Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [133]
David Keene. Ian’s Canadian doctor.
My throat was so pinched and dry that I almost reached for that awful little half pint of blood. “Goddamn,” I whispered, taking the papers and stuffing them into my Useful Things Bag.
I reached for a cell phone as I began climbing for the vent again.
We’d left Cal and Ian alone—and there was an excellent chance that Ian had been making some phone calls, asking about those records and trying to figure out if the doc was going to give him back his eyesight.
The phone wasn’t getting me anywhere. It gave me nothing but unending rings. No one was picking up.
“Shit,” I declared, slammed the cell phone shut, and popped myself back into the vent.
About halfway back I reconsidered. I could leave Adrian. I could get along just fine without him, couldn’t I? Ian and Cal were likely in danger—real and serious danger, perhaps every bit as bad as what was going down over at room 443.
I considered it. I really did, even knowing what a douchebag that would make me.
Then something exploded over near my destination, and I was shocked out of my ambivalence and right into terror. I squeezed and shook, with hardly enough clearance to hold my head up off the dust-smeared interior of the nasty metal tunnel, and I clamored back the way I’d come.
It felt like it took longer, coming back. It felt like I had more like miles to travel than mere yards, but that only made me shimmy faster.
I smelled smoke. It wafted up and inside. I’d only just registered it when I heard gunshots responding from inside room 443. I knew the sound of my piddly .22, and it was up against the kind of firepower I should’ve brought along, but hadn’t.
Something splintered and shattered. The window?
Shouts and protests and bullets, and the prickly static of electronic signals, and I reached 443 with a vengeance—exploding out of the vent and landing smack on the back of the man closing in on Adrian, who was backed up against the far wall. Two bodies were collapsed at his feet, but he was wrestling with a third and now I was on top of the fourth.
Shards of glass glittered on his clothes and yes, the window was completely blasted inward. That’s how they got in; I could’ve figured it out by noticing the filing cabinets were holding their ground (for the time being), but I wasn’t thinking that fast. I wasn’t thinking past break this fucker’s neck—which I did—and then a second explosion sent the heavily laden cabinets buckling and scooting into the interior of the room.
One of them stopped right at my feet. My ears were ringing from the detonation but I was mad now, and I wasn’t going to stand there and rub my ears while the Men in Black swarmed inside like ants.
Hell no.
The cabinet had split in two. I picked up the smaller half, torn, smoking, burning-hot metal surface and all, and I swung it as hard as I could—releasing it at the doorway and probably killing the first two guys who were trying to spill inside. Or maybe it just made them a whole lot less pretty.
Adrian was out of bullets. He used the gun to pistol-whip the last window-breaching attacker and then went to the empty hole in the wall to look outside.
I’d moved on to the desk. I upended it and shoved it—hoping it’d work like a cork to buy us time—more time, any time!—and it mostly just succeeded in flattening another couple of black-clad dudes who were too fucking eager. It wasn’t going to plug the door. It wasn’t quite big enough.
“More outside,” Adrian said. For the first time I heard real fear in his voice. Well, now was as good a time as any to be really afraid. We were cornered, outnumbered, and outgunned. “How many in the hall?”
“A dozen?” I estimated. Most of them down toward the north end; only a scattered couple were coming in from the other angle. “How many out there?”
“That many and change. Coming down from the roof and—” He ducked back inside as a spray of fire strafed