8
Dmitry
The last of the men trying to break in through the back door fell to the ground akin to those ironic fainting scenes in the movies. His torso was twisted backwards despite the way that he fell forward, like someone had reached down and twisted him at the waist. My ears still ringing with the noise that had battered my eardrums for the past handful of minutes, I turned to Shura.
He stood with his gun still raised, eyeing the pile of bodies by the front door, and slowly moving forward in that space as if to verify that nothing would be jumping out at him. Without a word, I turned back around, doing the same at the far end of the house until I could reach that congestion by the door, glancing out and around before stepping over them.
I didn’t lower my gun; I didn’t stop.
Every step was a new breath, my body and mind focused on only the one goal: securing the house. Securing those that were inside of it. I couldn’t focus on the sounds of crying that were coming from the other room, or even pause to consider why Manya would be crying at all. There would be time for that after and only after.
The red haze over my eyes was almost pulsing. Each new step was taking me closer to the front of the house and those SUVs that were parked haphazardly out front. All of their doors were flung open, the bodies like fallen dominos in a line leading to the front door. The blood pooling around them glistened in the dying light of the evening. Shura was already stepping over them as I approached.
He stuck his head inside one of the SUVs, poking around, and I moved past him to double check the others, to make sure there were no men waiting to surprise us . . . but they were all dead on the ground that we had already walked over.
“Mother fuck,” Shura cursed angrily from the other vehicle, pulling his head out and slamming the back door to a close before walking around to the front passenger side.
“Kakiye?” I called out, withdrawing from the car I’d been searching. I found him rifling through the coat of the dead man who sat in the front seat. Shura’s movements were jerky to the point of being angry, his huge fist slamming against the dead shoulder in front of him as if to complain at the lack of mobility coming from that body.
“This—this would be their—what you call—handler?” he questioned; the accent so thick he barely sounded like he was speaking English at all. “Bullet through the sternum. Won’t be telling us jack shit, motherfucking bastard.”
I snorted my contempt, taking the phone Shura held out to me and turning back to the house. I would have to ask my father what this meant and what his next step would be, obviously. The men were Italian, even if they wore nondescript clothing and had come in as unaffiliated a make of vehicle as possible. I heard snatches of conversation during the gunfight.
I would also need to get a doctor for the bullet that I was sure had hit my father’s shoulder, even though he would likely protest my doing so, the old bastard. . .
I opened the phone in front of me and rolled my eyes at the lack of password. “Shura,” I groused, kicking a body out of my way and glaring at the squelching sound that it made, “how many men do you think—”
“Dmitry.” Manya’s voice was shaky as she called my name. I looked to where she was standing framed in the doorway by the dead bodies and the pale light behind her. She pulled my shirt tighter around her frame, crossing her arms over her stomach and seeming to shrink into herself.
Blood painted her hands, and there was a further smudge against her cheek from where she had obviously brushed away her tears. She stared at me as if waiting for an explosion, her shoulders shaking and her black eyes seeming bottomless in their despair.
“Why aren’t you inside?” I asked, closing the phone and heading over to her. I didn’t want her in the open yet, no matter how many times we verified that all these bodies were dead. I also wanted my father attended to, although that need was secondary, all things considered.
“Dmitry. . .” she said again, this time sounding as if the words wouldn’t allow themselves to climb up the back of her throat.
My brow furrowed, and something shifted in my stomach as if to warn me about what I was walking into, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. “What? What is it? Did my father say something?” Her face shuttered at my question, her shoulders shaking further, and I could feel my heart drop into the soles of my feet.
Where I had been hurrying before, I ran then.
Pushing past her, I walked through the entryway to the room we had huddled in before. There, I stopped in the doorway. The bodies were more plentiful here, all condensed in front of the two doors they had tried breaking through like idiots. As if none of them had heard of bottlenecking before.
It was the body in the center of the room that caught my attention though.
The blood had begun to pool around him, gathered at his shoulder, with his eyes closed so softly that he could almost be sleeping. Except there was no shake of his shoulders or slow rise and fall of his chest, no grumble. Blood painted his eyelids the way that it did Manya’s clothing, and I knew she had been the one to close them. . .
And my world fell away from me in a spiraling wave of devastation.
I couldn’t believe my eyes, like the scene before me had somehow been staged. As if the old bastard was going to sit up and hack a laugh at me, perhaps throw something, and demand he be seen to before he actually died. I could hear his words, uttered in that dark Russian with a roll of his eyes, but his body didn’t so much as stir.
“Dmitry,” Manya muttered again. Her hand was soft against my back, but I shrugged out from under her touch.
I couldn’t feel my face.
I couldn’t breathe, like the air had suddenly become too scarce in the confined space. I could tell that Manya was trying to lead me to the body as well, as if to allow me to grieve, but I couldn’t feel that emotion. Where there should have been a deep abiding sadness, there was only numbness, stretching like a yawning, endless cavern that threatened to consume me.
My eyes instead fell to the phone in my hand. The GPS was still pulled up on the screen, highlighting where this group of fucking thugs had come from. . .
Today was a good day to die.
I spun around, walking away from Manya as she called my name, past Shura picking his way over the dead bodies at the front door, still unaware. . . . I moved away from them, to the open SUVs that waited with keys still in the ignition, taking the one with the least amount of damage. It was only when I was inside of the vehicle and behind the wheel that I reversed the coordinates on the phone and put the car in gear.
I couldn’t think. I knew only two things: My father was dead and the men responsible were likely at the other end of the GPS location that I was now heading towards.
My life didn’t matter any longer, the rules and stipulations I had followed for so long now null and void. All that mattered was that the men responsible faced the other end of my revolver before the day was out, with their blood painting the floor in the same way as my father’s.
All that mattered was that I have my vengeance, that they be held accountable.
This was my only thought as the scenery flashed by the windows, the automated voice from the phone leading me where I needed to go. I was no longer Dmitry Koalistia—no longer the Two Spy to the Koalistia Pakhan. I was only Dmitry, son of Yerik, orphaned at the hands of the Italian fucks, and heading to get my vengeance.