Breach of Peace (The Lawful Times #0.5)(22)

“Yes.” His voice cracked with fear.

“How many are in the building?”

“Over a dozen.”

The odds are in our favor.

More shots and screams rang out below.

“What is happening here tonight?”

“We were hired to store some carts for the M.O.D. That is all I know.”

“If that were all you knew, you wouldn't have armed yourself when you heard someone shout ‘Police.’ You were prepared to shoot officers of the law to defend a mystery box?”

No response.

A shot rang out from behind. Khlid reacted, kicking the back of her prisoner's knee and driving him to the floor. She rolled up facing the back of the hall and saw a man fall through the doorway Smits had been watching, dead.

Khlid’s prisoner reached for his dropped weapon, but before he could do more than grasp it, her rifle was at his temple.

The coward went limp.

She hit him again for his stupidity.

“You okay?” Smits called out. His eyes remained trained on the door.

Good man. “Yes.” She pulled a cord from her jacket pocket to bind the man’s hands. “Clear that room before we head down.” Patting the man down, Khlid found a note. It read, Eighty-four dead. Two successes. The inspector seems to be taking very well. A pit formed in her stomach.

“It’s Chapman. Something… something’s been done to him.”

Khlid got to her feet and ran to the back room.

Smits held a woman in a medical coat with her hands up at gunpoint. Tall, dark-haired, the woman seemed disturbingly at ease. Rather than distrustfully eyeing the officer holding her life in his hands, her focus was glued to a shirtless Chapman, restrained in a chair.

An empty syringe hung from his arm. A diseased-looking dark fluid undulated beneath his skin at the injection site, visibly pulsating in his veins. Two similar outbreaks writhed at his neck and armpit. His chest was almost completely overtaken by thick dark roots.

Khlid ran to him. He was conscious, but clearly in far too much pain to comprehend his plight. Soft moans rumbled weakly in his chest. Khlid tugged one of his eyes open. She could see the fluid seeping into them. The tendrils moved as if exploring Chapman’s body. She recoiled. Her friend spasmed involuntarily, with such force the wooden chair groaned.

“He’s beautiful.” The medical woman had an accent Khlid did not recognize. “Most would have begun deforming into monsters by now. He takes it like mother’s milk.”

“What did you do to him?”

“Ahh.” The woman’s grin widened. “We had fun playing with the little rebel inspector.”

Khlid looked back to Chapman. Aside from the nauseating motion of his flesh around the injection sites, Chapman bore many markings of hurried torture: His fingernails were peeled back. A stab wound was visible at his groin. His right nipple was—Khlid forced herself to stop examining the damage.

Instead she looked to the woman, still grinning with apparent glee at her work.

“Okay. Smits, watch the hall.” Khlid approached. The woman didn't flinch as Khlid walked right up to her nose, likely assuming an officer of the law would not assault someone in custody.

She was wrong.

Khlid picked the woman up by the collar and slammed her down on the desk. Into the wall. Into a chair that toppled with her. Back onto the desk. Out into the hall and then back into the office. Within thirty seconds, her grin had disappeared.

“What did you do to him?” Khlid hissed the words, holding the bleeding woman’s face within a foot of her own.

“We need as many subjects as we can get.” The woman coughed. “After we realized he wouldn’t tell us who sent him, we injected him.” Another cough, rattling now, with fluid.

Khlid had broken something in the doctor.

Good.

Khlid threw the woman back down onto the desk, crushing a case of the syringes. One, intact, rolled off the desk. Khlid caught it in her free hand, uncapped the needle, and brought it within an inch of the torturer’s left eye. “Tell me exactly what this does and why it was put into Lord Pruit, or this goes into that soulless eye.”

Petrified, the woman drew a ragged breath. “It makes them beautiful.”

“What?”

“Lord Pruit needed to be punished for his disobedience. A message for the rest of his ilk.”

“Disobedience? What did he do?”

“He attempted to profit off the Empire. The Empire found a new way to manufacture steel, a breakthrough that could assure the Empire’s supremacy for generations. And what did the short-sighted idiot do with it? He tried to tell us how much of it we could take. Signing contracts to sell privately. Now all his plants are ours.” She seemed to be gaining confidence as she spoke. “You don’t know what's coming tonight. You don't know whose operation this really is. You’re all going to die.”

“You know.” Khlid shoved the woman as hard as she could off the desk onto the floor. She wanted to ask more questions. She wanted more time. But every shot heard below could be the one that killed her husband. “I really don’t like tough talk.” She pulled her side arm and shot the woman three times.

Khlid walked to Chapman. “I am so sorry.” Khlid put her gun to his head. The image of Lord Pruit’s twisted form danced before her eyes. Her finger tightened on the trigger.