Eye of the Monster

Unless he had help getting down!

The Accelerator in one hand, Dawson sprinted down the second floor corridor lined with opened, empty cells. The floor below was a brutal press, a melee right out of simulation about medieval combat. It almost surprised her that Ionfist wasn't plunging headlong into it, but he clearly desired a more glorious death than being gunned down in a prison riot.

The enormous ork was not a difficult act to follow and Dawson began to close the gap as they ran out onto a walkway running across to the eastern side of the cell block. She turned the accelerator up to its highest setting and dropped to one knee to take aim.

The alarms and shouting masked the approaching sound of footsteps on the metal walkway until it was too late. Someone in an orange jumpsuit crashed into Dawson from her left, making her pull of the sensitive trigger on the Accelerator send a red-hot steel rod flying just over Ionfist's shoulder. The ork flinched away from the passing heat and the rod careened past him into the plate glass of the perfunctory security checkpoint leading to the palaces. The hole left by its passage made the surface weaker and Ivan crashed right through it without stopping.

Dawson crashed to the metal walkway and her hat went tumbling off of her head, floating off the edge and into the melee below. Without looking she directed a kick at her attacker and struck them in the midsection, sending them stumbling back several steps clutching their abdomen. Looking up and swiping the black hair out of her eyes with one hand, Dawson recognized the person who had struck her immediately as having been one of the cutters that had tried to uncover her identity when Ivan was still at large. Dawson had taken the time to learn her name: Carletta Milthorp.

Carletta had hit the railing of the walkway and doubled over to clutch her stomach, but when she looked back up the expression of rage on her face was more than enough to indicate she was still holding a grudge. Her testimony had been thrown out when Instinct had led Lone Star to that scientist's hideout in Seacliff while Dawson was busting Ionfist.

"Hey!" Carletta shouted, as loud as she could while still catching her breath. She pointed at Dawson to emphasize what she was saying. "Hey! That's Neon Justice!"

In the corridors inmates started to turn towards them. They had heard that feared street name that had been attributed to her during the gang war and they needed no evidence; most of them were probably in here because of the things she'd done to tip the balance in the favor of the law. Even those that didn't believe needed no particular motivation to attack someone with a badge on her coat.

So as Dawson got to her feet, a half dozen figures in orange jumpsuits were breaking away from the stuffed corridors to sprint out onto the walkways and charge at her. She took one second to dial down the Accelerator to its lowest setting, and then started firing while backing up towards the direction Ivan had gone.

The noise of the Accelerator firing was drowned out by the sirens as she sank four shots into the oncoming bodies. A knee dislocated, a shoulder broken, a stomach pounded, an elbow shattered. Carletta charged at her again, stabbing at her midsection with a shiv fashioned out of what appeared to be a toothbrush. Dawson stepped to the side, the sharpened plastic point slicing a thin line in the left side of her coat. With her free hand she grabbed the back of Carletta's head to force her down and ram one knee into her stomach, after which she collapsed gasping for breath.

With the cylinder empty of rods, Dawson holstered it in preparation of dealing with the two oncoming inmates, but to her relief a pair of muted gunshots from the other side of the walkway immediately preceded the collapse of one of them right beside Carletta on the floor, holding his leg. The other stumbled and clutched the railing for support, holding his right hip. Beyond them, some twenty meters away, stood Candles holding his streetline special.

"Go get him!" the ork shouted, popping open the almost comically small gun to feed two more polymer rounds into it. There was no telling how many he had in the pockets of his faded pleather jacket. "I'll watch your six!"

More inmates broke away from the press at the corridor and lunged at Candles, who directed a swift kick to the groin of one of them while hopping sideways, shooting a second in the foot. Polymer rounds were less-than-lethal but could easily maim.

Dawson righted herself on the walkway and resumed her pursuit, leaping through the broken security checkpoint and sprinting into the palaces. The alarms here were quiter, the din of combat just a low and distant roar. She passed by cells with open doors but whose occupants were crouched behind furniture or huddled in a corner, figures dressed not in orange jumpsuits but in business casual clothing. No doubt they were trying to avoid attention, fearful of being targeted by bitter rioters or for being mistaken as participants by guards trying to restore order.

Down the line she ran until she reached the stairs at the farthest end of the block, grabbing the hand rail to leverage her weight and begin climbing. She could feel the rumble of heavy, frantic footfalls from further up: she wasn't too far behind.

As a precaution against just this sort of event the cell block floors above the second were only connected by singular stairways so as to limit the possible angles of attack that a mass of bodies could apply themselves to. That meant the only way up to the top floor of the palaces was these stairs, and running all the way to the far end after each flight. A fire hazard, but few people had many concerns for the prisoners of Folsom.

Her physical conditioning was vital in making up for lost time, years on the treadmill and on the street chasing after fleeing targets paying dividends as she reached the opposite stairwell in a matter of tens of seconds. While she ran she replaced the cylinder in the Accelerator with the spare kept in her inside coat pocket.

Upon reaching the fourth floor she caught sight of an ork, but not the one she'd been chasing. Five of them were clustered in front of a cell, one of them holding what looked to be a laser chop-saw looted from the prison's machine shop. He was pressing it to the bars of the cell while the others menaced the person inside.

She knew the spot immediately. It was Megiddo's cell. On the far side of this crowd, Ivan was doubled over, catching his breath.

Pointing the Accelerator at Ivan and pulling the trigger, Dawson was dismayed when one of the orks flinched at the sound of the shot and stumbled into the path of the projectile. It struck him right in the right shoulder and sent him skidding three meters down the hall before he lost his footing and tumbled to his back.

The other orks turned to look at Dawson and she recognized one Miles Dagroda... Known on the street as Gore'gav. One of Ionfist's loyalists, and someone who would die for the warboss even in his humiliation.

Immediately the bloody tusks abandoned their efforts with the bars and started charging at her. Ivan gripped the handrail of the palace stairs and nearly pulled it free from its mooring hauling himself up the steps.

Approaching Dawson earned the first tusk the honor of getting shot in the groin with a steel rod. His scavenged pipe dropped to the ground as he decided to use his hands to clutch his fractured pelvis, falling to his knees before being shoved out of the way by the second in line. Her eagerness gained her a shot to the right knee, the jumpsuit a poor replacement for the leather greaves the tusks wore out on the street. She was still rolling forward on the ground when the third, the one carrying the saw, closed in on her. She ducked under his swing, the red-hot beam sizzling in the air as she positioned the gun a half meter from his solar plexus and pulled the trigger.

As he crumpled to the floor groaning, the sound of whistling metal prompted Dawson to drop to the ground. She narrowly avoided the pipe Gore'gav had thrown which passed above her prone body and clattered against the bars of the cell behind her. She rolled to her left towards the exterior wall and his foot stomped down where her head had been just a moment before. As he was winding up a kick she seized the still-active laser saw and interposed it between the two of them. When his foot came forward the tip of his prison-issued boots passed through the beam and sheared off the final five centimeters of his toes. He howled in pain and more importantly missed connecting with Dawson's face because of the section he was now missing.

The ork's fist struck the saw and smashed in the side with the battery, causing it to go out. Dawson dropped it and rolled to one side, coming up in time to lean back from a wide swing of Gore'gav's enormous arm. She ducked below another and his fist thumped into the wall, giving her an opening to strike him in the throat with as much force as she could muster in her free hand.

He coughed and spat saliva and a thin stream of blood on the wall, but when Dawson started backing up to put enough space between them for shot he lunged forward and swiped at her with one open hand, catching the neck of her coat and pinning her to the wall.

"Gonna feed you your own eyeballs," Gore'gav growled.

Dawson said back, "Alles Klar, Herr Kommissar?"

His eyes went suddenly wide and he hesitated for just a moment. It was all the moment she needed to point the Accelerator at his chest. The steel rod escaping from the barrel struck one of his ribs and she could hear the silicone head's muted thump as it broke the bone. Gore'gav's grip on her coat went slack and his other hand clutched his injury.

She pulled away from him and turned, expecting him to drop to his knees but to her sudden surprise he reached out and grabbed one of her ankles as he was falling. The sudden arrest of her motion put her off balance and sent Dawson pitching forward; instinctively she dropped the Accelerator and brought her arms up in front of her face with hands balled into fists, cushioning the impact against the floor.

Rolling over she saw the enraged ork looming above her and bringing one fist down towards her face. With one smooth motion she pulled the balisong out of her left pocket and deployed it, the blade jabbing point-first into the meat of his hand and holding his blow at bay.

For five long seconds they struggled like that, Dawson's right arm pinned below her body and her left holding Goregav's fist up at knife-point while his other hand remained locked around her ankle.

Then the sound of a shotgun firing from eight feet away echoed through the corridor. Gore'gav's right shoulder was struck by a blast of pellets that tore the fabric of his jumpsuit off, along with some of the skin and muscle below it.

He let go of Dawson and collapsed against the wall, turning to see Brandt leveling Sokoth's Enfield at him. At this range and from behind he could easily have hit Gore'gav in the head.

A flick of a switch on the AS-7 activated the shotgun's laser sight, which trained on the ork's forehead. He let go of Dawson's ankle and she pulled her knife out of his hand.

"I'm going for Ionfist!" Dawson shouted.

Still holding the Enfield in one hand, Brandt unslung the handcuffs he kept on his belt and tossed them at Gore'gav's feet. He muttered, "This is going to wreck our recidivism rate."

As she passed Megiddo's cell, she turned her head to look into it. Julius was inside in his expensive armchair, smoking a cigar in one hand with a glass of scotch sitting on the small table in front of him. He seemed to have not a care in the world, as if five pissed off orks hadn't been trying to get into his cell. Their eyes met but she didn't slow or speak, saving her breath for the dash to the fifth floor.

She was halfway up the stairs when the sound of shattering glass told her she was too late. Fragments were still falling out of the window frame as she skidded to a stop in front of it, arriving in time only to get a view of Ivan Ionfist holding onto the handle of a low-tech zipline that had been set up just above the window frame on the exterior wall. The huge ork's weight made the taut cord sag immensely while he clutched the pulley with his one remaining hand and as Ivan sailed across the Folsom prison courtyard a guard on the wall took a shot at him with a Remington 950 hunting rifle. The bullet grazed his left thigh.

And then the warboss was lifting his legs to clear the barbed wire. The zipline carried him another forty feet to where the line terminated at a post embedded in an old telephone pole on the far side of the winding road that led up to Folsom. The same guard took another shot but it went wild.

Ivan Ionfist had gotten away.

Dawson struck the wall beside the window with one fist and muttered, "Fucking hell."

= = =

She spent several minutes examining the mounting for the zipline. It wasn't a hack job--it had been professionally installed and clearly recently, set deep into the concrete of the exterior wall and then, based on the pattern on the metal, acid-rinsed to eliminate any fingerprints that might have been left behind in case it didn't rain before it was needed. It even had extra anchors to account for the immense weight of the metahuman it had been intended for.

As she was descending the stairway back to the fourth floor when the alarms went silent, suggesting that the riot was being brought under control. The corridor where she'd fought Gore'gav was just then being cleared of the wounded and now bound bloody tusks, hauled off to their cells by disheveled corrections officers. They had come to the palaces and used lengths of chain to force shut the sliding cell doors but hadn't bothered to put padlocks or anything similar on them. The temporarily incarcerated individuals had yet to come out of hiding.

Brandt was standing in front of Megiddo's cell, watching Dawson approach. She stopped in front of him and asked, "He say anything?"

"No noise but swallowing and the clinking of ice."

Dawson held out her hand. Without hesitation Asher handed over the Enfield.

"Leave."

He lingered a moment, looking not into the cell or at its occupant but gazing long at Dawson as if uncertain of what she might do. But then his trust in her judgment and her methods won out, and he took off down the hall at a brisk pace.

Stepping in front of the cell, Dawson made a show of holding the shotgun up at an angle so that the drum magazine was plainly visible, still carrying seventeen of its twenty-four round capacity. She checked the breach on the side of the firing chamber and, after seeing that it was loaded, closed the slide and hefted the gun up in both hands before pulling the trigger.

A spray of metal fragments ejected outward from the barrel and into Megiddo's cell, most of it ending up in an expensive display screen installed on one wall. It emitted a shower of sparks before listing heavily to one side and falling off the wall. Julius himself hadn't flinched, even though one of the pellets had grazed the shoulder of his arm chair, just a few centimeters to the right of his head. He drew heavily on the cigar in his mouth and shook his drink in one hand.

Dawson began walking back and forth in front of the cell. "A new lock on its own separate circuit," she pointed out, gesturing with the barrel of the Enfield at the panel in question. "Reflective resin spray applied to the bars to stall a laser saw. You want to tell me what you know now or do I need to give you a limp for the rest of your long, long life?"

Megiddo spoke around the cigar in his mouth, sounding entirely unbothered and even a little amused. "An entire prison breaks out in riot and you, detective, are questioning the only person who did not escape from his cell. Truly the requirements for a career in law enforcement have never seemed lower to me than they do at this moment."

She lunged at the bars and reached through with one arm, swiping at his throat. But he'd learned in their last few encounters; his chair was almost a meter further away from where she stood, safely out of her reach.

"Don't test me, Megiddo! Ivan Ionfist just got out of Folsom prison on a fucking zipline during a riot and you knew it was going to happen. Start talking or you're going to need an armchair with wheels by the time I'm through with you."

"You wouldn't dare," Julius chuckled. "The one prisoner who stayed put in all this chaos, maimed by an angry and, dare I say, now disgraced Lone Star consultant with whom there is a documented history? You would be throwing your career away, detective. All those innocent people out there on the street, left nigh defenseless because you discarded that badge of yours during a tantrum.

"No. No, I don't believe you will harm me, detective. You can wave your gun around and break as many of my things as you like, but in truth you have nothing to threaten me with. You are burdened with scruples, plagued by the desire to believe in something abstract like justice or morality. Your evidence is circumstantial and it will never hold up."

Dawson straightened up and retracted her arm from inside the cell, working her mouth. Eventually she said, "You're correct, Mister Megiddo. It would be a shameful abuse of my authority to interrogate you at a time like this."

She stepped back from the bars and switched the safety on for the Enfield. "But I know someone whose career wouldn't suffer the slightest from abusing his authority."

Candles stepped in front of the cell, streetline special in one hand. He looked into the bars at Megiddo and after only a single moment recognized who it was.

Without hesitation he lifted the pistol. In the hands of an adult ork it looked almost like a toy. When he pulled the trigger there was a muted click. Julius flinched in his chair.

"Drek," Candles muttered. "Thought I had a shot left."

Megiddo chuckled, taking the cigar out of his mouth with two fingers. "If you aim to scare me with this street thug, you should give him the weapon you're carrying."

"Yeah," Candles said, turning to look at her and then down at the shotgun. "That's a great idea."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Dawson said evenly. "I'm on the fifth floor, examining the scene of an escape. No idea what happened here on the fourth. Shame all the surveillance equipment has crashed, we'll never know what really went down."

Julius looked from the ork to her and back. Candles said, "You're right. A damn shame."

He pulled from the front pocket of his coat two small vials, each half empty. With his teeth he pulled out the plastic corks in both and then poured the contents of one into the other before casually hurling it into the cell where it struck Megiddo in the upper chest and spilled out onto his cool blue business suit. It had happened just as Julius was lifting the cigar towards his mouth to draw from it; the suddenness of the assault caused him to drop the item onto his chest, which promptly burst into flames.

Candles let out a long, low laugh as Megiddo began slapping at his torso in an effort to put out the fire. He did this for six straight seconds before giving up and standing to hastily pull off his suit jacket and rip free his now-smoking shirt, exposing the hairless and lean bare chest below. As he did so Candles retrieved another pair of vials from a pocket on his right pantleg, beginning to mix them together.

"I'm glad you let me come to this, Dawson," he said with a grin. "I didn't get to see that tusk burn on the chair but this'll last me a lot longer. Yes indeed, it might even last me the rest of my miserable life."

He tossed the combined vial at Megiddo's feet and when it shattered the flames were immediate. His priceless leather shoes were quickly kicked off to keep from incinerating Julius' toes.