1

A fist bounced off of the window, rattling the glass in its frame. Beyond the doorway, Dennis Owen, the security guard sitting at the reception desk, looked up and scrutinized the two men standing outside in the rain. 

After a moment’s consideration Owen stood, moving his post-retired police gut from behind the oak paneled desk, and tucked his thumbs into his utility belt. With an exaggerated swagger the guard aimed himself at Hilton Towers’ entrance.

Standing in the rain, the two men adjusted their stance slightly. And if Owen hadn’t spent so much of his spare time numbing his thirty five years of police training eating doughnuts and reading trashy celebrity magazines, he would have recognized that the men were getting prepared to move; that they were getting ready to execute something that had been planned for some time.

“What can I do for you, fellas?” Owen said, his voice blunted by the two hundred pound per square meter safety glass.

“I hear that the tenant in the penthouse suite has lost something?” suggested one of the men. He had a scraggy beard to compliment the scrawny body lurking beneath the camouflage combat fatigues and beaten up donkey jacket.

“Oh, yeah?” Owen queried, wearing suspicion like an ill-fitting suit. “And what would that be?”

“This little guy,” the man in the donkey jacket said pulling gently on a leash in his right hand. From behind him a small, short-haired poodle padded into view and sniffed at the doors, before climbing onto his hind legs and planting his front paws on the glass. He barked twice, his tiny tail wagging furiously.

“We heard he’d been stolen and there was a reward,” said scraggy beards’ companion. He was shorter with more meat on his bones; though his face was still gaunt.

“Is that true?”

Gaunt knew it was true since he’d actually been the one who had stolen the poodle two days ago. He’d stolen the dog so that he could stand here in the rain and use it as a ruse to get this lard-ass has-been to open the fucking door so he could use the Taser he had tucked in the waist band of his jeans.

Owen hunkered down and tapped the glass between him and the mutt. “Is that you, Pepper?” he asked with a smile. The dog barked that it was most certainly him.

“Hate to rush you,” said the man in the donkey jacket, but we’re getting a bit wet out here.”

The guard eyed them one more time. Maybe his old instincts were trying to fight their way through retirement fudge, but then he was lifting his access swipe card and the door clicked open.

The two men ambled inside, the dog beside them; its tiny nails clicking against the tiled floor.

“I’ll just buzz Dr. Whittington and let him know Pepper’s back,” Owen said turning back to the reception desk. “Haven’t seen him much today. So maybe I’ll take Pepper up to him.”

“Thanks,” said scraggy beard to Owen. “But we’d like to see the good doctor in person.”

Then Mr. Gaunt coolly removed the Taser from his waist band and fired 50,000 volts into Owen’s fat, inner tube of a neck.

For a few seconds, the guard jittered on the spot, and then collapsed in a heap, Pepper sneezing at the whiff of cordite in the air. The men tethered Pepper to the leg of the reception desk after tying up their immobilized captive with Velcro straps and bundling him into his office.

Their visit wasn’t going to take long. Hell, by the time these members of the Animal Activist League had finished their business with the good Dr. Whittington no-one would be concerned with the lump of flab flapping around in the office.

The men climbed into an elevator made from highly polished, stainless steel and hit the button marked Penthouse. Once the car was in motion, the two men unbridled the rucksacks they carried and placed them carefully at their feet.

In the slow hum marking their ascent, they pulled free several items. The first was a large canister that had started the day as home to six litres of olive oil but now came with a taper attached and swinging like a long, thin pendulum. This was followed by a gas mask each and two Browning automatic pistols.

“You know that once that door opens there’s no going back?” Scraggy beard said to his companion.

“I’m not backing out, Sean,” the other guy said sternly, his eyes reinforcing his resolve. “Whittington is a fuckin’ murderer and he’s being allowed to get away with it.”

“Okay, Sam,” Sean replied. “Let’s get ready.”

The two men donned their masks and the slurping, sucking sound of their breathing filled the tiny car space, drowning out the electric motor overhead.

Sam hoisted the container to his chest, keeping it upright by hugging it to him with one arm; the other tightly clutched the Browning.

“Why can’t we just shoot him?” he asked Sean.

“Because he needs to know fear,” his colleague replied, his eyes cold behind the face plate. “He needs to suffer the way his victims have suffered.”

“Oh, he’ll suffer alright,” Sam scoffed, the noise coming through the mask as a harsh, staccato rasp.

The chime of the bell told them they had arrived on the penthouse level; nineteen floors above Birmingham City Center. The rewards for murder, Sam thought grimly as they exited the confines of the lift.

The men walked carefully down a short hallway with a single door at the end. Either side, the corridor’s walls were lined with rosewood and the burgundy carpet absorbed the footfalls from their heavy boots.

“Inhumanity pays,” Sean said bitterly.

“His times up, Sean,” Sam replied placing the canister by the door, its contents rattling slightly as it settled.

Within its metal innards the container held two compounds: iron oxide and aluminum metal powder. Separately these two composites were innocuous, but together with a lit magnesium taper as a detonator, they created Thermite; a substance that burns at approximately 2500 degrees Celsius. And inside the tin was an outer sleeve containing ordinary tap water. Sam knew that when this beauty was detonated the Thermite reaction would be so intense, you wouldn’t be able to look at it for fear of frying your retinas, and when the molten iron hit the water it would detonate like a small bomb, obliterating the penthouse and the monster that lived there.

“Okay,” Sean said behind him. “You ready?”

“Yes,” Sam said pulling a Zippo from his pocket. “We’ll have ten seconds-”

“I know the drill, Sam,” Sean scolded. “Just light the fucker!”

Sam flipped the Zippo and the flame danced in the air.

Then they heard the yelping; followed shortly by a small terrified whine.

“There’s another dog in there!” Sam said, sharply. Stowing the Zippo he raised his pistol and pressed his ear against the door.

But the door wasn’t locked; in fact: it wasn’t even shut, and Sam fell into the room with cry of surprise. And when he saw what was happening inside the room his surprise turned to absolute horror.

At first the two members of the AAL thought they had stumbled across one of Dr. Whittington’s notorious vivisection experiments; but this wasn’t the case. As their eyes adjusted to the carnage inside the suite, it became apparent that no-one had ever seen anything quite like this.

In one section of the penthouse a mobile laboratory had been established; a glittering ark of stainless steel and glass. Work surfaces glistened under spots in the ceiling and phials and flasks were stowed neatly away in cabinets of opaque glass.

But on the other side of the room Dr. Richard Whittington was eating the still whimpering remains of a golden retriever. It was lying on its side in the middle of an expensive Persian rug, its bowels and lower intestines swinging in the doctor’s mouth, its life’s blood pooling bright and red on the carpet, the ceiling; the walls.

The doctor bit down hard on the offal and the animal squealed pitifully. Still kneeling where he’d fallen, Sam raised his pistol and pumped five bullets into Whittington’s torso, each one leaving a plume of bloody mist as it exited.

The doctor recoiled from the impact, toppling onto his side, his meal slipping from his teeth and slopping onto the rug.

“Jesus God!” Sean snarled at Whittington’s prone body. “What kind of sick fuck are you?”

Whittington answered by sitting up and looking at him, and in the doctor’s eyes the men saw nothing. And while Whittington wasn’t known for compassion, his eyes were now devoid of what little humanity he may have possessed. His eyes were dead; yet his body still moved.

“I shot you!” Sam cried and, to illustrate this, he let off two more shots at the doctor’s body as it began to crawl towards him. But Whittington didn’t stop. Instead, he clambered over the coffee table, launching his gore splattered body at Sam, who was too stunned to raise his weapon.

Whittington landed, knocking Sam flat and the two of them rolled across the heavy mauve shag pile, a tangle of arms and legs, making it impossible for Sean to take a clear shot.

“Get out of the way, Sam!” he yelled in desperation; his hands wrapped around the pistol grip.

Suddenly there was a terrible cry of pain and Sam’s face came into view, his nose was gone; chewed away by the thing that was Whittington and his eyes rolled back into his head as the doctor located his neck and clamped onto it before yanking his mouth away, bringing with it a tattered strip of flesh and a tangled web of veins.

Sean watched as the arms of his dying colleague flailed in the air. Then he noted that Sam still held the Browning. And in that moment the gun went off, the bullet shattered Sean’s shin before striking the home-made Thermite device in the doorway behind him.

The explosion drowned out the screams, ripping into the room, into the flesh of the living and the dead before consuming the mobile lab in a wall of searing flame.

Another huge explosion punched out the windows, showering the city below with powdered glass and flame and debris.

As the oxygen rushed into the room the flames raged, consuming all in its fiery wrath; purging the room of the awful things that it held only a few moments ago.

But for the city nineteen floors below, it was already far too late.

***