The Pale: Volume One by Jacob Long (portable ebook reader txt) 📕

Was it designed to go without food or sleep? Adam hadn’t so much as felt the craving for either, but he knew stories of men who had lost their minds after only a week without a wink. He could only surmise that the energy of the one human soul he’d consumed upon returning to earth was still sustaining him.

“Seventy-nine . . . eighty . . .”

So Adam started to exercise. He pushed his body as far is it would allow. At first, it was to burn all the excess energy, but soon he was too amazed by his performance to stop. Push-ups were his standard exercise, and he broke records that night. He destroyed them. Only after exceeding the capacity of four or five soldiers did Adam finally break a sweat and feel the lactic acid in his muscles, but he kept pushing until his arms could do no more.

“Eighty-one . . . eighty-two . . .”

Spent at last, Adam stretched and wound himself down. To his great relief, his eyelids grew heavy. He lay on the bed and finally, mercifully, slept. It was nearly afternoon by the time he woke with drool leaking from the corner of his mouth. It was the best sleep he’d ever had in his current life or the last. He left the bed and went right back into pushups. Sweat was pouring from his forehead, and his muscles were screaming. That time he didn’t do so well.

“Eighty-thhhhhrrrr—ah, fuck it!”

Adam’s arms fell out from under him, and he thudded against the carpeting. After the previous night, he had only his human strength remaining. At least he’d learned something.

The champion of the Wheel of Fate mustered what was left of his strength and took a shower. His old clothes were almost comically tight after his time in the Army, but at least they were his and didn’t make him look like a gigolo. Adam placed a quick call to Téa to see if her visitors were gone, but it sounded like she was having reception issues when she picked up. The only option left was to swing by and see for himself, so he squeezed back into Téa’s compact, inexpensive, eco-friendly loser-cruiser and drove all the way across town.

When Adam passed the house, he saw that there were no extra cars crowding the short space in front. What he didn’t see were the two men sitting in the black sedan further down the street, but they saw him. When Adam circled around and pulled up to the house, one smacked the other on the shoulder to rouse him. Adam went into the house, and the two men were quick to follow to the front door. What they didn’t see, was the cop in plain clothes who drove by behind them after they crossed the street, but he saw them. Sergeant Fisher watched the two tough-looking men approaching the address he was looking for, dressed in slick, expensive suits and fully accessorized with nice watches, cool sunglasses, and automatic pistols that flashed with the billowing of their jackets in the wind. The situation had become very complicated very quickly.

Lamont kept driving. He needed time to think. His first instinct was to call for backup, but he wasn’t in his squad car. He had only two handheld radios in the trunk. He would have to call 911 if the situation escalated. It could be hard explaining what he was doing at the house, but hell, it was a free country. Nothing had happened yet, so Lamont decided to wait and see. He continued around the block.

When Adam opened the door, he carefully poked his head just inside. No one was in the living room. “Téa?” Adam whispered. There was no response. Adam could see Téa’s bedroom door was open, so he began to suspect they had all gone out and not bothered coming back.

Adam stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The first thing he detected was an odor. He sniffed. “Is that . . . piss?” Adam asked aloud. Some fluid had dried to the floorboards just outside Téa’s room, and that’s where the smell was strongest. Following the trail, Adam noticed the broken pieces of the doorframe on the other side of the portal. The door was kicked in. A device Adam soon discovered was a step-up transformer sat on the dresser next to the door. The outlet had stripped wires hanging from it. The curling of the copper at the ends led Adam to check the inside doorknob, where he found the fashioned copper hook. Téa had trapped the door. Someone had gotten shocked enough for them to lose bladder control. Whoever she was trying to keep out had gotten in, and considering that the bedroom window was closed, she probably hadn’t escaped. Some half-finished release trap still waited uselessly.

The realization came quick to Adam that Téa had been in trouble and shooed him out of the house. The various bags Téa didn’t let Adam see the previous night were filled with the hardware for her clever little traps. Adam’s head swirled. Why would she keep that a secret from him? Why didn’t she let him help? What kind of trouble could someone like Téa possibly be in anyway? Was it drugs? Was it him?

The doorbell rang. A dozen awful possible visitors flashed through Adam’s mind, but none of them even merited concern, not against the gravity of Téa being in trouble, or worse. Instead, Adam hoped his visitors would further the plot.

The front door had small windows at the top arranged like a slice of orange. Adam peered through this and found two mean mugs waiting patiently on the doorstep. Adam opened the door without a second thought and had a gun in his face before he could blink.

“Morning,” Adam said, not about to blink anyway.

One man had his gun arm extended over his friend’s shoulder. His friend stood in front and did the talking. “Don’t try anything stupid,” he said.

“Nah, I won’t,” Adam replied. “I think you’re exactly who I wanted to see.”

In the time it took Lamont to circle just one time, everything had gone sideways. He wasn’t within four hundred feet, and he could see that the front door to the home was open, and one of the thugs already had their piece stuck inside.

Lamont cursed, pulling his car over.

“What’s going on here?” Adam asked. “Is Téa alive?”

“We didn’t come here to answer your stupid questions.” The thug’s speech affectations outed him as being quite “hood” before moving up to sharply dressed organized crime.

“I’m not going anywhere until I know Téa is alive, and I want to know where she is.”

“Your ass comes quietly, or we blow your damn brains out.”

“Freeze!” the commanding shout disturbed the peace the little slice of suburbia was still pretending it had.

Everyone turned to look. Adam had to lean a little out of the house to see. Some guy wearing a leather jacket was waddling up to the scene with his gun drawn.

“Oh, come on,” Adam breathed, slipping back into the house.

“Farol Verde PD! Drop the weapon!” the man continued to command.

Everyone appeared to be frozen, but Adam caught the unarmed thug surreptitiously reach for the gun at his belt. His hand rested on the grip, and their eyes met. Adam shook his head to disagree.

The man gripped the gun and slowly began to draw it from his belt. Adam could only shake his head a little more insistently.

“Slowly, now,” Lamont said, stopping short of the nearest house. He began strafing for cover behind the neighbor’s car. “Let the gun hang on your finger, and slowly take your arm off the other man’s shoulder.”

The gangster in question began to do what he was told, but then his partner moved. He tore the gun out of his belt, and the two whirled about. The thug nearest Adam attempted to take aim at the policeman, but Adam’s arm reached from the doorway and held him fast. Adam forced the gun toward the ground and pulled the thug inside. The other man aimed quickly and fired wildly at the officer. The bullets flew off into the neighborhood, and Lamont returned fire before rushing toward the neighbor’s vehicle and ducking behind it. All the bullets fired missed their targets.

Adam and his quarry stumbled into Téa’s living room with the gun locked between them. Suddenly regretting spending all his energy, Adam was forced backward. The two blundered into the chair across from the couch and fell onto the coffee table with the thug on top of the whole pile. The moment of impact unseated the legs, and the assembly collapsed into the carpet, nearly driving the air from Adam’s lungs.

Both men had both their hands on the weapon, one on the grip and one on the barrel. The snarling thug atop of Adam was trying to force the barrel into a deadly direction, and Adam was straining desperately to keep it away.

The armed gangster at the door fired two shots into the neighbor’s car to keep the cop under cover and shouted to his partner. “We gotta go, man! If that’s a cop, we gotta go!”

The man trying to murder Adam snarled, “Just a second!”

His strength failing, Adam had to play it smart. He opened his hand on the grip and probed about with his fingers for whatever function he could find. He discovered a button and pressed hard, but then the magazine fell from the grip and onto his stomach. The barrel of the gun was slowly making its way to Adam’s chest with one round still in the chamber, so he focused what was left of his might on trying to push the slide back. That would eject the remaining bullet and effectively safety the gun.

Adam plied his strength to the task, but the thug was quick to react. He held the barrel fast, but at least it wasn’t approaching Adam any more. The force was being applied in a different direction, so Adam took advantage by suddenly pushing the gun straight up over his head. The thug was pulled off balance and accidentally pulled the trigger. A deafening gunshot rang everyone’s ears, and the thug screamed. A small explosion had just been vented into his hand, and then a hot shell was delivered into his waiting palm.

The thug eagerly dropped his useless gun and shook his burned hand free of the shell. He tried to crawl away, but Adam wrapped his legs around the man’s waist. The thug was all the protection Adam had from the other gangster simply shooting him and calling it a day. The thug squirmed and struck Adam, but Adam wouldn’t let go, and he wasn’t interested in fighting back, either. Instead, Adam grabbed the empty gun and found the ejected magazine. He deftly loaded the magazine and chambered a round. Then he pointed it at the gangster standing in the doorway. The gangster saw Adam and pointed his gun right back.

“Don’t!” Adam shouted.

The two didn’t fire, and the man in Adam’s grip stopped struggling. He knew if his partner was going to kill this man, he would have to go through him.

“I only want one of you,” Adam said. His voice was shuddering, sweat beading on his forehead. “There’s a back door to this place. If there’s only one cop, you can get away. I’d give you that chance. I just want him, and you can run.”

“Don’t fucking leave me here!” the man’s partner managed to say over his shoulder while in the grip of Adam’s legs.

The gangster in the doorway hesitated. He was torn between self-preservation and some shred of loyalty. He also considered that the partner he was leaving behind knew his name and would probably dime him out in a heartbeat. Then there was the cop, in all likelihood calling for backup. His situation was impossible.

Suddenly, there was a single gunshot from outside. It tore into the gangster’s exposed shoulder, kicking a splash of blood onto the white of the doorframe.

Lamont’s heart was pounding, speeding that sweet adrenaline into his blood. His stress levels were peaked. One of the gunmen he was in a standoff with was keeping him ducked behind his cover. He didn’t know where the other was, but he kept his head on a swivel just in case he was being flanked. Lamont cursed. His hands were shaking. Having to draw and fire his real gun was affecting him. He shouldn’t have returned fire so wildly in a residential area. He could have hit someone, maybe even a child.

Lamont tried to control his breathing. If he couldn’t get his body under control, then he was just as much of a trauma case as everyone made him out to be. He needed to keep cool, and he needed to use his tools as he was trained—all of them.

Being pinned down as he was, Lamont’s only recourse was to call for backup. Doing some explaining was a hell of a lot better than taking on armed gunmen alone. He dipped one unsteady hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He was about to dial, but then there was a gunshot inside the house, and the suppressing gunfire