by Amy Lane
Jackson wrinkled his nose. “If you hear shots, that’s him not wanting to hurt people, but go on—”
“These guys are evil. They make Sonny Daye look like a kitten. And they’re loose. Whatever happens here today, these psychopaths are out in the world, and we’re about to take out the one place they call home.”
Jackson closed his eyes. “Shit.” He opened them and dealt with reality. “You got files?”
Burton shook his head. “Not on me—”
“We get out of this, send them. Me and Ellery, this is sort of our mission from God.”
“Well, fuck you both for being my fucking assignment these last months, because now it’s mine too. Deal.”
Jackson checked his phone. “Two minutes.”
“I’m going to take a left, a right, and two lefts and unlock the door that says Detainment. The minute shit goes boom, you go get your guys and get out of here.”
“Ernie wants you home,” Jackson said bluntly, because Ernie had been damned human to him, and Jackson felt like he owed the boy.
“I’ll….” Burton looked away, and his almost perpetually stoic expression deserted him, leaving him hurt and alone. “I miss him,” he said apologetically. “I’ll… I’ll find a way to make that boy my home.”
“Good. Now move.”
Jackson left first and listened for the bathroom door behind him before he checked his phone.
One minute left.
No minutes left.
Two more minutes passed, and Jackson could have pissed fire, he was so nervous.
Then his phone buzzed with Ernie’s number.
Wait for it….
Jackson was down the three hallways, Ellery’s door in sight, when an explosion shook the administration building, breaking windows and shaking tiles loose from the ceiling.
Jackson ignored all that and broke into a run.
Rescue Fish and Going Boom
THE EXPLOSION rocked the detention room, throwing Ellery to his knees and sending the office chairs spinning across the floor.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Ace snarled, pulling himself up against the wall. “That was a land mine?”
“Oh, like I’d know?” Ellery retorted. “Do you know anyone with a shit-ton of explosives?”
Ace grimaced. “Goddammit—I told Jai to set that shit off in the desert. I don’t even know where he got that.”
Ellery stared at him. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Then the door opened, and Ellery forgot that they’d almost been blown all the way back to the fucking ocean.
“Jackson?”
Jackson took two steps and crushed him to his chest, hard and without mercy. For a sweet moment, Ellery went boneless in his arms, as close to being a damsel in distress as he ever hoped to be.
Then Jackson stepped back, and that moment never happened, and they were trying to get out of the base alive.
“Okay, guys—we’re winging it through the building and then getting behind the hangar, where Jai and Ernie will pick us up.”
“What about Sonny?” Ace asked, and Jackson grimaced, compassion in full evidence.
“He’s setting up a surprise in the hangar. They were planning to fly you guys out, so we had to do something to distract everybody there. C’mon, let’s git—Ace, keep your eye out, Ellery, with me!”
Ellery allowed himself to be dragged by the hand through the building, surprised when it didn’t sound deserted anymore.
“Where you going?” Ace asked after they’d jogged through several corridors. “The entrance is—”
“Where everybody’s going,” Jackson said shortly. “We saw a schematic—there’s a back exit down here.”
Ellery would have missed it—he was damned glad Jackson knew where he was going. In a sudden turn that looked like they were going to a bathroom or a copy room, they were outside, the sun lowering in the thin sunset of January.
God. Was it still the same day?
They could see men running past the front of the admin building, heading west toward where the explosion had occurred, and Jackson kept his eyes on the soldiers while dodging them behind a small building marked with a red cross on the front.
“Medic,” Jackson whispered harshly. From the front of the building, they could hear a clatter of feet coming down the ramp and an absurdly young voice muttering, “Fuck fuck fuck bugger goddammit—”
“Hey! Saunders! Where do you think you’re going?” A refrigerator of a man turned from the running mercenaries and disappeared around the front of the building. The sound of their raised voices snapped through the thin wood of the portable surgery like rubber bands.
Jackson grimaced and looked apologetically at Ellery. “Uh… do you mind?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I… I sort of… you know….”
“You made friends with the enemy?” Ellery should have known—holy God. This fucking man.
“No!” Jackson snapped. “I just… you know. Gotta go do a thing.” He turned and glared at Ellery. “Look for the SUV coming up behind the hangar. If you see it, you guys run—I’ll be there.”
“Jackson!” Ellery begged, and Jackson gave him a sort of winsome smile before reaching out to graze his cheek with a knuckle and shoving the gun he’d held in front of him into the back of his jeans.
“Stay safe, Counselor,” he said softly. “Back in a sec.”
Ace grunted as Jackson disappeared. “He do that a lot?”
“I’d say it’s a hero complex,” Ellery told him sourly, “but he’d deny it completely.”
“Isn’t that what makes him a hero?” Ace reached around the back of his jeans and grunted. “He had a gun. Goddammit, why does he get a fuckin’ gun and I got nothin’ to hold but my dick? I left my fuckin’ knife in the car at fuckin’ Walmart, even.”
From the front of the building, they heard the sound of bodies hitting wood and the grunts of men hitting each other.
Ellery kept scanning the far horizon restlessly, irritated that they were stuck here in the shade of the medical bay in what felt like plain sight. A gangly figure with reddish hair and blood pouring from his nose distracted them both as he stumbled behind the bay, and then—even from the other side of the building, the snapping sound of a bone and a man’s pained scream.
Jackson came hauling ass back at that point, holding a small semiauto in his hands and looking considerably worse for the wear.
“You’re bleeding,” Ellery said, horrified.
Jackson gave him a fierce smile, ignoring the cut on his cheek and another one on his forehead. “He’s bleeding more. Ace!” He shoved the semiauto into Ace’s hands, and Ace actually grinned.
“You’re a good friend,” he said happily, and Jackson grunted.
“C’mon—Saunders, you’re with us or you’re back there doctoring that asshole’s arm. Can you deal with that?”
“Yeah, sure.” The boy smiled cheerfully, and Ellery had a sudden image of one of those cats tapping a computer screen fitfully with his paw. Yeah. Okay. Jackson had good instincts for whom to rescue and whom to break like a matchstick—Ellery would give him that.
They turned and trotted as a group, sticking to the shadows behind the buildings, coming up behind the smaller hangar while Jackson and Ace scanned the space behind the campus.
“How far did they go out?” Ace asked.
“Couple of miles,” Jackson said. “At least around the perimeter. They had to swing back around to get to us.”
They kept going, passing across the space between the big hangar and the smaller linear hangar, more like a carport, with their hearts in their mouths. When they got back behind the big hangar, Jackson tried to peek around.
“Fuck,” he swore. “Sonny, goddammit—”
“Lemme see.”
Ace pretty much shoved Ellery out of his way and took a look out front. “What in the fuck is he doing?”
“Rigging the big helicopter to flop around like a fish—I hope,” Jackson told him.
“But he wasn’t looking—fuck—”
Jackson started like he was going to run out to save Sonny too, but Ace grabbed him by the back of the collar and yanked him into Ellery’s arms.
“Goddammit, Sonny!” Ace hollered, heading for the copter. “Would you watch your fucking back?”
“Ace?” Sonny’s joyful cry was loud enough to be heard all the way to Victoriana. “Ace—oh fuck, Ace, get that fucker!”
The gunfire from this distance didn’t sound as loud as it should have, but Jackson had gotten back into position to watch, and he jerked away, grimacing, until it stopped.
“One, two, three—okay. We’re short a guy. C’mon, Sonny, tell him… tell him to watch his back….”
Ellery turned his head then, alerted by a vehicle moving toward them from the fence line. “Jackson—is that your car?”
Jackson looked up, squinting. “Two guys in there, right?”
“Yeah—yeah. I can see someone in the passenger’s seat. Why?”
“Ernie’s okay,” Jackson said on a breath. “Burton was fucking worried. But yeah—and hey. It’s intact!”
“It’s missing all the windows,” Ellery told him, appalled.
“Is it blown up, Ellery? Seriously. If it’s not blown up, we’re okay.”
Ellery scrubbed his face with his hands. “Jackson, we’ve really got to work on your definition of okay—”
And in the middle of the shooting, the windup of what sounded to be a helicopter on its last gasp, and the sound of what was once a new automobile but could now be heard from two hundred yards away, Jackson turned to him with his green eyes wide and shiny.
“If we get out of here with your skin intact, that’s all I need,” he said gruffly. “I will kill anyone who lays hands on you again.”
He turned away then, dashing the back of his hand against his eyes, and stiffened. “Ace! Behind you!”
Ellery was standing just a step behind him—close enough for Jackson to back up into him when he took a pace back as gunfire started to rip into the corner of the hanger that had been their shelter.
“Shit!” Jackson muttered. “Shit—that’s not a flunky. I thought it would be, but goddammit!” He looked beyond Ellery for a moment. “Saunders!”
“Yessir?” Saunders spoke around Ellery’s shoulder.
“Give me your pistol and get to the car! Ellery, go with him!”
“Yessir!” Saunders removed his service revolver from the holster at his waist and thrust it into Jackson’s hand before he began a gangly lope toward the oncoming SUV.
“Who is it?” Ellery asked, frustrated to realize that Jackson was standing in front of him, shielding him.
“That’s fuckin’ Lacey himself,” Jackson told him, handing him Saunders’ Sig Sauer. “Go get in the car!” With a deft move, he dumped the empty clip from his Berretta and shoved another one from his pocket in its place. Not for the first time, Ellery was reminded that Jackson Rivers had been born in violence—that he believed it was where he fit in best.
“No!” Ellery snapped. “I’m not getting in the fucking SUV—”
“Jai and Ernie will get you to safety,” Jackson muttered. “We need you out of here—that thing is only so big!”
“I’ll go when you go.” Madness. He and Jackson had spent a couple of days at target practice in January. He understood how to handle a gun, but the Sig didn’t feel any lighter in his palm now than the Berretta Jackson had bought for him then. “What are you going to do?” Ellery asked. God forbid Jackson just hop in the SUV and leave the fighting to the soldiers.
“Talk to him,” Jackson said tersely.
“Wait—what?”
“If we get out of here, we need to know what he was planning. The leader of the mercenary group may get away too, and there’s maybe a dozen trained killers that were given missions and sent into the general population. This ain’t over when it’s over.”
“Oh dear God….” The numb horror of what they’d gotten themselves into threatened to overwhelm him, but Jackson had more immediate concerns.
“Lacey!” Jackson called into the open space. “Lacey, give it the fuck up! Just give it up and let us go! That boom shook up every town from here to Barstow—they got it on satellite. You’re already rogue—own it and get the fuck out of here!”
“You think that’s gonna happen?” Ellery recognized Lacey’s voice from their two meetings, but now—now the man didn’t sound icy or in control. He sounded unhinged. “You think the military doesn’t have crews just like this one? Ready to take me out?”
“Man, you let serial killers out into the public—don’t you think they’re going to have enough to do?” Jackson risked a look around the corner, dodged back, and swore.
“What?” Ellery whispered.
“I can’t fuckin’ see him,” Jackson said. “Where’s his voice coming from?”
“Uh—”
“There’s a vent to your left, along our edge. Go back to back with me. Gun at ready.”
“What are you doing?” Ellery asked, pulling the gun into the safety position Jackson had taught him. Some people spent New Year’s Day nursing hangovers. They’d spent theirs teaching Ellery gun safety—go figure.
“Still using my mouth as a weapon! Now watch my back.”
Cautiously Jackson advanced around the corner, going just far enough to keep Ellery still behind the hangar.
“Lacey!” he called. “Wherever the hell you are—you think I haven’t called Taylor Cramer?”
“Who are you?” Lacey demanded, but it sounded like his voice was coming from inside the hangar. Jackson advanced a few more paces.
“Who does he think I am?” he asked Ellery.
“He has no idea. I think Burton’s been feeding him shitty intel. He assumed Ace was you.”
“Awesome.” Jackson advanced a few more paces, and Ellery followed him, keeping his gun down but his arms in front of him. What was left of Jackson’s Infiniti had gotten close enough for Ellery to see two men with decidedly singed clothing in the front, and that the once silver paintjob had now been scorched beyond repair. Saunders was racing up to them, hands up in classic surrender position, and both men looked to Ellery like they knew him. Ellery held out his hand to stop them, and they came to a halt. They were behind the long hangar right now and out of sight for any of the active players in this little op. Ellery thought they would be more useful unshot—and Saunders could take the opportunity to get in the car and out of something he never should have been part of in the first place.
“I was a victim of your little behavior experiment!” Jackson called to Lacey. “Those basket cases you sent to war—what do you think they did? Just kill the enemy? They didn’t know the enemy. They weren’t trained to fuck with the enemy. You trained them to fuck with their brothers, asshole. How many soldiers didn’t return because you manufactured sadistic psychopaths to be their COs? How many of our boys are raining blood on your conscience? You ever ask yourself that?”
Ellery took a deep breath. This was personal. Jackson knew someone affected by this man’s actions in this way. Jackson was talking about Sonny and Ace, and Ellery suddenly wanted Lacey’s blood.
Sonny and Ace were Jackson’s brothers now. They were Ellery’s. And this man had hurt them.
Ellery should have been prepared for the red wash in his vision, but he wasn’t.
“Weak!” Lacey called from inside the hangar. “Weak men shouldn’t go to war—they’ll never come back. It’s not my fault those men weren’t strong enough to deal with a killing machine!”
Oh God. Right by them. Lacey’s voice came from right by them. Jackson stopped abruptly, and he and Ellery looked at each other long enough for Ellery to catch the jerk of Jackson’s chin.
Lacey was in there.
They couldn’t see his exact location. They didn’t know who was with him.
But odds were good he was armed, and he was maybe twenty feet away.
“Run!” Jackson hissed. “Take the
gun and run for the car. Fucking now!”
But Ellery was too angry. “Weak?” he screamed, voice breaking in his own ears. “You sit back here and bully men to death and you call men in the field weak? Why aren’t you in the action, asshole! What are you doing back here by the—”
Three shots, precisely spaced, blew out one at a time in front of Ellery.
And that day of training, the last few months of fear, snapped into Ellery’s sinews and bones, and he turned and fired back.
In slow motion, he saw Jackson turn to push him to the ground.
Just when he heard the shot that ripped through his body and stopped his breath.
Fish Down
JACKSON CRASHED on top of Ellery, but he’d seen the shot hit, couldn’t unsee the shot hit, knew when he looked Ellery’s mouth would be open and blood would be on his lips.
He stayed on top of him for a breath, a heartbeat, until the shots stopped. Then he rolled off Ellery, gun in hand, and screamed, firing his clip into the hangar, opening up the thin aluminum wall, shooting until his gun clicked and clicked again.
Secure the suspect.
Old training—good training—pulled him to his feet, and he peered tentatively into the hangar through the grapefruit-sized hole he’d opened up while emptying his gun.
He saw the body—silver-white hair, wide-open eyes, the same sized mass of spreading blood on his chest that Jackson had opened up in the siding of the hangar. Oh Jesus—he’d been standing maybe ten feet away. Bullet through the siding, slowing down—did it bounce off his ribs? Did it hit his heart? Oh Jesus….
He turned his back on Commander Karl Lacey, traitor to the US Navy and his country, father of killers, without another thought.
Ellery hadn’t moved, was lying on the ground twitching, and Jackson fell to his knees beside him because Ellery, because please, oh God, please…. Ellery… please….
Ellery moaned, eyes closed, blood trickling from his lips, spreading across his abdomen. Ribs, lungs, kidneys, spleen, liver, intestines, not heart not heart not heart not heart….
Jackson hauled in a breath he’d forgotten he was holding and stopped trying to categorize Ellery’s injuries.