The Ryan, that sinister brothel hidden in plain view. A walk down a short gravel road surrounded by woods brings me to it. Grey-blue siding, large wooden decks, colorless brick parapets. It looks empty now, truly the heart of this town. Through binoculars I see the top of a silver gun barrel behind a window. No cars, no bar goers, but there is one real human inside, I know it.
I march up to it, pistol in hand. They’ll expect nothing less.
I go in through the front door and for a moment there’s no one. No lights. Then men appear from behind the long wood bar, turned-over tables, doorways to the kitchen, siderooms. Rifles and submachine guns, ski-masks, goggles, bulletproof vests.
I point my gun in the air and open my jacket, revealing the bomb vest, the detonator squeezed in my hand. Behind the bar, an ashen brown haired man in a black leather trenchcoat wielding a grey metal AK-47 and wearing sunglasses inside slowly lifts his muzzle from me and nods once, then once toward the stairs.
I obligingly walk up, my jacket still open and my gun pointed straight ahead, held close to my chest. I remember the Ryan, so full of smoke and people and noise, but it feels a long-passed nightmare, like another person walked its halls before to get to the nameless friend that became Care. My head should be much clearer now, but instead feels at once crowded and empty.
More armed men on the second floor, but they all stand at attention, looking me over as I walk across the room with my pistol and jacket raised, poised forward like a darting wasp’s stinger.
The third floor, less finished, rougher, more enclosed, reveals the building’s part-concrete skeleton. A long walk past more soldier types. I stop at a window and rub three fingers on it slowly, wistfully, wondering if it will be the last glimpse of the outdoors.
Back up those familiar grey steps, taped on their rims with yellow-black caution tape, graffiti and posters on either side. Those familiar neon signs ahead, unplugged and dead like the rest of the house, bearing its fateful message: “MOVE ALONG. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.”
I go through the first door, then that familiar wooden door, the last one before I first saw her here, before we ran away. I wonder if she’ll even be here, if I’ll even...
I open it slowly. The room is lit red like before. Only the smell of cologne masking sweat and fear hangs in the air. A tall man in his early twenties stands next to Care. He is holding a compact pistol at her temple. She is gagged, tied to the char, mascara streaks running from her terror-filled eyes. The man’s face is ruddy and stubbled, his hair golden orange, his eyes a deep blue, welcoming but terrible, alien and familiar.
Two black-masked men are crouched beside, pointing guns up at her head in opposite directions like a sword-crossed death crest. There’s a man in each corner of the room, rifles pointed at me. Four less pointed at her. Finally I notice the last piece on the board, a snivelling, gagged man, sitting on the bed, hands tied behind his back. His face is covered in bruises and cuts from blows, his scraggly beard matted with dried snot and blood. Matty.
“Autumn, good to see you,” says the maskless man next to Care. His voice is soft but firm, familiar.
“The last person who called me that is dead,” I say.
“Yeah. A real shame what you did to Hera. She became very... hot-blooded, after you left her to die in that smoky room. Not unlike yourself, it seems.”
“I meant to finish the job.” But I’m unsure that’s even true.
“And now you have. But there’s always more to do, remember what I taught you?”
Always more to do. Always more to do. Always more to do. It rings through my head, countless lessons.
“It was you... You taught me...” I say. The visions of the fiery-haired boy in the city return. Deep blue eyes blink in my mind’s eye and disappear. “You made me into this...”
“Yes, Autumn.” He bows his head with a smileless face. “Though I can’t take all the credit. In a way, we only bring out what’s already there. We have a program of sorts.”
“Spiders... that’s what we’re called.”
“So you haven’t forgotten everything. But do gods only have one name?”
“I remember enough,” I growl. “We’re not gods. We’re human beings. Flesh and blood that dies and melts back into the earth.” I point my gun at his head.
“The human brain is very resilient,” he says, looking over Care. “I wonder if your friend’s can recover from a bullet.”
“You don’t threaten her!” I shout. “Three guns at her head is enough. And you wouldn’t hurt her.”
“Won’t we? What’s a threat worth if we won’t follow through?” He grins lightly.
“Nothing, which is why I came prepared, too.” I flash the explosive vest.
“Ah, that’s one way to do it,” he says casually. “Not how I would have done it, but you’ve gone off the rails I set you on. We can call it improvisation, I suppose, like a limp. Well, it may have worked at the police department, but cooler heads will prevail here. You’d rather see your friend alive and well than go out in a big bang that does nothing. What I see is two sides that don’t want to hurt this poor girl, and the only matter unsettled is you coming with us peacefully.”
Care shakes her head and rocks in the chair, till he pushes the gun further into her temple.
“Your friend should be calm... like you,” the man says. “But you’re not calm anymore, are you, Autumn?”
“Why should I be? Everything I remember is terror and frustration. Everything I can’t remember is the same. It’s starting to get on my nerves.”
“And imagine, Autumn, I could tell you everything about your past. I could tell you who you are, where you came from. You would no longer be lost.”
I flash a glance at my watch.
“Somewhere to be?” he asks.
“Far away from here would be good.”
“That’s where we’ll be going, Autumn. Far away from all the madness. You’re even specialer than we ever thought. I can’t tell you all we have in store for you, but as for your friend... you wagered your chance at freedom to save her, so we can do you this courtesy to save more bloodshed.” He strokes her head with the end of his gun and my hand shakes. “If you come back peacefully, we’ll set her free. We’ll give her the money she had and much, much more, enough to make a new life without ever being bothered again. And we’ll let her have her way with him.”
“She can kill him?”
The man nods. Matty thrashes about in his cuffs.
I look at Care’s eyes, full of fear and sadness, like when we first met. The tears never dry, but keep falling down her cheeks. I remember our plights and perils and fun and gladness like childhood memories, knowing it was just a week. Everything lost and found and lost again in just a week. Already it all pours away like a forgotten dream. She can have a new life, and I’ll just be me, the old me, whatever that is. Or gone altogether. The only thing the world seems to demand is our separation forever.
I search deep in her eyes for the answer, those big, sad eyes. Her pupils dilate and her eyes thin. She shakes her head ‘no,’ ever so slightly.
“Can’t help it,” I sigh. Life flashes before my eyes. Suddenly I remember the key, the thing they seek me for. It is not just words, code phrases, but my voice itself that they fear, that gives me power over them.
I let go of the detonator. Something metal falls to the floor with a clank. Secrets words dawn on me from within and I shout, “Let the programming go. You’re free now.”
The man’s eyes roll to the back of his head. I squeeze my trigger finger and feel my hand jerk as blinding light and ringing fill the world. A commotion can almost be heard through it, and the world rocks and shakes with explosions.
The white slowly turns to vision piled on top of itself through a tunnel. Muffled silence. I roll over to Care and nearly knock her over. She’s already got the gag out, screaming something at me, throwing her arms around me. She pushes off and looks like she’s screaming as I put two bullets into the masked men beside her.
I stand over the brown-haired man, whose eyes are wide and clueless. He sees me clearly, seems to mouth “Where am I?”
I’m ready to scatter his skull and brains across the floor with a blast. But I remember Dryden. I remember Jackie’s hidden tears. I think of all the people like us, not given a chance. “Run away and never look back,” I say deathly in the ringing. He stands and runs off in confusion.
Either side, the four-corners gunmen are slumped dead, light shining in thin beams over their bodies through holes in the wall. More holes appear in plaster explosions, and their bodies jerk as more shots run through them, scattering human jelly on the walls. Chaos rumbles beneath our feet, but I know what it is. Wall and his boys, clearing the lower floors.
I wait for the barrage to stop, then strike toward the high, small window, taking Care hand-in-hand. But she stops in front of Matty, who’s still bound, deaf, and half-blind, thrashing to escape his bindings. She looks to me longingly and I know what she wants. I shuffle through shreds of notebook papers in my pockets I’d pre-written and hold one in front of her face. Her eyes strain hard to adjust, and she grins widely.
She motions for my gun and I nod, pointing it toward his head. Her hand wraps around mine and draws the barrel down. She squeezes my finger and blows his balls off. His screams of pain go unheard but hardly unfelt. She draws it up a little and I direct it to the gut, perforating his bowels with a blast. Shouldn’t be lethal immediately.
She looks at me like I’m something unreal and I almost smile. But I put in a new magazine and hurry her to the window.
She puts her hand out. I try to hand her the 1911, but she shakes her head, takes my knife instead. I knock on the invisible clock on my hand and she nods and gleams, laughing through the blaring silence.
She faces Matty head-on, looks into him deeply. The man wriggles helplessly. His dilated pupils follow the blade as she raises it above her head. Its edge seems to glimmer in his terrified eyes.
With all her strength, she slices across his face. From his brow to his lip, the flesh suddenly parts, and I wonder if I see bone, the roots of teeth. She looks to him and her shaking hand, wondering if it’s real.
Though weak, she holds nothing back. She opens his skin and veins dozens of times, and blood pours as his skin grows pale. She cuts and slashes again and again in great arcs, down to his fingerbones, down to his ribs. Red splashes paint the silk sheets, her clammy skin, her golden hair, her white face and clenched teeth. She’s laughing, crying out. She stabs, and stabs, and thrusts her whole weight into his gut, and twists. She drops to her knees. Drops run from her eyes, mottled with pink and dark blood glistening with sunlight. The knife drops.
I pick her and the knife up and signal we have to go. She half-nods, looking toward him and the puddle of blood beneath him.
Most of the furniture is gone, so I drag the bed across the room, Matty’s flayed body still tied to it, half-conscious, dying. Care pushes it with me. I hoist her up to the tiny window by her foot, then jump up after, barely squeezing myself through. The heavy, lumpy vest and fresh stomach wound are suddenly catching up with me. I fall to the gritty rooftop below, and though my feet hit first, my knees give and I smash on my ass, a stabbing pain shooting through my belly. In between the feelings of crashing to Earth and being torn apart from the inside, I still think of that first escape just a week ago, jarring through my mind.
Care takes my hands and pulls me up with a grunt. We jump a story onto the hard lower deck and it shakes through my feet to my bones. Pain ceases to have meaning. I only wonder if my joints will keep together, if my belly will rip open, if I’ll fall to a thousand pieces.
Off the balcony and into the grass, rolling, yelping in pain. It’s Care who takes my endless weight to its feet, her who drags toward the woods where we first ran away.
“Stop,” I say, unzipping my vest. “Watch.”
Below the ringing, we can just barely hear bangs from three directions, far-off. Streaks of fire burst through the innards of the Ryan like snaking dragons, blasting apart wood and brick, engulfing the building.
The beige vest slips off me. Spurts of sand pour out of it as it thuds on the ground and I throw my jacket away, covered in scars and bandages, the fiery dance reflecting in our eyes. The paper I wrote falls from her hands into a pile of fire and folds on itself, crisping and turning to ash. “BURNING IT ALL UP. HE’S UP TO YOU.”
A small explosion sends flaming debris at our feet and we look down surprised and laugh, still half-deaf. We run away like we did seven days before.
But when I look back, I see the young man I released from the bondage of his programming with the passphrase pulled from the depths of my mind. He’s sprinting and flailing, running away from the Ryan, confused and terrified. Just as I pray he’ll reach the woods and safety, a sniper bullet spins him into a ragdoll mass of instantly-dead flesh. I cry out to nothing and no one hears, not even us.
A few more shots rattle his desecrated body as it lies in the almost-green field. And I wonder which of Wall’s son’s pulled the trigger, or whether it was both, or how they could have known he was no longer a threat, that he was just a fleeing spirit, just one like me.
My eyes flood with lakes of water, heavier than my deafened ears.
“Come on!” Care yells in the silence, dragging us away from it all.