Ruthless (Out of the Box Book 3)

by Robert J. Crane

  I crept on, moving around the three-wire divider that was strung between poles to keep people from falling down the sides of the ramp. I hurried to the corner of the empty parking garage, scrambling under the dull fluorescent lights to keep from making noise as I moved. I made it to the brick stairwell in the corner and paused at the door, putting my ear to it to listen.

  I heard nothing.

  I eased the door open carefully, taking notice of the fact that my fingers were still feeling particularly numb at the ends. I kept my HK cradled in one hand, ready to sweep into the stairwell firing. After all, at that point my position would be pretty well given away, might as well go out in a blaze of glory. And bullets. Mostly bullets; killing these faceless idiots wasn’t going to do much for glory. I’d killed the strongest man on the planet, after all. Nameless mercs weren’t much of a feather in my cap, so to speak.

  I opened the door, and it squealed just slightly. I froze, listening. I doubted the sound was easily audible on the floor below, but if someone—by chance, which was one in four, since there were four stairwells—happened to be in this very one, they had almost certainly just heard me.

  I waited. Listened.

  Heard nothing.

  I slowly shut the door, easing it through another squeal as it closed, hoping that wasn’t the noise that gave me away. I kept my eye fixed on the downward path, making sure someone didn’t sneak up on me.

  Once the door was closed, I started up the stairs with a confidence. This might actually work. I might actually be able to get to the top floor and—

  The sound of gunfire from below was a rude interruption to my train of thought, and I felt bullets spray against the wall, showering me with concrete shards. I felt a sudden stinging in my right eye and dropped instinctively.

  It saved my life.

  The next stream of bullets spattered the wall behind where my head had been a moment earlier. The firing came from below.

  Yep. Wrong staircase. What were the odds?

  Oh, right. One in four. Crap. Looked like their luck had changed. Mine, too, but not for the better.

  I started toward the squeaky door, figuring maybe I could get back into the main garage area. My backpack clung to my back, my frozen camo starting to melt in the warmth of the heated garage. Clearly the camo wasn’t doing much to hide me, dammit.

  I reached up for the door, pulling the handle. I couldn’t see the gunman who was spraying the area around me with liberal amounts of lead, but it wasn’t a stretch to assume he wasn’t far down the stairs. I opened the handle, listened to the squeak as I pulled it open—

  And felt the door rattle under a hail of bullets from inside the garage. I shoved it closed, hard, with my shoulder, sick in my gut from knowing what this meant.

  My retreat was cut off.

  38.

  Feeling cornered was not exactly a new experience for me, even before this marvelous night in which I wore formal wear and metaphorically tangoed with more men than I cared to. As in, “Tango down!” It was looking like this time I was the tango, though, because another spate of bullets pelted the door above my head, as the merc in the stairwell with me made his own play to kill me with another burst.

  Being powerless really cuts down on the available options. I hate that. Also, I never wanted to leave my couch again.

  Footsteps closed in on the door, and I knew I had only a few seconds. Rummaging through my backpack, I grabbed a smoke grenade and tossed it down. It clinked on its way to the bottom of the stairwell. I thunked my boots against the ground on the side of the walkway, trying to produce a false impression that I was bolting upstairs, then waited for the response.

  It didn’t come.

  I heard the smoke grenade pop down the stairwell. I’d thought about going with a flashbang, but those were a little more chancy. Grey smoke flooded the stairwell, surging up to my level before the footsteps outside the stairwell had even reached the door.

  As quietly as I could, I slid headfirst down the stairs, careful not to knock the butt of my gun against anything at all. I was as noiseless as a young woman could be while swimming down stairs. Fortunately the hiss of the smoke grenade covered some of it.

  I made it to the landing below and waited until I heard the sound of gunfire from the guy who’d kept me from going up. A flare of muzzle fire lit up the smoke, and I realized he was about ten feet in front of me, heading up. He was working on instinct, his actions guided by what he thought I’d do. In the face of overwhelming odds and a bunch of guys about to reinforce him from the second floor, my smartest move would have been to head up.

  But he’d already inadvertently given away the fact that he was the only one between me and the first floor exit because he hadn’t shouted, “Grenade!” when I tossed that smoker down there. He’d just quietly gone about the business of covering himself. Which meant he was either alone or the worst team player on the face of the planet.

  I was banking on the former; mercenaries generally have some military training, and that’s the sort of thing you don’t just forget to do.

  Besides, if I was wrong, I was going to end up no more dead than if I tried to escape up. That was certain doom.

  I made myself a part of the wall, leaning hard against it, clearing myself out of the stairwell path as the guy charged up, firing willy-nilly and blind in an effort to keep me from getting up to the third floor and beyond. If I’d still been trying to go up, I would have seriously reconsidered my actions right about then.

  Instead, I popped up from behind him as he passed me in the smoke without a thought that I could have been lingering on the landing. I drove my Gerber knife into the place where the skull meets the base of the spine and twisted. It was harder without my meta strength, but I got it in there. He didn’t make much more than a noise of protest before it was done, and he dropped. I had to step quickly to keep from having his falling body knock me over. I dodged neatly over him, and I pushed him to the side then listened to him thump down the stairs, keeping my steps only semi-quiet as I charged to the first floor.

  There had been a decent interval of time since I’d heard shots at the second-floor entry to the stairwell. I’d figured this was where things would get troublesome, with those reinforcements pouring into the stairwell and hampering my progress. But they were taking their sweet time, messing around with the door handle and opening it oh-so-slowly. It took me a moment to realize why: the claymore I’d left at the first door had made them cautious. Fool me once and all that. Well, I could certainly use the delay.

  I slammed against the exit bar on the first floor and burst out of the smoky stairwell into fresh, cool air. The fluorescent overhead lighting was a welcome change from the obstructed view of the stairs offered after I’d tossed the grenade, and I immediately ran, doubled over, for the cover of the nearest car. No shots greeted me, so I assumed I was alone for a brief moment in time.

  Which was good, because I had plans that required at least a brief moment of time.

  I could hear shouting in other parts of the garage, and muffled yells from the stairwell behind me that told me someone had probably discovered my handiwork in there. Not to brag, but that was an ace sort of kill, pulling that off. Totally ninja.

  I crept along, sneaking in front of the bumpers of cars, keeping low and watching through windshields and out the back of vehicles as best I could. I didn’t see any movement, which was the biggest giveaway. I made my way as quickly as I could to the part of the garage where we kept the agency vehicles.

  There was a keybox like the kind valets use, with a numbering system to denote which keys go to which parking space. In space one was the car used for the director, a lovely SUV made to government specs, complete with armor. It wasn’t exactly Nick Fury’s car from The Winter Soldier, but I liked it. I seldom used it myself because I don’t really love driving, but in a pinch it was a hell of a vehicle.

  Now it belonged to Andrew Phillips, I supposed, so I didn’t really think anything of it when I g
rabbed the keys and planned my next bit of mayhem. This one would involve vehicular homicide and more destruction of government property, so I felt like I’d picked the right car for the task at hand.

  The garage attendant, bless his soul, had always parked the car for me. It was a big damned SUV, and the genius who’d designed the parking structure had made the parking spaces with Honda Civics in mind, forgetting that this was America and we drove cars big enough to challenge garbage trucks for road dominance over here, dammit. As a result, the attendant always parked the cars he drove backward, front end facing out so that if I desperately needed my car, I could just get in and go. He said he did it for insurance purposes, whatever that meant. He had a whole monologue about it, but I just nodded politely and tuned him out.

  I crept up on the car, unlocked the door quietly with the fob (one click) and opened it wide enough to thrust my backpack in first. Then I slid up into the driver’s seat and kept myself low in the seat, so that I could look out through the steering wheel and see what was going on in front of me. For now, there was nothing going on.

  But I suspected that was about to change.

  I waited, undertaking a little modification and preparation while I did so. I’d once heard in a movie (Under Siege 2, a classic of American cinema) that chance favors the prepared mind. I wasn’t leaving much to chance here. These guys wanted to find me, they probably figured I was here on the first floor, and I wasn’t going to disappoint them in their search. They were definitely going to find me, all two or three of them that remained.

  Of course, they were going to be sorry they found me, but hey, no plan survives contact with the enemy, guys. (That one’s Sun-Tzu.)

  I’m detecting a pattern in my quotes. It probably says something about me.

  I waited and waited, for what seemed like hours but was probably only minutes. The fluorescent bulb just ahead of me had developed a flicker, but the insulation in my car was so good I couldn’t hear the hum. Points for that, because it’s an irritating noise.

  Pretty soon I saw the first mercenary emerge. He crept along, breaking cover in the row of cars to my right and crossing the row to wait behind the hood of a sedan. He’d just checked the exit door over there, I figured, and determined that there were in fact no footprints heading out.

  Just like I figured they would. Predictable.

  Two other guys came creeping along the row, one just in front of me, and I slid down even further, counting out thirty seconds before I bobbed back up enough to peer out again. He’d hardly made an exhaustive search; it looked like he was coming together with his buddies for a confab. I counted one, two, three of them, and breathed a sigh of relief as they congregated near the trunk of the sedan.

  They were on either side of it, trying to keep themselves from being exposed in case I was waiting somewhere in the garage with a gun, but also leaning toward each other enough to minimize their volume. I realized in that moment that these geniuses—these super geniuses who’d been trying to kill me—didn’t have radios. Why? Maybe they figured the government could overhear them?

  It all worked in my favor, though, because I quietly buckled myself in and started my car, making sure to set the lights to the “off” position first, rather than let them snap on automatically. I figured that might buy me an extra second of surprise as I threw the car into drive and floored it.

  Someone with a gentler temperament than me—like, oh, I dunno, Conrad Hilton—might have used this opportunity to escape. Not me, apparently. I’d felt the fear for my life and it had passed somewhere around the time Miksa Fenes tried to burn me into ash, around the time I figured out what these Russians were planning to do to my prison. Leaving aside the obvious worries of what could be happening to the hostages, I was left with one overwhelming emotion: rage.

  Yep. Now I was just pissed off.

  I mashed the accelerator all the way to the floor and listened to the horses run. The mercs wasted precious seconds trying to figure out where the noise came from in the echoing garage and then at least another precious second deciding internally what to do about the black SUV barreling at them doing about fifty. The guy closest to me leapt sideways as I slammed into the back of the sedan they’d been meeting around. I didn’t hit the other two guys directly, but I whipsawed the sedan sideways as I T-boned it, and it smashed flush into the car next to it, leaving no room for space between them.

  Take a government car, weighing several thousand pounds, add a dab of velocity for several seconds, then a parked car, garnish with two assholes who were out to kill me. Voila! That’s my recipe for mercenary puree. Put it in your cookbooks, kids, because it’s one that the whole family will love.

  I was dazed after the impact, but I could see through the dust that the deflated airbag had left behind that I’d gotten two of them. One was screaming at the top of his lungs, his groin and everything below crushed between two cars. The other hadn’t been quite so lucky; he’d dived for the open aisle to our right and didn’t quite make it. Now his body was hanging out in the open, pinned from the middle of his chest down. If he wasn’t dead, he was close; there wasn’t a doctor in this world that could fix him.

  I didn’t exactly admire my handiwork, but I felt a sense of satisfaction for a brief second until the bullets peppered my window. They did what bullets do when they hit bulletproof glass—spidered the hell out of it. This stirred me back to life and I made a quick, last-minute adjustment before I scrambled into the passenger seat and prepared to bail out.

  I almost got out before the last idiot got the driver’s side door open. I’d hoped I’d have a second or so due to the mangling of the car in the crash, but luck was only kindasorta on my side this time. This guy was enraged, livid at what I’d done to his buddies, and it was obvious on his face. He jerked the door open just as I was tumbling out the passenger side, and I got an unfortunate and undesired boost as the claymore I’d just finished wiring to the door blew up behind me.

  I knew it was going to be loud, but this was like a 747 taking off in my frigging ear. The force of the explosion sent me end over end as my legs—which were still on the passenger seat—flipped over my upper body, which was almost slithered out of the car. I landed on the concrete floor with a WHUMP! and all my air left me.

  I lay there, staring up at the still-flickering light above me, for several minutes. I wanted to get up, but I couldn’t. My ears were ringing like I’d listened to a death metal concert from inside a speakerbox, and my entire head was shaking.

  My only consolation was that I’d probably killed the last of these douches, so there was that.

  I peeled myself up off the floor after another minute, still hearing that ringing in my ears. I shuffled off toward the nearest door and bailed through it, losing my balance and pitching forward into a snowbank just off the sidewalk outside. Someone was playing cymbal in my head, with a whole chorus of triangles to add to the pitch and wail. I tried to push myself up but my shoulder screamed at me in a voice that resonated throughout my whole body. I told it to shut up, but I had a feeling that those bandages I’d attached had pulled free in the crash. Shoulda known better, a faint voice of reason in my brain told me.

  You should shut the hell up, I told it in reply. I was in no mood.

  I crawled on my knees, the dormitory building rising up in front of me. It was an angular building, with balconies and a long L shape that left one wing of it stretching out to meet me. There was an entrance over there, and I was by God going to find it, even though the lights were off and all I could see was blurry shadows along the length of it.

  Wait, why were the lights off?

  I felt the cold press against my gloveless hands as I crawled, my clothing once again freezing against my skin. I felt the sling with my MP5 fall into the snow, and I dragged it back up with useless hands. I was shaking, from cold or injury or shock, maybe even some combination of all three.

  “You bastards sure know how to show a girl a good time,” I said as I collapsed i
nto the snow again, but I couldn’t even hear my words over the ringing. I saw snowflakes dancing past my eyes. One fell on my nose. It tickled.

  I wanted to collapse here and sleep for the night. It had to be late, past my bedtime. My brain wanted to trick me, wanted me to take this opportunity to just rest and attack the problem by dawn’s light. I’d be rested. I’d be refreshed. My shoulder wouldn’t be crying and moaning in pain. It felt cool and wet, like it was bleeding again. Or was that just sweat?

  I hauled myself up to all fours again and made another start across the field. The dormitory building was impossibly far away. Miles, maybe. It didn’t feel like it was getting any closer. I thought maybe walking would get me there quicker, but my body vetoed the idea of standing. My shoulder pleaded for mercy with each movement I made to crawl forward, but my legs told it to take a flying leap. You’re on your own, they said, we’re out for the night. Assholes.

  I made it another mile or five, but the dormitory grew no closer. I flailed my arms to try and crawl, and then realized my belly was firmly in the snow. I couldn’t make myself move. Hell, I didn’t want to move. I wanted to sleep.

  Hypothermia, a distant voice whispered. Did it have a Russian accent?

  Shock, another one added.

  Death, came the most compelling of all, deep and gravelly.

  I felt myself stop shivering, but only dimly. I felt strangely … and suddenly … warm? And sleepy. Oh, so sleepy.

  I curled my legs up to my chest and wrapped my good arm around them, lying there on my side. I saw my breath frost in the air, go misty and float off into the dark of night, lit by only a faint and distant light from headquarters.