Max Collins - After the Dark

On Alec’s motorcycle, the handsome X5 and a lizard-faced passenger were trailing a bike length behind. The engines roared throatily as they cut across the lawn away from the paved road. Though the road sliced through the cemetery and ended near the Furies’ HQ, Max didn’t want to take the direct approach. The Furies would have numbers, so that meant it was important that the transgenics have surprise on their side.

Immediately, as arranged, the speed on both bikes was cut and their engine roar settled into a humming purr.

Max made a quick hand signal and Alec peeled off to the right, his bike gliding across the grass, in and around gravestones, Mole looking vaguely disgusted having to hang onto the X5. Max and Joshua took off to the left, also keeping the speed and engine sound minimal. The idea was to come at the Furies’ HQ from two sides.

The HQ had at one time been a mausoleum constructed after the Pulse, not far from the graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee. Max had actually visited the graves before, not long after she’d come to Seattle. The graves had reminded her of the old days, back at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, living with the Clan, with her mentor Moody and the young man named Fresca. Back then, Moody would run movies in the theater from time to time. One had been this really cool kung fu flick called Enter the Dragon, and had starred Bruce Lee.

She had seen the late kung fu star’s son Brandon in a movie called The Crow , but that had been on a cheesy video player with a bad tape. Before the Furies took over, the mausoleum HQ had been that of an Asian street gang called the Crows, so-called in honor of the late Brandon; but Badar Tremaine’s forces had wiped them out, six or seven years ago.

The mausoleum stood maybe fifteen feet tall and was at least twenty-five yards long and almost as wide — suitable to house the remains of a small town.

And even that had not been big enough for the Furies, the cement wall at one end serving as a brace for a lean-to extension that had been cobbled on. The doors at either end were wooden now, the weathered coffins that had formerly been stored inside now stacked outside like so much cord wood.

Within seconds of each other the two motorcycles arrived on either side of the mausoleum. Max kicked her cycle to loud, throbbing life and Alec followed suit. Their timing synchronized, the two motorcycles broke down the doors at either end of the mausoleum as they crashed splinteringly through.

Barely inside, both Max and Alec braked, burning rubber, screeching to a halt; they laid their bikes down, the four of them rolling off and coming up in combat stances, ready for action, expecting anything...

Just about anything.

They froze.

All around them, Furies lay dead.

Blood painted the walls in vivid splashes, recent enough to still be a dripping red; the floor, the meager furnishings, dribbled gore. Tables and chairs were overturned, TVs smashed, and a long wood bar that ran along one wall was pocked with bullet marks.

Max and her transgenic brothers had come prepared for a fight; what they found instead was a massacre.

Bodies lay everywhere, sprawled in various postures of surprised violent death — shot, stabbed, slashed. Whoever or whatever had done this had accomplished it with great speed and no mercy. Easily a hundred of the Furies, probably every member, had been slaughtered, and from the looks of things, they hadn’t had time to put up much of a fight.

This was not the aftermath of a battle. Some spent cartridges lay scattered around, but any sign of casualties the Furies might have inflicted on their opponents were gone, if there ever had been any.

“God,” Mole said.

“Damn,” Alec said.

“Logan,” Max said, the word spoken with the reverence of a prayer, edged with the sort of sorrow that had been present so often at graveside services nearby.

Without being told, Alec and Mole went back to the doors on either end, standing guard in case whoever committed this carnage was nearby or planned a return. Max and Joshua crept through the roomful of bodies, walking gingerly, as if to not wake them, and searched for Logan.

Max recognized members of the kidnap team among the corpses. The night of Logan’s kidnapping, they had presented little trouble to her, until the Tazer came out of nowhere; but whoever did this was working with heavier artillery. It was plain to see that not only had the bangers been shot to death, someone had obviously walked along strafing the bodies with automatic weapons fire, just making sure. Others had been sliced and diced — machetes, she thought — like so much meat being prepared for a giant cannibal’s stew.

Amid all of this Max walked, terrified that she would find Logan among the dead...

... though if she found him, at least, she would know . How terrible not to find him, and never to know what happened to him...

From the other side of the room, Joshua said, “Logan not here, Little Fella.”

Though he kept his voice low, it boomed off the mausoleum walls and seemed to echo in her skull. She thought that gunfire in here, this much gunfire, would have sounded like the end of the world — reports rocketing around the walls, bouncing this way and that.

“Sad,” Joshua was saying. “So sad.”

They had come to fight these Furies, to kill if necessary; but to see this massacre was to pity the victims in death, whoever, whatever, they might have been in life.

Her half of the room revealed no sign of Logan either, but there was the cutout in the far wall that led to the wooden add-on they had seen from the outside. As she approached the shadowy hole, Max’s heart pounded and she wondered if the others could hear it, echoing off the blood-spattered walls. Beads of sweat pearled her forehead, even though it was still cold both outside and in this unheated mausoleum.

There was light beyond the opening, but she couldn’t make anything out yet, and no one had called out to them; of course, Logan might have been tied up, and gagged... But if so, the marauders who’d committed this atrocity would hardly have spared him.

Still, this was the last possible place — if Logan was here, he would be in that add-on room. Willing herself to move forward, she took a few steps, her feet feeling impossibly heavy, as if she were turning into a stone gargoyle to adorn this cemetery.

And as she slipped through the hole cut in the wall, she could see one person sitting at a table, a man, his back to her.

She felt a snake of revulsion slither in her gut as she realized that the body was headless.

The room was small, barely ten feet across, with a square table in the center, one wooden chair drawn up to it, holding the seated body — not Logan, apparently, as the corpse wore the black T-shirt and jeans of a Fury — three matching chairs scattered on the floor. In the corner, a small TV had been smashed.

Moving forward, she looked over the shoulder of the body at the table and saw what was presumably the body’s former head on a plate in front of it, the face recognizable as that of Badar Tremaine, leader of the Furies.

Despite herself, she let out a sigh of relief as she confirmed that Logan was nowhere in the room. If he wasn’t here, he might still be alive somewhere.

Taking another look at Tremaine’s head on the plate, she noticed an object sticking out from his mouth. Though not squeamish, Max shivered, and buried the impulse to turn and flee, instead going over to the detached head for a closer look at the protruding object.

Whatever it was, it was metallic and not very large, the cylindrical end sticking out like a stiff, silver tongue.

Slowly, as the gang leader’s dead eyes stared at her, she withdrew the metal object from the slack mouth...