Derek Haas - Dark men

Footsteps approach and I don’t have the energy to feign unconsciousness. I feel a thumb press my eyelids open and then a penlight shines into my eyes as a man with a tight beard frowns in my face. If I weren’t so drained, if I could even lift my right hand from my side, I might try to wrestle that penlight from his hand and bury it into the side of his neck until his throat lit up like a fucking runway, but I can’t seem to muster the strength.

“Can you talk?” he asks after he checks my pulse.

I shake my head, or at least I think I shake my head, and his frown grows more pronounced.

He turns to another man standing over his shoulder, a man I didn’t realize was in the room. “It’s not good.”

“Chances?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

The other man bullies past the first and lowers himself inches from my nose. After a moment’s inspection, he says, “I’d take that bet,” then spins and exits my field of vision, if not the room.

I’ve never seen either man in my life.

I tried to change but I couldn’t. Ping. I thought I’d evolved but I hadn’t. Ping. I thought I could protect her but I couldn’t. Ping. I thought I could end this but I didn’t. Ping.

With each ping, my pulse seems louder, steadier. I can feel it in my throat, the ends of my fingers, my earlobes. I’ve never defaulted on a job, not one, and the only times I’ve failed to make a kill were by my own volition. This isn’t a job, but the path was the same. Someone put my name on paper and I killed him for it. Someone else hired him to do it, “dark men” he called them, and I’m going to kill them all. Every last one of them. If they hurt Risina, if they touched her, they’re all going to die.

My fingertips. Ping.

I can feel the pulse there, yes, and now that I concentrate, I can flex the fingers. They don’t do more than twitch, but they do twitch. It’s not much but it’s something. Maybe Spilatro’s bullet didn’t cause as much damage as I presumed, maybe I’m not paralyzed, maybe I’m not going to die.

I owe. I owe…

I know that focusing on a goal can increase your chances at recovery, that pledging to see one last relative, one last birthday, one last wedding, one last reunion can help the dying live for days, weeks, months longer than a doctor or surgeon thought possible.

Whatever they did to her, are doing to her, that’s what I have to use to sustain me, to heal me. Hatred I can let grow inside me to replace the pain. Ping. Hatred I can let flow inside me as warm as medicine. Ping. I’m going to kill these motherfuckers, these dark men, and I’m not going to die before I get the chance to bury them.

I owe… I owe…

Can I bend my elbow? I concentrate solely on my right arm as I will it to flex. It responds, only a millimeter of movement, probably invisible to anyone but me. But it was there; I felt it. Ping.

A woman enters and breathes onions into my face while she checks my pulse, my blood pressure. I crack my eyes just enough to see that her face matches her breath.

“Back to the land of the living.”

I try to respond to that unimaginative opening but my throat feels like it is filled with sand.

She holds a cup of water to my lips and I start to gag, but when she withdraws the cup I manage to croak out “more.”

She returns the water and it goes down better this time, like a sudden squall washing the dust from a dry creek bed.

“Your vitals are all solidly in the green,” she says. “You look rough but you’re gonna live for a bit.”

I cast my eyes about the room. We’re alone but there are a couple of cameras affixed to the ceiling. The dark men may not be here, but they’re watching.

I have to watch too. Wait and watch for a mistake. I owe. I owe.. Ping.

It happens a week later. I can’t be precisely sure of how much time passed, but it feels like a week. Nurse Onions has been in and out at regular intervals, what I’m guessing are eight-hour shifts, replaced by Orderly Tough Guy and Nurse Eyebrows. I did my best to extract some personal information out of each, but Onions is the only one who strung more than two words together. I haven’t asked about Risina. I won’t. If they already know I care for her, then I’ll make them question how much. If they don’t know, I’ll make them think she was only my pawn.

My strength returns, slowly. I’ve been flexing my legs under the sheets and my arms, I’ve been swinging in small concentric circles just above the mattress. I hope it’s unnoticeable to the cameras as I lie in the dark. I make barely enough movement to toggle a few pixels on their monitors or maybe they’ve figured out what I’m doing. A man named Mr. Cox used to lock me inside a house all day when I was a kid. While he was gone, I’d work on my strength until I was ready to confront him. I don’t have the time or the freedom to do pushups, chin-ups, sit-ups like I did then. I’m just going to have to make a move with the strength I built from those little circles and flexes. They made a mistake not handcuffing me to the bedrail.

Onions enters carrying a steel tray of food. Some kind of protein shake, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bowl of fruit. They haven’t given me a single utensil, and that pen-light hasn’t made another appearance, but sometimes larger objects can do the trick. Ping. They should have brought everything in on a paper plate. Ping.

As she moves to set the tray in my lap, I spring up with more agility then they’ve seen out of me since they dragged me here. I grab the tray with both hands and as Onions leans in to restrain me, I slam the flat steel into her face with everything I have. She spills backward but doesn’t drop as a metallic clang reverberates around the warehouse. Her nose is broken, and her hands go there instinctively, as I spin the tray around like I’m twirling a football and smack her with the flat end a second time, this time to the back of the head. She topples forward on to the bed now, a moan rising up like a foghorn from somewhere deep inside her.

I hear footsteps rushing in my direction from the darkness and I’m going to have to move quickly now. I charge the footsteps and just as Orderly Tough Guy steps into the light I hit him with the edge of the tray into the white of his throat and he falls to his knees, his strength sapped as he gasps for air. Twirling the tray again, I set my feet like a baseball batter and swing for the fences, the flat of the tray catching him in the temple. He capsizes the rest of the way to the floor and I’m into the darkness, looking for an exit.

I find an open doorway in the corner and enter a narrow corridor only lit by emergency lights. I move quickly now, the tray curled up in my arm. A man in a suit swings out from a doorway fifteen feet away, a gun in his hand, and this might’ve been the end of my escape, but as he pulls the trigger, I realize he’s firing a stun-gun, one of those devices that shoots out an electrode along a connecting wire. This ignorant bastard thinks we’re playing a game of capture or be captured instead of life and death. The electrode flies forward and I swat it away with the tray like I’m backhanding a tennis ball, and then I fling the tray at his head. It frisbees through the air, making the sound of a ringing bell as it slices into his forehead and nearly rips his scalp off. He drops instantaneously, as though his bones and muscles turned to jelly after the flying tomahawk nearly decapitated him. I scoop up the tray on the way through the door from which he just emerged.

The room is something akin to a break room, complete with a couple of vending machines, a long table lined with folding chairs, and a microwave. I flip through drawers along a row of cabinets, nothing, nothing, nothing and then jackpot: metal silverware. I take a handful of knives, start to leave my tray behind, then think better of it and retrieve it before heading through another door.