Namaste (5 page)

“Next,” said Amit, standing erect.
 

“Jesus,” said the other white man.

“Shoot him, Justin,” ordered the bat man.

“Yes,” said Amit. “Shoot me, Justin.”
 

“JUST FUCKING SHOOT THAT FUCKER!”
 

Justin’s head jittered toward Mike’s gurgling corpse, his brain still trying to process whatever it was that had just happened. It had all gone too fast. One moment Mike was charging the monk and swinging to pop his top, and the next he was twitching on the ground with his throat slit end to end.
 

Now Justin was in the spotlight, all eyes on him to end things. He had a gun out and pointed, but the pressure seemed suddenly too much. He fired, barely seeming to see what he was aiming at. Amit easily ducked the shot as the gun, with its long trigger pull, went high just as he’d known it would. The gun — a silver semiautomatic — was now cocked and deadlier in Justin’s hands, but Amit twisted it from his grip before his arm recovered from the first shot’s recoil. The shot struck something in the barn’s loft, and there was the sound of wood splintering, but by the time anyone heard it Amit had turned the gun around and had it pointed between Justin’s eyes. Justin, who bore at least a fifth of the responsibility for the dead woman at Amit’s feet.
 

“It works better like this,” said Amit, and squeezed the trigger. A red blossom of brain and blood exploded like a water balloon on a post behind what used to be Justin as his body was blasted onto its back by the shot’s blunt force. His face was charred hamburger.
 

Amit threw the gun into the loft, because he’d promised to kill each man with his own weapon, and a monk did not break his promises.
 

The second man with a gun would have to be next, because he was already drawing. It was a shame. Amit was fluent in martial graces, and here he’d already killed one man rather inelegantly, with a firearm. Guns were for thugs, not monks. The draw was so long and so clumsy, though, the Asian man reached him first, tackling him with an arm around his neck. Amit had heard him approaching from behind, had felt the wind of his passage. He twisted the man around and used him as a bludgeon to strike the last man as he was raising his bat. The bat hit the unarmed man in the leg, then the flail of limbs hit the man with the bat. Both flew to the dirt. Finally the man with the gun had his weapon out, so Amit ducked into a scissor-split and pulled his legs out from under him. The man struck the clay hard, concussively, and the gun rattled free. Amit climbed onto the man’s chest and reached for it, taking the cool metal in his hand.
 

He swung the gun toward the men he’d felled a moment before, to keep them at bay. There was no need; they’d barely recovered. He turned his attention to the pinned man, who Amit had noticed earlier had blood on his hands.
Nisha’s
blood.
 

“We were just following orders!”
he yelled as Amit, still on his chest, pointed the gun down at him.
 

Amit looked at the man’s hands, crimson with innocence. He looked up at the inelegant firearm, then spun it on its trigger guard so the muzzle was below his fist and smashed it hard into the man’s eye. Years of training made Amit deceptively strong, and he felt the man’s skull give at the eye socket as he smashed the barrel deep, fracturing it and allowing the metal to pulverize the right side of his frontal lobe.
 

The bat man scrambled to his feet and started to run. Amit eyed the Asian man, who was still dazed and unmoving, and followed. He made it as far as the barn’s front door. Amit easily caught up with him, and when the man tried to hook around the door’s support post and outside, Amit grabbed him by the back of the neck and rammed his face hard into it. The man slumped, scalp bleeding and nose broken. Amit looked back into the barn to keep an eye on the last man — the man he’d have to interrogate — and saw the four surrounding bodies.
 

His training slipped. Rage welled inside him, taking over his senses. He looked at the man on the floor and screamed in agony, then knelt by him and rammed his knuckles hard enough into the gurgling throat to shatter the man’s neck and pierce his spinal column. Then he wrenched the man’s head backward hard, touching the back of his head to the spot between his shoulder blades. There was a satisfying final crack, and the body went still.
 

Amit closed his eyes and drew a breath, fighting emotions into their corners.

He approached the Asian man, who’d apparently broken a leg, and knelt by him.

“I have done a terrible thing,” Amit said.
 

The man’s eyes widened, seeing reprieve through the mercy of a suddenly regretful killer.
 

“I failed to kill that last man with his bat.” He pointed at one of the dead black men. “And him? I promised I would break his leg bone through skin, but I failed to do so. Can you forgive me, for them?”
 

The Asian man stared at him, then nodded.
 

“Good.” Amit grabbed the man by his broken leg and hauling him toward the pulley in the barn’s center. “Then you and I can get started.”
 

Chapter 5

10:59
A
.
M
.
ON
F
RIDAY

Amit was uncharacteristically nervous.
 

He was a monk; he was supposed to be able to master his emotions. He mostly had. He’d learned to suffuse disappointment and appreciate patience; he’d fought anger even in the face of infuriating things. In his youth, he’d had a temper, and his parents steered him into hobbies that they’d hoped would vent his aggression, like hitting the heavy bag that hung in their basement. But in his years at the monastery — since he was 5 or 6; Amit wasn’t sure — he’d learned to deal with his frustrations in other ways. When he wanted to blow up, he meditated. When the elders had refused to acknowledge his advancement in his teens, he’d almost hit them, before meditating his way through it. Amit was no longer an angry or violent man. And if he could overcome those emotions, learning peace and tranquility, he could overcome any emotions.
 

Except for one. Two, if you counted his nervousness now.
 

Nisha had said she’d explain everything. But was this a confession or a date? Amit didn’t know. That pesky emotion he’d felt since first meeting her had muddled his thinking. She was so back and forth. He knew she loved him (or thought it anyway; damn the persistent, chaotic nature of affection), but she was also troubled by that thing she kept from him. And that duality had muddled everything further. When Nisha was upset, was it because of Amit or because of the unknown menace? It would be so much easier, he kept telling her, if she’d simply confide in him. But she said that doing so would be dangerous. Nisha had to choose her islands of trust very carefully.
 

Today, she promised to explain, but the location was as ambiguous as his feelings — or her apparent feelings for him. Usually, when they met at the abandoned barn, they did so to be alone, and sometimes to engage in behaviors the monastery forbade a monk. The elders suspected that the girl who had come to the monastery (to hide, she’d said) was causing a stir with some of the younger men, but so far Amit believed he’d kept their relationship secret, hiding their rendezvous in the barn that had become their special place. But if her purpose today was to tell him what she’d been hiding, why had she chosen a spot so amorous? Confession, for a change, might have actually made sense at the monastery.
 

Unless purpose had two sides. Amit felt his not-quite-subdued monk’s heart swollen by the thought.

He stepped over the barn’s threshold, peering around as always before darting inside to make sure that nobody saw him. The barn seemed to be unused, but the cliché of the angry farmer with the pitchfork was one they both knew, and so they’d always been covert. And what of the monastery elders? Amit didn’t think the other monks would care enough about his deviations from protocol to spy on him, but you never knew, and everyone in the order could move like wind. If he was cast out, then what? His family was long gone. Amit had nobody, and no skills other than the hard-trained, nearly inhuman muscular and perceptual talents taught by the order. If he were tossed out, could he simply move into an apartment and get a job? That was a world he’d never known. He’d been a monk all his life, training for …
 

For the next life, he supposed. For nirvana. For a connection with spirit. But given the intense conditioning they all received, they could almost be warriors. Yet violence was strictly anti-doctrine. Amit thought of his old, heavy punching bag, of the cathartic thrill of venting frustrations. He thought of his training, and how it was all for the sake of itself. Really, what was the point?

“Nisha?” he whispered into the silence.
 

The barn wasn’t quiet at all. He could hear her heartbeat and breathing, there in the stillness. It was some sort of a lovers’ game of hide and seek. That sounded like Nisha. Except that …

 
Something was wrong. Her heartbeat was too fast, but simultaneously too weak. She sounded almost as if she were hibernating — the heartbeat of a wintertime bear. Her breathing was raspy. Almost wet. It seemed as if he could sense others nearby. Yet, Nisha had specifically wanted to be alone.

He walked farther inside, increasingly nervous. He pushed it down, closing his eyes and drawing a slow breath, remembering his training. Love made him sloppy. He was letting things in that he shouldn’t.

When he felt more in control, he tried again: “Nisha?”
 

This time she answered. “Amit!”
 

Urgency.
There was urgency in her voice. And her voice, frantic like her breathing, sounded wet. As if in shallow water. And that heartbeat …
 

He scampered forward across the clay floor, pulling his orange sash tight around his waist so he wouldn’t make sound.
 

Then he saw her.
 

Nisha was near the middle of the barn’s open floor, lying in a pool of blood. She was on her back, mouth wet as if she’d coughed up some of the blood that ran down her cheeks and joined the torrent that spilled from her throat. There had been a terrible accident. Amit searched for its source, and then in a split second realized that whatever she’d fallen into or run across that had impaled her no longer mattered. Only fixing the damage mattered now. He looked around for something to staunch the bleeding, found a surprisingly clean rag within reach, and pushed it against her throat. Nisha hadn’t just gotten a nick. Whatever she’d managed to do to herself was worse than Amit had originally thought. Her throat was sliced open in a giant gash. Dark, arterial blood welled up and poured from the wound, spilling into a crimson river around her. There was no accident. This was murder on its way.

“Nisha! What happened?”
 

She couldn’t speak with the rag pressed tightly to her throat. Nisha tried anyway, nudging his hand, but he held firm and shook his head, tears welling his eyes at their corners. Another betrayal of emotion, his body being more intelligent than his conscious mind; it knew she would die even as his hands tried to save her.
 

“Who did this to you?”
 

Amit swore inside as soon as he’d said it, his mind returning to his teen years when he’d still fought with anger, when he’d still picked up so-called bad words and enjoyed using them. She couldn’t answer, couldn’t tell him anything if he was to hold pressure on her throat.
 

Blinking away his tears furiously, angry with himself, Amit refocused. He could only ask yes or no questions. And he
had
to ask, because he had to know what to do next. How to quell this strange, new — yet oddly ancient and familiar — emotion building within him through some sort of action.

“Is this because of the secret? The thing you were going to tell me?”
 

Her eyes met his, big and brown and softer than usual. They seemed to want to slip into somewhere far-away, beyond Amit and the world. Below his pressure, without moving her severed neck, she gave a tiny nod.
 

Already Amit was empty of questions. There was nothing he could ask that could be answered with a yes or a no. And there was so much else beyond the yeses and nos.
Who had done it? Why? And how can I find them?

Instead, he looked down at his Nisha. Her eyes kept wanting to go, but he wasn’t ready to release them. He couldn’t take it. He wasn’t prepared. All his years of training in spirit and substance and right and wrong and good and evil and in striving to reach paradise in realms beyond this one, and none of it was helping him now, as he stared down at this visceral piece of real-life horror.
 

“Nisha,” he whispered. “I love you.”
 

She nodded, her lips pressed together in a tight line. Tears welled in her eyes, untouched and pure of the blood beneath her.
 

Amit took her hand, finding the one on this side dry and soft, as it had always been. It was slightly cold, but otherwise it was Nisha’s, same as yesterday. He looked at the hand, then up the arm to her sleeve, to Nisha’s simple, floral-print dress — the dress she’d been wearing when they’d met, when she first came to the monastery for help, hair bundled down her back in a thick braid of black. It seemed unfair for her to die in the same dress — that such pleasant, sweet, innocent memories were soiled with such an ending.