The Fourth Bear

“I felt so liberated. As if I had finally met my match. You and the delightful Sergeant Mary were a formidable team.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

The smile dropped from the Gingerbreadman’s licorice lips. “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, Jack. You and I are going to play a little game. Ever seen a cat playing with a mouse?”

“Ye-e-es.”

“Ever wanted to know what the mouse felt like?”

“No, never—not at all. Not once. Nope.”

“Too bad. Here’s what we’ll do: To tip my inevitable triumph a few millimeters into your favor we’ll do this as gentlemen. Back to back, ten paces, turn and fire. Any questions?”

“Yes,” replied Jack. “Are you a cake or a cookie?”

The Gingerbreadman glared at him. “Don’t make this any worse for yourself, Spratt. Insult me again and I’ll ensure that the agony of your demise is stretched out so long that you will beg me for death.”

He smiled a disquieting smile, the edges of his licorice mouth almost reaching his large glace cherry eyes.

“Right, here we go, then,” he said cheerfully, handing over Demetrios’s revolver. Jack’s prints were now on the weapon that had killed Bisky-Batt, but armed was better than not armed—he hoped.

“Five shots left. Make them count.” He drew his sawed-off shotgun at the same time and flicked off the safety. “And since you’ve been such a tremendous sport over the past few days, I’m willing to give you the first shot. Am I not the most magnanimous of murderers?”

“To a fault.”

“There’s that sarcasm again! Jack, you disappoint me sometimes. We’ll do this out in the corridor where there’s more room. You stand there. Ready?”

Jack nodded, and they stood back to back. Jack thought of turning and plugging him there and then, but he had seen the speed at which the Ginja assassin could move.

“Eight paces, then,” said the Gingerbreadman, enjoying himself tremendously.

“You said ten earlier.”

“I did?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s not be small about it. Ten it is.”

They both started to walk, the Gingerbreadman glancing over his shoulder now and again to make sure Jack was playing by the rules. Jack was walking back toward the stairs and the rest of the visitors’ center. He looked at the revolver. He’d used one only three times before; he didn’t like them, and NCD work generally called for brains, not firepower. He reached his tenth pace, stopped and turned. The Gingerbreadman’s paces were longer than his and he was a lot farther down the corridor than Jack had thought, while Jack was only about two strides from the top of the stairs. He had planned to aim for the Ginja’s head, but given the distance a chest shot seemed like a better option.

“Your go, then, Jack!” called out the Gingerbreadman cheerfully. “Take careful aim, now.”

Jack lifted the gun, aimed and fired. The shot struck the Gingerbreadman in the area of where his heart might have been if he’d had one, but to no effect—the slug went straight through and embedded itself into a doorframe at the other end of the corridor with a resounding thunk.

The Gingerbreadman smiled at him and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I should have said: Bullets have no real effect on me. My turn.”

He raised the shotgun and fired in a single swift motion. Jack dived to one side as the blast struck the wall behind where he’d been standing. Without pausing for a second, he dashed down the stairs four at a time and ran back into the darkened atrium to take refuge behind the tank.

“Cheat!” he heard the Gingerbreadman yell. “I stayed still for you!”

Jack looked around desperately as he heard the assassin walk noisily down the staircase. The tank was a battle-scarred example and was peppered with shell holes. He peered through one hole and saw the Ginja padding across the area outside the entrance to what would one day become The Phosgene Experience. Jack waited until he was opposite the turnstiles, then jumped out and fired. The shot blew a small patch of ginger off the assassin’s shoulder, and the Gingerbreadman bounded with surprising dexterity into the entrance of the Scents of the Battle Odorama™ exhibit. Jack took the opportunity to make a move and dashed across the atrium to the Virtual Trenchfoot attraction, shut the door behind him and then swiftly jammed a chair under the door handle.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” sang the Gingerbreadman as he walked across the atrium. Jack looked around desperately for a possible escape route. The room was full of desks with Quang-6000 computers hooked up to virtual reality headsets, gloves and boots. There were no windows, so Jack headed as fast as he could to an emergency exit at the far end of the room. He pushed the bar to open it, but it was locked. He threw his full weight against the door but it wouldn’t budge, so he picked up the heaviest object he could find—a computer—and hurled it at the recalcitrant door, with all his strength. It did nothing except scratch the surface. He might as well have tried to throw a tomato through a piano.

He had just raised his revolver to try to blow out the lock like he’d seen in the movies when the other door was kicked off its hinges by a well-placed gingerbread foot and the Ginja assassin strode into the room. Before Jack could even react, the Gingerbreadman had loosed off a single shot that destroyed the exit sign above Jack’s head. He turned to look at the figure framed in the doorway, who was still smiling.

“Not like you to miss.”

“I didn’t miss,” the Gingerbreadman said, tossing the shotgun aside and removing the belt of cartridges from his waist. “It’s just that I do so enjoy a certain ‘hands-on’ feel to my work. Using a gun does so distance one from one’s victims. Why, you cannot hope to smell the fear from farther than a couple of feet away. What enjoyment snipers get from their sport, I have no idea.”

Jack stared, his mind racing but his fear under control. The abomination at the door had killed—as far as Jack knew—112 times. One more was nothing to him. The Ginja rubbed his powerful, spongy hands together.

“What shall I pull off first, Jack? An arm? A leg? I could twist your head a full three hundred and sixty degrees…. Okay, fun’s over. I’d expected a better fight than this, but perhaps you aren’t the man I thought you were.”

Jack fired the revolver again, but the slug flew through the cakey body, this time hardly making a mark.

“Two left, Jack.”

He fired again and blew an icing button off the Ginja’s chest.

“That leaves one. I’ll think I’ll do your legs first, but from the knee down—a leg torn from the hip always results in rapid death through bleeding, and I want this to last. Unless you have any objections, of course?”

He smiled again, the murderous subroutines in his gingery body running through to their inevitable end. He was built for one purpose and existed for only one reason. Regardless of the ideological wasteland that governed his psychotic thought processes, he was a creature at peace with himself. His life, such as it was, had meaning.

Jack, despite having a 280-pound monstrosity lumbering toward him, was oddly calm. He found himself thinking about Madeleine and the kids. He wouldn’t see them graduate, or even grow up. And then there was the wedding.

“Pandora.”

“Sorry?” said the Gingerbreadman, who was wondering whether to postpone the leg tearing in favor of something unbelievably unpleasant he’d seen happen to Mel Gibson at the end of Braveheart.

“My daughter. I’ll miss her wedding. It’s in a month.”

“Well,” said the Gingerbreadman reflectively, “I could just let you go—as long as you promise to come back straight afterward. No, just kidding. You’ll have to miss her wedding—and the birth of your first grandchild. You’ll miss your own memorial, too—but only by a couple of days.”

Jack wasn’t listening. He was thinking. There had to be a very good reason that Project Ginja Assassin had been canceled. He was such a perfect warrior. Intelligent, resourceful, amoral and indestructible. Cake or cookie? Did it matter? Jack had a sudden thought. Yes, it probably did matter. A cake went hard