Parts of the Whole Read online

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  My fist drove forward, crunching into the thug's jaw. I needed a breather to reload my pistol, and this guy was not giving me that time. I drew my other hand back, the one with the empty gun, and smashed the metal into his face. He crumpled to the ground, probably lifeless, but I didn't care at that point. These were not humans; they were creatures of some kind, perverting some belief so they could take part in some insane ritual that, according to Tommy, wouldn't accomplish a damned thing anyway. It was murder for the sheer fun of it, and it offended me like nothing else ever had.

  We had made it further into the warehouse, which had been divided into several different large areas. The floor was still dirt, and the walls were little more than plywood dividers decorated with reddish-brown stains and ideograms of a brighter red. There were rugs and pictures of some blue six-armed woman given some pride of place everywhere. Bodies which had been dead for days littered the ground, their bodies torn to pieces. I kept thinking of them as just scenery from a movie, that they weren't real, that they were just plastic dummies with red syrup-covered ground sausage spilling out of them. It wasn't easy, but the fact that there seemed to be an endless stream of rag-clad killers helped keep my mind off the carnage.

  I ejected the magazine and slapped another in, the slide moving forward and putting a round in the chamber. I fired a few bullets into the mass of thugs heading our way, dropping several, but not enough. Tom had moved to my left, his gun firing in a steady rhythm, each shot making a kill. No drug around could outdo a bullet to the brainpan.

  The thing was, there had to be a small army in this warehouse, and they all wanted our blood.

  “Oh screw this,” I muttered, reaching into my jacket. “Tom, down!” I pulled the pin on the flashbang grenade and let it fly. The cylinder was aimed over the two ranks of foot soldiers and I ducked and covered my ears while squeezing my eyes shut.

  When the grenade went off, the shockwave rebounded off the walls, amplifying the effect. I counted to two and brought my gun back up. The close quarters had made the flashbang have devastating effects, with about two dozen of these bastards on the ground bleeding from ruptured eardrums. Some were rolling around screaming in pain while others were just unconscious. I put my gun away and pulled some zipties from my pack. They were down, and I couldn't just arbitrarily execute them. If they wanted to gnaw their own tongue off and bleed to death, that was their choice. I'm a cop. Killing in a gunfight, I could justify. Killing the helpless, no matter what, was not what I was about.

  Tom came up to me as I was hogtying the idiots, shaking his head and trying to get his bearings back. He didn't look too happy with what I was doing, but he understood, and even helped me secure the prisoners. We didn't need any words; when one of them woke up while I was securing him, Tom reached over and bashed him in the back of the head with his gun without my asking. It took about five minutes, but we got them taken care of.

  “That takes care of most of them, I think,” I said.

  “Oh yeah,” Tom laughed. “We've got most of them. Still gotta find the kid, though.”

  I closed my eyes and sighed. “Christ.” I glanced at the next and last closed-off section of this crazy hellhole of a warehouse. “It's going to get worse through there, isn't it?”

  Tom didn't even hesitate. “It's going to be a godsdamned nightmare in there.” He reloaded his pistol and his shotgun, while I put my last full magazine into my own weapon. “Ready?”