by Lou Cadle
He wriggled backward until the weight of his body dragged him down from the window. A three-shot burst was followed by the sound of breaking glass, and a shower of glass rained down on him. He ducked his head and closed his eyes.
The last of the glass tumbled onto him. He shook his head without opening his eyes. Glass tinkled as it fell off him and onto the floor. He put his hand down to push himself back from the window and the pile of glass, and a piece of broken glass sliced painfully into the heel of his hand.
Stupid. He managed to push himself along with only his feet, skating along on the seat of his pants, and made it another few feet away from the window. Gingerly, he put his uninjured hand down. A few little pieces of glass were on the floor. With the edge of his hand, he brushed them away, and he managed not to drive any glass into that hand when he put it down.
He pushed himself up to his knees and stood. More glass fell from his hair. His hand with the glass in it hurt. He really wished for light now. He moved down the hall to the first doorway, leaned his rifle against the doorjamb, and tested his hurt hand with his unhurt one. There was a piece of glass still in there about three inches long, thin. His mother would probably yell at him for doing this, but he got a grip on it with his other fingers and yanked it out. Ow. Son of a gun, that hurt. He held the hand up and could feel blood dripping down his wrist. Gotta be something in my pack to deal with that, right? He touched his rifle, reassuring himself it hadn’t moved, and then shrugged off his pack and rooted blindly in it. Ha. There. Duct tape. That’d do. Might regret it in a few hours when he ripped it off, but it would stop the bleeding, which he couldn’t see but could feel and smell, a metallic scent that hit him in some nervous animal part of his brain.
He started the duct tape with his teeth, held the end between two fingers of his uninjured hand—his non-dominant hand, unfortunately—and wiped his blood on his jeans. Then quick as he could, working in the dark, he slapped the tape onto his injured hand. But it slipped. Too bloody. Okay, we need a plan B. He wiped his bloody hand again, both sides, took hold of the slippery tape end and gripped it between two of his fingers on the injured hand. Then he was able to unwrap more tape, and he slung it over his hand, and over again, and over a third time. It was something of a snarl at first, but he finally had it sticking in places. Once that was done, he was able to slow down and be more careful with a couple winds of tape. The second wind, it stuck to itself solidly, so he made the next wind tighter, and a final wind tighter still.
He checked the bandage to make sure it wasn’t going to shift, and then bit the tape at the roll and tore it in two. The roll went back in his pack. He used the bandaged hand to finger-comb his hair to get the rest of the glass off him. Pack back on, rifle over his shoulder, and he was ready to move.
For the whole time he’d been bandaging himself, he hadn’t heard the men outside below him, neither their voices nor their weapons. But that might mean they were still trying to flank his mom’s group. So he went to the room with the front windows, and tried to open one of them. He couldn’t find the lock. Time was of the essence, so he took his rifle, his cut hand hurting badly as he touched it to the hot barrel, and he slammed the butt against the window, once, twice. It broke out.
Gunfire came from his people. He sat on the floor and yelled, “It’s Dev, it’s Dev. Don’t shoot!”
The bullets stopped. But he wasn’t taking the chance of sticking his head up there. He yelled from where he was, “Watch it! They’re flanking you to your right!”
Then he heard bullets firing below him, up into their ceiling. Good time to leave. He ran for the hallway and kept running, not stopping until he hit the interior stairway again. He went slowly down the stairs, feeling a wave of tiredness. Normal after a surge of adrenaline. His head was pounding again, not the low-level headache he’d had most of the day since he’d woken, but a rush of sharp pain. He touched his left temple, but he really wanted to sit down and massage his head. No. Don’t leave Sierra alone for any longer.
Right, right. Had to get down the steps. He found an emergency release bar on the door and pushed it, taking a step and only then realizing he should have looked first.
But no one shot at him. Sierra turned, brought her rifle around, took one look at him and screamed his name.
“What?” he said.
“Oh my God!” she said. “Are you hit?”
“No,” he said, confused. And then he looked down at himself and saw the blood. He was really smeared with it. His bandage was an inept-looking thing, and it had merely slowed the flow of blood, not stopped it. He had a smart thought, a bit of a miracle considering his pounding head, and stuck the injured hand over his head. “I think I need first aid.”
Sierra looked forward to the office where the men were holed up, then back at Dev. She shook her head, pushed off the wall and fired one last time into the broken door, and then ran for Dev.
Or not. She ran right past him, to the back door, and pushed the metal handle down. The door slid open. “Can you walk?”
Dev nodded, then regretted that he had. It made his head hurt worse. The pain was coming on him like a freight train.
“Let’s go.” When he made it to the door, she plucked at his shirt and dragged him out. The door shut behind them.
“They can follow us. We should try and block it,” he said.
“Don’t worry about that. I need to get you safe. C’mon.” She kept dragging him by his shirt front.
“I can walk,” he said, reaching up for her wrist and pulling at it. It was still raining hard, and both their hands were already wet.
“Can you make it to the truck?”
“Yes.” He was getting irritated with her. “But whatever you do to fix me, do it quick, so we can get back to fighting.”
“Dev,” she said. “I think you’re out of the fight.”
“I’ll be okay,” he said, following her to the truck, which he knew was close but seemed strangely far away. When he got there, he leaned against the truck. Only then did he remember the men at the side of the building. He raised his rifle scope to hunt for them.
“No, no,” she said, coming over to yank at his shirt again. “Down here, behind it.”
They made it to the far side of the truck. She reached up and grabbed the door handle.
“What are you doing?”
“Hoping for an interior light,” she said, and she opened the truck door. Her wish was granted. Interior light spilled out.
“They’ll see us.”
“They aren’t back here. I looked.” She was examining his duct tape bandage and shaking her head.
“Guys came around the driveway, maybe out a window or something, trying to flank my mom and them. Watch out for them coming back this way.”
“There are?” She looked up. “I’m borrowing your rifle. For the scope.”
“It isn’t zeroed for you.”
“Just to look,” she said. “Not to shoot.”
While she crawled over to check their—what would that be? Ten or so on the clock for her—he looked at his hand. Yeah, that was a really crummy job of bandaging. It’d hurt too much to pull it off, so he’d have to cut it. He had a pocket knife somewhere.
And damn, but his head was killing him. It was making it hard to think. Too much noise, that’s what it was. But no, it was silent now. So why was his headache getting worse with every moment?
Left-handed, he searched through pockets for his knife. There were a lot of pockets. He found a magazine, a box of ammo, and finally the knife. Which was impossible to open one-handed. He was working at pulling out a blade with his teeth when Sierra sat back down. “No sign of them.”
“Still a firefight?”
“Pretty sporadic shooting,” she said. “I hope they’re low on ammo and not saving it all for when we run out.”
“Mom will know what to do.” He probably did too, but it was hard to think right now. His head hurt so much.
“Dev?” she said. “What is it?
”
“Head hurts,” he admitted.
“Were you shot in the head?” Her fingers went to his head and she began patting it. “Ow, dang, what’s that?”
“Glass,” he said. “Be careful. I wasn’t shot in the head. I was shot in the window.”
“You aren’t making sense,” she said. “I think you were shot in the head.”
“No, it’s my headache. Got worse again.”
“You should have stayed home.”
“I wouldn’t’ve.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t.” She finished checking his head. “I don’t feel blood up there. So where did they get you?”
“They didn’t get me. I got myself. In the hand, with glass.” He held it up and held up the knife. “You’re going to have to cut it off. I can’t even get the knife open.”
“You want me to cut off your hand?” She sounded horrified.
“No. The duct tape I put on it.”
“Let me check the building again.” She picked up his rifle once more and scanned. “Still no one. Okay, let me play medic here, though I don’t know what I’m doing. Front of the hand or the back is hurt?”
“The heel of my hand, like the base of the thumb. Cut this mess off. Then tape me up better.”
“I don’t have any first aid gear. Hang on.” She got out of her pack and upended it. She pawed through her gear and came up with a smashed flat roll of toilet paper and a bandana and a bottle of water.
When he saw it, he craved it. “I’m thirsty.”
“In a minute. I need it to rinse your hand off first.” She flipped out knife blades until she found one she liked and began to saw through the tape. She unpeeled it from the back of his hand and then delicately eased it up from the palm. Blood poured out.
“Holy shit, Dev.”
“I guess it’s pretty deep.”
She dabbed at it with the bandana, but the blood kept coming. “What do we do?”
“Pressure,” he said. “Fold that cloth and hold it down on the cut. Then I’ll hold it over my head.”
She folded the bandana and pressed it down on the wound.
Dev yanked his hand back from the pain. It was totally involuntary.
“Maybe you should do it. It might be easier to suffer the pain if you have control of it.”
He nodded and took over, holding both arms over his head and gripping his wound.
She looked at him, worried. “I think you’ll need stitches.”
“My mom can do that.”
“But not right now.”
“Not going to bleed to death. But my head might fall off. It’s pounding.”
“And all this blood is from this one cut? At least the rain is washing it off your face.” She used a finger and scrubbed above his eyebrow. “Yeah, that’s just old blood, not a cut. You look like you’d been dumpster diving outside a butcher shop when you came down those stairs. Glad your mom didn’t see you like that.”
“We should go help her.”
“Dev,” she said sternly. “You’re out of it for now. I want you to stay here. You hear me?”
He nodded, then winced at the sharp pain that brought.
“I’ll go help. And here.” She reached down and pulled her shirt off over her head. She was in a bra thing, a mysterious girl’s undergarment he didn’t know the name for. “I’ll wrap my shirt around your hand too.”
“Put it back on,” he said. “I don’t want them to—I mean, if we don’t win.”
“We’ll win. And if we didn’t, and I live, they would probably try to rape me if I had twenty layers of clothes on.”
“Put it back on, please. It won’t help me. It might help you. It’s camouflage. And let Mom know it’s you coming.”
“All right, all right.” She tugged the shirt back down over her torso. “I’m closing the door so there’s no light. And leaving you your rifle. You stay still. If you start feeling cold, crawl in the truck and lock the doors.”
Dev watched her go, feeling such a wave of guilt that he almost was able to get up and follow her. But there was no reason to. He couldn’t shoot right. Hell, with one hand holding the other, he could even pick up his rifle. What a stupid thing to do, to cut his hand like that.
He closed his eyes against the pain in his head, but it didn’t help.
Chapter 13
Sierra pushed her worry about Dev to the back of her mind. He surely wouldn’t bleed to death in the next half hour, and she wouldn’t leave him alone for longer than that.
In fact, if she had her way, the men in that building would all be dead by then.
She ran to the back corner of the building and pressed herself against the wall, thinking about what she should do. If men had been in the driveway, and there was a broken window, maybe she could also go in that way. A clap of thunder and a lightning flash came together. She left her night vision goggles dangling on her chest. The storm was right on top of them. Why wasn’t it moving away from them? Monsoon storms usually moved quickly.
But then she realized that probably only ten minutes had passed since they left the jail. Battles took real time and twisted it around in the human mind, stretching it out, or making it slide by impossibly fast.
She looked around the corner and saw no one. Stepping out, she scanned the wall. Most of the windows on the ground floor were thin slits that didn’t look like they opened. There was part of a metal fire escape that ended over the only double-hung window. Was that a possible entry point? She saw no one at that window, and walked over to the fire escape, giving the “friend” whistle in case Kelly was within hearing range. The hairs on her neck rose in response to the thought of taking an accidental bullet from her own side.
The end of the fire escape was pretty high, but she was tall. She bent her legs and leapt. Her fingertips touched metal, but she wasn’t nearly close enough to grab on, and she hit the ground again. She stared up, her night vision goggles pushed up to her forehead, and waited for the next lightning strike to illuminate the scene. When it did, she saw the flat section that was made to descend from just below the second floor to the ground level. It couldn’t be that hard to move, could it? They’d want a design that made it easy for panicked people fleeing a fire to push it down.
She flipped the rifle’s safety on, slung the strap over her head and one shoulder, and leapt again, aiming for the very end of the retracted section. This time her hands found the end, and immediately the section started to descend. Noisily. She let go, dropped to the ground, and it retracted.
Because of the noise she had made by moving the fire escape, she hit the ground, curling right up against the building wall. She waited, but no one came out to investigate. Maybe they hadn’t heard.
Okay, good to know about the fire escape. But it didn’t get her closer to the men in the meeting room. The window under the stairs was shut. No light shone through it. She slid the night vision goggles back over her eyes, pulled her rifle off her shoulder and snapped the safety off, so she’d be ready to shoot if someone surprised her. Then she stood on tiptoes and put her face right up against the glass to look inside.
Light spilled from the lit meeting room and under a closed door. But no one was in the hallway. The narrow hall ran behind that room but didn’t seem to intersect the main central hallway that stretched from front door to back. She couldn’t have accessed it from where she had been shooting at them before.
So they might not expect anyone to come from this direction.
The window was closed. Locked? Probably. There wasn’t anything like a handle outside, of course, but by reversing her rifle and reaching up, she could catch the lip of the window with the rifle butt. If it wasn’t unlocked, it would move up under pressure.
When a hand touched her shoulder, she almost screamed.
“Sorry,” a man’s voice whispered. “Kelly said it was you over here.”
Jackson. Sierra’s heart had leapt well above a hundred beats per minute when the hand had touched her, and she found he
rself gasping for air.
“Sorry,” Jackson said again. “What are you doing?”
“Seeing if I can get in this way, come up behind them. Give me a boost, would you?”
“Be careful.”
“Boost me up,” she said. “Make a step.”
He leaned his rifle against the wall and made a step for her with his hands. She held her leg cocked up and felt it when he put pressure on her boot. “Now,” he said, and he lifted her up.
Sierra pushed at the window and was surprised when it slid up under her hands. She dropped one arm and put her hand down on the window sill, pushing the window all the way up with her back. She wriggled through, having to fight her rifle, thinking she should have put on the safety again before she did this. She got herself balanced on the sill and shifted until she could get her hand on the rifle and pushed it in ahead of her. It hit with a crack that told her the floor wasn’t carpeted. Then she shoved herself the last bit and dropped through, hands first, to the hall floor.
She moved as silently as she could in getting back to her feet. The sound of rain pelting down outside seemed terribly loud to her from in here. A few rounds were fired from the meeting room, now to her right as she leaned out the window and held her arms out for Jackson. What she felt instead of his hands was his rifle. She took it, leaned it against the wall by the window, and reached down for him.
He gripped her forearms and she did the same to him. Then she planted a foot on the wall under the window and heaved. The first moment was the hardest, but then his weight was moving, and she had him halfway through the window before she knew it.
“I’m good,” he whispered.
She let go, found his rifle, and waited for him to get to his feet before returning it to him.
“New magazine,” he whispered. She waited while he changed his out. When she started to close the window, he said, “Don’t.”
While he got ready to fire his weapon, she put the goggles on again and scanned the hallway. There was a door on her right, and she tiptoed up to it, put her hand on the knob, and twisted it open, glancing in fast and yanking her head back. A bathroom. No one in there. Did it lock? It would be another option for retreat if it locked. But she felt around and found no locking mechanism inside the door. So whatever they did next, if it didn’t finish this, their retreat would have to be out the window.