The Mission Is Never Over—Fire Sale

From the movie Smile.

 

(See the previous post, The Knight of the Round Table, for a map of Avalon Gardens.)

 

The fire engine pulled into the Avalon Gardens parking lot and plowed up the gravel drive alongside the building. Three firefighters jumped out, but a group of employees had already extinguished the brush fire they'd been called to deal with. Confusion abounded. Voices started rising.

 

And then the employees stopped, stupefied by a rustling only they could hear.

 

One of the gardeners smashed his fire extinguisher into a firefighter's head. A second firefighter screamed, but John Bellamy silenced them with a gunshot to the face. The third firefighter ran to grab a fire ax from the truck, but a second gardener tried to pull it away from him. They struggled on the ground, the firefighter raised it high, prepared to slam it down into the gardener's face... and then John Bellamy shot him twice in the back.

 

While the gardeners dismembered their victims, John noticed the building's garage door rising open. He barked at the gardeners to fall in line and marched across the drive to the secure lot.

Round 3

Malachi fled out the loading dock attached to the processing lab, gulping down the night air. A tank of hydrogen gas was on fire and threatening to set the chemicals alight, the bugs from Growhouse C were throwing themselves into the flames to try and suppress them, and Malachi had escaped.

 

And then a door flung itself open. Three Avalon Gardens employees burst in: another gardener and two lab technicians who apparently had hung around for hours getting high after their shift ended. One technician scrambled for a way to put out the fire, cursing that all the fire extinguishers were gone, but the other caught a look at the main computer and threw himself at it, trying to reverse the pressure build-up.

 

The gardener fell into the flames, like the bugs trying to diminish them with his body. Malachi put him out of his misery with a gunshot.

 

The tech searching for a fire extinguisher turned to face him. Her face split in a sinister smile, and she grabbed a plastic bottle of butane on a table. She ripped its the top off. She doused herself with its contents.

 

"Dad?" she called out. "Dad, is it ok if I have two marshmallows on my smore?"

 

In the secure parking lot, Rex surged to his feet, overcoming the pain to summon all his psychic power. He stared John Bellamy down and screamed, "YOU!"

 

Bellamy's head exploded. Shards of bone and spatters of blood mixed into the gravel.

 

But the two gardeners didn't even hesitate. One charged forward, smashing a car window with his fire extinguisher as Rex side-stepped the attack. But the other slipped in John's blood, accidentally slicing his own leg open with his stolen fire ax.

 

While Rex held them off, Wren put all her weight on the garage door, trying to keep Dakota Knight locked inside as the buckshot wounds in his chest closed themselves. But for the moment he was distracted: his phone was buzzing with multiple notifications. His "confession" had gone viral. Today, he was Twitter's main character. With his reputation shot, he ran to the break room and grabbed a fistful of trash bags. And then he got an actual call. He tried to answer with pleasantries, but then:

 

"What the fuck do you mean we're being raided by the feds?!"

 

Whoever had called him sent a picture. It was the picture of Wren on her lunch date with Danny.

Round 4

Malachi fired on the smiling technician, but adrenaline made his hands shaky, and the shot went wide. She sprinted for the burning gas tank, arm extended, and burst into flames. Then she sprinted towards him, giggling with every step.

 

Dakota Knight swiped his Merlin-tier keycard at the door to the vault. Inside, shelves upon shelves sagged under the weight of bricks of hundred-dollar bills. He filled the double-bagged the trash bags and filled them until they threatened to burst. And then he grabbed a glass jar with a shelf all to itself. Small, black, round objects—plant seeds—floated in a clear solution; the jar itself was labeled "Y7."

 

"Yeah... yeah, I got something worth your while if you invest in me."

 

Outside, Rex tried to fire his stolen rifle at the gardener assailing him, but his gun got knocked aside by the fire extinguisher, each round firing into another car in the lot. He didn't see the second gardener hobbling closer and closer, still upright on his bleeding leg.

Wren lined up a shot at the gardener sneaking up on Rex... and at the precise moment she would have pulled the trigger, her mind fled the scene.

 

She didn't recognize the street where she found herself. But she did recognize the woman she was looking at. After 20 years, Joy Shusterman had died her hair. She walked with a cane now. But Wren could never mistake the cold tone of her voice for anyone else.

 

"Wonderful. It's good to be in business with you, Mr. Knight."

Round 5

Malachi was faster than the smiling technician. He fled into the employee parking lot, weaving among the cars while she burned: the flames took care of her before she could reach him.

 

But inside, the last technician still tried to undo his sabotage. A cloud of buckshot ruined that effort.

 

Rex should have dodged, should have disentangled himself from hand-to-hand combat, but his megalomania drove him. All it would take was one solid shot and this gardener would be on the ground, fertilizer for the weeds.

 

While trying to get a shot on the first gardener, the second got behind Rex.

 

He raised his fire ax.

 

He brought it down.

 

And the weight sent Rex toppling into the warm, acidic waters of the primordial sea that had spawned him. His Mother's arms ensnared him; the current pulled at him like an embrace. And when Rex merged with Her, he did not reemerge.

 

Wren watched Joy approach a nearby building, a classic movie theater. The marquee had big red letters saying "Izaldo." A note on the door read that the building was undergoing renovations, but Joy opened it with a ring of keys, and inside all the seats had been removed from the theater. She listened as Joy and Dakota hashed out their fledgling alliance: apparently she had lost access to certain chemicals useful in her research, and she hoped Yerba al Cuadrado could provide a substitute.

Round 6

Malachi had heard the rifle shots from the other side of the building. He sprinted up the side, shoving new shells into the tube and hoping to get a clear shot into the secure lot before it was too late.

 

Dakota approached the garage door, phone against his shoulder, but it wouldn't open, and he tore it open with his bare hands. Wren lay slumped against it, insensate. The two gardeners looked up from hacking up Rex's corpse, and they moved towards her, but Dakota ordered them to stop: she was still useful. She was going to take a ride with him instead.

 

The last technician's mind broke. He crawled out of the burning lab on his belly, the asphalt of the employee lot pulling at his buckshot wounds. Goddammit, he wanted to live! He wanted to live no matter how desperately the thing in his brain ordered him to sacrifice himself.

 

Wren felt herself drifting again, her mind drawn back to her physical body. But before she got there, she learned something terrible about an event from her childhood imprisonment; a bizarre question Joy had once posed to her was now clarified by a page from a classified document.

Round 7+

Chuk.

 

Malachi's shotgun jammed. The two gardeners saw him and took off in his direction; small miracles, but they went around the lot's chainlink fence rather than tearing through it.

 

Dakota climbed into his Ford F-150 and started the engine. He didn't notice Wren suddenly put a round through the cabin's rear window: it took him a moment to realize the blood and flesh smearing the inside of the windshield had come off his own ruined face.

 

Malachi managed to clear the jam just in time to gun down the second gardener, already wounded by his own fire ax. The first one stepped on his fallen comrade as he lunged for Malachi, fire extinguisher swinging wildly.

 

Dakota calmly linked his phone to the truck's Bluetooth and called someone.

 

"Hey, dad?" he gurgled. "Why don't you meet me at the airport? I think it's time we take that vacation we always talked about."

 

Then he shifted the truck into reverse and floored it towards Wren.

 

He compacted a sedan into the wall of the building, but not Wren. She leapt aside and flung open the truck's passenger door.

 

Malachi and the last gardener clumsily did battle. The gardener was grazed but not slowed while Malachi took several hits from the fire extinguisher that got absorbed by his body armor.

 

Dakota stared at Wren bug-eyed, then laughed. She kept making this easier and easier for him. Then his eyes rolled up into his head, he moaned deeply, and his already-ruined clothes tore apart as his stomach opened, forming a vicious mouth. What Yerba al Cuadrado had done to Radomir Reznik's lungs, it had instead done to Dakota Knight's digestive tract: his intestines launched from him in hungry, grasping tentacles, lamprey-like mouths biting into Wren and dragging him towards the cavity. At the last moment she managed to tear herself free... and she lit a match, tossing it into Dakota's guts.

 

Seeing this, Malachi focused his own psychic power on the match. It exploded, setting Dakota aflame. But while the fire neutralized his healing factor, Dakota was still hungry: his tentacles caught Wren again before she could escape the truck, and this time his rib-jaws snapped shut around her head.

 

Malachi finally managed to put down the gardener just in time to see Dakota start consuming Wren. He ran up to the truck while the bastard was distracted, put the barrel against the driver's side window, and 

Blam

Wren's injuries were not so severe as it first looked. The rib-teeth left multiple puncture wounds, and she'd suffered unpleasant burns from the digestive acid, but she would live. Together they dragged the bodies around the lot into the building; the cherries of the police came into view just as the processing lab burst into flame, and the two surviving Agents took off into the night.

 

A few weeks later, the survivors of Task Force HOLIDAY were summoned to Quantico for a debriefing with Special Agent Grant Grayson. The Avalon Gardens case had turned into a shitshow. Multiple bodies had been found in the ruins of their headquarters, enough to confirm "Dakota's" account of murdering innocents to fertilize the growhouses. Meanwhile, every security contractor on Instant Deterrent's payroll, including Danny, had died in shootouts with the police rather than let themselves be arrested; and Bill Knight, Dakota's father, had vanished into the night. For all intents and purposes, the Unnatural threat of Avalon Gardens had been neutralized.

 

But questions lingered. Police searching Dakota Knight's condo had found evidence of a break-in, and forensics turned up the fingerprints of Dr. Rex Marianetti. It came out that Rex had been consulting with Task Force HOLIDAY; that Special Agent Wren Harris had been denied a search warrant for Avalon Gardens days before it was destroyed by fire; and that Rex's body was among those recovered from the ruins. Grayson demanded an explanation, and the one Wren and Malachi provided—that they had discovered Dakota's murders through unspecified means; had been surveilling the building when Avalon Gardens employees launched an unprovoked attack on the firefighters; and had been dragged into a firefight involving Dakota Knight himself when they intervened—did not convince him.

 

The situation was enough of a mess that everyone involved wanted to put it behind them. The Knights were clearly guilty of murder, and the reputation of the junior senator from Colorado had been besmirched by his association with them. But it was equally clear Task Force HOLIDAY had acted outside the law in some capacity, and they couldn't be allowed to continue. Wren was suspended from the FBI; Malachi was stripped of his FBI consultancy.

 

They'd soon learn the mission isn't over just because an Agent loses their job.