The Madman of Miramar/Part 3
Part 3
Madison Malholtra  |
Lunchmeat  |
Julie Skels  |
Duncan Slade  | |
Under the water the machine gun sounded like an angry god banging on a drum. Duncan’s world was now pain and seawater.
He clawed his way toward the sunlight above. The surface seemed only inches away and yet he swam and he swam and that ripple of light didn’t seem any closer. His body wanted to scream – needed to scream – but he had no more air in his lungs to give. Just pressure and a burning that radiated from his chest to his head. He knew that no matter how strong he was, no matter how trained, it was only a matter of seconds before his reptile brain would take the wheel and force him to inhale.
And then that would be it.
With one last kick he broke through to the surface and tasted air. The helicopter was still above, hovering in place like a 6-ton mechanical vulture waiting to feast on their corpses. Its rotor blade whipped the wind into a fury, blinding him with saltwater spray.
The catamaran had been cleaved in half by gunfire. He scanned the surface for his friends but couldn’t see anyone – just torn sails and shattered pieces of the hull. And that goddamn vulture in the sky.
He swam to what was left of the boat. He took hold and recoiled at the wet red-pink handprints he left against the white fiberglass. He was bleeding – of course he was bleeding. In the panic he had forgotten about the bullet that ripped through his calf.
Adrenaline is one hell of a drug, he thought, almost laughing before the reality of it all set in. A bullet to the calf wouldn’t kill him, but he was weak and growing weaker. And the shore was more than a half-mile away.
Where were the others? Had he been the only one shot? He shielded his eyes from the rushing wind and scanned the wreckage. They had to be here. Somewhere. Unless...
Flashes of the moment before the helicopter swooped in played in his head. If they had been buckled into any heavy gear – a backpack, even an LMG – would they have just sank?
Then he saw Mal and felt relief and panic at the same time.
She was unmoving, floating half-tangled in the torn catamaran sail. The sail had saved her, kept her afloat. Duncan pushed off from the hull and swam to her side. She was unconscious, bleeding badly from the side of her head. Not a gunshot wound – part of a mast must have fallen on her when it all came down.
He snaked an arm under her and lifted her head up. Her eyes fluttered and she coughed.
"Mal," he called but she was unresponsive. Could he get her to shore like this?
He rolled on his back, arm around her waist pulling her close. With his other arm, he frantically clawed at the water to try to keep them afloat. It would have been nearly impossible even without the helicopter creating a fucking hurricane above them.
A wave crashed over them and they both went under. This was it. They were going to drown. Or...
Or she was going to drown.
He could let her go. Could leave her in the wreckage and tell the others that he had no choice. It was let her go or they’d both drown.
Julie and Lunch would understand. They would have to. He had no choice.
But he couldn’t let her go. Fuck that. Duncan knew there was a pattern here. Knew it in his bones and his balls. He didn’t know how this story ended but he didn’t come all the way to Miramar for them to drown in the fucking ocean.
They were going to make it to shore.
He kicked as hard as he could. Kicked until his legs went numb and he was certain half the blood in his body had poured out into the Atlantic. He swam like a madman. The helicopter didn’t follow – just hovered. Watching. Duncan knew any half-decent shot with a rifle could easily have ended this little Olympic event. And he didn’t care.
Survive this moment. That’s what mattered. Any energy spent worrying about the next moment was energy wasted. All that mattered was getting them both to shore.
He couldn’t tell how long he had been swimming. Felt like seconds, felt like days. At some point he could feel Mal clinging to him. And then something else. He first thought she was convulsing but then she found her rhythm. She was kicking. Without saying a word, they pushed through the rough waters together. Kicking in unison. Breathing in unison.
His hearing started to wobble and then fade. Like someone turning the volume down. He came up for air and couldn’t hear anything but a rush of white noise.
That was bad – but not nearly as bad as when, seconds later, his vision started to go. Everything bleaching out to a powerful endless white. By the end, he couldn’t see and he could barely hear. He could only imagine what he looked like, this ravaged sea creature, blind and deaf and bleeding, swim-crawling to shore.
His foot hit sand and then he was crawling up the surf with her. Without the buoyancy from the water, he couldn’t lift Mal. And so they lay in each other’s arms on the shore.
He felt hands on his body. He looked up and it was like looking up from the bottom of a well. He could just barely see Lunchmeat and Julie, dragging them up the beach.
"I thought we lost you two," he heard Lunchmeat mutter. Duncan couldn’t stand – but Lunchmeat lifted him up, pulled him into a full-on hug. When he let go, Duncan tried to stay on his feet. His legs were useless – he crumpled into a heap on the sand.
Julie marched back down to the water, gun in hand, taking aim at the hovering helicopter. She screamed and pulled the trigger, ready to purge all emotion in a storm of gunfire.
The gun failed to fire. Julie didn’t seem to care. She just jammed the trigger again and again in some cathartic ritual. The helicopter slowly turned on its axis, bowing low and taking off across the peninsula toward to mountains. It hadn’t come to kill them – just to keep them here.
Just to keep them in the game.
"Mal..." Duncan spit out, coughing seawater as he turned to her.
"I’m okay," she muttered. She didn’t look okay – she was lying on her side, eyes closed, breathing slow. But she was breathing.
They all were.
When the adrenaline started to wear off, the pain came back screaming. The bullet had ripped a fat channel through the side of his calf. Cut dangerously close to the bone. An inch to the right and it would have shattered his tibia. He secretly wished it had – then he wouldn’t be walking.
And walking was agony.
Every step was a tooth pulled. A kick to the jaw. Or the jewels. Twice he lost his balance on the rough terrain and fell. The second time the pain was so bad he couldn’t get back up. Lunchmeat had to throw an arm around him and support him.
Mal was struggling as well. The bleeding from her headwound had stopped but she had almost certainly suffered a concussion. She vomited ten minutes after they started inland. She was walking on her own – that’s more than Duncan could say – but her balance was off, and she wasn’t talking. She kept a hand on Julie’s shoulder to keep herself steady.
They determined their guns were fine; it was the ammunition that needed replacing. The weapons had been submerged for too long – saltwater had gotten into the casings and ruined the powder. The only thing that would fire was the shotgun.
They spent twenty minutes ransacking an abandoned apartment building. Duncan was again struck by the real-but-not-real nature of this town. Squint and yeah, maybe people used to live here. Maybe. But it all felt like a staged home now. How many people had died in this building?
How many people had watched?
No luck in the apartment – it had already been looted. Shelves were left open. A crate lay pried and empty in the corner. There was a blood-soaked mattress on the floor and next to it, a discarded used-up medical kit. Duncan dug through it anyway, hoping for sutures or morphine. Something.
He got nothing. Not even gauze.
In a bathroom they found an alarming pool of blood and two partially drank soda cans. Julie took a sip and cringed.
"What is it?" Lunchmeat asked.
"Battery acid," she replied, and then downed the rest of it.
An hour later, salvation was found behind the counter of a 2-pump gas station.
A medical kit, untouched.
Alcohol to clean the wound and sutures to stitch it up. Painkillers. Enough for everyone. They found ammo too – a box of 12 gauge by the register and three boxes of 5.56mm rounds in a rear garage. There was even running water in one of the bathroom taps. Hallelujah.
Duncan stuck his head under the tap and drank greedily. The water tasted like rust and dirt. He let it pour over his head. Washed dirt and dried blood across his sunburnt face.
Then he lowered himself to the ground and tried to roll up his pants leg. He couldn’t – the cotton had soaked through with blood and dried hard. He used his knife, cutting the pants off at the knee.
He had wrapped the wound as tight as he could in strips torn from his t-shirt. As he loosened the makeshift bandage, he could feel the suck of congealed blood pulling against the cloth. He pulled it free and for a moment, glimpsed the white of bone. More blood came and he looked away.
Time to take care of business. He uncapped the alcohol and poured half onto the open wound. He knew it would burn and that didn’t help one bit when the fire came. His eyes instantly teared. He tried to stay silent but couldn’t and so instead of screaming he bit down and hummed Donna Summer as loud as he could.
I feel love? Well, I sure feel fucking something...
"Let me stitch you," Mal said, squatting down beside him.
Duncan looked at her and laughed. They’d done this before, hadn’t they? In the nightclub. Or was it the internet café? Yeah, Thailand. Memories of dark computers and Mal cutting into his flesh.
"I wouldn’t have clocked you for a Summer fan," she said, managing a smile.
He shrugged. Without saying another word, she got to work on the wound. She was halfway through stitching him up when they heard the gunshots.
Two quick pops and the sound of broken glass. Then the roar of a shotgun blast and a shriek and a man’s moan and then Julie screaming.
"You fucking shit. You FUCKER!"
There was pain in her voice. Real trauma. Duncan was certain from the sound of it she had been shot.
Mal pulled him to his feet and then was out the door. Duncan had to hold onto the counter to keep the weight off his mangled leg. He took a breath, waiting to see if his vision would whiteout again. It didn’t.
He staggered as best he could out the back to the scene. He was wrong.
It was Lunchmeat who had been shot.
"You piece of shit," Julie cried out. She had the shooter on the ground, her knee on his throat. He was trying to talk but Julie wouldn’t let him get a word out – punching him in the face as hard as she could.
She hit him again and again. The man no longer had a nose, just a mash of red. His mouth was a bloody pit; if you’d told Duncan that Julie had knocked every single tooth from his mouth, he would have believed it.
Lunchmeat lay a few feet away, slumped against the side of the gas station. Blood pooled into his hands from the gunshot wound to his gut.
"What happened?" Duncan asked.
No one needed to answer – Duncan could figure it out plain enough. The man had ambushed them, likely came out shooting from the warehouse across the street. He had caught Julie and Lunchmeat in some private moment and took the shot. Pop Pop. He’d hit Lunchmeat in the side. Julie had responded with the shotgun.
And when that wasn’t enough, she used her fists.
He watched as she swore and cried and pounded his face. He moved to pull her off but Mal stopped him.
"Let her do what she needs to..."
Then she was finished. Purged and satiated, she crawled away, holding out her broken bloody hands like they were foreign objects. She crawled to Lunchmeat’s side, pressed her face against his, and started whispering something to him.
The bloody man who shot Lunchmeat wasn’t dead – though Duncan imagined he wished he was at this point. One eye was already gone. The other was trying to focus on Duncan and Mal.
"I was close..." the bloody man coughed out. "Got the big one. Lunchmeat."
Duncan froze at that. He turned to Mal to make sure he hadn’t imagined it. The look on her face told him she was just as confused as he was.
"How’d you know his name?" Duncan barked.
"... know all you. Malholtra. Julie the Skeleton." He blinked his one eye and for just a second, almost seemed to smile. "Slade..."
"How?"
"The Russian told me... told all of us."
Duncan closed his eyes and remembered the young woman from before. The one with the scars who had curled up in the dirt. The one who he couldn’t understand.
The one who had recognized them.
"What did he tell you?"
"You don’t know?" The bloody man laughed. "Different rules today. It ain’t last man standing. This one’s personal. Russian said he’s giving the prize to... to..."
He trailed off. For a moment Duncan thought he had just died. Then a cough and a wet gurgle and the man uttered his final words.
"He’s giving today’s prize to whoever kills you four first."
Duncan looked over to Mal. She had both her eyes closed, head hung low. She had clocked the look of recognition on that woman too. And she knew this man wasn’t lying.
They had thought themselves the hunters, but they were prey. They had been prey the moment they woke up on that plane over Sanhok.
Mal finally spoke, eyes still closed. "How many boxes of ammo do we have?"
"Three of the 5.56. Plus, the twelve gauge," Duncan responded.
Mal did the math. Duncan watched her shoulders slump. From bad to broken.
He didn’t know what to do. So he put his arms around her and just held her. She allowed it, her breathing in sync with his.
The sun was starting to set behind them. From far enough away, someone passing by – someone not paying enough attention – might have mistaken them for lovers embracing. Part of a long goodbye.
It was a goodbye of sorts. They both knew that.
"No way we can kill them all," she said.
"No. But we can try."