by Logan Jacobs
Every step the guard took was lower and slower, the blue glow from Aurora’s mouth getting brighter and brighter. By the time she had guided him to one of the side passages that led to the elevator banks, she was practically carrying him.
Aurora dropped the guard onto the floor, then bent over and began to unbutton his shirt.
I motioned for everyone to close ranks around her. “This looks suspicious enough, guys,” I muttered.
“Don’t worry, this’ll only take a second,” Aurora assured me. “I’m kind of a pro at opening other people’s shirts.”
True to her word, she held up the shirt at the end of her sentence.
PoLarr, Tempest, and Nova golf-clapped politely. Even Olivia joined in.
“Who would wear it better?” Aurora asked. “The old priest or the young priest?”
“You’re calling me a priest?” I smirked. “I thought you knew me a little better than that, Aurora.”
Aurora shrugged and started to unbuckle the guard’s holster belt. “Well, the only thing I can remember about the priests on your planet is that they have a really elaborate system to exorcise demons from people’s bodies.” She tossed the shirt to Thomas. “You get to play security guard today, but you’re going to have to explain why Marc thinks that it’s so funny that I called him a priest once we’re out of here.”
Thomas slipped the shirt over his own and began to button it. “It fits fine,” he said. “I won’t even comment on the priest thing.”
“I suspect that priests on Earth don’t know how to handle their guns as well as Marc can,” Nova said with a perfectly innocent look on her face.
Aurora handed Thomas the holster belt. “Lobby, men’s accessories, everybody out,” she said to him.
The belt came equipped with one of the fake-looking walkie-rayguns, a small pistol, a gigantic flashlight that looked like it could double as a seriously powerful baton in a pinch, and a can of something I assumed was pepper spray because it had MACE printed in huge red letters along the side.
Thomas buckled the belt around his waist and held his walkie-raygun in front of him. “All right, folks,” he said with an extra note of gruffness into his voice. “Follow me.” He tilted his chin up and squared his shoulders, looking for all the world like a harried security guard who absolutely had better things to do than dealing with one more goddamn problem.
I could nearly feel the weight of the world on his shoulders and bearing down behind it was a nasty temper for anyone who piled one more ounce on those shoulders. My dad could look intimidating just by changing the way he set his face and shoulders. It was a good skill to have, and one I was sort of glad I hadn’t had aimed at me growing up.
Thomas led us into the stairwell. “Coming through, folks,” he barked. “Please stay to your right, we need to keep the stairway clear. Single file, for God’s sake.”
I checked the staircase above for any security guards as we moved up the staircase. It was hard to see clearly more than a flight or two up, but I didn’t see any of those beige uniforms besides the one Thomas had put on. The Skalle Furia voices on the radio had been talking about sending guards down the back stairs to check on the garage, but it was likely that they just hadn’t gotten there yet.
If their First Aid kits were down to nothing but bandages, maybe they weren’t as prepared and resource-rich as I’d gotten the idea they were. Heck, Tempest had taken out the largest part of their firepower down in the parking garage. I hadn’t yet been able to figure out how many enemy combatants were in the building and I didn’t know exactly what proportion of their forces were gone, but it was pretty goddamn encouraging.
We’d made it past the 3rd floor landing when I heard a fluting whine in my ear like an octogenarian mosquito.
“Excuse me, excuse me, sir.” The whine came from a hunched-over old woman who reached out with a withered hand draped in diamond bracelets. She wore something that looked like a black sequined potato sack under a color-block ski jacket, topped off with a brassy wig cut into a 60s bob, or maybe a 20s bob, or from whatever long-ago decade when she’d last been in style.
The crone poked at Thomas’s shoulder. He stiffened visibly. “We need to get through here, ma’am,” he said as he continued up the stairs. I followed him up the stairs, one metal stair after the other. My hand dipped into my shirt for that special walkie-talkie.
“But are we meant to be going upstairs?” the old lady asked. She sounded like a dowager in a romantic comedy from the 30s, the kind of secondary character who’s always concerned about her niece’s virtue. “Only they told us we were to go downstairs if there was to be a fire. Has that changed, sir?”
“The building’s not actually on fire,” Thomas said. “So you don’t need to worry about it.”
“But ought we to follow you upstairs, sir?” the lady pressed. “Is it safer on the roof?”
“Do not go to the roof,” Thomas growled. “If you have any more questions, go ask one of the guards in the lobby. They’re the ones on evac duty.”
“Yeah, don’t follow this guy unless you’re part of the resident tech team,” Olivia said loudly. “We’re just heading up to check on the alarm system.”
“Yeah,” Tempest chimed in, “the thing’s been going haywire. It’s probably a false alarm.”
“But we heard sounds,” the old lady pressed.
“Yeah?” I snapped. “What kind of sounds? Listen, lady, this is L.A., there’s a hell of a lot of fuckin’ crap going on all the time out there.” I hoped that if I swore enough, she’d get all flustered and storm off somewhere in a huff to complain to someone who wouldn’t care. We were just coming up on the landing for Level 5, and we were making good time despite the crush of scared people in the stairwell.
“But you must have heard the Earth-shattering kaboom,” the lady insisted. She dug in her purse. It looked like two or three other really ugly purses had had a fight and the surgeon had just decided to stitch them all together. “There was no way anyone could miss the Earth-shattering kaboom!” As her voice went up on the word “kaboom,” a ray of familiar sodium orange light shot out from the depths of her purse and sizzled past my earlobe.
I smelled the stench of burning hair and realized that the ray had actually singed my coif. Hopefully it just added to the devil-may-care tousle my hair had been arranging itself into these days. I yanked the walkie-raygun from where I’d had it sitting inside my shirt, lined the antenna up with the old lady’s eyes, and squeezed the top button.
The old lady went cross-eyed and then toppled over. People gasped and moved aside to get out of the way of her body and the contents of her purse. Lipsticks, butterscotch candies, and orange pill bottles bounded merrily down the steps and came to rest on the slumped heap of her body.
A walkie-talkie spilled out of the bag on its way down. I saw Olivia reach down and scoop it up. She stuck it hastily into her cleavage, where it disappeared from view entirely.
Killing an old lady hadn’t been on my list of things I’d wanted to accomplish today, even if it had been in self-defense and even if she was probably an alien under that doddering disguise. The rest of the people in the stairwell didn’t seem happy about it either. Terrified screams filled the air, and the stairs got even harder to move through as the Brownian motion of panic spread through the stairwell.
I threw elbows left and right, but there was only so far I could push people out of my way before they were going to end up falling down the stairs and make it even harder going for my comrades behind me.
Thomas barrelled ahead as well as he could. He shed people left and right, but it quickly seemed like gaining even a few more inches on the staircase was going to be nearly impossible for any of us.
Elbows and shoulders pressed against me while bony limbs and appendages jabbed into my ribs and hips. I shoved the walkie-raygun into my front pocket and pressed forward.
A tanned man wearing board shorts and a tuxedo top shoved himself between Thomas and me. His long, flowi
ng blonde hair made him look like Fabio as a superspy surfer, and I tried to shoulder my body around him, but his fraternal twin stood in my way. He had the same jawline with a shorter haircut, and he had the bottom half of the tuxedo pants plus a surprisingly tasteful Hawaiian shirt.
Fabio shoved me sideways towards the center of the stairwell. Hawaiian Shirt tucked his elbow into his side and pulled his arm back. His fingers curled loosely as he prepared to punch me.
I saw it all happen in what seemed like slow motion, and I saw the trajectory of his fist as he prepared to punch me in the stomach. My arm shot out, and I wrapped my hand around Hawaiian Shirt’s wrist. I heard him grunt as his punch changed direction. Instead of knocking me over the center of the stairwell like they’d undoubtedly planned, his arm was now the lever I used to steady myself. Then I heard the telltale crack of bone. It wasn’t mine. I grinned to myself.
I hooked my foot under the bottom bar of the stairwell rail to anchor myself and pushed my body backward into the superspy surfing brothers with my elbows out. The crunching feeling under my left elbow, and the shriek that followed told me that I’d connected with something vital on Hawaiian Shirt, so I hoped he was out of commission for the moment.
I turned to take care of Fabio and watched as his corpse plummeted past me.
Thomas glanced down after Fabio and dusted his hands off.
Bullets bounced off the concrete wall right in front of us, so I didn’t have time to thank my dad for dispatching the other half of the superspy surfer duo for me. Thomas and I both ducked at the same time, accompanied by another chorus of screams.
I turned and started to fight my way back downstairs. The girls were back down there, and no matter whose bullets were flying through the air, I couldn’t leave them alone.
The walkie-raygun vibrated in my hand. “I’m hearing reports that there’s been a bit of a disturbance in the stairwell,” the British voice said. “Shots fired and so forth. Would you care to send out anyone to actually investigate?”
“I’ll tell one of the guys to stick their head in,” the Midwestern voice answered.
I managed to hip-check my way down another stair and pushed through the crush of bodies.
From behind me, I heard several loud bangs that could only be the discharge of firearms. Holes appeared several at a time in the wall at the bottom of the stairs, both the chips and cracks of bullet holes through concrete and the scorched pits I knew came from the walkie-rayguns. There were too many holes that appeared too quickly for it to be Thomas on his own, so there were either more security guards coming down the stairs or more disguised Skalle Furia than we’d thought. The crush of people made it almost impossible to see who was shooting as long as they held their weapon low enough.
A black-clad body fell through the center of the stairwell. It was a little too fast for me to see whether it wore day black, evening black, or mercenary black. I glanced up behind me and saw Thomas on the landing next to the sign that declared it to be the fourth floor.
Thomas aimed up the stairs with his walkie-raygun and traded bolts of sodium orange with the attackers above. In his left hand was the tactical-strength flashlight, and he wielded it expertly to keep the crush of people at bay. He turned his head and caught my eye, then pointed at the door with the flashlight.
I nodded and pointed downstairs to indicate the rest of our team, then made a cupping motion, indicating that I’d get them up to Thomas.
He nodded and raised the thumb that was on the tactical flashlight, then went back to his battle with the horde.
I slid the walkie-talkie out of my pocket and put my thumb on the top button.
A warm hand landed on my shoulder. I nearly threw another elbow until I turned my head and saw who’d touched me.
Olivia’s hazel orbs and sexy specs peered over Nova’s shoulder. Nova had angled her body, so that she was standing between Olivia and the path of any bullets that came from upstairs. That made sense, because Nova was arguably the best human shield in our crew, and Olivia was currently one of the two most vulnerable, but it meant that Nova was also at the perfect angle to keep Olivia from being able to advance up the stairs.
“We need to get everyone up to the next landing,” I said into her ear. “See who you can snag.”
Nova nodded and pushed Olivia into my arms. My blue-skinned lady friend clung to me with one arm and kept her walkie-talkie ready with the other.
I looked up the stairs to where Thomas still battled two fronts. “I’ll get you up there,” I told Olivia. “Hold that landing until everyone’s standing there.” I slid the walkie-talkie out of my pocket, put my thumb on the top button, aimed it at the flight of stairs above us, and willed the Ar’Gwyn in the back of my brain to take over.
“Someone took a gun out of their bag,” Olivia told me as we elbowed our way up the stairs together. “I shot first.”
“Just like Han and Greedo,” I enthused.
“I am going to need so much counseling after this,” Olivia said. She raised her walkie-talkie and squeezed off two shots.
One body plummeted through the center of the stairwell and bounced off the railing. I didn’t see the other body drop, but I did see the people stumble and fall as the unseen corpse made its way down the staircase toward my father. It rolled across the landing and stopped at the tip of his shoe.
“Aww, you’re not having fun storming Nakatomi Plaza?” I asked.
“Honestly?” Olivia fired off an orange bolt and jabbed her elbow back into a luckless body at the same time in one smooth, coordinated motion. It was incredibly sexy how casually she did it. “A lot of this is pretty damn exciting. I do like being out in the field,” she said. “I don’t like killing civilians.”
“Nobody does,” Thomas said as we reached the top of the staircase. He reached out to Olivia with his flashlight. She took hold of it and levered herself up onto the landing. “It’s rough when you know anyone could be an enemy combatant, but not everybody is. Keep your weapons in hand.”
The crowd on the stairs above us opened a little as more people pushed each other out of the way and fell onto the ground. A body flopped out of the gap in the crowd. The head landed on my boot, and I kicked it away. More bodies toppled forward and lay where they fell.
Olivia and Thomas glanced at each other, then up the stairs. Thomas nodded at her in confirmation of a silent question. “They’re shooting civs,” he said grimly. “They still don’t know who we are.”
“And we still don’t know who they are,” Olivia said.
I turned back around to start down the stairwell. There were significantly fewer people behind me than had been there before, but significantly more corpses.
A few steps down from me, Nova yanked a silvery pistol from a woman’s hand, then picked her up by her frilly blouse and tossed her over the edge of the staircase like a sack of potatoes.
Aurora held a bald man in her arms and sucked on his life essence like a kid with a freshly straw-stabbed Capri Sun on the hottest day of summer. She dropped him to the ground and licked her lips, then stepped on his corpse. Her violet eyes glowed faintly even through her human disguise.
PoLarr and Tempest were still on the landing below us, but it was clear to me that they’d been staying there for a reason. PoLarr’s Ar’Gwyn moves helped her avoid the bullets that came from the flight of stairs above as she took her shots. Her guns were aimed toward us, but I knew she was deft enough to avoid her own team as she picked off enemy combatants in the stairwell.
People cowered on the stairs, hands over their heads. Some of them had dragged dead bodies over themselves to use as shields. As I watched, a skinny brunette in dark glasses and an Anna Wintour bob reached into her clutch. I saw a glint of silvery black in her hand before she slumped forward and toppled down the stairs. The people around her screamed in terror, but I knew that PoLarr would only shoot if she saw a weapon.
Tempest had built herself a bunker of bodies that she hunkered behind as she aimed down the
stairs. She held off the advancing horde with gun and walkie-talkie. The Skalle combatants on the lower steps must have figured out the situation and started to reverse direction, because she was keeping pretty busy.
I waved to my ladies in a “come join me when you’re ready” motion, then turned back to the stairwell above to join Olivia and Thomas in their shooting gallery. I thumbed the top button on my walkie-talkie with my right hand, drew my pistol with my left, and let the Ar’Gwyn tell me what to do.
I kept watch on the flight of stairs below out of the corner of my eye. It wasn’t hard to sneak quick peeks on my comrades’ progress as I helped Thomas and Olivia deal with the stairs above.
Aurora drained her last snack dry, then dropped the body. She bounced over the corpses that littered the staircase as she sprinted upward. Nova had gone down the stairs to shield Tempest, who crouched behind her gorgeous legs and laid down suppressive fire on the enemy combatants below. PoLarr brought up the rear of the procession as she moved unerringly backward up the stairs, keeping her guns trained on one spot on the landing even as her angle changed. I kept an eye on the civilians as my team made their way up the stairs, but the only people left alive scrambled out of the way as the girls advanced.
Nobody downstairs seemed to want to come up past the landing for fear of PoLarr’s crazy accurate bullets mowing them down.
“I can’t see anyone outside the door,” Olivia said once we were all on the landing. “That doesn’t mean anything, I know.”
“It’s not like it’s bad news,” PoLarr said.
“But we do have some bad news just for you,” I told PoLarr. “The bad news is that I’m calling dibs on clearing, and I’m taking Tempest and Nova with me.”
“I’m happy to share,” PoLarr replied, and opened the door.
Nova went through first. She took a step and then angled her body so that she would take the brunt of the hits from anybody who shot from the right. She stuck her free hand behind her luscious behind and waved a crouching Tempest over to the left. Tempest scuttled over to Nova’s cover.