The woman who gradually became aware of her surroundings however many hours later was a different person. Someone as yet unnamed. Someone at whose very core nestled a cold, hard knot of calm determination and resolve. Someone with only one thought in her head.
Vengeance.
THE WORLD CAME to the woman a piece at a time.
First it was the faint smell of burning hops. Then the sound of her own breathing. She floated in a dark void, examining the smell and the sound for a long time before her body began to send back signals that told her she was lying on a bed. Then there was a taste of stale wine and bile. Finally, she opened her eyes.
The world looked… different. The room was monochrome — black walls, white nurse’s outfit hanging from the white hook on the inside of the door, shiny grey buckles on the straps that adorned the sturdy black wooden cross, white trolley with black implements strewn across it — whips, dildos, clamps and catheters. But even despite the lack of colour, the woman who awoke on that bed (and was it a waking, truly? Had she been asleep or just comatose? Had she really opened her eyes or had her optic nerves instead rebooted themselves after a long shutdown?) somehow knew that even had the room been painted in fluorescent colours they would have seemed muted.
The way she saw the world had literally changed.
The bed springs creaked as she sat up. She had been expecting a headache, but her head was clear and her senses were sharp. There were no windows in this dark place. The only illumination came from four uplighters, one in each corner of the room.
She stood up and checked the door, knowing it was locked but determined to be thorough. She then turned to assess the room, methodically cataloguing its contents in her mind searching for a means of attack or something she could use to defend herself.
She noted the absence of panic, but did not think it worthy of further examination.
The trolley offered the best hope, but there was nothing there that could be of genuine use. The cat o’ nine tails lacked the sharp stones that would have rendered it really painful, and she did not think beating a man around the head with a giant black rubber cock would do anything but provoke laughter.
Perhaps if she pushed the trolley itself at whoever entered, it would unbalance them long enough to give her an opening. But when she tried to move it forwards the wheels squealed alarmingly and refused to move.
She made no further progress before she heard a key turn in the lock. She stepped away from the trolley and into the only really clear area in the centre of the room. If she was going to fight, this was all the space she would have to do it in.
The door opened and the giant stepped inside. The woman who was no longer Kate abandoned all thought of fighting.
He closed the door behind him, not bothering to lock it. He knew there was no way she was getting past him.
She stood there, impassive, as he removed his jacket and hung it on the hook, covering the nurse’s outfit. He then removed his shirt, revealing an acreage of tattooed chest that was twice the woman’s width from shoulder to shoulder. He hung the shirt over the jacket.
He stepped forward and reached out his huge right hand, wrapping the fingers around her throat and lifting her off the ground with a single outstretched arm. He brought her face close to his as she choked. She felt his warm breath on her cheek as he examined her closely. Then he relaxed his grip and she collapsed in a heap at his feet, gasping for air. He turned his back on her, stepped to the door and removed a huge bayonet from the inside of his hanging jacket.
“Stand,” he said. The woman did so.
He stepped forward and inserted the bayonet under the bottom of her t-shirt. He ripped the blade upwards and the cloth parted before it like butter meeting a hot knife. The bayonet was so sharp, she thought, you probably wouldn’t realise you’d been stabbed until you looked down and saw the hilt sticking out.
The blunt edge felt cold against her skin as it rushed up from her belly to her throat.
When the t-shirt had been split from waist to neck, it fell off her. She stood in her bra, facing this enormous man, knowing exactly what he intended to do to her, and still she felt no fear.
She remembered the dojo, she recalled the moves she’d been taught in a draughty hut in Camden, and she knew that all that training was useless. If he came at her with some momentum, she could perhaps have used it against him. But the room was too small; he had no need of speed. If he had been smaller, she could have tried to throw him from a standing start, but she hadn’t been able to throw Sanders who, big as he was, was slight in comparison.
Her best chance, she realised, was the bayonet.
“Rush a gun, flee a knife,” Sanders had told her. “If you run at a person who’s trying to shoot you, you force them to fire quickly and without time to aim properly. You have a better chance that they’ll miss you than if you turn and run. But a knife is different. It’s only lethal in close quarters and once you’ve got a hand to it, it can move both ways. You’d be amazed how many stab victims are killed with their own blades.”
The woman focused all her attention on the blade. This man was too strong to wrestle with, but even so she had a slim chance of turning his weapon against him. To do that she had to know exactly where it was, how it was angled, where it was pointed at all times.
He reached down and unbuckled her belt, pulling it out in one fluid movement, cracking it like a whip, and tossing it over his shoulder into the corner.
He angled the knife down, inserting the point inside the waistband of her jeans, directly below her belly button.
Then something distracted him. A distant rumble. The floor shook briefly. There was a scream somewhere far away. He glanced over his shoulder instinctively, even though the closed door and windowless walls offered no vantage.
When he turned his attention back to the woman he noticed she had taken a step backwards. He looked down and registered that she had something in her right hand. Something long and thin. Something dripping.
He took a step towards her and felt his centre of gravity shift in an unsettling way. There was a soft wet sound and he felt pressure on his foot. He looked down to see his entrails spooling out of his belly and falling to the floor like a coil of steaming, lumpy rope.
Still looking at his feet in wonder he saw a hand enter his field of vision and felt it punch him on the breast. The hand withdrew and he opened his mouth in astonishment as he realised there was a black metal handle sticking out of his chest.
How the fuck had that got there?
He reached down and grabbed the handle, pulling it and exposing the blade of his grandfather’s bayonet. It emerged from his heart smoothly, without a sound. The room spun and he felt something hit him on the back of the head. He wasn’t conscious long enough to realise that it was the floor.
The woman reached down and took the bayonet from twitching fingers, then stepped over the giant corpse and opened the door. Somewhere in the distance she could hear gunfire.
She walked out of the room, blade in hand, spoiling for a fight.
As she moved down the corridor, she could still hear occasional bursts of gunfire somewhere below and ahead of her. She didn’t know how, but Cooper and his men must have found the warehouse. This mean that time was not on her side. She had to find Spider before Cooper did.
The corridor ran the length of the building along its external back wall. Tall metal framed windows ranged to her left, a collection of doors to her right. A quick glance outside told her that it was late evening and she was at least one floor above the lobby bar.