Blackteeth, page 27
Today’s Thomas Madrid had been in jail for the better part of two years. His conviction had been speedy, and it had been pushed through the system because families were outraged that he hadn’t been captured sooner. The media’s coverage was rampant over the blunders that had been made. Mistakes had been made, and Madrid had been interviewed initially but he’d been overlooked. The most grievous mistakes were likely the same ones that freed him. Her mother had told her about it how long ago? Long enough, she answered herself.
Hesper knew his conviction was because he was the Blackteeth’s stooge. Used at their discretion, he’d probably muddied the waters when the initial six children had been taken and caused enough distraction that no one realized it was really monsters from another realm that was stealing their babies. Then when Hesper had escaped, Madrid had been thrown to the wolves. Possibly the Blackteeth had promised that he would be freed very quickly or something else equally lucrative. Who knew what would prompt a man like Thomas Madrid? Who knew what would prompt the Blackteeth?
Today’s Thomas Madrid looked like a man who’d been in jail for the better part of two years. His hair had been black. Now it was salt and pepper and shaggy. His face had been lined before and now it was aged and saggy. He might be thirty-five years old, but he looked like he was a senior citizen. His paunch indicated that he hadn’t missed meals while inside a cage, and he hadn’t invested time in exercising. He appeared tired, anxious, and angry all at the same time.
Furthermore, he wore that dirty, rumpled football jersey and equally dirty jeans and glared at Hesper as if he hated her personally.
Perhaps he did hate her. Was it her fault that he’d been imprisoned? No, but he likely thought it was. If only she’d just died like a good little girl, instead of having the impudence to survive and to even go up against the Blackteeth like an impassioned guerilla in the throes of warfare on their beloved home turf.
Hesper stepped out to fully catch Madrid’s attention. She stared at him in a similar way that he stared at her. She heard the rustling behind her but didn’t turn to see what was happening. She heard Kostya said, “Hurry up!” The door behind her started to rumble and John said, “Thank God!”
Madrid stepped toward her, and she could see that his eyes were following the children as they went, not waiting for the door to fully open. Hesper didn’t have to look to know that they were scuttling through the door just as quickly as they could go.
Then Madrid held up a gun and pointed it at her. “Stop,” he said feebly. Then he said it louder. “Stop!”
Hesper glanced over her shoulder and sighed. The last child disappeared into the darkness. It was Kostya who looked back at her briefly before he was consumed by the blackness.
She looked back at Madrid and held up her hands as if she was surrendering, capturing his attention again.
“Stop them!” he commanded Hesper. The end of the pistol pointed at her; the opening of the barrel was a black hole of annihilation.
Ruger. 22 long. Capacity of 10 plus 1 in the barrel. Hesper nodded as she recognized the weapon he held. There were other details that filtered into her mind. Madrid didn’t practice holding it. His finger wasn’t inserted into the trigger guard but rested on the outside of the rim. She couldn’t see the safety on the side of the pistol, but she made herself a bet that it was on. He hadn’t practiced shooting dozens of weapons hundreds of times until he was well versed with almost every popular model. Muscle memory didn’t just work only for martial arts.
“STOP THEM!” he screamed and shook the end of the Ruger at her.
Hesper took a step toward him with her hands still in the air. Oh look, she’s surrendering to me. She’s helpless. She’s not very tall, and she doesn’t weigh more than a buck large. She’s not really a threat. Then she took another step. Madrid’s eyes went large and round as he obviously realized that Hesper might very well be a threat. The Blackteeth might have told him stories about how she’d killed them and decapitated them to boot, if they bothered telling a paltry human about such things. He fumbled with the Ruger. He pulled the trigger, and without hesitation, Hesper ducked to the right. There was a muffled clicking sound.
No, the safety is still engaged. He also doesn’t clean his weapon after firing it. He’s probably never cleaned it. It may well have gotten wet when he went through the portal.
Madrid made a helpless noise under his breath and looked down to see what he was doing wrong.
Hesper didn’t waste the opportunity. She jumped at him. One hand knocked the gun to the left. The other punched him in the face. That didn’t make Hesper’s fist feel particularly good nor did Madrid seem happy about it. He lurched backward, and Hesper caught his gun hand, twisting it to the left and yanking on his arm at the same time. She followed up by a direct front kick to his groin. The sound of her bare foot connecting with the cloth-covered genital area was a loud and sodden whack.
Madrid immediately dropped the gun which Hesper caught in her left hand. Then he fell backward onto the hard-stone floor, and curled up into a ball. The sound he made was a muffled shriek of agony.
“Fucker,” Hesper said, and as she held the gun, she flicked the safety off with her thumb. It would be so easy to just shoot him in the head. There would be one less monster to worry about. Her finger twitched ever so slightly on the trigger. She could almost feel the mechanism of the Ruger preparing to drop the hammer on the bullet. One less monster. But, she thought, then there would also be one more monster. Me.
Madrid looked up at her and whispered, “Please don’t. They just wanted me to run errands for them. Food for the children. They gave me things. They wouldn’t let me touch the children. I didn’t hurt any of them.”
Right, sure you didn’t. Hesper’s finger tightened on the trigger for another moment. She could kill the Blackteeth. She had killed the Blackteeth. She would kill more if she could. What she could and couldn’t do was extremely important, and there was a line she hadn’t yet crossed. Killing Thomas Madrid was that line.
“You’re not worth it,” she snarled. “Don’t come after us. Don’t touch any of the children. You understand? I won’t be so nice next time. I won’t just kill you. I’ll chop things off, and believe me when I say this, you won’t be happy about it.”
“I understand,” Madrid said through gritted teeth as he cupped his testicles in his hands.
Hesper left him there. She turned toward the back door and checked the Ruger. She’d fired one of these before. She cleared the barrel and checked the magazine before she slapped it back into place, leaving the safety off. Then she chambered a round. Madrid had ten bullets. Only ten. He hadn’t chambered an extra round, and he’d unthinkingly left the gun’s safety engaged. Was it because he was stupid or because he really didn’t want to kill anyone? Either way, she didn’t care if she knew the answer.
Kostya appeared at the door, and he stared behind her as something caught his attention. His mouth opened to say something.
Madrid suddenly clutched Hesper’s left elbow with his right hand; his dirty fingernails dug into her flesh. Somewhere he’d found the energy to try to attack her from behind and put the truth to his paltry lies. She didn’t hesitate this time. She dropped the gun as she swiftly turned. Her right hand grasped his hand on her elbow as she brought her left arm up. She held his hand in place as her other hand gripped the knob of his elbow. Using the momentum of forcing him back, she shoved his elbow into the air. She continued to apply pressure on him evenly as she stepped into his space, driving the elbow back into a position it was never meant to be.
Madrid resisted for about two seconds before his shoulder loudly snapped into two pieces with a gut twisting crunch-crunch. She followed him down to the ground, and her knee came down into his stomach. She let go of his ruined shoulder and used a palm strike directly to his solar plexus, putting all of her body weight behind the hit. Madrid had been making a gasping, choking noise and then he wasn’t anymore. He rolled to his side and twitched like a fish on the deck of a boat.
“That’s number thirteen of the self-defense one-steps in Tang Soo Do, you sorry piece of shit,” Hesper said to Madrid and then used the butt of the gun on his head. He collapsed on the floor in a hot mess. She took a breath and then stomped on the fingers of his left hand so that he wouldn’t be able to use either arm. The sickening cracks echoed hollowly in the room. Ultimately, she disregarded the Blackteeth’s stooge because he wasn’t a threat anymore.
“That way is blocked by rockfall,” Kostya said as he came to Hesper’s side. He held out the Ruger, and she took a deep breath before she took it. He stared down at Madrid and said in Russian, “Mudak.”
Hesper looked to the front. The door that Madrid had used was still open. He’d used a stone to block it. It grinded against it as it tried to close.
“Get the others,” Hesper said. “We need to leave now.”
All of the children followed Hesper like she was the Pied Piper, and her pipe was playing the magic tune. Some of them didn’t know what else to do. A few of them probably didn’t want to be left alone. Some had a very good idea that they were going to die unless they followed her.
As they passed through the chamber with the stories carved into the walls, Hesper gestured at Kostya. He came to her with the cellphone, and she grabbed his arm to direct the light at the last part of the wall. She looked at the wall for a long moment and nodded to herself. “I know what to do.” She looked at Kostya. “The Blackteeth will kill you if they catch you. Come with me, and we have a chance. I’ll get you back to where we came from.”
More gunshots sounded. It was difficult to tell how far away they were because of the acoustics of the cavern.
“What if we run to whoever’s shooting?” Daisy asked.
“Better them than the witches,” John said.
Petra gestured at Luna. “What about her? What if she gives us up to die hexen? To those things?”
Hesper looked at Luna. There was a chance that Luna would do that, but Hesper hoped the child at least had some sense to understand the direness of the situation. “She knows what will happen if she does,” she said. Luna nodded slowly. “She knows we’ll all die.”
“I’m never going to see my daddy again, am I?” Luna asked.
Hesper wanted to lie because the truth would sound awful, but lying to a child stuck in her craw, even to one who’d already betrayed her. “I don’t think so,” she said. She would have added something positive but she couldn’t think of anything.
“Kostya,” she said.
“Da?”
“This cavern, this place is shaped like the capital letter I,” she said carefully. “You know that letter?”
Kostya shook his head. “Russian writing isn’t like yours.”
John knelt and sketched the letter in the dirt on the floor while most of the children gathered around them, and Kostya pointed the light at what John was doing. “This shape, yes?” John asked.
“Yes,” Hesper agreed. “This place is shaped like that letter. We’re here.” She pointed to the corresponding place. “We’re going there. I’m going to lead you across the I to where the pools are that we need. Plus, there’s something else I need to get. If we can connect with the shooters without getting shot ourselves, then great, but we don’t know who they are or why they’re here, so I wouldn’t necessarily trust them.” She took a deep breath. Then she said, “You need to keep quiet. You need to run when I say so. You need to do whatever I do.”
Hesper jabbed her finger at the bottom right side of the I. “We’re going here,” she emphasized. It was in case any of them got separated, so they would have a slight chance. “Then I’ll get you to the nearest pool, and you’ll all be going through, just like when…the witches brought you here.”
“What about you?” Kostya asked.
“I’ve got things to do here.” Hesper took a breath and listened to distant gunshots. They went on and off as if the shooters were sporadically seeing their targets, which was likely the case.
Once they reached the grand hallway, Hesper left them for a minute. She climbed to the roof of the nearest residence and looked out across the expanse. Lights were scattered across the vastness. There were paths as someone or something explored. There were rapidly moving trails of lights as someone or something fled. Gunshots echoed across the massive chamber seconds after she saw flashes of light.
Kostya joined her and looked. “What is this place?”
“Don’t know,” Hesper said. “It’s something someone built a long time ago.”
“The witches,” Kostya asked and then said, “The Blackteeth?”
“I don’t think they built any of this, but they took it over.”
“We’re going down there,” Kostya pointed.
“Yes. It’s about two miles as the crow flies.”
“What’s that in kilometers?”
“Um. Three klicks, maybe three and a half.”
Kostya shrugged. “Three kilometers is a long way when there are people shooting with guns and those things out to get us.”
Hesper didn’t have an answer for that because he was correct.
“And the lights turn on as we pass them,” Kostya said.
“Can’t do anything about that. We’re up on the roofs from here on out, but I don’t know what else might be up here, too. Once we start on the roofs, we need to tell everyone not to look down. Those shooters might shoot us by accident. I’m assuming that they don’t want to shoot us.”
“Da,” Kostya said. “I’ve been here a long time. Maybe a year. I looked at the date on the cellphone, and since I don’t remember exactly when I came, I’m guessing.”
“I was here ten.”
Kostya looked at Hesper as if she was insane. “Ten years here? And you came back?”
“It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”
Hesper mapped out the locations of the lights and thought about the best route to take. “Get the kids up here. Carry the younger ones if you have to. Remember…shh.”
Kostya nodded, unlocked the cellphone’s screen, and handed her the cellphone.
The children climbed to the roof in measures. Some of them wanted to go back to the “safety” of the room they’d been kept in. Hesper merely gave them a look and they shut up. Even the ones who were crying shut up. She had an idea she was going to have to gag some of them at a later point.
They began to move, and Hesper adjusted their path as they went down the long, expansive part of the I.
Twice they had to move to the darkest shadows of the roofs to sit still while something passed below. Once, Hesper tried to get a look at the people with the guns, but they were just out of her range, and she didn’t feel good about leaving the children alone. They reached a spot Hesper recognized, and she whispered in Kostya’s ear. “Be right back.”
She climbed down a wall and kept out of the range of the automatic lights. She found a series of racks of fungi against the curve of the cavern’s walls. The bottom one was cracked on one side where a stalactite had dropped on it from above. The heavy rock structure lay on the floor next to it, far too heavy to be moved. Hesper chambered up the racks to the top one and found a stash of weapons she’d put there an eon before. There were three makeshift swords and two knives, all constructed from metal pieces the builders had left.
Madrid’s Ruger was nice to have at her side, but she much preferred an edged weapon. She didn’t know what a .22 long would do to a Blackteeth. It wasn’t the largest caliber of bullet, so it might just annoy them whereas a good blade would take them down. Hesper knew exactly where to hit with the improvised swords to do just that.
She returned to the children and drew Kostya out to where he could see what she had brought back. One sword went to him. One went to John. She kept one for herself while sticking the Ruger into the waistband of her sweats. Then she handed out the two knives to Daisy and Petra.
Kostya experimentally swung the weapon and briefly smiled.
Hesper led them across the next rooftop and hesitated. Something didn’t feel right. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up and tickled her warningly. She motioned at Kostya, who could be seen dimly in the lights that came from two rows of residences over. She gestured at him to stay in place while she looked to see what was happening. He nodded and shrank back into the deep shadows.
More gunshots echoed distantly, and the sound sent a rash of goosebumps across Hesper’s flesh. She crouched and edged up to the next space between the buildings. She paused to listen but heard nothing.
As Hesper went to cross the gap something grasped her ankle and dragged her down.
Chapter Twenty-Six
On the tip of the tongue lies the fate
of the entire world. – Yiddish proverb
Hesper fell like a rock. She’d been pulled off balance and taken by surprise. Claws bit into her ankle, and she didn’t need to guess what it was that grasped her. She knocked into the creature and both of them dropped the twelve feet down to the stone floor. However, Hesper twisted and immediately rolled just as she hit.
Pain erupted in her back where her kidney had been damaged, and every other bruise and ache screamed their disapproval of this foul treatment, but it couldn’t be helped. As Hesper rolled to her feet, remembering to tuck her head to the opposite side of the shoulder hitting the floor, she had a moment of appreciation and gratefulness. She acknowledged that if she survived this place, she was going to have to thank her dojang master not only for one-steps in self-defense, but for requiring all his students to learn how to fall so that they wouldn’t hurt themselves. And she would have to thank him for forcing them to do roll after roll after roll so that it became second nature to them. Plus, a case of Rémy Martin Cognac wouldn’t make the sixth degree blackbelt unhappy.
