by Huss, JA
He does.
He shoots himself all over her back with grunts and groans of supreme satisfaction.
And that’s when the alarm begins to scream.
That’s when the bullets come crashing through the wall of glass, shattering the dream and pulling the dust-colored moonlight blanket off us in a single sweep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - ALEC
Danny shrouds Christine in a protective embrace and rolls them off the piano and onto the floor. This makes them no less vulnerable to the penetrating gunfire than they were on top, it just makes them vulnerable and also now on the ground.
Lying on my back, on top of a Steinway concert grand piano, spent from the rigors of our gymnastic sex, my wilting dick in my hands… It seems like the perfect way to die. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to work like hell to avoid dying just now, but if it must happen, I reckon I’ll be fine with it.
Fokken kak, man. This has been a shit week. But it’s also been a fokken brilliant week. We’re about to find out which one will triumph. The sun or the shitstorm.
“What the fuck?” Christine yells, as I roll off the piano top and land beside them.
“How’d they fuckin’ find us, Alec?” Danny shouts.
“Fokked if I know, man!”
Jesus, the gunfire is loud. I’ve seen war before. Seen it up close. I’ve been in some proper warzones and also some hostile environments that look like warzones, just without a formal declaration of war. And this is exactly that. Someone isn’t just trying to kill us. Someone has declared war.
I know this because not all gunfire sounds alike. I cannot explain how such a thing is possible, but it is. Some gunfire sounds clinical, unemotional. And some gunfire is filled with rage and blistering passion.
This gunfire feels very much like the second one.
“I thought the glass was bulletproof!” Christine shouts over the maelstrom of metal.
“It is!” I return.
“Yeah?” hollers Danny. “Doesn’t fuckin’ look that way, does it?”
“It’s not made of fokken unicorn dicks, man! It ain’t magic! It has its limits!”
Spying our discarded clothes on the floor, I crawl out from under the piano and retrieve my and Danny’s trousers and Christine’s sweatpants and t-shirt. My still-leaking cock sliding across the cold floor makes me a tiny bit wistful. Moments ago, it was so goddamn warm and happy. Gaan naai ’n fokken koei, man. Go fuck a fuckin’ cow. Kak.
I grind back under our sorry excuse for cover and parcel out our paltry outfits. As we slide clothes on Danny yells, “Guns!”
“No shit, bru!”
“No, motherfucker! Do you have any?”
“Ah. Right! Yeah, man. Of course! I have a whole fokken cache of them!”
A streaming river of automatic weapons fire comes flowing into the piano. Right where the three of us were enjoined in libidinous congress just moments before. It makes a horrific sound.
A lullaby for a nightmare.
“Where are they?” Christine shouts.
“What?”
“The guns, Alec! Where are the guns?”
I’m so distracted right now. Violence and death have been a part of my life for so long that I don’t process it like other people, I suppose. When you’re born into conflict, it just becomes part of your routine. Like those videos of befok soldiers you see in war zones. Those jas naaiers who just smoke cigarettes while bombs are going off all around them. It’s a conditioning. We are all animals. And we can be trained.
I have been trained to accept death as a necessary end to all. It’s where that Hulk fokker comes from. He swells and expands and makes the confrontations I’m in less appalling to deal with. He will be making himself known shortly, I imagine.
So it stands to reason that as much as I’m not chuffed to have this foolishness unfolding all about us three, I’m just as much lost in pleasure at the notion of it being us three who are stuck in the middle now. I look from Danny to Christine and back again. And I can feel myself smiling.
“Fuck are you smiling about?” Danny asks.
I love you both, I think. I’m so glad you’re here.
“Guns, Alec!” Christine again.
Oh, right.
“They’re on the other side!”
“The other side of what?” growls Danny.
“The house, bru!”
Danny’s eyes close tightly, and he says, “I’m an asshole for not having an escape route, but you only have guns on the other side of the fucking glass house?”
Fair point he makes.
“They’re really good guns, bru! We just have to get them!”
He shakes his head and Christine asks, “Fuckin’ fine! How do we get to them?”
Tipping my chin, I say, “Down the hall.”
Their faces drop.
“The exposed glass hallway?” Christine asks.
“I’m sorry, luv. The house was designed for privacy and seduction and all that. It wasn’t intended to be used as a goddamn bunker!”
Danny looks at me, grinds his teeth, then gets a tiny smile and in what is a clear imitation of me says, “Shame.”
“All right!” Christine yells. “Let’s go fuckin’ get ’em!”
She starts to leap out from under the piano, but I hold her back. I take Danny with my other hand. I pull the three of us toward each other until all of our heads touch. Then I close my eyes and breathe.
I let my lungs fill. This time not just with my own breath, but with the breath of all three of us. We breathe into each other. I take from them, I give back, and I feel myself growing in my body to thrice my usual size.
When I open my eyes and sit back, they are looking at me. They don’t say anything. I squint at them with a tight-lipped grin on my lips and then give a tiny nod.
And at that, we scurry out from underneath our nominal cover, like the proverbial rats fleeing the proverbial ship, and we clear our harmonic canopy just as a ribbon of small-arms fire lacerates the legs, and the strings and keys comes hammering to the floor in a kind of screeching death knell.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - CHRISTINE
“Glass house. Fuckin’ ridiculous.” I’m whispering that under my breath like a mantra as Alec, Danny, and I make a break for an interior concrete wall. Bullets chase us. The spray shatters the concrete floor in the exact place the soles of my feet were less than a moment before.
This is a serious fucking ambush.
But I don’t have time to think about that. I don’t have time to think about anything. Not even the hopeless nature of this stupid plan that isn’t a plan. Because a fresh round of automatic fire comes bursting through the window, making Alec duck back.
He looks at Danny. Small hand movements. Eye gestures. Danny moves his head in a way that tells me he’s disagreeing with Alec’s proposal. But then a shoulder shrug.
Whatever. We’re dead anyway, that’s what that shoulder shrug says.
We’re not really in stealth mode. I mean, shit. There is only one reason for that platoon of fucking people to be outside the house shooting at us.
They know we’re here.
But the silent shorthand language of gestures feels right for some reason.
Danny lifts up his hand, flicks his fingers at me, and the second the fire lets up, we break for the interior stairwell that will take us down to the art gallery—I mean, death trap. Because that’s what it is.
But those are details that can be worked out later. And by later I mean ten seconds from now. Because the only thing that matters in this moment is that we make it to the concrete tube of a stairwell that will act as a shield.
I run. Oblivious to the thousands of pieces of shattered glass under the bare soles of my feet. And when we duck into the stairwell and realize none of us were hit, we lean back and smile.
It’s sick, the way we smile when we’re in the middle of shit.
But it’s familiar too. And comforting.
“OK,” Alec says in the
eerie silence. “We’re good for a bit. The hallways and stairs are concrete. So now we’ve just got to go through the gallery and the glass hallway.”
“Is that all?” Danny growls.
“Why did they stop shooting?” I ask, trying to peer ahead. It’s pointless though. There’s nothing but stairs leading down into the hallway that will take us directly into the art gallery. “Do you think they’re inside?”
All three of us simultaneously look back where we came from.
“No,” Alec says. “That room is too high up off the ground. Unless one of them is a parkour prodigy or they brought grappling equipment, they’re not gonna get in that way.”
Now we all look at each other. Because there was a team of people we knew once. A team of people who were the kind of enemy who could get into a tree house like this without the aid of equipment.
“It’s not them,” Alec says.
“No, can’t be them,” Danny agrees. “When we last saw them we were even.”
Shit.
“Focus,” Alec says. “We got this.”
Sure we do. But we focus. Because that’s the only choice we have.
A second later we’re at the bottom of the stairs, easing our way along to where it makes that sharp ninety-degree turn back into the gallery.
The shooting has stopped and that worries me more than if the attack was still happening.
“Why did they stop?” I hiss a second time, ducking under Danny’s arm. A barricade to keep me behind him. Alec has stopped at the corner, badly wanting to peek around to see what’s waiting for us. But I get there first, crouch down on my knees, and cautiously peer around the edge of the wall.
I duck back immediately. “Shit.”
“What?” Danny asks.
“Laser sights. Like a dozen of them, darting back and forth across the gallery.”
“They’re looking for us,” Alec says. “Which means they’re not familiar with the house.”
“Neither are we.” Danny huffs.
I pop my head out again. The lasers are fewer now, like some of them have moved on. They’re either wearing radio headsets or employing a secret hand-gesture language like we do. Because outside, it’s silent.
Doesn’t matter. Either way, a team like this has professional written all over it. The exact opposite of those dumb fucks who came in like blundering bulls at Danny’s garage this morning.
I watch, Danny and Alec waiting patiently for me to give a sit rep.
A few seconds later I whisper, “No more lasers. Must’ve moved on. Let’s go.”
I make to go first, but Alec tugs on my shirt and pushes me behind him. Danny does the same, and I end up last again.
Fucking men and their fucking hero complexes.
CHAPTER FORTY - DANNY
“Stay behind me,” I whisper to Christine. I know she’s capable of taking care of herself. Hell, she’s saved my ass many times in fights like this. But there’s no way I’m gonna let her go first into the death trap that’s waiting ahead.
She can bitch at me about it later. I can’t wait for her to do that. Because it’ll mean we made it out alive and she’s still around to throw one of her I’m-just-as-tough-as-you-two-assholes tantrums.
Alec flashes us a hand signal. Crawl, that gesture says.
Maybe they have moved on. Maybe no one is waiting for us to make the walk of death down that long, narrow hallway lined with glass on one side.
Then again, maybe not.
So we crawl. And every inch we move forward I wait for it. I wait for the bullets to rip through my body. Or worse, Christine’s.
But it doesn’t happen. And if I didn’t just live through a hailstorm of automatic gunfire, if there wasn’t a whole room behind us ripped to shreds from bullets, and a piano reduced to shards of wood, I’d think there was nothing happening here at all. It’s that quiet.
We make it to the next stairwell, get back on our feet, and wait. All crammed into a six-by-six-foot landing space that leads down into the glass hallway.
“OK,” Alec whispers. “Decision time.”
I want to laugh at that. Because Alec’s not typically in a democratic mood when it comes to war zones.
But he knows we could all die here. We could be dead in seconds if we walk into that hallway and they’re waiting for us.
But if we don’t walk into that hallway and get to those guns, we’re dead anyway. So what the fuck.
“Let’s do it,” I say.
“Go,” Christine says. “Just run.”
Just run.
Her words echo through my head as Alec steps out into the hallway like he’s invincible. He’s running, so not quite Mr. Invincible. But it’s one of those fuck-it moments.
We die. We don’t die. We can’t really control that right now.
But if we get to the other side. If we get to the guns…
Yeah. It goes like that through my head as I take off after him. I want to look over my shoulder, make sure Christine is behind me, but that’s when a stream of bullets slaps against the glass.
Thoop. Thoop, thoop, thoop.
Unlike last time, it’s not a barrage. Just one guy, probably. Just one guy left behind.
And the reinforced glass holds. For like two whole seconds I think, Fuckin’ hell. We’re gonna make it. We’re really gonna make it.
I’m about halfway across when that thought hangs there in my head.
And that’s when the barrage comes.
That’s when they open up. Not one guy, but the whole fuckin’ team.
I just run. I run the fuck out of that hallway. And when I crash into Alec on the other side and see his face, I know.
Christine didn’t make it.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - ALEC
Christine is ducking her head forward and then pulling it back. Ducking forward and pulling back. Like one of those plastic birds they sell to tourists at the ocean. The kind that are weighted to dip their heads into a glass of water and then spring back, making it appear that a fokken plastic bird is drinking from your tumbler.
The glass walls have lost their battle against the gunfire and sit defeated and shattered on the floor of the hallway. It is not, however, the decking of tiny glass daggers that is keeping Christine from running down to join us. It is the unrelenting wave of hot metal pouring in that is keeping her pinned down.
The fire will abate for a moment, but then it commences again the moment Christine ducks around to see if she can make it. The laser sights, which betray their owners’ positions and indicate that the shooters can’t see what they think they can as well as they’d like, disappear and reappear every time Christine disappears and reemerges. The fact that I don’t respect their flippin’ lasers doesn’t make the after-effects of using them any less deadly.
And in the blink of a gnat’s eye, Danny steps out into the hallway, ready to dart back in the direction from which we just ran. I grab him and pull him back.
“Fok are you going, man?” I shout to him, sotto voce for some reason. It’s loud, we’ve already been found, and quieting my voice now won’t give any cover or prevent us from being shot to ribbons, but I do it anyway. Habit.
“Christine!” he screams to her, not nearly so self-conscious.
“We can’t get to her, man. We have to go forward,” I tell him, with quite a bit more disappointment and regret than I’d like to be feeling.
“Fuck you,” he says, pushing me off.
For so, so many years Danny was Christine’s protector. Her lodestar. But Christine is graduated well past the point of needing him in that way. She’s well past the point of needing anyone in that way. And it’s that almost superheroic self-sufficiency she possesses that I’m counting on to save her now.
“She’ll figure it out, bru. You can’t help her none if you’re dead on the fokken ground. We need guns, man.”
He looks at me, a tortured anger in his eyes. I feel his frustration. But he knows I’m right. It’s a miserable feeling to be relegated to t
he last option rather than the best option, but that’s where we find ourselves.
“Stay down!” he shouts to her. “Don’t try to run this way until we’ve neutralized some shit!”
Danny has never served in the military. I don’t know where he inherited all of his military speak. Movies and television, probably.
Americans, man.
“Yeah,” Christine calls back, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Thanks,” she adds.
Dear Christine. Same as she ever was.
She’s going to be fine.
I hope. I deeply and desperately do. We’ll find out soon enough.
“Let’s go,” I say, dragging Danny with me in the opposite direction as we watch Christine disappear from our view.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO - CHRISTINE
I’m not a complainer. I’m really not. I’m a total go-with-the-flow kinda girl. You have to be in my business. So when the hellfire cuts me off from the guys, I deal. I do. In fact, I think Danny takes this the hardest.
I do not wince, either. I’m not a wincer. But as I run through the shattered glass house, back the way we came, back through all that chaos that we just crept our way out of—I feel like I deserve some complaining and wincing time.
Because my feet are bare. And I’m running through glass shards. And my partners in crime are together and I’m not with them. And there’s this small army after me, and I’m stuck in this weird maze house, and I have no gun.
So thirty seconds to… you know, process this bullshit would be nice.
What the fuck is happening?
I’m past the gallery. I kinda just ran straight through it without stopping because I figure, fuck it, right? They’re either there or they’re not and I certainly can’t stay in that tiny hallway just hoping for a rescue.
So now I’m at the top of the stairs, peeking out in the great room where the piano is—was. I mean, it’s still there but like, three legs have been blown off with automatic weapon fire and that hundred-thousand-dollar Steinway might as well be firewood at this point.