Chapter 3 - The Purge of the Old GuardBy morning, the city belonged to Victor Cole, but it was a city held together by terror.
Inside the penthouse of the Cole Tower, Victor sat behind Marcus’s mahogany desk, pouring himself a glass of thirty-year-old scotch. Ray Delgado stood across from him, his right arm bound tightly in heavy bandages, his face pale and sweating.
“Explain it to me again, Ray,” Victor said, his voice deceptively soft, his eyes fixed on the rain washing over the floor-to-ceiling windows. “Because my ears must be failing me. You had ten men. Marcus was unarmed, bleeding out, and cornered in a dead-end alley.”
“It wasn't just him, boss!” Ray stammered, stepping back involuntarily. “There was a animal—a giant monster of a dog—and a kid! They threw military smoke! They used storm drains! We searched five square miles of the sewers, but—”
“A dog,” Victor repeated, setting his glass down with a sharp clack. “My cousin, the most dangerous man in the state, was saved from execution by a dog and a little girl?”
“We found blood!” Ray insisted defensively. “Liters of it! He was shot twice in the gut, Victor! Even if he got away, there’s no way he survived the night. He’s dead in a ditch somewhere!”
Victor stood up slowly, leaning over the desk. “Marcus Cole doesn't die in ditches, Ray. Until I see his cold, stiff body lying on an autopsy table, he is alive. And if he is alive, he is coming for me.”
Victor turned to his head of security. “Purge the ranks. Every lieutenant who was loyal to Marcus—Capone, Doc Elena, the Weaver brothers—put them in chains. If they don't swear allegiance to me by nightfall, throw them in the river. And put a two-million-dollar bounty on any information regarding a scarred Bouvier dog or a little girl.”
While Victor’s death squads swept through the upper levels of the city, five floors beneath the street, Marcus was learning how to walk again.
His body screamed with agony, but his mind was crystal clear. Guided by Lily, he spent the morning reviewing her surveillance networks. She had tapped into the city’s fiber-optic traffic grids, the police department’s digital dispatch, and the internal security feeds of Cole Tower itself.
“Your old lieutenants are being rounded up,” Lily reported, her fingers flying across her mechanical keyboard. “Victor’s locking them in the old meatpacking plant on 4th Street. He’s going to execute them tonight to prove to the other syndicates that he’s in complete control.”
Marcus stood near the map board, leaning heavily on a wooden cane he’d found in the theater’s prop room.
“Doc Elena,” Marcus muttered, pointing to a photograph pinned to the board. “She was my chief surgeon for twelve years. She saved my life three times. If Victor kills her, I lose my supply of medical gear and my most loyal captain.”
“The meatpacking plant has thirty armed guards,” Lily pointed out neutrally. “You can barely walk without that stick, Marcus. You can’t fight thirty men.”
“I’m not going to fight thirty men,” Marcus said, looking down at Ghost, who was standing by the door, ears pricked, waiting for a command. “We’re going to make thirty men fight each other.”
Marcus turned to Lily. “Can you hack the meatpacking plant’s automated environmental systems?”
A faint, wicked smile touched the corner of the nine-year-old’s mouth—the first true emotion Marcus had seen on her face since they met.
“It’s a legacy industrial system built in 2004,” she said. “I can override the ammonia cooling valves in my sleep.”
“Good,” Marcus grinned, the old predator inside him awakening from its short slumber. “Then let’s go rescue my doctor.”
Two hours later, a heavy storm returned to the city, plunging the streets into gray darkness.
Outside the 4th Street Meatpacking Plant, six of Victor’s enforcers were standing near the loading dock, smoking cigarettes under a rusted corrugated awning. Inside, tied to heavy steel chairs in the center of the freezer floor, sat Doc Elena and three of Marcus’s senior lieutenants, bruised and bleeding, surrounded by twenty more guards armed with assault rifles.
Ray Delgado walked down the line of prisoners, tapping his pistol against Doc Elena’s chin.
“Last chance, Doc,” Ray sneered. “Sign the affidavit stating Marcus was embezzling from the family, or you don't leave this freezer alive.”
Doc Elena spat blood onto Ray’s polished leather shoe. “Marcus built this family. Victor is a leech sucking on a corpse. I’d rather die than sign your paper.”
Ray raised his weapon. “Suit yourself—”
Before he could pull the trigger, every light in the vast facility turned deep red.
A deafening siren began to blare as the automated industrial valves along the ceiling violently snapped open. High-pressure streams of supercooled liquid ammonia gas erupted into the space, creating a blinding, freezing mist that dropped the temperature forty degrees in five seconds.
The guards began coughing violently, drop-shooting their weapons as the toxic chemical fog burned their eyes and lungs.
“What is this? What’s happening to the valves?!” Ray screamed, stumbling backward into the red haze, his vision turning white with tears.
Then, from the red fog, came the growl.
It was low, resonant, and echoed off the stainless-steel walls like a demon rising from hell.
A guard raised his rifle blindly into the mist. A massive black shape burst through the fog, taking the guard down before he could scream. Panic erupted. Men began firing blindly into the red smoke, their bullets striking metal pipes and setting off secondary alarms.
Through the chaos, a tall figure stepped silently into the freezer room.
Marcus Cole wore a long, heavy oilskin coat over his bandages, a dark fedora pulled low, holding a suppressed shotgun in his right hand. Beside him, holding an electronic control tablet, walked Lily.
Marcus didn't speak. He moved through the blinding mist like a phantom, taking down Victor’s panicked guards one by one with cold, surgical precision. Shot after suppressed thud echoed through the chamber, each followed by the heavy thud of a body hitting the icy floor.
Ray Delgado staggered through the smoke, clutching his throat, trying to find the exit door, when a heavy boot slammed into his chest, throwing him flat onto his back.
Ray looked up through his burning eyes.
Standing over him, backlit by the flashing red emergency lights, was Marcus Cole. Ghost stood at his left side, teeth bared, dripping blood, and the little girl stood at his right, holding the master control panel.
“M-Marcus…” Ray gasped, his face draining of color. “You’re… you’re dead…”
Marcus lowered the barrel of the shotgun until it rested directly against Ray’s chest.
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“Tell Victor,” Marcus whispered, echoing his words from the alley, “that I’m coming for my seat.”
BOOM.
