The cheap rubber smelled like toxic paint and old sweat.
Kai pulled the oversized rooster mask down over his head. The eyeholes barely lined up, filtering his glowing crimson vision through two uneven slits of plastic. It was suffocating, but it covered enough.
He stood in the narrow, flickering hallway above the pawn shop.
At the end of the hall was a reinforced steel door. Behind the steel, a money counter whirred in a steady rhythm.
Beneath that, voices.
"—third week straight. I'm telling you, this city's cursed."
"Shut up and count."
"I'm just saying. Vinnie's guys moved forty last Tuesday and we're sitting here with what, twenty-two? Sal's gonna lose his mind."
"Sal can lose his mind on his own time. Count."
The money counter resumed its steady whirr.
Kai heard something else beneath it: four distinct heartbeats. One near the window, one behind the table, two by the door.
He just walked forward.
He raised his boot and drove it into the deadbolt.
The steel door bowed inward with a deafening clang. Inside, the money counter stopped. A chair scraped violently against the floor.
"Hey! What the fuck—"
Kai kicked it again. The metal hinges tore out of the dry rot doorframe. The heavy door slammed flat onto the floorboards, kicking up a cloud of dust.
Four men were in the room. Stacks of twenties and fifties covered a folding table.
The man closest to the door stared at the seven-foot figure in a black trench coat and a rubber chicken mask. For a split second, his brain simply couldn't process what he was looking at.
That second was all Kai needed.
Kai stepped into the room. The man reached for a Glock on the table. Kai grabbed the man's face — his massive fingers spanning from temple to chin — and slammed the back of his skull against the cinderblock wall. The skull cracked like a dropped melon. The man dropped.
"Shoot him!" someone screamed.
A shotgun blast deafened the small room. The buckshot caught Kai's left shoulder and tore it open — flesh peeled back in strips, muscle shredded to the bone, blood welling up and sheeting down his arm in a solid curtain.
Kai didn't flinch. He didn't even break his stride.
He crossed the room, grabbed the searing hot barrel of the shotgun, and ripped it out of the shooter's hands. He swung the wooden stock into the man's ribs. The ribcage shattered, folding the man over the table.
The remaining two men didn't try to fight. One scrambled for the window. The other tripped backward over a chair, screaming as he crawled blindly away from the giant rooster.
Kai grabbed the man by the collar, lifted him effortlessly, and threw him entirely through the drywall into the adjacent bathroom.
The man at the window shoved the glass up. Freezing rain blew into the room. He threw one leg over the sill.
Kai caught him by the ankle just as he cleared the frame. He dragged him back through the window and let him drop face-up on the linoleum.
The man looked up.
Kai brought his foot down.
The room went quiet. Just the hiss of a busted pipe and the freezing wind blowing through the open window.
He looked at the four men on the floor without particular interest. Then he pulled a canvas duffel from his coat and began sweeping the banded cash into the bag.
Bring back something useful, the Maker had said.
Kai looked at the heavy stacks of paper. He figured this counted.
As he packed the last stack, a police scanner sitting on a milk crate in the corner crackled to life.
"Dispatch, this is Unit 4. Shots fired, 4th and Elm. We have a double homicide inside the residence. Suspect fled on foot. Requesting immediate backup."
Kai stopped. He listened to the address.
He zipped the duffel bag shut. The bleeding had stopped. He pulled the collar of his coat aside — the buckshot was gone, and the flesh beneath had already closed.
He slung the canvas bag over his shoulder. Stepping over the shattered steel door, Kai walked out into the dark.
The room settled. Wind pushed through the open window, carrying rain across the floor and over the bodies.
Then, a faint scratching echoed from inside the walls.
A gray snout pushed through the jagged hole Kai had smashed in the drywall. The rat that followed was the size of a stray cat, its coarse fur matted with filth, its eyes catching the light from the flickering hallway — a dull, bleeding red. Its overgrown claws scraped against the drywall as it pulled itself through.
Another squeezed out from behind the radiator. Then two more dropped from the ceiling.
They didn't squeak. They just moved, straight toward the blood on the floor.
The first reached the pool beneath the table and lowered its head. The others went for the corpses.
The room filled with the sound of feeding.