The Ghost Consigliere

Chapter 9: Symphony of Blood in the VIP Room

EDM music thundered from massive speakers in every corner of the ground floor of The Apex, shaking the bulletproof windowpanes. Purple and red strobe lights flashed wildly, slicing through the sea of hundreds of VVIP guests dancing without restraint. They were far too lost in synthetic drugs and alcohol to notice the danger creeping closer.

But in the side corridor cordoned off by red velvet ropes, pure panic erupted.

The two corpses controlled by Elias staggered out of the dressing room. Mike’s corpse, neck broken, led the way, carrying a short-barreled shotgun. Behind him, the newly dead guard with the hole blown through his chest crawled forward stiffly, raising a suppressed Glock.

“Stop them! Shoot their heads!” shouted a security commander in a white suit from the far end of the hallway.

Four tactical guards immediately opened fire into the narrow corridor. Nine-millimeter rounds sprayed everywhere, smashing into plaster walls, shattering displays of expensive liquor bottles, and tearing through the bodies of Elias’s two corpses.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Mike’s corpse jerked violently as bullets punched through its shoulder and thigh. But it did not stop. With horrifying steady speed, Elias forced the corpse’s finger to keep pulling the trigger of the shotgun without pause.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Two enemy guards dropped, their chests exploding under buckshot blasts. Blood splattered across the corridor walls, mixing with the strobe lights.

Club patrons near the bar finally realized something was wrong. Hysterical screams began to pierce through the EDM music. People trampled each other, running for the main exit, while Vancroft guards tried to fight the monsters that felt no pain in the corridor.

Inside the van parked deep in the rear alley, Elias’s real body began convulsing.

The distance between the club corridor and the van had now reached one hundred three meters. The signal stretched to a life-threatening level. In his head, Elias could no longer hear the club music. He heard the shrieking distortion of radio static tearing through his cerebral cortex. Fresh blood dripped from his left ear, soaking the pillow beneath him.

“Sloane... move... NOW!” Elias roared through his earpiece, his voice nearly drowned out by the noise of agony.

“Hold on, Boss!” Sloane shouted from the driver’s seat.

Sloane slammed the gas pedal to the floor. The van’s heavy tires screeched through puddles, spraying mud into the air. The old diesel engine roared as the van shot backward out of the alley, crashed through a pile of trash bins, then whipped sharply onto the front road.

Sloane stared straight at the wrought-iron gate protecting The Apex VIP parking area. Behind it stood two armed guards panicking at the sight of an armored van racing toward them.

“Out of the way, dogs,” Sloane growled.

BRAKKK!

The van smashed into the giant iron gate at sixty kilometers per hour. The hinges blew apart instantly, and the gate flew into a concrete pillar. The front of the van crumpled badly, its windshield cracking like a spiderweb, but Sloane’s reinforced steel plating absorbed the worst of the impact.

The van kept barreling across the paving stones, cutting dozens of meters in seconds before Sloane slammed the brakes exactly three meters from the club’s outer wall. Elias was now only twenty meters from the club’s center.

Inside the van, the shrieking in Elias’s head vanished at once. The connection that had nearly snapped became dense and stable again. He breathed hard. The black veins in his neck stopped swelling. Full control had returned.

“Distance cut, El! Finish slaughtering them!” Sloane shouted, pulling out his light machine gun from beneath the seat, preparing to secure the van’s outer perimeter.

Inside the club, Elias grinned.

Mike’s corpse, which had been slowing and stuttering, now moved with a predator’s agility. It hurled aside the empty shotgun, then lunged at the white-suited guard trying to reload.

Elias used the corpse’s hand to yank the pin from a gas grenade on the guard’s belt, then kicked it into the cluster of guards just coming down the second-floor stairs.

PSSSHH!

Thick white smoke instantly swallowed the main staircase.

“Fall back! They’re bulletproof, damn it! Fall back to the VIP floor!” shouted one guard, coughing through the gas.

They still did not realize Elias had no intention of letting even one of them retreat.

Elias severed his connection to Mike’s corpse, now out of ammunition, then swiftly shifted his necrotic cable into the two fresh guard corpses he had just created in the corridor. Two new puppets rose inside the smoke, grabbed their assault rifles, and charged up the stairs toward the second floor.

The indoor slaughter continued brutally.

Merciless close-quarter combat.

Elias, hidden behind dead bodies, shot anyone wearing a Vancroft uniform. He ignored guards who hid or begged for mercy. Every time one host body was destroyed by gunfire, Elias instantly leaped into the next freshly fallen corpse.

He was a virus spreading through blood and bullets.

Third Floor, VIP Room

Dante stood silently behind the bulletproof glass wall of his office. His usually calm face had hardened. Cigar smoke curled from lips pressed tight.

On the security monitors above his desk, he watched a horror no human logic could explain. His best guards, men trained to military standards, were shooting each other.

No, not betraying each other.

Dante could see clearly that the shooters had clouded white eyes, broken necks, or shattered chests.

They were corpses.

“Ghosts,” Dante muttered softly. The hand wearing a gold ring trembled slightly. “He really hacked the dead.”

“Mr. Dante!” A commander in black body armor burst into the office. “We can’t hold them! They keep coming to the third floor. Every time we kill one, another corpse gets up! This is witchcraft, sir! We have to evacuate!”

Dante crushed his cigar into a silver ashtray.

He was a rational man. He did not believe in magic.

He believed in logic and distance.

“He’s not using magic. He’s hijacking enemy nerves from nearby.” Dante snatched up his metal briefcase filled with money and syndicate data. “If Elias is controlling these corpses, then he’s outside somewhere, hiding within a certain radius. Blow up the van that hit the front gate with an RPG. The real target is there!”

Dante did not wait for an answer. He pressed a hidden button beneath his desk. A bookshelf in the wall opened, revealing an emergency staircase leading directly to the roof, where his private helicopter had been warming its engine since the chaos began.

“Hold the door. I’m evacuating through the helipad,” Dante ordered sharply, then ran up the stairs.

Down below, Elias’s two new corpses had just breached the steel door to the VIP floor. They stepped inside, trampling thick red carpet now soaked in blood. The final four guards protecting Dante’s office immediately fired an RPG.

WHOOSH-BOOM!

The rocket struck one of Elias’s corpses, blowing it apart into chunks of flesh and charred bone. The shockwave severed Elias’s connection with brutal force.

Inside the van, Elias convulsed violently. He screamed in pain as black blood gushed from his nose onto the blanket.

“Dante... escaping... roof...” Elias groaned, eyes half closed from unbearable suffering.

“The helipad is one hundred fifteen meters from this van, Elias!” Sloane shouted in panic, continuing to fire at guards beginning to surround the vehicle. “You’ll never make it! Your connection will break before you reach the roof!”

“Cut the distance, Sloane,” Elias growled hoarsely, the veins in his neck throbbing madly, spreading pain that threatened to shatter his sanity. “I need ten meters. Drive this van into the club lobby.”

Sloane’s eyes widened. “Are you insane? There’s a three-meter stair rise to the front lobby! This van’s too heavy, we’ll get stuck!”

“DO IT!” Elias barked, black blood dripping from his mouth.

Sloane gritted his teeth. “Damn it. Hold on tight, Boss!”

He floored the gas pedal.

The van’s tires spun wildly, crushing what remained of the gate. At full speed, the two-ton armored vehicle charged the marble staircase at the club’s main entrance.

KRAKKK-BRAKK!

The van launched briefly into the air, smashed through the main double glass doors into shards, and landed hard in the center of the luxurious lobby. Its front end plowed into the granite reception desk, reducing it to rubble. The engine died instantly, belching black smoke.

But the distance had been cut.

Fifteen meters closer.

Inside the club, at the final staircase leading to the roof, Elias’s remaining host corpse turned its head. The burning sensation in his mind faded, replaced by a restored and complete connection.

Elias forced the corpse to leap forward and kick the helipad access door off its hinges.

Rain and wind howled across the rooftop.

The helicopter blades spun at full speed, ready for takeoff. Dante was trying to fasten his seatbelt in the passenger seat while the panicked pilot worked the controls.

“Get us up, idiot! Fly now!” Dante screamed.

Elias’s corpse, a guard in a torn uniform with a bullet lodged in his shoulder, sprinted toward the helicopter. It moved without hesitation, ignoring the deadly spinning blades.

“Shoot him!” Dante pointed frantically, drawing a pistol from his jacket.

The pilot had no time to react.

Elias’s corpse leaped, smashing into the helicopter door that had not fully closed. Its dead left hand punched through the side glass and seized Dante by the collar with iron strength.

“W-what... let go, bastard!” Dante fired his pistol point-blank into the corpse’s chest.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The corpse did not care.

Elias yanked Dante out of the helicopter seat with one savage pull. Dante screamed as his body was hurled from the cabin and rolled across the wet concrete pad. Terrified by the monster before him, the pilot immediately took off and fled, abandoning his master.

Dante tried to crawl away, blood dripping from the forehead he had slammed against the pavement. His gray suit was drenched by the acid rain. He looked back and stared at the horrifying figure walking stiffly toward him.

The corpse had no weapon.

It did not need one.

Elias stopped his host corpse directly in front of Dante. He stared at the terrified face of Vancroft’s brilliant lieutenant. The man who had always believed himself untouchable was now crawling and begging beneath the feet of a corpse.

“Wait, Elias... we can make a deal.” Dante’s voice shook, his rationality shattered before absolute horror. “I can pay you... I can give you access to Vancroft’s bank codes, I, ”

Elias poured all his remaining strength into the corpse’s leg and stomped hard onto Dante’s chest, forcing him flat onto the ground.

The corpse bent down.

Its ruined face moved close to Dante’s ear.

“Father sends his regards, Dante,” Elias rasped through the corpse’s mouth, accompanied by bubbling fresh blood.

Before Dante could scream, Elias’s corpse raised its hand high, then drove it straight into Dante’s throat with full force, crushing the cartilage inward until it shattered.

Dante’s body convulsed violently for two seconds. Then it lay still forever beneath the pouring rain.