Tailor started down the hallway, and I followed. Most of the doors on either side were open, and we carefully checked each one before proceeding past. One was locked, so we kept going.
A toilet flushed. Tailor and I froze and swung our weapons toward the bathroom door just as it opened. The man inside was buttoning his shirt back up when he saw us. He had a pistol in a shoulder holster. His eyes grew wide, and he reached for it, but he wasn’t nearly fast enough. His white shirt splashed red as we both hit him with a two-round burst. He fell over backward, hitting the hardwood floor with a thud.
Tailor immediately swung his weapon toward the door at the end of the hall. I swung mine back toward the stairs. Back to back, we waited for a long moment. Nothing happened. The strange music was the only sound that could be heard. The upstairs of the house must have been sound-dampened or something. Sweat trickled down Tailor’s blackened face. He nodded at the door at the end of the hall and started toward it. All of the rooms in the upstairs hallway were now empty. If Adar was in the house, he was through that door.
The bizarre chanting music grew louder as we drew closer, but it was muffled enough that I still couldn’t tell what language it was. As we approached the end of the hall, I felt strange. Apprehension grew in me. My heart rate sped up. The Calm was wavering. Something was wrong.
I put a hand on Tailor’s shoulder. He stopped and looked a question back at me. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Looking irritated, Tailor just jerked his head at the door and reached for the handle. He signaled me to go right while he’d go straight. It’s hard to properly cover the angles in a room when there’re only two of you. We’d have to be quick. He hesitated for a long second, hand hovering over the handle, then grabbed it and slammed the door open. Together, we rushed into the room.
The bedroom was huge. Directly opposite the door was a large four-poster bed, with some kind of big painting hung above it. Against the far wall was a mirrored dresser, a desk, and what looked like a vanity.
Adar stood in the middle of the room. He was taller than I thought he’d be. He was also completely naked and splattered with blood. He clutched some kind of curved dagger in his hand.
In front of him, hanging from the ceiling, was a woman. Her hands were bound over her head. Her hair, matted and wet, hung down in her face. Blood dripped from her ravaged body onto plastic sheets spread across the floor. She’d been utterly mutilated. Adar had split her open like he was cleaning a game animal. Bloody lumps that appeared to be internal organs had been neatly arranged on the dresser. Behind them was an iPod and a set of speakers, the source of the strange music.
My stomach lurched. My mouth fell open. It felt like my balls were trying to crawl up into my stomach. It took me a moment to process what I was actually seeing. I could hear a strange buzzing in my ears over the bizarre rhythms of Adar’s music.
“Jesus Christ,” Tailor said, turning toward Adar. I don’t know why neither of us fired. The whole thing was surreal.
Adar, as if noticing our presence for the first time, turned toward us. His face was a mask. If he was surprised or afraid, he didn’t show it. My heart was racing now. My knees were weak, and I thought I was going to fall. I wanted to turn and run out of the room. Adar spoke to us then. He said something in Arabic that I didn’t understand. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth as he talked. I looked over at the dead girl again, then back at Adar. I felt numb. Adar smiled. I closed my eyes . . .
“Val!” Tailor yelled, startling me.
I blinked, realizing then that my revolver was in my hands. Confused, I slowly reholstered it.
“Nightcrawler, Nightcrawler, Control, what’s your status?” Sarah asked, the concern in her voice obvious. I tried to speak but couldn’t.
That’s when I saw Adar. He was lying on the floor, on his stomach, in a huge pool of blood. Some of it was his, some of it was the girl’s. A gory wound protruded from the center of his lower back. There was another exit wound on the back of his neck; hebeen nearly decapitated.
“Get it together, goddamn it!” Tailor yelled, grabbing my body armor and shaking me.
“I’m . . . what happened?” I asked. “I think I blacked out.”
“You fucked him up is what happened!” Tailor said, letting me go. He walked across the room, stepping over Adar’s corpse, and smashed the iPod. The horrid music silenced, Tailor keyed his microphone. “Control, Xbox, radio check.”
“Loud and clear, Xbox,” Sarah replied, relief obvious in her voice. “What’s your status?”
“The target’s dead,” Tailor said. “We’re fine. Stand by.” He looked up at me. “Why didn’t you just shoot him with your submachine gun?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t remember shooting Adar. “Why didn’t you just shoot him?”
Tailor hesitated. “I don’t know, either,” he said. “Fuck it, it’s done. Let’s check for intel and get the hell out of here. This place is freaking me out.”
Nodding, I looked around Adar’s room. The mirror behind him had shattered, presumably from my bullets passing through him. The painting above the bed depicted a horrific monster, a mass of tentacles and teeth, devouring a girl. I looked back over at Adar’s victim. I felt dizzy, turned, and threw up on the floor.
“You alright, Val?” Tailor asked, calmer now.
“No,” I replied. “We can’t leave her like that!”
“What? Val, we gotta go, man, we don’t have time to —”
“We can’t leave her like that!” I shouted, standing back up.
“Listen, goddamn it!” Tailor said. “She’s dead! You can’t—”
“Tailor, please,” I said, much more quietly this time.
He mouthed another curse word. “Fine. Let’s hurry this up. We have to get out of here.” I closed my eyes as I held the girl’s feet. Tailor stood up on a chair and snapped out his automatic knife. He used it to cut the ropes that she’d been hung with and grabbed her shoulders. He helped me gently lower her body.
“Oh, God,” Tailor said, making himself look up at the ceiling. The girl’s head had flopped back as we carried her; her eyes were gone. Empty red sockets stared up at my partner. “This is fucked up. This is fucked up,” he said. Doing our best to ignore it, we carried her to Adar’s bed and wrapped her in the sheets. Tailor quickly looked away, sweat trickling down his face.
“Hey look,” I said, noticing for the first time a small safe. It was mounted in the wall next to the bed, and was open.
“Let’s . . . let’s check it out,” Tailor said, regaining his composure.
Inside was a stack of American hundred-dollar bills. “Wow.”
“There has to be fifty thousand dollars here,” Tailor said. He began stuffing the money into his assault pack.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to report that,” I said as I rummaged through the safe, stuffing documents into my pockets. At the very back of the safe, my hand touched something solid.
“What’s that?” Tailor asked as I pulled it out.
“I don’t know,” I said. It was a small wooden box wrapped in a plastic bag.
“Take it. Grab everything else you can find. We’ve gotta bounce, man. We been here too long.” We took one last look around the room but didn’t find anything else. As we turned to leave, I pulled an Ace of Spades out of my pocket and dropped it onto Adarback.
He hadn’t stopped smiling, even in death.