Jinx lunges across the space just as the rear doors are starting to rattle open.
In quick flicks of the blade, Jinx cuts the bonds around Lilly’s wrists first, then Norma’s, and finally Tommy’s. The doors swing open and the one named Hopkins is standing outside with an odd expression on his face—part amusement, part shock, part awe. This kind of thing just never happens. In this environment, captives are either too sick, too exhausted, too malnourished, or too drugged to do anything even remotely like fighting back. He flinches backward instinctively as he reaches for his HK auto pistol and lets out a yelp, accompanied by a single word: “WHOA!”
Jinx doesn’t allow the man’s hand to reach the gun on his belt.
She fires two quick bursts of 62-grain, jacketed, steel-core projectiles into the general vicinity of the man’s head. Most of the rounds are direct hits, sending two enormous chunks of the man’s brain out the back of his skull in florets of pink tissue and puffs of blood-mist. The man careens backward as though yanked with invisible cables, landing on his back, spread-eagle, bleeding out ten feet from the van’s rear bumper. Lilly sees the HK still holstered on the man’s belt, and Jinx sees it as well, but the footsteps coming fast across the adjacent lot take precedence.
From their vantage point, they see that they’re parked in a sublevel of some vast, airless, deserted parking complex. About the size of a football field, the cavernous space has no power, a low ceiling dripping with muck and cobwebs, a few scattered vehicles either overturned or completely totaled, and piles of garbage drifted against three out of the four walls. All of these observations register to Lilly in the space of an instant, the sound of hurried footsteps closing in.
The last thing Lilly sees before the shooting starts is an ambulance sitting on blocks to her left, the wheels and trim and most of its accessories cannibalized. It sits in front of a huge sliding-glass door punctured with bullet holes and a million fractures. A sign above the lintel says EMER ENCY ENTRA CE.
Right then, Lilly realizes where they are. She’s been here before. She’s sure of it now. But she has no time to reminisce about succumbing to a ruptured appendix during her senior class trip all those years ago, and getting dropped off here by her drunken best friend Megan Lafferty, because right at this moment the two gunmen have arrived with muzzles up and ready to rock. They come around the corner of the rear doors, a big one in a leather biker jacket and a smaller one in army camo pants, fishing vest, and bandolier.
Camo Pants raises his M1 and screams, his voice echoing as it bounces around the cement crypt of a parking lot: “DROP THE WEAPONS NOW! DOWN ON YOUR FUCKING KNEES! NOW! OR WE WILL BLOW YOU THE FUCK AWAY!!”
Two things happen very quickly behind the rear doors of the panel van. Lilly glances over her shoulder at the other two members of her team, who are now standing directly behind her, coiled like springs, ready for action. In that heated instant, she sees something powerful on both their faces—Tommy’s earnest chin jutting proudly, Norma’s lips pursed with determination—and Lilly knows that they are ready now for anything. The second event that unfolds is Jinx crouching down and taking cover against the door frame, and then firing off another salvo from Mohawk’s assault rifle, catching Camo Pants in his ribs.
The man in the leather jacket dives for cover behind the closest wreck as Camo Pants lets out a grunt and spins with the impact of the bullets, his blood spurting, his face going taut with pain. He drops his M1 and his legs give out, sending him to the pavement. His gun skids across the cement. He tries to crawl out of the line of fire but Jinx squeezes off a single shot from the van’s rear doorway and puts a round into the back of the man’s head.
Then, without skipping a beat, Jinx gives Lilly a hard look right before throwing her the assault rifle. “Here ya go, cover me!”
“The fuck are you doing?!”
“Just do what I say! Cover me and—!”
Right then a burst of automatic fire booms in the enclosed space, cutting off Jinx’s words, the noise deafening. Jinx and Lilly jerk behind the door frame for cover, the others going belly down in the cargo bay. Leather Jacket fires a second time, the bullets chewing through the metal of the van’s doors, sparking left and right, sending hot spittle against the side of Lilly’s face. Jinx returns fire. Her gun roars and sprays the pavement in front of the wreck behind which Leather Jacket now hunkers.
“Listen to me!” Behind the cover of the door, Jinx grabs Lilly and shakes her. “I gotta get to the machine pistol on that stiff!”
Lilly wriggles free of her grasp. “NO! That’s not the way we do this—we go together.”
“Okay, all right … but we need to do this now. We need to get the fuck out of here before the rest of them join in!”
Lilly glances over her shoulder. “Okay … everybody … we’re going to make a break for those stairs on the far side of the lot! Stay behind me! Stay close! Jinx is going for that—”
The air lights up again. Lilly covers her head. Bullets gobble the bumper, taillights exploding, hot strings of tiny explosions puckering the metal above the doors. The salvo goes on seemingly forever. There might be more gunmen firing at them now, it’s hard to tell in the thunderous, echoing chaos. Lilly can hear Jinx yelling.
The gunfire ceases.
“They start in with that RPG, we’re dead meat!” Jinx grabs Lilly’s sleeve and hauls her to her feet. “C’mon! We gotta go now!”
Lilly gives a quick nod. “Okay.” She looks at the others. “Stay close.” She nods at Jinx. “I’ll lay down the rest of the rounds in the magazine but you gotta hurry!”
Jinx nods. “Okay. Good. Ready. On three … one, two, three!”
* * *
Sergeant Theodore “Beau” Bryce watches things go awry from the corner of the lot, sitting behind the driver’s seat of his idling Humvee, shaking his head in disgust and nervously rubbing his gold signet ring as he sees the first figure lurch out the back of the van. It’s the badass girl in the ponytail—surprise, surprise—now unleashing hellfire on Bryce’s men, who are currently huddled like pussies behind a wrecked SUV with limited ammunition and no balls, and it makes Bryce want to scream.
He grabs his bullhorn, the batteries getting low now, the speaker crackling as he rolls down his window, sticks the horn out, and presses the button: “Okay, folks, c’mon, this is not necessary … if we could just stay cool and … and … okay I’m going to have to ask you not to turn this into a thing … if you could just do me a huge favor and drop your weapons … I promise nobody will get—”
Ponytail sprays a volley across the wreckage, the blasts flickering and booming in the claustrophobic space, sending blossoms of sparks up into the hazy, acrid air. Behind her, the other subjects shuffle quickly along on her heels. Somebody needs to shut this thing down before it gets any further out of hand. Bryce starts to say something else into the bullhorn but instead throws it on the seat in anger, letting out a grunt of annoyance.
Next to Bryce, Daniels is about to jump out of his skin, slamming a banana clip into his assault rifle and grousing, “I knew it … I knew it … I knew these fuckers were going to get creative.”
“Calm down ferchrissake.” Bryce reaches behind his seat and finds his trusty Remington 700—a weapon that has gone to the Middle East and back two times, serving as the most well-oiled killing machine in the history of the Scout Sniper platoon in Helmand Province. Bryce rarely uses the weapon for everyday skirmishes, but somehow this chick with the ponytail has gotten under his skin. He brings the rifle up to his lap and checks the breach.
“I’m going to nip these motherfuckers in the fucking buds!” Daniels has his piece locked and loaded, and he’s starting to open his door when Bryce grabs the younger man’s arm with vise-grip pressure.
“Stay put.”
“What?! Cap, this is getting—”
“I’ll take care of this.” Bryce slams the cocking lever forward, injecting a long round into the chamber. He reaches for the door. “You stay inside th
is cab, try to avoid getting waxed.”
Bryce steps out of the Humvee just as the telltale rattle of the HK fills the air, echoing off the hard walls and the cement crannies of the parking level. The air has gone hazy with blue smoke, smelling of scorched circuits and brimstone as Bryce’s men scatter for cover. In the distance, the four subjects from Woodbury race toward the exit stairs embedded in the far corner of the lot, right next to the boarded elevator vestibule.
Flipping open the bipod legs on the end of the rifle, Bryce rests the weapon on the corner of the vehicle’s hood. He looks through the scope and scans the crosshairs across the wasted pavement of the lot. His plan is to center them on Ponytail and take her ASAP. It’s regretful but she’s the one, has everybody up in arms, the ringleader. Take her down, eliminate the threat.
He finally centers Ponytail in the scope. At the moment, she’s leading the boy and the black lady toward the stairs, and Bryce smoothly pans with her. The crosshairs of the scope find the target. His left hand gently caresses the underside of the forestock. He steadies the rig. Breathes out slowly. Body stone-still. He slowly starts to squeeze the trigger when the flash of the HK distracts him.
Through the scope, the silver strobe-light flicker behind Ponytail draws Bryce’s attention to the other woman—the one with the tattoos and spiky hair—who is now spraying automatic fire across the warren of rusted-out wrecks where his men have taken cover. Sparks ping and ricochet in the haze. Some of the rounds find their targets, a few of Bryce’s men going down in whirlwinds of pink mist.
The woman backs quickly toward the stairs, following closely behind her comrades while continuing to blast away. Some of the men return her fire, and they barely miss her, the rounds puffing in chunks off the pavement at her feet, but that doesn’t seem to faze the woman. She keeps emptying the high-capacity clip until it starts clicking.
Bryce judges the distance and drop rate and fires a single shot at the woman’s head.
ELEVEN
Jinx sees Lilly urging the others up the cement steps ahead of her—the three figures barely visible behind veils of gun smoke—when she gets hit. The wasp-sting of the sniper’s bullet passes through the back corner of her skull, taking a small, ten-gram chunk of her cerebral cortex. Jinx lets out a gasp, staggers, and stumbles forward as if tripped by an invisible wire. Blinding, hallucinatory white light zaps across her field of vision as she drops the machine pistol and sprawls to the pavement. Her respiratory system instantly shuts down as though a switch has been thrown. She gasps for air and tries to signal to Lilly what’s happened—tries to say something—but the catastrophic damage to her brain has already started her convulsing, the back of her scalp going icy cold and wet with blood, her arms and legs and every last voluntary movement practically useless now.
Not one to give up under any circumstances—even when it has dawned on her what’s happened and what the implications of it are—Jinx starts to crawl. Virtually blind now, choking on her own blood, leaving a leech trail on the pavement of deep arterial crimson red, she struggles to see Lilly, to send the woman some kind of message to not worry and to keep going. Don’t stop. Get the others out. Find those children and get them back safely.
In her final moments, which encompass all of twenty seconds or so, Jinx manages to register several things happening around her, glimpsed in the opaque, milky, failing vision of her ruined optic nerves. In the blanched white haze, she sees the surviving gunmen—amounting to only about half a dozen people positioned around the desolate parking garage—pause to either reload or await further orders or just take cover and watch. In this fleeting instant of stillness, Jinx hears the warbling, underwater sounds of Lilly screaming at her.
“I’M COMING, JINX!—STAY DOWN!—I’M COMING!—DON’T MOVE!”
The sound of Lilly Caul’s powerful mezzo-soprano voice piercing the air draws Jinx’s attention to the stairwell. Lilly comes out from behind the vestibule with the assault rifle raised, and that hard look on her face with which Jinx is all too familiar. The two women make eye contact one last time. Jinx manages to shake her head. This simple gesture seems to say a thousand words without saying anything. It’s her final act of will, and it makes Lilly come to a sudden stop fifteen feet away, pausing behind a massive, graffiti-stained, load-bearing pillar.
Jinx gasps for air, her eyelids sinking, and she manages to raise a shivering, blood-soaked hand but doesn’t complete the gesture.
Lilly will never know whether Jinx was about to wave goodbye, wave Lilly off, or blow a kiss. Lilly’s eyes well up. Neither woman hears the second blast from the sniper’s rifle. Nor does Jinx feel a thing when Theodore “Beau” Bryce—former sergeant major with the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army—sends a second projectile directly into the back of her head.
* * *
For a moment, Lilly just stands there, gaping, breath seizing up in her lungs, tears searing her face as she tries to process this colossal loss. It is such an incomprehensible turn of events—it could be argued that Lilly was unaware how much Jinx actually meant to her—that Lilly now forgets where she is, forgets her mission, forgets Norma and Tommy, and forgets the dangers all around her. She can’t move—even with the advent of Tommy’s voice screaming, “Lilly! Lilly! Lilly!—LILLY, C’MON!”
The thing that wakes her up is the third blast from Bryce’s Remington.
She jumps with a start at the blast kicking a bloom of sparks off the very pillar behind which she’s hiding, and she jumps a second time at the booming report echoing off the mortar walls around her—the bullet moving faster than sound. The heat on the side of her face gets her heart pumping again. She spins toward the stairs.
More gunfire nips at her heels as she vaults across the gap toward the stairwell. She fires off a few wild rounds from the assault rifle as she lunges back into the shadows of the vestibule. She climbs the steps two at a time, her tears drying, her heart beating so furiously now it feels as though it might just pop through her sternum.
Tommy and Norma are waiting for her at the top of the staircase. They huddle inside a cement alcove situated on the corner of the ground-level lot. The adjacent tollbooth is boarded and gouged with bullet holes. Kudzu and brown vines have woven through every fence, every light stanchion, every sign. To their immediate right rises the circular ramp leading to the upper levels of the parking complex, and to their left, the tall buildings and barren architecture of the city loom—the awnings of the medical center, the neighboring residential blocks, the urban courtyards, and the glass canyons of offices. Lilly catches a waft of death-stench and senses in her peripheral vision a neighboring pack of walkers closing in, drawn to the commotion of gunfire. All of these observations she makes instantly, before saying a word to the two remaining members of her team.
“What happened?!” Tommy’s voice cracks with terror. “Did Jinx—?”
Lilly doesn’t answer, just shakes her head as she catches her breath and drops her ammo magazine. Metal clatters on the ground. She can hear the men down below coming out from their hiding places, voices yelling, footsteps shuffling now. They’ll be here in a matter of seconds.
“Oh Lord have mercy,” Norma Sutters murmurs, shaking her head and looking down.
“Fuck … fuck-fuck.” Tommy clenches his fists, tries to put something into words that cannot be put into words. “What are we doing?”
“C’mon!” Lilly grabs Tommy’s sleeve with one hand, clutching the assault rifle with the other. “There’s no time, c’mon—c’mon!”
“NO!”
Tommy yanks his arm away, stands in one place, and shakes his head. “I’m not going.”
Lilly looks at him, her neck prickling with panic. “What?—what?!”
“We gotta give ourselves up.”
“Tommy—!”
“I don’t want anybody else to die.”
For a terrible beat, Lilly just stares at the boy, speechless, out of answers, out of wisdom. She shoves another magazine into the po
cket and looks at Norma and sees that the older woman is still shaking her head, staring at the ground, looking as though she, too, might be ready to throw in the towel. Heavy boot-steps scuttle across pavement below them, men entering the vestibule, starting up the stairs, drawing closer and closer with each passing second.
Lilly grabs Tommy by the shoulders and gently shakes his gangly adolescent body. “Listen to me. Jinx gave her life so we could get away. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Bullshit!”
She shakes him again. “Tommy, listen, they will kill us. Believe me. We have to stay with the plan. We have one shot. Trust me, we have to get out of here right now. Jinx died for Barbara and those kids. Don’t let her death be another meaningless tragedy.”
The boy lets out an anguished sigh, his eyes welling up with tears. “Fuck it, fine … whatever.”
Lilly turns and starts across the weathered macadam of the entrance ramp. “This way.”
* * *
They don’t get very far before Norma Sutters starts to limp and waver and lag behind Lilly and Tommy. They have crossed less than a quarter mile of urban real estate—circling around the front of the medical center, getting shot at a couple times, and giving wide berth to the gathering swarm of dead—and now they race down a side street. They reach the end of the street, and Lilly turns sharply down a narrow alley between two buildings.
The others reluctantly follow, Norma lagging back even more, gasping for breath, her dark skin glistening with sweat. The alley smells of charred timbers and the rotten-egg odors of sulfur and decay. The pavement is littered with human remains long ago turned to blackened skeletons in the unforgiving Atlanta microclimate. Lilly wades through the trash and the puddles of unidentifiable sludge. She has a fire escape ladder at the end of the alley in her sights. If they can evade Bryce’s men long enough to get off the streets—and the ladder is a key to this—then they can proceed with the next stage of the plan.
Search and Destroy Page 12
