Fan Fiction ❯ Frailty ❯ Murderer ( Chapter 7 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

"Frailty"


Chapter Seven- "Murderer"


Considering his massacre of other human beings in a frantic, bizarre time like this, the assumption that prison warden Jonathon Stidewall was not an intelligent individual wasn't lavishly far-fetched. Quite believable, really. Though it was an easy conclusion to draw, Raven had discovered this fact through a more personal form of experience.


A violent, bloody and humane encounter that would etch itself in the sorceress' memory for many years to come, it begun the instant her shield of black magic dropped.


There was no way to tell when a new wave of bullets would make their lethal contact with an intended target, but it was quite easy to hear them being discharged. The second occasion of which Jonathan Stidewall placed aim and fired at his new prey was no exception. The rotating barrels of his stationary auto gattling-gun begun to squeal and groan in accordance with their abrupt circumnavigation. As it started to pick up speed, the first bullet exited from the top-most hole, emitting with it a deep, piercing thoom noise. In less than a second the entire room erupted into a flurry of gunfire, all aimed at one target--Raven.


The horrid symphony of racket that the auto-gun produced was more than enough warning to move, which the titan promptly adhered to. With no time to survey her surroundings for proper cover, Raven dodged behind the nearest solid object--a disorderly collection of crates. A breath later, the fleet of bullets came forcefully colliding with the concrete floor that she once stood on, giving birth to a whole new genre of wholesomely unbearable noise.


Though it made her wince, Raven kept her eyes open, knowing that she had to keep focused. Stidewall was stupid and predictable, but he had a state of the art piece of heavy-artillery backing him, which left even a Green Beret no room for error.


The hope that her venture behind the stock-pile of crates had gone un-noticed was particularly stale, thus it was no shocker when after close to a half-minute of pulverizing the floor, the gunfire begun to change courses, shifting in her direction. Reaching it's destination in a shorter window of time than Raven had expected, the auto-gun blasted into the first crate it came to, reducing it to splinters almost instantaneously. As a result, the number of available cover was reduced to four and she was pushed further back.


Even after this took place, the gun's ear-splitting screech did not subside. Relentlessly, it's flock of shells came to meet with their second target. This crate out-weighed it's predecessor by well over three pounds, which enabled it to survive Stidewall's merciless pummeling nearly ten seconds longer. After the sixth shot had been sustained, the frame gave way, leaving that of which it supported to collapse into a smoldering heap.
Three crates remaining. Time was running out and she knew it, but there didn't appear to be anything she could do. The nearest structure stable enough to withstand the power of Stidewall's auto-gun was an over-turned shipping cart, nearly forty yards away. Even if she flew, the odds that the distance could be traveled without sustaining injury were slim to none.


Hopeless as the situation was, Raven doubled her strategies to escape while retreating further into the depths of the crates. It couldn't end like this. Not here, not now. She couldn't have spent this entire time fighting an army of repulsive beasts only to die by Stidewall's hands. The irony alone would be enough to damn her to this island for eternity. As much as she hated the idea of putting another living, breathing human being to rest, if it called for it, there was nothing that would stop her. That seemed to be the way things were on Carnate. You weren't aloud to have morals if you wanted to survive. Never take your enemy into your conscience, because it was guaranteed that they weren't doing it with you. Outside of that, the only other rule was to always be prepared. Expect the un-expected and be overjoyed when it didn't come…


Her train of thought was snapped when the third crate abruptly busted to pieces, leaving only two behind. Grimacing, the sorceress crawled behind the last crate and awaited the second's fate. Her grim anticipations were not let down. After enduring only three blasts, it crumbled to the floor. A terrible thing to have happened, no doubt, however it left behind something pleasantly opposing to the ominous predicament--a steel box containing hand-grenades, neatly arranged in rows of three.
Raven's eyes widened and a gasp escaped her lips as the blatant plot formulated in her head.
No....I couldn't possibly....
She still couldn't see Stidewall's gun, much less the warden himself. It was a million to one that a grenade would even get halfway there.
...But what choice do I have? It's that, or die not even trying...
The hand-held explosives were a gamble, but they were all she had.


Just as the first bullet sank into the base of the crate she hid behind, Raven crouched and sprang forward, landing near the remains of the second crate in a roll. (An evasive maneuver she had learned while watching a movie called "True Lies") It took less than a second to recover to her feet, seize a grenade from the box and dash forward, keeping her head low. Realizing his prey's completely un-expected gambit, Stidewall re-focused his aim and brought the steady stream of bullets back to their target. This was Raven's cue. Channeling all available strength into her right arm, she pulled the pin from the grenade and flung it forward, screaming with the strain.


The explosive sailed through the air end-over-end before erupting a few feet shy of it's target. Stidewall, who had been utilizing the auto-gun from the confined safety of a small depot office, was slung to the ground as the massive explosion rattled the four walls surrounding him.


The warden lay still on his back for full minutes, praying that nothing had been severely damaged, but his hopes were quickly shot down when he painfully shifted his forearms underneath him to support his torso, enabling him to see the remains of his once prized and highly lethal auto-gun. The tri-pod that supported it had been mangled and twisted, leaving two of the three legs completely snapped in half. The rotating barrel had been cracked and on-top of the gun's base was a particularly small fire that whipped and cracked about threateningly. All of these things conspired to grant the auto-gun the status-earned title of S.O.L.


Groaning more out of frustration for losing his state of the art weapon than the searing pain that shot through his legs, Stidewall gradually climbed to his feet and lightly surveyed the damage. He snickered slightly as the old phrase "Good news for people who love bad news" visited his mind.
His stationary gun was royally fucked. The office itself had a rectangular fifteen-by-ten foot plate glass on the left wall that looked out into the corridor that led into the next set of hallways. The explosion had shattered it completely and left it's shards scattered about the floor. The lights recessed in the ceiling had been busted, casting him into a dim light that made a surprise attack hard to forebode, and the person that was to blame for all of this was still alive, lurking about somewhere in the shipping hangar, most likely right outside his office.


The only bright side he had left to look on was the fact that he still had a side-arm holstered and strapped to his waist; a forty-four magnum. The infamous "Dirty Harry" gun. One shot from this indisputably powerful fire-arm, and the victor was decided. That was all it took.
Thinking of all these things, some hopelessly dire and others good, a smirk crossed the warden's lips, which quickly morphed into a full-fledged ear-to-ear beam. The playing field had just been leveled, and he always loved an even fight.


"A good plan, little girl..." He breathed while approaching the exit from the office, keeping the forty-four leveled.
"I admit, I had no idea what was gonna' happen, ya' got me. You're a pretty clever kid..." His hand gripped the knob.
"It's almost gonna' be a shame..." It slowly begun to turn.
" WHEN I KILL YOU! " Abruptly, Stidewall burst through the door, raised the magnum and whirled completely around, hoping to catch his enemy in mid-motion, however he was greeted by nothing.
It took a full five minutes of confirming that there was no present danger before he would grow terribly confused. There was no possible way the mysterious girl could have escaped. He had locked down both entry and exit of the shipping depot using a console inside the office. She had to be somewhere in here, cowering behind the clutter, but surely she would have made some kind of sound by now.


"Come on now, little girl..." He started, his voice echoing throughout the otherwise eerily quiet hangar, "Don't play games with me....."
Hesitantly, he begun to venture further out, completely un-aware that his opponent was sitting high up in one of the rafters on the ceiling, carefully watching every move he made.


The prison warden looked every bit as Southern as he sounded. More notable was the striking resemblance he bore to General Custer. He stood a some six and a half feet tall and had a definably large gut that, even from her point of view, Raven could easily see. Crowning his head was a crop of wavy blond hair that spilled down to his shoulders, on-top of which he sported a straw, pale-beige cowboy hat. His face, in the midst of in apparent shaving-neglect, was rather narrow and chiseled, despite his heavy-set frame. A silver necklace dangled down to the center of his chest, bearing a small pendant/cross that led the eye to a plain-white button-down Versachi shirt, over which he wore a faded brown vest.
Belted and wrapped tightly around his waist were a pair of Wranglers that hugged to his legs tighter than celefame.


When he finally grew to a close proximity from underneath her, Raven retorted to his remark, "Who's really playing the games, Stidewall?"
The warden quickly rose his magnum and scanned the area in response, but still found nothing. The voice itself seemed to have no origin. It simply echoed about the room. With a certain cord of anxiety struck, he was shot for a reply, thus Raven continued, "Me, the one who's just trying to escape? Or you , the one who knows he's not the right strain to survive, so instead he tries to take everyone else down with him...."
" DAMN LIAR!!! " Stidewall, vexed by his enemy's venture and snapped from the trance, bellowed and fired aimlessly ahead of him.


"Oh, c'mon, Stidewall, like that's really going to shut me up!" Raven fired back when the shooting subsided. "You did a pretty good justice by admitting the truth to yourself, but this isn't the answer. I'm asking you nicely, let me out, and we can pretend this never happened..."
Her plan seemed to be going out well. Jonathan Stidewall was a human being, and doing him in was last on the list of acts she wanted to perform, now or ever. While taking cover behind the crates, his reason for trying to kill her became quite obvious and from there she begun to lay out her plans to mentally break him.


"... Never ..." He growled in an almost inaudible tone. Naturally unable to hear him, Raven pressed on, "What did you just say? Speak lou--"
" I SAID NEVER, DAMN IT, NEVER!!! " Not completely sure of what he was doing, Stidewall raised the forty-four to the ceiling and let three bullets fly. The simple-minded warden would never know the impact of his erratic, rage-driven action in that moment.
The first and second shots whizzed past Raven's face and pierced the ceiling, easily startling her. She scooted back in shock, but too late realized that a maneuver of that degree could not be made without a dire consequence. Seconds later she was plummeting toward the concrete floor, unable to get her barrings straight enough to catch herself with levitation.


Raven struck the floor with an audible, echoing thud. Seconds later, the shotgun followed suit. Her shoulders, which had been the main point of impact, promptly begun to grow numb. Her hunter wasted no time approaching her, a sickeningly sadistic grin streaked across his face. He stopped a few feet short of Raven's prone form and raised the magnum, placing aim between her eyes.


"You were a challenge...Lord, how I thought I'd die..." He confessed. "Because of that, I'll let you have yer' last few words, but make em' quick..." His fatal error had been made. In one breath, she gasped, "AzarathmetrionZINTHOS!" and took telepathic control of the steel shipping cart that lay roughly twenty yards away from them. All too suddenly, the large cart smashed into Stidewall from behind, flinging him toward the very girl he was about to shoot. Doing her best to ignore the pain that had spread throughout her back, Raven rolled out of the way and recovered to her knees, blindly groping for the shotgun.


By the time the sorceress' hand wrapped around the handle of the two-handed firearm, Stidewall had wrestled out from underneath the cart and was well on his way to completely recovering.
Knowing not another second could be sparred, Raven shot her other hand to the middle of the shotgun then turned onto her back, catching her enemy just after standing to his feet, the forty-four only half-raised. For nearly a minute, Raven remained perfectly still, failing to realize she had won the draw. When at last that inevitable moment occurred, she hissed, "Drop it!"
Stidewall paused briefly before letting the magnum plummet to the floor, landing with a loud clunk . His look of sheer disbelief terribly clashed with Raven's victorious, smug, yet still subtle smirk.


"Don't worry about it too much...I said it once and I'll say it again, I don't want to kill you...."
Using only her legs, Raven begun to pull herself up.
"We can just go our own ways and pretend we never met eachoth--" After managing to land one of her feet flat on the ground, the titan lost her balance and begun to tumble over. As her back came to meet with the concrete floor once more, her finger jerked down on the trigger of the shotgun. The recoil of the blast hit her arm with such force that the gun flew free from her hand and came to land a few feet away. The distinctly clear thoom of the shot echoed about the room hauntingly longer than it should have.


As much as she wanted to, Raven didn't stay down. Just after fully meeting the floor, she sprung back up to her knees and took in the sight of Stidewall's grounded form, a dark pool of blood slowly engulfing the ground around him. Her heart begun to pound profusely as she crawled toward him. Reaching his side, she nudged him in the ribs and received no reaction.
"...Stidewall?"
Nothing. He lay perfectly still.
Raven's mouth begun to quiver and a feeling of dread grew within her as what she had done became painfully clear. Finally arriving at his head, the mortal wound was brought into view. The blast had predominantly connected with his neck, leaving it intact by only a few threads of skin.
She knelt over him and examined the devastating impact for a brief moment more. The fact that the sad incident was a sheer accident and nothing more didn't seem to register as the dark sorceress covered her face and wept, "Stidewall! Oh Gawd, I killed him! I killed a human being !"


-End chapter 7-


*Rambling*


At first, I was quite skeptical about trying to get the battle with Stidewall exclusively in an entire chapter, but as I wrote, things seemed to be carrying themselves rather nicely, so I figured "What the Hell" and persisted with the idea. This chapter may have been a few K's (And by a few, I mean a few ) shorter, but it'll really help me kick the next one off, and more often than not, that's how I aim to ideally end a chapter, as there is nothing that is more of a pain in the ass than sitting in front of the blank computer screen trying to think of a halfway decent sentence to start things off with.


Moving along, I believe it was wordbearer that predicted this fic to end pretty soon. My good friend, I assure you this-your prediction was dead wrong. I still have quite a bit more to get done before this fic can be proclaimed finished, but I intend to stay strong with it. When I took this on, I had no real idea of what I was doing, but I knew this, it would be rather lengthy (At least compared to the other meaningless crap I write) so before I close, keep this in mind; with this chapter finished, I am only halfway done, if even that, but I enjoy every second of it.


-JackoMegane