Gluttony Bay Read online

  Lena nods, accepting his comfort and counsel, accepting the situation and what she has to do.

  She reaches up and seizes Monrovio by the back of the succubus’ neck with her empty hand, drawing the woman forward and thrusting up with the butcher’s knife. The razor-sharp instrument’s impossibly long blade pierces Monrovio beneath her chin, puncturing her soft palate and skewering her tongue. It enters the roof of her mouth easily and half a second later glides smoothly and devastatingly into her brain.

  “Stop!” Allensworth yells in genuine alarm.

  He sounds very far away to Lena in that moment, but a part of her relishes in the shock she’s inspired.

  Lena grits her teeth as she rips the knife free of Luciana’s skull with great effort. The neon green of her suit jacket is overtaken by blood as black as an eclipsed sun. She drops to her knees, swaying there like a top that’s done spinning. Monrovio’s eyes are wide open, but they focus on nothing, glazed and empty. In the next moment, they’ve filled with the same black blood.

  Lena turns the stained knife on Allensworth menacingly. She has no intention of making the same mistake she did back at her and Darren’s apartment. She didn’t take her shot then, and it cost them all.

  Unfortunately, before she can advance on him, her attention is drawn behind them. Without warning, several figures emerge from the shadows of the kill floor, more of those plastic-faced attendants in their shock trooper smocks. They’re unarmed but move with predatory grace and intention.

  Bronko intercepts the first one, picking him up and slamming him to the floor like a professional wrestler. The impact is such that the tile beneath the attendant’s body cracks in places, shatters in others. Bronko quickly raises a booted foot and stomps several times on the man’s head and face, caving in the mannequin features of his mask.

  Meanwhile, an attendant twice her size advances on Lena. He seems totally unprepared when, without the slightest hesitation, she shoves the entire length of her blade into his chest. The attendant collapses forward, and Lena has to sidestep to avoid being felled under him. She can’t pull her knife free in time, however, and its handle is forced from her hand.

  The third attendant wraps his arms around her from behind and lifts Lena into the air. She struggles, kicking at his legs with her heels, but before she can even formulate a plan, his arms disappear from her body and she lands back on her feet. Whipping around, she watches as Bronko, holding the masked man by the throat and head, gruesomely and with sheer force breaks his neck.

  The sound of bone ripping from bone causes her to cringe. Lena is left staring at Bronko like a child. Making her peace with killing has been a horrific enough internal process for her, but watching him, a mentor and even father figure, commit the same brutality unsettles Lena in an entirely new way.

  There’s no time to dwell on it. The corner of her eye catches movement, and Lena turns to see Allensworth attempting to casually stroll from the room. She quickly kneels down and pulls the blade free of the attendant’s chest, leaping over his body and running up behind the fleeing rat that masterminded all of this.

  Lena grabs Allensworth by the back of his collar with a bloody hand and halts him, pressing the tip of the blade into the small of his back.

  “Tell me again how to butcher a human being,” she bids him in a shaking, rage-filled voice. “Tell me now.”

  “Tarr, don’t kill him,” Bronko orders her. “We need him.”

  “More than you shall ever know,” Allensworth says, ever weary, only to have Lena painfully jab him in the back.

  “Yes, Chef,” Lena says. “For now.”

  As she holds him at bay, Bronko has already moved over to where Darren is still suspended in the air. He carefully climbs up onto the embalmer’s tub, balancing his large booted feet on opposite edges as he reaches up to unlatch Darren’s ankles from where they’re hung on a hook.

  “How do we get out of here?” Lena asks Allensworth.

  “You don’t, Miss Tarr, with or without me. This is one of the most secure facilities on the planet. Unless you’re a VIP guest dining in the restaurant, there is no exit from this bay.”

  “Then how do the guests come and go?”

  “By private helicopter.”

  “Okay. You’ll take us to the landing pad.”

  “That won’t help. If you try to commandeer an incoming or outgoing helicopter, you’ll certainly be killed.”

  “Then it’ll be on my terms, not yours.”

  “You’re rationalizing, Miss Tarr.”

  “No, I’m holding a big fucking knife against your spine, so shut your mouth.”

  She punctuates the statement with a pricking jab that causes Allensworth to jump.

  Bronko has hauled Darren down and quickly swaddled him in the same black cloth with which Allensworth’s people mummified him. He slings Darren’s body over one broad shoulder like a firearm and turns to Lena and Allensworth.

  “Let’s go,” he says simply.

  “Byron,” Allensworth ventures tentatively, “you have to have more sense than this young woman—”

  “Like she said,” he interrupts the man, “if we die here, it’s on our terms. Now, if I were you, I’d walk before this ‘young lady’ makes her some kidney pies.”

  Lena grins up at him, despite everything.

  “Yes, Chef,” she says, and prods their hostage forward.

  WALK-INS

  The sentry’s mask splits in half as Cindy swings the blade of her tomahawk into his face, the impact alone folding his padded knees and knocking him down to the rooftop.

  Cindy places a booted foot against the sentry’s flak jacketed chest and uses it for leverage to yank her axe blade free.

  “Ain’t that a bitch?” she asks his still form. “One minute you’re admiring a flock of seagulls, the next an angry black woman with an axe leaps out at you and that’s your whole ass right there. Shit!”

  Cindy quickly ducks as the body of another sentry goes flying a sparse inch above her head. It collides with the top of a ventilation shaft, and what’s left of the man falls to the roof, limbs twisted like a rag doll.

  She looks over at Hara, who booked the sentry’s abrupt flight.

  “Really, man?” she asks.

  Hara shrugs by way of an apology.

  Ritter and Marcus are already pulling bundles of nylon rope and climbing rigs out of rucksacks.

  “Cindy!” Ritter calls to her across the rooftop. “Work fast! We’re over the side in sixty seconds!”

  Cindy nods, unzipping a black bag slung around from her shoulder and removing an octagonal charge the size of her palm. She quickly slaps it between her booted feet, a magnetic plate on its backside adhering the charge to the metallic insulation beneath the rooftop’s surface. She dashes thirty yards ahead, laying another charge there. Fifty-seven seconds later, she has sprinted from corner to corner and blanketed the entire rooftop at strategic structural points with a dozen identical devices.

  “Everybody hook up!” Ritter orders them.

  “I’m thinkin’ I’ll wait with the chopper,” Moon says. “Y’know, in case the gremlin gets lonely.”

  “Seeing as how Moon on the end of a rappelling rig basically becomes a yo-yo, I’m inclined to let the boy slide on this one,” Cindy tells Ritter.

  “Fine,” he says. “If Ruby has any trouble up here, hit us on the radio.”

  “I can totally do that,” Moon assures him.

  “What is he for, again?” Marcus asks as they all slip into their repelling gear.

  “He eats weird shit,” Cindy explains.

  Marcus nods. “That actually makes a weird kind of sense, considering what y’all do.”

  “Does it?” Cindy asks.

  “Thanks, Cin,” Moon says, sulkily.

  “Anytime, boo.”

  * * *

  “Dinner is served!” Alfonse grandly announces to the long table occupied by stylish demon warriors.

  Behind the hooded host, servers wheel
out massive human rib cages hoisted upright on two vertical spits apiece. The meat between their bones is crackling brown and still steaming.

  There are animalistic sounds of approval from the Vig’nerash clan members.

  One of the servers, barbeque fork and carving knife in hand, leans over the rib cage. He pauses just short of piercing the cooked flesh, staring through the slits in his face mask and out of the panoramic window composing the entire bay wall of the restaurant.

  Cindy, tethered by a thin line of nylon cord, seems to glide on the air itself toward the outside of the window. She lands against the reinforced panes with the soles of her boots. The noise on the inside barely registers. The nearest patrons, in fact, don’t even look up from their meals.

  “Uh . . . Señor Alfonse,” the server tries to warn the host, who is occupied with schmoozing the Vig’nerash elder at the head of the table.

  Cindy slaps something against the outside of the window, and whatever it is sticks there, a small red light flashing on it. She bends her knees and kicks away from the glass, hard, putting as much distance between it and herself as possible.

  “Señor Alfonse!” the server exclaims.

  “What is it, Marco?” Alfonse demands impatiently.

  In answer, Marco points at the bay.

  Alfonse looks up just as the entire middle section of the restaurant’s towering picture window cracks and then shatters altogether, glass shards hailing through the dining room and covering the tables, patrons, and staff.

  There’s shrieking from the ghouls and confused, angry outbursts from the humans. When Cindy swings back through the window, the rest of the team is on their own ropes right beside her. Once they’re all inside, they detach themselves from the ropes and drop to the floor of the restaurant, Hara taking two tables with him as he does.

  “Everybody down!” Ritter thunders at the patrons and staff. “Everybody hit the floor now! Now, now, now!”

  Marcus racks his shotgun to punctuate his brother’s command, firing a warning shot into the ceiling that causes emeralds to rain down over them all.

  The humans and ghouls are quick to cower beneath their tables or in their booths, but the Vig’nerash demons hesitate. Several are hovering inches above their seats, growls rumbling in their scaly throats.

  Marcus levels the muzzle of his shotgun at the nearest demon warrior and racks the weapon’s heavy slide.

  “Who wants to play ‘How Bad Can I Fuck Up a Demon’s Eurotrash Suit?’” Marcus asks him.

  The warriors all sit back down.

  “Let’s go!” Ritter says to the rest of his team.

  They quickly and cleanly sweep through the dining room, and Ritter hits the doors to the kitchen first, kicking them apart. He and Marcus hold them open for the others, Marcus covering their flanks with his shotgun.

  By the time he joins the rest of the team inside, the kitchen doors swinging closed behind Marcus, Ritter and the others have stopped moving. They’re bunched together just inside the doors, and Marcus nearly plows right into their collected backs as he breaks into a sprint, still laboring under the notion they’re sweeping through the facility with all haste.

  “What the hell, guys?” he hisses at them.

  Cindy’s and Ritter’s shoulders part in front of him, and Marcus finds himself taking in the same sight as the rest of them, and like the rest of them, it stops Marcus cold.

  There is no blood. There are no screams. Stark white hazardous materials suits and particle-filtering masks wholly obscure the “chefs” working in the Gluttony Bay kitchen. They go about their grisly tasks in calm and efficient silence. The far wall is lined with a wide-stretching row of tall, clear cylindrical chambers. They’re filled with superheated water boiling uncovered. Steadily deteriorating human bodies occupy each one. Those bodies have been shaved of all body hair and surgically cleaned like wild game, the flaps made of their torsos wafting over hollowed cavities beneath. The layers of their flesh have loosened and separated. Shiny aluminum staircases lead up to a catwalk that skims across the tops of the cylinders. The human fare is fished out in pieces by the hazmat workers, who pull the bodies apart with long, razor-sharp pole instruments, and delivered to stainless steel cooking stations for preparation.

  It is somehow far worse than the fairy-tale horror-show cannibalism of people chained to butcher’s blocks and gargantuan black steel cauldrons bubbling with human soup. This is clinical and sanitized and completely detached. It is thoroughly inhuman horror, the kind manufactured in concentration camps where sadism is transformed into purposeful and industrial genocide, and where even the base humanity of being a victim is taken away as people are reduced to cattle.

  “Motherfuckers,” Marcus curses, racking the shotgun’s slide and putting the butt to his shoulder tightly, his finger tensing against the weapon’s trigger.

  The first swarm of buckshot he unleashes shatters the center cylinder and floods the kitchen with scalding water and what has mostly been reduced to a skeleton. The cooks in their hazmat suits flee from its path, although several of them feel the stinging droplets splattered against their few exposed patches of skin. Marcus once again racks the slide and blasts the cylinders at either end of the row, the sudden boiling tidal waves forcing the sterile butchers into the center of the kitchen, where they begin falling over one another like lobsters in a tank. Marcus continues expelling empty shells and pumping fresh ones into the shotgun’s chamber, emptying it of ammo as he destroys every last human pot in the kitchen, bathing the now-shrieking cooks in lavalike water.

  Ritter looks beyond the chaos, spotting another set of doors set into the far corner of the kitchen.

  “Let’s move!” he orders them all. “We can’t do any more here. We have to find our people.”

  Marcus looks at his brother, the younger sibling’s ordinarily dark eyes appearing absolutely black in that moment. He nods silently, retrieving new shells from the ammo bag affixed to his belt and reloading the shotgun on the move.

  Ritter and Hara follow, but Cindy lingers behind a moment longer. She pulls her bag in front of her body by its shoulder strap, unzips and upends it, spilling several octagonal charges onto the kitchen floor. Zipping the sack closed and shoving it behind her back, she spares one final, disgusted look at the half-drowned cannibal cooks wallowing in scorching pain among the gutted and flesh-stripped skeletal remains of their victims.

  “Better than y’all deserve,” she mutters to herself through gritted teeth.

  Her boots splash across the wet floor as she hustles to catch up with the rest of her team.

  DOUBLE-BOOKED

  The elevator careens between the upper floors of Gluttony Bay with the force of a slow train. Its attendant is curled up in one corner; Bronko didn’t kill him, but he did hit him hard enough to cause the man’s brain to smack against the inside of his skull.

  “I’m curious,” Allensworth says, his voice tighter and more cautious than they’re used to hearing it, probably because Lena’s still holding a knife to his back. “Let us suppose you succeed in extricating yourself from Gluttony Bay. Let us even suppose you return to the warm confines of your beloved Sin du Jour safely. Then what? And what happens to me? Do you intend to kill me in cold blood, Byron?”

  “You killed me in cold blood,” Bronko reminds him.

  “That was different. I knew you’d come back.”

  “It damn sure didn’t feel different.”

  Lena has no idea what they’re talking about, but she also knows this is no time to inquire.

  “Very well,” Allensworth relents. “You kill me in cold blood. Then what? What do you imagine happens next?”

  “Maybe I’ll start a food truck,” Bronko muses. “Somewhere in the Southwest, say.”

  “Byron,” Allensworth chastises.

  Bronko ignores him. “I could use a sous chef on the truck, Tarr.”

  Lena smiles weakly. “Sounds good to me, Chef.”

  The elevator stops, its touchscreen dis
play indicating they’ve reached the top level, the helipad.

  Lena tenses as the doors in front of them part, preparing to rush Allensworth by the collar out onto the platform at high speed.

  She doesn’t even take her first step toward the doors.

  “Jam it up my ass sideways,” Bronko whispers to himself in pure dread.

  There must be thirty of them, all draped in executioner’s hoods and all of them as large as Bronko or bigger. They wear leather gloves up to their elbows and all carry oversized meat cleavers and machete-sized knives. They’re gathered shoulder to shoulder just five feet outside the elevator doors, so thick neither Bronko nor Lena can see the helipad beyond.

  “I tried to warn you,” Allensworth says. “What would you like to do now, Byron?”

  Bronko gently shifts Darren’s weight over his shoulder, carrying the younger man obviously beginning to wear him down. He doesn’t answer Allensworth’s question.

  “Miss Tarr, then?” Allensworth calls behind him. “What’s it to be, Lena? Shall we go back downstairs and try this again, my way? I’m willing to excuse your dispatching Miss Monrovio. She was an outside hire, anyway. We can still salvage our relationship and your careers. I give you my word.”

  Lena looks up at Bronko, trying to stuff down the panic she’s feeling, determined to act from here forward with resolve.

  Bronko’s eyes are hard and soft at the same time, soft for Lena and all that’s happened, and hard for what has to happen now.

  He nods.

  She nods back.

  “Miss Tarr, my leniency will only extend so long before—”

  “I gave my word, too,” Lena says.

  She runs him through, piercing his back with her large butcher’s blade and skewering his kidney.

  Allensworth tenses and groans, arching against her helplessly as she perforates him. Outside the elevator, the brutes roar with rage and lethal intention. Lena raises her left leg and places a boot against Allensworth’s ass, ripping her blade free and kicking him through the doors at the same time. He collides with the nearest brutes rushing the car, knocking them off balance and bottlenecking the rest for just a moment.