Hawk, page 29
part #6 of Will Slater Series
The unnamed man wasn’t scared. He had the same monotonous expression on his face as Hawk. They were cut from the same cloth. The earthquake, and the death of a close friend and colleague, were mere inconveniences.
What mattered was scientific advancement, and the unnamed man stared at Slater like he was a piece of meat.
George regarded him with confusion.
Torn between two choices.
Slater figured his best hope was trying to usher George toward doubt.
Slater said, ‘What are you two doing in here?’
The unnamed man said, ‘We’ve been told to clean this place up for surgery.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
Slater made sure to stare at George as he spoke.
George said, ‘I’ve told him it might not work. My arm, and—’
The unnamed man cuffed him around the ear, and George visibly grimaced.
‘Don’t talk to him,’ the unnamed man said. ‘Ali wouldn’t want you talking to him.’
‘Fuck what Ali thinks,’ Slater said. ‘You two can’t make your own decisions? Or does Hawk have both your balls in a vice?’
The unnamed man laughed and said, ‘It’s almost cute that you think this will work.’
But George had a hazy, unfocused look in his eyes.
The man was deep in his own head.
And the unnamed man didn’t like it.
He turned to look at his colleague. ‘George. Do I need to go get Ali to beat some sense into you?’
George let his gaze drift lazily over to his co-worker, and said, ‘What’s the point of him beating me? He can just…’
As he said it, he tapped the back of his neck.
And Slater understood.
Hawk’s chipped all of them.
Christ, what a nightmare.
George said, ‘Actually, Quinn, aren’t you the only one without a chip?’
Quinn said, ‘Don’t need it. Wouldn’t even think about being disobedient.’
‘That’s awfully convenient down here.’
‘Down here?’
Slater said, ‘It means we’re all trapped down here for a long time. There’s no getting out without some serious excavation. Leaves a lot of room for allegiance switches.’
Quinn strode up to him and slapped him across the face.
Slater laughed back. ‘Didn’t Hawk tell you anything about me? Keep hitting me — I don’t care.’
‘You’re some super soldier. Doesn’t matter. You’ll be our super soldier by midday.’
As he spoke, Slater scrutinised him. He had no weapons on him whatsoever, which meant if Slater revealed he had a hand free he’d quickly come up against the other three restraints.
No, he needed someone with a gun to walk right up to him and threaten to pull the trigger.
Then he could disarm them with one hand, and use the gun to control the other occupants of the room. Because he sure as hell wasn’t getting out of another handcuff and two leather straps any other way.
Then Quinn got a funny look in his eye. He said, ‘I’ll be right back.’
Then he turned on his heel and strode over to George. He snatched the neuroscientist by his injured arm and dragged the man out of the room, ignoring his feeble protests and gasps of pain.
Slater rocked back in the bed, confused by the sudden change in the atmosphere.
Quinn’s last words had given him an uneasy sense of déjà vu, but he shrugged it off.
He thought he heard the words, ‘Disobedience will not cut it,’ softly spoken from the corridor outside.
‘I’m sorry,’ George yelped. ‘I made a mistake.’
‘What’s this?’ a new voice said.
Slater recognised it.
Ali Hawk.
Quinn said, ‘He’s acting up. Don’t worry about it.’
‘Why shouldn’t I be worried?’
‘Because I told you not to be. That’s not good enough?’
Then silence unfolded, and Slater thought of it as the tensest silence in human history. He could feel it in his bones. Either Ali Hawk was about to kill someone, or all would return to normal very shortly.
Slater had no idea which it would be.
He couldn’t see a thing. His foot ached with pain, he was sweating in the stifling underground heat, and the air was still thick with dust particles.
Then Hawk said, ‘Fine.’
And he stepped into the room to deal with Slater.
68
King saw desolation, and ruin, and despair.
Several buildings had collapsed, the foundations torn apart by the viciousness of the quake. There were civilians out in the street in various states of distress. Some were placid, shocked into quiet, and some were sobbing.
There were a handful of people visibly injured on the sidewalks — some with bloody faces, some pressing arms to their chests that had clearly been damaged by blunt falling objects. The roads were a mess, with cars swerving this way and that, paying no attention to the road rules.
King took it slow through Tapanui, overwhelmed by what he saw.
When he noticed an elderly woman with a grandmotherly look standing at a crossroads looking somewhat calm, he pulled up next to her and rolled the window down.
She finished instructing a pair of teenage boys on where to head for relief efforts, and noticed King looking at her.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘Can I help?’
‘Of course. There’s still people trapped in buildings. We need all the help we can get.’
‘I’ll be back in half an hour.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Need to check on a friend in the area. But it won’t take long. I don’t think there’s much hope for him. I’ll be back to help as fast as I can.’
‘Not much hope?’ she said, with a look on her face he couldn’t figure out.
Then he realised what it was.
It was her sudden understanding that her perspective had changed — an hour ago, she might have been horrified to hear that there was little hope of a stranger’s friend being alive, and now she was realising it was the least of her concerns.
She didn’t know if half the town was alive after such devastation.
So she shrugged, and gave him a glassy-eyed look, and said, ‘Best of luck.’
‘I’ll be back,’ King promised.
‘We’ll need you,’ she said, and then she strode off down the street to take care of the first pressing concern that rose up to greet her.
He continued onward, and his stomach sank as he left the town’s limits behind. Now there was nothing between him and his destination but the open road. Although … there was some morsel of hope resting below the surface of his consciousness, floating around in there, accompanied by strange emotions. He didn’t know whether he wanted to find Slater alive or dead.
He’d consistently come across people with foreign objects in their heads, and that was Ali Hawk’s own staff.
What might the man do to his prisoner if he was messing around with the minds of his own men?
That same feeling returned.
The thought that he was out of his depth.
He was in a world he knew very little about.
He pressed forward, dreading the arrival, dreading the fight — he wasn’t used to a sensation like that. He’d spent his entire career barrelling toward every objective, terrified to slow down at risk of getting stagnant and losing his hardened edge. But now it seemed he wanted nothing to do with this particular fight, despite the fact that his dear friend’s life might be hanging in the balance.
Unlikely, he thought.
But possible.
The GPS beeped.
You have arrived.
He slowed down, and he saw the white brick fence running around the perimeter of a vast property on the left.
The front wall was set a few dozen feet back from the highway, and a pale gravel trail led down to the start of the driveway.
From his vantage point, stopped in the middle of the highway, surrounded by nothing but churned farmland and damaged asphalt, King peered over the property wall and saw ruin.
A colossal mansion rested in the middle of gorgeous green fields.
It was a shell of its former self.
The foundations had cracked, spilling the roof into the house itself, crushing most of the top floors and dumping the entire churned pile through the ground floor’s ceiling. From King’s perspective it looked like a makeshift arena, as if the centre of the ruined mansion had been fashioned into a miniature colosseum.
There was a sizeable excavator picking uselessly at the rubble around the walls of the building. A driver in a high-visibility vest sat behind the wheel. Even from this distance, King recognised a civilian when he saw one.
Probably carted in to clear a path to…
To what?
There was valuable cargo in the wreckage of the house.
Or underground…
King felt a pang of hope.
Then he scouted the rest of the perimeter, because there had to be somebody above ground who called the excavator in. And they must have promised to pay him a small fortune to ensure he prioritised them over the rest of the surrounding area, even though everything in sight was just as badly affected as Hawk’s compound.
King found them sitting on the cracked porch in front of the mansion. They had their knees tucked up to their chests, and they were resting their forearms on their knees.
Although they were specks in comparison to the landscape King could see, he made out their dejection.
But why?
They’d survived getting buried under a mountain of brick.
Then King noticed their hands.
Empty.
Bare.
No weapons in sight.
And it hit him.
They hadn’t been armed when the quake had struck. They’d been above ground, but perhaps in their mad scramble to get out they’d left their guns on a table, or a chair, and focused entirely on preserving their own lives as the building threatened to come down on top of them. Now they were stranded outside the house without a weapon in sight, unnerved by the fact that King hadn’t been caught yet, expecting him to show up and shoot them dead at any moment.
They didn’t want to hide, because if their boss caught wind of that they’d be summarily executed as soon as he was pulled free from the rubble.
But at the same time it struck them as odd to sit there and sacrifice themselves the moment King showed up.
What they didn’t know was that King wasn’t armed either.
The situation revealed itself in all its uniqueness, and King couldn’t help but chuckle.
The hairs on the back of his neck bristled.
He revved the engine, and waited for the two men to notice him at the mouth of the trail.
They looked up, and spotted his vehicle resting idly on the highway.
Neither of them reacted.
No panicked reaching for hidden weapons.
Just a look of resignation.
Which dragged on, and on, and on.
And then they seemed to realise he was stalling too.
Something clicked in the air — a mutual realisation. No-one was coming in with guns blazing. Neither of them were in a hurry to rush toward each other and finish the foe off. Because they were all weaponless, and waiting for the other party to show their hand.
But none of them had a hand to show.
The two men stood up and walked out to the middle of the circular parking lot in front of the mansion.
King turned into the property and accelerated toward them.
69
Hawk was mad.
Really, really mad.
He barged toward Slater and pulled to a halt in front of the bed. He put his hands on his hips and bore his sharp gaze downward. Slater didn’t flinch.
Hawk said, ‘You’re still trying to win, aren’t you?’
‘No harm in trying,’ Slater said.
‘You really think you’re going to convince one of my staff to switch allegiances? You really think that’s going to fucking happen?’
‘Judging by how angry you are, I’d say he almost did.’
Hawk snarled and yelled, ‘Bring him in.’
Quinn materialised in the doorway, dragging George behind him. George had blood matted to his scalp. He looked broken. His eyes went everywhere except to Ali Hawk. He stared at the floor, then the walls, then Slater for a brief spell.
Slater saw defeat in his eyes.
Hawk said, ‘George. Care to tell us if you’re going to get disobedient again?’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ the man whimpered.
Quinn slapped him in the ear.
George whimpered and cowered away.
Quinn said, ‘Yes you did.’
Slater said, ‘It’s not too late.’
Hawk came at him with reckless abandon. Perhaps the ramifications of the earthquake were sinking home, but the illusion of calm disappeared. The rage came out in all its intensity, and Slater saw something incredibly strange in the man’s eyes. Something he hadn’t seen before.
A loss of control.
And when Hawk spoke, he sure didn’t sound like the same Ali Hawk.
He had a completely different accent…
He said, ‘Listen here, you scum. Get this through your thick fuckin’ skull. You need to fuckin’—’
‘Hawk!’ Quinn barked.
Hawk ignored the neuroscientist. Slater was shocked by the change in demeanour, and it was only when he looked past Hawk’s raging silhouette that he saw Quinn standing there with deep concern plastered across his face. At first Slater chalked it up to Quinn’s boss acting erratically, but as Slater continued to watch Quinn, he saw something like frustration setting in.
Then Hawk made a lunge, and Slater stopped thinking about anything other than survival.
Hawk snatched a scalpel off the floor, resting next to one of the overturned trolleys. He came at Slater’s throat with it, his teeth bared and saliva dripping from both corners of his mouth. The rage had taken him entirely. Slater had no choice but to reveal his cards.
Reveal his last desperate effort to come out the other side alive.
He wrenched his right hand out of the loose cuff and caught Hawk’s knife hand in an iron grip.
Hawk froze, flabbergasted by the sudden movement.
Slater jerked Hawk forward by the knife hand and threw a colossal headbutt. The thick bone in his forehead smashed against Hawk’s nose, breaking it clean. Blood sprayed and Slater kept a vice-like grip on the man’s wrist, making sure the knife went nowhere.
Now the tricky part.
A single error would lead to his death. This was a game of inches, unfolding at lightning speed. But he had no other choice, so as Hawk writhed and moaned and concentrated on his broken nose Slater leant forward and opened his mouth and closed his teeth around the scalpel’s handle. He crushed his fingers into Hawk’s wrist, making sure the man didn’t jerk reflexively and cut Slater’s mouth wide open.
Then Slater wrenched the knife free from Hawk’s grip using his teeth.
It came out of Hawk’s palm without incident.
Slater burst into motion. He let go of Hawk’s wrist for a half-second, and he recognised it as the most vulnerable moment of his life. If Hawk found the strength to pull away and managed to dart out of Slater’s reach, he would be left defenceless, still chained to the bed.
It would leave him with a knife in his mouth and little else.
But Hawk didn’t utilise the half-second. His nose was badly broken, and he was still reeling from the pain. And Slater’s mind was moving in overdrive — barely any time had elapsed at all.
Those genetic reflexes Hawk wanted his hands on were now useful after all.
Slater grabbed the back of Hawk’s shirt and pulled him down, throwing him off-balance. He stumbled and dipped into a crouch, and Slater reached out and wrapped his arm around the man’s throat.
Hawk choked and spluttered, and Slater wrenched him in tight and held him there.
There we go. You’re not going anywhere.
Gently, moving carefully with the scalpel between his teeth, he pressed the tip of the blade into the soft nape of Hawk’s throat.
Slater tightened his forearm, and heard the man wheeze for breath as his thorax constricted. He sensed blood rushing to Hawk’s face, turning it crimson red, making veins protrude from his forehead. Then Slater squeezed harder. He let the breath sputter and wheeze out of Hawk’s mouth, and just as he was about to slip into unconsciousness Slater slackened his grip a little.
But he kept his forearm pressed tight like a boa constrictor, and he kept the knife handle between his teeth. He tickled the scalpel under Hawk’s chin.
‘Want to save your boss?’ he screamed, and saliva dripped from the corners of his mouth as he fought to keep the knife in his mouth. ‘Get me out of these cuffs, right now.’
George went pale and for a moment Slater thought the man might pass out. Then George backed away — to the corner of the room. He sat down and put his head in his hands and moaned.
It was a moan of despair. Of utter horror.
And it didn’t gel with the situation at hand.
Slater got a dark, dark feeling in the pit of his stomach that George knew some terrible truth. Some truth that would make him look like a fool when it came to light.
But he didn’t have any more time to consider that, because Ali Hawk struggled against his grip, and Slater was forced to squeeze his forearm even tighter. That put Hawk into pure survival mode, and he kicked and thrashed his legs like he was dying. Which he was, if Slater kept his grip this tight.
But he eased off again, and muttered through clenched teeth, ‘Stop fucking moving or I’ll slit your throat right now.’
Hawk went still momentarily.
Then the man lifted his eyes to Quinn and said, ‘Ali.’
He said his own name.
Slater paused, confused.
He figured it was just the ramblings of a man on death’s door.
A man whose life hung in the balance of Will Slater’s teeth.
Slater said, ‘Get me the hell out of these cuffs, Quinn. You told me you respect your boss. I’ll kill him right here. Then all your dreams are gone. He told me how he convinced you to come out here. To advance neuroscience. To take it to unseen heights. You can’t do that if he’s not bankrolling you. Think of yourself. Think of your future.’
