The Madman of Miramar/Part 4
Part 4
Madison Malholtra  |
Lunchmeat  |
Julie Skels  |
Duncan Slade  | |
They had almost 90 rounds of 5.56 and a handful of shotgun shells. They would use it all before the sun rose.
Duncan thought the gas station was too small to fortify, and even though there was certainly no more fuel in the pumps, he couldn’t shake the idea that one well-placed explosive would turn the whole building into a bonfire. Instead, they limped across the street like a band of bloodied horror-movie survivors and took position in an empty warehouse.
The building had once stored industrial kitchen supplies. It was nothing now. Debris and empty pallets stacked to the roof. This would be where they had their final showdown. In this empty warehouse, in this empty town, in this godforsaken dustbowl.
Julie set Lunchmeat down in a rusted metal folding chair. His skin was grey and soaked with sweat. He’s going to die, Duncan thought.
We’re all going to die.
Lunchmeat turned as if he could hear Duncan’s thoughts. "Just gimme the shotgun and face me toward the door, Dunk," he said, lips curling up as he spoke. Squint and maybe you could mistake his look for a smile.
"Someone makes it in, I’ll show him how much life I got left in me..."
Mal spotted the first vehicle from her sniper’s nest up on the roof. An up-armored jeep racing across the desert toward them. She waited as long as she dared before putting a round through the windshield. At this distance, there was no satisfying impact hit. No starburst of red across the backseat. All they could see was the jeep suddenly veer off road and crash into a rocky mess of scrubland.
Another man with a rifle stumbled out of the passenger side, taking cover behind the open car door. He had on some kind of bizarre helmet. Maybe a welder’s mask? It was hard to tell at this distance. He tried to line up a shot on Mal but he was too slow. Mal shot him through the car door.
Julie volunteered to make a run for the jeep. No one argued. It was simple really; they needed the weapons. If what they had been told was true – if it really was them against everyone – they would need every goddamn gun in this fake town. Lunchmeat wasn’t getting up from his chair. And with his leg the way it was, Duncan didn’t think he could make the trip either. Mal offered to go instead but they all knew they needed her on the roof with the rifle.
Julie knelt beside Lunchmeat, silent. No words or whispers this time. Just a look that told him he wasn’t allowed to die while she was gone. No sir. He understood. He placed a hand on the back of her neck, pulling her close for one last embrace.
Then she was off sprinting through the desert.
Lunchmeat stayed below while Mal and Duncan watched from the roof. Mal tracked her with her scope while Duncan watched through the binoculars. He didn’t like it – if trouble came, there was piss-all he could do except clench and hope Mal could make the shot.
Julie made it to the crash in under ten minutes. Duncan watched through the binoculars as she cautiously approached the jeep, shotgun in hand. The man on the ground – the one with the weird helmet – was still writhing in pain. He didn’t notice Julie until she was kneeling over him, knife in hand, opening up his throat.
Julie dragged the dead driver from his seat and dumped him in the dirt. Then she began to scavenge. She took the helmet. Both their backpacks. Boxes of ammo and a bandolier of explosives – flashbangs maybe. She even found what looked like medical supplies. All told, it was a beautiful haul. She packed it up and slid into the blood-slick driver’s seat.
That’s when Duncan spotted the approaching trucks. Two of them, barreling in out from the desert.
Julie threw the jeep into reverse but the vehicle wouldn’t move – the wheels skidded on loose dirt and the whole vehicle just seemed to rock to-and-fro. The tires finally caught and the vehicle lurched backwards. Julie whipped the wheel around and started back.
"C’mon girl, you got this," Mal muttered under her breath.
The trucks were gaining. As Julie got closer, Duncan saw why: one of Julie’s tires was shredded from the crash. She was driving on rims. Her foot was down on the gas and it didn’t matter, she was crawling.
"She’s not gonna make it," Duncan spit. The trucks were now close enough that he could make out the drivers. Two men in a black Durango – one of them in a cowboy hat, leaning out the passenger window with an AK47. The truck behind them was a silver flatbed with three more gunmen, their faces wrapped up in bandanas.
"She’ll make it," Mal muttered. She popped up into a kneel and took aim. Fired like a machine. Shooting and reloading and shooting without missing a beat.
Julie must have realized she wasn’t going to make it back to town. She jammed the wheel hard and spun the jeep around. She came rolling out the side with a rifle in each hand, firing controlled bursts at the approaching trucks.
Watching these two work together was a thing of beauty; Mal from range shoot-reload-shoot-reload, Julie in the heart of it all, firing in a frenzy. He watched Cowboy take a round and go limp, his body hanging out the side of the vehicle like a violated puppet. He watched Mal land a shot and send another gunman into the dirt. And for just a moment, Duncan allowed himself to feel something he hadn’t felt in a while.
Hope.
They could do this. They could win.
Then he heard metal clatter across the roof behind him. The frag grenade rolled lazy across the asphalt. A dull green apple of a thing ready to turn them into red mist.
He had no time to shout a warning. He grabbed Mal and before she realized what was happening, he leapt over the side of the building.
Duncan Slade died on Miramar.
It was not a traditional death. Not an all-at-once death. It was a kind of bleeding; an experiment in how much of a man you can destroy before he’s no longer a man at all.
They had miraculously dodged shrapnel from the frag grenade, but Duncan had landed badly. He felt his shoulder dislocate as he hit the ground. Felt his already-injured ribs crack once again and his leg – that bloody mess of meat – screamed in agony.
They scrambled to the safety of the warehouse as best they could. There, they watched from cover as Julie sprinted back toward them.
She had made it! Out of the desert and loaded up with gear: two rifles crossed over her back, a backpack filled with ammunition and medical supplies. She was even still wearing that silly helmet.
She never saw the gunman lob the Molotov.
It shattered at her feet and splashed liquid fire across her body. For a moment, she didn’t seem to understand what had happened. Duncan couldn’t see her face behind the helmet. He couldn’t see her look of confusion or her eyes as she started to shriek.
God, he’d never heard a person scream like that.
But she didn’t stop running – she didn’t even slow. She ran for the warehouse even as her body burned. Mal grabbed her and brought her to the ground, rolling her in the dirt, trying to douse the flames. It wasn’t working and she wouldn’t stop screaming. Not until Lunchmeat was by her side, ignoring the 9mm sized hole in his stomach, extinguishing the flames with his own bare hands.
Seeing Julie in Lunchmeat’s arms, like some half-burnt pieta, all that hope poured out of him like cold piss from a sick dog.
That’s when the first part of Duncan Slade died.
No, they could not do this. No, they could not win. Reality had come crashing in like a wave. Like a rust-and-cobalt-blue Mirado loaded with psychopaths smashing through the rear entrance to the warehouse.
Which is exactly what happened next.
Another part of him died when he saw Mal get shot.
He wouldn’t have admitted it, but she had become his rock. His captain. He loved her in a way he never loved his ex-wife. She was indestructible – and watching as she was raked with gunfire caused him to step outside his body. He was suddenly watching himself watch Mal as she fell. Watching himself watch as she raised her rifle and punched a hole through the man who had put two bullets in her. One through her bicep, another in her thigh.
He fought beside her, firing at waves of gunmen. In the dark, in the chaos, everyone seemed to be fighting. Teams of gunmen killing other teams for the right to claim the prize of the Sanhok 4. There were no more tactics here, no more strategy.
And then he realized he was fighting alone.
Mal had lost the strength to shoot. She had lost the strength to even sit up. Her eyes were half open, a half-smirk painted on her dying face which said, the fuck you think was gonna happen?’
He thought about laying down and dying beside her and that would have been okay. Except he couldn’t. For the same reason he couldn’t let himself drown in the Atlantic.
The rest of Duncan Slade died when he fought back.
When he threw himself at the nearest gunman and beat the man to death with a pipe. When he smashed his way through bone and tissue. When he lifted a man’s corpse and used it as a shield. When he was brought to his knees by gunfire – laughing at the sheer atrocity of it all.
How many holes could they punch into his broken body before all that was Duncan Slade just poured out.
And the more of him that died, the less he cared. What remained had no name. He was a monster. He was myth. He was the ancient bull-headed god in the center of the labyrinth. The coiled serpent rising from the waves.
He killed and he killed until he lost track of how many fell. The killing became a haze he was lost in. No men or women here. Nothing old or young or weak or strong. If there was movement, he fired until it stopped moving. If it breathed, he beat it with a brick or a fist full of broken glass until it stopped.
This is what a survivor is, he thought, as he shot out the knees of a fleeing combatant.
This is what a survivor is, as he pressed his thumbs into the eyes of an adversary and felt the twitching convulsions of his prey.
Had Death himself emerged at Miramar then, sitting proud atop a pale horse with scythe in hand, Duncan would have pulled the skeletal fucker from his mount and stomped his skull until it was powder.
He found the last of them, the last adversary, hiding in a ruined building East of where Lunchmeat had been shot. It was a woman. Young with scars on her face and a look that said she recognized him.
He saw the Molotov in her hand, how she frantically now was trying to light the rag. He thought of Julie and the way she had screamed and he put the woman down and placed a boot on her throat. And the last of Duncan died there.
All that remained was the Madman.
When it was done, he staggered out into the dark streets of Miramar. The sky had changed – it had started to glow. Duncan Slade would have thought it an offensively beautiful sunrise. The Madman knew better. He knew this wasn’t a sunrise at all.
This burning orb in the sky was his trophy. He fell to his knees and started to cry. Not for what he had lost; he cried at their generosity.
What he had done was simple – he had merely survived. And for this, they had given him the sun.
How long he knelt there like that, he couldn’t tell. Long enough to see the sun burn the sky from dark ocean blue to a blinding white. Long enough to feel the blood dry and flake on his skin.
He looked down at his hand and was confused. He was missing three fingers from his left hand. They were just... gone. The skin was mangled and burned and there were bite marks across his forearm.
But these scars – all these scars – they were the scars of the man who had died on Miramar. They did not belong to the Madman and they certainly would not kill him.
He found he could stand, and when he did, he learned he was not alone. There was a man in a suit watching him. He stood beside a helicopter – the very same mechanical vulture which had shot the catamaran to pieces and ruined his leg.
Had the helicopter landed while he knelt in the sun? Had he not heard it? That made no sense and yet he had no other explanation. Gun in hand, he approached the man in the suit.
This was who they had been seeking. The Pawn. The Lone Survivor of Erangel. The one behind all of this.
This was Sergei Kalimnick.
Pale taut skin with striking white hair. Piercing eyes that radiated power. The Madman aimed his gun at Kalimnick’s head.
"You are not going to shoot me, Mister Slade," Kalimnick said. He didn’t seem frightened.
The Madman tried to speak and found he could not. His lungs burned and all he could manage was a wheeze.
"Shoot me and what will you have won?" Kalimnick said. "You are dying. Your allies are dying. I don’t know if Pavel can be saved at this point, but Malholtra and Julie? I may be able to bring them back from the edge."
In that moment, he remembered them. Julie’s laugh. Lunchmeat with the parking meter. Malholtra telling her Peruvian campfire tale at Eddie Denim’s ranch.
"Shoot me," Kalimnick continued, "and then what? Will you curl up and bleed out? Will you swim to safety?"
Kalimnick stepped closer. There was something off about this man. An unreal quality to his skin and his eyes.
"This was all for you," he said. "We couldn’t let you run. Not after what you did. We couldn’t let you risk it all. So I gave the people I work with what they needed. I showed them what you were capable of. We gave them a demonstration so overwhelming they’d have no choice but to agree."
"Agree to what?" The Madman managed to wheeze out.
"That you are Vir Solidarius. That you are not our enemy. You are the children that Kallipolis birthed into the world."
The Madman lowered his weapon. He didn’t understand. But he knew that this man was right. That he was not a martyr. He was a survivor.
And he would do whatever it took to survive.
"What now?"
"That is up to you," said Kalimnick. "You are the winners of this Battleground. As per our doctrine, you’re given what you desire. New names. New faces. Peace. Freedom."
Kalimnick took one last step closer. He placed a hand on the Madman’s shoulder.
"I can give you back your family. Your old life. But the man who yearns for that is gone, is he not?"
The Madman didn’t have to nod. Kalimnick knew the answer.
"Then I will offer you what I cannot offer the others."
The offer was one simple word.
And when the man who had once been Duncan heard it, it brought new tears to his one good eye. He would accept this offer. Not to save his friends. No, he would accept this offer because The Lone Survivor of Erangel was right. This was what he needed.
Purpose.