Rook sprinted for the door, ripped it open and then paused. He replaced the now empty magazine with a fresh one, and caught his breath. If the guy had anything else to throw at him, waiting a second might draw him out. Nothing came, so Rook burst through the doorway and leaped to his right. The flashlight illuminated the man, as tall as Rook and dressed in black. He had only managed to get fifteen feet away, hampered by a limp that appeared to affect both legs.
Satisfied that the shot had struck flesh, Rook pounced. A few steps and he crossed his forearms and delivered a tackle any middle linebacker would have appreciated. The man’s cry contained unmistakable pain, and his legs slipped out from under him as his face planted in the frozen dirt. Rook dropped, drove a knee into the man’s back and pushed his hand into the back of the man’s head, forcing it further into the ground.
Despite his anger, Rook did remember to speak in Norwegian. “Who the hell are you?”
He couldn’t make out the muffled response, so he flipped the man over. He put his knee on the man’s chest and stuck the Desert Eagle under his chin. “Answer the question.”
“Fuck you.”
Rook put down the flashlight and let his fist smash into the man’s nose. When he picked up the light again, blood streamed from both nostrils. “Let’s try that again.”
“I am going to kill you, foreign asshole. Do not ever close your eyes.”
“And why would you want to do that?”
The man spit in his face, and Rook could feel the saliva dripping down his eyelid. “We do not want your kind here. You are filth that needs to be cleaned.”
“Look who’s talking, pal.”
Rook had known that trying to pin a strong man to the ground while holding a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in another was risky. So he wasn’t shocked when the man’s hand shot up, holding some sort of knife. Rook dropped the flashlight and grabbed the man’s wrist to keep the knife away. Rook literally had the upper hand, and he could feel the man’s resistance failing.
A second later, the resistance stopped. The knife dropped as if the man were pulling it toward himself. With only a wayward beam from the dropped flashlight for illumination, he couldn’t make out exactly how it happened, but the intent seemed clear enough: The man had turned the blade on himself.
Rook tried to pull back on the man’s wrist, but it was too late. The knife buried itself in the man’s throat, and Rook felt warm blood spurt onto his hand. As his hand finally pulled the knife away, some drops of blood landed on his cheek. The smell hit a few seconds later, a heavy odor that reminded Rook of so many prior battles.
He grabbed the flashlight. The man’s eyes had opened wide, but the gash in his throat and the huge volume of blood still leaking out confirmed the only possible outcome: The intruder was dead.
Rook stood up, still holding the gun and flashlight.
“Damn it!” He swore in English. Corpses didn’t often answer questions. Where’s Richard Ridley when you need him, Rook thought. Ridley, as head of the now shutdown Manifold Genetics, had not only developed a serum that regenerated the human body and extended life indefinitely, but he could also animate the inanimate. Rook wondered if that applied to dead bodies, too.
A moment later, a light came on near the door of the house, and Peder came out. “You okay, Stanislav? I heard the shots.”
“Yeah, Peder, I’m fine. This guy here, though, he’s not doing so well.”
Peder reached the body, and when he saw it, he gasped. “Dear God, what have you done?”
“I didn’t do anything. He cut his own throat.”
“Please, Stanislav, do not take me for a fool.”
Rook raised his voice. “Hey, it’s the damn truth. I woke up with him standing over me with a razor. He ran when I shined the light in his face, and I hit him in the legs with a shot. I was trying to find out why he wanted to kill me, then he tried to hit me with another knife. When he couldn’t do that, he slashed his own throat with it.”
Peder stared at the body, shaking his head. “This is very, very bad.”
“I don’t know; I’m still alive. That’s got to count for something.”
“Stanislav, do you know who this is?”
“No, who?”
“The man you just killed? This is Jens Fossen.”
“Wait a minute. You don’t mean…?”
“Yes. This is Eirek Fossen’s son.”
“I’ll fucking kill him.”
“Stanislav, you already killed him.”
“Not Jens. Eirek. You said it yourself that Dad runs this town. There’s no way Junior came up here on his own.”
“Stanislav, killing Fossen is not a good idea.”
“Sure it is. I might be a stranger in this town, but when someone tries to kill me the first night I’m here, I’m gonna respond. You guys’ll be better off without your own little Stalin telling you what to do.”
“You do not understand me. Killing Fossen will unleash terrible things.”
“Come on, what terrible things? How bad can it be?” Even as he said it, Rook knew he didn’t mean those words. He’d seen some stuff that made disaster movies look like uplifting films. But some dude in a small town in Norway couldn’t possibly be that bad.
“You don’t know Eirek Fossen. He is a scientist. He has discovered both terrible and wonderful things. And that is all I can say about it.”