Elsewhere
The Scarecrow waited until it was certain the man was fully incapacitated before reaching through the bars of his cage and checking his pulse and respiration rate, just to be sure. It unlocked the cage, grabbed the man by his collar, and pulled him out onto the floor. His wrists bled from where he’d attempted to use one of the tongue depressors to sever his bindings, reminding the Scarecrow of how it had once done the same thing, although for entirely different, and equally futile, reasons. In response, they had taken away all of the tongue depressors and the scarecrows it had made from them. The very same man who had demonstrated how to make them had gathered them all in a bag and taken them away, the same man now lying unconscious at its feet.
A hissing sound erupted from its throat and it kicked the man. Over and over. Until blood trickled from his ear.
“No…” the Scarecrow said aloud. “Not … yet.”
For as much as it wanted the man to suffer, it had been planning his death for so long that it needed everything to be perfect, the precise way it had envisioned his denouement for nearly half a century, during which time it had tried to create a normal life for itself, only to see it derailed by the painful and degenerative conditions that not only consumed it from the inside but also caused the physical deformations responsible for the expressions of revulsion on the faces of those it passed on the street, forcing isolation upon it, trapping it within its own mind, where it rehearsed its ultimate transformation and the misery it would inflict upon its tormentors through the lonely days and sleepless nights, at least until it had found a group of like-minded individuals, a family, for as long as that had lasted.
Now, with its other half dying and its family destroyed, all it had left was the vengeance it had been plotting since the first time the men in their white lab coats entered its room, since the first time it breathed from the mask, electrifying the passageways of its nerves, like so many lightning bolts striking beneath its skin, triggering the muscular contractions and the nausea that would cripple it for days at a time. It had spent years meticulously stalking those responsible, tracking their movements, cataloging every aspect of their lives, not merely waiting for the perfect opportunity but creating it. Carefully inching closer and closer to the man whose family had been behind everything, working its way into his sphere of influence until such time as it was able to plant the seed of its revenge with his most trusted adviser, who, in the end, had proved that trust to be misplaced. His time would come soon, only on the grandest stage possible, one from which everyone in the world would see him fall, taking his godforsaken name with him.
It had received a far better offer for the services it had rendered anyway, one that would serve as the perfect posthumous insult, a proposal relayed to it by the Hoyl, a faithful believer in the mission of his true master, whose goals aligned perfectly with those of the Scarecrow. A master who wanted Quintus to realize with his final thoughts that he had never had any control over the coup he believed he had started, that he’d been outmaneuvered from the very beginning by another, the mastermind whose machinations had set the coming war into motion, who’d used the Hoyl to orchestrate the downfall of Secundus and now employed the Scarecrow to destroy Quintus. It cared nothing for the internal politics of the Thirteen. The only thing that mattered was knowing that it would live long enough to kill Quintus, and die knowing that it was taking millions of people with it, achieving a dream first envisioned in the mind of a terrified child, a dream its family had failed to achieve a quarter of a century ago.
The Scarecrow dragged the man down the hallway, through the dirt, and into the cold room, its breath pluming from its lips. It released the man’s arms and let them fall to the floor. The back of his head rebounded from the concrete hard enough to make his teeth click. It rolled him over a mound of broken flooring and packed earth to the edge of the hole. With a smile, it nudged him over the edge, descended the ladder behind him, and stepped down, planting one foot to either side of his head. It watched the man’s chest rise and fall and blood flow from a laceration on his cheek for several minutes before scooting him onto the travois and strapping him down.
A faint tapping sound emanated from its backpack, which caused its smile to grow even wider.
The Scarecrow donned its harness, hooked the straps to the contraption, and struck off into the darkness.