Kingdom of Heroes (38 page)

The Detective placed his left hand on the back of the guard’s neck while his right hand pushed the gun against the back of the man’s head. “Walk to the holding cells. Make any kind of sudden move, try to get smart in any way, and I’ll turn your brains into a post-modern abstract work of art with the wall as my canvas. We clear?”

“Clear,” the guard said in return, trembling slightly as he spoke.

The Detective pushed him forward. “Good to know we’re on the same page,” he said in a hushed tone. They continued walking in the same position: the guard in the front, his face covered in fear, with The Detective behind him, one hand on the back of the guard’s neck, the other holding the gun. The corridor the guard led them both down seemed extra long and way too quiet. This was the most high tech building in the country, home to America’s own personal despot, yet this particular floor was devoid of life and activity; it all just seemed way too out of place. Every instinct he had was buzzing, telling him that something---everything---was wrong. Not that anything felt right or normal, but this, this moment, this trip down the deserted corridor, just felt particularly out of place.

After a few more steps, The Detective could see the end of the hallway and the holding cells just beyond. They veered to the left, and they stopped. The guard in his grasp stood there without a word. Across from them, on the other side of the large room, in front of what appeared to be the middle holding cell, stood two more men, both in the full storm trooper outfits, decked from head-to-toe in the same armor all of the other guards had been wearing.

They both quickly reached for the guns in their holsters, but they both stopped, almost at the same time, when the hostage/guard began to scream out.

“Please, don’t!” he yelled across the room. “He’ll kill me; I know he will. Just give him what he wants.”

“And what’s that?” the guard on the left, a large man with dark skin, asked, his right hand still perched precariously above his firearm.

The Detective moved himself and his hostage further into the large room, all the while making sure the guard in his grasp always stayed between their line of sight and him. “I want the young lady you have in that room. You give me her; I’ll give you your friend here, and we’ll all walk away happy.”

“And what happens if we don’t?” the guard on the right asked, a nondescript type of man who reeked of exceptionally cheap cologne. It burned The Detective’s nostrils.

“It won’t be pretty,” The Detective said in return.

Both guards laughed. “What you gonna do?” cologne guard on the right asked in a mocking tone. “You gonna kill Eugene?”

The Detective leaned forward ever so slightly. “Are you Eugene?” he asked as he leaned into his hostage’s ear.

“Yes,” Eugene managed to say in return, his voice cracking to the point that one word seemed almost impossible for him to utter.

“Nice to meet you, Eugene, hope I don’t have to kill you,” The Detective said as he resumed his previous position, allowing Eugene to be his own personal human shield. “And yes,” he yelled across the room, “that’s the plan. Give me the girl, or I kill Eugene. And right after, I’ll kill the two of you.”

“Think you can take the two of us before we kill you?” guard on the left asked, his hand noticeably closer to his gun’s handle.

The Detective tightened his grip on the back of Eugene’s neck. “Pretty sure I can, boys, so it’s probably not worth taking the chance. You will live so much longer if you just take me up on my offer.”

The two guards looked at each other, and The Detective could almost feel what they were thinking. There was a sudden scent in the air, a stench of sweat and adrenaline, and he could hear their heartbeats quicken, the rhythm in their chest gaining more and more intensity, until he saw them move, as if in slow motion, each of them almost simultaneously reaching down for the guns in their holsters.

The first bullet passed by The Detective’s right ear; he could hear and feel it as it traveled past his and Eugene’s heads. The second and third bullets hit Eugene square in the chest. He moaned with pain as the projectiles bounced off of his bullet proofed armor. The fourth bullet hit Eugene directly in his uncovered neck and traveled out the back, passing cleanly through The Detective’s left hand.

Eugene fell limp, and The Detective assumed the bullet hole in his neck had been the killing blow. Several more bullets flew towards them, some passing harmlessly to the left and the right, others bouncing off of Eugene’s armor. The Detective held the body up, continuing to use him as a human shield as they moved forward towards the other two guards.

Within a few seconds, they were close enough for The Detective to make a move. He threw Eugene’s lifeless body at the large guard on the left; Eugene landed right on top of him, knocking them both to the ground with Eugene landing on top, and the guard’s arms pinned beneath the dead body. Cologne guard continued firing towards The Detective, who spun himself out of the way of the bullets, his own speed enhanced by the extraordinary amounts of adrenaline pumping throughout his system, until he was standing directly behind the lone remaining guard.

The Detective grabbed the man’s jaw from the rear and lifted his head ever so slightly up; with his other hand, he placed the barrel of his own gun beneath the guard’s chin, the one spot on his body not covered by a helmet or armor, then he pulled the trigger. Pieces of brain mixed with blood and bone rained across the room. As the shower of gore landed all around him, The Detective released the guard’s chin and let him fall to the floor, where he landed in a heap, the remaining blood from his head draining onto the floor beneath him.

The Detective slowly crossed the room until he stood above the other guard, the large, dark skinned man. Eugene’s corpse laid on top of him; his arms were pinned to the ground; he was as helpless as one could get. For a moment, just the briefest of moments, The Detective thought about taking the noble road and sparing him, being the bigger man, being the hero he always knew he could be, and all of that other crap he associated with the idea of being the good guy.

The man was saying something, and despite his super advanced hearing, auditory senses that could hear a fly fart from a hundred feet away, The Detective couldn’t hear a word he was saying. It was something about not killing him, about how sorry the guy was, about how this was just a job, in the end, nothing that mattered.

The Detective looked down at his blood covered shoulder and the new wound he had received the last time he had let someone live after they had tried to kill him. It wasn’t a mistake he would repeat anytime soon.

“What’s the code to her door?” The Detective asked as he looked at the electronic keypad that opened and closed the cell doors.

“Please don’t kill me,” the helpless guard begged.

“The code.”

The guard tried to free his hands one last time, but he was still trapped beneath the girth of the dead body on top of him. Eugene, The Detective couldn’t help but notice, continued to come in handy. The Detective bent down next to them; he reached across and ripped the helmet off of the large guard’s head. He placed his own gun against the guard’s bulbous forehead and asked one last time.

“The code.”

The guard swallowed hard. “Zero, nine, nineteen, eighty-six.”

“Thanks,” The Detective said in return just before he pulled the trigger, blowing the large guards brains out the back of his head.

The Detective stood up, silently satisfied with the large amount of carnage he had managed to create in such a short amount of time. This wasn’t his fault, he reminded himself. He gave them every chance to just make a nice simple trade, and everyone walk away the better for it. It could have been a whole lot easier.

He held up his left hand and inspected the new found opening he had in it. The bullet had passed cleanly through, leaving an almost perfectly round, bullet shaped hole in its wake. Blood poured from the edges and ran down his arm, soaking his coat sleeves in crimson. Didn’t matter, he thought. It just matched the rest of his blood soaked clothes.

With Peterson’s gun still held firmly in his right hand, he walked over to the keypad and began typing in the code the large dead guy in the floor had just given him.

Zero.

Nine.

One.

Nine.

Eight.

Six.

With a swoosh sound straight from an old episode of some crappy sci-fi television show, the door slid open. Emily looked up from her chair. “What in the hell took you so long?” she asked as a huge smile covered her beautifully disheveled face.

_______________________________________________

“Sorry about that,” The Detective said in return. “I got a little distracted with the whole shooting people thing. It happens.”

She looked up at him and smiled. Her expression seemed to light up the whole room, making everything he had gone through to get here more than worth it. She was just as beautiful as she was the last time he had seen her, some twelve hours or so earlier, but she looked as if she’d been put through the ringer. Her face was stained with the tears she’d obviously been crying, and the front of her white dress was stained with blood, presumably from the nose bleeds she had told him about after she had helped him with his little encounter with Light and Dark. But despite the blood, despite the tear stained face and the disheveled hair, at that exact moment, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

She sat in the middle of the room in a straight back chair. Both her hands and feet were free; she didn’t appear to be restrained in any way. Not that he thought she would be, not with armed guards outside of her door and all. She was wearing the same clothes she had worn earlier that day; not that he could say anything; he hadn’t changed clothes since getting involved in this whole fucked up mess. With the gun still in his right, he walked over to her and held out his bloody left hand for her.

“Well,” he began as he looked down at her. “Are we staying here all night or are we leaving?”

She smiled again. “I didn’t want to be presumptuous and just assume you were going to take me with you.”

She reached up and took his hand, and he pulled her out of the chair. She leapt to her feet, landing against him with her arms wrapped around his neck. She squeezed him as hard as Fire had when they first met some twenty-four hours before. Hugging, he assumed, must run in the family.

As she squeezed him, her delicate arms wrapped around his neck, she playfully inserted one hand into his hair just below his hat; he leaned in close to smell her. She still smelled like honey. And then he caught it: another scent in the air, just past them, located a few feet past the chair where she had been sitting. It smelled like sweat and male pheromones, with the slightest hint of metal and a slight twinge of gunpowder.

Without thinking, he brought his right hand up and quickly aimed at a point just past the chair, to the exact spot where he smelled the telltale signs of a man holding a gun. He pulled the trigger.

Emily let out a little scream as the gun went off next to her head, looking up at him before turning to see what he had just fired at. They both watched in silence as a man suddenly appeared from behind the chair, a fresh bullet hole in the center of his forehead and a pistol in his hand, a hand that slowly fell to his side. He dropped straight back, landing hard on the white floor.

With both of her arms draped around his left one, the two of them walked over to the chair and looked down at the now dead man who hadn’t been there before. Emily turned herself ever so slightly, seemingly to get a better view at her previous company.

“What the hell just happened?” she asked, staring down at the man in disbelief.

“Invisible man,” The Detective answered as he too stared down and silently congratulated himself on his own excellent aim. This guy, this invisible man, wasn’t dressed like the rest of the guards in the building with the whole storm trooper swat team get up; he had been wearing a nice suit, marking him as a higher level employee than Peterson and Eugene. Probably, The Detective thought, another one of The Agent’s private stash of assassins.

Emily looked up at The Detective. Without her shoes, he was almost a good eight or ten inches taller than her. “That’s the fucker who brought me here, the one who took me at the hospital. How long had he been in here with me?”

The Detective broke free of her embrace for a moment, placing the gun inside of his coat as he bent down next to the dead man. He turned the body’s head to the side and looked behind the ear; there was a small metallic patch, just like the one Barren had been wearing. “He had probably been in here the entire time you were. Look.” He pointed out the patch.

“Telepathic inhibiting patch,” she replied. “Figures. Pammy always wears them when she doesn’t want me to know what’s going on. So how did you know he was here?”

The Detective stood back up. “I smelled him.”

“Handy talent you have there.”

“Tends to be.”

“What was he doing? Just standing here waiting on you?”

The Detective sniffed the air around them, just to make sure there were no other unnoticed visitors. “Well, he was waiting on me to get here, but I doubt I was his target. The Agent has made it clear he wants to see me in person. He was probably here for you.”