After the man's third push I sprang up, angled the barrel of my rifle through the shattered glass, and fired several rounds into the man. The door pushed back as the man's weight gave way.
“Frank! Frank!”
One of the men rushed over to crouch atop his fallen comrade, and though it churned my stomach, I shoved the barrel through again and fired.
The third and final man was smarter, charging through the opposite door with his gun pointed at me before I could withdraw my rifle from the glass.
He fired at me, missed me by a fraction of an inch and riddled the wall with bullets. I lunged at him, grabbing the hot metal of his weapon to keep him from aiming it at me again.
“You motherfucker!” he shouted, and almost succeeded in twisting the gun back to point in my direction. I derailed him with a sharp punch to his jaw, forcing his entire body back, and his rifle went toppling down over the banister.
Disarmed, his mad green eyes glowing with hatred as eerily green blood spilled from his open mouth, the man now tried for my gun instead, and I only just barely succeeded in warding him off. Another hook to the jaw, this one to powerful for him to withstand, and the bastard went flying back over the railing as his weapon had done. His fingers clawed at the metal bar, and very nearly succeeded in grabbing hold. But at the last second he slipped, and went plunging down the stairwell, his yells echoing upwards as he went.
That was smart, asshole, I chastised myself, and knew that I might not survive such carelessness again.
I pushed back in through the doors and down through the third floor hallway, mercifully abandoned at the moment. I poked in my head from door to door at every room I could find, breaking the glass through some of them, the element of surprise something I no longer had to consider.
It turned out the door where they'd been keeping her wasn't even locked when I got there. I pushed through and nearly tripped over my own two feet, my senses taking a moment to catch up to me as I surveyed the scene before me.
A man was lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood. His cell phone lay beside him, surreally playing a hardcore porno video beside its unconscious owner. He didn't have any shoes on. Also lying next to him was an aluminum folding chair, covered in his blood. A few feet away there sat a jug of water and a tray of food, consisting of a half-eaten sandwich and chips, some of which were strewn across the concrete floor.
God bless her, she escaped, I thought, and almost had to smile, but didn't.
If she wasn't in here, then that meant that she was out there somewhere in the building.
And that meant that I wasn't the only one looking for her...
Shit, shit, shit, shit!
I braced myself suddenly, alert at the sound of running footsteps moving past outside the door.
“She got out?”
“Yeah, we think she's down on the second floor!”
Damn it, I thought, I should have gone with my gut...
I peered out the door and watched the two men disappear into the stairwell from which I'd just come. Then I ran out in the opposite direction, for the stairwell on the other end of the hallway. I leapt down the stairs two at a time, nearly sick with exhaustion, but needing desperately to get to Sylvia before those men did.
I'm coming baby... I'm almost there. It's almost over now.
Only it might not be almost over in the way that either of us hoped...
11
Sylvia
I ran down the hallway with almost nothing on, a lamb among lions, with nothing but a rinky dink pea shooter to defend myself against these thugs, I wondered if even my own resourcefulness would be enough to get me out of here alive and in one piece.
At first I was reckless, desperate to escape without giving a second thought to how exactly I planned to achieve it. I rounded corner after corner, realizing after a while that I was just running around in circles, and that I needed to get my bearings about me.
A plan, Sylvia... You need a plan!
But this wasn't something I could come with at the same time I was carrying it out. Give me a few hours hunched over a table with information about the building at hand, and I could probably figure it all out scientifically– the best route to take, how to avoid being seen, even how to defend myself properly. But this wasn't anything scientific. This was life or death, spur of the moment, no second chances type shit. Stuff that maybe someone like Luc could navigate through alive, maybe, but which seemed next to impossible for someone like me.
Take, for instance, as I was still running down along the hallway, and very nearly didn't stop in time as the shadows of two men appeared around the corner, rapidly growing closer.
I shrieked, and managed to duck behind a concrete pillar just in time as they stepped into the view, marching straight toward the spot where I'd been just moments ago.
I held my breath, gripping O’Leary’s gun for dear life as the men's voices approached. I fiddled with the weapon, having no idea whether it was ready to fire, having never been around guns before in my life. I hated the things, and had only been able to handle the one dropped at Luc's place because it had already been prepared to fire when I got my hands on it.
Thankfully, the men passed without seeing me, and once they were out of sight and out of earshot I hurried on my way, rounding the corner, and hurrying off down another hallway in the direction of a huge wall of mismatched factory windows. A few were clear, a few opaque, a few cracked, with flakes of snow drifting in every few seconds, and quickly dissolving as they twinkled down to the floor.
I was up high, that much was apparent. Maybe three or four stories up. A warehouse of some kind, overlooking a snow covered field bathed in orange light. Then I saw that there was a guard's shack out there, much to my chagrin– but wait...
There were men out there, underneath the dim amber lights. Men fighting, silhouettes tangoing in the snow...
My brow furrowed, I had not yet made sense of this fact when a voice called out to me from the end of the hallway.
“HEY!”
Two men, perhaps the ones who'd just passed me behind the concrete pillar, came storming in my direction, weapons in hand, but not pointed at me.
“Shit!” I yelled, and spun around, racing as fast as I could in the opposite direction. I very nearly slammed into a wall, however, as suddenly the entire hallway went pitch black, and everything became completely invisible.
“What the fuck?” one of the men muttered, and I could tell that they'd stopped running.
Now, I thought, was as opportune a time as any to see whether I knew how to fire the gun in my hand.
There were two bright flashes, two deafening shots, and two furious howls from the men who'd been pursuing me.
“God damn it, my knee!”
“Gah! She shot me in the fucking nards! What the fuck?!”
“Oops! Sorry!” I called, honestly feeling bad about that, but glad to know that I at least had them off my tail.
Stairs... I needed to find stairs, and fast!
I hurried along the hallway as fast as I could, grappling in the darkness, unsure as to how the hell I planned to pull off this particular feat in question. Then out of the darkness, praise Jesus!, four glowing vermillion letters hummed at me through the otherwise pitch darkness: E-X-I-T.
I flung myself through the door and dashed down the stairs, pushed through another door, praying that I was on the ground floor. I passed another window, however, and quickly saw that I wasn't.
“Damn it!” I hissed.
And that was when a bright white light shone on me from halfway down the hallway.
“Hey! You!”
“Damn it, damn it, damn it!”
I ran back in the opposite direction, my way clumsily guided by the shaking flashlight of the man pursuing me.
“Thompson, go the other way! We'll cut her off!” one of the men yelled, and now there was only one set of footsteps instead of two and I knew I was being chased into a trap.
I need anoth
er exit sign... Another set of stairs... Something!
And God, what was that? Suddenly, through the floors, seeming to come from all directions throughout the building, I heard the sound of gunfire. Rapid gunfire, not the single shot of a pistol like the one in my hand.
What the hell was going on?! This was a nightmare... This had to be a nightmare! Where I'd nodded off into sleep, where I'd lost the plot and it had all gone spiraling into oblivion, I had no idea. But this couldn't be real. There was no way that this could all be real!
E. X. I. T.
My eyes caught the neon of the battery powered sign and I lunged for it, throwing myself so hard onto the landing that I nearly slammed into the opposite wall. Nearly the moment I was on the threshold, something large and metal slammed against the concrete ahead of me. I screamed, leaping backward, and actually hitting the wall this time. My assailant's flashlight beamed through the glass pane at the top of the door before he could burst through, and I saw with a shock that the object on the ground was a gun. A really, really big gun.
I leapt for it, struggling even to hoist up its tremendous weight, and managed to do so just as the door flung open, my pursuer stampeding through the door.
I pulled the trigger, and instantly wished that I hadn't. A sickening sensation ripped through my body as the rifle discharged in my hand. The light jolted nauseatingly as my assailant's body was torn to pieces by gunfire, the flashlight leaping in his hands.
He fell dead to the floor, and I didn't even have time to be horrified by what I'd just done. I threw the gun down on the ground, unable to fathom that I had just killed a man– and not just killed him, but destroyed his body, made it into something unrecognizable.
My hands were still trembling violently as the second guard leapt through the door, a second flashlight beaming at me, not even stopping to examine the bullet riddled body of his friend.
“I've got you now, my pretty,” he snarled, edging toward me with a pistol in his hand. “You're cornered, with nowhere to run. I do believe you've caused enough trouble for one day, don't you agree?”
I screamed.
Or at least, I thought I did...
Let me rephrase that.
I heard the sound of a scream.
But not from me. From above.
It was falling, falling, falling, getting louder and louder and louder until–
CRACK!
And now I did scream.
A body had just fallen from the landing above, landing right on my attacker's head, throwing him violently to the ground. His pistol flew out of his hand and discharged, its heat whizzing past my head and missing me by inches.
At this point, my body must have just gone into autopilot mode. I know that I was not in control of myself, my arms and legs trembling as I stooped down and grabbed one of the men's flashlights, then rushing back down the second floor hallway at the sound of footsteps approaching from the first floor, headed swiftly in my direction.
I'd just seen three men get killed. One of them by my own hand. The entire building was blacked out save for the narrow, unsteady beam of the flashlight in my hand, and everyone in said blacked out building seemed dead set on murdering me. How I was even on my feet any longer was nothing short of miraculous.
I very nearly collapsed, about halfway along down what seemed an endless array of them, but was spurred on by two more bad things happening simultaneously. Of course.
First, a sign of movement up ahead, caught in the beam of my flashlight, but whose source remained nonetheless a mystery to me. I was just about to turn around to avoid whatever it was, however, when a second light source shone from behind me, casting my shadow forward across the floor. I gaped back into the collective eye of several flashlight beams pointed in my direction, three more men chasing down the hallway, doing their damnedest to try and apprehend me.
A rock and a hard place, I realized with horror, damned if I did, damned if I didn't. I switched my flashlight off and continued to run forward, praying that it might mix them up not to see me running, and that I might also confuse whoever was up ahead by doing so.
I didn't though.
All of the sudden, out of the darkness a hand reached for me. I was pulled back screaming, despite the protestations of the whisper in my ear: “Shh! Shh! Shh! It's okay, it's okay!”
Then there was a rush, a clacking sound. Many clacking sounds.
Confused, I stared off as the flashlights of the approaching men caught the multitudinous, gleaming forms of several round steel balls, spilling toward them across the floor. Then all at once, the beams of the flashlights went haywire, darting from one corner of the hallway to another as the men tripped on the objects underfoot, dancing on them like something out of an old slapstick comedy. Then one by one they fell to the ground, each collapsing with a pronounced “AH!” or “OOF!,” the consistency of their cries almost comical under very different circumstances.
At last, there was a moment of complete stillness, and an almost eerie silence, every one of the men presumably knocked out by their fall. Then I felt another sharp pull, and I was spirited away through a door into a room with the man who'd grabbed me, who then slammed the door shut behind us.
“What the hell was that?” I gasped, totally out of breath, and honestly out of gray matter at this point.
“Ball bearings,” he said matter-of-factly, a voice that now struck me as familiar. I clicked on the flashlight in my hands, and stared up through the beam to see Luc smiling at me, eyes squinting through the sharp white light.
“Oh my God! Luc!”
I threw myself at him, my body pressed against his guns, my arms wrapped tight around his neck. I kissed him, soaking him in, needing him so badly in that moment. Our reunion, my salvation, seemed entirely too good to be true, far more than I had any right to wish for, exactly as it had seemed out there on the balcony, when he began to tell me how he truly felt about me.
He let me go on like this for a while, probably too long, drowning him in my soaking wet kisses. Then the two of us pulled apart, and he gripped me by the shoulders, staring seriously into my face.
“Are you alright?” he asked, his brow furrowed. “Are you hurt in any way?”
I shook my head vigorously, the tears still flowing liberally.
“Luc, you came for me! You actually came for me!”
“Of course I did,” he said, and I wondered at that moment why there had ever been any doubt in my mind. “I am so sorry, Sylvia... I never meant to get you involved in any of this. I don't even know how to explain it to you right now. I fucked up, big time. I was lost and confused, and I made some horrible decisions a few years back. Decisions that have come back to haunt me, and the people I love...”
I was taking all of this in, trying to figure out what all of this meant, but then that last word caught my attention, and it was all that I could focus on at that moment.
“You– you love me?”
He seemed to hesitate, his mouth opening slightly, then closing again. But then he nodded, and at last said, “I do love you Sylvia. I've never stopped loving you. Not since we were kids, and we barely knew one another. But I have no right to love you. After everything I've done. All the mistakes I've made. I had no right to drag you into this life, or put you in danger. I wish to God that I hadn't. And I swear to God, if we make it out of this alive, I am never, ever going to let you end up in a position like this again.”
I stared at him for a long, long moment, still not entirely sure what he'd gotten himself into, or how truly responsible he was for all of this. I had the feeling the two of us would have a lot to talk about if, as he said, we even made it out of here in one piece. And maybe, reasonably, I shouldn't be putting my trust in him again. But staring up into those blue eyes of his, even in the harsh, unflattering glow of the flashlight, I knew beyond a doubt that I was looking at a good man. A man who really did love me, who really had made a horrible mistake as he'd said, and who would spend every day for the rest of his life d
oing everything he could to try and make it right.
I reached out a hand for him in the darkness, and rested a palm against the prickle of his cheek. The gesture very nearly seemed to break him, and I could see the tears beginning to trickle from those magnificent azure eyes of his.
“I love you too,” I whispered to him. “And I trust you. Completely. You're here. You came for me. You've proven your love for me, whether we make it out of this or not. And as far as I'm concerned, that's all that matters.”
I could see him trying to say something again. Words forming on his lips, then dying before they could come to fruition. In the end I decided to put him out of his misery.
I leaned in, and kissed him once more. Long, slow, deep, and passionate. I felt him shiver up against me, and I shivered too, even as his warmth spread throughout my entire body.
Very slowly we pulled apart, gazing at one another, his chest rising and falling steadily up against me.
“You're one hell of a kisser,” he whispered to me.
“And you're one hell of a football player,” I said, and he smiled at me through the darkness.
And then, all at once, the darkness was gone.
With a blinding flash the room was suddenly illuminated, forcing my eyes tightly shut. When I opened them again the entire building was alight, and Montana Holder stood in the door with a pistol pointed at us, gold tooth gleaming out from his acne pockmarked smile.
“Very touching,” he growled. “I would almost be tempted to let you two little lovebirds go. If, that is, our little star quarterback here hadn't just slaughtered half of my men... Now, I'm afraid, the price has gone up from what it was before...”
Luc grabbed me and pulled me back behind him with a single, swift motion, and Montana, in the doorway, didn't move a muscle.
“You aren't going to touch her,” Luc snarled, “You'll have to kill me first...”
The Red Zone: Second Chance Sports Romance Page 9