Francine Mathews - The Cutout

“What now?” she asked. As though he were a grown-up. Someone who knew what should be done.

“To the barracks,” he cried. And heard his father in his voice.

Caroline crouched with her ear against the tunnel door, listening intently. Her gun was raised. Beyond the flat panel of wood must be the supply closet; beyond that, a silence that made her flesh crawl. Too tight. Too heavy. A silence screaming for air.

Someone was waiting beyond the closet door.

Of course he's waiting. You didn't really think this would work, did you?

Shut up. I don't have time for this now.

Caroline clutched her Walther more firmly and thrust aside her fear. She was within an inch of death and singing about it, she was intoxicated with derring-do. For an instant she stood alone on a forty-foot jump tower in deepest Tidewater — only this time there was no Eric to shove his hand into the small of her back. She took a deep breath. Felt for the latch of the tunnel door. And hurled herself off the platform — He must have expected her to ease the door open gently, to peer around the edge, a deer in his headlights, while he pumped a round of bullets straight into her face. Instead the tunnel door slammed open and Caroline propelled herself, still crouching, straight at the man's knees. He lost his balance and swayed heavily against a shelf, raining boxes and vials to the floor. The crash of glass.

Caroline screaming, a guttural, wordless battle yell.

It won her a few seconds longer.

She saw the man's dark eyes, the close-cropped hair, the healed white sickle at his temple where a bullet had traveled long ago. Mian Krucevic. The man she had hunted obsessively for years, the man whose face she had never seen. The man who had strapped Eric to a door and waited for it to explode.

His foot swung in an arc toward her head. She had no place to roll in the closet's narrow space, no place to dodge. A piece of glass knifed into her bicep — She thrust herself upward and fired. If you're going to use a Walther , Eric murmured to her, a closet's the only place to do it .

Krucevic grunted with pain. Then the boot completed its arc and smashed into her cheekbone. Pain exploded behind her eyes, her hands came up to her face, she was curled in a fetal ball on the floor. He kicked her again in the kidneys. Then his hand was on her wrist, twisting. The delicate bones snapped under his strength — and she let go of the Walther's grip. Two iron talons grasped her shoulders and hauled her to her feet.

In an instant he would put his gun to her skull and pull the trigger. The pain was a dull roar in the back of her ears, like the sound of the sea captured in a shell.

“Where are they?” he screamed in German. “Your team. Where are they?”

Her bullet had struck him in the abdomen. Blood spread like a map across his stomach, it stained the dark gray sweater he wore to black. Why was he still standing?

“Where are they?”

The sound of a gunshot, and a man's brutal scream, from the hallway beyond.

His gun smashed again into her battered cheekbone. Agony cut like a jagged knife through her brain. She summoned her last shred of strength — and shoved her knee straight into the dark stain at his abdomen.

He howled and doubled over, still clutching his gun. She kicked backward and scrabbled for the missing Walther.

Footsteps pounded toward them.

“Papa!”

Her skull still ringing, Caroline glanced over her shoulder and saw a thin kid in underwear, his eyes two charcoal holes in a bone white face. Jozsef. He had called Krucevic Papa. Behind him were other faces — haggard, deranged, a crowd of eyes burning. He had brought the whole camp with him.

“Vaclav!” Krucevic yelled hoarsely. One hand clutched his stomach, his gun was still potent in the other. “Vaclav!”

Caroline rose slowly to her feet, her eyes fixed on Krucevic. He had sunk to the floor, and the Walther was pinned beneath him. There was no salvation that way. Blood spilled between the fingers he pressed against his shirt. His teeth were clenched in a snarl. But still he raised his gun — “Papa!”

The boy slid across the floor to huddle at Krucevic's side, his face a mask of fear.

“You're bleeding!”

Krucevic clapped a crimson hand on his son's shoulder. He turned Jozsef around to face Caroline and the throng of silent inmates standing twelve feet away. She saw now that they were armed. There would be no reply from Vaclav.

Krucevic raised his gun to Jozsef's temple. He gasped out something in Serbian.

Caroline could not understand the words, but she caught the meaning. He would shoot the boy in the head if they came any closer.

The value of a life is relative. Krucevic has known that since birth. He's on record as saying that death is always preferable to failure.

Jozsef's lips parted, but no sound came. And then his eyes slid closed with a terrible weariness. He leaned his head into the barrel of his father's gun and sighed, a child up too long past his bedtime. And Caroline at last understood.

He was Krucevic's son, as Mian was the child of his father. Jozsef was waiting for the death he had always known would come.

Fury swept over her like a wave of heat: fury for this boy who had always been trapped, exchanged like a prisoner of war between parents who never loved him enough. Fury for Eric, who was Jozsef grown up. Fury for herself, and what she had become.

Krucevic muttered something more. But his hand was shaking and his voice was faint. He had lost too much blood.

Caroline felt a spark of satisfaction — her one bullet had evened the odds — and then she threw herself at the pair of them without pausing to think, as though Krucevic were just a trainer in a prison shack, the grenade dangling temptingly from his munitions belt. She fell on top of the boy, her hands clawing at Krucevic's face.

His gun went off.

The bullet winged her, then plunged over her shoulder to bury itself in the closet wall. She tore the boy from Krucevic's arms and rolled backward, fighting her own pain. The gun fired again — A woman with ragged blond hair and intense green eyes leapt over Caroline and fell upon Krucevic. Caroline saw the knife in her hand rise — then rolled again to shield Jozsef from his father. She had managed to thrust them through the closet door. She dragged herself to her knees, her arms still around the boy's frail body, as the horde of crippled things Mian Krucevic had made surged past them.

Caroline pressed herself flat against the wall, pain stabbing through her shoulder, and took a dizzying blow on the side of the head. They were like animals, like brutes, their hatred and blood lust destroying reason; she would be overwhelmed and then she would die.

“Papa!” Jozsef's voice, pinched and shrill with terror.

A hand scrabbled at her neck, gripped hard on her collar. She screamed into a pair of shocking blue eyes, a mouth open in a snarl; then the man yanked her ruthlessly toward the hall. One of the camp's inmates.

Krucevic was being bludgeoned with pieces of chairs, with laboratory tools, with shattered frames torn from the windows. The inmate dragged Caroline forward, stumbling, through the insane tangle of bodies. She could not fight him. She could not feel the fingers of her right hand. Blackness clouded her vision. She tripped over a leg. A child's leg, bare to the edge of his filthy shorts.

The dark-haired man lifted Jozsef in his arms and shouted at Caroline, an incomprehensible word. He was gesturing for her to follow.

A terrible, high-pitched cry rose from the knot of bodies behind. He's dead , Caroline told the leather jacket receding in her mind. Mian Krucevic is dead .

But Eric did not turn to look — he had better things waiting down the road ahead — and in the end, neither did she.