60
Blasted to the Past
Blake and Ethan looked down the elevator shaft, mesmerized by the carnage below. They both wore smirks of triumph as they pulled away from the edge.
A pool of blood was forming near Blake’s foot. He put pressure on the wound and hoped the bleeding would stop soon.
The sound of stomping boots resonated from every direction on the sixth floor. Blake and Ethan froze. Before they could face the enemy, someone spoke to them with a harsh Russian accent.
They leaned against the edge of the opened elevator door as they turned around. Heavily armed men surrounded them, each wearing a gas mask.
In the silence that followed, a peculiar clicking came from the back of the group as someone walked forward. This uniformed man was in no hurry, like he enjoyed the sound of his own approach. He spoke again, this time in Russian. Neither Blake nor Ethan understood Russian; they both shrugged their ignorance in unison.
Blake took a furtive glance behind them. The elevator shaft would not be a route of escape this time. Even if they jumped back inside and made it to the next level, the men in front of them would open fire before either Ethan or Blake could pry apart one of the other doors. Blake evaluated his remaining options — to either transport or teleport — but they were just as disastrous. He played them out in his mind.
Option one: transport himself and maybe Ethan to his failsafe — a pre-programmed destination on the watch. But that would take him to a when and where that wouldn’t be helpful. The images of the unfortunate Snow, Amhurst’s white rat, exploding flashed in his mind. Would it even work?
Option two: take on each of the Sons of Stalin by using the teleporting function. But the variable in that equation was Ethan. Even if Blake managed to take them all out, there was no guarantee that Ethan wouldn’t be shot down in the melee. Plus, his weapon was currently empty and he wouldn’t have time for a magazine change.
That left the final option: surrender and hope for survival. These people were after the watch; his only leverage.
The soldier with tap boots was now in front of the troops. He was an enormous man with military crew cut blonde hair. He spoke again, this time in thickly accented English. “Put down your weapons and give us the watch.”
Ethan glanced at Blake, who said nothing. Their choices were exhausted.
“Okay.” Blake pulled his bloody hand away from his leg and reached for the watch, taking care to move slowly. He gave the face dial a deft counter-clockwise turn. He didn’t have to look to know what the display would read; the series of numbers that were his failsafe. Three clicks on the bottom right prong would provide a three second delay.
Ethan stared in astonishment at Blake. “Don’t give it to them.”
Blake began to wrestle the watch off his arm. “They want it. Once they have it, they kill us. If they don’t get it, then maybe we live another day.”
“Then why are you handing it over?”
The hooks retracted from Blake’s arm, and he winced, then winked at Ethan as he pulled it off and whispered, “I’m not.” He clicked a button on the watch and threw it at the Russian in charge.
It took one second for the watch to travel through the air, and another for the Russian to stabilize it in his hand after instinctively catching it from Blake’s lopsided toss. The final second caught everyone off guard except Blake.
A whip-strike sounded, accompanied by the now familiar rush of air, and the Russian was torn apart from the waist up. Everything from his huge barreled chest, to his rifle, and his snarling face, all gone in an instant.
The lower portion of his body was all that remained. The pair of stationary legs buckled and fell to the tile floor in a bloody pile. Guts spilled down on top of them, looking like a string of slimy sausage links.
From behind the gas masks, all eyes must have been staring in disbelief at the carnage, because no one moved a muscle. With their leader gone, another would need to fill the role. After several long, silent moments, a random man disengaged from the mob of matching uniforms and said, “That was not wise.”
The self-appointed commander pulled another cylindrical device from his ammo strap and tossed it at them.
It landed in a weird spin, swiveled to a stop, and balanced on its end like the previous one from two floors below. As before, five tubes ejected from the device, spilling gas into the air. Blake and Ethan covered their mouths against the fumes, but it was pointless.
The Russians watched them, motionless. Then they began to fade and disappear behind a rising cloud of thick smoke.
61
The Long Goodbye
The media was calling it The Massacre at New York Medical, and a massacre it was.
Art didn’t feel there were adequate words to describe what he saw. Death was everywhere his eyes touched. An arm stuck out from beneath a blood-splotched white blanket, as still as stone, cold and pale. From another square of red-white, a leg in khaki pants protruded. There wasn’t a room he passed by or a hallway he walked down that didn’t bear some sign of the devastation that had been caused by the gang of armed men. Close to a hundred souls lost.
Art’s pulse had been beating a roaring cadence in his chest from the moment he’d gotten word of the situation. Mary wasn’t supposed to work that day, but his first reaction was to phone home and check on her to see how she was handling the news, which had hit the airwaves immediately. When she didn’t answer, his mind reeled with fabricated possibilities.
He found out that his initial assumption had been close to correct; she’d decided to head to the hospital after he had been called in instead of spending the day alone. His imagination kicked into high gear then, anticipating the worst for his wife. However, when he found her safe, the story she relayed had been one that his mind could have never conjured.
He engulfed her with his massive frame, clutching her against himself like a warm blanket on a cold night. It wasn’t an embrace of passion, but one of security. Her arms were curled into her chest, hands tucked under her chin, head burrowed deep into the safety of her husband’s chest. She hadn’t stopped weeping and shaking since he’d pulled her into his arms.
Of all the dead bodies he’d seen in the building, only two were peculiar in appearance, as corpses go. One individual — a member of the gang that had shot up the hospital, if his military garb was any indication — had been sliced clean through, the body strewn about, its pieces needing more than a single covering to hide the nauseating display. Art had taken a curious peek, and what he saw was beyond the scope of his expectation. What could do that to a person?
The second gruesome killing was that of another uniformed man, and stranger still. This scene portrayed an entirely different — though no less brutal — story. The top half of this body had been sheared off, as if it had received one clean slash from a massive sword. An arc of blood had showered down and around the bottom portion in a giant, sticky, red circle, punctuating the finality of the event. But the odd gruesomeness wasn’t the only thing that perplexed Art. The torso wasn’t just separated from its body, it was absolutely missing. No trace of it could be found anywhere in the immediate area. This posed another question in Art’s mind: where was the other half?
The two oddly mutilated bodies weren’t the only thing strange though. There was a gaping hole in the floor of one of the hospital rooms, and a secondary hole in the hallway below as well. Art couldn’t begin to guess what sort of device might have caused such uniform damage to the surrounding concrete.