Chapter 44:  Jamie’s Got a Gun

The pain...
The pain was coming from every part of her mind and body. She could not remember any time in either of her lives that she had felt so much pain. 
And the fatigue... God, she was tired. Even through the pain she could feel the sluggishness and aching that the body used to signal when it has had enough. It didn’t even feel good to have her eyes closed- to take a much-needed rest after the hard exertion.
“Get up! You’re not done yet.”
It was Janet... The melodic voice with the hard, jagged, reprimanding tone that Jamie never remembered having when she was Janet. She had never used it, not even on herself.
“I’m so tired. So tired...” 
Her voice trailed off as she felt her consciousness slipping away towards the abyss. A part of her was aware enough to realize that she would never, ever, return from that place.
“I told you to get up, Jamie. You aren’t going to die like this. I won’t allow it! We’ve worked too hard to get this far!”
Jamie could feel it now- the part of her mind and soul that was still Janet. It was the only part of her that had not gone numb and started to slip away into the abyss. Janet still wanted to live and Jamie just wanted to die. Wasn’t that funny?
“Get up, Jamie. Wake up, for God’s sake!”
A hard slap to her face made her eyes open out of shock, the lights blinding her with a sharp pain that rose above all of the rest. She shook her head and fought her way back away from the edge; the strength to do so coming from someplace foreign to her.
It was the warehouse where she and her friends had been slaughtered. Through the many times she had dreamt about it she had lost her fear and repulsion to the place. The part of her that was sustaining her soul felt as though it belonged here, an idea that was brought home by the sight of sight of Janet, the whole one that Jamie knew, stretched out alongside the very (or was it nearly) dead body of the old Janet Wells. They were like the ‘find-the-changes’ pages in the tabloids, with the cut up, naked body on the right and the whole, clothed one on the left.
“I keep asking where I came from.” Janet spoke without moving from her spot, as if the imitation was conductive to understanding. “Compared to who I was and who I became, my time was short. I was this thing lying beside me, and now I’m the thing that you are. So if I am so rigidly defined in between you two, does that mean I was born here?”
Jamie struggled to crawl over from where she had been sprawled out on the floor. The pain had subsided enough that she could feel the hard, cold concrete, and smell the blood of her friends.
“Does that also mean that I died here?”
“You’re not dead. You might have been born here, but you’re still alive inside me. In fact, I think you’re the only thing keeping me alive right now.” Jamie couldn’t find the strength to smile at the irony. Moving the short distance and rolling over beside the pair of Janets had taken everything she had been able to muster.
The silence was overwhelming, but calming at the same time, especially to Jamie, who felt like going to sleep again. A nudge from Janet stirred her enough to keep her grip on life.
“If you had to pick one thing from the life you know to frame and put on the wall, what would it be?”
“Like a picture?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh... I don’t know. Maybe that night in Paris when we got dressed up, went out to eat, and Michael kissed me on the cheek so gently. I could see the pain inside him, but also the relief that being so close to me brought to him. He needed someone to love him, and I wanted to love him as much as Tanya had. I couldn’t compare, though, and I guess that’s why he pushed me away so many times.”
“You really believe that is the reason?”
“Yes.”
“Being reborn as a cyborg certainly hasn’t given you any more in the way of brains.”
A surge of energy flowed through her as the insult took hold. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you don’t understand him at all. It means that the reason that you are willing to let him go and just give in to death is because you have misread your importance to him.”
The smug tone from Janet made Jamie want to reach over and slap it out of her, but her strength was lacking. It seemed to be flowing in spurts, not unlike the blood she could feel flowing out of her body.
“Well? Are you going to enlighten me? You’ve made it clear that you don’t think I can figure it out.”
“You don’t want to figure it out. You’ve blinded yourself to it, and so you don’t see it.” 
There was a bloody cough from the carved up Janet beside them and a chill swept through them both as their impending death felt closer still. They were all going to die if Jamie didn’t find the strength to live.
“The truth about Michael is that he loves you as much as he loved Tanya. He felt it even before she came to Rome, but he was obviously not going to give up on her, not with so much at stake. He has been hurting ever since because he wants to love you more than he has been able to, but doesn’t want to hurt her memory. Maybe... Maybe, given a few years, he could have moved on from her, but he knew that it wasn’t going to go as planned. He expected that you and he were going to die in this, and so he couldn’t bring himself to say it to you, out of the fear that he was going to have to watch you die while he lived on.”
“NO! If he loved me that much, he would have the guts to tell me!” Her eyes filled with tears as she said the words, knowing that it was what she had known all along. Michael was afraid to love because he was tired of facing death and surviving. Survivor’s guilt... Just one occurrence was enough to break the average person, two destroyed almost all of the rest, but as many as he had built up over the years... There was no real way she could blame him for wanting to get it all over with.
“ ‘I think he wants to die... He just hasn’t found anyone that can make it happen’.” 
“It’s ironic that your words about Amherst strike so close to home with Michael as well. That is why Michael wants to keep going after him- because they are opposites that will destroy each other when they collide.”
“That’s not true. Maybe Michael believes that to be the case, but I can see that they are different. He just needs me to tell him that.”
Janet sat up with a laugh, patting the dying Janet on the head for strength. “How are you going to do it, genius? You’re dying. You’re almost as dead as this one here, and unless you find some internal strength fast, you aren’t going to last another five minutes.” 
To punctuate this she brushed her fingers across Jamie’s forehead, and the slight touch made Jamie fall sickeningly towards the abyss, suddenly overcome with the desperate need to sleep forever.
“Don’t... No. I... I need to hang on.”
“Sweet, sweet Jamie. We’re both dying, and there’s no way we can stop it like this. I told you before that you needed to get stronger and you thought I meant physically. You dummy, I meant stronger in your convictions. The body means nothing without the will to use it. You’ve killed us all with your lack of understanding.”
“No...”
Janet brushed the hair from in front of Jamie’s eyes and stared into them, still finding enough awareness in them to get through to her.
“Now listen to me. I have enough strength to get through this, but it’s going to kill us both. The only way to give Michael a chance is to use our combined strength to kill Amherst. We can’t even afford to use any to save Michael- we just have to go do our thing and hope he makes it. The only way I will give you this chance is if we become one, and that means I’ll be in control.”
“That’s so...”
“I know, it’s a little metaphysical in concept but you’ve never had a problem with believing in something. From your point of view it might even seem like blackmail, but you need to realize that it’s simply the way it has to be. I’ve been there, speaking to you, telling you what our mission is in this life, and you’ve heard it. You just have to believe in it.”
“What?” Jamie couldn’t understand what Janet was talking about.
“Our divine mandate. The reason you and I are here right now.”
Jamie felt numb all over again and her grip on life was slipping. It was all she could do to keep focus on what she was hearing.
“You and I are charged by God to destroy Amherst. You’ve known it, even embraced it at times, and now it’s time to decide whether you are going to follow orders or abandon your post.”
“Please... I just want to end this all. I don’t have the strength.”
Janet buzzed loudly and grabbed Jamie’s nose, twisting it painfully. “Wrong answer, Jamie! You are not going to give up! If you have any hope at all of redemption for the many, many lives you’ve snuffed out, it is to do what you are told. Only by God’s Grace are we forgiven, and He is very interested in how you are performing right now. To fail now is to fail for eternity.”
“I can’t! I don’t have the strength!” Jamie’s eyes were pouring tears at her own failing. She was trying, really trying, and it wasn’t doing any good. There was nothing left in the well.
“Do you want more people to die?”
“No.”
“Do you want Amherst to cut more people? Do you want him to cut Michael?”
“NO!”
The tears were really pouring now, perhaps the only tenuous grip the girl had on life.
“Do you want Michael to die without knowing how much you love him?”
“NO!”
Janet felt the spark of desperation in Jamie, the acknowledgement that she wanted to trade everything for the strength, do anything, to save him, if only for a moment more together. She leaned over and kissed Jamie, breathing her strength into the body that would be the means of her vengeance.
Jamie’s eyes went wide as she was kissed, not knowing what the sudden spark of life was inside, but certain that it was morally questionable at best to be kissing another woman. Janet pulled away slightly with a soft smile; the same soft smile Jamie had always given Michael.
“It’s okay. We were the same person once. With this kiss, we are one again.”
Their lips met again and Jamie realized that Janet was right. The only way forward was as one and that meant becoming something different from both. Perhaps that something was what they originally split off from.
It hurt. 
The pain was back, and it hurt more than she had ever felt before. Her chest burned like it was on fire and her head pounded as if it was being hit with a sledge. Her eyes could no longer see Janet, or anything else, and she screamed as her mind began to burn inside her skull. 
She screamed at the top of her lungs, a scream of agony that sounded through the trees surrounding her and seemed to reverberate off of the hills beyond. Her eyes were burning now as well and she instinctively covered them, feeling the blood there and the stinging as the artificial optic nerve fought to transmit what it thought she was seeing to her brain. 
Her right hand felt different from her left and she opened her eyes to see why, not seeing her right hand at first, but then realizing that only her left eye was working. As she brought her right hand into view she saw the remains of her destroyed right eye; the clear liquid mixed with blood and semi-flexible shards of whatever the agency used to make eyeballs out of. 
She started to panic, knowing that just behind her eye was her brain, and the memory of the shot that did the damage made her reach in with her fingers, probing past the shards to the back of her eye socket to feel for the nine-millimeter that had to either have been stopped by the armored plating installed there or had lodged itself into her brain.
There was a dent, about the size of an expanded hollow-point bullet, with the associated jagged feel, but it had held. The bullet wasn’t there, but the dent was, and that’s all that mattered. It occurred to her that the hollow-point bullet had been fortunate. A ball or solid-core bullet would have lanced through the eye and probably through the armor, especially in the higher-powered mil-spec rounds that were common. But the hollow-point bullet had already started expanding on it’s way through the tougher-than-normal walls of her eye, and the larger surface area had caused it to mushroom more on impact with the plate, dissipating the energy.
It hurt her head, it hurt a lot, but she was still alive, and all because of a bullet designed to do more damage after entry than it’s cheaper cousin. It was almost funny.
She laughed anyway, ignoring the pain the movement caused, and continued laughing for nearly a minute as the feeling of being alive against all odds made her mind stop working in a sane manner for a little while.
Eventually the laughter tapered off into an exhausted sigh, the last one she was going to have for a long time. Her mind started to take stock of her situation, her goal, and her ability. 
She was sitting in a ravine next to the crushed remains of Michael’s Jag, late afternoon setting in, and Michael was nowhere to be seen. The Jag was upright and the driver’s door was open but not seriously damaged, so he had either gotten out or was taken out. The roof was crushed in so it had apparently rolled, and she had been ejected, thankfully, as a large broken tree branch was jammed into the passenger side through the windshield. 
She had to find Michael because Amherst was going to be there as well. Amherst must die, and her whole body and mind was now devoted to it. She had become whole again, including the bitter victim that had sprung from those hours in the warehouse of death, but aside from the desire for vengeance now being impossible to ignore, Jamie couldn’t say she felt that much different.
Finally, she started checking her body for damage. Her suit was torn in numerous places and blood splotched even more. She counted six holes in her, including a possibly serious one near her chest that hurt every time she took a deep breath. Her right arm was acting a little strange as well, responding sluggishly to fine-motor commands, a sign that the bullet that had passed through her forearm did something to hinder it. Over all, she was in workable shape, at least in the short term. 
A part of her mind told her to go back to the agency and get repairs, but the more practical side of her overruled it, as there was simply no time. Self-preservation was no longer a point to consider, a laughable situation given that it was exactly what the agency specified from the beginning and she had spent so much time fighting against. Michael had wanted her to believe that she was of more value than she had been told to be by the agency, and she had finally started to, but now her life was forfeit in order to avenge the lost, and she had no choice in the matter.
“It’s time...” 
Jamie struggled to her feet and swayed slightly as her mind adjusted to the badly scrambled input from her senses and the haze from the pain. The trunk of the car was loose from the wreck and her left arm tore it from the remaining hinge, tossing it carelessly aside. The car was a write-off anyway.
The Beo was there and undamaged by the tossed contents of the compartment, but it was locked down and needed the keys. She climbed into the trunk and reached through the smashed back window to free the seat from it’s locks, and pulled the rifle through the gap, glad that Michael was smart enough to make things simple. 
His equipment case was there and she dug through it, putting extra magazines and ammunition, along with numerous other items she would need, into her large backpack. There was a first-aid kit as well and her brain told her to take the time necessary to patch up, as it would pay off later.
A cigarette lighter and piece of steel cauterized the bullet holes fairly well, and taped gauze pads covered the rest. A makeshift eye-patch covered her right eye and actually made it feel a little better. Finally, she pulled a pack of pills from the kit, ones she knew were meant for her and her alone. It was the drug, a chemical she had made every effort to get away from, but whose properties were going to be the only thing she could count on to get her through to the end. There was only the single sheet of foil-covered tablets, about a dozen in total, and she knew that the stuff was also used as an anesthetic when they were having repairs made, so dosage was going to be critical. She didn’t want to find herself falling unconscious at an inconvenient time. 
She took four of the pills and washed them down with a large swallow from a vodka bottle Michael had stashed away. It was unhealthy, it was foolish, but she needed every hedge against the pain that was sure to come. Pills and booze... She was going to be a freight train when she got up to speed- powerful and unstoppable.
Michael’s pistol was in the front seat on the floor and went into the backpack with everything else. She kept her M9 Beretta handy, though, as she was going to have to be creative in order to catch up with him. She was going to have to be ruthless.
Jamie smiled in the car door’s mirror as she wiped a little more blood on her face. The final act was about to start.

Raimondo Moretti loved his new Lotus Exige. Sure his friends had laughed as he passed up the Ferraris and Lamborghinis that were easily in his price range, but they were rich-kids who didn’t know how to appreciate the things their money bought. More than one had totaled their brand new car and simply brushed it off and bought another, never learning anything from it.
Not Raimondo. His family had worked their way up into being wealthy after he had started his life virtually in the gutter. Every day he had worked hard to make the family business progress, and with the booming of the Internet, he had seen an opportunity, one that his father had taken advantage of and had played well. Now their company was international, if only just, but the domestic side was booming and they were seeing their hard work pay off. This car was a gift to himself, to reward his determination and tenacity that had been the focus of his life.
This car was his, so he had purchased one he liked in spite of it’s limited performance (when compared with the more expensive players), and had promised to treat it like the lady it was. 
His careful adherence to the speed limit was the only reason he noticed the woman, clad as she was entirely in black and hunched over on the side of the road. Her head raised as she heard the engine rev with his downshift, and she struggled to her feet and started to shamble into the middle of the road, seriously hurt.
Raimondo was nothing if not a compassionate person, but then only a heartless bastard would ignore an obvious need for assistance, so he braked hard to stop near the woman. Her voice struggled to reach his ears as he climbed out and stepped to her side, just in time to catch her from falling down.
“Help... Help me.”
“What’s happened, Miss? Where are you hurt?”
Her eye was bandaged and the blood on her face made it clear that something terrible had happened. 
“Please... Our car went off of the road. I need... I need...”
He pulled her closer as her voice began to trail off and strained to hear. “What? How can I-“
His stomach felt like he had landed on a concrete post and the force of a blow made him stagger back, seeking to stay upright as he tried to understand what had just happened. The woman got to her feet and pointed a gun at him, her eyes deadly serious if a bit amused.
“I need your car.” 
He finally lost his balance and sat roughly in the dirt on the shoulder, still holding his stomach. “A car-jacking? You’re car-jacking me?”
“Yes. Sorry.” She grabbed a backpack and rifle from a shrub beside the road and climbed into the car. 
Something in Raimondo snapped. He had worked so hard for that car, given so much... And now it was being stolen. He lurched to his feet and ran to the door, grabbing the woman by the arm and trying to pull her from the car through the window.
“You bitch! You’re not taking it! I won’t let you! Get...Out!!”
He had forgotten the gun entirely in his rage. The muzzle was suddenly jammed painfully into his chest and the woman’s eye seemed void of all humanity, all emotion. Her words seemed mechanical, robotic even, and were just as much of a surprise as the shot she fired through his heart.
“I said I’m sorry.”
The body dropped to the ground beside the car, having only scant moments of life left; moments Raimondo used to ask the age-old question of why. Why him? 
Jamie knew the look on the dead man’s face. It was the same face her friends had made as they gasped their last breaths- the same face she had as she took hers. The answer was simple, if less than satisfying.
“Because.”
Jamie dropped the clutch and spun the car around, something that was slightly tougher with the mid-engine design of the Lotus. She drove slowly up the road until she spotted what she was looking for alongside it: Her Walther pistol. Having retrieved it, she settled into the car and started driving back towards Milan, looking to put as much distance between her self and the body she had just left behind. It wasn’t the first, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
No, it was just a lead-in for what was to come.

The car was loaded and Jamie was thankful for that. The windows went down and she took the deepest breaths she could as the smell of blood faded into the wind. Clean air helped to take her mind off of the innocent person she had just killed. It had been the easiest thing to do in the situation, and were she not buzzing from the alcohol, she might have found it frightening.
“Oh, you’re going to hate yourself for it tomorrow, assuming you survive.” The eye in the mirror seemed amused. “But that’s not likely.” Morality had taken a flying leap from her mind, an attribute of the woman who had been born in that warehouse on that ugly, God-forsaken night. Jamie could feel that woman controlling her body in the way that she feared- the way that had tried to kill Michael.
The hell of it was, it felt good.
“Time to make things happen.”
She picked up the phone that was sitting on the passenger seat and dialed the agency’s number. 
“Social Welfare Agency.”
“This is Jamie Christiansen. Authenticate for non-secure line. Situation-critical.”
“Authenticate: Alpha Foxtrot seven.”
Jamie searched her mind for the response code she knew had been planted in her head for her ‘phone-home’ contingency. “X-ray Tango four dash Echo six.”
“Stand by.”
She was on hold for a moment before the transfer was made to a phone that rang. She wasn’t sure who was supposed to pick up when she phoned in, but the voice that finally answered made sense once she remembered why she had a phone-home contingency. It assumed she was on the loose, injured, lacking instructions, and in danger of some form, which meant she was extremely dangerous to innocents around her. Survival was now her commanding instinct, though she doubted her programmers had anticipated that she would be acting the same way without their control.
“Belisario. Jamie, are you okay?”
He would understand. She could probably even trust him.
“I’m injured, but mobile and capable. Michael’s been taken by Amherst. I need you to get me his location from the agency’s tracker.”
“Tracker?”
“Don’t bull-shit me, Doctor. I know Michael’s wearing a tracking device that was implanted after he collapsed in the rain. He found it when we were testing his bug-scanning equipment.”
Her sharp tone had told Belisario what her actual state was. It’s not that she cared, but he was going to waste time by trying to talk her down.
“Jamie, tell me what you plan.”
“I’m going to try to save him. I need to know his location.”
“Jamie, you know I can’t have you operating like this. You need to return here immediately, or to the nearest agency safe-house.”
“There’s no time for that. I know you’re recording this call so I’m just going to tell you for the record that I am refusing my return order. Send the teams after me for all I care. When they find me they can shoot the bad guys with me. But Michael is my first priority and I will not return until he is safe.”
A slow car was blocking her path and she maneuvered around it sharply, creating a near-miss and getting some gestures in return. The silence on the other end of the phone surprised her a little. She could not tell what was going on in Belisario’s head.
“You’ve become a lot more than I expected. It gives me hope for the other girls.”
“I’ve had to grow up faster than the rest. That was something I had to do even before all of this started.”
“Don’t let it end so soon, Jamie. There is so much more you can live for.”
It would have been touching if she had not known what was to come. Even delivered by his dispassionate voice, it warmed her.
“Michael needs me. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to save him. Besides, there’s something he needs to know.”
“I understand. Ferro has the information you need and wants to talk to you. Hold on. And be careful.”
“I’ll try.”
The phone went dead for a couple of moments as she was put on hold, leaving her to her thoughts of what she was going to have to say to Ferro. She was going to have to take charge and put her off-balance from the start. It was the only way that Ferro seemed to back down, even to Michael.
“Jamie, it’s Ferro.  I have the location for you and I’m sending it now to the phone you’re using.”
A text message popped onto the screen with the numeric coordinates. The GPS in the dash quickly showed the place as being several kilometers west of Milan.
“Got it. Any idea what it is?”
“Satellite imaging shows an industrial complex of some kind. It’s owned by the same company as that warehouse Europol gave you. There are some storage tanks and large buildings, but that’s all we can tell. We’re working on it now.”
“Okay. Get whatever teams you can round up with an A-4 load-out and get there as fast as possible. I’m about a half-hour out from where I am.”
“It will take almost eighty minutes to get any teams there. That’s assuming I can get the transport we would need.”
“Do what you can, Ferro. Michael doesn’t deserve what they intend to give him.”
“I know. Do your best, Jamie.”
Jamie smiled. “You’re not going to try to talk me out of it?”
“It would be a waste of time that I could be spending arranging for your rescue. Am I right? Besides, you wouldn’t listen to it anyway.”
“Yeah.”
“Go save him, and good luck.”
“Good bye.” She hadn’t been able to say what she had wanted to- that Ferro wasn’t the person Jamie had always thought her to be. Maybe Michael’s persistence had brought out the human in her, something he seemed very good at.
The problem with that characteristic was that some people simply did not want to feel anything and would resist, even violently, any attempts to humanize them. 
Amherst was such a man.

It wouldn’t last long, Michel thought to himself. They would eventually tire of beating him and move on to the true torture, and then he could show them what a real man was. In spite of the repeated blows from fists and clubs, he had not uttered anything more than a grunt, something that seemed to anger the bastards even more as time went on. It wasn’t as if he was trying to prove anything with his emotionless state. It was simply the most comfortable place to be since everything had gone to hell. 
Watching Jamie die hurt him more than any physical pain Amherst’s goons could administer, and if he were going to break down emotionally it would be for her, not for them or his self. He had been the one who had risked her life and he was the one who would take the responsibility for its end. 
His tormentors took a break from their work and left him alone, his arms and legs numb from how tight he was restrained to the wooden chair. The light was switched out and the darkness enveloped him, possibly the worst thing they had done to him yet. 
His mind, desperate for input, conjured up the moments before the crash. Jamie’s determined look as she emptied her gun into the one chasing them, her smile as she glanced down at him, and then the blood as she took the lucky bullet to her eye and collapsed half out of the car window. The jolt had made her slide the rest of the way inside and the dead look in her remaining eye seemed to accuse him.
The car was rammed from behind and he lost traction, sliding over the edge and into the trees, rolling over multiple times. Somewhere between blinks she had disappeared from the car.
It didn’t matter- she was dead now, and he would soon follow. Before that, though, he was going to put every bit of his strength into robbing them of satisfaction. They had underestimated Tanya- beautiful, sweet Tanya- and it had infuriated Amherst to no end. The large production he had made of her execution was to get some satisfaction from Michael since the woman had robbed him of it, and Michael had fallen for it. The things that had happened to Mario and Maria were on Michael’s conscience because he had been too weak to think straight past Amherst’s attacks.
“You’re an idiot.” Somehow the whisper to his self didn’t help the situation any. A part of his mind took that realization and ran with it, getting him back into gear on finding some way to escape so that he could make Ian Amherst’s life more miserable, if only for a little longer.
The wooden chair had a weakness, he could feel, and it would only take a little time to break it. The noise involved would bring the guards and end it before it began, however, and given the lack of feeling in his limbs, he would be too slow to react to anything without getting killed.
Still, as he stretched his legs a bit, he could feel the back shifting a little, and the chair swayed as if the legs weren’t solidly attached.
“Damn... Sloppy methods. It’s like he wants me to escape.” That wasn’t it. This was just one chair among many that were around, all wooden, and built like dining chairs. His eyes had adjusted to the dark and he could see spots of light filtering in though the panels that covered the only window of the room, like an indoor storm shutter. The wall was plain drywall over sheet metal, just enough to make a break-through impossible.
The lights came on and Amherst entered with his lackeys in tow. He was probably going to start the real show, Michael thought. Cameras and lights were brought in to be set up, confirming the thought, as did the smile on Amherst’s face as he watched Michael look around at the things being unpacked.
“Tell me, Christiansen... What punishment would you use if you were going to execute someone for the cameras?”
Michael only glared at his tormentor for several moments as he decided on what to do. He had been willing to stay silent and simply take it, but it occurred to him that he had another weapon at his disposal, one that would make his refusal to scream even more potent.
“Well, I would have sat back and let their own conscience eat away at them, but since you’re interested in an execution, I’ve always been partial to a firing squad or electric chair.”
Ian smiled and picked up a baseball bat, swinging it one-handed and whacking Michael sharply across his left shin. Through sheer grit, Michael had managed to keep a straight face through the pain.
“Americans... Trying to be funny until the end. That blonde whore was the same way at first, even going so far as to insult my manhood. She found out exactly what I had when she choked herself unconscious on it. Stupid cunt.” He swung the bat again and caught Michael across his arms that were secured across the back of the chair. 
Michael counted his blessings that nothing was broken just yet, though he was sure his ribs had been cracked earlier. Another blessing was the subtle crack he had felt through the chair at the impact. Something was going to give eventually, though it hardly mattered if he was still surrounded.
“Your file was interesting, Christiansen. I especially like the winks and nods pointing to your involvement in the Prague terrorist incident. You had been shot up, were dying, yet your team went out and flayed a few of them for revenge.” 
He paused to consider it and Michael noticed a hint of a nostalgic smile on his face.
“You went through my file, obviously, so I’m sure you noticed the numerous blanks that resulted from my special ops work. One of those blanks was a quaint trip into the jungles of Myanmar back in 2000. You see, the government there had their bollocks in a twist over something or other and my SAS team was sent in for recon purposes, as a little look around to see what could be complained about to bring pressure against the fools in charge there. We stumbled on a Karenni village just after the government troops moved out, and you could imagine our horror at the scene there. Every male in the village had been flayed alive and their skins strung out across some strands of concertina wire for the animals to chew on. Even from a distance we could tell that a few had yet to die from their wounds.”
Michael had heard something about there being trouble there, but the truth, as this no doubt was, had either been kept from the CIA or had been kept quiet. The Brits had obviously not used the information publicly, but the changes in the Myanmar government that had occurred were probably the result of someone being pulled aside and spoken to quietly.
“Yes, that was my first exposure to an honest to God flaying. I felt it grotesque at the time, perhaps even maddening, but now I’m kind of liking the idea of trying it.” He rubbed his chin theatrically as he eyed Michael. “It’s not that different from skinning a rabbit, really, and it would be somewhat fitting for you.”
It wasn’t a joke, Michael knew, and the sweat that he broke out into was entirely reflexive. It was one thing to be cut up, but to be skinned alive was going to be a bit much to take.
“Well, I can only hope that you screw it up like everything else you’ve done. One shouldn’t use an unpracticed trick for a performance.”
The bat cracked against his legs again, right on the same spot, and the pain was intense as the bruising spots from the earlier beatings were reminded that they should be hurting him on a constant basis.
“You’re forgetting that I’m a natural. It won’t take more than a few slices to figure out how to do it. It should be fun.”
The cameras and lights were set and Amherst instructed his men to go get a table for the cutting to be done on. 
“Phillip, you and Robbie get him off of the chair when they bring the table in.”
“See, you’re fucking it up already, Ian. You don’t flay someone lying down. You string them up by their feet and pull down or you’ll never get the head intact. Jesus, it’s like I’m teaching a kindergarten or something.” Michaels remark and smirk pushed Amherst’s buttons, getting an unconstrained scowl and raised hand before he was able to adjust to the baiting.
“It doesn’t really matter how I do it, Christiansen. I’m just searching for as many screams as I can get out of you. I doubt you’ll be so cheerful after I start peeling.”
The table had arrived and Michael’s helpers took spots beside him as the cameras were started. Amherst took a spot in front of the camera and opened his mouth to begin his intro, but his phone rang, resulting in an annoyed look at his own forgetfulness.
Michael watched his enemy’s eyes, his body and mind telling him that anything resembling an opening he could not afford to be missed. What he saw there was fear, though- a split heartbeat of fear that gave Michael a bit of hope.
Something was going to happen. He could feel it.

Jamie crawled silently through the weeds beside the road, carefully picking her way and quietly wishing the darkness would come quicker, so as to better cover her movements once she was in the open. She could see the two guards at the main gate, a chain-link fence on a sliding-rolling setup, and they were alert, but relaxed. They were in for a surprise...
She could see no patrols but the activity inside the main building was only average, meaning they weren’t moving anything major through there at the moment. Anyone inside was likely to be involved with Michael’s torment and that meant they were in one place.
It took a few minutes but she managed to find a spot where she could poke her thermal scope through the weeds and get an unobstructed view of the building, and sure enough there were a lot of people in one section that seemed comprised of a couple of large rooms with one smaller one on the outside wall. That was where they were keeping him if he was still alive.
“Steady on, Jamie. He’s still alive.”
She thanked the whispered thought as she slipped back into the brush, glad for the little things that kept her going.
The things she had to do would take time, but she had to go in with every asset she had. Her supplies were limited and her backup non-existent, so every bullet was precious.
She slipped a loaded magazine into her Walther and screwed the suppressor on, racking the slide and swapping the mag again for one that was topped off. Her pockets were loaded with everything she might need in a fury of her attack and everything else was now tossed carelessly around the inside of the car. She just couldn’t envision a need for listening devices or lock picks at this point.
The sun had set, but the mercury-vapor lamps of the facility had not come on yet, giving her a precious few minutes to move unnoticed and in relative darkness. A guard lit a cigarette, his lighter effectively blinding him in the twilight as Jamie dashed to the side of the guard shack and jumped, planting a foot on the brick siding and pushing off, launching her into a cart-wheeled jump over the razor wire at the top of the fence. Her feet hit the ground and she rolled to absorb the impact, popping to her feet right next to a guard. 
Her arm wrapped around his head, her hand on his mouth to silence him, and her right arm extended towards the other guard who was ten feet away, only now spinning around to see what the noise had been. The Walther coughed and the guard dropped as the nine-millimeter punched through his temple and out the other side, taking an important part of his brain with it.
“Two...” Jamie did not hear her own voice as she holstered the Walther and pulled her knife. The point slipped sideways between the man’s ribs and through a lung, making the man scream into her quieting hand as his heart began to tear itself to shreds on the knife’s point. 
She could feel the heart beating against the knife and she closed her eye to savor the feeling of righteous satisfaction that washed over her. She nearly let the man slip from her hold, so powerful it had been, but the moment was soon over, as was the man’s existence, and she let the lifeless body fall to the ground at her feet, his eyes locked in a look of pain.
“Three...” She consolidated their ammunition into a single one of their rifles and opened the gate, stooping momentarily to pick up one of their phones before running back to the Lotus that she had parked some ways down the road.
She parked the car in a tactically sound spot and climbed out, setting up the Beowulf on its bipod on the hood, sandwiched between her packs for stability. Her next move was to get the ball rolling.
She scrolled through the phone’s memory and dialed the number she expected would be the one. It rang several times before it picked up and she somehow knew she had been exactly on-target.
“I want Michael Christiansen. Send him out alive and I’ll let you walk away.”
There was a long pause, a sign that she was catching him off-guard.
“And if I refuse? What will you do then?”
She started to think about telling him but then thought better.
“Yes or no?”

Amherst’s face changed to one of amusement as he had spoken, a bad sign for Michael that was made worse when Amherst looked at him in an appraising way.
“No.”
Whoever it had been hung up immediately, robbing Ian of the chance to goad them a bit further and making his anger flare up again.
“Get your weapons! It’s the-“
A spray of plaster pelted several of the men and one fell to the floor, his left side a bloody wreckage caused by the three-hundred and twenty-five grain bullet as it had passed through, slightly expanded but barely slowed by the wall. A moment of panic ensued as more rounds were fired through the wall at chest level, the pounding crack of the Beowulf audible even over the yelling inside the room. Another man was hit in the leg and it nearly separated from his body, but he would not last a few minutes with the blood pouring from his artery.
Michael started laughing as his mind realized things that Amherst and his cronies could not know. He shifted his weight and fell on his side, a bullet whizzing past him in a shot that would have killed him had he not moved.
“He’s fucking lost it!” A goon kicked the underside of the chair and Michael felt it give a little. He was almost free.
“Clearly you boys have no idea what you’re dealing with.”
Amherst had ducked behind the heavy table but had no illusions as to the lack of cover that provided. “It’s the girl. Fuck, Robbie, I told you to finish her!”
“I emptied the rest of the clip into her! No way anyone can live through that at that range!”
A round smashed through the table right next to Robbie’s head, putting the fear of God in him. Amherst wasn’t a fazed, however, and motioned several men to the exit of the room to try to fight back from elsewhere.
“You don’t get it! She’s programmed to protect me.”
Amherst looked into Michael’s eyes and saw a victorious glimmer, a glimmer that made him truly begin to fear the girl. Sometimes it only takes the thought of facing death to destroy the feeling of invulnerability.
“What?” Robbie wasn’t nearly as smart, as were the others. What better way for Michael to stir them up a bit more than by telling the awful truth?
“If she knows I’m in here, and she’s still firing blindly, then that means that she is no longer valuing my life. If she no longer values my life, then she has lost every ounce of sanity she might have had.” He smiled at them- a smile of someone who was going to Hell in a crowd. “None of us are leaving this building alive.”
As if to punctuate this, another round ripped through the wall and table, taking Robbie’s arm off below the elbow. His scream of pain coincided with an end to the havoc from the Beowulf, making the whimpering of the man as he cradled his bleeding stump seem all the more real through the silence.
“Phil!”
Phillip rushed back in with an M4 rifle, trailed by a couple of others, and pulled the nearly destroyed shutter from the window. He cautiously peered out and around, trying to locate the aggressor.
“I can’t see her.”
“Then go out there and find her!”
Michael wanted a picture of the look Phil gave Amherst. Trust was so fragile when everyone was being hunted.
Phil kicked out several smashed sections of sheet metal and started to venture out, but jerked back inside and behind cover, leveling the rifle. “She’s going to smash through! Open fire!”
The three rifles opened up on full-auto, ripping the thin-framed sports car to shreds in less than a few seconds. It drifted left and bogged its shredded tires down in the grass at the edge of the pavement, stopping it cold. There were a few breaths of relief but the rifles didn’t waver any, showing Michael that at least some of these soldiers still had it in them. 
Phil started to go out again, never taking his eyes off of the car that was only eighty feet away. The other two followed and closed in on it in a loose formation, and then Phil waved one forward to check it, his rifle locked on the driver’s seat in case the girl had ducked down behind the dashboard.
The man swallowed hard and moved to only a few feet away, close enough to see the empty passenger compartment and the rigged steering and accelerator.
“She’s not in here!”

“Four.”
Jamie smiled wickedly and pressed the button on the detonator, watching the hapless man get fried by the flames that erupted from the Lotus as the makeshift bomb tore the once-beautiful car apart. The other two were far enough away to live with only some shrapnel wounds, but they would die in time. They would all die.

Phillip pulled his remaining man back to the wall and hid inside the building, watching the burning pyre from relative safety.
“Shit! What the fuck is she doing?”
“She’s hunting you.”
All eyes turned on Michael as he propped himself up against a wall, the remains of the broken chair still helping to bind his arms.
“She’s coming for all of us. She’s a machine, gentlemen... Literally a machine made of carbon composites and copper wires. What could be considered human was tenuous at best, and with her level of injury she has gone into a purely survival mode. At this point, everything that she has ever identified as an enemy or threat is likely to be her target.” Another smile. “You wonder what that is out there? She is Death incarnate.”
He couldn’t have scripted it better. Amherst and his men all looked out through the Swiss-cheesed wall at the flames that had spread with the leaking fuel tank. Through these flames stepped the Angel of Death, her remaining eye glowing red with the fires of Hell, her hands wielding the assault rifle she had taken from the guard.
“Oh shit...”
Amherst smacked Phil across the back of the head for the comment and backed away from the wall. “She’s looking for a fight, we’ll give her one! Load up in the armory and spread out through the building. Take any shot she gives you. If she’s wounded, we can kill her. Phil!” He pointed a finger at Michael, and Michael could still see the fear in his eyes. “Kill him.”
Suddenly Phil was alone with Michael in a shot-up room and with a murderous woman closing in on him. He leveled his rifle at Michael but caught sight of Jamie at the wall, staring straight at him with the soulless eye. He spun to fire at her but she was gone, ducking away before he could ever line up the sights. 
Christiansen was on his feet beside him, having loosened his ropes enough. He tossed a length over Phil’s head and spun, crossing the rope ends and choking him for a moment before hoisting him over his shoulder by the neck to the floor, and then using the stunning event to flip the rope around his neck again and draw the ends out, crushing the man’s throat. 
The choking gasps finally broke into the death rattle of a man and Michael realized that he had been clenching his teeth in anger as he had strangled him. It was the first time in as long as he could remember that his body had reacted as such while killing and it reminded him that things he had been holding in were going to have to come out. He was no stranger to life and death struggles, but everything he had ever feared was now going to try to kill him as persistently as the men with guns. 
Something- everything- was going to try to stop him in this last battle... Such was the nature of the evil they fought. He was fighting against his own limits of the physical and mental forms. He was fighting to finish the evil that he had pledged his life against. To give in to death before the evil was destroyed meant failure.
“Five... Six...”
He spun and saw Jamie looking at the bodies on the floor. The one with the leg wound had bled out, as had the one with the chest wound. She was emotionless as she had said the words, but not robotic in tone. Jamie was a person who was killing without emotion, quite possibly the most efficient way to go about it.
Michael, however, was not a machine. His knees buckled and he sagged to the floor, powerless to move in the face of the relief that he felt.
“Jamie... Jesus Jamie, I thought I had lost you.”
Her eye snapped to him but there was no real sign of familiarity in it. The look she gave him was just as cold as the corpses at their feet. She stepped over to him and knelt down to check the corpse of Phillip, then stood and fired a shot from her Walther through its head. “Seven...”
Michael watched her continue walking towards the door, oblivious to what he had said. Her body was tense and every muscle seemed ready to fire off at its full power to deal death out to those she chose. She was the huntress... And she was leaving him again.
“JAMIE!” 
His scream had come from inside his heart, the part that he heard so often but refused to listen to. The desperation in his voice found a bit of humanity to latch onto and made her stop- shuddering slightly as she fought for the words to face him.
“Michael... You should leave now. There is no one in this building but the dead and those who are going to die. For what it’s worth, I’m thankful that you saved me, and I don’t hate you for making me what I have become.”
Her head turned and she gave him a sad smile, one that spoke of the sadness that he would soon have to face. 
Michael could see through it. She was saying goodbye. 
“Damn it, Jamie, don’t do this. We can walk away.”
Jamie’s voice was dark and bordering on the edge of sanity. Any stability left inside her head was devoted to the killing to come. 
“I can’t. I’m out of time. I can’t afford to waste the single breath that I have left.” She pulled his Smith&Wesson from her belt and tossed it to him along with a pair of magazines for it. “You should do what you feel is right, Michael. There are plenty of people in here that hurt Tanya, just as they hurt Carol and Angie. Kill them or don’t, I really don’t care what you do. Just don’t get in my way. Amherst is mine.”
She didn’t give him time to respond. She knew that the more she talked, the less time she had and the more likely it was that she would lose her taste for blood. The pills helped, of course. Her body was almost numb from the last of the pills she had taken, making the pain seem so far away, and their effect should last long enough. Her senses hadn’t suffered, though, and she had trouble understanding why until she realized that she was operating at the edge of human existence. 
Many had spoken of their senses being finely honed as they went to what they felt was their death in battle, and that component of their fight-or-flight instinct made them more efficient and nearly impervious in ways that could not be trained into a person. Life and death- two sides of the same coin.
Some lived.
Some died.
So when your death was assured, how would you spend it? Whining and crying, submitting to the fear and the pain until you take your last breath? Janet had done that before and it had brought no satisfaction, no enlightenment, and no end.
Janet Wells would not make that mistake a second time.