"Slaughterman"
Mar. 1st, 2023 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dochermes"Slaughterman"
3/22/2009
I.
From the floor in the corner of the living room, Bane watched the crooks as they stood near the windows. He had not really expected them to let any of the hostages go when he had surrendered himself. Half-sitting up, he tested his bonds. He was tied with wet clothesline, both wrists bound together behind him painfully tight. They had yanked off his jacket, removed his pistol and patted him down before tying him up, then forgotten about him.
As soon as their attention was elsewhere, the Dire Wolf carefully got his fingertips at the top of one boot. Years ago, he had started to order his boots handmade, with steel caps on toes and heels, as well as one more item. A ridge at the top of each boot was actually the raised back of a razor blade concealed in a slit. Without moving more than his fingers, Bane drew the blade out and cut through the clothesline. Long hours of practice let him do this without more than a nick or two. The bonds came loose.
One of the bank robbers turned to look at him suspiciously. He had lowered his Glock and held it loosely in one hand. The other one, the more dangerous one with the uneasy eyes, was peering out the window at the police car. There were only two officers and a plainclothesman out there. The robber shifted his grip on the shotgun.
Without any preliminary movements, Bane snapped up off the floor and plunged six feet at the robbers in a split-second. The one with the pistol took a full power backfist that twisted his head around until he looked down past his own shoulder, spinning him to crash to the floor. Sensing the motion behind him, the other robber swiveled, raising his shotgun but it was yanked away from him with a roughness that broke his trigger finger. In the same movement, Bane spun the shotgun in a vertical arc that hammered its barrel to the side of the man's face. That one also fell to the floor like a sack of wet laundry.
Bane put the shotgun far to one side, then lunged to pick up the Glock and also place it far out of reach. The Dire Wolf looked back over one shoulder where the Rourke family huddled terrified on their own couch. "It's all right!" he called loudly to them, speaking slowly to make his point. "They are both knocked out. I took their guns away. It's all over."
Very uncertainly, the father stood up. He was a soft, balding man in shorts and a white polo shirt. "I never saw anything like that. You just... you just rushed them before they could blink." He held out his hand to help his wife up, and the granddaughter had already jumped to her feet. "Who ARE you?"
"I'm nobody special," said Bane. Picking up a cell phone one of the crooks had dropped, he called the number of the plainclothes detective outside. "Lt Montez, it's all over. I'm opening the door. I will be dragging these losers out, tell the officers to hold their fire."
"Gotcha, Bane. Good work," came the gruff voice.
The Dire Wolf paused to retrieve his own pistol from the younger robber before grabbing the man under the arms and hauling him through the doorway. Outside, bright early spring sunlight struck him after being inside the dimly lit home. One cop handcuffed the prisoner, while the other officer came in to help Bane carry the other one outside as well.
"This guy has a dislocated jaw!" one officer said. "Man, they are both out for the count. What did you hit them with?"
"Oh, you know, just training and experience," Bane said, going back in. He retrieved his black sport jacket and tugged it on. "You folks all right?"
Mr Rourke came to shake hands vigorously. "I need to thank you. Anything I have is yours. When those bastards broke in here and held us at gunpoint, I thought we didn't have a chance. We were as good as dead. Then you came in, and they tied you up, and I thought you were a goner, too." He wouldn't let go of Bane's hand. "How can I repay you?"
Embarrassed, Bane disentangled himself. "It's my job," he said. "I don't need any reward." For once, the Dire Wolf decided against asking this man to join his network of observers. He headed out to where the bulk of Lt Joseph Montez loomed over the unconscious robbers. "You read them their rights yet?"
Montez snorted. He had been putting on weight again as trips to the gym had start becoming less frequent and boxes of donuts more so. "They won't be in any condition to listen. You hit them any harder and we would be calling for the coroner, Bane."
"It takes some judgement," Bane admitted. "Well, I guess I will be going about my business. I can come down to 20th Street and file a statement later?"
"No," Montez said. "I need to talk to you. The officers can watch these goons until the ambulance gets here. But even before you turned up, I had something you might be interested in."
"Something weird and gruesome, I expect?"
"Yep. Right up Dire Wolf territory. Listen. Earlier this morning, all LE agencies got a news flash. Up near Cayudoga Lake upstate. Richard Moore Dorsett escaped custody. That's right, Slaughterman."
Bane turned and looked at Montez with a new alertness. "Well. I didn't think I would hear that name again. Last I knew, he was in Federal custody and so-called experts were studying him."
"Cutting him up and watching him heal in seconds, more like it. I got rumors. Dorsett is a freak of some kind. You put a bullet in his chest, it pops out again an hour later. He got run over by a freaking Dodge pick-up and he sat up and started chasing it. I heard of people with good healing but that's crazy. And... I thought maybe you had some inside dope."
"Oh yes." Bane got closer and lowered his voice, which made Montez uneasy. "I tangled with Slaughterman twice, back in the old days. He regenerates, all right. By now, his powers must be weakening, though."
"You can tell me, Bane, How does it work? How can he heal up bullet holes and grow new skin after being set on fire?"
The Dire Wolf took a deep breath. "This is one of the things I know that you will find hard to believe, lieutenant. All the biologists they call in will never figure out Slaughterman, because he doesn't work by the laws of nature. He runs on gralic magick, based on a Darthan spell. That's right, when he kills somebody, he sucks in some of their lifefore and uses it to keep himself going. In a way, he's a vampire."
"Goddam. I used to laugh at stuff like that. But you know, I keep seeing things and learning things. Instead of drinking blood, he takes what? Vitality?"
"Exactly," Bane said. "It's been years since he has been in custody. His lifeforce must be getting low. My bet is that he made this break because it's his last chance."
"And you... you're going after him?"
"I am," said Bane emphatically. "Right away."
"Let me give you a lift. You heading back to your office?"
"Yes. Thank you." The two men walked over to Montez' unmarked car. "You remember Samhain?" asked Bane.
"Oh Christ protect us, how could I forget that devil? You brought in him a few times, too, didn't ya."
"And Seneca. They all had that same healing factor, based on stolen lifeforce. Samhain was the worst because he was intelligent and cunning. He would have been a serial killer even without his powers. Seneca, on the other hand, was just a beast. He didn't know why he was killing, he just did it."
As he navigated traffic with the ease of long practice, Lt Montez said, "Klein was right about you. Just before he retired, he told me you was like a guard dog protecting a bunch of sheep from predators they didn't even know about."
The faintest of smiles turned up the corners of Bane's thin lips. "Good old Harold Klein. He didn't trust me at first, even tried running me in a few times. It took years before he agreed we should work together."
"Same here. I'll tell you the truth, the boys at NYPD all say to never mention this in public, that it's all unofficial and off the records, but they told me when I transferred here that you should be called in for crimes too bizarre or unexplainable for the regular force to handle."
"It's what I do. It's my nature, can't change." At a red light, Bane opened the door. "I'll get out here, lieutenant. Thanks. I'll report as soon as things are settled." With that, the Dire Wolf stepped out and hopped up on the curb. 58th Street. He began moving fast, crossing over a few blocks. There was his bank. Going in, Bane asked to see his safe deposit box. A chunky young woman in a black and white striped dress let him into the vault and opened the compartment where he kept a wide flat metal box. She left him alone in a tiny cubicle. Bane spun two combination dials on the metal box and opened it. Some interesting items were in here. A tiny gold skull, a stone arrowhead, two green stars made of soft stone, a chamois bag full of cyrinkyl, some legal papers, a few keys. There was a bundle of fifty and twenty dollar bills. And the Eldar travel crystal.
Bane regarded it somberly. This was a relic of his earlier career with the KDF. It was a pale blue faceted gem, just small enough to fit within one hand, set in a pale gold frame. There were only eleven of these in the real world, as far as he knew, and he had seldom used this one since he had stepped down as KDF Director and re-opened his own PI agency. With a barely audible sigh, he closed off memories and slipped the crystal into the side pocket of his jacket. He locked the box and had the bank officer return it to its compartment, then went back on the street. Walking briskly, he got to 44th Street and 3rd Avenue quicker than he would have done in a car. Here was the small yellow brick building. He hurried through the lobby, down the short hall that ended in an EXIT ONLY alarmed door, and unlocked the plain wooden door that had a brass plate reading DIRE WOLF AGENCY.
Thumbing on the overhead lights, Bane went through the tiny waiting room to his office. At his desk, he checked for messages. Quite a few but nothing urgent. So far, he had managed to keep his office from getting too cluttered. There was the big oak desk with its reading lamp, a few plain wooden chairs scattered in front of it. To his right, facing 3rd Avenue, a leather sofa sat under the wide window with opaque curtains. There was a short endtable with a lamp at each end of the couch; the lamps did not quite match, but he had never gotten around to replacing them. In the far left corner, a door opened to a tiny compartment with a toilet and sink but no shower.
Bane had added a three shelf bookcase on the wall facing his desk, now starting to fill up with newspapers, clippings, general debris he threw there. The Dire Wolf unlocked hidden wheels on the bookcase and spun it away to reveal a compartment sunk into the ground. When he left this office, he expected he would have to pay a hefty fine for some of the unauthorized changes he had made, including this hiding place. Bane tugged up a trunk, carried it over and dropped it in the center of the room. Sudden excitement made his heart beat faster. He hadn't used this gear in too long a time.
Bane stripped off his outer clothes. He was already wearing a bodysuit of flexible grey metal which looked like wet silk with a faint sheen. He seldom went anywhere without this armor. The Trom-metal was not invincible but it gave good protection up to high-power rifle slugs. He drew on tough black pants with a number of flap pockets, then a black crewneck shirt of the same durable material. Under the sleeves, he fastened the sheaths of the silver-bladed daggers he had used his entire career. They had been a gift from Kenneth Dred, and Bane would have held on to them no matter what else he had to give up in life. He fixed straps to the ensalir setting on the Eldar travel crystal and tied it securely high on his back, between his shoulder blades. Then came a black waist-length jacket of a tough leathery material, also fitted with several flap pouches and inner pockets.
Digging through the trunk, Bane began stowing odd equipment in various pockets. Some was conventional, like a small first aid kit in a plastic box or a multiple-bladed tool knife, but most had been handcrafted for his use years ago. From a padded setting in the trunk, he took out an air gun with an extended barrel. For decades, he had used anesthetic darts in this to take enemies alive, but now he slid a clip of resonance caps in and clicked it shut. He buckled the gunbelt so the holster would be behind his left hip, hidden by the jacket.
Finally, Bane raised what looked like a black motorcycle helmet and lowered it over his head. It connected to the high collar of the jacket. He lowered the visor and saw the read-outs start on the heads-up display. Perfect. He knew Leonard Slade had guaranteed the Trom power source had an active usefulness longer than Bane's own life would be, but it was reassuring to check. The Dire Wolf slid up the visor again to its track inside the helmet. He felt good wearing the field suit. It brought back many memories and wearing it gave him a thrill of anticipation. Moving quicker than ever, he returned the trunk to its hiding place and swiveled the bookcase over it.
Now to see if he could see use the Eldar crystal. With it fastened to his back, since he was already in contact and did not need to place his fingers on it. Bane half-closed his eyes and visualized where he wanted to be. It was not enough to half-heartedly wish to gate, you had to put full-out will power into the effort. Bane concentrated hard. There came a silent flare of pale blue light and, when it faded, the office was empty.
II.
With a gasp, Jeremy Bane dropped to one knee and caught himself with his fingertips on the ground. That was harder than he had remembered. There had always been a jolt of transition as the travel crystal opened a gate and passed him from one location to another. But not like this. He straightened up and took a deep breath. He must be more out of practice than he had expected. Bane took his bearings. To his left was a body of water he recognized, the Schuyler Reservoir. He was about ten miles from the nearest town then. It was a gorgeous early spring afternoon in the Adirondacks, crisp and clear, with buds just opening on the trees and the mountains looming up blue and beautiful on the horizon, but the beauty of it all was lost on a city boy like him. To Bane, this was just another arena.
Bane slowly turned around. He was standing next to a dirt road. Without a specific exact location in the user's mind, the Eldar crystals tended to materialize near a source of gralic energy. He had used this natural attraction many times to appear where he would be needed most. Now he had to rely on his own instincts. Slaughterman was probably in the immediate area because this was where the crystal had brought him, and the fiend was weak from a lack of victims over the past few years. Bane got on the dirt road and set off in an easy trot that was faster than Olympic sprinters could match. In less than a mile, he caught sight of a car parked by the road. A white Jeep Cherokee. Items were spread out on a tablecloth, it looked like a picnic. Bane broke into a full run. The grass sloped down steeply toward the reservoir here and halfway down the slope he was a big man in an orange jumpsuit struggling with a woman. It was Dorsett!The Dire Wolf rushed for the scene full tilt.
The Slaughterman flung the limp body far to one side and turned to face this newcomer as Bane whirled to crack a spinning roundhouse kick hard to the killer's face. It connected with the sharp impact that sounded like a whip and Dorsett spun halfway around. The Dire Wolf smashed out three full-power punches in half a second, snapping the Slaughterman's head from side to side and knocking him down. In the instant that his opponent was on the ground, Bane stole a glance at the victim. From the angle her head was bent, she had to be dead. As Bane went for his airgun, Dorsett had lunged back up and seized him in a grip stronger than Human hands could match, lifting Bane up overhead and throwing him far out over the reservoir.
The freezing water closed over his head, but Bane had kept enough presence of mind to take and hold a breath before he hit. He kicked back up to the surface. Damn, he must be twenty feet away from shore. How could Slaughterman be that strong so soon? Despite the weight of his field suit, the Dire Wolf stroked quickly for shore in a fury. Water dripping off him, he got to his feet on the slope and raced up the hill. Dorsett was nowhere to be seen. Sprawled on the grass was the body of a young woman with light brown hair, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, lying with her head turned almost completely around. Within arm's reach was another woman, this one older and heavier, a bloody rock lying next to her crushed skull. Bane stepped past them. Leaning up against the Jeep was a man with a shaven head and grizzled beard, also dead. Blood spread over the front of his coat. Three victims, three lifeforce flames burning inside Robert Moore Dorsett. The Dire Wolf growled deep in his chest. He thought of looking for the keys to the jeep, then decided not to. Better to leave the crime scene as untouched as possible so he would have fewer questions to answer.
It was getting near dusk. Bane stepped onto the dirt road and spotted a few footprints. Big shoes. From the distance between the prints, it looked as if the man had been running. The Dire Wolf gave a last regretful glance at the victims and leaped down the road in a blur of motion.
Two miles down that road, a driveway led up to a big white two-story summer home. On the lawn was a rowboat, with cans of paint showing it was being readied for the season. A Dodge pick-up truck with a white cap was parked nearby, and two teenage boys stood there talking. They were maybe thirteen, thin and gangling in their jeans and baggy hooded sweatshirts, and they seemed to be arguing about some rap group. Suddenly they froze into silence.
Running up the road was the biggest man they had ever seen, way over six feet tall and wide. He was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit partially covered with fresh blood and he had a white cloth tied over his face, showing only his eyes. In one hand was a tire iron. He came straight at them.
"Dad! Hey, Dad!" one kid managed to yell before the tire iron whipped around to crack open his skull. The boy dropped ungracefully to the ground, and the killer swung to face the other one. That teen had made a run for it, screaming, and he got almost to the house before the tire iron spun in a whistling arc to crash hard between his shoulder blades. In another second, Dorsett was crouched over the boy, one meaty paw pressed down on the dying kid's body to suck the lifeforce out of him. Then he lurched over to kneel over his first victim. The Slaughterman drank deeply.
As Dorsett rose to his feet, he heard a man yell in a hoarse voice, "Why, you son of a bitch!" and he turned just as both barrels of a shotgun caught him point blank. Slaughterman was knocked down, his prison jumpsuit shredded by the pellets but he himself was not hurt. Without a twinge, he rose and ran right at the father, wrestling the shotgun away from the yelling man. Dorsett seized the father by the neck, with a grip that had the stolen strength of five human beings in it, and he pulled the man's head clean off with a sudden twist.
Then Dorsett paused, sensing some danger. He turned his masked face over one shoulder and dropped the body of the headless man before he had taken its lifeforce. Even in his clouded, hate-driven brain, there was something familiar about the figure in black who strode purposefully up the driveway toward him. That helmet...
"Bane," he rasped, the first word he had pronounced in years. As he spoke, he saw the Dire Wolf draw and fire, and something exploded right in his face. The resonance caps were designed to knock a man down, usually without fatal results although cracked ribs were common. Four more blasts detonated right in his face in close succession and Slaughterman went down.
Striding angrily up to the brute, Bane took in the scene. Three more victims. Three innocent people snuffed out, for no fault of their own, just so this monster could live on and on. Well, this would be an end to it. He holstered the empty airgun and reached Dorsett just as the killer got to his knees. Bane set himself, raised one leg and drove it out in the hardest straight kick he had ever thrown. Even as the Slaughterman fell backwards, Bane knew that no blow landed by flesh and blood could stop this creature for long. On the run here, he had thought about his options and abruptly knew what had to be done. The Dire Wolf stamped down hard with one boot right on Dorsett' chest and drew on the Eldar travel crystal strapped to his back.
Again, clear blue light swirled and played around them, and as the radiance faded, a burst of brutal cold hit them. Bane snapped shut the visor on his helmet. Even in his insulated field suit, temperatures of fifty below zero still stung. They were standing on a flat white surface of cloudy ice. Howling winds filled the air with tiny ice crystals. Even the inhuman Slaughterman was affected, he stumbled and got unsteadily to his feet, turning to his enemy in dismay.
Bane swung an open hand to take in their surroundings. "It's more than a thousand miles of this in every direction. Start walking, you animal. Long before you reach any outpost, your stolen lifeforce will be used up. This is Antarctica." As the Slaughterman made a move toward him, Bane stepped aside and knocked him down with an elbow to the back of the neck. "There's no point in returning you to custody. They will just keep you for study and sooner or later, you'll get out again. No, this is best. I figure you'll freeze solid in an hour at best, even with your stolen lifeforce, and you'll stay put here for the next million years. You deserve it!"
A final time, the gralic force blazed up. Bane was standing back on the dirt road in the Adirondacks again. He unfastened his helmet and took it off, a thick coating of ice breaking off his suit as he moved. The Dire Wolf suddenly felt tired. Using the travel crystal took a lot of mental effort. He went over and sat down on a boulder beside the road, putting his head down. No one living had seen him since he had left the city. In a few minutes, he could gate back to his office, take a hot shower and sleep for a day or two. Then he could decide what to tell Lt Montez. He debated not filling a report at all, just saying he had no luck in the hunt and avoiding the hours of questions. The important thing was that they had seen the last of the Slaughterman.
3/8/2013
3/22/2009
I.
From the floor in the corner of the living room, Bane watched the crooks as they stood near the windows. He had not really expected them to let any of the hostages go when he had surrendered himself. Half-sitting up, he tested his bonds. He was tied with wet clothesline, both wrists bound together behind him painfully tight. They had yanked off his jacket, removed his pistol and patted him down before tying him up, then forgotten about him.
As soon as their attention was elsewhere, the Dire Wolf carefully got his fingertips at the top of one boot. Years ago, he had started to order his boots handmade, with steel caps on toes and heels, as well as one more item. A ridge at the top of each boot was actually the raised back of a razor blade concealed in a slit. Without moving more than his fingers, Bane drew the blade out and cut through the clothesline. Long hours of practice let him do this without more than a nick or two. The bonds came loose.
One of the bank robbers turned to look at him suspiciously. He had lowered his Glock and held it loosely in one hand. The other one, the more dangerous one with the uneasy eyes, was peering out the window at the police car. There were only two officers and a plainclothesman out there. The robber shifted his grip on the shotgun.
Without any preliminary movements, Bane snapped up off the floor and plunged six feet at the robbers in a split-second. The one with the pistol took a full power backfist that twisted his head around until he looked down past his own shoulder, spinning him to crash to the floor. Sensing the motion behind him, the other robber swiveled, raising his shotgun but it was yanked away from him with a roughness that broke his trigger finger. In the same movement, Bane spun the shotgun in a vertical arc that hammered its barrel to the side of the man's face. That one also fell to the floor like a sack of wet laundry.
Bane put the shotgun far to one side, then lunged to pick up the Glock and also place it far out of reach. The Dire Wolf looked back over one shoulder where the Rourke family huddled terrified on their own couch. "It's all right!" he called loudly to them, speaking slowly to make his point. "They are both knocked out. I took their guns away. It's all over."
Very uncertainly, the father stood up. He was a soft, balding man in shorts and a white polo shirt. "I never saw anything like that. You just... you just rushed them before they could blink." He held out his hand to help his wife up, and the granddaughter had already jumped to her feet. "Who ARE you?"
"I'm nobody special," said Bane. Picking up a cell phone one of the crooks had dropped, he called the number of the plainclothes detective outside. "Lt Montez, it's all over. I'm opening the door. I will be dragging these losers out, tell the officers to hold their fire."
"Gotcha, Bane. Good work," came the gruff voice.
The Dire Wolf paused to retrieve his own pistol from the younger robber before grabbing the man under the arms and hauling him through the doorway. Outside, bright early spring sunlight struck him after being inside the dimly lit home. One cop handcuffed the prisoner, while the other officer came in to help Bane carry the other one outside as well.
"This guy has a dislocated jaw!" one officer said. "Man, they are both out for the count. What did you hit them with?"
"Oh, you know, just training and experience," Bane said, going back in. He retrieved his black sport jacket and tugged it on. "You folks all right?"
Mr Rourke came to shake hands vigorously. "I need to thank you. Anything I have is yours. When those bastards broke in here and held us at gunpoint, I thought we didn't have a chance. We were as good as dead. Then you came in, and they tied you up, and I thought you were a goner, too." He wouldn't let go of Bane's hand. "How can I repay you?"
Embarrassed, Bane disentangled himself. "It's my job," he said. "I don't need any reward." For once, the Dire Wolf decided against asking this man to join his network of observers. He headed out to where the bulk of Lt Joseph Montez loomed over the unconscious robbers. "You read them their rights yet?"
Montez snorted. He had been putting on weight again as trips to the gym had start becoming less frequent and boxes of donuts more so. "They won't be in any condition to listen. You hit them any harder and we would be calling for the coroner, Bane."
"It takes some judgement," Bane admitted. "Well, I guess I will be going about my business. I can come down to 20th Street and file a statement later?"
"No," Montez said. "I need to talk to you. The officers can watch these goons until the ambulance gets here. But even before you turned up, I had something you might be interested in."
"Something weird and gruesome, I expect?"
"Yep. Right up Dire Wolf territory. Listen. Earlier this morning, all LE agencies got a news flash. Up near Cayudoga Lake upstate. Richard Moore Dorsett escaped custody. That's right, Slaughterman."
Bane turned and looked at Montez with a new alertness. "Well. I didn't think I would hear that name again. Last I knew, he was in Federal custody and so-called experts were studying him."
"Cutting him up and watching him heal in seconds, more like it. I got rumors. Dorsett is a freak of some kind. You put a bullet in his chest, it pops out again an hour later. He got run over by a freaking Dodge pick-up and he sat up and started chasing it. I heard of people with good healing but that's crazy. And... I thought maybe you had some inside dope."
"Oh yes." Bane got closer and lowered his voice, which made Montez uneasy. "I tangled with Slaughterman twice, back in the old days. He regenerates, all right. By now, his powers must be weakening, though."
"You can tell me, Bane, How does it work? How can he heal up bullet holes and grow new skin after being set on fire?"
The Dire Wolf took a deep breath. "This is one of the things I know that you will find hard to believe, lieutenant. All the biologists they call in will never figure out Slaughterman, because he doesn't work by the laws of nature. He runs on gralic magick, based on a Darthan spell. That's right, when he kills somebody, he sucks in some of their lifefore and uses it to keep himself going. In a way, he's a vampire."
"Goddam. I used to laugh at stuff like that. But you know, I keep seeing things and learning things. Instead of drinking blood, he takes what? Vitality?"
"Exactly," Bane said. "It's been years since he has been in custody. His lifeforce must be getting low. My bet is that he made this break because it's his last chance."
"And you... you're going after him?"
"I am," said Bane emphatically. "Right away."
"Let me give you a lift. You heading back to your office?"
"Yes. Thank you." The two men walked over to Montez' unmarked car. "You remember Samhain?" asked Bane.
"Oh Christ protect us, how could I forget that devil? You brought in him a few times, too, didn't ya."
"And Seneca. They all had that same healing factor, based on stolen lifeforce. Samhain was the worst because he was intelligent and cunning. He would have been a serial killer even without his powers. Seneca, on the other hand, was just a beast. He didn't know why he was killing, he just did it."
As he navigated traffic with the ease of long practice, Lt Montez said, "Klein was right about you. Just before he retired, he told me you was like a guard dog protecting a bunch of sheep from predators they didn't even know about."
The faintest of smiles turned up the corners of Bane's thin lips. "Good old Harold Klein. He didn't trust me at first, even tried running me in a few times. It took years before he agreed we should work together."
"Same here. I'll tell you the truth, the boys at NYPD all say to never mention this in public, that it's all unofficial and off the records, but they told me when I transferred here that you should be called in for crimes too bizarre or unexplainable for the regular force to handle."
"It's what I do. It's my nature, can't change." At a red light, Bane opened the door. "I'll get out here, lieutenant. Thanks. I'll report as soon as things are settled." With that, the Dire Wolf stepped out and hopped up on the curb. 58th Street. He began moving fast, crossing over a few blocks. There was his bank. Going in, Bane asked to see his safe deposit box. A chunky young woman in a black and white striped dress let him into the vault and opened the compartment where he kept a wide flat metal box. She left him alone in a tiny cubicle. Bane spun two combination dials on the metal box and opened it. Some interesting items were in here. A tiny gold skull, a stone arrowhead, two green stars made of soft stone, a chamois bag full of cyrinkyl, some legal papers, a few keys. There was a bundle of fifty and twenty dollar bills. And the Eldar travel crystal.
Bane regarded it somberly. This was a relic of his earlier career with the KDF. It was a pale blue faceted gem, just small enough to fit within one hand, set in a pale gold frame. There were only eleven of these in the real world, as far as he knew, and he had seldom used this one since he had stepped down as KDF Director and re-opened his own PI agency. With a barely audible sigh, he closed off memories and slipped the crystal into the side pocket of his jacket. He locked the box and had the bank officer return it to its compartment, then went back on the street. Walking briskly, he got to 44th Street and 3rd Avenue quicker than he would have done in a car. Here was the small yellow brick building. He hurried through the lobby, down the short hall that ended in an EXIT ONLY alarmed door, and unlocked the plain wooden door that had a brass plate reading DIRE WOLF AGENCY.
Thumbing on the overhead lights, Bane went through the tiny waiting room to his office. At his desk, he checked for messages. Quite a few but nothing urgent. So far, he had managed to keep his office from getting too cluttered. There was the big oak desk with its reading lamp, a few plain wooden chairs scattered in front of it. To his right, facing 3rd Avenue, a leather sofa sat under the wide window with opaque curtains. There was a short endtable with a lamp at each end of the couch; the lamps did not quite match, but he had never gotten around to replacing them. In the far left corner, a door opened to a tiny compartment with a toilet and sink but no shower.
Bane had added a three shelf bookcase on the wall facing his desk, now starting to fill up with newspapers, clippings, general debris he threw there. The Dire Wolf unlocked hidden wheels on the bookcase and spun it away to reveal a compartment sunk into the ground. When he left this office, he expected he would have to pay a hefty fine for some of the unauthorized changes he had made, including this hiding place. Bane tugged up a trunk, carried it over and dropped it in the center of the room. Sudden excitement made his heart beat faster. He hadn't used this gear in too long a time.
Bane stripped off his outer clothes. He was already wearing a bodysuit of flexible grey metal which looked like wet silk with a faint sheen. He seldom went anywhere without this armor. The Trom-metal was not invincible but it gave good protection up to high-power rifle slugs. He drew on tough black pants with a number of flap pockets, then a black crewneck shirt of the same durable material. Under the sleeves, he fastened the sheaths of the silver-bladed daggers he had used his entire career. They had been a gift from Kenneth Dred, and Bane would have held on to them no matter what else he had to give up in life. He fixed straps to the ensalir setting on the Eldar travel crystal and tied it securely high on his back, between his shoulder blades. Then came a black waist-length jacket of a tough leathery material, also fitted with several flap pouches and inner pockets.
Digging through the trunk, Bane began stowing odd equipment in various pockets. Some was conventional, like a small first aid kit in a plastic box or a multiple-bladed tool knife, but most had been handcrafted for his use years ago. From a padded setting in the trunk, he took out an air gun with an extended barrel. For decades, he had used anesthetic darts in this to take enemies alive, but now he slid a clip of resonance caps in and clicked it shut. He buckled the gunbelt so the holster would be behind his left hip, hidden by the jacket.
Finally, Bane raised what looked like a black motorcycle helmet and lowered it over his head. It connected to the high collar of the jacket. He lowered the visor and saw the read-outs start on the heads-up display. Perfect. He knew Leonard Slade had guaranteed the Trom power source had an active usefulness longer than Bane's own life would be, but it was reassuring to check. The Dire Wolf slid up the visor again to its track inside the helmet. He felt good wearing the field suit. It brought back many memories and wearing it gave him a thrill of anticipation. Moving quicker than ever, he returned the trunk to its hiding place and swiveled the bookcase over it.
Now to see if he could see use the Eldar crystal. With it fastened to his back, since he was already in contact and did not need to place his fingers on it. Bane half-closed his eyes and visualized where he wanted to be. It was not enough to half-heartedly wish to gate, you had to put full-out will power into the effort. Bane concentrated hard. There came a silent flare of pale blue light and, when it faded, the office was empty.
II.
With a gasp, Jeremy Bane dropped to one knee and caught himself with his fingertips on the ground. That was harder than he had remembered. There had always been a jolt of transition as the travel crystal opened a gate and passed him from one location to another. But not like this. He straightened up and took a deep breath. He must be more out of practice than he had expected. Bane took his bearings. To his left was a body of water he recognized, the Schuyler Reservoir. He was about ten miles from the nearest town then. It was a gorgeous early spring afternoon in the Adirondacks, crisp and clear, with buds just opening on the trees and the mountains looming up blue and beautiful on the horizon, but the beauty of it all was lost on a city boy like him. To Bane, this was just another arena.
Bane slowly turned around. He was standing next to a dirt road. Without a specific exact location in the user's mind, the Eldar crystals tended to materialize near a source of gralic energy. He had used this natural attraction many times to appear where he would be needed most. Now he had to rely on his own instincts. Slaughterman was probably in the immediate area because this was where the crystal had brought him, and the fiend was weak from a lack of victims over the past few years. Bane got on the dirt road and set off in an easy trot that was faster than Olympic sprinters could match. In less than a mile, he caught sight of a car parked by the road. A white Jeep Cherokee. Items were spread out on a tablecloth, it looked like a picnic. Bane broke into a full run. The grass sloped down steeply toward the reservoir here and halfway down the slope he was a big man in an orange jumpsuit struggling with a woman. It was Dorsett!The Dire Wolf rushed for the scene full tilt.
The Slaughterman flung the limp body far to one side and turned to face this newcomer as Bane whirled to crack a spinning roundhouse kick hard to the killer's face. It connected with the sharp impact that sounded like a whip and Dorsett spun halfway around. The Dire Wolf smashed out three full-power punches in half a second, snapping the Slaughterman's head from side to side and knocking him down. In the instant that his opponent was on the ground, Bane stole a glance at the victim. From the angle her head was bent, she had to be dead. As Bane went for his airgun, Dorsett had lunged back up and seized him in a grip stronger than Human hands could match, lifting Bane up overhead and throwing him far out over the reservoir.
The freezing water closed over his head, but Bane had kept enough presence of mind to take and hold a breath before he hit. He kicked back up to the surface. Damn, he must be twenty feet away from shore. How could Slaughterman be that strong so soon? Despite the weight of his field suit, the Dire Wolf stroked quickly for shore in a fury. Water dripping off him, he got to his feet on the slope and raced up the hill. Dorsett was nowhere to be seen. Sprawled on the grass was the body of a young woman with light brown hair, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, lying with her head turned almost completely around. Within arm's reach was another woman, this one older and heavier, a bloody rock lying next to her crushed skull. Bane stepped past them. Leaning up against the Jeep was a man with a shaven head and grizzled beard, also dead. Blood spread over the front of his coat. Three victims, three lifeforce flames burning inside Robert Moore Dorsett. The Dire Wolf growled deep in his chest. He thought of looking for the keys to the jeep, then decided not to. Better to leave the crime scene as untouched as possible so he would have fewer questions to answer.
It was getting near dusk. Bane stepped onto the dirt road and spotted a few footprints. Big shoes. From the distance between the prints, it looked as if the man had been running. The Dire Wolf gave a last regretful glance at the victims and leaped down the road in a blur of motion.
Two miles down that road, a driveway led up to a big white two-story summer home. On the lawn was a rowboat, with cans of paint showing it was being readied for the season. A Dodge pick-up truck with a white cap was parked nearby, and two teenage boys stood there talking. They were maybe thirteen, thin and gangling in their jeans and baggy hooded sweatshirts, and they seemed to be arguing about some rap group. Suddenly they froze into silence.
Running up the road was the biggest man they had ever seen, way over six feet tall and wide. He was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit partially covered with fresh blood and he had a white cloth tied over his face, showing only his eyes. In one hand was a tire iron. He came straight at them.
"Dad! Hey, Dad!" one kid managed to yell before the tire iron whipped around to crack open his skull. The boy dropped ungracefully to the ground, and the killer swung to face the other one. That teen had made a run for it, screaming, and he got almost to the house before the tire iron spun in a whistling arc to crash hard between his shoulder blades. In another second, Dorsett was crouched over the boy, one meaty paw pressed down on the dying kid's body to suck the lifeforce out of him. Then he lurched over to kneel over his first victim. The Slaughterman drank deeply.
As Dorsett rose to his feet, he heard a man yell in a hoarse voice, "Why, you son of a bitch!" and he turned just as both barrels of a shotgun caught him point blank. Slaughterman was knocked down, his prison jumpsuit shredded by the pellets but he himself was not hurt. Without a twinge, he rose and ran right at the father, wrestling the shotgun away from the yelling man. Dorsett seized the father by the neck, with a grip that had the stolen strength of five human beings in it, and he pulled the man's head clean off with a sudden twist.
Then Dorsett paused, sensing some danger. He turned his masked face over one shoulder and dropped the body of the headless man before he had taken its lifeforce. Even in his clouded, hate-driven brain, there was something familiar about the figure in black who strode purposefully up the driveway toward him. That helmet...
"Bane," he rasped, the first word he had pronounced in years. As he spoke, he saw the Dire Wolf draw and fire, and something exploded right in his face. The resonance caps were designed to knock a man down, usually without fatal results although cracked ribs were common. Four more blasts detonated right in his face in close succession and Slaughterman went down.
Striding angrily up to the brute, Bane took in the scene. Three more victims. Three innocent people snuffed out, for no fault of their own, just so this monster could live on and on. Well, this would be an end to it. He holstered the empty airgun and reached Dorsett just as the killer got to his knees. Bane set himself, raised one leg and drove it out in the hardest straight kick he had ever thrown. Even as the Slaughterman fell backwards, Bane knew that no blow landed by flesh and blood could stop this creature for long. On the run here, he had thought about his options and abruptly knew what had to be done. The Dire Wolf stamped down hard with one boot right on Dorsett' chest and drew on the Eldar travel crystal strapped to his back.
Again, clear blue light swirled and played around them, and as the radiance faded, a burst of brutal cold hit them. Bane snapped shut the visor on his helmet. Even in his insulated field suit, temperatures of fifty below zero still stung. They were standing on a flat white surface of cloudy ice. Howling winds filled the air with tiny ice crystals. Even the inhuman Slaughterman was affected, he stumbled and got unsteadily to his feet, turning to his enemy in dismay.
Bane swung an open hand to take in their surroundings. "It's more than a thousand miles of this in every direction. Start walking, you animal. Long before you reach any outpost, your stolen lifeforce will be used up. This is Antarctica." As the Slaughterman made a move toward him, Bane stepped aside and knocked him down with an elbow to the back of the neck. "There's no point in returning you to custody. They will just keep you for study and sooner or later, you'll get out again. No, this is best. I figure you'll freeze solid in an hour at best, even with your stolen lifeforce, and you'll stay put here for the next million years. You deserve it!"
A final time, the gralic force blazed up. Bane was standing back on the dirt road in the Adirondacks again. He unfastened his helmet and took it off, a thick coating of ice breaking off his suit as he moved. The Dire Wolf suddenly felt tired. Using the travel crystal took a lot of mental effort. He went over and sat down on a boulder beside the road, putting his head down. No one living had seen him since he had left the city. In a few minutes, he could gate back to his office, take a hot shower and sleep for a day or two. Then he could decide what to tell Lt Montez. He debated not filling a report at all, just saying he had no luck in the hunt and avoiding the hours of questions. The important thing was that they had seen the last of the Slaughterman.
3/8/2013
