urgently displaying his empty hands, and dragged him out by the scruff of his neck.

Anton ran to him and kicked the man in his wounded legs, “Where is she, you bastard?”

“Ahhhh, who?” screamed the man.

“Anton, take the corridor, let me handle this,” shouted Deus. He ran up to the frightened man held up by Dave, while Anton took Machini's place at the corridor. Deus whipped out his knife and slashed the prisoner's cheek, “Tell me where the girl is now, or things will get very ugly.”

“I don't know. They took her.”

“Who's they?” asked Dave.

Deus shook his head at him. Wrong question for the moment. They had no time for this. He bellowed into the prisoner's face again, “Where did they take her?.”

“Down, into the lower floor, no one goes there, I don't know...”

Anton shot at someone in the building corridor. The someone screamed.

Deus took the wounded guard by his other shoulder. “Take us there, if you want to live,” he barked.

The man nodded, his pale face covered with perspiration.

“Tony,” shouted Deus, “you take this bastard; me and Dave will be at the front.”

“Okay,” shouted back Anton and took the prisoner with an ugly expression.

Although the wounded guard was a well-built man, and his torn legs could not support him, Anton held him with very little effort. The Cobra Delta pills made them all into very strong men.

Deus and Dave rushed to the end of the corridor, passing by three corpses in uniforms, and stopped a few yards from a turn. They looked at each other, each unhooked a stun grenade from his belt. At Deus' signal they hurled them beyond the corner into the unseen portion of the darkened corridor.

A blast melting into a second blast followed, two consecutive flashes lit up the corridor for a second with white-blue glares, invisible people screamed.

This time, after Dave's signal, they both took the turn and sprayed the corridor with their Peperudas.

Five men stopped screaming and fell twitching to the ground.

Anton appeared with the prisoner.

There was a thick looking metallic door. Deus turned back to the captive held up by Anton, “Where does this door go?”

“Into the inner corridor.”

“How do we get to the lower level where the girl is?”

“Through that door and then there is another one, but no one can open it.”

“Can you open this one?”

The prisoner averted his eyes from the menace in his captor's face, “Yes. Please, look, I...”

Anton dragged him to the door. “Open it now,” he barked at him.

The prisoner punched in a code. Nothing happened. “It's not working.” He looked at them pleadingly.

“Of course. No electricity,” shouted Deus. “The anti-tank grenades.”

Anton and his prisoner retreated to the first corridor. Dave and Deus raced after them, bounding over the dead security guards and a deafening explosion made the very walls vibrate, just as they had made the turn to safety. They saw debris pelting the walls where they had been a second ago.

“Right, back we go,” shouted Deus, and there was unmistakable exhilaration in his voice. Back they went.

Anton kicked the prisoner in the leg again, “Where is the door to the lower level, scumbag?.”

“Stop, please. It's one floor down.”

“Well, no elevators now,” interjected Dave. “Where are the stairs?” he shouted at the man and slapped his face.

“The second door over there.” The prisoner pointed with a weak arm.

They raced to the second door. It was a smaller door, with a small keyboard and an old-fashioned retina-reading orb above the lock.

Deus shot the lock into oblivion and kicked the door open. He sprayed bullets into the staircase. There was no one there. He turned to the prisoner, “How many more guards are there?”

“I don't know,” mumbled back the man with a tortured expression. “Maybe one-two more, maybe none.”

They dropped more stun grenades down the staircase just in case. No screams were heard after the explosion. They ran down the stairs, the wounded man dragged roughly with them.

“Where is the door?” Anton shouted in his face.

“There.” The man pointed to a door just six yards away.

“Right, grenades again, retreat,” Dave commanded.

They retreated back to the staircase. Another strong explosion rocked the corridors. More debris dug itself into the walls.

They ran through the blasted door before the smoke had cleared, Dave shooting just in case. Anton dumped the now unneeded groaning prisoner on the floor.

They were at the top of an old looking stone staircase. Deus collected the last stun grenades, pulled their pins and threw them down.

After the flashes and the blasts they raced down the stairs, Peperudas on the ready.

They reached the bottom and entered a large dimly lit place. It was a broad cavern in which torches and candles flickered. Disoriented men in white robes scrambled this way and that.

Deus appraised the situation in a split second. “Don't hit the plastic bag,” he shouted and sprayed the men with armor piercing bullets. Dave joined in. They mowed down the whole bunch in what seemed like five seconds. The men fell like sacks, with red stains growing rapidly around the numerous small tears in their robes.

Anton threw down his machine gun and sprinted towards the plastic bag on the floor. He ripped it open with his knife. “Natalie,” he shouted at the pasty-faced girl.

She didn't stir.

He slapped her face twice—nothing.

“CPR,” shouted Dave in his ear. “You take the heart, I take the mouth. Thirty by ten.”

Anton nodded, his mind chemically free of fear, and put his hands in the middle of his daughter's unmoving rib cage. “One,” he counted, “two, three, four...”

The thirty times took what seemed like an eternity.

Then Dave pinched Natalie's nose and breathed into her mouth. He pressed his fingers at her neck artery. “Nothing,” he shouted and Anton started pressing at the frail black chest again. “One, two, three...”

“Please...money...” someone croaked a few feet away.
Brattattat.
He was silenced by a burst from Machini's Peperuda.

Dave breathed into Natalie's mouth again. He touched her neck, “We have a pulse. Tony, we have a pulse.”

“Thank God,” Anton said and cradled his face in his hands.

Deus strolled over and looked at the girl, who stirred as her chest began fitfully to suck in the much-needed air. “A lovely girl you have there, Tony,” he said with deliberate calmness and took out a pack of cigarettes. He and Anton lit up.

Dave also asked for one.

When Natalie came to, the first thing she saw was Anton, Dave, and an unknown man, wearing bulletproof vests, smoking cigarettes and grinning at her.

She blinked, looked around, seeing the white and red corpses and then looked at them again. “What took you so long?” she asked in a hoarse voice. “I was already in the tunnel...”

Anton laughed out in relief. Dave kneeled on one knee and kissed her face. He couldn't help himself.

“How about untying me?” Natalie asked and smiled.

“So, anything you want,” declared Eberstark, “just ask for it.”

Natalie, Anton and Dave sat in his office and the two men were smoking. Both looked detectably tired, but in good health.

They had lain in their beds at Eberstark's safe house for a fortnight, replenishing the energy reserves eaten up by the Cobra Delta pills, while Eberstark himself had pulled his strings and shaped the news, and now both were finally able to walk, think and communicate.

Natalie's bruises from the wooden staffs of the evil cabalists had cleared up as well.

Deus had gone back to wherever he worked. Hopefully to not get fired or court marshaled. He had enjoyed the whole thing obscenely.

Strange fellow.

One had the impression he was like that even without the special pills.

Dave looked at Natalie. She looked beautiful and fresh—beautiful, fresh and gay in fact. Her small frame was covered by a fashionable checkered shirt and equally fashionable slim denim pants. A thin green tie hung from her neck.

Her arms were crossed and her fingers methodically counted each other as she smiled into Eberstark's face. “Just to recap, Mister Eberstark, the great wizards of the lodge my Dad and Dave massacred were both from the right wing and the left wing?”

“Absolutely,” affirmed Eberstark. “Famous politicians and businessmen to the last man. Eight sons and eight fathers.”

“So now,” Anton said, “your party is ahead in the polls?”

“By a landslide,” said Eberstark smugly. “By an absolute landslide. Especially since the list of the pedophile customers leaked to the press.” He winked at them. His hand even started going up, no doubt to tap his nose knowingly, but he restrained himself. “Both of the two parties are almost totally discredited in the voter's eyes. We the National Patriots are now likely to have a majority in Parliament, and the Liberals and, for some reason, the Communists are also going to enter for the first time in decades.”

A major political upheaval
, Dave thought. It all started with a woman suffocated by her shit.

No,
he corrected himself,
it started decades ago, when the first suffocated girl was found at the edge of the city
.

“So, what kind of sect were they, in the end?” Anton asked.

“Ah, quite peculiar,” said Eberstark. “You know how in Scientology there is an evil Lord Xemu...”

“They were scientologists?” asked Dave in disbelief.

“No, no, certainly not,” snapped back Eberstark very quickly. “Nonsense, some of my best friends are scientologists. You know how Satan is the bad guy for Christians, and you get Satanists...”

“No way,” Anton said, obviously in the middle of one of his peculiar intellectual orgasms. “They were scientologist Satanists?”

“Quite right, Mister Martorino,” said Eberstark, leaning forward on the heavy oak table. “They were ‘post-Theosophist Left Foot Xemuists', as I remember it. They were working to free Xemu from his eternal bondage and bring about his second coming, or something like that.”

Anton rubbed his sweating palms into his pants. This was all far too good. “Why did they leave the bodies in special places?”

“Marking energy portals, or creating them, maybe. I'll tell my people to forward you the report after we're done here.”

“That would be great.” Anton looked at his cigarette, the second half of which had burned itself out without his intervention, and lit another one.

Natalie, ever practical, decided to return the conversation to less abstract realms and take Eberstark at his word. “Anything we want, you say?”

“Anything,” his head bobbed at all three of them.

Natalie shot a quick glance at her Dad and smiled humbly at Eberstark. “Well, I want to remain head of public relations for your party, and the government, should we manage to make one.”

Eberstark's eyebrows danced. “Oh we will, there's no doubt about that now. Of course you can be head of Public relations. Of course.”

Anton smiled. His daughter was doing her duty to the best of her abilities. Because of the events that had transpired, these obscure Nazis had suddenly been catapulted by fate from being a minor party to being the core of the next government.

Someone had to keep them in check. Someone had to make them say toned down things, and needle them constantly that it's in their best interests to keep their promises.

He was sure Natalie would do her best to wrap them into a straight jacket of pledges and statements, which would hopefully keep from making too much trouble.

“How about making me chief of internal affairs?” Dave asked with an unintentionally squeaky voice. He held his breath, his finger digging into the edge of his chair.

“You got it,” said Eberstark, still drunk on euphoria. “You got it, Mister Cohran. I wouldn't trust anyone else with cleaning up this swamp we've inherited.”

Dave rubbed his hands in glee rather theatrically. Now he would show them. Now he would show them all. Naturally, he would take Maldiva with him; he'll be finally able to pay her a wage she deserved.

“And you, Mister Martorino?” asked the next leader of the country.

“Me…” drawled Anton, “I think I want a break from everything. By that I mean, of course, that I would like to be a very well paid, but rarely used adviser for the N.M.H.” He grinned and stubbed out his cigarette in the glass ashtray.

“It would be my pleasure,” said Eberstark, and leaned back into his chair, his pudgy fingers caressing in a self-congratulatory manner his silk purple tie.

The first snowflakes of the season danced behind the windows of the office. Dave looked at them and let his thoughts dance too. He was very much at peace.