Chapter 22: Raid
STAY WITH ME: A Superhero Novel
Snow crunches under the Assassin’s heel. This is not Estreya. This is somewhere very far away. Somewhere where these cities are unknown to each other. Somewhere where the police don’t have nearly as much power.
She’s dressed much the same as before: a leather jacket, black jeans, and a ski mask. In fact, it seems she hasn’t changed at all. Her gloved hand, sliced across the knuckle, rests on a sheath to a sword at her hip. There are knives hidden all over her body. In the spirit of keeping things interesting, she elected to not bring any of her guns.
She marches with deliberation, her eyes focused only on what’s ahead. She walks down a cobblestone path leading to the city square. At the center is the statue of a tall, thin man with a handlebar mustache and a mean slouch. The name is both in Russian and English: BILL.
She looks up at the statue and snorts. Reaches up and palms Bill’s marble calf. Makes the slightest push, and CRACK! the statue splits off at its knee and faceplants into the cobblestone, eliciting a mighty BOOM. Fractures erupt all over the stone, and it breaks into chunks.
Lights flicker on in the buildings around her, except in the tall, looming complex ahead. Made of brick. That place stays dark, but she knows those people. She knows what they’ll do. She almost feels sorry for them; they have no idea who they’re up against.
Well… she’d at least like to give them a hint.
She pulls her mask off with one hand, letting her long, raven hair fly free. She takes a big, theatrical bow.
She stuffs the mask away. Moves ahead at a calm pace.
Bang!
A bullet pounds into the cobblestone at her feet, sending plumes of dust and debris shooting upwards. The dust sprays onto her outfit. A warning shot, it’s nothing of her concern. She advances.
Bang!
Another plume. She marches forward, unimpressed. That’s when she notices a sudden movement. A black glint from one of the ground floor windows. They’re aiming right at her face.
She breaks into a wide, toothy smile—
BANG!
There’s a flash of light, and she collapses on her back.
Cold winds bluster by.
The door to the dark building opens. A bearded man in a suit slinks out of the tower, crouched low with his gun pointed at the ground. Behind him, other men in suits fan out in formation. Slowly, they move towards the fallen Assassin, making a perimeter around her.
The head goon shimmies forward. Takes a knee and grabs the Assassin’s leather jacket to lift her sagging body up.
The Assassin seems unconscious but decidedly isn’t bleeding.
The goon furrows his brow…
…and the Assassin’s mouth opens wide. Wedged between her teeth is the bullet. Playfully, she pushes her tongue against it. The bullet pops out of her mouth. Soars and spins in front of the goon’s eyes.
“Really?” he sighs in Russian.
The Assassin tugs the goon downward. He yelps as she flips herself over him. The perimeter backs off. Raises their guns. One particularly antsy goon ignores the others and fires, despite the Assassin’s iron grip on his comrade.
The bullet strikes the Assassin in the thigh. She doesn’t even flinch. She merely looks at the goon with annoyance.
He bites his lip and shoots again. Again. Again.
Bullets puncture her clothing but harmlessly bounce to the ground.
The Assassin holds her arms out and shrugs. She speaks in the Russian tongue that’s native to her. “What can I say? I’m immune.”
“Demon!” the gunman barks. He waves at the others to join him, and an onslaught of bullets pound into the Assassin’s body from all sides, narrowly avoiding the goon she’s holding hostage. Of course, the gunfire accomplishes nothing but make the Assassin laugh. Some fifty bullets collapse around her, glinting under the moonlight.
The goon she’s got in her grip tries to make a move at her. She forces him down and purely out of aggravation, she punches him in the chest. His body thumps into the pavement hard enough to fracture the cobblestone into a small crater. His spine utterly broken, his heart stopped, he dies instantaneously.
“Oh,” she says. “Oops.”
His name was Sergey. He was the best at billiards. Oftentimes, it was just him and her going at it.
She looks up.
All around her, the mobsters stare at Sergey. They exchange nervous glances, but still they aim their guns at her.
The Assassin extends herself to her full height. Holds her arms out in a friendly way.
“Ivan! Alexei! Mikhail! Oleg!” She speaks as if she had just bumped into them at the grocery store.
The goons all frown. Even when they do meet people at the grocery store, they are not so cordial.
“Maxim! Svetlana! Danyl! Uh, randos I don’t know!” the Assassin says. “So good to see everyone. Now, you must know what I’m here for. There’s no reason to keep holding onto her. If you raise your weapons, I am almost certainly going to have to kill all of you. So maybe consider running—”
“You killed Sergey!” Oleg barks. “You’re a traitor!”
The Assassin pinches the bridge of her nose. “That was an accident. If you can believe it, I have superpowers now. Just working out the kinks.”
Mikhail suddenly loses his composure and lunges at her with a jagged knife.
She dodges the lunge with ease. Grabs Mikhail by the wrist. Squeezes hard enough to crack bone. As Mikhail howls in agony, she holds his wrist up like a trophy.
“I’m being serious, fellas!” the Assassin says. “I don’t like doing this!”
Ivan lunges at her with a dagger. She scoffs, merely dragging Mikhail before her as a meatshield. The dagger goes through his back and into his chest. He squirms as the dagger shreds his innards. She casually tosses him aside while going for a high kick to Ivan’s chin. Mikhail hits the ground, writhing, while Ivan’s head snaps ninety degrees against his neck. He falls to the ground.
Ivan showed her The Sopranos when she was a teenager. But then again, he went along with what Bill said. Just like everyone else.
Another man charges at her. This man she doesn’t know at least. She grabs him mid-rush and hurls him through the air. He flies several feet across the city square. His head bashes straight-on into a brick wall, and he falls to the ground, dead as the rest of them are going to be.
Someone grabs her from behind. She yanks a knife out from her sleeve and stabs him in the stomach. Over and over. He squirms, losing his grip on her fast. He falls backwards, and she spins around. Slashes him in the throat. Turns away before she can catch a glimpse of his face. The way he moved though, she’s sure that was Maxim.
The remaining goons all charge at her at once. It strikes her as odd, she figured at least someone would have the wits to run away. She’s a ghoul from the dead, they should be terrified of her. And she sees that in their eyes, but something’s forcing them to do this. Forcing them to throw their lives away against her.
What does it matter? she supposes. She knew this would happen. She spent years planning this after all. Funny that the solution only came to her at the very end.
She kills. She slashes throats. Stabs people in the chest. Cracks necks.
It’s not even hard. They flutter around her like flies, pointlessly failing to attack her with their puny might. She crushes them, and within seconds, it’s over. She ends every last one of them. Their bodies fall around her like dominos, and she lets her eyes drift towards the starry sky.
There are no powerplants here. Because of Bill. Bill protects them. But never did he try to protect her.
She takes a knee. Looks at Ivan’s face, frozen in terror. Blood all over his chest. She sighs. Sticks a hand into one of his pockets and pulls out a lighter. Reaches into her own pocket and returns with a cigarette.
Klick-klick!
Fwoo!
She lights the cigarette. Takes a long drag, closes her eyes, and breathes out. Despite the eternal numbness within her body, she can still feel this. Sweet relief somewhat resembling an actual catharsis. She drops down to the ground, cross-legged and starts counting bodies. Suddenly, she stops and looks at Ivan’s frozen look of horror.
“What are you looking at?” she says.
Ivan does nothing. He’s dead.
“I’m just counting the bodies! What do you think I am—a sociopath?! It’d be weird if I didn’t know many people I’ve killed!”
The Assassin opens the big, wide door to the tall, brick building and steps into the dark foyer. Looks up the tower. The walls are lined with a winding staircase up to the top. Six stories by her memory, though she hasn’t been here in… five years? Perhaps more. Regardless, she might be able to jump it. Who knows if she can actually pull it off… though really anything is worth trying nowadays.
“Lydia!” a voice calls out from up high. Oily and raspy with a faint whistle bleeding through. “Lydia, Lydia, Lydia…”
Bill emerges from the top floor, standing at the very edge. Thin with a thick handlebar mustache. Aged, patchy skin. Blond hair. Square jaw. Leather jacket.
“How did things get so fucked up, eh?” he sighs.
Lydia narrows her eyes. Sidesteps around the perimeter of the room, looking for an opening.
“I think you know, Bill,” she says coolly.
“Well,” he huffs. “I do. But you just killed all my buddies. You didn’t have to do that.”
The contempt she holds for this man curdles in her chest. Though his fate is already sealed, she still finds that she must restrain herself. His death needs to be a perfect one after all.
“I gave them the chance to walk,” Lydia says. “But you probably told them not to run. Actually, I doubt you even needed to give the command, they’ve just always done it for you. You’ve been so goddamned lucky to have been loved by so many, Bill. But now your time ends.”
He rests his hand on the banister.
“Well, to each their own, I suppose,” he says, unfurling his hand, revealing a gray orb. He pushes it gently and it tumbles down the shaft, landing directly in front of Lydia.
A grenade.
Can she handle a grenade?
The thought makes her laugh. She cackles loudly into the air as the grenade bursts, the flames enveloping her. She feels a faint tingling on her skin, much like holding one’s hand a few inches over a stovetop burner. A quick semblance of feeling that she craves. She laughs louder, and the flames die down. She stands in a crater, completely fine.
“Oh, baby doll!” she cries out and leaps into the air. All the way up to the second floor bannister. She grabs onto it, shimmies her feet onto the floor, and leap frogs her way up the tower. Just as she leaps from the fourth floor bannister, Bill drops another grenade. It explodes—
BOOM!
—taking out the fourth floor beneath her. The structure crumbles away, the floor collapsing down to the third floor. Another loud BOOM!, and the third floor breaks apart, initiating a chain reaction of avalanches. Still, Lydia is unharmed. She rockets through the blast, emerging from Hell itself to reach the fifth floor. Then the sixth.
She leans against the bannister, searching for Bill, but he’s disappeared. The entire building shakes, the floor breaking apart at her feet. She steps forward, following her intuition, and passes into the first room she sees: Bill’s office. A royal red carpet runs through the center of the room. Statues line the walls, statues of past enforcers who meant quite a bit to Bill. At the very end of the room is a large portrait of Bill himself, larger than life.
Most prominently though, there’s a hostage tied to a chair. The rope binding them is minimally wrapped, at least for someone as talented as this captive. She has long, curly white hair and red eyes. Somewhere in her early thirties. Soft chin. Small nose. All personality from her has been sucked dry. She is defeated. Slouched over, arms hanging at her sides. Her eyes are utterly disconnected from this place. Downcast and glazed over. Burrowing into a world that’s hopefully a little brighter.
Bill stands beside her. There’s a gun in his hand. He raises it up.
Lydia rolls her eyes. “After all that, you think a fucking gun will still work?”
Click.
The barrel pops out. Bill spins it with his finger, dumping the bullets across the floor. He limply tosses the gun aside, a toothy grin breaking across his face. His arms held out, positioned for some kind of embrace. (Disgusting.)
“Listen, you want her, you can have her,” he says. “I shouldn’t have let it go this far, but I’m still here. I can still do what I do, and you can still do what you do. Happy?”
Lydia shakes her head.
He backs away, left hand suspiciously falling down to his hip. His voice shakes. “What about Gurgurant?”
She stalks after him. “I wish I knew.”
She rushes him. Bill’s left hand flies up from his hip, a different gun in hand. How utterly predictable. He fires. The bullets pound into her body, as if it matters. She crosses the gap between them in but a moment. Takes her knife and plunges it right into Bill’s heart. He makes a blood curdling cry. She withdraws then thrusts again.
Lydia pursues Bill across the floor, thrusting and thrusting, cutting away more and more at the same chest wound. Blood spills across his chest. She smirks and stabs, stabs, stabs—
His back hits the wall.
She reaches for her sheath. Pulls her sword free and plunges it into the open wound. Bill howls in agony. She forces his head back and thrusts the sword through his chest and out the back. She runs the sword through him until the hilt finds his chest. Now pinned to the wall, she releases him. Leans in close, inspecting every echo of pain spasming across his face.
“Alright, this place is kaput, but I’m going to set it on fire anyways, you know the drill,” she says casually. “You can either stay and watch the show, or call it quits and pull the blade. Doesn’t matter to me. I got what I came here for.”
Bill gurgles something indistinct. Feebly reaches out to grab her, pulling something in his chest. He gasps a hollow sound and falls back against the wall.
Lydia smirks, though the smile doesn’t reach her eyes, and turns away. She approaches the hostage, who hasn’t looked up from her dazed trance at all through all this. Lydia takes off her glove and gently slides her finger under the hostage’s chin. Just a little pressure to raise her head up.
The hostage’s red eyes find hers. They widen slightly with recognition.
“No,” the hostage says in a childish intonation. She winces and looks away.
Lydia shakes her head. Speaks much less harshly than she’s used to, her voice getting soft with understanding. “I’m not a fantasy, Belle. This is real. And the building is coming down any minute now.”
Belle slowly turns her face to look back at Lydia. “Bill?”
“He’s dead,” Lydia says. “They’re all dead. There wasn’t another way.”
Belle’s eyebrows rise up,. “Behind you.”
Lydia turns around.
Bill rushes her. Swings the sword over his head to slice her in two—
—Lydia grabs the sword mid-swing, catching it by the blade. The sharp of the silver makes her palm tingle. Lydia holds the sword still, staring into Bill’s desperate eyes. He coughs. Shaky white hands lose their grip on the hilt, and finally, he slumps to the ground. Lydia drops the sword beside him. Turns back to Belle.
“Alright, we really gotta go—”
CRACK.
The floor underneath Belle breaks apart, and she falls through the floor. Lydia screams and lurches forward, diving after Belle.
Belle falls, observing her imminent death like a child peering into a fish tank. Pensive and quiet. She passes by what’s left of the fifth floor banister, her spine nearly smashing against it.
Lydia falls after her. Grabs the fifth floor banister and quickly pushes off of it before it can kill her momentum. She blasts ahead, picks up speed, and pushes off the fourth floor banister. Belle flies up to meet her, and Lydia grabs her mid-flight. They spin in the air. Briefly, they meet eyes.
Lydia smiles. Then cries out desperately as she sees the second floor rush up to meet them. She throws herself against Belle, sending them spinning further. Lydia ensures that it’s her own spine that smashes against the floor, and CRACK! they break through the wood. Wood breaks all around Lydia, forcing her to protectively curl herself around Belle’s body. Shrapnel batters uselessly against Lydia’s body, and then darkness.
They land in the basement. Lydia releases Belle and pushes herself up to her feet. Looks up at the ceiling which threatens to completely cave in within seconds. “Shit.”
Belle stands up behind her. Winces from the severe pain that Lydia couldn’t protect her from. Broken ribs, a fracture in her spine maybe. Still, despite everything, Belle stands.
“How are you doing this?” Belle asks quietly.
Lydia looks back at her. “It’s a funny story. Well, maybe not funny ha ha… but it was a Tuesday.”
A rare smile cracks Belle’s hard exterior. “Go on.”
A faint blush across Lydia’s cheeks. “In a minute. I got something I need to take care of.”
And just like that, the rest of the building comes down. Up above, all six stories tumble into each other, the brick walls breaking apart in chunks. The floor caves in, and a mountain of debris pours into the basement, thankfully fronted by the entire goddamned first floor.
Lydia catches the floor. Holds it up like a shield over her head to catch the rest of the debris. The ruins cave in, pounding most of the first floor into dust, but it remains safe where Lydia and Belle stand. Rubble pours around them in cascades. The two women stare into each other’s eyes.
“Does that… hurt?” Belle asks.
Lydia shrugs. “Nah. This is pretty heavy though, even for me.”
Belle gets closer. Swoops in and cups Lydia’s jaw with her dainty, boney hand.
Lydia hesitates for a second. But only for a second. She allows Belle’s kiss to drift in.
Their lips touch, and—
Lydia f e e l s n o t h i n g.
At first, it feels like a trick. Belle kisses Lydia, a several years old tension releasing itself unto her. Belle gets more and more daring. All the while, Lydia stays perfectly still. She throws all her focus into her lips, trying desperately to feel something.
And then, finally, it strikes her: She can’t feel something as small as a kiss. Of course. What was she even expecting?
Lydia breaks from Belle. At first, Belle doesn’t understand, so Lydia releases her hold on what’s left of Bill’s tower with one hand to touch Belle on the shoulder. Lydia squeezes Belle tight, nodding for her to back off. Belle furrows her brow. Slowly backs away.
Lydia growls like an animal. Pushes back on the building with all her might, growling louder and louder as the rubble goes higher and higher…
Pieces of stone break off the building, raining down around the two of them. Lydia roars and lurches backwards, and the tower falls back with her. It tumbles onto the neighboring building. Pierces through the wood, but only some of it. The angle is gentle enough to allow Bill’s collapsed tower to lean against the other building.
The starry night sky exposes itself to Lydia and Belle. Cold, frigid winds pass through the basement that’s now exposed like a rotting wound.
Lydia lowers her arms. Bows her head, thinking, not wanting to be perceived or even understood.
“Lydia?” Belle squeaks. She takes one step closer—
—Lydia turns away. Stares at the underbelly to the wreckage that lies directly before her and unleashes her wrath. Punches and kicks pelt into the rubble relentlessly, kicking up a storm cloud of dust. Lydia screeches and lays into the wreckage. Pounding through stone, pounding through brick, pounding through everything. It all turns to dust at her hand. Nothing stands in her way, so she keeps on the assault. Doesn’t let up. Tears away at it. Opens her hands and literally yanks debris out from the wreckage and tosses it aside, as if she were searching for something within.
But there’s nothing left inside Bill’s tower.
Suddenly, Lydia stops. Her shaking arms retreat to her sides, her fists curled. There’s not a scratch on her. Her shoulders bob up and down, a sound somewhere between laughter and sobbing comes over. She throws her head back and cackles loudly, two tears gliding down her cheeks. She laughs and laughs and laughs.
Something hits the ground behind her. Lydia turns around and sees that Belle passed out.
“Oh shit.”
Belle awakens several hours later in a dark, dilapidated warehouse. Her body rests on a stretcher, her body connected to several tubes. She sits up and sees Lydia leaning against a far-off wall, glaring at her.
“Artemi still runs her practice, thank God. Any other doctor would kill you,” Lydia says gruffly. Draws closer to Belle and reaches into her jacket. Finds a wallet and tosses it onto Belle’s lap. “I don’t know how much is in there, but it’ll last you until you get to my safehouse. I’m sure you remember the address, the rest of the money is there.”
Stunned, Belle stays silent. She sits up and looks at Lydia imploringly.
Lydia doesn’t take the bait and turns around. Starts marching off at a calm pace.
“Where are you going?” Belle chokes. “We just got back together.”
Lydia glances back at her. Grimaces, dreading what she must do. She pulls a hair tie off her wrist and pulls her hair back into a ponytail. She slips the ski mask back on then turns around to look at Belle longer. At first, there’s emotion in Lydia’s eyes, a clear desire to stay.
Belle reaches out for Lydia’s hand, and Lydia flinches. Anguish in her eyes now, Lydia turns away.
“You know I’m capable,” Belle says aggressively. “Whatever it is, I’ll help you.”
Lydia shakes her head without looking back. “You nearly broke your spine, Belle. You need time to heal. Besides, you don’t want to go where I’m going.”
Belle stiffens. “Don’t tell me it’s a job.”
Lydia looks down at the floor and considers her wording. “It’s a loose end. Someone did this to me, some—fucking—some fucking vigilante brat. I’m sorry. I need to do this. Maybe I can find a cure.”
Belle stares at her. Swallows something strong. “Are you at least coming back?”
Lydia’s shoulders tense. “I don’t know. You’re better off without me anyways.”
Belle bites her lip and turns away from Lydia. It takes her several moments to find her words, the words she knows can keep Lydia with her. They’ve been apart for so long now, this isn’t right, and Lydia must know that.
“Lydia, I—” Belle starts, looking back to where Lydia stands, and—
Lydia’s gone, and Belle feels colder than ever.