Apocalyptica (Book 1): Ran Read online

  “Wow, what an asshole,” I said. “You know, I have ten thousand dollars’ worth of computer equipment in my house. I fucking love machines. Jeff knew that. He knew how obsessive I am about security, yet was so self-absorbed that he never noticed the cameras.”

  Kurtz perked up. “Cameras?”

  I nodded. “He came close to attacking me this morning. My dog scared him off. I have motion-sensitive security cameras on my house. If you look wherever they put my personal items when they booked me, you’ll find a USB drive with footage on it. That should clear this up.”

  The detective frowned thoughtfully. “How did Mr. Conway receive his head injury?”

  “He slipped while he was running back to his car and smacked his head on the bumper,” I answered.

  “I’m going to take a look,” Kurtz said, then leaned over the table. “You’re going to stay cuffed, but I won’t leave you stuck to the table. Feel free to stretch your legs while I’m gone.”

  As promised, the detective released my bound hands from the wide metal ring. It wasn’t ideal, but it was an improvement. I stayed seated until he left the room and the door locked behind him. I have always had what I consider to be a healthy fear of cops, so I didn’t want to do anything that could be remotely construed as aggressive.

  I stood and paced around for a minute, then stopped in front of the two-way mirror. I had no idea if anyone was behind it, but found I didn’t much care. I looked at myself and for a second was put off by the fact that I didn’t appear any different in a world where my boyfriend had just died from a seemingly minor wound.

  Five and a half feet tall. Dark hair just long enough to be pulled back, though it hung ruler-straight at the moment. Dark hazel eyes, which I considered my best feature given how they stood out from my light brown skin. During the winter I looked like a tanning bed addict; in the summer I could pass for any ethnicity from Hispanic to a native of an African country depending on how much sun I got. I have strangely angular features considering my actual heritage, which makes me look older than I am.

  I found myself worrying about what might happen to Nikola. I mean, the dog didn’t bite anyone, but the world is a strange and illogical place where animals are killed for completely nonsensical reasons. A small pang of guilt lodged in the back of my head when I realized I was more concerned for my dog’s fate than Jeff’s.

  Maybe it was the drawn-out way our relationship crumbled, creating resentment that slowly strangled any spark of love I’d ever possessed for the man. My lack of guilt or really any strong feeling about his death was, if I’m being totally honest, probably being influenced heavily by the situation I was in.

  Or it could have been shock. The human mind is weird.

  I was back in my chair when Detective Kurtz returned. My heart stuttered when I saw the stormy expression on his face. My initial judgment of the man’s ability to keep his emotions in check swayed beneath that look. There wasn’t any question in my mind whether it was genuine; no one was that good an actor.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, forcing calm into my voice.

  Kurtz lifted a familiar bag and set it on the table. It was the one with all my personal items.

  “I watched the video,” the detective said. “According to Mister Conway’s statement, he didn’t return to your home. It’s pretty clear to me you didn’t attack him.”

  I said nothing about my dog. I said nothing very carefully.

  “I called the hospital to get an idea of how long the autopsy would take,” Kurtz continued. “Normally the results would take a day at minimum, but I thought the medical examiner could at least give me an idea whether the blow to Conway’s head was what killed him or some other underlying condition.”

  “What did they say?” I almost didn’t want to know.

  Kurtz looked up at me, and I saw barely-controlled terror in his eyes. “No answer. Not in the morgue, not to the main line, nothing. I radioed a patrol car in the area, and he said there’s some kind of riot going on over there. Most of the police force has been sent to deal with it.”

  I sat back in my chair, handcuffs clinking as my hands fell into my lap. “What the hell? What is there to riot about here?”

  It wasn’t quite a rhetorical question, but came close. Wallace, our little town, was the county seat. If you put every human being from one corner of Louis County to the other together, you might get fifteen thousand people. Asking what could have caused a riot was technically a fair question since the act was possible in theory, but it was akin to asking why God or the universe had taken away a loved one. The answer was either too simple and common to easily guess or so mind-bendingly complex that our poor brains couldn’t even see the edges of the answer.

  Whatever answer (or lack thereof) Kurtz had in store was forgotten as the door to the interview room burst open, slamming against the wall so hard the handle broke chips out of the cinder block.

  A frozen moment followed.

  Kurtz and I sat in our chairs, bodies turned instinctively toward the intruder even as our reflexes made us recoil in surprise. We mirrored each other across the table, perfect opposites. The policeman and the suspect, the woman and the man. The one thing we shared was a moment of complete shock, disgusted gasps ripped from us in unwilling unison.

  The man framed in the doorway was impossible. Simple as that. His face was a mask of shredded skin, his hands so badly mangled they barely resembled living things, much less functional limbs. He was drenched in blood, missing an eye, and the center of his throat was split from the top of his sternal notch all the way to the bottom of his jaw. That, at least, appeared surgical. I could tell by the clean edges of the wound and also from the surgical tools still attached to the open wound. They wiggled to a stop as I stared at him.

  “Who—” Kurtz began.

  “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!” I screamed the top of my lungs. Because honestly: what the fuck?

  The crazy dude didn’t bat a blood-soaked eye at my outburst. He ignored me, choosing instead to lunge toward Kurtz. The big detective wasn’t fast enough to get out of his chair before getting slammed with a few hundred pounds of person-shaped nightmare, but he did manage to get his hands up. I watched them tumble backward, felt the impact of the chair slamming into the floor under the weight of two full-grown men.

  Kurtz made a wet choking sound, and both men grunted as they struggled. The attacker’s back and shoulders arched above the plane of the table. I saw the muscles bunched up in effort and the tendons standing out from his neck in stark relief.

  The absolute certainty that I was about to watch a man be choked to death or worse crash-landed in my brain.

  Fact: cops really don’t like it when you let their fellow cops die. Also I was pretty sure the cop in the room with me wouldn’t like dying at all.

  Action happened before I could process what I was doing. I grabbed the ring in the table, taking a microsecond to be thankful I wasn’t still attached to the thing, and used it as a base to guide the rest of my body. My feet went up and over, sliding across the smooth metal. I let go and allowed momentum to carry me back to my feet. I was standing right behind the psychopath trying to murder my new police friend to death.

  I did a little lunging of my own and looped the chain of my handcuffs around the psycho’s throat. Rather than pull back with my body, which would have been effective but unstable, I leaned forward and dug my elbows into his back. This made them the fulcrum of my attack as I brought my hands and wrists toward me, essentially turning my restraints into a makeshift bridle.

  Worst. Horse. Ever.

  It worked, though. The murderous jackhole reared his head back in a vain attempt to escape the intense pressure. Though I was much smaller, this didn’t present much of a problem. I just stepped back while maintaining my hold, forcing him to bend backward to keep his neck from breaking.

  Then his neck broke.

  Goddammit.

  Have you ever suddenly found yourself being squashed by two hundr
ed pounds of meat? No? Not your fetish? Well, it sucks. The fight went out of the attacker while I was still pulling him back, leading to my being almost crushed to death.

  The sound of snapping cervical vertebrae was loud enough to temporarily drown out the choking gasps from Kurtz. As if my day weren’t bad enough, the dead guy decided to add to my overflowing reservoir of nightmare fuel by not actually being dead. His teeth gnashed hard enough to make sharp clicking sounds, sending rivulets of saliva oozing from his mouth and down my hands.

  “Little help here,” I squeaked, all out of Wonder Woman for the day.

  I was afraid to move, worried if I shifted my hands enough to free them from the obscene necklace I’d created that I’d have fingers bitten off. Every second I was trapped beneath the warm bulk added another therapy session, and I wanted out. Badly.

  Kurtz, ever helpful, stumbled to his feet and began punching the crazy guy in the face as hard as he could. Every drop of the rational control I’d seen before had evaporated like a puddle on a hot summer day, leaving nothing but raw animal fury behind.

  When the clacking jaws had been reduced to feeble trembles twenty seconds later, Kurtz guided my hands safely over the head of the attacker before rolling the mostly dead guy off of me.

  “Thanks, Kurtz,” I mumbled.

  Kurtz rubbed a hand across the bruises spreading across his neck and spoke in a hoarse voice. “You just saved my life. Call me Jem.”

  3

  I was about to ask Jem to take off my handcuffs when the sound of otherworldly screams mixed with shattering glass filled the space between us. The noise made the normally inefficient means of communication we humans call speech unnecessary. Jem reacted by moving, and I reacted by following him. He had his gun drawn, which as far as I was concerned put him firmly in the lead.

  We stepped out of the interview room and into the hall. The door behind us stood at the intersection where the hall leading from the lobby crossed in a T with the main hall serving the rest of the building. The situation was bizarre enough that, even though we had just left an apparently psychotic man paralyzed from the neck down, neither of us was panicking to find a supervisor or whatever.

  Not having a deep understanding of Jem Kurtz, I can only speak for myself. The day had already been so far on the right side of my weirdness bell curve that I just didn’t have much more distance to travel that way. I wouldn’t have batted an eye if Princess Sparklehorn, an imaginary unicorn friend I had as a little girl, had appeared with a bag of tacos looking to get high.

  I’m not saying I was blasé about it or anything. Far from it. I could feel my pulse in the abrasions on my wrists where the cuffs had cut into my skin, in my neck, and the nearly painful thump in my chest as my heart dutifully continued spreading the dangerous levels of adrenaline my glands were dumping like a cocaine deal gone bad.

  “Stay close,” Jem said in his now-raspy voice. That combined with the raised pistol and his cheap suit made me think of him as some hard-luck gumshoe in an old noir film. I suppressed a laugh.

  “Please hand me the keys,” I said, not too proud to sprinkle a pleading note into my voice.

  Jem hesitated, then quickly fished around in his pocket. “Shit. They must have fallen out of my pocket in there.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s ten feet away, why don’t we…”

  A deep, furious scream echoed through the building, growing louder. Rapid, heavy footfalls heralded the arrival of another gibbering madman. This one was also injured; one arm was torn off at the elbow. I don’t mean amputated, at least not in a surgical sense. A few inches of bone waved in the breeze as he slid to a stop, raw red muscle tissue exposed to the air.

  He was a little guy, not much bigger than me, but the wild hunger in his eyes made him seem ten feet tall. Jem was already pivoting to face the man, his pistol leveling, when the man howled in rage and barreled toward us. Jem shouted a warning that contained words but was so pro forma as to have no real meaning.

  Thunder blasted a few feet from my head. I flinched from the sheer volume of it, a matter of closing my eyes for less than a second in shock. When I looked again, the one-armed man was off his feet. He was face down on the green tile, but no pool of blood spread out from the body. I could see a ragged hole in his back where a sizable chunk of lung had been obliterated, and that wasn’t bleeding either.

  Then the guy started to get up.

  “Holy shit,” Jem said.

  One-arm got to his knees and I noted with detached interest that Jem had managed to fire off three rounds. The one in the upper right had probably slipped between both sides of the rib cage to make an exit wound. The other pair had not. One of those two was definitely a hit to the sternum, the other right over the heart. Right through the heart. I’d lay money on it.

  “Run,” I said, the words oddly distorted from the ringing in my ears. I grabbed Jem by the back of his coat and pulled. My conscience had just enough slack for that. Had he not given in and moved, I’d have left him behind. After all, I was the one in handcuffs and without a weapon.

  I glanced over my shoulder as we raced down the long hall and saw One-arm rise to his feet. He stumbled forward unsteadily, gaining his balance as he moved.

  “We need to get outside,” I said. “He’s not going to stop.”

  Jem pointed at the door where the hall ended. “That goes to the motor pool.”

  I grabbed his coat, pulling him to a stop. “Wait. Look at it!”

  He cursed, seeing what I saw. The door was mostly glass, the sort of cheap industrial thing you could find in almost any public building. The glass was missing, spread out in small chunks all over the interior of the station. Smears of blood could be seen on the concrete beyond the door.

  Jem swore and spun back the way we’d come. The one-armed man was moving more slowly, but he had covered half the distance. Jem fell into a Weaver stance and fired two more times. One-arm’s head snapped back. He toppled gracelessly to the floor.

  “What’s through there?” I asked loudly, over the increased buzzing in my ears. I pointed with both hands to a heavy door on the left side of the hallway.

  Jem led us inside.

  It was an office, one with only a single window set high in the wall. It had an abnormal shape, as if another small room was set inside one corner. Which turned out to be the case; it had a door with one of those man/woman signs on it.

  “Captain’s office,” Jem said as he locked the door behind us. “Let me see if he has a set of cuff keys in his desk.”

  I hoped so, but was already coming up with a solution for freeing my hands. Luckily Jem found a spare key and let me out. I was not looking forward to using the edge of the cinder block bathroom to wear a weak spot in the chain so I could break it.

  ***

  In the quiet of the locked office, the buzz from our fight for survival began to wear off. The small aches and pains of rapid exertion faded into existence, and my wrists began to hurt in earnest. Terror, which had been a vague background noise in my brain, suddenly cranked itself up to eleven.

  “I’m going to prison,” Jem said, head in hands. He was sitting, which I had asked him to do after making use of the bathroom and the first aid kit within. I had come out to a man pacing a hole in the already thin carpet, someone who had just done things that changed who he was as a person.

  I knew that because I was in the same boat. The sense memory of a neck snapping vibrated through my hands every time my thoughts idled, and it didn’t get any better for the repetition.

  “You’re not going to prison,” I said, forcing my voice into being calm. “Those guys attacked us. You were protecting us. I’ll testify to that.”

  “Not the second one,” Jem said, his voice soft. “He was aggressive, but he wasn’t armed.”

  A second later Jem froze at his own choice of words. I exploded with laughter.

  It took a good ten seconds to get my fit of giggles under control. I spent the whole time under the dirtiest glare
I’ve ever received in my life.

  “Oh, stop looking me like that,” I said. “Unarmed, honestly. It was funny.”

  His expression grew a shade less grim, but Jem shook his head. “It wasn’t. You didn’t kill that guy.”

  “No, I didn’t. But you know it was a judgment call. You warned him, hell, you shot him and he got back up. If that isn’t grounds for use of force, I don’t know what is.” I studied his face, looking for any sign he was about to lose it. The burned hand, as Tolkien said, teaches best. My life had been full of enough toasted digits to make me observant of people to a paranoid degree. My mistake with Jeff was letting my guard down in that respect.

  To his credit, Jem didn’t look like his psyche was about to come unglued. He just looked like a man who had seen Some Shit, which was true. He was young for anyone carrying the title of Detective, which implied good training, a good mind, and a strong ability to cope. But no amount of preparation can make dealing with killing someone easy or predictable.

  If what happened in the station and apparently at the hospital was an indication of what we’d be facing on the street, I needed to know if Jem would hold up.

  The signs were good.

  “I need to get to my place,” I said. “Unless you’re going to charge me and keep me here.”

  Jem stared at me, astonished. “Charge you? Uh, no. I don’t think so. I mean, I saw what happened on the video. I don’t know what we’d charge you with even if someone above my pay grade decided it was a good idea.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think it is?”

  Jem shook his head. “No. What I saw was a man grab hold of you and almost lose his shit. You see it enough as a cop to know when it’s about to happen. As far as I’m concerned, chasing him off with your dog was more than he deserved.”

  “That’s kind of refreshing,” I said with a small smile. “Not many people give me the benefit of the doubt.”

  Jem shot me a confused look. “You have a history of dead boyfriends I’m unaware of?”