Hexenbox

Chapter 1 - Things Gone South

She couldn't tell where the heist had gone off the rails. Probably with that "artifact", as he had called it. She still had trouble calling it anything. Yes, maybe it had started with that darn artifact. Gone off the rails. Because gone off the rails, it had. Literally. She should know, lying here in the wreckage of that god-forsaken train somewhere in the depths of the subway system. Lying here in the dark, with not a single spark of light and with something pinning her down, her left leg likely crushed—although it didn't hurt much.

Yet.

She could remember the chase. At least some of it. How she had shot at it. Whatever it had been. In her memory, it was a shadow, massive, vicious. It had come after her through the cars, ripping the metal to shreds like it was cardboard. Werewolf? The fuck. This thing was enormous, hulking, horns, claws. Something with a slavering mouth full of teeth. Eyes trained on her. She shot at it with the subsonic ammo from her Heckler and Koch sniper rifle. Why? This was ridiculous. This called for something that would man-stop a charging rhino. A 700 Nitro-like. Or a 120 mm canon from a main battle tank. Why not? Why not a helicopter that she could fly away with from this terror, from this... thing that just ripped everything to pieces behind her: doors, walls, seats, the screaming passengers? She could remember a little boy whose trike had rolled by itself in the way of the thing. She didn't want to remember. Didn't want to remember the mother who had raced after him. Her mind started to go blank at the memory.

Then, something had crashed. The whole car had bolted, a screeching and a thud that went through the whole construct, the world having gone upside down, inside out, and back again. And now she lay here under the rubble with all sound gone, all the lights gone. The screams gone. As if they all had died, leaving her as a monstrous joke, the only one around that would be found alive by the monster. The monster that she could now hear some way off. Sniffing. Going through the rubble. Meticulously. Leaving her here, unable to move, her body numb and near-dead. She could only open and close her eyes, and what difference did that make? Leaving her to her thoughts, which told her in no uncertain terms that it had probably been the monster itself that had dropped into the gap between the cars, dropped with a claw or a limb and collided with the wheels or whatever had happened to make the train cars flip over like... It didn't make a difference. Not to her. Gone off the rails. Like it shouldn't have. Because it had seemed so...

God, it had just been a heist! Go into that museum, get the artifact, get out again.

The artifact itself had been an ornamented box, black with intrinsic patterns made out of brass or something. Something a magician would use, the sides as long as a hand. Luce had picked it up. She could still remember his face, smiling beneath the dreadlocks.

They had been instructed. They had been instructed to be ever so careful with this thing.

"Only the rim," the man had told them. Fifty-something, grey coat, grey suit, grey beard. Grey eyes. Prothesis for one leg as far as she could tell from the way that he moved and the cane he leaned on the side of the chair. In that lobby of the Hard Rock Hotel where everything was like brass and gold and beautiful colors and the scent of espresso and, for some reason, of strawberry and the walls all decorated with trivia of famous pop and rock stars.

"Only by the rim."

And Luce had picked it up like he didn't care, and for goddamn sure he didn't because, since Syria, he had developed this annoying habit of thinking himself indestructible. Like he could not die. And for sure, he hadn't died in Syria during this air raid that somehow had bombed them, not the enemy, and everyone around had been torn to pieces. Only a trick of... luck, of sheer beautiful, brutal luck, had exempted both Luce and herself from the shrapnel flying in all directions. Except for them. She had thought differently. Luce had thought himself God-chosen or whatever, standing there in the ruins, laughing his head off at all the destruction. Maybe it had been his way of coping. Because she, for sure, had heard him crying himself to sleep in the days and weeks after, and they both had quit afterwards because there was no other way after having seen your friends being ripped apart like that, in a single moment, one second here, one second gone. And having survived without so much as a scratch.