Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,62
She hit him again, and I watched him spit out blood. “You, on the other hand, I find no redeeming value in.” She pulled back her fist into a palmhand and ran it into his nose, causing it to break. Blood dripped down the sides of his face and, I presume, into the back of his throat, because he started to gag.
“You,” she said, rolling him over and placing her weight on his back, “are the worst sort. I know of you, James Fries, and I know what you do to women. How many bodies have you left in dumpsters in the last year? In your lifetime?” She took his face and rammed it into the cold, black floor tiles. “I’ve been begging Ariadne for months to let me have a shot at you—just one shot, as a personal chance to thank you for how you treat women. It sets me—how do you say?—on edge?”
Fries took a moment to answer, his eyes rolling in and out of focus. He smiled, a terrible, bloody smile. “Yeah. On edge. And I’ve left some bodies by the wayside, it’s true. In alleys, in dumpsters. Tons of them.” She snapped him hard in the nose and he gagged, making a glottal-stop noise as he spit blood out. “You gonna beat me to death for them? You didn’t even know them.”
“I bet,” Eve said, wearing the thinnest, most lethal smile, “if I told you that I would kill you if you didn’t correctly write down the names of the last five girls you slept with, you’d not only die, you wouldn’t remember a single one of them.”
Fries smiled again, and I could see the bloody lines tracing between his teeth. “You got me there. I don’t even remember one of them. Sandy, maybe? Cindy? Ah, who cares.”
Eve nodded slightly, her face tight, then she unloaded another three punches on his face in rapid succession. “You’re going to choke on your own blood,” she said, turning his head to the side to let him gag it out onto the floor, a slow, steady red spill of liquid rolling its way across the black tile, an ocean of death washing toward me.
I watched, paralyzed, not sure what to say, not sure if I should stop her. My head spun, I felt a pounding sense of guilt, even though it was Fries—the worm—and a murderer of women, and nearly of me. Part of me raged internally and called myself too stupid to live for any remorse I might feel; the other part tried to play up my guilt for not stopping Eve, just as I hadn’t stopped Old Man Winter.
“If I tell you something, will you stop beating the hell outta me?” Fries said, causing my head to snap up. His teeth were broken now, and Eve had another fist cocked and ready to unload on him.
“Trying to save your own life now?” Eve asked, and hit him again, snapping his head back. “I think your pleading may be falling on the deafest ears you could have found in the Directorate, Fries.” She hit him again, and I saw his eyes unfocus, one of them starting to swell shut, the purpling on his cheek obvious and growing.
“Wait,” I said, only just louder than a whisper, but enough for Eve to hear me and halt before her next punch. “What do you think you could say that would convince Eve to stop?” I asked, and Fries turned his head, letting his neck hang slack, looking at me out of his one good eye.
“I’ll tell you...” His words came out slurred, his lip split open and bleeding down his neck, “who’s running...Operation Stanchion.”
“You’ll tell us who’s running it,” I said, taking the two steps to carry me to Fries’ side, and kneeling to get closer to him, “and what it’s all about, what’s happening.”
“Don’t know...what’s happening,” Fries said, his head lolling. “Don’t even know the objective...they...thought I was a high risk for Directorate capture so they didn’t...tell me.” His pupil was dilated, he was concussed, and he sounded like he was drunk.
“Give me a name,” Eve said, readying her fist. “Give me a name, or so help me, my next punch will sever your serial killing head and end your little perverted reign of impotence forever.”
Fries’ once-handsome face was twisted, an eye already swollen shut. The strong smell of iron filled the air, and he seemed to have no strength in his neck. Eve had him suspended by the front