Jace
The gunfire quickly petered out to the occasional crack and pop, and then stopped altogether. I stood beside the door and adjusted my grip on the baseball bat, breathing deep and slow, each breath puffing out my cheeks as I listened to my heart booming in my chest.
I could hear voices out there, swearing, calling out instructions. They were getting closer. Then I could hear faint footsteps, people yelling out “clear!” and getting closer still.
A few minutes later, I heard careful footfalls on the steps I myself had walked up only half an hour ago, harsh whispers. I was gripping the bat so tight that the handle creaked as I held it poised, waiting for my pitch.
Soon, they were gathered on the other side of the door. Two low-level goons were arguing about who would go first until somebody higher up the food chain told one of them to shut the fuck up and get in there.
A split-second after I heard them count to three, the door burst open and I swung for the fences. Some asshole Picolli had his face turned to mush by that first hit, but the bat splintered apart just above my hands.
The first guy, already unconscious, fell backwards and became tangled up with the second soldier, who had been rushing forward to follow him. I jumped in with the broken bat and shoved the sharp end through his throat before he could lift his gun up in my direction again.
Blood spurted everywhere when I pulled my bat-turned-stake out, and he dropped his gun to use both of his hands to try and stem the flow of his life as it gushed out of him. He was even more of a dead man than I was.
A third soldier shouldered his way past the stabbing victim, and over the crumpled heap of the first one. He managed to block my first swing, grabbing my wrist to stop himself getting impaled like his friend, as I did the same with his gun hand.
He managed to push me back a step, before I brought my knee up into his nuts with testicle-popping force. His mouth opened wide as he gasped in air and I sensed a certain limpness in his arms.
Taking a massive risk, I let go of his gun hand and gave him a left hook to his dangling jaw, dislocating or breaking it so it hung off his face at a horrific angle and rocking his head to the side. His grip on my wrist failed, and I shoved the bat into the back of his throat through his open mouth.
As he fell, I had to admit he’d done his job though, because two more Picollis were through the door before I could block that choke point again. I charged forward, lashing out with a kick to one of their knees that resulted in a satisfying wet crack and made his leg bend the wrong way, as I blocked the second’s attempt to pistol-whip me.
It seemed the fucking idiots were under instructions to take me alive, or they would have got a shot off by now. Three more came through the door as I stomped on Mister-Broken-Leg’s head and turned his lights out for the time being.
One of them flew in and tackled me, putting me off balance as I brought the wooden stake down into his kidney area. He sank towards the ground, whimpering, but somebody else punched me just below the eye before I could retrieve my weapon.
I grunted and lashed out blindly in that direction, feeling teeth break and cut my knuckles. While I was blinking to clear my vision, somebody else tackled me, managing to bring me to the ground but also dislodging the splintered bat.
Whoever tackled me ended up falling into my guard, and I used my legs to put him off balance as he tried to rain punches down on me. Twisting to the side, I struck out at somebody else’s knee with the heel of my hand and heard a satisfying, if girly, scream from somewhere above.
On the backswing, I knocked out the person on top of me with a lucky elbow strike and then drove the stake into somebody else’s leg on the other side. Putting my feet on the hips of the unconscious sandbag on top of me, I kicked out, pushing both of us backwards in opposite directions.
As I was getting up, something heavy hit me on the back of the head hard enough to make me see stars, robbing me of the vision I’d only just managed to clear. In a daze, I bunched my fist and lashed out, hitting something. Maybe it was a skull, maybe it was one of the log-walls of the cabin.
Either way, it didn’t matter, because that heavy thing hit me on the head again and I went down like a sack of shit. Blackness and blurry shouting washed over me and a few stray boots found the time to kick me in the ribs, but I was drifting far enough away that I could barely feel them.
Rough hands picked me up and dragged me to the other side of the room before dumping me on to a small chair, where they held me still and others tied me down. The ropes dug in and burned my wrists, bringing voices back into focus.
“Al, Tony, search this joint. Kill anybody you find. The Kung Fu Fighter over here’s gonna learn a lesson when he wakes up. I’ve been waitin’ to talk to this motherfucker for a long time now.”
That could only be Santino Picolli, the Italian Ninja himself.
Jace
The water felt freezing when it hit me, and I gasped for air, hallucinating for a moment that I’d fallen off a ship somewhere in the Arctic Circle. The reality was much worse.
I didn’t know how long I’d been drifting in and out of consciousness for, but it couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen minutes because the first thing I heard after “wakey, wakey, motherfucker” was Tony, or Al, telling Santino that there was nobody else in the cabin.
It took every ounce of willpower I had to not let my relief show. I should have been given an honorary entry into the Poker Hall of Fame.
I allowed myself to have one last memory of her, taking those barriers down and letting herself love me. I wore it like an impenetrable fortress around the very core of my being. They would take my life today, but they’d never break me. I’d be in there to the end. With Kendall.
“I said wake up, you little bitch.”
Santino gave me a slap across the face while I tried to muster up as much swagger as a soaking wet man tied to a chair could while regaining consciousness. I twisted my head to each side, making the vertebrae in my neck crack, and looked up at him.
“Santino. How’d you manage to find time around your busy cock-sucking schedule to come here?”
“Oh you always were a funny son of a bitch, Jace. Truth is, I’ve been dreaming of this ever since you bit the hand that fed you. You knew your days were numbered, right? You didn’t really think a piece of shit like you could bring us down forever, did you?”
“Sure did fuck up your day though, didn’t I?”
“A hundred and ten years we’ve owned that fuckin’ city, and we’ll own it for a hundred and ten more with you out of the way.”
“You know, I had a picture of your father painted in my toilet bowl so I can piss on him every morning?” I asked.
Santino’s brow furrowed and I saw his skin move a few shades closer to red. He cocked his fist back and punched me in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me.
It took me a few seconds, but I laughed as soon as I could breathe. If I could get him blind-angry enough, he’d snap and kill me quick, rather than dragging it out over the course of hours or days. That was preferable.
“You punch like a Picolli. Where the fuck have you rats been hiding these last couple years?”
“You’ll be beggin’ soon enough, motherfucker. We had to call in some old favors, and promise some new ones, but we managed to regather in New Ashby.”
“New Ashby? Oh yeah, Gavino Bertolini always did like the special way you had of licking his gooch, Santino. I bet he’s letting you know all the time how much better the Bertolinis are than you, huh? Especially while he’s got your wife and daughter giving him a tag-team rim-”
Santino punched me in the face and I was reacquainted with visions of stars. The pistol-whipping under my eye he followed up with was going to swell it shut soon enough too.
I clenched my teeth, holding in the grunt of pain. On the inside I was climbing the winner’s podium. This final gloat of his wasn’t going anywhere near as well as he had no doubt imagined it. It was a shame my prize was only going to be a quicker death.
“Shut your worthless fuckin’ mouth. At least we’ve got some fucking allies. You’ve got nothin’, punk, you think any of the other families are gonna shed a tear when we go on tour with your rotting body?”
“Should I give a fuck?” I asked.
“Even your own people would rather see you dead. Lorenzo’s been feeding us information, bet you didn’t know that, huh? Must sting to know that even-”
“I killed that piece of shit this morning. Give me your address and I’ll have my people send you his shiny bald head in a little box with a pink bow.”
Santino faltered for a second, I could see him getting hot under that collar and edging towards the danger zone, but he shrugged and tried to regain his composure.
“Well, we would have ended up killin’ him for runnin’ with you in the first place anyway, no big deal.”
“Yeah, true. Hey, if we’re coming clean, let’s talk some more about your daughter. Did you know I corn-holed that bitch? Man, she
cried
when she took it, but she was back for more the next day. The last thing I wanted was a worthless slut like that again though, so I told her to fuck off.”
Santino’s eyes went from attempted-smug to murder in a blink. With a shaking hand, he brought his gun up and held the barrel against my forehead. The various Picolli, maybe some Bertolini, soldiers leaned forward, enthralled, waiting. Checkmate, motherfuckers.
“Everybody here knows you’re too big a pussy to do it,” I said.
I could feel all that rage in every quiver of the muzzle against my skull, and time slowed to a crawl. Every blink I took seemed to last for minutes. Every breath, for hours.
My job was done. I let my mind wander and memories of Kendall drifted in front of my eyes, blurring reality. I was lucky to have had that, to have had her, even if it wasn’t for long enough. Forever wouldn’t have been long enough with a girl like her anyway.
Fuck sake. Goodbye
.
Bang!
Kendall
Jace’s gun kicked back and I wasn’t able to completely halt its momentum before it struck me right in the middle of the forehead. I flinched at the impact and then held the gun out again as quick as I could, smelling a strange burning odor.
The way things looked, the trigger on the gun might have been connected to time itself. Nobody was moving. Jace was still tied to the chair, head bowed, while mobsters in suits stood watching the impending execution with several of their colleagues dead on the floor.
Even the one holding the gun to Jace’s head still stood there, still as a statue. The only difference was that I could see a red hole just behind his ear, and a spray of gore on the wall opposite.
Holy shit! I shot somebody!
All at once, things started moving again. The older man started to tumble as Jace brought his head up, eyes narrowed in concentration.
The Mafia men started turning around, reaching inside their jackets, and I aimed at the closest one. Terror gripped me with every squeeze of the trigger, replacing the desperation with which I had pulled it the first time.
The noise was terrifying and after the second shot, I sprayed bullets almost randomly, looking out at the chaos through squinted eyes. Men were diving and falling in every direction, some of them still oblivious as to what was happening.
Jace leaned forward, standing to his feet with the seat still strapped to him, before throwing himself backwards to the ground and breaking the flimsy old chair into a million pieces. The last thing I saw was him struggling with ropes before my nerve broke and I stumbled to the side of the doorway, cutting off my view.
To my ears, the noise in the other room was no quieter than inside that car with Jace when the Picollis attacked us with those machine guns. Gunfire, screaming, crashing, thumping. I clutched Jace’s gun, my lips pulled back in a petrified grimace as tears streamed down my cheeks.
Through the doorway came a man with his hand clamped against his belly, on top of a dark red stain that was quickly spreading. Looking around in a daze, he soon spotted me.
He tried to aim his gun in my direction, but raising his arm seemed to be causing him some incredible pain and it was slow going. I screamed, pointed my weapon and pulled the trigger.
Click.
In quiet horror, I stared up at inevitability. I could almost
see
the line between the gun and where it was aiming, but there was nothing I could do about it. The floor, now my foot, now my knee…
A blur of muscles and tattoos charged through the door, taking the Mafioso off his feet. He and Jace crashed to the ground with grunts of pain and whooshes of knocked out breaths.
Jace was just beginning to scramble to a kneeling position when I heard a gunshot go off, and he slumped back down. Three more followed and then all was silent.
The two of them went still. I heard myself make a strangled sound that would have meant “
please, no!”
in a time before language, as I dropped the gun and crawled over to them.
With a trembling hand, I pulled on Jace’s shoulder, rocking him a little before getting a better grip and pulling harder. He was so
heavy
, but he unceremoniously rolled off the man below him on to his back.
I saw his chest rising and falling as a red patch, similar to what the other man had come through the door with, spread over his shirt. He was alive, and the other guy was dead. I almost fainted in relief.
“Please be OK, Jace, please!” I sobbed.
“Not out of the woods yet,” he said softly. “Help me… to the window.”
I pulled on his arm and he sat up, a warm gush of red flowing between his fingers when he did so. It was a thick enough flow to start a new wave of panic rising in me.
Jace staggered to his feet and I draped his arm over my shoulder. He was leaning on me so heavily that I could barely shuffle one foot in front of the other, and when I looked up at his face I could see a cold sweat on his brow.
He sank down next to the broken window and took a few deep breaths before turning his head and shouting out. Compared to how he looked, I couldn’t believe how strong he sounded.
“You fuckwits still out there? I’ve got Santino! Anybody approaches the cabin and I’ll shoot his balls off. Step inside and he’s dead! Fuck off and we’ll negotiate for his life some other time!”
“Fuck you, Barlow!” came the response. “Let him talk so we know he’s alive!”
“Hold the line!” shouted Jace.
Every word he spoke seemed to make more blood flow out of his belly and his skin took on a sick, clammy, appearance. He slumped lower against the wall.
“Fuckin’ hell,” he whispered. “So close.”
I knelt by him, cradling his head against my chest, dripping tears into his hair. My stomach was churning so much I thought I might throw up as I looked around the room in desperation. There was nothing to help us.
“What do we do, Jace?”
“You. Find another gun. Hide again. Don’t come out. Live.”
Jace seemed to be deflating a little more with every breath, every word he spoke was weaker than the last. My stomach went from a swirling turmoil to a painful cramp that made me wince.
“No! Please be OK! I love you, Jace, I love you! Please!”
“I guess… you know now… why you have… to fight. Love you. Go.”
“Shut up! Hide with me! Come on!”
I tried to stand and lift Jace but, if he was heavy before, he was the proverbial immovable object now. Even when I tried to drag him, I could barely get him away from the wall.
On the ground, I thought I heard Jace say something. It sounded like “What’s taking them so long?”
As soon as he said it, I heard something in the distance but getting closer. Motorbikes. So many that the deep rumble was soon loud enough to
feel
under my feet.
It sounded like an army was arriving.