by Sam Sisavath
Quinn glanced up at the ceiling. “What about the civilians? Did they all get out?”
“Some stragglers, as to be expected in a place this big,” Mack said.
“I heard some movements from up there after we took the place,” Abbie said. “Sounded like they were trying to break the windows to get out, but those things are tempered glass. You can shoot them and they’ll spiderweb, but no way they’re going to crack from a chair or whatever they’re throwing at it. Although, maybe a fire ax…”
“What if someone panics, tries to come down and make a run for it?” Quinn asked.
“They haven’t yet, and I don’t know why they would. Besides, we told them through the loudspeakers to stay put. Can’t do anything more than that.”
Of course you can, because if they die it’ll still be your fault, Quinn thought, but kept that part to herself.
She glanced back at Porter and Xiao instead. They had remained in the back, crouched next to the remains of the information desk talking, but the distance meant she couldn’t eavesdrop. Porter must have sensed her staring and looked up and over, and gave her a pursed smile.
Quinn narrowed her eyes at him before turning back to the well-organized army outside their doors.
She hadn’t looked for more than a few seconds when she finally glimpsed them, and thought, There you are.
Mack saw her reaction and said, “What?” before peeking over the counter. “Anyone you know?”
“Used to,” Quinn said.
There were seven of them—men and women in suits and ties standing next to one of the parked police trucks. She would recognize them anywhere. It wasn’t their clothes, but in the way they stood and conversed—in the middle of the throng of law enforcement, and yet worlds apart from the rest.
“Who are they?” Abbie asked.
“The FBI,” Quinn said, staring at people who, once upon a time, were her colleagues. Except now all she could think was, How many of you are who you say you are? How many of you are here to kill me?
“Hooray, the feds are here,” Abbie said. “I guess that means shit just got officially real.”
“You mean they weren’t before?” Jack asked.
“It’s not a real party until the feebs show up.”
“Too bad we don’t have a kegger.”
“Who needs a kegger when you have ammo?”
The two of them chuckled. Quinn couldn’t be sure if that was real amusement or their attempts at calming their nerves. Probably a little of both.
She glanced behind her at Porter and Xiao again, the two of them still in the middle of their own little conversation. “What are they talking about?”
“The plan, probably,” Mack said.
“To get out of here?”
“Uh huh.”
“Did they tell you?”
“Of course,” Mack said. “They didn’t tell you yet?”
“No.” She got up and jogged across the lobby.
Porter and Xiao looked over as she approached.
“How’s it looking?” Porter asked.
“My former colleagues have arrived,” Quinn said.
“Happy reunion?” Xiao asked.
“Not quite.” Then, “So what’s the plan?”
“It’s risky,” Porter said. “And we might all die in the process.”
“So you’re saying there’s a chance.”
Porter stared at her for a second or two, before, “Another joke?”
“I told you, it’s a coping mechanism. I got it from Xiao.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Xiao said.
“Right,” Quinn said. “So Aaron came up with this brilliant plan that may or may not get us all killed?”
“He’s a twerp, but he’s a smart twerp,” Xiao said. “It’s a solid plan.”
“He’s just a kid.”
“A smart kid,” Porter said.
“Are you some kind of hacker?” Quinn remembered asking Aaron at the warehouse.
“Nah. I just like tinkering with electronics,” he had answered.
He was being humble, considering his contributions to Porter’s little group. Not just with the phones, but also with the Kobalcom data theft. Did that skillset, she wondered, extend to coming up with escape plans too?
I guess we’re going to find out.
“It’ll work,” Xiao was saying.
Quinn nodded, but couldn’t quite hide the doubt on her face—
BOOM!
Quinn was sitting in a crouch when the building shook and she struggled to remain on her feet even as a thick plume of smoke erupted out of the back hallway and flooded the lobby, swallowing up everything in its path.
“Breach!” someone shouted from somewhere in the sea of smoke. “We’ve been breached! They’re coming in from the back!”
Chapter 31
“Xiao! Stay with Xiao!”
It was Porter. Or Quinn thought it was Porter shouting nearby, but it was difficult to be sure with the loud rattle of gunfire blasting in her ears. It had followed the explosion from the back of the building. Or at least she thought all of it had come from the back. The truth was she couldn’t be sure of anything.
It didn’t help that she had lost sight of where she was in relation to the lobby—were Mack, Abbie, and Jack still behind her? Were Porter and Xiao in front of her? Where the hell was the back hallway that was being breached? Was it just the back hallway? Then where were all the gas canisters coming from?
She didn’t know how long she spent standing up and spinning around trying to get her bearings, unable to tell where left and right were—or even up and down, for that matter—with so much smoke everywhere she looked. She was intensely aware of the Sig Sauer in her good hand and the sound of a submachine gun (one of the UMPs, or maybe something else?) firing on full-auto to her right.
Or was that to her left? Behind her?
Her senses were overstretched, simultaneously confused and hyperaware. (How is that even possible?) She could feel every gunshot and bullet casing bouncing off the floor and smell every wisp of smoke that pushed against her skin, stinging her cheeks and burning her eyes. Tears flooded down her face before she got wise enough to grab her shirt and pull it over her mouth and nostrils, not that it did a whole lot to spare her from the choking gas.
“The head!” someone shouted.
Porter again? Xiao? Or was that Mack? The persistent clatter of gunfire was so deafening and close by (was it even close by?) that she couldn’t tell the sex of the shouter.
“Go for the head!” that same person shouted. “Go for their heads!”
“Move, move, move!” someone else shouted. This time she was almost certain it was Mack because the voice was deeper, heavier. “Get to the exfil point! Get to the fucking exfil point now!”
“Come on!” someone said next to her just before a hand grabbed her arm and began dragging her along. “We gotta go!”
She recognized Xiao’s voice only because the other woman had appeared right next to her, and Quinn let herself be dragged by her left arm through the lobby. The tugging should have caused a world of pain, but instead there was just the numbness. Even without Porter’s magic pill she wondered if she would have felt the pain at all, given how badly her face was burning and her eyes were watering and the sheer amount of tear gas she had swallowed earlier, and frankly continued to do so even with a part of the shirt over her mouth and nostrils.
She had no idea of the direction they were going, but Xiao seemed to know what she was doing, and it wasn’t like Quinn knew any better. She concentrated on keeping her footing as she was led and holding onto the Sig in her right hand and trying not to suffocate on the thickening smoke.
Christ, how many gas canisters did they send into the place? All of them?
The unmistakable sound of shattering glass reached her from seemingly the other side of the planet. But reach her it did, along with the realization that the assaulters were coming through the front of the lobby usi
ng the windows, bypassing the doors.
She coughed and struggled to breathe and run at the same time in order to keep up with Xiao. Her lungs threatened to implode and tears continued to pour down her cheeks, and the burning sensation that had begun on her face had traveled down her neck and chest and through all her other extremities. At this point she wondered if being shot dead wouldn’t have been the more merciful death.
Shut up! You can’t quit now! Quitting’s for losers!
She felt like laughing hysterically for some reason, except saliva was filling up her mouth as she stumbled to keep up with Xiao. She struggled to breathe, to keep out the smoke, but she might as well be trying to hold back the ocean. Still, a little something was better than nothing, or at least that’s what she told herself.
Xiao’s grip suddenly disappeared, and a split second later there was the pop-pop-pop of a submachine gun firing in three-round bursts in front of her. What was Xiao shooting at? Quinn couldn’t see anything through all the smoke—
Movement flickered at the corner of her eye and she spun to confront it.
One—two figures emerged out of the clouds, like ghostly apparitions with assault rifles. They were dressed in HRT fatigues, and she could tell by the way they moved—slowly, with purpose—that they were heavily armored.
They were searching the smoke when one of them turned and saw her from barely ten feet away, his eyes behind the thick lenses of his gas masks going wide. Was it possible he was just as shocked to stumble into her as she was to them?
Shut up and shoot!
She would have, but Xiao beat her to it, appearing between her and the two figures and opening up with the UMP. There was an almost melodic ping-ping-ping! as Xiao’s rounds deflected off the nearest man’s heavy body armor, and the man jerked and stumbled, but didn’t go down. It wasn’t until Xiao retargeted, putting three rounds into the man’s face—shattering one of the lens of the gas mask—that the black-clad figure finally collapsed to the floor.
The second assaulter was firing at something (someone else) in another part of the lobby when Xiao began shooting, and the man finally turned in her direction after a few rounds had bounced off his own armor plating. It was almost as if Xiao was a mosquito that finally did enough to get his attention. The man was taking aim when Quinn stepped up next to Xiao, who was struggling to reload, and fired.
The Sig bucked in Quinn’s hand, and the first round hit the man in the side of his head and deflected off his ballistic helmet. The commando’s head snapped backward an inch, just enough to throw off his aim, and his rounds sailed into the ceiling above them instead of going into Xiao. Quinn’s second shot hit him in the forehead, just under the helmet’s rim, and the man disappeared into the thickening smoke as if he had been swallowed up by some camouflaged beast.
Xiao turned to her and shouted, “Gotta go, gotta go!”
The other woman rushed through the smoke before jumping over something on the floor. It wasn’t until Quinn was almost on top of them that she saw the two black-clad “somethings”—two bodies in heavy HRT gear, their gas masks shattered, lying in a pool of blood.
You signed up for this, she thought as she too jumped over them.
She hadn’t gotten a few feet when gunfire ripped across the lobby behind her. Quinn stopped and glanced back, but there was too much smoke and her field of vision was limited to five feet (if that) at a time. The continued gunfire was close enough that she could hear the clink-clink-clink of bouncing bullet casings.
“Quinn!” someone shouted. Xiao, from behind her. “We gotta go!”
“What about the others?” she shouted back.
“They know the plan! Come on!”
Someone screamed in pain, and someone else shouted, “Shoot the head! Go for their goddamn heads!”
But Quinn couldn’t be entirely sure if she had heard two someones or just one shouting both times. The constant and never-ending pop-pop-pop of gunfire around her, seemingly stretching out across every inch of the lobby—both semi and fully automatic—didn’t help her concentration. The continued clink-clink-clinking of bullet casings falling like raindrops dominated her senses—
“Quinn!” a voice (Xiao?) shouted before a hand grabbed her by the arm. “Come on!”
“They’re in trouble!” Quinn shouted.
“We’re all in trouble!”
Quinn looked back and could just barely make out Xiao’s face through the smoke. The other woman had also pulled her shirt over her mouth and nostrils in an attempt to keep back the tear gas, but her bloodshot red eyes and tears said everything.
More gunfire, this one even more hellacious than the previous, and someone screaming. A woman this time, Quinn was certain of it.
Abbie. It has to be Abbie…
“Come on!” Xiao said, and pulled even more urgently at her arm. If not for Porter’s pill that had dulled everything from the shoulder down to the fingers of her left arm, Quinn would have screamed. “They can take care of themselves!”
“What if they can’t?”
“No time!”
Quinn looked down at the two dead HRT on the floor. How many more of them were already inside the building? How many more were coming in—
THOOM!
The explosion was so close that her entire body was still shaking from the proximity even as its concussive force sent Quinn into Xiao and flung the both of them forward and to the floor in a pile of tangled limbs. They slid along the rubble-strewn tiles for a good three or four feet before finally slamming into a wall and coming to a stop.
She wasn’t sure how long it took for them to gather themselves. It could have been a second or maybe they lay there for a whole minute. But when Quinn opened her eyes and the ringing in her ears started to ebb into the background, she saw them right away thanks to how she was positioned. Another inch to the left or right, and she might have missed them entirely.
Oh, God.
She glanced over at Xiao, lying barely a foot from her. Xiao was grimacing and was opening her mouth, either to scream or shout something, when Quinn reached over and clasped her hand over the other woman’s mouth before she could make a sound. Xiao’s eyes went wide and she lifted her UMP 45 when Quinn pointed, and Xiao froze.
There were at least six that she could see (maybe more that she couldn’t) and they were crossing the length of the lobby in formation. There was purpose and elegance to the way they moved, like ghosts gliding through a swirling supernatural fog. They might have been HRT or a local SWAT team, because all she could make out was their dark black clothing and boots, with the smoke obscuring everything else.
They were barely ten yards away, and all it would have taken was for one of them to turn to his right and spot her and Xiao crumpled on the floor against the wall. There was no way she and Xiao could take them. Not even if they unloaded everything they had.
She wasn’t sure where they had come from, but the same smoke they had pumped into the lobby was also saving her and Xiao because the men couldn’t see her. They were all wearing gas masks, but while those spared them the itching and watery eyes she was suffering through at the moment, they did nothing to help them see better through the twisting white smoke. The fact that she and Xiao were also low on the ground, almost lying flat on their backs, probably helped to obscure them.
She counted seven figures…eight…nine…
Quinn didn’t know how long she lay still, her head propped against the wall while one hand gripped the semiautomatic and her lungs continued to burn and the need to open her mouth, to let out a belching cough, drove her insane. The longer she didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, and watched the procession of heavily armored men move past them, the more tears streamed down her face. She was afraid the drops that hit the tiled floor would be too loud.
Next to her, Xiao hadn’t moved a muscle and might have even been holding her breath. She clutched her submachine gun, one finger in the trigger guard, her eyes glued to the dark forms as they seemed to glide a
cross the lobby, appearing then vanishing, one by one by one, into the thick white clouds.
How long did they stay that way—unmoving, barely breathing—even after the commandos had been swallowed back up by the smoke? Ten seconds? Twenty? A minute?
Finally, unable to stand it any longer, Quinn let out a gasping breath and sat up. Xiao did the same next to her, letting out a shallow, haggard breath.
They exchanged a quick glance to confirm with one another before cautiously pulling themselves up from the floor, afraid of making too much noise. The lobby had become eerily quiet around them, so much so that she thought she could hear the hiss of smoke still shooting out of gas canisters and the purposeful tap-tap-tap of boots in the still-hidden parts of the building.
Quinn didn’t want to think about what the lack of gunfire meant—not that she could avoid it.
They’re dead, that’s what that means. Dead, or dying.
Dead or dying…
“Quinn,” Xiao whispered next to her.
The other woman’s eyes were bloodshot to match her reddening face, and her cheeks were stained with tears. Quinn didn’t want to think about what her own face looked like.
“Come on,” Xiao said. “We have to follow the plan.”
She nodded and followed Xiao, though they didn’t have to go very far. Xiao used the wall as a marker, and soon there was a rush of fresh air, followed by a rectangular opening appearing in front of Quinn like some magical portal, calling to her. She hurried inside, and the door clicked shut behind her.
Xiao leaned against the brick wall of the stairwell, her chest heaving with every massive breath she sucked in. Like her, Quinn was desperate to fill her lungs with untainted air for the first time in seemingly a lifetime.
They hadn’t completely escaped the smoke. Tendrils of white and gray invaded the confined space from slivers under and along the sides of the closed door. But it wasn’t the smoke she was concerned about—it was the people on the other side of the door.
Maybe Xiao was thinking the same thing as their eyes met and they stared at one another. She didn’t know how long they stayed that way—not saying a word, but unable to look away either.