by Matt Forbeck
The man sighed. “Hey, kid,” he said, “aren’t you kinda clumsy for a stormtrooper?”
“Oh, wow,” Eliot said, pretending to be dizzy. “Can someone make this fully armed and operational battle station stop spinning? I want to get off.”
The man reached down and grabbed him by the front of his armor and hauled him to his feet. Then he said the words that Eliot least expected. “You’re a disgrace to that uniform, you son of a bitch.”
“Huh?”
“For one, that FX helmet was deprecated a while back. For two, no stormtroopers ever came anywhere near Princess Leia in that slave-girl outfit. That happened in Jabba’s palace, not the Death Star. You’re totally breaking the setting.”
“Dude,” Eliot said as he grabbed hold of the man’s shirt to help keep himself upright. “Lighten up. It’s just a freaking costume.”
“And I suppose next you’ll tell me it’s just a freaking movie,” the man said. “You disgust me.”
“Hey,” Parker said as she weaved up behind Eliot. “It’s my big brother’s outfit. Give him a break.”
“And you,” the man said to Parker, his lips curled into a sneer. “It’s the rancor pit they threaten to toss you into, not the sarlacc pit. That’s the one that Jabba wants to make Luke walk the plank into.”
The man pulled Eliot’s helmet off his head and glared at it. “See? It’s way too wide, and the eyeholes are all wrong. The angles are all off.” He looked down his nose at Eliot. “And you two call yourselves fans.”
Eliot reached up to snatch the helmet away from the thug. “Gimme that,” he said. “I need something to be sick into.”
The man laughed and let Eliot take the helmet. “Go right ahead,” he said. “That’s about all it’s good for.”
Then he turned and looked Parker up and down. “Girl,” he said, “I don’t even know where to start with you.”
Eliot took the helmet in a two-handed grip and smashed it into the man’s face. He wasn’t expecting the blow, and it caught him cold and laid him out flat on the ground.
“Hey!”
One of the other men shouted at Eliot and started toward him with three other guys in tow. He and the others had been watching their compatriot give Eliot and Parker a hard time, waiting for him to finish so they could leave. From the way they were stalking toward Eliot, they’d given up on that plan and swapped it out for the chance to beat him to a pulp while Parker watched.
“Hey, you!” Eliot said, still staggering about. “This jackass just insulted my girl!”
Eliot noticed that all of the men had been standing outside of the van closest to him. As far as he could tell, none of them had gotten into the other van at all. He wondered why that might be, but he didn’t have the time to think much more about it.
“That ‘jackass’ is with us,” said the man in the lead of the four coming at Eliot. “And you and that helmet of yours just bought yourself a lot of trouble.”
Eliot gave the men an angry grin and then set to work.
He tossed the helmet up into the air, and the man in the lead of the four thugs put out his hands to catch it. While he was occupied with this, Eliot charged the man standing next to him while shouting at the top of his lungs. Surprised, the man started to back up, which was both exactly what Eliot had been hoping for and the worst thing he could have done.
Eliot smashed into the retreating man like a linebacker and drove him backward, hard, his legs pumping like pistons. The thug retained his balance for a few steps, but that only allowed Eliot to shove him straight into his friend behind him and keep going.
The man in the rear of the line tripped over his own heels as he got knocked backward and went down hard, his friend falling over on top of him in a tangle of arms and legs. His head cracked against the van’s rear bumper as he went down, cutting open his scalp and knocking him silly.
Eliot let go of the man on the top of that pileup and turned his attention to the fourth man, who was now standing next to him, gaping at what had happened to the two guys Eliot had just attacked. Eliot stood up and punched the man in the throat with a sharp, vicious move. The thug bent over, clutching at his neck and gasping for air, probably wondering if he could survive having his Adam’s apple crushed.
Eliot hadn’t hit the man hard enough to kill him, although he could have. It wouldn’t have taken much more force, though, and he knew it. He had held back, out of professional courtesy if nothing else. These guys were young. They might still learn something from this altercation and decide to go into another line of work.
Also, he didn’t need any more blood on his hands, figuratively or literally. He’d seen enough of that to last him a lifetime.
Of course, if these men had killed Hardison, there wouldn’t be enough planet left for them to hide on. He’d track them down and make sure they paid for everything they’d ever done, every sin they’d ever committed, and he’d make sure it hurt too.
The man holding the helmet spun about and stared at what Eliot had done. He clearly hadn’t expected any trouble here, especially from a guy in crappy, ill-fitting stormtrooper armor.
Eliot snatched the helmet from the man’s hand and spun around in one smooth movement. As he did, he cracked the top of the helmet against the jaw of the man he’d charged into a moment before. He’d been getting up off of his friend who’d banged his head against the van’s bumper, and Eliot caught him just before he could launch a counterattack.
The impact sent Eliot’s attacker spinning around, unconscious before he hit the ground. Landing on his face on the cement put a fine point on that, as well as knocking out one of the man’s teeth.
Eliot spun back around to find the man who’d been holding his helmet gawking at him. Eliot stood in front of him and said, “Next time, tell your pal to not be such a jackass. It’s a great movie, but it’s just a movie.”
“Aren’t you going to hurt me?” The man trembled as he spoke. He had seen Eliot take out three of his friends—three large, burly brawlers like him—in the space of a few seconds. He thought he knew what he had coming.
“Nuh-uh,” Eliot said, pitching his helmet around the side of the shaken man. “That’s her job.”
“Huh?” The man turned around right on cue, and Parker—who had taken the helmet in a solid, two-handed hold—swung it like a baseball bat and flattened the man’s nose. He crumpled to the ground in a heap.
“Would you look at that?” Parker tossed aside the helmet. It had cracked in half, right down the middle. “He was right. What shoddy workmanship.”
“There’s one more,” Eliot said. He pointed to the van the men had been standing next to. “Behind the wheel.”
The driver opened the door to the van. He had a gun.
FORTY-FIVE
“Move!” Eliot pushed Parker aside as the driver opened fire. She wound up moving past the other van, which sat there with its back door closed. She glanced back and saw Eliot take a round in his shoulder that spun him around and knocked him to the ground.
Eliot growled in pain and frustration as he crawled away from the gunman on his knees and the hand beneath his one good arm. From the bloody hole that had appeared in the back of his left shoulder pad, Parker could see that the bullet had passed right through his arm and out the other side. That would make it easier to treat and for it to heal, she knew, but this only mattered if they lived long enough for it to happen. In the meantime, the twin entry and exit holes meant that Eliot was bound to lose blood.
Parker slipped around the other side of the van, putting it between her and the gunman. She didn’t know if she could get away from the man this way, but she knew that if she tried to run, he’d have a clear shot at her and would put her down, Princess Leia costume or not.
She peeked around through the driver’s-side window of the second van, hoping she could spot the man through the opposite window. Instead, she found Hardison sitting in that van’s driver’s seat.
Hardison’s eyes grew wide at the sight
of Parker, and she had to stifle the reflex to scream. With a quick glance, she saw that his hands had been bound to the van’s steering wheel and that someone had covered his mouth with duct tape. She had no way of knowing how long he’d been there, but he looked tired and scared.
She wanted nothing more right then than to open the door and free her friend, but she couldn’t ignore the man with the gun. She held a finger to her lips for Hardison to be quiet, then ducked down on her hands and knees and slid underneath the van.
From down there, she could see the gunman’s feet as he crept toward the stretch of open concrete in the aisle where all his friends (coworkers?) lay battered and unconscious. The man had to know that he’d hurt Eliot. Even if he hadn’t seen the damage the bullet had done, the splatter of blood he’d left on the ground should have been enough of a clue.
“Come on out,” the man said, his voice steady and confident. “I won’t hurt you.”
The audacity of that lie impressed Parker. She didn’t know if she could have managed telling someone that she’d just shot that she wasn’t going to hurt him. The idea was just too ludicrous.
The man crept toward the back of the van and popped out around its bumper. He moved like he knew how to handle a gun, at least as far as Parker, who was only able to see his feet, could tell.
He had to be in a hurry, right? Someone had to have heard the gunshot, and that would bring people running over here to check it out right away. Even if no one in the area was brave (stupid?) enough to do something like that, somebody was sure to alert security or call 911. And once the call was answered, whatever the man and his friends were planning would come to an end.
Right?
Of course, Parker couldn’t afford to just wait him out. On the off chance she was wrong, the man’s friends might start recovering soon and get up to help him. And if they managed to kill Eliot or Hardison or even Parker herself, it wouldn’t matter much when the police arrived, at least not to the dead.
“Come on, guys,” the gunman said. “Get up. That little stormtrooper of yours isn’t going to hurt you anymore. You can stop shamming.”
None of the five other men moved. Eliot and Parker had done their job well.
“Shit,” the gunman said. He made a sudden move around the back of the vans and, as far as Parker could tell, swept his gun left and right, searching for either her or Eliot. He found neither.
“Come on out,” the gunman said. “I promise to make it quick.”
He stepped forward into the aisle, looking for someone—anyone—to shoot at. Parker hoped that no one innocent came rushing up at that moment, because the gunman was as likely to shoot him as say hi.
The gunman kicked one of his friends on the ground. The man didn’t even groan.
“I did not sign on for this,” the gunman said, growing more agitated by the moment. “I warned each and every one of you bastards that this was going to go wrong, didn’t I? Didn’t I?”
Parker slipped out from beneath the van, right behind the man. She didn’t know what he might do next, but if he’d started to look underneath the cars, he’d have found her for sure. Much as she didn’t mind tight spaces, it was awful hard to get away from a gun when you had a van on top of you.
She didn’t have anything to hit the man with. She was just going to have to improvise, use some of the training that Eliot and even Archie had taught her over the years.
If she were to listen to Archie right now, though—or at least his voice in her head—she’d hide away someplace tight where no one would think to look, a place too small or too uncomfortable or just too plain crazy for anyone else to fit. And she’d have stayed there until the man with the gun gave up and went away, and if his friends woke up, she’d outstay them too.
The trouble with that plan, of course, was that Eliot and Hardison couldn’t join her in it. If she hid, she’d wind up letting the man with the gun hunt down Eliot, who was already wounded, and maybe shoot him dead. Sure, Eliot was a tough man—the toughest person Parker had ever known, which counted for something—but even he could be killed, she knew.
And Hardison sat there, gagged and bound and tied to that steering wheel in the van that the bad guys had been about to leave behind. She didn’t know if the man with the gun would take the time to shoot Hardison before he left, but he and his friends—or Patronus or Kanabe or whoever—clearly had something horrible planned for him. She couldn’t abandon Eliot or Hardison to that. Neither of them.
So instead of listening to Archie’s voice, which practically yelled at her to hide away—which, she recognized, he did out of some twisted sort of love—she crept up behind this man with the gun and figured out how to take him down.
She decided that she’d hook her foot around his ankles and then push him forward onto the cement. With luck, he’d drop the gun when he fell, or maybe it would go off in his hand and cause him to shoot himself, which would take all the hard work right out of her plan. No, she didn’t really expect that or anything so fortunate to happen, but a girl could hope, right?
Parker took a deep, silent breath and got ready to make her move, just when a blaster rifle came sailing out of the someplace beyond the gunman. It didn’t quite clip him in the head, and on reflexes alone he turned to see where the thing that someone—it had to be Eliot—had thrown at him had gone.
And, of course, he spotted her standing right there behind him.
While seeing the man turn around had surprised Parker, seeing her there had surprised him a lot more. He froze for a second and then tried to bring his gun around to bear on her.
This time, listening to Eliot’s voice in her head, Parker lashed out with her left hand and knocked aside the man’s right hand, the one with the gun in it, as hard as she could. Luck was finally with her, and she smacked his wrist hard enough into the van he’d been about to escape in that she heard it crack. He dropped the gun, and it clattered on the cement near his feet but did not go off.
He reached out with his left hand then and caught Parker around the throat. She thrust out with her leg, trying to kick him in the crotch, but he turned his thigh toward her at the last instant and deflected the blow. As she brought her leg back down, he took advantage of the fact that she was on only one foot to reel her in, bringing her close enough to his wide chest that she could not bring back an arm or leg far enough to get a good blow in.
Once he had her like that, he squeezed her throat as hard as he could. She tightened the muscles in her neck against the pressure, striving to grab whatever air she could, but he was so big and so strong that it barely helped. She could feel her pulse pounding in her head, and the edges of her vision began to grow dark.
She knew she didn’t have long. She tried to stomp on the man’s feet, but he moved them back, out of her reach, and leaned down on her so hard that she couldn’t lift her feet again without him falling on top of her and crushing her with his full weight.
Parker wished that she’d had a chance to say good-bye to the people who mattered to her: Sophie, Nate, Eliot, and Hardison. Especially Hardison. She’d come so close.
Then she spotted a pair of white boots topped by white leg greaves next to the shoes she’d been trying to stomp on, and she heard Eliot’s voice.
“Let. Her. Go!” he said. And then he hit the man with something, maybe just his armored fist, and bits of white plastic cracked and splintered and fell to the concrete floor.
The man let go of Parker’s throat so that he could deal with Eliot, and he swung her around, putting her between him and her friend.
Eliot looked so pale, and not just because his stormtrooper armor was white. There was a bullet hole in his shoulder pad, and blood had poured out of it, coating his armor in crimson and turning his black undershirt a glistening mess. He didn’t have much fight left in him.
Looking at Eliot, Parker could hardly believe he could stand. He’d managed it, though, to try to save her, even though it would have been a whole lot easier to let himself pass out and
hope that it wouldn’t be the end. Now that he’d given her a chance, though, she meant to make the most of it.
The thug froze when he saw the mess he’d made of Eliot, and that’s when Parker made her move. She stomped down on the inside of the man’s shoe, crushing his arch.
The man howled in pain and let Parker go. He reached for her as she broke free, and if she’d tried to run, he would have caught her for sure. Instead, though, she pirouetted like a ballerina—like the gymnast thief Archie had taught her to be—and planted her elbow right into the man’s nose.
She felt the bones in the man’s face give way with a sickening yet satisfying crunch. He toppled over then, his hands falling from her.
Ignoring him, Parker rushed over to Eliot, who’d fallen to his knees. “Don’t,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
He adjusted the shoulder pad lower. “This damn costume’s coming in handy for a little direct pressure.” He gritted his teeth in pain as he pressed down on the wound. “Go check on Hardison first.”
“All right,” Parker said, her voice coming out as a croak. She felt horrible about leaving Eliot there bleeding. She didn’t believe him when he said he’d be all right, but she trusted that he wouldn’t die before she got back.
“What the hell’s going on down there, Parker?” Nate said to her through the earpiece.
“We’re okay,” she said in a voice the gunman had made rough by trying to strangle her. She cleared her throat and tried again. It was better. “Okay, Eliot’s been shot, and Hardison’s tied up in a van, but we’re all going to live. I think.”
“Do you need us down there?” Sophie’s voice ached with concern.
“I think we got it,” Parker said as she walked over to open the driver’s-side door of the van in which Hardison had been bound. “The bad guys are all down. Once I get our guys out of here, I’ll phone it into 911 for cleanup.”
“Good work, Parker,” Nate said. “How’s Hardison?”
Parker opened the door and saw him. He had bruises on his face, and one of his eyes was swollen and shot through with blood. She reached up and ripped the duct tape from his face.