The Finishing School Read online

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Allahu Akbar!" The jihadist on the left was the first to voluntarily decide to go and meet his maker. He ran straight at her. Anya didn't bother to evade. She simply met force with greater force, taking a step forward and slamming her outstretched hand into his belly.

  One of the greatest gifts that the curse of undeath had bestowed upon her was the fact that the more blood that came into contact with her skin, the stronger she seemed to become. It had come as a pleasant surprise when she had first made the discovery while exacting her revenge on the filth that had murdered her. She had heard it referred to as blood magick, and it was said to be as old as the human race itself; despite being dead, her body did not decompose...so long as it was given regular infusions of blood. All that blood needed to do was touch her; it soaked through the flesh and disappeared as quickly as a sponge absorbed water. Immediately afterward, she could feel her strength and stamina markedly increasing, giving her almost superhuman capabilities. Her perceptions were also clearer, sharper, and her ability to gather and process information was also vastly increased.

  Anya's blow had been very deliberately angled upward at a forty-five degree angle. Stepping further into it, she thrust forward and upward, her stiffened fingers leading the way as they punctured the skin and penetrated deep inside the stunned jihadist's abdominal cavity. Her entire forearm was suddenly drenched in blood as her hand sliced its way through thick, gelatinous ropes of intestine and a host of other organs. She felt the man's diaphragm rupture, giving way to her unyielding fingertips.

  By the time that her arm had stopped moving, it was buried up to the bicep inside the man's torso. His guts protruded around either side of the jagged rent in his belly, their loops an angry purple that was shot through with smaller veins and arterioles.

  Probing around inside the terrorist's chest, her questing fingers finally located what she had been searching for: A tough, muscular sac that was beating away as though it was being worked by a drummer on steroids.

  Anya wasn't exactly what one might call an avid movie watcher when she lived in her native St. Petersburg, but ever since coming to the United States she had managed to catch more than a few late night movies. She remembered seeing one in which the bad guy did exactly what she was about to do now. It had made her laugh out loud, despite being so macabre.

  All it took was a single, powerful jerk. She ripped the disbelieving jihadist's heart away from the veins and arteries that secured it in place, pulling it free of his chest and triumphantly holding it high above her head. She was delighted to see that the heart continued to beat for a few seconds, just as it had in the movie, before its orderly rhythm degenerated into a quivering mess that looked like nothing so much as a bag full of squirming snakes.

  Blood poured down the now-heartless prisoner's chest, but without a heart to pump it, the gush quickly became a trickle. The dead man collapsed, leaving Anya with just one last obstacle standing between her and the completion of this exercise…and her graduation.

  Terrorist Four raised his hands pleadingly and began to back away, shaking his head wordlessly from side to side. It was one thing to sacrifice oneself for the glory of Allah when the means of reaching paradise (and those oh so alluring seventy-two virgins) was a suicide vest, or some other equally quick method of passage; the horrific deaths of his three comrades were something else entirely. They had not only died in excruciating pain, but they had done so at the hands of a mere woman — an inferior to him in every way, one who should have been subservient and known her place...one who should have covered up her nakedness, rather than flaunting it like a whore.

  Anya's chest and belly were covered in blood. She could feel it energizing her to new, towering heights of strength, making her feel intoxicated, invulnerable, like a goddess walking the Earth.

  A goddess of revenge, death, and destruction.

  Without any kind of warning, she hurled the blood-slick heart straight at her final opponent. He tried to duck, but the sheer speed of the throw sent the organ splattering against the crown of his skull with a sickeningly wet thud. It disintegrated, dripping a red mess of bloody tissue down the man's face. He tried desperately to blink it out of his eyes, to no avail.

  She advanced upon her final victim slowly, step by measured step, intentionally maximizing his sense of terror. Finally, she had backed him into the one unoccupied corner of the warehouse. His back was up against the wall, leaving him with nowhere else to go. Anya stepped forward into his personal space, distastefully noting that his hands were still raised in a weak approximation of a boxer's stance.

  Both arms were shaking.

  Taking a firm hold of his trembling wrists, Anya yanked them out to the sides as though spreading a blanket. A loud crack accompanied each shoulder being dislocated from its socket. The jihadist threw back his head and screamed. She kept the pressure on, pulling the pair of limply dangling arms toward her, and planted the sole of one foot firmly up against the man's chest for leverage.

  Then she jerked again, adding in a sharp twist of the wrists for good measure and kicking out with her foot. The already-dislocated arms tore free of the shoulders in a shower of blood. For just a moment, they were held in place by pink stringy lengths of connective tissue, but as the pressure mounted, both arms were ripped away from the shoulders, leaving nothing behind but gleaming white bone and glistening connective tissue.

  Staggering backward, the jihadist howled like a banshee. Arterial blood sprayed from both of the jagged shoulder wounds, gushing as if was coming straight from a fire hose. Taking a couple of steps back, Anya swung the amputated arms with all her might and began to beat the prisoner's face with the wet ends, drumming out a sloppy tattoo on each of his cheeks that left behind a pair of bloody smears.

  Splat.

  Thud.

  Splat.

  Thud.

  The drumbeat went on, slamming the man's face from left to right and back again. He slid slowly down the wall, rapidly losing consciousness thanks to the amount of blood he had already lost. Placing her feet a shoulder-width apart, Anya dropped his left arm and grasped the right with both hands, using it like a baseball bat to club him repeatedly over the top of the head. Each whack stove in his skull a little deeper, until after five or six blows had landed, her victim's brains were leaking out of his ears.

  "Two minutes, seventeen seconds. Not bad, but there's always room for improvement." Was it just her imagination, Anya wondered, or did Commander Wilson's voice in her ear hold the slightest note of grudging respect?

  She dropped the arm into its now-dead owner's lap. A living combatant, even one in superb physical shape, would have been panting and trying to catch her breath in the wake of such exertion. Anya didn't have that problem. As long as she absorbed a ready supply of blood, she felt as if she could fight her way through a whole army if she needed to.

  "End exercise," the SEAL announced. "Fellas, make sure thats they're all dead. Not that there's much doubt about that..."

  The three special operators unslung their weapons and went to check on the six corpses, pausing to take a knee and press two fingers to each of the dead men's throats in turn. Finally satisfied, the leader keyed his lapel mic. "We're secure, sir. Bad guys are toast."

  "Let's get a clean-up crew in here. Anya, go shower off and then come join me for debrief in twenty."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Before being hired on as a Guard at the United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX), located out in the wilds of Utah, applicants underwent some of the most rigorous background checks that the Federal Bureau of Prisons was able to devise. This included a friendly visit from retired FBI agents to every friend, neighbor, coworker, and perhaps most importantly every former lover, domestic partner, and spouse that could be tracked down; each one was grilled in minute detail, made to spill their guts in regard to the potential prison guard's suitability for the role.

  Those applicants with a penchant for petty lar
ceny, sexual misconduct, and most especially a propensity toward temper tantrums or any sort of domestic violence were screened out before ever getting the chance to set foot inside one of the most secure prison facilities on the planet. Only the squeaky clean need apply.

  Working at the place known as "Utah's Alcatraz" was a pretty big deal, and the pay reflected that in spades. It was where the Federal prison system sent some of its most high-profile long-term inmates, the very worst of the worst. All were lifers, and many had multiple life sentences stacked up against them. The vast majority of the inmate population would never step foot outside the Supermax prison as a free man ever again. They would spend the rest of their miserable lives inside the close confines of its tiny seven feet by twelve feet cells and the slightly larger common spaces, breathing their last underneath the harsh artificial lights of the medical bay.

  "Still, they're the scum of the Earth, so fuck 'em all six ways from Sunday," said Nathaniel (call me Nate) Saunders to the newest member of the team, one Mark McCrudden. The new guy had transferred in from the east coast after getting the offer to come and work at ADX Utah. His background check had come back spotless, and his paperwork had gone through without a hitch.

  Yet unbeknownst to the seventeen people that the investigators had interviewed, McCrudden had a darker side to his personality — one that he had kept successfully hidden for his entire life so far.

  Outwardly nothing more than a family man with a wife and two daughters aged seven and thirteen, the thirty-seven year-old prison guard took every opportunity possible to hire call girls in order to fulfill his rather more specialist needs. Sometimes he would rent a hotel room for the night or weekend, telling his unsuspecting wife that he was going away on a hunting or fishing trip — though wasn't it a little strange how rarely he seemed to kill or catch anything, she sometimes wondered?

  On other occasions, McCrudden would go to a motel for an hour or so, picking up a hooker from the street and offering her a few bucks extra in order to get her to comply with his special little peccadillo.

  Some men got off on beating and humiliating prostitutes. He wasn't one of them. The idea of inflicting physical or emotional trauma brought him no pleasure whatsoever. Why damage the object of one's lust, after all, and risk rendering it anything less than perfect?

  His routine was always the same. After paying the girl whatever sum had been mutually agreed upon, she would slowly strip herself completely naked and then lie down on the bed, closing her eyes and relaxing her entire body.

  That was all she was required to do until the session was over.

  "Try not to move. Try not to breathe. Just lay as still as you can..."

  Mark McCrudden had always had a thing for dead women. Oh, not in a Ted Bundy sort of way, or anything like that; he just wanted to fuck them, not kill them and then fuck them afterward. He wasn't turned on by the idea of hurting women, or even by violence in general. There was just something about the stillness of a dead woman, the vulnerability of her flaccid nakedness, that turned him on — turned him on hard.

  The girls themselves didn't seem to mind one little bit. Compared to some of the warped and perverted shit they were probably asked to do, McCrudden reasoned, this had to be cake. He would stand between their knees, unbuckling his jeans with hands that trembled with the sheer anticipation of what was about to happen, before parting their thighs and entering them from above. With his pants and underwear pulled down around his ankles, his bare white ass thrust in and out between the faux dead girl's legs, the only sound being the forceful hiss of his breathing and the repetitive jingle of his belt buckle.

  He had finally whittled the pool of pay-for-playmates down to a core group of just a select few, the ones who actually put some effort into playing their assigned role. Those girls never reacted in the slightest when he slid inside them, didn't respond when he kneaded their breasts roughly with his hands or ground against them with increasing urgency as he approached orgasm.

  "You even listening to me?" Saunders sounded a little annoyed. McCrudden struggled to bring himself back to the present, pushing aside the happy memory of LaToyah, the girl from Queens that he had fucked just two weeks ago in a run-down little motel room.

  "Yes sir, I am," he lied, hoping that Nate wouldn't call him on it. Fortunately he didn't. Mark didn't want to get on Nate's bad side; the guard supervisor had a good fifty pounds on him, and despite the fact that his belly was just beginning to stick out over the top of his black leather belt, a lot of it looked to be solid muscle.

  "We keep the rag-heads all along this level," the other man went on, seemingly willing to let Mark's state of distraction go. In between regular bouts of chewing dip, he spoke with a thick twang that practically screamed Texas. "The Colorado ADX got all the famous ones, a lot of those Taliban and Al Qaeda fuckers. You probably heard about some of 'em. That fucker Moussaoui, for one. Cunt should have got the chair, if you're askin' me."

  McCrudden nodded to indicate his understanding, not to mention his absolute agreement with what Nate was saying. Zacarias Moussaoui was one of the most hated men in America. He had been pivotal in organizing the 9/11 atrocity, helping set up the hijackers with the resources they needed in the run-up to the events of that tragic day. The Utah Supermax also had an entire level devoted to the incarceration of Islamic terrorists, all of whom were serving at least one life sentence each.

  "Rumor is that if the Navy SEALs hadn't capped his ass, Bin Laden woulda gotten a cell in here with the rest of these sand niggers." Nate spat out the dip into a nearby trash can as they passed, then began rooting around in the breast pocket of his shirt for a replacement. "Personally, I think those boys did us a favor. They're all heroes. God-damn heroes, I tell ya. Saved the tax-payin' public a whole lotta wasted time and money defending that worthless piece of shit, and all for the price of a few rounds of 5.56mm. Money well spent."

  "Couldn't agree with you more, sir." Except where the racism was concerned, anyway. McCrudden knew that there was a lot of that shit floating around in the prison system, which was basically a powderkeg of racial tension just waiting to go off. All it took was one comment, one sideways glance from an inmate, and before you knew what was what, you had a prison riot on your hands. Personally, he thought that judging prisoners based on the color of their skin was nothing short of moronic. In his eyes, they were ALL fucking worthless pieces of shit, no matter whether the packaging the shit came in was white, black, yellow, or brown.

  "No need to sir me, son...I work for a living. Call me Nate." The big man chuckled, digging an elbow into McCrudden's ribs in what he probably thought was a humorous way, but in actuality did nothing but irritate the living fuck out of him. Still, it was his first real day on the job (the two days of bullshit orientation didn't count) and the newbie was smart enough to shut up and pay attention, soaking in every detail as the senior man walked him through the complex.

  Utah ADX was one hell of a special place, he had to admit that. The team of designers had made a few refinements over that of the prison's sister facility in Colorado, and Nate took great pleasure in telling him all about them.

  "If they're too dangerous for the maximum security prisons, they send 'em to us," he explained with obvious pride. McCrudden was pretty sure that the man's step developed an extra swagger as he said it. Hell, maybe he'd even popped some wood at the thought. This was a man who really got off on his job...And who was he to argue? Keeper of monsters was a pretty cool thing to put on your resume. "We got 'em all in here, Mark. Gang bosses. Terrorists, both foreign and domestic. Serial killers. Serial rapists. Pretty much all of 'em are violent as the day is long. They'd stab you soon as look at you."

  McCrudden had no problem believing that. He'd read up on the prison's populace before taking the job, and it had been like a who's who of maniacs. He'd say this for Nate: the man wasn't exaggerating, not one little bit. The inmates here were the absolute worst of the worst.

  "You look inside one of the cells yet?
"

  The new guy shook his head. He'd seen photographs and diagrams in orientation, but he'd yet to actually enter one.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The long corridor they were in had solid steel doors at regular intervals on either side. Nate selected one seemingly at random, reaching up to slide open the metal plate that covered the tiny rectangular viewing window which was set into it at eyeline height.

  "You decent, Herb?"

  "I'm done jerking off for the morning if that's what you're asking, Officer Saunders."

  "Relieved to hear it. Now sit down on the bed. Officer McCrudden here would like to take a look around your cell." Nate unlocked the door and carefully pushed it open. It swung smoothly on well-oiled hinges.

  "Oh, fresh meat!" The middle-aged man named Herb sounded genuinely excited. To Mark's eye, he looked like a bank manager or somebody who worked in I.T. He couldn't have weighed more than one-twenty dripping wet, based upon what little of his frame the bright orange jumpsuit gave away. His voice was almost over-the top camp, though Mark wasn’t sure whether it was an affectation or his actual speaking voice. A comb-over and pair of horn-rimmed spectacles complimented the nerdy look perfectly. "Welcome to our merry little band, Officer McCrudden. It is such a pleasure to make your acquaintance!"

  He held out a hand as the two guards entered, closing the door behind them. McCrudden knew better than to shake it. Almost every single inmate had a history of extreme violence, either against civilians, their fellow inmates, and even the prison guards at one time or another.

  Besides, this was Herbert Williams, the so-called "California Chopper." He had been given the lurid moniker because of his penchant for roofying the young gay men he lured back to his farmhouse, cutting off their penises when they were too weak to fight back, and then stuffing the hacked-off appendages down their throats. It was usually impossible for the coroner to tell whether it was asphyxiation or blood loss that had killed the men first, but one thing was for sure: There were twenty-seven grieving families because of what this piece of shit had done. The fact that he liked to fuck the corpses while they were still warm before disposing of them in the woods at the back of his property only made matters worse.