Kitabı oku: «Grave Mercy»

“Are they all dead?”

Bolan nodded. As an afterthought, he picked up a pair of empty water bottles and cut open a vein on two of the bodies. He hoped the blood samples would reveal what types of toxins were used to turn humans into weapons.

“Who were they?” Rudd asked.

“Someone’s pawns,” the soldier replied. “Most likely, they were kidnapped tourists, harmless people sparked to insanity by some biochemist.”

“Who’d do such a thing? And who’d let them loose here, where there’s just kids?”

“If there’s a clue in the blood, I’ll use it. I’m going after them,” Bolan stated grimly.

“Alone?” Rudd asked.

“Alone. With an army. It won’t matter. I’m going to find the people behind this,” the Executioner said.

Grave Mercy

Mack Bolan_®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Age after age, the strong have trampled upon the weak; the crafty and heartless have ensnared and enslaved the simple and the innocent…

—Robert Green Ingersoll 1833–1899

I have witnessed the innocent being ground into the earth by heartless monsters. Enough! They will be avenged.

—Mack Bolan

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER ONE

Mack Bolan, running at full speed, speared his foot into the door of the laboratory and was stopped cold. Usually the Executioner’s 220-pound frame and the forty pounds of gear he wore were more than sufficient to easily splinter a door. Bolan grimaced under the impact as he rebounded from the heavy panel. It took a few steps for the soldier to recover his balance. The stench of incinerating heroin was heavy in the air, impenetrable cloying clouds obscuring the burning processing tables sprawled throughout the long room. The soldier’s brilliant, tactical mind was unaffected by the airborne opiates, as his face was masked. He doubted that he’d been physically affected by the gases filling the room, so without muscular impediment, he realized that the door was reinforced. Under the usual set of circumstances, such a kick would have loosened the crossbolt from its mooring in the doorjamb, but the door was locked from the outside, which made sense.

No drug lord wanted his drug processors to have a free way out when they could slip packets into their mouths or other orifices. Locking the lab from the outside was a means of control. Only Long Eddy himself made the profits, not some emaciated, poor, jittery lackey with a rectum full of heroin-stuffed condoms. That’s why Bolan kept a 12-gauge shotgun—a Masterkey—under the barrel of his rifle. He triggered the stubby blaster, and a cylinder of lead powder turned the locking mechanism to scrap.

With a push, the door flew wide open. Even as the first shafts of sunlight and fresh air rolled in through the crack, Bolan realized that he’d made a mistake. With a new supply of oxygen rolling into the burning laboratory, the flames flared even hotter. The process was called a backdraft, and it was one of the most terrifying traps that professional firemen could walk into.

The Executioner had made a mistake—he was only human—and now his nerves were screaming at him, announcing the harm the blast of superheated air around him was causing. It was survivable. The heat rose, air rumbling behind him and igniting under superheated force. His legs pushed, long limbs releasing coiled energy as he sprung out onto the sand, trying to push himself prone and let his heavily protected back and boots absorb most of the damage that vomited into open air. Flames seared the back of Bolan’s head, his hair curling up and snapping off instantly, his scalp singed. Something struck him hard between his shoulder blades, the Kevlar back of his armored, load-bearing vest and the trauma plates inside sucking up much of the force. Something hot and painful seared across his right shoulder, flesh parting under the impact.

Bolan hit the sand and buried his face in it as the gush of superheated air created a vacuum. The walls of the corrugated aluminum and plywood laboratory crumpled inward, the implosion crushing the building like a beer can. Twisted, and spewing smoke in the sand behind Bolan, the Jamaicans’ drug laboratory was history. He knew that he had left wounded enemy gunmen inside, and by now, those people were dead. There was a pang of regret. While he was known as the Executioner, Mack Bolan wasn’t a cruel man. The wounded he’d left behind were knocked out of the fight, no longer a threat to him. They’d have received medical aid once the battle was over, just small fry who didn’t deserve to suffer after they’d been put out of the fight.

It had been Long Eddy who’d set off the conflagration, and the dreadlocked crime lord had little concern for the people under his command. Right now, the Jamaican was racing along the beach toward a long pier where a couple of cigarette boats had been moored. His legs looked skinny and now completely black in contrast to the pristine white shorts that flapped above his knees like a skirt.

Bolan surged to his feet and whipped off the mask covering his nose and mouth, the collar of his blacksuit grinding painfully against the tender skin on his neck. He realized that his right shoulder wasn’t responding, though his hand was still clamped around the pistol grip of his M-4 rifle. He tried to pull up the muzzle of the weapon, and he knew that his nervous system had shut down, trying to suppress the pain of his injured arm.

Tentatively, Bolan reached to his shoulder, feeling the hard edges of broken glass shards sticking out of his deltoid and right biceps. One particularly large spear was jammed into the muscle just below his neck and behind his collarbone. He let his head droop, then his eyes locked on Long Eddy as the cop murderer leaped into his boat.

“Jack!” Bolan called over his throat mike. “I need a pickup, fast!”

“I saw the lab go up just now,” Jack Grimaldi, one of Bolan’s oldest surviving friends and allies, answered. Instants later, the bulbous form of a Hughes 500 helicopter rose over the trees, its downward rotor wash buffeting the Executioner with heavy winds.

“Jesus, Sarge!”

Bolan threw the M-4 onto the floor of the passenger cabin, then dragged himself into the back seat. “Do you see Long Eddy’s boat?”

“You need medical attention first. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig,” Grimaldi countered.

“I’ve come this far to bring down Eddy, I’m not going to let a couple of flesh wounds stop me from finishing the job,” Bolan said. “Go.”

Grimaldi was torn between obeying his friend’s order and concern for his health. “Take care of yourself while we catch up, damn it. I don’t want you bleeding to death—this is a rental, after all.”

It was one of those rare moments when the Executioner would have smiled, suppressing a chuckle at Grimaldi’s smart-ass remark, but the pain of wrenching off his load-bearing vest had overridden that bit of levity. The blood-smeared ballistic nylon shell dropped to the floor in a clump, and Bolan could see multiple deep gouges and burns where shrapnel and flame had tried to reach him. He gently touched his shoulder again and felt for the biggest pieces of broken glass. There were four jagged shards, and he’d have to take care of them before peeling himself out of his blacksuit top.

The largest piece of glass had plunged into Bolan’s shoulder muscle and come out far too easily for Bolan’s taste. He grimaced as he saw bits of human tissue—his muscle fibers to be exact—clinging to the blast-sharpened tip. The soldier let it tumble out into the wind. The other three pieces were smaller, but Bolan had to explore the wounds with his fingertips. He felt the ragged gash, wincing as he carefully advanced deeper into the rift of flesh, looking for any remaining bits that might not have come with the big shard. The cut was wide, and deep, so the soldier reached into a pocket of his vest for a packet of coagulant powder. The moment the compound hit the cavity of his shoulder wound, it turned into a semisolid gel that conformed to the shape of the injury, sealing off severed capillaries and damaged veins.

It wouldn’t last long, but Bolan could hold on long enough. Now that he’d stopped the bleeding, he plucked out the other square pieces of glass. A splinter at the top of his right biceps slid out with sickly stickiness, but none of these lesser lacerations were going to be a problem. The soldier slapped gauze and tape on the smaller cuts, then laid a thicker pad of sterile dressing on top of the shoulder wound, with medical tape sealing the clotting agent in place.

“Sarge, that boat must be rocket-powered,” Grimaldi said. “I’ve got this baby up to 110 miles per hour, and he’s still holding his distance.”

“Are you saying you can’t catch up with him?” Bolan asked, shrugging into the bloodied load-bearing vest. He winced as the shoulder wound took the pres sure, but the field dressing would stay in place, ironically thanks to the added weight. A fast pat-check showed him that he had three magazines left for the M-4, and the Beretta 93-R stored in a holster clipped to the side of the vest. Usually the Executioner liked having a shoulder rig for the sleek 9-mm pistol, but with heavy kit like the armored vest, he didn’t have space beneath the shell to fit his holster straps.

He zipped up the armored vest, tugging on its side vent straps to accommodate the lost layer of clothing. He didn’t need his gear bouncing and jiggling around, possibly doing more damage to his injured arm. Bolan flexed his right hand, then bent the arm a few times. He had movement, enough to handle his weapons, but it would be a temporary thing. He’d taken serious injuries before, and experience taught him that anything more than a few minutes of activity would sap the strength from the wounded limb.

Bolan transferred the M-4 to his left hand. While he was born predominantly right-handed, years of warfare had made him ambidextrous. He was glad he hadn’t taken a bullpup rifle into this fight because he didn’t have the time now to shift an ejection port for left-handed use. The M-4, as it was configured, was relatively friendly to left handers, especially with its selector switch and magazine release on both sides of the receiver. He adjusted the holographic scope atop the weapon, adjusting it for his “off-side” eye, knowing that the settings for his normal use would be way off target for his left eye. The new parallax was perfectly aligned now, enabling Bolan to put every bullet where he needed it to be.

He put Long Eddy in his sights, the red holographic dot centered on the Jamaican’s spine. Bolan pulled the trigger, but the physics of the helicopter and the cigarette boat over choppy waves sent his bullets careening over the side of the speedy watercraft. The tall Jamaican whipped his head around as fiberglass was chewed by autofire so close to his spine. Though there was no magnification on the holographic sight, Bolan knew that Long Eddy was shouting something. There was someone else on the boat.

“Jack! This has got to end!” Bolan roared. Grimaldi checked over his shoulder. Even through the dark visor of his pilot’s helmet, the soldier could see the look of concern on his friend’s face.

“You’re hurt!” Grimaldi called back, but already the sleek helicopter nosed down, its bulbous front locked on to the rapid, dartlike boat. “Too hurt for close quarters!”

“But not hurt enough to accept collateral damage,” Bolan growled. “He’s got someone down there.”

Grimaldi’s sigh hissed over their intercom. The Executioner knew that the pilot, his faithful friend through countless wars, had given himself over to the orders he had received. The two men had been working with relentless urgency in an effort to stop the Jamaican drug dealer, especially since Long Eddy had taken captives. For a brief few minutes, before Bolan had turned the heroin lab into a blazing funeral pyre for contraband and bandits alike, he had been under the impression that he had rescued all but one of the USO performers who were contributing their time and effort to American servicemen engaging in humanitarian aid in Haiti.

It had been a reckless firefight in an arena where there were plenty of volatile chemicals, but the one hostage that the Executioner had thought he’d failed was a young woman whose stage name wasn’t much different from the one she’d used when they’d first met in Japan. Punk singer Vicious Honey, despite her nearly anarchist lyrics and music, was still an artist who gave her all for the U.S. military. With the thought that Honey might have been dead in a ditch somewhere, Bolan had shut down and became an unstoppable killing machine. Only the blast of burning lab chemicals hurling him to the sand had snapped him out of his numbed warrior state.

For a moment Bolan wished that he’d still been in that war fury, as pulled muscles, bruises, burns and lacerations were weighing heavily on his shoulders. A flash of the familiar mix of pink-and-blond hair appeared in the cockpit of the speedboat.

“She’s alive!” Grimaldi spoke up. “But you already knew that.”

“Get me close,” Bolan said, discarding the M-4. In the tight quarters of the racing watercraft, even its compact length would be too unwieldy. This fight was going to need speed and brutality, so the Executioner drew his Beretta, removing its blunt suppressor so it would move even faster in his grasp. He wrapped his right hand around the handle of his combat knife, his teeth gritted as he knew that violent activity wasn’t going to do his injured arm any good.

Pain and convalescence were going to have to wait until a life was saved.

Bullets peppered against the bottom of the helicopter as Grimaldi swung the aircraft close enough for the warrior to jump. With a kick, Bolan hurled himself toward Long Eddy and the renegade Rasta who held Honey by the back of her neck.

For a brief heartbeat the world came to a stop, the roar of the rotor, the chatter of autofire, the rush of wind. Bolan was free from gravity, sailing to a spot between the tall masts of the cigarette boat’s airfoil spoiler. Even as he hung weightless, traversing from air to watercraft, he saw Honey’s blue eyes lock on him with recognition.

The shock of the diving Executioner left Long Eddy’s man staring at him, agape. Long Eddy himself, clutching the wheel of the boat with one hand and a sawed-off shotgun in the other, was also frozen in surprise.

The audacity of Bolan’s attack had bought him vital moments as his waffle-treaded boots slammed hard into the fiberglass shell between the spoiler’s supports.

Long Eddy recovered his wits, swinging up his shotgun up as Bolan pushed himself forward. Honey twisted, lowering her head, making herself even smaller than her petite five-foot-one. The Rasta struggled to keep Honey’s head up with his forearm under her chin, the Uzi in his other hand still aimed up toward the helicopter. The Executioner knew that he was going to take some pain, but he had committed to this, his lightning-fast mind plotting out the angles even as his forearms uncrossed.

The knife in his right hand struck the barrels of the stubby shotgun that Long Eddy raised, steel clanging on steel just a moment before the twin 12-gauge shells within detonated, launching their payload. Struck with twelve .36-caliber pellets just above his ribs, Bolan willed himself past the pain that slashed him from shoulder to right hip. The Beretta 93-R’s extended 6.5-inch barrel touched the captor in control of Honey, and as soon as Bolan felt that spongy contact, his finger closed on the trigger.

A 3-round burst tore through the gunman’s face, emptying his head of brains as if it were a gore-filled piñata. Honey snaked herself loose from the dead man’s grasp, pushing herself away from Long Eddy, who was still in the fight.

His shotgun’s payload expended, the Jamaican drug lord sneered and whipped it around like a club, the hot double-muzzle slicing open skin on Bolan’s cheek. The twin barrels and their wooden furniture continued swinging after the bloody impact, cracking against the soldier’s left wrist. It was almost painful enough for the Executioner to drop his Beretta, but all it succeeded in doing was stopping the gun from aiming at Long Eddy. The only weapon Bolan had was in his right hand, and his right biceps had taken two pellets from the shotgun, the bare limb pouring blood from the injury. Agony seemed to be crushing half of his body, but the Jamaican drug lord was looking to make a far more impressive dent in his adversary’s skull with the empty shotgun.

It felt as if Bolan were pushing his knife-wielding fist through molasses, muscles screaming at him to stop even as the double-bladed dagger’s tip struck Long Eddy in his chest, between the fourth and fifth buttons of his vividly colored shirt. There was resistance as the knife encountered a Kevlar vest underneath the linen shirt, but Bolan pushed hard with both legs, using their tremendous strength to add to the penetration power of the knife. The Kevlar’s ripping gave way to the squishy parting of flesh and the grinding rustle of bone cut by steel.

Blood poured over Long Eddy’s lower lip, his big brown eyes bulging in horror.

“Fuck…er…” Eddy gurgled as the Bokor Applegate-Fairbairn fighting blade twisted in the man’s chest, tearing arteries and bronchial tissue.

Bolan didn’t respond except to bring up the Beretta. A stroke of the trigger left the would-be king of Jamaican crime without half of his face and skull. Bone snagged the knife blade between ribs, and Bolan didn’t have the strength to yank it out. He simply released the blade’s handle, and Long Eddy’s corpse toppled backward over the rail, gangly limbs flying in the air as he struck the water.

Honey had figured out how to work the throttle and had killed the boat’s engines, then turned to Bolan. “You came for me?”

Bolan nodded weakly, collapsing into the pilot’s seat now that the danger was over. Less than a hundred yards away, black dorsal fins broke the surface around the splashy froth where Eddy had gone into the Caribbean Sea. “It let me take care of two birds with one stone.”

Honey chuckled nervously. “What do I call you now?”

“Friend is good enough,” Bolan answered. The trembling young woman gave him a tight hug, her eyes clenched shut so she couldn’t see him silently redden as she aggravated his broken rib.

“They were going to sell us,” Honey whispered. “The bastards were going to sell us.”

Bolan stroked the frightened young woman’s hair. “You’re too rebellious to be for sale, Honey. You’d have found a way out.”

Sooner or later, Bolan was going to have to start the engines and head for land, but right now, he had to soothe a young woman’s trauma and recover enough strength to pilot the craft. Above, Jack Grimaldi orbited the Hughes over the speedboat. With luck, Bolan would have a week or three to recover from the injuries he received today, but Long Eddy, the King of the Caribbean, was dead.

Bolan put enough breath together for four words as he watched a shark swim past, a gangly leg in its jaws. “Long live the king.”

CHAPTER TWO

Three couples were entwined in each other’s arms on the bobbing yacht that was anchored at sea. They were watching the Caribbean sunset, yet seemed more interested in their partner’s curves and supple warmth.

It was an idyllic interlude, the soundtrack provided by an MP3 file pumping out tropic island tunes over the yacht’s sound system.

Pierre Fortescue felt a pang of regret for ruining such a perfect romantic vacation, but it was quickly subsumed as he remembered that these were Americans, the people who had withdrawn their approval and allowed the Duvaliers’ ceaseless control of Haiti to disappear. Since the end of Papa Doc’s and Baby Doc’s reign, Fortescue’s home nation had fallen into a sewer pit. The worst insult was when the earthquake that he and the rest of his cult had prayed for was misread as the punishment of God against the nation that had bartered their freedom to the Devil.

Fortescue snorted. The gods that he and the Black Avengers spoke with predated the quaint humanist concepts of a supreme being weak enough to let his son be nailed to a tree. The loa were no sniveling pacifists, no way in heaven or hell. When the Fortescue family’s first Haitian ancestors called them down, their vengeance against France was a total emasculation that had allowed the British, an insane emperor, the Nazis and now the Muslims to overrun them and bring them ruin. The loa didn’t caress their enemies, they scourged the fools until they were hollow echoes of their former selves.

France was but one crippled victim of the dark lords of voodoo. And now, America and Haiti would feel the harsh caresses of voodoo magic.

The motion of the yacht wasn’t sufficient to make it hard for the tall, dark-skinned Fortescue to hop up, grab the rail and haul himself over. There were two young people on the deck, a swarthy young man with black hair, nuzzling into the neck of a young blond woman who looked emaciated except for a pair of swollen breasts too large for her bony torso.

Fortescue, crouching out of sight behind the deckhouse, sneered as he realized that those were probably some of the best breasts that money could buy. Typical whites—so frightened of having an ounce of body fat on them, and yet they were envious of the voluptuous curves of healthy women.

One of his fellow Black Avenger raiders had slipped aboard as he observed the scene, then opened up a small duffel to retrieve the inoculator pistols. Fortescue loaded the first twin-dart cartridge into the breech of the inoculator. The tiny weapons were designed for dealing with animals, and had been stolen from a Florida wildlife ranger station.

Fortescue walked onto the bow, staying low so as not to betray his position, yet craning his neck to see if there was any semblance of alarm on the part of the two couples on the port deck. They, like the couple closest to him, were oblivious to the presence of dark raiders on their craft. Fortescue cleared his throat, and the man looked up in his direction.

Fortescue could see that the young man was a Hispanic, and the young Latino grunted as Fortescue’s first dart caught him under his pectoral muscle. The dart wasn’t actually an anaesthetic but a quick-acting paralytic. The dose froze the young man, rendering him inert, yet not strong enough to stop his lungs. The blonde woman was about to squeal when Fortescue punched his second dart into her, striking her in the stomach. He wasn’t certain that if the dart had struck one of those silicone-inflated bags on her chest that it would reach her bloodstream.

The blonde stiffened in paralysis, the paralytic effects of the tubocurarine hitting her like a ton of bricks. The toxin was one of the main chemicals from the primitive jungle poison curare. The young woman’s eyes widened with horror as she was unable to move. She was too small, too light, for the dose of toxin that Fortescue had put into her, but as long as her diaphragm was paralyzed, she couldn’t make noise. It was better to let her die here, on the yacht.

The young man beside her was strong enough that his chest still rose and fell, lungs working despite the complete loss of strength in his arms and legs. He’d likely survive the dosing with tetrodotoxin, leaving him mentally malleable. It wasn’t as if a scrawny, ninety-pound girl would have provided as much of a threat as a 180-pound man, not with the plan proposed by Morrot, the Black Avengers’ leader.

Blue eyes looked up pleadingly at Fortescue. The young woman looked as if she wanted to move her lips, minor twitches, but the power of the tubocurarine was just too much for her. It would take upward of a minute or two more for her to suffocate. The young man twitched, able to influence his own body that much, staying alive. He could sense his lover’s distress, or at least see that she had stopped breathing.

Fortescue rested his hand on the paralyzed young man’s chest, checking for a heartbeat. You’ll forget her quickly enough, he thought. It was a pointless gesture, the youth couldn’t hear his thought, and he really didn’t care about his torment, but that brief show of compassion was something he felt the urge to give.

As soon as the Haitian had his dart gun loaded, he nodded to his companion. A third of their number was waiting in reserve, ready to hit anyone who wasn’t put down by Fortescue and friend’s darts.

Four quiet puffs of CO₂ launched their pointed, toxin-laden missiles with stealthy quickness. The two young couples were rendered immobile with little fuss or muss. One of the young men struggled, his lungs failing due to an unforeseen bout of asthmatic response, but two losses abovedeck were little loss to Morrot’s operational plans. Fortescue waved his assistants on to scoop up the unconscious ones, ignoring the flopped corpses on the decks.

“How many belowdecks?” Fortescue asked.

“Register says three crew and another couple,” his ally, Cornelius, said, looking at the laminated paper. “Do we take the crew?”

“They’re strong and will be useful,” Fortescue said. “Besides, these men aren’t true believers. Just because they share the same skin color means nothing. They are pagans, adherents to heathen gods.”

“They think the same about us,” Cornelius answered. “So, it’s only fair.”

“It is unconscionable that they consider us savages, worshipping carcasses impaled to planks or a burning shrubbery,” Fortescue replied. “When we make our move, their world’s streets will run with their blood.”

Cornelius’s smile was broad and infectious. “Blood shed by their own hands.”

Fortescue nodded sagely. “Reload, and we’ll head belowdecks. Get Gallad.”

The three Black Avengers headed below the deck.

THE STRAPS CUT into Guillermo Rojas’s wrists as consciousness returned to him, his arms twitching futilely in response to his feeling of restraint. Rojas wanted to turn his head, but a leather thong across his forehead and gripping his chin kept him still.

All he could remember was Stephanie, her gorgeous blue eyes alit with horror, foam streaming over her lips. Then there was the black shadow, wielding a strange, sci-fi-looking handgun, that reached out to touch his chest, as if to soothe his worries over the gurgling, drowning girl who trembled beside him. Rage and grief spun in his strap-bound chest, his fury an impotent storm as he didn’t know where the midnight-skinned marauder was, and grief over the sweet, blue-eyed creature he’d fallen for. Stephanie Coulton, tiny and privileged, had found him as beautiful as he’d found her, and had brought him down for a spring getaway despite her father’s disgust that she was consorting with someone that the man felt was destined to be a pool boy or a gardener, not her social equal.

She’d loved him, she’d defied her father, and now he knew what her face looked like when her lungs shut down, jammed with histamine. He knew the symptoms of bronchoconstriction well—Rojas was a medical student, only a year away from his first internship. His mind reeled as he searched for a reason why he’d just lain there, helpless as she died, suffocating.

His mouth was dry, and he wasn’t able to speak. His pharmaceutical knowledge simply wasn’t enough to determine what had happened, but he was certain that it wasn’t any form of anaesthetic. No “knockout drug” acted so quickly against a person, but he knew that there were toxins out there that were used for rapid incapacitation. He’d been present at emergency intubations, and knew anaesthesiologists utilized drugs that caused instant paralysis—which was why intubation teams acted instantly when the patients were given their injections. As soon as the subject went limp, the intubation tube was put down the windpipe and into the main bronchial tube.

Such a drug acted instantly, and was capable of stopping someone’s breathing, indeed it was counted on to prevent reflexive movement during surgery. Handled right, it could render a big man like him immobile, easily captured, but a dose that would leave him helpless was far too much for a girl who was half his weight. Muscles frozen, Stephanie was doomed the minute the toxin hit her bloodstream.

A fingertip caressed his cheek, and Rojas grimaced as his effort to turn was again stymied by the rig that held his head in place. Tendons cracked as they tried to move a completely immobilized head.

“The first one awake, good.”

Rojas tried to open his mouth, but he finally figured out the dryness in his mouth—a leather “tongue” was stuffed into it, and it was part of the multistrap system that held him immobile. All he could do was murmur past the gag.

“Yes, so sorry about not allowing you to speak, but unlike my favorite visionary, I do not care to listen to the wails and laments of my experiments,” the voice said, a lilting French accent weighing heavily on his words. His timber was deep, its resonant echo making Rojas imagine that it came not from a throat, but a bottomless gullet that would be more at home on a shark.

Rojas snorted, trying to trumpet out some form of sound. His eyes craned to see the shadowy man flitting in the darkness at the edges of his peripheral vision. His chewed on the leather pad that gagged him until his teeth started to hurt.