In the depths of mania and its euphoric rush, she knew it was the world itself that was the problem. Mankind itself.
She shared her thoughts, her secrets with one person. One person who promptly hung himself. She’d known then that hers was a big idea that was bigger than the dreamers around her. A big idea that someone somewhere must have also had. She reached out, searching through haystacks for a needle to match her own. Her search led her to dark places and even darker thoughts until ultimately she said her final yes.
This yes delivered her to the gates of hell. A hell of her own making. A hell where men used her and threw her away, laughing at her tears, laughing at how the big idea idealist was brought so low.
God save me. Please, God, save me.
But there was no God to save her or even a god to answer her.
The next time one of them climbed onto her sweaty and smelling of piss and vomit she promised herself would be the last. And it was the last. Oh how the fat pig squealed when she bit it off after he stuffed it into her mouth.
The other men looking on didn’t know what to do as red sprayed the putrid mattress where the pig screamed and thrashed.
She knew what to do, however. She took his gun — the gun that had been pressed against her head moments before — and replaced their screaming holes with new ones that gushed red. Soon enough there was no more laughter, no more screams. Only death, death that she stumbled over as she fled.
Returning to the U.S., she thought she left all that behind her, but she hadn’t. There was no dark corner she could turn, no mirror she could stare into, that she didn’t see their faces. She tried going back to school, taking a new major: criminal justice. But there was no justice. Only criminals. Criminals at all levels.
She took up martial arts. Mastering Kyusho and Jujitsu. Kyusho’s focus on pressure points matched with Jujitsu’s use of knee strikes, elbow strikes, eye gouges, biting, chokes and throws were everything she was looking for in self-defense. But it wasn’t only self-defense she was after.
She was swallowed so forcefully when the darkness returned she thought she’d never find a way to climb out. She didn’t sleep; she rarely ate. Eventually the person staring back in the mirror was so unrecognizable she no longer saw any other faces. It was then too that she no longer saw anything hidden around dark corners.
It was then Peyton Iris Jones was born.
It was then too that she met him. Her conquistador, her savior, the world’s savior. Owen Blake.
Suddenly she no longer needed to be saved or found or seen or to save, find or see anything else.
Well, she was getting ahead of herself, wasn’t she?
She didn’t meet Owen Blake right then. She found him through his work, through his published papers. Papers that spoke to everything she’d learned, everything she’d discovered about herself, everything she’d discovered about the world.
The base of the tree, the root of all the world’s ills, had but one source. One source whose name was religion and whose very orthodoxy was itself a paradox. Throughout time, men murdered, raped, and pillaged in the name of their gods. They killed each other over whose god was the most true, over whose holy book was the true source of their god’s word, over whether one who would lead them had already been born and was returning or would be born some day in the future.
She studied Blake’s work and theories, losing herself for days at a time to his predictions of catastrophe and impending collapse of world governments. Her intellect fed and satiated itself on his speculations and musings, and for the first time she saw her place so obvious, so inevitable, in the future.
She discovered too late Blake’s words were a recruitment tool for those of a certain ideology, a certain mentality, because by then she was swallowed whole by the cause. The cause of mankind. And nothing else mattered any longer. An added benefit was that her unshakeable certainty of it all put the darkness behind her. Behind her where it belonged.
Peyton smiled as she thought about their first meeting. Owen plied her with drinks and smiles — neither of which were needed. She’d recruited herself to the cause. His words and thoughts over countless published papers were enough. Everything that followed was simply the cross and dots in her signature already pressed to the page.
“Come home with me,” he said after their dinner, desert, and drinks.
She went willingly, not because she wanted what was to come, but because she was curious. Curious to see if the man himself could possibly live up to what she built up in her head. It wasn’t while they were screwing in his tiny one-bedroom apartment a block from the University of Chicago downtown campus that he told her the truth about everything. That came later while she lay there listening to him speak quietly in the dark.
“Thank you for tonight,” she told him. “You’re everything I hoped you would be.”
“You’re more woman that I ever thought I could possibly handle,” he said back. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
In that moment, she became the woman who was more than possible for him, losing her fears and trepidations and forgetting what had been done to her, focusing instead on what she would do and what they would accomplish together.
“I’m yours,” she told him.
“I know,” he said with a smile. She didn’t see the smile, but she heard it in his voice.
Love wasn’t what she expected when she pursued him, but it was what she found.
Just as she was about to slip into the hall behind the escorts, she pulled back, her eyes going wide. She thought she’d finished the other on the Kearsarge, but clearly hadn’t. The other’s presence changed everything.
Chapter 6
Gunshots. There was a moment of silence as the gravity of the situation settled in. Edie pulled Scott back from the door, her heart racing. “I’m not letting you go out there. Not like this.”
She pointed to the showers. “Through there.”
On the far wall of the men’s showers was a locked door and from an earlier visit to the women’s bathroom she knew where it lead. She forced her way through, pulling Scott with her into the women’s showers and out into the women’s bathroom. The women’s bathroom emptied out into a hall that ran parallel to the hall they’d entered the men’s bathroom from. She turned left, instead of right, going into the main wing.
Just as they opened the door to the second floor stairwell, a shot rang out, striking the cross-wired safety glass in the door. She glanced back, saw a ghost. Then she pushed Scott through.
“Not down, up,” she said, as he moved in the wrong direction.
The Saint Vincent De Paul Residence was a massive structure of brick and stone, with four floors in the main wing and three elsewhere. Not only were the executive offices up, so were the security offices.
By the time, they reached the third floor landing, she heard heavy footfalls behind them, the occasional clink of a handgun against the metal rail. At the fourth floor landing, she pulled him through a door and into a hall, turning right toward security. “Armed gunman in the building,” she shouted in English as she pointed back down the hall. Then in Italian, she added, “Affrettatevi, affrettatevi!” Hurry, hurry!
The swish of the door alerted her to what was coming. A shot rang out, narrowly missing as she pulled Scott to the floor.
“Madonna ta' Mount Philermos,” one of the guards exclaimed, rushing into the hall, pistol drawn.
Another still inside the security office called out an alert over the intercom system. Scott heard it over the loud speakers. “Attenzjoni, attenzjoni. Intruż armati…” Attention, attention. Armed intruder in the building. There was more, but Scott knew so little Maltese everything else was a jumble. Something about a lockdown instead of an evacuation.