Hawk, p.33
Hawk, page 33
part #6 of Will Slater Series
King stumbled and lurched back behind cover, plunging out into the ruined corridor once more.
But now he was invigorated.
Now he knew he stood a chance.
And then the truth hit him. It didn’t matter where his energy levels were. He was rapidly fading irrespective of his motivation, and if Ali Hawk camped out in the back of that room he would win by simply waiting it out.
Hawk wouldn’t miss the next shot.
He’d panicked at first, surprised that King had mustered the awareness to make it to his office.
It probably seemed like he was being stalked by a predator.
But now the brutal truth was hammering home, and the momentum was seeping back in Hawk’s direction.
King saw shimmering light in a ring around his vision. But it wasn’t coming from external sources. It was in his own head, and the walls were closing.
One last chance.
Make it count.
This was all he had.
Another minute, and he’d pass out.
Another fifty seconds, and he was gone.
Another forty…
He was still waiting.
Go, his brain screamed.
His limbs twitched.
He fought hard through the endless quicksand. He felt the heaviness of the air. His brain sunk down in his head — or, at least, it felt like it. He couldn’t comprehend anything. Panic bubbled below the surface of his consciousness, threatening to seize him and lock his limbs in place.
Then it was all over.
All over…
All…
Now.
He bent down, picked up a giant slab of rock like it weighed nothing, and sprinted into the room.
77
He wasn’t sure what came over him.
He would never be able to pinpoint it.
If the concept of a second wind was scientifically accurate, then he used the mother of all second winds. Truth is, he was too delirious to even know what happened.
But a sharp click in his brain had spurred him into action, forcing all the side effects aside, replacing them with sheer barbaric determination.
So he picked up the boulder that had fallen from the ceiling with a grunt and a heave. Perspiration ran in sheets down his chest and back and arms but he didn’t dare let it compromise his grip. He ran as best he could, taking three bounding steps into the doorway, and he kept the boulder in front of his chest and face. He wondered if Hawk would have the wherewithal to adjust his aim to King’s stomach in the vital seconds he had, but he knew the man wouldn’t.
He bounded forward.
The boulder jolted once, twice, three times.
Three shots.
Cracking the rock. Deafening in the enclosed space.
King flinched.
But he kept moving.
And he stayed alive.
And then it was over.
King hurled the boulder with every ounce of strength in his body — it weighed well north of three hundred pounds, and it required an animalistic intensity he was only able to tap into every so often.
It wrenched all the strength from his bones, and sapped all the willpower from his mind, and he knew the second he let go of the boulder it would be the final action he carried out before he passed out.
As the boulder was in the air, King fell to his knees.
He could barely keep his eyes open.
But he fought to stay conscious for a single second longer, because he needed to see the result.
He needed to see whether he would wake up from the ensuing sleep, or stay under forever with a bullet lodged in his brain.
The rock crushed Hawk against the far wall.
It broke his skull like a watermelon.
It cracked his chest.
It tore his ribs apart.
It popped his stomach like a balloon.
King didn’t hear the sound the impact made, because he only had access to one or two senses — the rest were rapidly fading. But he saw the aftermath when gravity finally caught the boulder and discarded it onto the office floor.
Ali Hawk stayed standing for a few seconds.
Perhaps he was still alive, somewhere inside that broken bloody mess of a human.
Perhaps not.
But he was dead when he collapsed, and by that point King was already unconscious.
He knew he’d won.
He slipped into the deepest sleep on earth, sprawled out on his stomach on the office floor.
The carnage reached its apex, and then there was nothing but quiet.
78
Slater opened his eyes.
How much time had elapsed?
Where was everyone?
More importantly — was he still the same man?
Well, he was certainly something. He had the same body, and as far as he could tell, the same brain. He rolled onto his back on the operating table, and a sharp pain resonated through the back of his skull as it scraped across the metal. He reached back and touched a finger to the source of the agony, and felt dried blood there.
So they did it.
I’m not the same.
Deep anxiety took hold. He started to hyperventilate, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He lay still on his back and tried to control himself. But for how long? When would it kick in? When would he lose the ability to think and feel independently? Would it be a laborious process? A slow build?
He lay on his back, with no sense of how much time had passed. But when his gaze drifted around the room, he realised the two scientists — George and Eddie — were right there beside him. George was dead. That was immediately apparent. He was lying face-down with a vicious dent in the back of his head. It matched the side of the operating table, which sported a few scuff marks. Eddie was alive, but barely. He lay in semi-conscious delirium, groaning in pain. Every couple of seconds, his legs twitched, but it seemed he had no control of them.
Then Slater noticed Eddie’s shirt had been lifted up around his mid-section.
There was a dark, ugly, purple bruise across the entirety of his lower back.
And a damaged medical trolley rested beside him.
Betrayal?
Had Hawk given up on the plan at the last second?
Unlikely.
Where is Ali Hawk?
Slater tried to get up, but he couldn’t. He was delirious and detached at the same time. And no wonder. The general anaesthetic was wearing off, but it was the equivalent of waking up from a lengthy procedure at a hospital. He was light-headed and dizzy and didn’t have a proper grasp on reality.
He sat still on the operating table, his headspace muddied, and he decided not to try and think about anything. Coming out of a general anaesthetic in a hostile environment was a recipe for permanent psychological scarring.
He knew his mind was weak.
Patients in hospitals are gently coaxed out of their delirium and coddled for the first few hours after they wake up. Slater had none of those benefits.
He was surrounded by death and destruction. He was unsure whether the surgery had been performed or not. He had no idea where King was, or if the man had even survived the journey to Tapanui.
So he sat there and thought about nothing at all.
His mind drifted, but he fought to bring it back to stillness.
And slowly, moment by moment, the anaesthetic wore off, unwrapping its tendrils from his brain.
He swung his legs off the table and put them down on solid ground. He stood up, and wobbled, and went straight back down into a seated position. He stayed there for a beat, and tried again.
This time, it worked.
He stumbled through the devastation, refusing to pay attention to much of it. He knew his mental state was too fragile. He treaded carefully, skirting around overturned trolleys and destroyed CPUs and the odd corpse that cropped up amidst the wreckage.
Still no sign of Hawk.
But Slater knew he was defenceless if the man showed up. His outer extremities were numb — he could barely feel his hands and feet. Gripping a weapon, let alone finding one, would be futile. He stepped out into the outer corridor — strewn with rubble and bodies, each discarded without mercy — and stumbled around in the dark for what seemed like a year.
Then he came to … an opening.
A darker section of the darkness.
Black as night.
He went into it.
His foot nudged something.
A stair.
Could it be?
He didn’t know. But he was sure as hell going to find out.
He went upward.
One stair, then two, then three.
And then he had momentum. With each step, the lingering effects of the anaesthetic ebbed out of his system. He could feel it shrinking away, reducing the numbness, bringing back feeling.
He saw light above.
He almost broke down in tears.
He imagined a sick game Ali Hawk was playing with him. Giving him hope, only to hold him at gunpoint as soon as he reached the top of the stairs.
But he forced that thought out of his mind, and kept climbing.
He came out in the ruins of Hawk’s mansion.
It was late afternoon. He’d been out for eight or nine hours, he figured. His head swam as he gazed at the setting sun, and the endless farmland surrounding the compound, entirely empty. There was no-one in sight. If the earthquake had been as severe as he thought, they’d all be in Tapanui helping the injured.
He sat down in the wreckage.
He couldn’t think of anything else to do.
His perception of the world had changed. His life had changed. It had all changed. He didn’t know where Hawk or King were, and he didn’t want to think about it. It was the first time he’d been alone since he’d run into King in Budapest. It was his first chance to digest, compartmentalise, decipher, be still...
As dusk settled over the ruins, he thought about all that had happened and wondered how on earth he’d come out the other side in one piece.
79
King had no dreams.
He had no premonitions.
He was dead to the world.
When he resurfaced, he had no clue how much time had passed. He sat up groggily, sporting a pounding headache and a dry mouth. He worked his gums left and right, felt the pain all throughout his body, and took a moment to compose himself before getting to his feet.
When he stood up, he almost passed out as the blood rushed out of his head.
He lowered his head between his knees, counted to ten, and tried again.
There we go.
He scrutinised the corpse of Ali Hawk. The man had come so close to holding the entire world in the palm of his hand. He would have been the pioneer of a psychocivilised society.
And perhaps he would have succeeded if he hadn’t deemed it necessary to bring two of the most dangerous men on the planet into the fray. Now here he was, his body and face broken beyond repair, his features unrecognisable.
‘Shame,’ King said. ‘You were brilliant. You almost had it.’
He figured that was enough of a funeral sermon, so he left the room.
He found the stairwell without incident and began to climb. Was it nighttime? Was it daytime?
Had he been asleep for one day?
Two?
Three?
No way to know down here in this underworld.
He took the stairs slowly. There was no need to rush. The fight was over. Everyone was dead or crippled. There would likely be an investigation on what had happened here, but the devastation of the earthquake would overshadow any progress the authorities made. They’d probably come to some murky conclusions about what had unfolded.
By then, King would be a ghost.
He knew Slater was still probably face-down on the operating table, but he could stay there for a little while. First, King needed air. He needed to taste something other than artificiality. He needed to alleviate the tightness in his chest, a tightness that he knew didn’t come from injury. It came from the ludicrousness of the situation. It was anxiety in its purest form. He needed to wind down from what had almost happened to himself, and to Slater.
They weren’t automatons.
They’d kept their sanity.
They’d kept their minds.
He stepped out to find a setting sun bleeding into the horizon. The wind had picked up, and the ruins were cast in an orange hue.
Slater was sitting in the middle of them.
He was lost in thought, watching dusk fall, wrapped up deep in his own mind.
King walked over and sat down next to him.
Slater looked over and said, ‘There you are.’
‘Here I am.’
‘Where’s Hawk?’
‘Crushed to death.’
‘Good.’
‘Yeah.’
Then they both lapsed into silence.
Thinking about what could have been.
80
It was a long time before King spoke.
Slater let him think. He’d had his quiet time, and now he knew King needed it. They’d both been uniquely tested in ways they hadn’t considered possible. They’d both been stretched to their limits.
Slater thought long and hard about the fate that would have been in store for them.
King said, ‘I’m sorry I got you wrapped up in all this.’
Slater shrugged. ‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’
‘You almost weren’t.’
‘How close was it?’
‘When I made it down there, they were cutting into the back of your head.’
‘Shit.’
‘Another few minutes and you might have been beyond repair.’
‘Imagine you were a few minutes late,’ Slater said. ‘Even if you killed them, my skull would have been hanging open. You’re not a doctor. You wouldn’t have been able to fix me back up. I would have woken up to…’
‘Don’t think about that,’ King said. ‘No use considering hypotheticals.’
‘True. We both would have gone insane a long time ago if we did that.’
‘But I get it. Sometimes it’s hard not to.’
Slater said, ‘Where the hell do we go from here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you find the vengeance you were looking for?’
‘No.’
Slater stayed quiet.
King said, ‘I wish I never went looking. It feels like we opened a can of worms we know nothing about.’
‘Maybe it’s best we interfered. Without us, Hawk would have pulled it off without a hitch.’
‘I still can’t believe he wanted us. He knew about us. He killed my life partner just to lure us here.’
‘There’s always going to be people like that out there.’
‘I don’t know whether that motivates me to continue, or crushes me enough to just give up.’
‘When have you ever given up?’
‘I tried to. I tried retirement. Look where it got me.’
‘That was voluntary. You achieve whatever you put in your field of view. So decide what to achieve, right now, and then we’ll do it.’
‘We?’
Slater said, ‘No matter how ugly this game gets, no matter how bad the potential consequences become, I’m not leaving it. Because it’d be a hell of a lot worse without me in it. I realised that in Zimbabwe. I don’t know what conclusion you’re going to come to, but that’s mine.’
‘Even after you almost become something wretched?’
‘Especially because of that. What if it was someone else on the operating table?’
King said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. This wasn’t the resolution I was looking for.’
‘What were you looking for?’
‘Something you could tie up with a ribbon, I guess.’
‘That’s not how life works.’
‘I know. I guess in this case, I thought it would be.’
‘Hawk was the one who gave the orders to kill Klara. He’s dead. I’d say that ties it up with a ribbon.’
‘Not like this.’
‘What’s changed?’
‘Everything.’
And Slater knew it. He could deny it all he wanted, but that was the truth.
Slater said, ‘Do you think someone else will be able to achieve physical control of the mind soon?’
King said, ‘If Hawk did it, then it’s probably possible. Which is downright terrifying.’
‘We’re not built for this world.’
‘You saying we should both get out?’
‘I told you — I’m staying in it, no matter what. But I can’t shake the feeling that time is slowly passing us by. We’ll be dinosaurs in this game before long.’
King said, ‘We beat Hawk. And he was supposed to be the new breed.’
‘Would we have been able to do it without the earthquake?’
Silence.
A long, pondering silence.
Slater said, ‘A blessing or a curse?’
‘It can be both at the same time.’
‘Did you see the aftermath?’
King nodded. ‘There’ll be a significant body count when the dust settles. I can tell you that much.’
‘We should go help out. Where we can.’
‘You think that’s safe?’
‘Sometimes it’s less about our own wellbeing and more about everyone else’s.’
‘You’re right. I guess that’s why we signed up to Black Force in the first place.’
‘It’s only about ourselves to an extent. And don’t get me wrong, there’s something satisfying about the self-discipline and self-control it brought out in us. We can apply that to any area of our life. But you can’t do a job like that without wanting to help.’
‘Which is why the world won’t pass us by,’ King said. ‘There’ll always be people in need of our help.’
‘Does that mean you’re back?’
Out of the corner of his eye, Slater saw King gaze around the wreckage.
He let King think.
Then King said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘You’d better decide.’
‘I will.’
‘Then what are you waiting for?’
