Chronicles of War
Part 1: Way of the Storm
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(They fight.)
- William Shakespear, stage call in numerous plays
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Chapter 8: Death, Post Haste
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The 'hallways' of the Columbia Center Mall were intended to provide
enough floor space for hundreds of busy shoppers, their children, and
their countless bags of commercial goodness. On a busy day, they would
be rushing about like a river of bodies hitting a tributary of trendy
clothes and platic bags emblazoned with corporate logos. Anesthetic
white walls matched the off-white tile floor like pink paint on a
Corvette. The easy-clean floor tiles were some forty feet from the high
arched ceilings that reflected sound better than a speaker box.
But gone was the one hundred and thirty decible noise level and
two-legged missiles known as 'toddlers.' Gone was the machine-gun speed
spanish of a severely stessed out mother disciplining her gaggle of
young male children who spent their afternoons rooted in the arcade.
Now it was gutted. Dead. The four-foot high neon signs and eyeball
searing 'decorations' adorning each store remained, all perfectly
intact. It reminded Ed of what the aftermath of a neutron bomb might
look like. Every living thing gone and dead, the atrocious structures
they built and worked in left standing.
A silent story of stupidity.
He just couldn't get his head around what was happening.
James was nuts. James was psycho. James was insane.
James was an assassin.
*Well,* mused Ed as he trailed behind the engineer/murderer. *at least
it all makes sense now. Ah yes, James... James....* Ed frowned. *Funny.
I can't remember his last name. How could I forget his last name?! He
used to be my best friend!*
"James?"
"Yeah?"
"What is your last name?"
"What?"
"You changed it, didn't you?"
"It's Rahn."
"No, before today. I noticed you changed it, but I can't remember what
it used to be. Did it start with an F?"
"What are you digging for, Ed? Just drop it."
"No, I wanna know!"
Ed was suddenly looking down the barrel of James' gun. "I said, drop
it!" The assassin yelled.
As James swiftly put the weapon back in the belt of the pants, Ed could
only think of one thing: how quickly and silently James was able to draw
that gun; it was like belt-to-hand without the little bit in between.
*Engineer my bubbly black ass.*
As they drew closer, James waved Ed aside. They crept quietly up to the
wall near the store. Ed knew they looked ridiculous, creeping along the
wall of a hallway over 30 feet across, but he didn't care. He wasn't
eager to get shot up. Not since--
*No. Do NOT think about it.*
They were next to the entrance now, nervously watching the entire
hallway for any movement. The benches, various plants, and numerous
stands selling everything from frisbies to carpeting to jewelry composed
a veritable wall of cover while making a mockery of camoflauge attempts.
The place was a nightmare for military action. *Just what the HELL were
they thinking?* Ed fumed.
James tapped him on the shoulder, whispering. "Round two, pal. We go in,
take down as many as we can without killing them. You get scared, things
get out of hand, get 'em good. When we're done, we'll take two for
interrogation and double-tap the rest."
"Right. Uh... Double-tap?" Ed questioned. *He isn't thinking...*
"Two shots to the back of the head."
"Why the fuck--"
"They're willing to use deadly force if it comes to it, and I'm not in
the mood to let one sneak up behind me an take me out permanently. This
is war, Ed. Make no mistake about it. I'm taking every advantage I can.
Maybe we'll live through this."
*Great. Just fucking great.*
"And Ed?" James said.
"Yeah?"
"If you try to negotiate with them, I'm putting you down too."
"No need to get pissy." Ed groused.
James gave Ed a dirty look. "Hey, that cut in my leg stings like fuck."
"I get it, I get it." James continued to glare at him. "Can we go in
now?"
James nodded; the two cycled their guns and left the safeties on.
"Threetwoone!" James shouted.
Ed had enough time to open his mouth before James disappeared around the
corner. He jumped to his feet to follow James, and immediately rammed
his face into the hard rubber sole of a boot. The blow threw him out of
the entrance and knocked the gun from his hand as he landed on the hard
floor. For a moment he wondered which would break first, the easy-clean
tiles or his back? Then the boot was coming down on his face, preparing
to re-shape his head into a pancake.
Ed flung the pesky boot aside with his arm, growling. *So, it comes to
hand-to-hand does it?*
Looking up, he was startled to see a man in a black jump suit ready to
tear his throat out. Ed rolled to the side, tagging a pressure point on
the man's arm in passing as he escaped by reflex. He quickly rose to his
feet with a grace that defied his stature. "Come on!" He roared.
Then a loud thump was heard. Then another.
"Come on, you fuckers!" And that would be James.
Ed grabbed the boot from it's last failed kick and landed a clean
counter to man's jewels, then charged past him into the back of a man
standing back from the battle between James and four of the unlucky
pseudo-ninja.
A knife lay on the ground next to him like a strip of black paint on the
white tile floor. Without a second thought, Ed scooped it up and nodded
to James.
James winked in response, then unleashed a flurry of punches into one of
the men, dodging a wild swing of someone's knife an instant later.
Ed wished he had more time to watch his friend fight. James in motion
was truly a living art. He fought like a possessed man with the moves of
a master; he may miss, but he never stopped coming. Ed watched in awe as
the assassin cold-clocked one of the black-clad men just like he did it
a dozen times every day.
Ed eyed the two fighters that were closing in on him. The man who had
tackled him looked very pissed and held a stun baton in one hand. The
second was failing to conceal a tazer in his left hand. Fools. Ed the
security guard was a surprisingly skilled unarmed fighter. Numerous
military self-defense classes and years of practice had made him a force
to be reckoned with. As he engaged the baton-wielder, he wondered, in
the back of his mind, how he would stack up against James.
----------
James danced through his attackers, his mind working furiously. Fighting
these guys wasn't even a challenge. His hands whistled through the air
on instinct, landing vicious blows on his enemies while his
consciousness was focused on something else.
Mostly, he was wondering just how many of these morons were in the mall.
Hiding a hundred, maybe more, wasn't impossible in a structure of this
size. It was kind of flattering to think he warranted one hundred
soldiers just for capture, but James wasn't as vain as most people
thought. He knew even fifty people set on his trail was excessive. If
the man on the phone had his wires crossed, then the real Rick Genoni
had pissed off... well, it couldn't have very been _them_, could it?
*Nah.* Thought James. *If it was _them_, this Rick bullshit wouldn't be
happening. It would be a bullet in the back, real quick and real quiet.
It's someone... or something else. But who?*
James tossed his worries aside, blocking a three punch combination with
his free hand. He was holding one of the soldiers in an arm bar with his
right hand. *Oh bother.* Another attacker went down with a single punch
that seemed to snap the man in half like a rotting toothpick hit by a
haymaker. The one held in the arm bar was taken down a split-second
later, as James applied excessive pressure to the move, dislocating his
opponent's shoulder and throwing him aside.
He ducked and pulled back as the end of a wooden staff whizzed through
the space his head used to occupy.
James made a come hither gesture with his hand, uncertain whether his
last opponent would take the bait. That staff strike was pretty good. He
didn't even see it coming; he just moved on instinct to get out of the
way.
The soldier did take the bait. James jumped back, then weaved and dodged
around the probing strikes. *Nuts. This guy isn't so hot.*
----------
Ed watched in amazement. *James is playing with him!* He didn't yell.
This was nuts. Every one of these guys was trained in some military
martial art. The one still fighting James looked like a multiple black
belt, yet the assassin was making a... a... a _farce_ of the guy's
technique!
He decided to watch in wonder.
----------
James wasn't perfect though. He might not have been human, but even in
fighting, he wasn't quite perfect.
While spinning through the air like a top to avoid a series of stabs and
low swings, he missed a twisting follow-up move that put his arm and the
soldier's staff in the same space at the same time. Wood rang upon flesh
for an instant, then the two separated.
"FUCK!" James swore, grasping his arm.
The soldier rushed for the opening without a word. It proved to be a
fatal mistake as James punched the staff into two splintered pieces with
apalling ease.
The soldier stared dumbly at the mess of his weapon, then looked back up
at James in time to see a pistol aimed at his face.
----------
Everything was happening too fast. They were fighting--well, James was
dodging some dangerous-look shit from that guy with the bo staff--then
James was shouting and shot the soldier in the face.
"Why the fuck did you do that?!" Ed yelled.
James tucked his pistol back into the holster on his hip. Ed made a
mental note to ask later when that had appeared on his friend, then
glared at James.
The assassin pulled out a cigarette he had apparently pilfered from Kat
and lit it leisurely, taking a long drag from the cancer stick.
"Well?" Ed demanded.
"He's waking up." James pointed at one of the semi-conscious, now almost
fully conscious fighters.
"So you shot his friend? Why? To inspire fear in him?!"
"Hey..." James said, a thoughtful look on his smoke-obscured face.
"That's a damn good idea."
The assassin--yes, Ed now considered him just an assassin... and a damn
good one--turned away, leaving the security guard's mouth to flap
indignantly while he tried to fire off a scathing retort that held at
least a mediocre amount of intelligence.
Insane. This was just insane.
And it was all happening too fast for him.
----------
James took a pull off his cigarette, staring at the figure on the floor.
*Yeah, those headaches can be hell.* James reminisced. It had been a
while since he'd been on the receiving end of an attack like that. He
almost missed the feeling of his brain being violently slammed into the
side of his skull before conciousness was wrenched from his grasp. Yes,
he almost missed it.
Almost.
The soldier appeared to be pulling himself together, groaning slightly
and actually moving around a bit... like a bug pinned to a block of wood
really. An old bug... with arthritis.
"Wake up." James commanded, putting his cigarette out on one of the
soldier's eyes.
The man jerked away with a slurred scream that poured out of his mouth
like a pound of worms. He writhed on the floor more actively this time,
slowly moving away from the assassin.
"Fuuuck..." He said, hands clasped tightly over his face.
"I have questions. You will answer them to the best of your knowledge."
James said flatly.
Ed looked on in morbid fascination. James' voice had about as much
figurative warmth and give as a literal block of steel. This would
probably scar him for life, Ed thought, but it was damn hard not to
watch.
"Fuck you!" The soldier shouted.
*Oh. So he's waking up.* James thought.
"So you're still alive. You're going to regret that." The soldier
flipped onto his back with blinding speed, his sickness and slow
reflexes were apparently a fient.
James dealt with the kicks sent in his direction by performing a short
standing jump over the figure. The kicks missed completely, and James'
booted feet came down on the soldier's free hand with a wet crunch, like
he's just smashed the world's biggest Tarantula.
"This might sound unreasonable," James said with the sickeningly sweet
voice of a telemarketer catching their mark at dinnertime. "but I expect
you _not_ to futilely attack me, know that I've defeated you and all of
your little friends. You're only alive now because you have some
information I can get from you easily. If you don't have this
information, or insist on making it difficult to extract, I will kill
you. In the process, expect a lot of pain to be delivered in an effort to
correct any deficiencies I find in your spirit of cooperation."
*That was a mouthful.* James mused. Perhaps he should take it easier on
the long-winded explanations. They were all right when you had a limited
number of unconcious armed killers locked in the same building as you. A
large, potentially unlimited number of most certainly concious armed
killers was another story. Brevity, it seemed, would be the way of
things today.
"Look," James stepped off of the soldier's crushed hand. "just answer
the damn questions."
"Tyler, Shawn. Private First Class. Serial number 77825562." The soldier
said.
"Hey, that's real informative. Thank you for the information." James
pulled out another cigarette and waved to Ed. "Let's get those two in
here. Oh, nice knife."
----------
Ed shook himself. James had said something to him, was coming this
way.... Oh. He probably wanted to move the bodies out of the hallway.
The security guard quickly turned around, eyes scanning the area
rapidly. He didn't want to get a bullet in the back because he was
distracted by James.
"Hey, I said nice knife. One of them?" James gestured towards one of the
soldiers before grabbing the body by the arms and dragging the body
inside of Hot Tommy's.
Ed tossed the knife into the middle of the store and followed James in
with the second soldier. Inside the store, he looked over the figures as
if seeing them for the first time. All wore similar black jump-suit type
clothes with no patches or writing or anything on them. Weird.
James went over the bodies, looking for identification, and coming back
with even less than when he went fishing. Literally. One of the
unconscious guys must have taken his lighter. He was feeling like
shooting the lot of them, just in case, when he noticed the one with the
useless hand and missing depth perception had gone limp. James walked
over the soldier, and amended his earlier observation.
The soldier had gone limp and was foaming at the mouth.
"Ed." He said slowly. "We've got a problem here."
Ed's mind was a blank. Sitting Indian style in the middle of a 'popular'
clothing store. Sitting in the mall he used to be employed in. Staring
at a patch of slowly staining carpet. Mind blank.
It was deathly quiet. James sat next to him, deep in thought while he
played cat's cradle with a loop of string. Ed didn't know if James had
been carrying the string on him when he arrived at the mall, of if he
had made it once they got inside. He could tell that James was damn good
at it. Steady hands, methodical motions.
All of the soldiers were dead. Every one committed suicide with the aid
of cyanide capsules hidden somewhere in their mouths. The last one had
been savagely beaten by James, even after he slipped from the bounds of
reality and his eyes stared blankly ahead.
Ed found that James had fists of steel, or something like it. The face
of that unfortunate man looked somewhat like a watermelon that had been
trampled by a herd of cattle. The body was still bleeding profusely, the
liquid soaking into the gray, low-pile industrial carpeting, staining
every thread crimson.
They called it 'nuclear carpeting' sometimes, because it was practically
indestructible. They joked that after thermonuclear war killed off the
human race and destroyed all they had built, only cockroaches, dust, and
this carpeting would remain.
Including this stained nuclear carpeting. *Would the blood remain as
well?* Ed wondered. *Even after everything else is gone; faded away,
will this trace of a dead man remain?*
"Observe! The Ribcage!" James bellowed, shoving his latest cat's cradle
into Ed's face shamelessly.
"Will you SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!" Ed screaming, scrambling to his feet.
James pouted, a ridiculous face for him to wear, and turned away from Ed
with a theatrical sniffling noise. "You... you don't like it?"
"You're insane!" Ed said, nothing more eloquent coming to mind. He
gestured at James with the excess energy that ran around his gut,
threatening to crash into his breakfast. Somehow, this man couldn't be
as dense as he pretend to be.
"Bah!" James rose to his feet languidly. Ed noticed the cat's cradle was
gone as if it had simply never been. "You're too easy. Ready to get out
of here?"
"I thought you were gonna question these people!" Ed pointed at the
bodies.
"This is what I live for." James said with a smile, then he continued in
a lecturing tone of voice. "The spectacular success part, not the total
lack of well-deserved praise part.... You know, you should have that
nervous eyetwitch looked at."
*Right.* Ed growled in his mind. *As if that made any sense at all.*
"Look. We're alive. They came here and they came here knowing that
defeat is death. That means we _can_ win. My plan _will_ work."
"Excuse me, Mr. Assassin sir, but I don't see how this is proof your
plan will work."
"My dear Mr. Flemming, please remember that my original plan was to
strike back by eliminating the offense. These guys don't know shit about
_why_ they're supposed to grab me. I suspected this was the case. So,
since they don't have any useful information for me, I'll just kill 'em
all."
"You _are_ insane." Ed said with great understanding.
"You don't understand." James insisted. "I'm a professional killer. This
is a situation that I can handle."
"That's what worries me." Ed said.
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