“I thought you would be more angry when you figured it out. But your face just went kind of sad instead,” said Piotr as he stepped through the doorway behind us.
At the sound of his voice, Anne spun around and snapped off two rounds into his chest. It was fast, precise, and shockingly loud.
The bullets hung in midair for a brief moment, suspended by the same tendrils of milky fog that we had seen at the lake. Metal fragments clattered to the concrete floor as the tendrils seeped back through Piotr’s shirt to a spot over his heart. He shrugged gracefully, even apologetically.
One of the hugely swollen bags came through door behind him, sans helmet. His neck was purple and stretched taut with the massive trunk of the worm distending it, and his jaws were locked wide open by the thick black tentacles hanging and curling out of it. I doubted he could still get a helmet on over all of that.
Then another came in. And another. And still more until the door was flanked on both sides by a dozen of the glassy-eyed horrors. Anne’s knuckles went white around the grip of her pistol as she calculated the odds of taking them all down before they killed us, and then went slack as the same answer came up over and over again.
Chuck’s face was resigned as well. I could see the fight drain out of both of them.
Piotr sauntered over to the work table and picked up a pair of long-handled bolt cutters, likely left there for this purpose when he set all of this up. He then went over and clipped through Mazie’s restraints, catching her as she began to fall over. He helped her up, every bit a gentleman and walked her to over to his monsters. She didn’t bother struggling.
He moved back to Greg and turned to me. He searched my face with a critical eye, looking for something. Judging me. I stared back. He sighed, raised the bolt cutters over his head and swung them down, crushing Greg’s skull. Blood flew. I screamed and launched myself at him.
I made it halfway across the room before a tidal wave of inhumanly strong, foul smelling bags crashed into me and smashed me to the floor. I heard guns go off as I struggled, punching and kicking and tearing.
I gave it everything I had, but I never really had a chance. In the end, I wound up face down on the ground, with a bag kneeling on my back between my shoulder blades pointing my face at Piotr with both hands while his buddies pinned my arms and legs to the floor.
I stopped struggling when I saw what Piotr wanted me to see. He was holding Mazie’s head in both hands, and with a savage jerk, snapped her neck in front of me.
I came off the floor. The bags were able to immobilize me again, but this time two of them were down as well, heads crushed or missing. I could feel blood on my face and my right hand felt broken.
Piotr knelt down next to my face, just out of my reach as I struggled. “That’s much better, Abraham. But it seems that I’m going through these hostages pretty fast. We’ll have to be more careful, yes?” Anne and Chuck were standing at the front of the room with two stout cords tied around their necks.
Behind each of them stood one of the huge alpha bags. One cord went to a wooden handle in the swollen fist of the bag behind them, and a second, longer cord was tied around the bag’s waist to prevent an escape even if the bag were killed.
Piotr was close enough that I could see the fine drops of Greg’s blood dotting his shirt and jacket. I strained to move, to reach him, and actually managed to drag the bags holding me several inches closer.
“Good,” he said. “Hold on to what you’re feeling. We’re getting close to the end of this unpleasant business, you and I, and I promise that you’ll be satisfied with the way things turn out. We’ll each get what we want, in the end. For now, however, you’re going to have to trust me. I’m going to have your hands bound behind your back with police zip cuffs. Now, I know they can’t hold you, even as … unfinished as you are, but if you break free, that’s a clear sign that you’re not cooperating, and my slaves over there will simply give a good yank on those cords and kill your friends. Okay?”
I went limp. Piotr placed one hand on my head, almost reverently. Possessively. “Thank you.”
Zip cuffs are police restraints that resemble big plastic zip-ties like the kind the hostages had been bound with, only thicker and with two loops that ran through a central plastic block to hold each wrist. The bags pulled the strips so tight that my skin caught in the slot where the band entered the plastic housing, cutting the flesh.
After that I was yanked roughly to my feet and shoved out the door and into the parking lot with everyone else. One of the prison buses sat idling close by. Piotr took the pistol from Anne and tossed it away. He stepped up to me and pulled my baton out of its holster. He turned it over in his hands thoughtfully.
“You made this, correct?” I could still hear a touch of his Polish origins under the tacked-on Midwestern accent he used. “Well, I say you made it, but I think we both know that it wasn’t entirely you.”
“I made it. Just me.”
“Really. Quite a coincidence, isn’t it? That you would create this object, this specific object, right after we met. I mean, what are the odds? Unless, perhaps, our meeting changed you more than you admit to other people. Or to yourself, yes? Well, in any case, you won’t be needing this crude imitation any more.”
My heart sank as he turned and threw my baton out into the darkness. I never heard it land.
“Well. Time to get started. I’m a patient man, but I think I’ve waited long enough, don’t you? Thanks to your friends all those years ago, pulling you out of your birth waters too soon and stealing my book. Yes, I think we’ve both waited long enough.”
Piotr gestured at the open door to the bus with a little half bow, every bit the genial host.