Pocket Dungeon 2, page 34
“Don’t be too loud,” I warned her. “We only want these guards to hear it.”
She exhaled slowly and nodded. “Got it.”
Iris took a slight step back from the door and leaned in toward the seam where the two wooden doors actually joined.
“Help me,” she gasped out in a terrified, crying tone.
It was absolutely fucking haunting, and even though she was right in front of me, and I knew for a fact that she was fine, because I was the one who had told her to do it in the first place, I still felt the urge to ask her what was wrong and what could I do to help.
I pressed my ear up against one of the doors and heard the sounds of low, alarmed chatter inside, as well as new movement.
The sounds of voices grew louder, alongside the sound of footsteps, as one of the guards seemed to near the door.
The three of us quickly lunged to the side when the handle began to turn to avoid getting spotted. The man stepped out with his weapon at the ready, and he looked to the left first for any sign of who had made the sound.
The door swung closed behind him, and that was our chance.
Yasha lunged first and grabbed the guard around the neck with one of her slim hands, despite the fact he was at least a foot taller than she was. She dug her nails into the side of his neck and swung her weight around him like he was a pole and dropped him to the ground in a flash.
It was definitely one of the sexiest things I had ever seen, and I marked myself down as scared and horny as I watched her snarl in his face.
“What the fuck!” he shouted loudly, just as Yasha punched him directly in the face. She rolled off of him as he swung around his massive assault rifle, but before he could fire off a single shot, I beat him to the punch.
I pressed my gun to the back of his head and pulled the trigger.
His skull exploded like a watermelon hit with a baseball bat. Blood and brains splattered across the concrete like a fucking Jackson Pollock painting, but to my surprise, I didn’t feel bad about what I had done.
He had been attempting to hurt one of the women I loved, so I felt entirely justified in my actions. It was strange to have that overwhelming sense of calm wash over me after having just killed a man, but there it was. I knew he was a bad person, and I knew he had been ready to hurt someone I cared about. That was all that mattered to me.
The gunshot was still deafeningly loud, and past the ringing in my ears, I heard the sound of the second security guard making his way to the closed doors. He didn’t seem overly alarmed, however, and I reasoned that he assumed it had been his partner who had fired off the weapon, not someone else.
As the door opened and he stepped outside, he didn’t have a chance to react before I slammed the butt of my gun in his face.
I had always wanted to pistol-whip someone.
He staggered backward with a gasp, and before he could get his hands properly around his own weapon or reach out and attempt to hit me back, I swung the gun again.
The door was still open, so I was being more cautious about shooting him. I didn’t want to alert Harper about our presence just yet and have him call for backup.
The man let out a low growl in the back of his throat, and when he looked up at us, I saw that my first blow had entirely shattered his nose. It looked like a Mr. Potato Head that had the nose put on entirely sideways. My stomach roiled in revulsion at the sight, but now wasn’t the time to dwell on a new thing that apparently made me squeamish.
My second blow had knocked his gun from his hand, so he simply lunged forward at me and tackled me to the ground.
I was glad I was holding my own weapon, because otherwise I would have slammed down onto it on the hard, blood-spattered concrete. Instead, my back took the full brunt of the fall, and the force sent stars dancing in front of my eyes.
The man raised up one of his bowling ball sized fists with the obvious intention of bringing it down on my head, but before he could, a knife shot out of the darkness and slammed right into the hollow of his throat with deadly precision.
He made a gurgling, gasping sound as the blade sunk home, and blood began to pour from the wound as I reached up and ripped the knife free.
The man dropped on top of me like a sack of potatoes as his hands scrabbled at his throat, but there wasn’t anything he could do. He bled out on the floor next to his comrade with his hands still wrapped around his throat.
I didn’t have to ask to know who had thrown the knife, and as I rose back up to my feet, I simply turned and placed the hilt of the weapon back in Yasha’s waiting hand.
“Thank you,” I told her. “I really didn’t want to get punched in the face.”
“And now we are even,” she told me with a grin. She pecked my blood-spattered cheek like it was nothing, and then the three of us slipped inside Harper’s office and pulled the door closed behind us with a soft latching sound.
I motioned for Yasha to twist the lock so no one could get in, just in case, and she did so.
The door that led to the secondary, internal portion of the office was only a few yards away, but the distance seemed to loom and stretch like it was made of taffy as we made our way toward it.
“Are you ready?” I asked, and the question was leveled almost entirely at Iris.
The blonde woman set her jaw and nodded. Her face was a mask of pure determination, and despite the flickering of fear behind her eyes, it was clear she wasn’t about to back down.
My feelings for her seemed to grow trifold at the sight of that, and I pulled open the door.
I wasn’t sure what I expected to see, but I don’t think I was fully prepared for how normal it would all look.
There was a large, magnificent-looking desk in the center of the room, and behind it, sat William Harper. There were a few pieces of art up on the walls that I didn’t recognize, as well as a safe mounted into the wall behind his head, and some gold and platinum records in fancy frames. He looked up at me from his paperwork and frowned.
His hand moved toward a button on his desk, but I raised up my gun and aimed it directly at him.
“Don’t touch that,” I said. My tone left no room for argument. “Put your hands up where I can see them.”
I’d always wanted to say that.
Harper pressed his lips into a thin, withered line as though he was debating if he was actually going to listen to me before he finally did what I said and lifted his hands in the air.
Now that he couldn’t do anything without me seeing it, I finally gave myself a few seconds to take him in.
I had seen him before on the internet and television a few times, but he looked different in person. He looked much smaller. In fact, I thought he looked like any other man in his mid-seventies.
He was handsome for an old guy, but he wasn’t anything remarkable. The only thing about him that made him stand out was the wickedly sharp glint in his brown eyes. It was like he could see through me and straight to my very soul. He was dressed in a button-up shirt that probably cost more than my rent, and the watch on his wrist would probably pay off all of my student loan debt in one fell swoop.
“Well, what is this about?” he asked. His tone was annoyingly cool and casual.
It was then that I realized only Yasha had entered the room with me. Iris had stayed out of sight and in the first level of the office.
“I’m going to kill you,” I said simply. “Because you’re an evil person who is doing evil things.”
He frowned, like my answer didn’t quite satisfy him, and somehow that was more infuriating than anything else that had happened so far.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
And that’s when I realized he didn’t know we were there because of the crystals. He probably just thought we were a couple of criminals who were trying to rob a billionaire blind.
“The crystals,” I said in a hardened tone. “I know what you’ve done and what you’re doing to people, and I am going to put a stop to it here and now.”
The look on William Harper’s face shifted then, and he seemed to transform in front of my very eyes from a relatively harmless-looking old man to a wild animal that knew exactly how to stalk his prey. He was a predator and a weapon, and now that he knew that I knew it, he clearly saw no point in hiding it.
“So what, is it money you want?” he asked. “One of my crystals? Do you think you could possibly build up the sort of empire I’ve built? Please. No one can do what I have done, and believe me when I say plenty have tried.”
“I don’t want your empire,” I snapped. “It’s built off the backs of people you’ve all but fucking enslaved, you piece of shit. I’m here to end this.”
“End this?” he repeated to me. “I think you misunderstand what is going on here. I might be just one man at the top, but I’m not the only man.”
My body went cold as ice. “What do you mean?”
He seemed pleased with my reaction and leaned back in his armchair, like we were having a casual conversation. He even dropped his hands down to rest folded atop his chest.
“I’m a businessman, and when I came across a lucrative opportunity, I sought out like-minded individuals who had the gumption and the drive to make good on the idea,” he said. “I’m the top of the pyramid, and there are dozens below me. I meant it when I said I ran an empire. I am not a man to mince words.”
My mind rapidly began working through his statements and piecing together what he was saying, and the answer I came up with made my blood run entirely cold. I felt as if the floor had just dropped out from beneath my feet as I continued to stare at him in abject horror.
“There are others running schemes like this,” I said. “Other rich and powerful men enslave people to go into dungeons and give them the profits at the end.”
“You don’t make it sound very impressive,” he chided. “But in a nutshell, yes. We find willing participants to enter our dungeons with promises of business opportunities, wealth, or whatever else it is their hearts desire, and then we reap the benefits. We’re the men who rule the world. This one, and the one contained within those crystals.”
I switched the safety off my gun.
Harper tensed ever so slightly, but he didn’t lose his cool yet. “How about I offer you an in. Is that what you want? Think of it. All the power and wealth you can imagine with none of the risk. You seem intelligent, intelligent enough to get in here without my guards informing me of your presence, and so I have no doubts in my mind that you could be incredibly successful at this business.”
I felt sick to my stomach that he would even think something like that, and he seemed to think my silence was some sort of acquiescence, because he flashed me a too-white smile.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Everyone wants in, really. Sometimes it just takes them time to come around to that fact. So how about you put that gun down, and you and I, as well as your lovely little friend there, can discuss the details. How about it, hmm?”
He gestured to a set of chairs in front of his desk with a casualness that made me feel ill.
I moved, and Harper smiled, but I wasn’t moving to sit in one of his stupid chairs. I was moving so Iris Tucker could take center stage.
Chapter 24
The entire room went so quiet that I could have heard a pin drop from a thousand miles away.
Iris’ face was set in a curious look. It wasn’t quite hard, but it was far from soft at the same time. She stared at William Harper, and it was as if she could see straight through time and memory to the man he had once been on the day he left her inside the crystal dungeon to die a cruel and tragic death.
I wondered what he looked like to her, or if maybe, she was just seeing the monster that so carefully masqueraded himself as a pleasant, kind man.
Her hand held the gun out steady in front of her, and unlike when we had practiced the first time at the shooting range, her arm did not shake or waver whatsoever. It looked like she had been preparing for this moment for the last fifty years of her life.
“Billy,” she said, and there were a thousand different things all packed into the two simple syllables.
I took another step back, and Iris stepped forward again until she stood directly in front of his desk. She cocked her head to the side, and her hair fell over one shoulder as she continued to stare at Harper without the look on her face ever changing.
Meanwhile, Harper looked as though he was in the active process of seeing a ghost. I supposed in his mind he really was. I didn’t think this was necessarily what Charles Dickens had in mind when he wrote A Christmas Carol, but it certainly hit the same chords.
His skin had gone as white as a sheet of bleached paper, and the color made the veins and liver spots that marred his hands and face that much more evident than they had been before. He was withering and turning into the sad old man he was in front of me.
His eyes were wide as he stared at Iris. He didn’t seem capable of looking at anything else in the room. His face was frozen in a look of incomprehensible horror as he simply stared.
Iris made no moves to get closer to him or to ready her gun. She just watched him. The tension in the room was so thick that I could have cut through it with a knife, but I didn’t dare say anything. It wasn’t my moment. It was hers.
“Billy,” she said again. “Do you remember me?”
“This isn’t real,” he gasped out. It was the first thing he had said since Iris made her appearance in front of him. “This can’t be real.”
“It’s real,” I said.
“I’m real,” Iris told him. “I’m more real now that I was while I stayed trapped for the past fifty years.”
Harper’s watery eyes didn’t move from Iris, but it was clear that his words were directed at me.
“How did you know about her?” he rasped at me. The terror was as clear as day in his voice. “No one knew about her. How did you know about her?”
“Say my fucking name, Billy,” Iris snapped. “I want you to say it. You haven’t forgotten it, have you?”
He swallowed what looked like an entire fucking egg, shell and all.
“Iris,” he whispered. “Iris Tucker.”
“Iris Tucker,” the blonde repeated her own name. She was shaking now, but it wasn’t with fear or anxiety like I had expected. It was with a clear, unbridled rage. Anger roiled off of her like steam and slowly worked to fill up the entire room. All of the emotions she’d clearly been forcing herself to hold back for so many years were exploding up toward the surface all at once now.
“This isn’t happening,” he tried again, but he seemed to have accepted that this wasn’t some insane trick of the light. The woman he had tried to kill fifty years ago was standing right there in front of him, and she was pissed.
“I think I once said the exact same thing,” she said. “When you left me in that crystal to die. Do you have any idea what it was like? Do you?”
She gestured at him with the gun, and Harper actually flinched in his chair. He looked small, feeble, and pathetic.
Good.
“Answer me,” Iris said. “I want to hear you answer me.”
He opened his mouth, but not a single sound came out, and then he tried again. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it was like.”
“Of course you don’t,” Iris sneered. “Did you ever even go back into a crystal again after that? Or was that when you started all of this?”
She used her free hand to gesture around the room, indicating his entire warehouse and criminal operation.
Harper seemed as though he didn’t want to answer her, but he wasn’t exactly left with much choice in the matter while she was pointing a gun at him.
“No, I didn’t.” He let out a shaking breath. “I was… horrified by what I had done, and so I vowed I would do things differently.”
A high-pitched, desperate laugh escaped from Iris’ lips. “You were horrified? You of all people were horrified? You tried to rape me and then left me to die, you worthless son of a bitch! I trusted you, I depended on you, and you left me to die! And you’re the one who was horrified? You don’t know what I endured, so let me tell you.”
She stepped forward until she was pressed up against the other side of Harper’s desk. He leaned back in his chair, as if the few inches he put between them would be enough to save him.
“I tried to get out,” she said in a slow, controlled tone. “I did. I fought my way all through the dungeon to get out. I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t ready, I didn’t know what I had been dragged into. When I finally made it to the end of the line, the door wouldn’t open.”
Logically, I knew Iris had become trapped after her timer ran out, but I hadn’t really thought much about the details of how it happened, and now hearing her relay them out loud filled my heart with a deep, heavy sadness that felt like it wouldn’t go away. All I wanted to do was hug her and tell her I would never let anything like that happen to her again.
“It wouldn’t fucking open. I was so goddamn scared, Billy. I pounded on the door and screamed your name over and over and over again, like maybe this was all some sort of fucked-up joke and you’d come back for me. But you didn’t.” Iris shook her head. “You didn’t.”
“I…” He croaked. “I am so sorry, Iris, for leaving you there. I never should have done that.”
“It’s too late for sorry,” she said. “It’s too fucking late for that. You didn’t kill me, but you stole my life. I was in there for fifty years. That’s a lifetime for some people, Billy, and you stole that from me. My parents are dead, my friends, my family, they all buried me a long time ago. They died expecting to see me in the afterlife, but I wasn’t there. I had dreams. I wanted to be someone. And now I’m just a ghost in a world that I don’t really understand, and I have to figure out who I am all over again. You stole everything from me.”
Harper had begun to sweat, and it trickled down his brows in thick, panicked rivulets.
“I can give you money,” he tried. “Anything you might need to start a new life.”
“I don’t want a new life,” Iris said. Her voice was as calm and cool as ice. “I just want yours to end.”
