Mountain Man jumped at the sound of the blade striking meat and wood. I felt nothing, but I thought it was weird that the machete would sound so strange.
Then I looked down and saw that the full width of the metal was inside my leg.
A spurt of blood washed over the blade and spattered onto the plastic, and I felt woozy. I heard the blade come free but couldn’t see it. My vision had gone cloudy, but when it cleared, I could see my left leg.
It looked almost the same. From my mid-calf to my ankle it was shiny with duct tape, and the tape was almost unbroken. There was blood on my shoe, and the tiny gap in the tape was wet along the bottom.
The gap—the machete cut—was slanted, low on the inside of my leg and high on the outside, like a fancy chef cutting French bread.
And that thought nearly made me empty my stomach into my lap. I looked away, then shut my eyes. That fucker just chopped off my foot. That fucker…
Which was the moment I realized that I’ve suffered worse.
“There should be more blood,” the creep said, standing back to admire his handiwork. “And this is where they normally lose consciousness.”
Mountain Man looked surprised at that, but before he could say something that might have turned his pals against him, I yanked my left hand as hard as possible to loosen the tape and gave the creep the finger.
He looked startled and delighted. “Okay. Okay. We can take that, too. We can take all of it.” His voice had a dreamy quality to it. Twirling his machete again, he moved to my left side.
Mountain Man stood, helpless, where he was. “We’re here to question him. We—”
CrossFit took hold of his arm. “He’s not going to tell us anything. It’s time to show him the justice he deserves.”
Goosebumps ran down my back. If Creep decided to apply that machete to my neck, I couldn’t do anything about it. I had small, protective spells on my neck, just below each ear, but…
He didn’t tee up my neck. Instead, he did what I expected. He laid the edge of the machete against my left wrist. That was the hand that flipped him off, so he was going to start there.
And he took his time, because he was enjoying himself.
I made a fist so my fingers would be protected by the spells on the back of my hand. Creep set his feet like a golfer and gently laid the edge of the blade against my wrist. I stupidly flinched, and although the tape held my arms and legs in place, the tape on my left leg was damaged. I accidentally pushed down, pressing the severed parts of my leg together. Pain rolled over me like a wave.
There was no way to hold in my groans, and I hated the noise I made and hated myself for making them in front of this asshole.
When I blinked my vision clear, I saw that Creep was grinning, waiting for me to get control of myself. Our eyes met, and he raised the blade and brought it down on my wrist with much more force than he needed.
But it struck the spells on the outside of my arm. The machete bounced back, tearing itself out of his grip and spinning into the corner of the room.
“Butterfingers,” CrossFit said in a mocking way.
“Why—” Creep whispered in a harsh voice. “Why didn’t it—”
He didn’t have an answer, but a mild voice behind me said, “It must have bounced off all that tape.” That must have been the guy in the Dockers, still standing guard by the door.
“My edge is sharp!” Creep’s voice was low and hoarse, as though he was holding back a scream. He began to swing against my arm with every word. “It. Is. Sharp.” Then there was a fourth swing, then a fifth. Creep couldn’t stop himself. One chop after another rebounded off the protective spells on my arm, and I lost count after thirteen.
But while he couldn’t cut through my skin, he was absolutely making a mess of the tape.
“Now, hold on,” Mountain Man said. “Enough.” He leaned forward, and both Gray Roots and CrossFit moved closer, too, looking down at my arm where the ruined tape had split and revealed it. “Hold on, there’s something happening here.”
Creep paused, breathing heavily. Gray Roots shook her head and backed away. CrossFit seemed puzzled. “This doesn’t make sense,” she said. “You should have broken his ulna and radius, at least.”
“Not likely,” I said around the gag, “not with this guy’s pudgy little baby arms.”
Creep bared his teeth and took one more swing, and this time he put his whole back into it.
As soon as I saw the hitch in his shoulder, I wrenched my arm against the shreds of tape, sliding it to the outside of the arm of the chair.
The machete bit deep into the wood, and I jerked my arm outward at the moment the edge struck. Wood splintered. My left arm broke free and the busted piece of chair struck Creep’s leg.
I reached across my body and took the pen from my right hand. Then I drove it upward.
I’d been aiming for Creep’s neck, but he was hunched forward, reaching for me, and the tip of the pen went into his armpit instead.
He let out a cry of surprise, not of pain. Before he could get oriented, I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and straightened my right knee. I couldn’t come out of the chair, not with my right wrist and ankle securely taped in place, but I could lift myself off the floor and put my weight on Creep.
He crumpled like a cheap shower curtain, and as soon as he hit the carpet, I let go of his clothes and fumbled for the holster on his hip.
He tried to swat at me but it was weak shit. His whole left side was wet with blood, and maybe that pen had hit home in a way I couldn’t expect or understand. I found his gun, lifting my elbow and turning my palm out so I could draw it directly.
As I pulled it free, I saw Mr. Mild Voice, still standing by the door, and Gray Roots reach for their own weapons. Their movements were identical, smooth and quick and assured, and I saw the similarities in that and their clothes and thought, absurdly, that they might be married.
Once Creep’s gun cleared the holster, I thumbed the safety and was surprised to find that it was already down. Gray Roots and Mild had already aimed their weapons at me, and I was going to have to shoot them with my left hand while they—
Gray Roots started shooting, and Mild joined in a moment later. God, I was never going to get used to that noise. I barely felt the rounds strike my protected chest—they were obviously well trained and knew just where to shoot someone who wasn’t me—and Creep below me. One round hit my left arm almost at the shoulder.
It didn’t matter. I squeezed off a shot at Mild, missing him to the right. The second time, I hit him dead center. He bent forward, folding his arms across his chest like he was hugging himself, and pitched forward onto the carpet.
Gray Roots’s gun was empty. When she saw me taking aim at her, she turned and tried to run into the other room. I shot her twice in the back.
It never occurred to me to let her escape. I supposed I could make up some bullshit about her reloading, then shooting at me from cover, but I wasn’t thinking about strategy. All that mattered to me was payback.
Mountain Man and CrossFit were behind me. I tried to roll over, but the chair and my fucked-up leg made that complicated.
“God, those fucking idiots,” CrossFit said. “They couldn’t hit north if they had a compass.” I heaved myself onto my back. CrossFit was right behind me.
She grabbed my left hand and pressed it against my body. Then she put her pistol to my forehead, just above my left eye.
She pulled the trigger.
I didn’t hear the shot before the world turned black.
And then the world was back again.
I knocked her gun away, and the startled expression on her face was a little bit angry, too, as though she’d caught me cheating at cards.
I shot her twice under the chin.
She fell back, revealing Mountain Man standing directly behind her.
He looked at my face, and a look of horror passed across it. His eyebrows rose and his mouth fell open and his eyes bulged.
I pointed the gun at him.
Staring down the barrel of a gun can really clarify things for people. I was not sure what I was going to say next, because I needed a whole bunch of things all at once, and now that the adrenaline hit of the fight began to fade, the pain in my leg and forehead began to grow again.
I looked down the length of my arm and saw a shallow cut just behind my wrist, oozing blood. Creep must have really caught me with that last swing.
“Please—” Mountain said, but before he could say much more, the door burst inward, flying off the hinges.
Annalise to the fucking rescue.
She surveyed the room, then grabbed the machete and stalked toward me. With one hand she began slicing through the tape. With the other she finally got me out of that fucking gag.
“Where have you been, boss?”
“Looking for you, you asshole. I was wandering around in your room, wondering where you could have gotten to, and what do I fucking hear but a shitload of gunshots. Good thing one went through the door, or I wouldn’t have known where you were.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I did that on purpose.”
She gave me a look, then studied Mountain. “Why didn’t you kill this one? Yet.”
“Because he’s going to try his best to be useful to me, so that I’ll let him live.”
“Yes. Yes, please” was all he said to that.
“No,” she said, “really.”
“Really,” I said. I gestured to Mountain to lift me off the floor. He did. I threw my arm over his shoulder. “Also, he gave my things to his buddy, who took them someplace else. All my things.”
“Then I guess we should find this buddy.” She stood in front of me, scowled at the spot where my left foot should have been, then examined my face. “I expected you to shrug off this kind of injury by now. How did it feel?”
“It hurt like a motherfucker. Plus, I think I died for a second or two.”
“Oh, quit your fucking whining. Let’s get out of here.”
We caught an elevator heading down just as the one beside it was heading up. Tyrell Frost was going to miss us by a few seconds, at best. Annalise sent us into the parking garage for Mountain Man’s truck, while she rode back up to John Scarlet’s room to grab whatever she had in there that she couldn’t leave behind. I didn’t bother asking her to get my toothbrush.
It took a while for me to hobble all the way across the underground parking.
According to his wallet, which he handed over before I’d finished asking, Mountain Man’s real name was Clive Whitsell. Then I read his home address out loud. Motherfuckers love to hear that from a man holding a gun on them. He was a plumbing contractor, according to the business card I found. I wanted to make a snide comment about him falling into the shit, but with the throbbing in my leg, I couldn’t focus my thoughts, so I decided to take the cash out of his wallet instead. My buddy Clive was learning an important lesson here, and lessons weren’t free.
He only had thirty-three dollars. Well, shit. If that meant he was poor, I was going to feel guilty at some point when all this was in the past. If that meant he just used credit cards all the time, I was going to get paid for my teaching services in some other way.
“I’m right here,” he said, pointing toward a Chevy Silverado with a front grille so high off the ground that I could have eaten dinner off the hood.
“You’re buying me new clothes,” I said, gasping through the pain. “And so much more.”
Annalise was waiting for us at the curb. She threw a little bag into the truck bed, then climbed in beside us. I had to slide over, and every time I moved my leg even a little, it flared in pain.
Which was pretty much a miracle, since I should have been slumped in a chair up in that room, dead from shock and blood loss. Still, this sucked.
“This buddy of yours,” I said, “who has my stuff, does he live near you?”
Clive pulled onto the dark, empty streets. He was driving too slow, but he was keeping his shit together the best he could. “My cousin. He’s maybe a mile away.”
Annalise said, “First stop, your usual supermarket, wherever that is, so we can stock up. Then your cousin. He’d better have all of Ray’s shit.”
Clive’s voice was quiet when he said, “He…” but he couldn’t bring himself to finish that sentence. I figured he had better be trying to say He will, because anything else was going to be a huge pain in the ass for me and even worse trouble for him.
Then Clive cleared his throat and spoke in an almost-normal tone of voice. “What are you?”
This was a question I was waiting for, but I still hadn’t decided whether I was going to say monsters or superheroes. Annalise beat me to the punch. “Aliens.”
Which seemed like the perfect lie, since it explained nothing and brought an asshole like Clive no closer to the truth about spells, spell books, and predators—who actually were aliens in a sense, but it didn’t matter. It also seemed like a quaint, old-fashioned sort of story, filled with flying saucers and retractable antennas in the back of our heads.
I fell asleep during the ride—passed out, really, but I hated to admit it. I only woke up when Clive and Annalise returned from the supermarket and slammed the doors. Annalise handed me a little white styrofoam tray filled with nuggets of stew meat, and I began gulping them down, one after another without chewing.
The first time I’d done this, it had been like swallowing turds. Now they had no flavor at all. There was a squishy texture, but otherwise it wasn’t pleasant or unpleasant. While Clive drove us through the darkness of the early-morning hours, I stuffed myself.
Annalise examined my face. “Good. That bullet hole is closing. Now that you’re growing a new brain, let’s hope this one has some common fucking sense in it. We’re going to lose days dealing with that fucking leg.”
“We can’t stay at this guy’s place. The cops are going to be all over it by noon. Hey, Clive, do you have a camper or something?”
“I have an RV, and a friend’s place in the mountains where you can take it.”
Where we could take it? Annalise and I looked at each other. No way were we going to let this guy out of our sight. Not yet.
We picked up Clive’s cousin, whose name was actually Russell, and discovered that not only did he have my wallet, keys, and ghost knife, he was the one who found and stole Annalise’s van out of Rick’s drive. We made him park it in a safer place—which meant not near his apartment building—then the four of us loaded into the RV. I fell asleep again while Annalise was asking how far it was and whether Clive could keep himself awake.
When I woke, we were parked in one of those forests you only see in California, where the trees stand wide apart and the ground around them is dry and bare. Another, more expensive RV sat parked on the far side of a thin stand of trees, but it was the only one.
The next three days were hell.
It’s never fun to cram meat into my belly while new bones and flesh grow back, but I had nothing to dull the boredom, and that made the pain so much worse. By the afternoon of the first day, I heard shushed whispers between Clive and Russell about being held hostage when they both had guns, and Clive said, very quietly, “They grabbed me and they didn’t bother about my sidearm. They weren’t worried about it. Now, what does that tell you? And don’t say that they’re stupid, because they’re not.”
By the afternoon of the second day, Russell was asking if we needed him to collect firewood.
There was no WiFi or cell reception, and I was in too much pain to read. Russell had brought his laptop, but I had no idea what he and Clive were doing with it. Video games, I figured.
And I had awful nightmares. The worst one had me trying to shoot my kidnappers left-handed, but they were surrounded by a crowd of people, and the bullets flew like they’d been thrown by a reckless junk pitcher. Some curved, some slid, some floated upward. No matter how carefully I aimed, I hit everyone except my targets, and no one would believe me when I said it wasn’t my fault.