by J. D. Tyler
Retta had snatched up napkins and passed them to people to staunch various wounds. Only Burke, Retta, Rouse, and Edward were still unscathed.
Edward turned back to watch just as another two beefy men dragged another unconscious woman up onto the stage. She was bleeding profusely from a head wound, so one of the men propped her up and pressed a bar towel to her head.
“Is she dead?” The mic picked up the new leader’s question. The man on the floor shook his head.
Not dead.
“Gonna die?”
He got a shrug in response. He didn’t recognize the woman, but she might be the Roberts for whom the first, now-dead leader had called.
“Better if she’s alive,” he said. “See what you can do.”
Another man dragged Cheryl Parkerston up the stairs by her hair. Cheryl was the CEO of one of the largest defense contractors in the DC Metro area. He’d met her many times, and never seen her with her hair down until tonight.
The no-nonsense, capable woman wasn’t crying, but she was hurting, for sure. Her lip was split, her left eye was swelling, and blood ran down her face from a cut over her eye. She was also bleeding from wounds in both arms. Shards of glass sparkled on the shoulders of her black evening gown.
“You, behind the tables,” the leader said. “Come out and line up down here in front of the stage. Do it now. The longer you offer resistance, the longer you stay where I can’t see you, I start shooting. I will kill one of these women outright if you don’t get up here in the next three minutes.”
Nobody moved. Edward, and evidently everyone else as well, realized the guy was going to shoot whoever moved anyway.
“Carter, get the other bitch, Kirk.”
“She’s dead,” a man called out. Edward cataloged his features. Carter. That one was Carter.
“Get Tolliver then,” he ordered.
“Hey Decker,” another voice called, and the man with the mic turned. The one on the mic was Decker, then. Edward cataloged that too, into his memory. “This one’s pretty shot up,” the man on the floor continued, holding up a woman’s blood-soaked head by her silver hair so Mic-guy, Decker, could see her face.
Edward knew her. Sylvia Tolliver.
“Drag her up here anyway,” Decker growled. A woman he didn’t know, wearing a simple black gown, fell heavily when she was shoved aside. She’d been tending to Sylvia. Sylvia was a DC society matron with a great deal of political clout. She was incredibly sweet and just as incredibly persistent. She would get exactly what she wanted because she just wore people down with sheer kindness, like water on sandstone. She always got her way.
She and Edward’s mother had both gone to Holton Arms School. There was more than two decades between the women, but that bond had made them fast friends.
Sylvia was one of the finest women he knew, a surrogate grandmother in some ways. There was no way in hell he was going to let anyone drag her anywhere.
“Jesus, that’s Sylvia,” Retta hissed before he could move. Looking like a Fury as she picked up two long spears of her own glasswork, holding them like weapons, she said, “No fucking way.”
Rouse glanced their way, his gaze narrowing at Retta’s armament.
“Stay back,” Rouse said, just as Edward said, “You can’t rush them.”
Retta glared as he grabbed her arms. “No. I’ll get her,” Edward said, pulling Retta farther behind the dubious safety of the blockaded tables.
“We’ll get Mrs. Tolliver,” Burke said, coming up to Edward’s side. To Retta he said, “Cover us.” He handed her a smooth, matte-black, Kahr 9 pistol.
“Can you shoot?”
“Oh yeah,” she said, sliding the action back to check the load. “I’m from Oklahoma. Extra magazine?”
Burke shook his head, grinned. “It ruined the line of my jacket as it was. Extra clips? Too much weight for a quiet night.”
She looked at Edward, and smiled. “The Chameleon?”
Edward nodded, relieved she wasn’t going to rush into the fray for Sylvia.
“Chameleon?” Burke questioned, as he and Edward crouched, ready to spring. The fake waiter hefted Sylvia, his hands under Sylvia’s armpits. The woman was so frail Edward wondered why he didn’t just pick her up.
“You are one, aren’t you?” he said to Burke. Burke looked surprised, then grinned and nodded.
“Ready?”
“No,” Rouse snapped the order, a hand on both their shoulders. “He’ll shoot one of the other women.”
“Yeah,” Burke said, looking up at Rouse from his crouching position. “But we have to try.”
Edward’s gut clenched, but he understood the reality of this situation. They were all, essentially, dead.
A line from Cruxshadows’ song, Sophia, popped into his head. The song was about death and honor and he felt every nuance of it as he crouched, considering how to rescue Sylvia Tolliver.
Retta actually beat him to saying it, however.
“If they’re up there with him, they’re dead anyway,” she hissed. “And if they don’t get her, I will,” she told Rouse defiantly.
“Give me those,” Burke said, pointing to the glass rods Retta had leaned onto the back of the tables. They were part of her shattered sculptures, the cobalt glass now crackled and sharply broken. “I used to throw javelin in high school. Tossing them at the guy will work as a good distraction.” He grinned at Retta and Edward in a flippant, “let’s go for it” kind of way. “And who knows,” he continued. “I might even hit him.
“Okay, you throw for the guy by Sylvia,” Edward said, “with that,” he tapped the glass. “Then the guy on stage. Then get back behind the table. I’ll get Sylvia.”
“Good plan,” Burke agreed.
To Rouse and the others, Edward said, “Get flat.”
Burke positioned himself, crouching at the ballroom edge of the table, and Edward took the side closest to the wall. He planned to slip out, come at the guy holding Sylvia from behind.
“On three,” Burke said. At three, he darted out, throwing one of the glass spears at the man dragging Sylvia Tolliver. Then, just as quickly, he threw the second toward the stage, at Decker Burke must have been a world-class javeliner, because he was dead-on accurate.
Decker had a fraction of a second longer to react, and was able –-barely-– to dodge the long, sharp projectile which crashed into the drum set and knocked the whole thing down with a spectacular, and distracting crash.
The other man wasn’t as lucky. He went down in a spray of arterial blood. Three strides had Edward at their side, and he caught Sylvia as the dying bad guy let her fall. The black-gowned woman, who’d covered Sylvia, just as quickly jumped back up to help. Edward gathered the fragile matron into his arms as gunfire erupted once more. He and Black-Dress-Lady booked it for the tables.
They got her behind the dubious safety of the upturned rounds, just as Decker sprayed the ceiling and walls with bullets again.
More glass snowflakes and hanging icicles shattered, flying everywhere with lethal results. Who the hell had decided glass hanging from the ceiling was a good idea?
You never expect the Spanish Inquisition, he thought irreverently as he covered Sylvia’s body with his own. And you don’t expect automatic weapons fire to shatter the glass decorations, either.
“Get them!” someone shouted into the confusion. Two men who’d been behind, or possibly under the stage, rushed it, only to be shot, nearly point-blank by Decker. However, two more had come from the other side of the stage, taking Decker down.
Rouse, ignoring everything else, spun to the rear and said, “We’ve got to block the doors!”
CHAPTER TWO
“We gotta get them open!” someone shouted.
But Rouse shouted, “NO! BLOCK THEM!”
Without further thought, Edward deposited Sylvia with Retta and the Black-Dress-Lady, and ran with Rouse and the Chameleon to the back of the ballroom, jumping over the bodies of the dead and the still-writhing injured. From bey
ond the doors, they could hear more screaming, and a near continuous bwrrrr and tat-tat-tat of automatic and small arms fire.
After four tours, Edward recognized the sound. He was also fighting not to go back there, to not get wrenched into the vortex of his memories. His memories tried to suck him down, but now was no time to let them distract him.
He forced himself to focus, and together, he and Rouse blocked the doors. All around the ballroom, there were screams and shouts, but neither he nor Rouse, nor Burke, who’d joined them, looked around. They’d assigned themselves this task, and as he worked, Edward knew why it was important.
If this was a terrorist act, their safest action, with all these injured people, was to lock down and shelter in place.
Provided they could.
Ballrooms were meant to be entered and were designed for flow of people in and out. Not for barricading. They were, in short, the worst possible place for a siege. However, two of the three doors had already been locked down by the fake waiters. Obviously an inside job, since those two doors conveniently had holes in the doors through which the terrorists had threaded a heavy chain, secured with a padlock.
For a siege, that was a good first step, but it meant that the terrorists had an objective here in the ballroom.
Rouse knew more about hotel doors than he did, because he was able to flip down a lever, locking down one side of the remaining set of double doors. This door, too, had holes.
“I need the key to lock the other side. Crash bar,” he muttered, pointing at the leather-covered, brass push bar. “They open outward, but fortunately, only this one will. We need some cord or wire or something.”
“Any more chain?” Burke asked, waving toward the other doors. There were holes in all the doors, not so big as to be glaring, but big enough for a solid chain to be looped through as had been done with the center doors.
“Don’t know and no time to look,” Edward said.
Another man came up with a long piece of wire-–obviously from the DJ’s rig, as there were speaker terminals on one end of the heavy wire. Without a word, he offered it to Rouse.
“Perfect. Wrap it through the holes. Without that, we’d never get these secure.” Rouse helped tie the wire as tightly as they could. It would have to be cut, but unlike the chain, it could be cut from the outside if the bad guys had time to work on it.
“Grab a buffet table,” Rouse ordered two more men who’d rushed to their assistance. “Two. Stack them here, in front of the doors.”
Dumping the array of cold hors d’oeuvres on the floor, Burke and one of the other men hustled back to the central doors, flipping the table onto its side. The third man singlehandedly carried the other table.
“Riley O’Keefe,” the stronger man said. “You know Sylvia? That why you rescued her? Was that your woman covering you?”
“Sylvia’s a friend of my mother’s,” Edward said, stacking another table. Although the shooting had stopped inside the ballroom, now there was a cacophony of shouted questions, moans and sobbing. There was still gunfire outside the doors, however. “Retta, my woman,” he said, grinning fiercely at the thought of that moniker, “doesn’t take that kind of thing well.”
O’Keefe laughed, despite the desperation of their situation. “My kind of gal. Why are all the good ones taken?”
“Yeah, I hear that.” Edward laughed as well. “I got hella lucky, all the way around.”
“If you were that lucky, you wouldn’t be here,” another man said. This was the one who’d brought the wire, he grunted as he shifted a table into position.
“JR’s a pessimist,” O’Keefe said, nodding at the other man in thanks. JR joined O’Keefe, slamming a shoulder against the door as someone tried to force their way in.
“Shit. Rouse! We got company trying to get in!”
Edward scanned the room for Rouse. Black-Dress-Lady had left off tending Sylvia and was now moving around the opposite side of the room, with several other people he recognized as some of those cop-types. They were checking the dead and wounded.
“Keep ‘em out!” Rouse shouted in reply. Rouse had headed to the stage, but had stopped to help someone halfway through the room.
“Damn,” Edward said, surveying the whole ballroom for the first time. Most of the tuxedoed men were down, and the few on their feet were bleeding and injured. That said, they were still working, moving purposefully to help.
“That move,” Edward said, his mind clicking into the pattern of events. “The thing they did with the disruption of the security people’s earpieces...”
“Yeah,” O’Keefe growled. “Brilliant. Pinpointed every agent or security geek in the room. Good thing I wasn’t on the job tonight.”
Edward nodded. “You a cop?”
“Marine. Off duty. Here with a friend, a date.”
“Semper Fi,” he said, automatically, then added, “Your date okay?”
“I don’t know. She went to the ladies’ room.”
Fuck. Edward saw the bleak fear in O’Keefe’s eyes. His comment about the good ones being taken probably meant it was a relative, co-worker, or casual date.
“She’ll be okay,” Edward said, even though neither he nor O’Keefe believed it.
“Yeah, she’s smart.” O’Keefe looked at him. “You a marine?”
“No, Navy. I’m out, though.”
“You’re never out,” O’Keefe said, shifting to look around the ballroom, his back braced on the table blocking the door.
Most of the laughing, dancing guests were now lying, dead or dying, on the rich, red-and-gold swirling pattern of the ballroom’s carpet. There had to have been two to three hundred people in the ballroom.
Ninety percent of them were down.
Edward fought to stay in the present, in the moment. The smell of the seafood they’d dumped from the buffet to get the tables, threatened to take him out to sea, to the ship. To the aftermath.
Blood everywhere. People dying. Groaning. Seconds before the blast they’d been playing cards, now one guy had the Queen of Spades embedded in his eye...
“Edward,” O’Keefe said, sharp and demanding. “Millner. Right here, right now, Navy,” he snapped.
Jerked back to the moment, and thankful for the reprimand, Edward stared at him for a heartbeat, then nodded. He looked around, letting his gaze skim just the immediate area. He didn’t let his eyes rest on the bodies, the blood.
“The bar,” he said, finally. “It’s heavy. It’ll brace the door.”
“Good idea. I got this,” he said as another attempt at the doors made them rattle. Someone beyond them shouted for Decker. “Do it now, Navy.”
While O’Keefe held the position, Edward pushed the heavy mobile bar away from the corner and rolled it so they could brace the tables blocking the doors with its weight.
“That should keep the riff-raff out,” O’Keefe said, making no comment about the blood streaking, and dripping down, the front of the bar.
“Rouse!” Edward shouted. “Doors are blocked. What next?”
“Help with the wounded,” Rouse replied, finally continuing onto the stage. “We’re trying to get them over here into one place by the stage. You three,” Rouse turned to shout at three men who were peeking out the back service doors. “Barricade those doors!”
“We can get out!” one of them shouted back. “We need to get out!” Panic suffused the man’s features and the other two nodded, looking defensive. “We have to get help. None of our phones work. We have to get out.” The man was practically babbling.
Rouse jumped down from the stage where he’d been tying up Decker and one of the other waiters the agents had brought down with their flying tackle. One of those brave men was dead, the other lay on the stage, groaning as he held his broken leg.
Rouse was nearly to the men by the service doors when the first of them bolted out into the hotel’s back corridor.
Rapid gunfire in the hall and a scream stopped every movement in the ballroom.
“I said, blockade those doors,” Rouse snapped, jerking the other two men back from the service door, his weapon drawn. “Get me some tables, now!”
Rouse opened the door a fraction, but slammed it just as quickly.
“Hurry! Tables over here now!” He shifted to the side as Edward, O’Keefe, and the two men who’d been trying to leave jerked a nearby table into place, hauling over three more to brace that one. They’d barely gotten them stacked against the swing of the doors when someone hit them from outside. Since the doors swung both ways –-into the ballroom and out into the hall-– they had to block them fully.
“Brace them,” Edward said, throwing his shoulder against the sides of the tables. With his weight on one side and the two men’s weight on the other side, they kept the door from opening. The other agent, JR, was calling from the front of the room for more people to brace those doors as well.
Edward looked frantically around, searching for Retta. Where was she?
He finally spotted her, amongst the wounded by the stage, bent over Mrs. Tolliver. She was wrapping a long piece of a silver tablecloth around the older woman’s head like an odd sort of turban. She was his fierce warrior woman again, blood on her arms, a glint like burnished steel in her eyes.
She must have felt him looking at her because she glanced up, met his gaze. She looked grim, but she managed a small smile.
I love you. He mouthed the words and her smile grew.
Love you back.
For once he didn’t care that he always said it first. He just knew he had to say it. They might not get another chance.
Rouse jumped back up onto the stage. “Is anyone a doctor? Does anyone still walking have any medical experience?”
There was silence in the room, other than the groans of the wounded. When no other soul spoke, Edward took a deep breath.
“I do,” Edward said.
These people needed help. People were dying. People he could save.
He was just going to have to suck up his personal demons and get over it.
All of it.
Now.
The Cruxshadows song came to mind again. It was about Honor. About finding, and holding on to, faith.