Chapter 44: Chapter forty-three

Three years ago

 

The text came late on a Friday night.

Oblivion is coming.

One of the world’s new vigilantes was coming for him. Marco had been expecting one of them to come for some months now, and he was ready for it. Since the masks had first appeared years ago, many of the world’s most successful and prolific criminals, warlords, and terrorists had been captured or killed. Crime was down worldwide and finding people willing to work for him was getting increasingly difficult. In order to survive in this new world, criminals had to be paranoid, ruthless and intelligent, or else hopelessly small-time.

Marco was not small time. He ran what was now the biggest cartel in Mexico, the previous holders of that title all being dead or scattered. He had hundreds of men under his command and controlled most of the drug trade and kidnapping in the country. Since the collapse of the Mendez cartel, he had been expecting one of the masks to come after him next. And, since he didn’t want to die, he had been holed up in a compound surrounded by as many guards and sicarios as he could find. It was expensive, he was spending almost fifty times on security what he would have if he weren’t paranoid about a man in a mask catching him alone one night. But if he killed one of these vigilantes when they came for him, it would break some of the terror they inspired in the hearts of his men and the men who would have once been his recruits. Once they were shown to just be flesh and blood, his men might stop calling them superheroes and get back to work without constantly looking over their shoulder for some shadowy boogiemen.

So when the text came, it was partly a relief. Objectively on paper, if you had to have a mask gunning for you, Oblivion was the one you should want. While Reaper killed with blades, Bodycount tended to take out whole buildings and Dusk routinely took out targets with a rifle from a distance, Oblivion usually fought unarmed. He even sent a text or email to his targets in advance so they had a chance to run or fight. But, for all that, there was something about Oblivion that sent a shiver down Marco’s spine. The faceless stare, the way he moved, and who fought gunmen unarmed anyway? So, while Marco was relieved by the notion of getting to leave his compound for the first time in months, a weight of fear settled in the bottom of his stomach at the notion of the man without a face coming for his life.

“Perimeter, report,” Marco said into a walkie-talkie, cell phones being too easy to jam. It was the third time he had asked for a report in the last fifteen minutes.

“North side clear.”

“East side clear.”

“South side clear.”

No response came from the guards on the west side of the compound.

“West side, report,” Marco said.

No report came.

“North side, south side, check it out. Don’t take any chances. If anything looks suspicious, shoot it a lot.”

“Yes boss,” came the reply. The seconds dragged by in silence.

“We found the west side guards,” said one of his men, trepidation in his voice. “They’re dead. No sign of Oblivion. Wait—” There was a sound of impact and the transmission cut out.

Silence.

“What’s happening?” Marco demanded.

More silence.

Marco’s teeth ground against each other unintentionally. His nerves were getting the better of him. He reassured himself that everything would be fine. That he had prepared for this for months and the mask was only a man.

A voice crackled over the walkie-talkie, but it was not a voice that belonged to any of his men. It sounded like someone had hollowed a man’s voice of all emotion and, in its place, filled it with a terrible finality.

“Oblivion is coming.”

Moments later one of his security feeds died and his perimeter alarms started blaring. Oblivion was in the compound.

So far everything was going according to plan.

Marco scanned the security feeds on the screen in front of him. The first feed to go dead was at the west entrance to the compound, but that could have been a distraction, so Marco’s eyes flickered from screen to screen.

His caution was rewarded when he saw one of his guards on the north side of the compound collapse in a heap. Then a dark shape flashed across the corner of the security feed next to it. He picked up a second walkie-talkie and alerted his inner guards to Oblivion’s location.

On another screen, a guard waited with his gun pointed at the door. Marco kept one eye on that screen, being the next one Oblivion would appear on if he kept following the same path. The guard looked understandably nervous, but his hands were steady as he held the gun. On the screen the door burst open and something flew into the room. The guard’s muzzle flashed as the thing—which looked a lot like one of the antique vases that used to belong to Marco’s mother and which Marco still kept to remember her—hit him in the head. The guard went down in a heap and a figure in black darted through the room. At this rate, Oblivion would be there at any moment.

Marco turned away from the monitor and looked out the bullet-resistance glass that comprised one wall of room he was holed up in. The room overlooked a much larger room filled with guards, hired thugs and professional killers. Over a hundred hard men armed with knives and other close combat weapons. On top of that, the rooms walls were lined with murder holes behind which hid trained killers armed with long-range rifles. The room was a trap, and Marco was the bait. He had left the security around his compound purposefully weak to draw one of the masks in. He was as prepared as he could be and so far everything was going to planned.

The door to the larger room opened and Oblivion stepped through.

Nobody moved. The faceless figure in black and the veritable army of hired muscle stared at each other for a moment.

“Weren’t expecting this were you mask?” Marco said, his voice amplified by speakers he had installed for the purpose of giving orders and, if he was honest with himself, gloating. “I’m not some scared sheep you can kill in the night. Tonight, I am the hunter. Tonight, you will die.”

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“You have gone to a lot of effort to kill me,” Oblivion’s said, his voice carrying across the room while still seeming hollow. The blank mask scanned the room for a moment. “It isn’t enough.”

 

 

One hundred and eight armed men stood between Oblivion and his target. The target was trying to overwhelm him with sheer numbers. It was a solid strategy. Human bodies have definite limits. Absolute thresholds of endurance beyond which they cannot be pushed. There were only so many people Oblivion could fight in a row before he grew sluggish and weak from sheer exhaustion.

But a hundred and eight was far from that number.

The men came for him and Oblivion went to work. The first knife came at him and he broke the man’s wrist mid-thrust, took the knife from him and plunged it through the side of his neck at an angle that the hospital wing of his automated mind palace informed him would sever the left jugular vein and the left common carotid artery. Blood sprayed from the man’s neck as the knife came out and he collapsed.

311.

Oblivion kept the man’s knife. If he had to fight over a hundred men with just his fists, he would get sore hands.

Another man, his face wet with the arterial blood of the first, swung a length of pipe at Oblivion’s head. Oblivion sliced the man’s radial tendon with one hand while plucking his left eye with the other. The man fell to the ground screaming and clutching at his face, but he’d live.

Then Oblivion was swamped in men and there was no more time for showy moves. Knives, pipes and chains came for him but they never found their target. Perfectly timed dodges and precisely placed pushes ensured that the only thing the men struck was each other. Each of Oblivion’s counter attacks landed with lethal precision.

341.

342

 Men tried to swamp him with sheer numbers, pressing in close in throngs, it only meant they died faster.

347.

348.

Oblivion killed and crippled with both hands, slicing throats with one while collapsing windpipes with the other. Against fewer opponents he could have broken kneecaps and killed fewer people, but kicks left him unable to dodge effectively against so many.

351.

352.

A man with a gun levelled it at him from too far away to get to in time, but Oblivion pulled a large man in the path of the bullet a half-second before the shot. A moment later a bloody knife sailed through the air and the man with the gun died.

354.

355.

Marco’s voice boomed over the speakers, ordering his snipers to fire on Oblivion. They didn’t respond. They didn’t respond because Oblivion had snuck into the compound, poisoned the snipers, and then snuck back out in order to enter the compound in a way that the security cameras would see. Reaper would have considered this a waste of time and effort, but he had never truly understood how to inspire fear. As evidenced by his choice of moniker.

Oblivion moved through the men like fire through wheat. Their combat experience ranged from untrained street-muscle to ex-military, professional killers, but none of them had fought anything like Oblivion before. Even the best among them was woefully outmatched by the faceless man in black. Nobody even landed a blow.

In a frighteningly short time, Oblivion stepped upon the stairs that led up to Marco’s overlooking room.

390.

 

 

The room Marco was in was built with invading masks in mind, and its security was top of the line. The ballistic glass he looked through was triple-reinforced and could resist military-grade, armour-piercing rounds, the walls were twelve inches of reinforced steel and the door had the best security money could buy. Nobody should have been able to get in there but him.

The door swung open anyway. Marco already had his gun levelled at the door, but he never got a shot off. Oblivion was upon him too quickly. The gun left his hand and the last thing he saw was the barrel of his own gun being pointed at his head.

“Three hundred ninety-one.”

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