Page 35 of Antihero (Tregam’s Fractured Souls #3)

Goodry lifts the gun. “No longer, though.” James is keening, hands clamped between his knees, bowed over.

He’s glancing around the scene like he doesn’t know how this came to be, doesn’t want to be here, or is expecting to wake up.

“This isn’t ideal, Paige dear. You were supposed to be dead, and I was supposed to have time to take anything from your house that I didn’t want the feds to find.

But then your damned boyfriend decided to drag me here instead…

” I feel cold as Goodry lifts the gun to me, my limbs quickening with fear.

But there’s nowhere to go. I put myself down in this hole.

The blast is loud over the driving rain. I gasp, losing sense of my body, not able to feel the pain.

I’m on the ground when the feeling comes back. Charlotte is half on me, her breathing ragged. I see the blood. Her abdomen. She took the bullet for me.

“Fucking hell, Charlotte, why’d you do that? It’s a little late for heroics, woman.” Goodry is cocking the gun again.

“Don’t,” Charlotte gasps out, stopping for a shaky, pained breath as she turns on her hip to face him. “Don’t do this.”

Goodry is lifting his arm once more. He’ll shoot again, getting me if he can, her if he can’t. He can take all the shots he wants. James is wailing. He reaches for his father, tugging on his gun arm.

“Useless imbecile!” Goodry screeches, a hand clapping onto his neck, shoving James so he falls onto the rotted wooden planks and lies writhing and crying. “As useless now as you were then!”

He dismisses his son before fixing his eyes on me again. I’m an ant to him, I realise, to be crushed under his boot. “Enough of this.”

This will be it. He’s aiming, squeezing the trigger.

Then, Dr Goodry goes flying, letting out a strained yell as he’s pitched forward, falling down into the basement with us, crashing through debris, cracking planks by one of the pillars. But he’s not alone.

“Tristan!” I gasp, voice laced with relief. He’s alive. Charlotte is sitting, trying to kneel, her blood pouring over her hand.

Tristan fell awkwardly, and is limping to a stand.

I can’t see a bullet wound, but there’s blood darkening his pants leg as he tries to stand and falls against the wall with a pained yell.

The mask has fallen away. He’s just Tristan again.

The side of his head and his temple are dark with blood thats clumped in his hair.

A trickle runs down the side of his face, like his head struck a brick or stone when he fell.

He turns to Goodry. The doctor has scrambled to grab the needle, but that won’t stop Tristan.

We all know it. The doctor tries to crawl away, dragging himself over slick splinters and blackened nails.

He’s near the stone pillar, reaching out as though he could reach it and drag himself up with a hold on it.

“Stop!” I shout to Tristan as he moves to follow and finish this. He does. Because Goodry has the needle. He doesn’t have the gun. James does.

James straightens, bringing the gun up from the ground where it dropped as his father was tackled. The nozzle is shaking as he lifts and aims. Straight at Tristan. He’s too close to miss this time. “Shoot him, boy!” Goodry wails. Tristan stills.

Charlotte is the one that speaks to him. “James.” He looks to her, unsure, eyes cutting to the blood pooling under her, drops of rain pattering into it. “James, you don’t have to do what he says. You know it’s wrong. You know he’s wrong.”

“But he’s…” he starts to argue, a child, forever a child, stuck in his mind. Not a Gina, not a Molly, but hurt and changed nonetheless.

“I know what he is,” Charlotte cuts him off, gently, her voice masking most of the pain. “But… remember what you said to me, that time in Feston? You said your father was so cruel to you. That you feared he hated you?”

James nods, snivelling once. He uses his sleeve to wipe rain from his eyes, snot from his lip. “I remember, Miss Charlotte. You stopped to speak to me when I was…” here he glances at his father, as though fearing recrimination. “I was sad.”

“Yes,” Charlotte says, “Do any of us hate you, James?”

James wavers, glancing between us all, as though trying to recall a time we’d been cruel to him. I’d thought poorly of him, and I regret that now. My ungenerous assumptions, my using his simpleness to my benefit. But such nuance, James doesn’t see. Goodry curses at him, and the gun lowers further.

“You need to stop him ,” Charlotte implores.

Tristan is struggling to stay standing, favouring one leg, swaying a little as the trickle of blood from his head reaches the side of his throat. Then James slowly turns towards Goodry. The utter shock on the doctor’s face is sweet to my eyes. But not for long.

In desperation, he lunges for Tristan. Charlotte holds a hand out towards James, stopping his reaction, his finger too tight on the trigger. I shout. But Goodry has his arm wrapped around Tristan’s throat. He has the needle in his hand.

“Shoot me then, boy!” He taunts. “Get us both!”

“No, don’t!” I scream. Not again.

Tristan, not one to be a hostage, throws himself backwards.

Goodry’s back connects with a wet, hard thunk against the stone column.

Goodry lets go with a wail, and Tristan sprawls forward, splashing into a puddle.

He grunts in pain as he hits the ground, flipping onto his back to face Goodry, as the doctor, face red, in pain and anger, lifts the needle, about to fall on him.

I won’t get there in time to stop it.

And then the stones wobble. They’ve born through so much these many years, but now, by the impact of his body or divine intervention, they finally crumble.

If they’d fallen a moment earlier, they’d have taken Tristan too. A moment later, and neither of them.

The breath thumps out of Goodry as six feet of stones the size of my head strike him in the back, two at first, then more, cascading, twisting and pushing him down to the ground. The blocks break Goodry, piling atop him as Tristan scrabbles backwards.

Silence. The rain even seems to ease for a moment, like a held breath.

The stone is a small mountain on the doctor’s torso, his chest. A foot peaks out from the side at an odd angle. Goodry wheezes underneath, mouth moving wordlessly.

Under a single stone, his mangled hand clutches the needle.

***

Needler

James runs. He’s gone in an instant, the gun with him.

Paige is beside me, her expression unreadable as she gazes down on Goodry. What must she be feeling right now? I’ve been in shock like that before, in the moments and hours after my world as I knew it changed.

Goodry is trying to speak to us. To ask for help, probably. My head throbs, blood drying against my brow. I already feel the fogginess of concussion, as though the unconsciousness that came when my head struck a brick is clinging to me still.

Goodry’s body twitches, but his eyes… they’re still alert.

Still him. Every despicable part. I brace a hand over the bullet graze on the side of my thigh.

Most of the pain is coming from the impact of the fall into this basement.

I landed on my hip, but the graze smarts, too.

“He’ll live yet. Once someone comes for him. ”

Paige tilts her head. She kneels, moving the rubble, prying the needle from Goodry’s broken fingers. His eyes roll to follow her.

I grasp her arm, and she turns to me. It’s deep, hidden, but there’s warmth in her gaze still. She’s still there. Still her.

“Don’t try to stop me,” she says evenly.

I let her go. “You need to hide.”

“You can’t be found with me. They’ll take you.”

She doesn’t know they’re here for me, too. Goodry’s call, the one he was making when I rammed into his office, I now realise, combined with the reports of Needler, and this place really will be swarming soon.

Her gaze confirms the fears I’ve had all along. She truly thought this would be it for her. The end. That I wouldn’t come to change things.

Her eyes flick to Charlotte. “Don’t let her die alone.”

With everything she’s just found out, I don’t know what she might be thinking, or planning after this. A flash of lightning turns her eyes to storm clouds.

Then Paige kneels beside the doctor, his eyeballs swivelling to her in fear, then following that fine tip of the needle as she places it, positioning right over the tear duct of his left eye.

He tries to move, tries to fight. His noises turn pleading.

He’s so afraid to lose his own mind, to lose anything. Horrible coward.

I turn away, going to Charlotte, where she’s dragged herself to prop her back against an old, tattered and burned couch. Paige positions a brick above the needle’s blunt end.

I hear the tap, almost delicate, then another.

When I kneel beside Charlotte, she’s staring up at the sky, looking more peaceful than I’ve ever seen her. The rain has picked back up again. Thunder rolls, lighting the sky. No more helicopters in the air, the storm has turned too violent. “I need to get you out of here…” I begin.

“No,” she smiles faintly, hand bracing on my wrist, glassy eyes finding mine. “I need to stay here. With them.” The ghosts. She presses her scarf into my hand, glancing at my leg. I tie it around my thigh.

“I wanted to save you…” I say, grimacing as I tug the knot tight.

She squeezes my bloody hand with what strength she has left. “I didn’t want to be saved.”

“What did you want?”

“Peace,” Charlotte breathes, a last, wet inhale. Her eyes lock on mine, and her words are for me as she murmurs, “We all deserve peace.”

A flat jingle. Her keys, fallen to the cracked cement by her hip.

I close Charlotte’s eyes, and when I stand, Paige is gone.

I walk over and look down at Goodry. His left eye is just blood, the remaining one gazing up. Totally blank, but alive. He too, looks peaceful.

I leave him staring unflinchingly into the rain.

***

The police are swarming the island. But so are the assortment of people here for the Bunker, many of them drunk.