4:44 AM
Brooklyn Hospital Center
The hospital was normally closed to visitors at this hour. In fact, the only ones allowed entry at such a time were those in need of emergency care. Alessandro “Pretty Boy” Marino did have an emergency, at the very least. He had to clean up the mess made by that idiot tasked with ending the thorn in the side of the Colombo family known as “The Tiger”.
Boss Persico had pulled the necessary strings to get him in, and get everyone inside out of his way. He was going to make this quick, and make it messy. He’d rather leave them with a mess than risk there being any chance of that psycho nigger drawing another breath. The staff stuck around just long enough to let him through the door, and now he had a special song he’d composed just for Marvin Hayes.
He knew the door. He knew he would be asleep at this time of night...and even if he wasn’t, he would still be bedridden and unable to put up any kind of fight. As he stepped down the hallway, drawing closing to his target with each breath, Alessandro opened the guitar case he had brought into the hospital to reveal an AK-74.
Shoving the clip into the chamber, he pulled back on the lock as he arrived at the door. Drawing a quick breath, Alessandro dashed forward to kick the door in as he aimed his rifle at the bed and opened fire in a spray of bullets.
Marvin’s senses had been going haywire all day; his body was reacting violently to its present predicament. Each sight and sound was sharper than previous, but this appeared only to be a result of the physical trauma his body had underwent days earlier--much like when his metagene first activated. A headache prevented him from truly sleeping, though he managed in spurts. It was nothing deep, however. His body was healing abnormally quick, much faster than a normal human could, would, or should. He had been rather restless all night.
The hospital itself was quiet. It was a weekday and the nursing staff who were on duty weren’t there. Odd. Not odd enough to arouse suspicion from Marvin, though; there were always anomalies. When a polished dress shoe hit the bottom of the door, Marvin’s head sliced toward the noise; where his senses had failed him before because he was becoming careless, they hadn’t failed him this time. Of course, this was no quarter in helping him avoid the hail of bullets which followed shortly after. A repeat of earlier, he was hit again in the shoulder, once more in his hip, and once in his left hand before he manage to roll out of the bed and onto the floor opposite the door. In the jerk reaction he pulled the IV stand over the bed with him and hand torn the IV needle itself out of the vein.
Coupled with growing fatigue, there swelled a flash of anger he had not felt since his first bout in the ring. It was fight or die. Tonight, Marvin Hayes would not be the one dying. No, not as long as the city needed him. Adrenaline coursed within, and his body tried failing him. he tried to muster what situational awareness he could and glean his surroundings. Cold floor, hospital floor. Alright. Now, set the trap; Marvin used his good arm to drag himself toward the window, and in one succinct motion, gave the illusion that the IV was still attached to him as he crawled and dragged the stand with him. Marvin knew better than to underestimate his opponents, he couldn’t run--his next moves all depended on how smart--or idiotic--this gunman was.
Dammit. God dammit. Why hadn’t he died? What did it take to put this motherfucking maine coon down?! The last guy they sent had been ran off by some fucking punks, like a goddamn amateur. But that wasn’t Alessandro. No man had ever escaped him, and he wasn’t about to see that reputation be ruined by
anyone.
Continuing to fire at Hayes as he seemingly attempted to escape towards the window, Alessandro reached into his white suit coat and pulled out a grenade. Pulling the plug with a grunt, he kept up the suppressive fire with his AK-74 as he counted down the seconds. Since he was wielding it with one hand, the shots were no longer terribly accurate in that moment, but that wasn’t the point. It just had to keep him pinned down for a few seconds until…
There, five seconds!
Tossing the grenade over the bed where Hayes had been sleeping moments earlier, Alessandro seized the handle of the door and pulled it shut before charging down the hallway to escape the explosion.
When the shots from the AK lost accuracy with less than sufficient plausibility, it meant something more nefarious was at hand. Marvin had tested his suits using the same weaponry the hitman brought to kill him this very night, and anyone with experience in the use of assault rifles can differentiate the severe drop in accuracy when an amateur believes it fine to shoot with one arm. Though Marvin couldn’t see clearly because most of his visage was covered, this ‘professional’ had left his case in the hospital room with his DNA all over it.
That wasn’t the crux of Marvin’s issues right now; he heard the clank of the grenade pin and its drop alongside him as it cooked. Maybe this hitman wasn’t
too amateurish, his boss had finally sent someone with a shred of mettle to try and end the Tiger’s run. Two seconds wouldn’t have been enough time for him to cease suppressing fire, toss the grenade, and leave before the grenade exploded. Nor would it be any set of odd numbers: three seconds would still not be optimal for the hitman to guide himself to safety, one was death for them both, seven was too long, the even numbers suffered a similar fate. He couldn’t tell what type of grenade it was, but it likely packed enough power to blow him and the room to smithereens in the happy medium five seconds he had likely left the timer on. He had enough time to try and lob it out of the window.
The window.Hahaha! Slightly amusing indeed. Every window, no matter the make, had a weakness in its side; and these were
hospital windows at that, the weaker kind, ironically enough. Marvin grabbed the grenade as it cooked and with the might he could muster, bellowed all of his remaining strength and pent up rage to toss the live grenade out of the hospital window.
Alessandro had waited far down the hallway for the sound of the explosion...and he had indeed received it. But there was something wrong. He could feel a slight rumble at his feet, and a muffled roar of thunder...but it should have been so much greater than that. Furthermore, he should have seen a bright flash from within the room, but that too was absent. The blast sounded like it was a good distance away, and there was only one thing he could think of that would’ve allowed that to be the case: the window.
“Motherfucker!” He spat, dashing further down the hallway before skidding to a stop. Kneeling down onto one knee, he took careful aim at the door with his AK-74, switching it to burst fire mode for increased accuracy. He didn’t know if Hayes intended to leap out the window after the explosion had died, but something told him that monkey would be too prideful for that.
He’d heard that Hayes had a freakish strength about him, so just in case he did something
unexpected like smashing through the walls of the adjacent room to get at him, he’d at least be able to hear him beforehand and make preparations.
Marvin had used a great portion of his remaining strength to take care of the grenade, and in doing so, he had given himself an out, in some respect at least. He didn’t possess the focus necessary to partake in his usual building scaling, but he had enough to get himself to the lower floor if worst came to worst. There was, of course, the matter of Alessandro being as prideful as himself and returning for round two. But if Alessandro’s boss had told him anything about the Tiger in particular, it was that if you didn’t kill him the first time, there would be no round two for you. He’d have already developed a plan C for your plan B.
The hospital room itself was not as large as those on the bottom floor; the rooms in ICU never were. It meant less space to hide, but more weapons in close proximity. Marvin used the window seal in order to stand and he shuffled himself as best he could toward the hospital bed; yanking off the sheets, Marvin used the moments of Alessandro’s departure to tie a three cord fold stretching from the doorknob to the end rail of the hospital bed and then to to himself. He wrapped the intravenous cord around his good wrist for added measure; it was his lone distance weapon at present, he was still bleeding from the wound in his vein, though it had slowly began to congeal--a sign of the rapid speeding up of his healing factor.
Should he hear footsteps down that hall to the north and toward the room, it was out of the window he went; should he hear them to the south, it was out of the room and down the opposite end of the hall. But first, some quick fiddling with the lock; using the second of his intravenous needles, Marvin made quick work of the hospital door’s archaic lock mechanism, setting the needle into the groove of the lock’s pin so the door was sealed shut. The only way to open it would be to shoot through the window, reach through and unlock it manually, or shoot off the doorknob. Either way, Marvin had a plan.
He wasn’t coming.
He had expected Hayes to either start smashing through the walls, or maybe kick the door out and use it as a shield to rush him. Either way, he’d have a plan for that...but he was still in there. Unless...unless he’d jumped out the window. But no, everything he’d heard about “The Tiger” indicated he was never one to run, so he must be up to something.
That was when he heard it. A small sound, very subtle.
Alessandro hadn’t always been contract killer. He’d started his criminal career breaking into places where he didn’t belong. During those days, he’d learned a good thing or two about picking locks...and while he didn’t need to resort to common thievery anymore, that skill still occasionally came in handy for getting to his targets.
Now, it told him that Hayes was fucking with the hospital door in some way, shape or form. There wasn’t really any way to tell what he was doing. Likely preparing a trap, he would guess. If he tried to go in with a spray of bullets, the cat freak would probably end him then and there. No, he needed to use
that.
His last trump card.
Once again reaching into his suit coat, he produced a small green rectangular object. It had been strapped tightly to him to the point where it only slightly distended his suit on his way inside, but after hearing everything this fucker had done, he wasn’t about to take any chances. Slowly removing his shoes, Alessandro began to slowly walk forward at a deliberate and silent pace.
When he arrived, he made certain to never step in front of the glass window or the door. They weren’t his target. Rather, it was the section of wall just adjacent to them. Still a part of the room, but at the left hand side from his perspective. The right from Hayes’.
Placing the green rectangle on the ground, he carefully and quietly began to prime the claymore. Once this was done, Alessandro stood and once more distanced himself from the room. Gently nudging the door of an unoccupied room open, he hid around the corner before activating the explosive. It contained enough force to easily blast out the wall and likely pelt the room with a fair amount of shrapnel.
Once the smoke cleared,
then he would go in and open fire with precision shots.
A demolition man was Alessandro. As a kid, Marvin enjoyed blowing things up, but as a man, he found it sloppy. Some shrapnel cut across his face and upper chest before he bound himself backward in a freefall, part of him forced out of the broken window from the concussive force of the blast. With the rope tied around his waist, all 220 pounds of his frame and the added force of the blast itself pushed Marvin out of the window and activated his makeshift harness; as he had hoped, the bed dragged along the room’s floor and when it hit the window seal, its top end snagged against the top of the window vertically. It served as an added layer of protection against bullets and made cutting the bedsheet itself difficult unless one had a dozen or so minutes to spare.
By that time, Marvin would have been gone already. His descension to the ground down the side of the hospital wall was not as swift as it would have been were he in better condition, but it was apt enough. Once the bedsheet was finally taut as Marvin lay his feet on the ground soft as possible, he uncoiled himself. Alessandro couldn’t get through the window to give chase, and would likely have to go down the hospital’s several flights of stairs in order to reach the ground. But, ever a master of the urban jungle, Marvin broke for the nearest alley in a limp; he had the entire city of Brooklyn’s landscape nearly memorized. It would be a sin for him not to, much time as he spent watching it every day. Escape and preservation were necessary--especially given today’s news. To live and fight another day was the goal; Marvin would see to it that Alessandro got his due.
He had underestimated him.
As Alessandro stared at the bed, it was obvious that her mark had escaped him, much as he was loathe to admit it. Never before had a target escaped him, but he had today. Never before had he bothered to bring multiple explosives just to kill one man, and yet it hadn’t been enough. Not for this opponent.
It was clear that even a professional like himself was not equipped to bring down somebody like “The Tiger”...even when he was already wounded. There was no telling how long he would even remain so now, given his freakish abilities. No, this was something that was beyond him...beyond any mere hitman the mafia had on their payroll.
But that didn’t mean it was impossible.
No, he knew somebody who would complete his mission for him, and do it for free. A man not interested in money, or “the good life”. No, this man was only driven by one thing in life: the thrill of the hunt.
And there was nothing he loved to hunt more than a Big Cat.
