Whatever else she reported got drowned out by an explosion much closer to us than I was comfortable with, staggering me as the building around me shook, making dust and two ceiling panels come down. With my pulse spiking, I at first thought it must have been the hot lab that had blown way too early, but the epicenter of the explosion seemed to have come from a different direction than behind us. Nate looked over at me briefly, then reached into his pocket to get out a half-full pack of earplugs and offered it to me after taking two differently colored ones out himself. “It's going to get loud either way. You might want to preserve what's left of your hearing, which likely isn't all that much, anyway.”
I didn't protest as I accepted the plugs and squeezed two of them into my ear canals.
“What was that? One of yours?” I figured he’d know I was talking about the detonation.
“Nope,” he replied, loading up on magazines. “But I’m sure we’ll find out very soon.”
Breaking eye contact, he got two of the rifles out, and held one out to me. I shied back as if he'd pointed it, muzzle first, in my direction.
“No way! I'm not touching that thing!”
He gave me a sharp look, but then shrugged and slung the straps of both weapons over his chest.
“Then you better hope that they believe in taking prisoners.”
Like that, we were on our way again, until we reached the first open door leading to one of the ransacked labs. It was me this time who called for a halt. Ducking inside, I looked around, then grabbed two lab coats from beside the door and tried to hand him the larger one. Nate frowned.
“And what should I do with that?”
“Put it on?” I snarked back as I shrugged into mine. It was too tight, but it would hold up on a brief inspection. “They're looking for terrorists who are armed to the teeth. They likely have instructions to rescue any remaining hostages, and anyone else who might have been hiding inside the building for the last couple of hours. They don't know that you've been through the entire building, but then you can't be sure if you really got everyone in the first place. Took you three hours to drag me in, remember?”
Nate just gave me a blank look. “They’re not here to rescue you.”
“Well, maybe not me personally—“ I started, a little chagrined, but he shook his head.
“Trust me. This is not a rescue operation. They didn’t even waste a minute negotiating.”
We started walking again, maybe a little slower than before, but still faster than I'd usually traversed these halls.
“You’re sure about this?”
He nodded. “I’m starting to have a really bad feeling about this.”
“You don’t say?” I jeered, but when he continued to give me a blank stare, I felt my stomach seize up. “Define ‘bad feeling,’ please?”
“I’ve been part of my fair share of rescue missions. This doesn’t feel like one.”
Just then, another explosion rocked the building, making me seriously afraid that it was only a question of time, not more explosives, until it would come down on us. A moment of eerie quiet followed, but it was suddenly broken up by the staccato sound of an automatic rifle going off, quickly followed by a few more. Nate stared into the direction the racket was coming from, then pushed me into making a right turn into a crossing corridor, further away from it.
“What do we do if we run into a search party?” I asked after we paused at the next corridor crossing, and Nate signaled me to continue on after checking that the way was clear. We took another turn to the right.
“We try to evade. If that fails, we shoot our way out.”
As much as I hated that idea, I didn't put up any protest.
“Couldn't we try to talk our way out of it?”
I never got an answer to that question, as just then a group of three soldiers stepped into the hallway ahead of us, their rifles up as they scanned their surroundings—two in front, one covering their rear. Nate cursed low under his breath as he grabbed my arm, yanking me through the open door we'd just passed. My heart was suddenly in my throat, and I let him lead me through the lab and back the way we had come at a half-crouched run. The lab was a multi-room affair, allowing us to travel from room to room without having to go back outside into the hallway until we were back at the previous intersection. He motioned me to remain behind, sneaking up to the door to peek outside. The tension in his shoulders was enough to tell me that our small evasive maneuver hadn't worked. At his gesture I joined him, crouching low beside him.
“They're scanning the individual rooms, so we have maybe twenty seconds. One of them is guarding the hallway so we can't run across. Besides, they are much too close to the connection to the hot lab. I need to collapse the tunnel to keep them out of there.”
“Are you crazy? There can't be that much time left!” I hissed, mangling half of the words as fear made me utter them way too fast.
“They have enough time to simply yank out at least half of the detonators if they are stupid enough to just walk into the lab,” he shot back. “Then the explosion pattern will likely only destroy but not cave in the interior of the concrete shell.” He looked outside once more, then gave me a pointed look. “I need a diversion.”
“Diversion?” I whisper-squeaked, but it was already too late. Taking hold of the lapels of my coat, he pulled me to my feet, then shoved me ahead of him out of the door. Fright and surprise alike made me squeal, then crouch down and raise my arms protectively over my head.
Shouts greeted me as the soldier patrolling the hallway saw me, his rifle now trained steadily on me. His colleagues joined him moments later, and their determined expressions made me freeze all over. I couldn't even look behind me to check whether Nate was still crouching in the lab or had made it outside and into the other hallway. With my pulse thundering in my ears, it was impossible to hear anything but the slow, deliberate steps of the advancing soldiers.
“Please don't shoot me!” I finally got out when my mind kicked in. Peeking through the cage of my arms, I saw that they were only a couple of yards away now. While the middle one still had his full attention on me, the one to his left kept glancing into the labs, while the other had his eyes trained down the corridor. They clearly didn't perceive me as threat enough to engage their entire attention.
“What are you doing here, Miss?” the one still looking at me asked.
“I've been hiding. In the lab.” I gestured at the rooms to my right. “Please help me! You're here to rescue us, right?”
He started to nod, but then his brows drew together underneath the brim of his helmet.
“What makes you think that we're not terrorists?”
Maybe it was my paranoia, but my mind immediately skipped to the suspicion that he knew that I'd maneuvered myself into the gray area between the two fronts. I didn’t need Nate’s skepticism to add to my paranoia, but suddenly it seemed twice as significant as before. But all that was nonsense, of course, and I was quick to tell him.
“Your gear looks different.” And it did. While Nate’s people were equipped with a more heterogenous mix of camo and black, they all wore dark tan colored clothes with black patches and vests over it. Only then did I realize that they also carried gas masks with a separate rebreather unit at their belts. They definitely knew what might be waiting for them in here—lending even more credibility to what Nate had explained.
The guy who'd been checking the labs had now reached me, and after glancing around the intersection—clearly seeing nothing—he returned to stand beside his comrade. The third still kept his attention on the hallway, but in a more relaxed fashion. The first two exchanged looks, and when the other shrugged, the one who'd been talking to me reached for the radio attached to his shoulder.
“We have a survivor. She says that she's been hiding out here for the entire attack,” he said after exchanging whatever codes their operation was running under. I felt relief flood me when he didn't outright call me a liar, but he still sounded wary. I couldn’
t hear the reply he received via the ear piece in his helmet, but it must have been less enthusiastic.
“Checking now,” he confirmed, reaching for something on his belt that looked like a field version of a mobile phone. Briefly glancing up, he asked for my name.
I froze.
Should I give them my real name? The coat I was wearing had an ID tag that was clearly not my name and photo, but I hadn't cared to check it before I'd shrugged it on, and looking at it now would make me twice as suspicious as anything else. Sure, I could have changed coats, but explaining that would sound like lying immediately. Then again, being unable to do something as simple as tell them my name wasn't exactly casting me in a good light, either.
Before I managed to make up my mind, the second soldier, who had been glancing at the device as well let out a curse, immediately training his rifle at me. The one who'd scanned the corridor mirrored him, while the first did a double check between me and the screen. When he spoke up again, his voice had hardened.
“Miss, is your name Brianna Lewis?”
“Y-yes?” I more asked than stated. Shit.
Either I looked guilty as hell, or the sudden increase in tension that hung in the air was just my imagination, but it pushed my pulse into cardiac arrest threat territory. My arms started to shake, and it got increasingly harder to keep them lifted.
“Have you been cooperating with the terrorists?” the soldier bit out, now clearly hostile as he pocketed his phone and joined the other two in aiming straight at me.
“N-no?” I gave equally unconvincing testimony. His eyes narrowed, and words started falling over my lips in a near unintelligible stammer. I didn't even know what they were accusing me of, or what they could possibly know, and in the back of my mind there was still that rapidly decreasing countdown. “They held me at gunpoint, they forced me. They killed my friend, for fuck's sake! I don't know what you think you know, but I didn't do anything!”
A muscle spasm zinged through my left calf from staying crouched for too long, and with a grunt I sank to my knee, trying to shift my balance. That they didn't immediately shoot me was pure luck.
“Stay where you are, Miss! Don't move!”
I was frightened enough to have a panic attack right there, but I'd never been able to cry on command, something that would have been very useful right now. What I could do was stop trying to compose myself. I might have laid it on a little heavy. Having a whimpering, shaking woman kneeling on the floor in front of them clearly did move the soldiers somewhat, even if they were half convinced that she was one of the bad guys. My only chance was to try to capitalize on that.
“Please, you have to help me, you have to believe me! You have to get me out of here! You have no idea how horrible those last hours have been, what they did to me, what—”
A hollow boom sounded from behind and to my right, loud enough to make me scream. I felt the vibrations under my knees, but it wasn't enough to shake the walls around us. I figured it was the detonation Nate had been talking about, and wondered if it had worked. The explosions that had started his operation had been a lot more forceful, same as the ones just minutes ago. Then again, they had done a lot more damage to a far greater area of the building, or so I figured.
The soldiers were on high alert immediately, the one in the middle barking a status report into his radio. Their rifles were still trained in my general direction, but no longer straight at me. I still didn't dare to move, trying not to set them off.
“Sir, what shall we do with her? Response teams four and five are zeroing in on our position.” He listened, and the look on his face turned grim. “Acknowledged, Sir. We're not taking any prisoners until the situation has been secured.”
That was the moment I lost faith in humanity.
“What? You can't just shoot me!” I shouted, dumbstruck.
While a lie, my cover story was plausible, and even if they knew that I'd been a hostage, I could have managed to flee and hide since then. I wasn't carrying any weapons, nor had I done anything to threaten them. In the soldier's eyes I saw the knowledge of all that, but also the conviction to follow his orders without question.
“Please, don’t,” I repeated, coming to my feet slowly. This just couldn’t be happening. Not like this. Not after—
Coming from the other side of the corridor—the direction the explosions had originated from—I heard the most toe-curling mixture between a howl and a moan.
My head whipped to the side as I felt a deeper kind of fear grip me. This just sounded too much like what that… thing that Raleigh had turned into had sounded like. Just like—
A strong hand came down on my shoulder, making me yelp, but before I could wrench myself away, Nate had pushed me behind him, putting himself between me and the soldiers. That in itself was strange enough—more or less—but while he still held one of the rifles, he hadn’t pointed it at the soldiers. He looked tense, but it was a different tension than before.
“Trust me, you don’t want to do that,” he said, his eyes fixed on the guy in control.
“Says who?” the soldier bit back, adjusting his grip on his weapon.
The howl repeated itself, cutting off when gunfire made me flinch, and resumed—much, much closer. As much as the three rifles trained on us bothered me, the sheer menace in the sound just made me look down the corridor.
A woman was standing there. I’d never seen her before, but she didn’t look like she belonged here, wearing a summer dress and cardigan, but no shoes. Why my mind latched on to that detail, I didn’t know, but it only took me a moment to take in the rest. Like the fact that dust mixed with blood and what looked like vomit were covering the front of the dress, and there were dark streaks all over her cheeks and neck, down from her eyes and ears. She took a staggering step forward, moving as if her limbs weren’t quite under her control—until her gaze fell on me. Immediately, the vacant stare turned to one of boiling rage, and she let out a scream as she launched herself toward us.
“Nate,” I started, looking away briefly, but no one was paying attention to me, still locked in their unmatched staring contest as the men were. A little louder—and with a rising note of panic—I repeated myself. “Nate!”
“What?” he bit out, his head swiveling to me—until he saw what was limping with surprising speed toward us. “Shit.”
He still hesitated for a moment but then swung around, now training the rifle at the woman.
“What the—“ the soldier I had been talking to asked, but was quickly cut off when the one who had been checking the corridor also saw her, and he and Nate started shooting in unison. Even with the ear plugs the rifles going off physically hurt, but my mind was too occupied with what they were shooting at to care much. Several bullets hit the woman and the wall beside her, making her body jerk—but not stop. If anything, the howl she let out was even louder, and it took a direct shot right between the eyes to make her go limp and drop to the floor, missing the entire back of her head.
For several seconds straight, all I could do was stare—and shake, as fear made muscles all over my body want to jump into action. My eyes were glued to the body on the floor, unable to take in anything else. From up close, I could clearly see that it had been vomit, yes, and the darker stains on her legs and the lower part of her dress looked like… other bodily fluids. Even with the dust covering her entire body, it was evident that she had been sweating, and in the light streaming in from one of the labs, her skin looked pallid and sick.
Maybe it was simply because of the video that Nate had shown me, but there was one very distinct term that came to my mind, and it wasn’t one that I’d ever thought to utter in earnest.
The sharp bark of male voices got me to tear my eyes away from her and focus on the now much more immediate threat of being shot—but while the two soldiers who hadn’t fired a shot still had their rifles trained on us, the third had taken on a more relaxed, if still alert pose, and his eyes were firmly trained on Nate.
�
�What the hell are you doing here, Lieutenant?” he asked. His tone held a lot more bewilderment than surprise.
“Saving your ass, as usual, Martinez,” Nate replied, offering him a toothy, if surprisingly real, smile before he focused on the other two soldiers, clearly dismissing any danger that might have come from his former… comrade? “Whatever you came here to do, forget about it. We need to get out of here.”
The third soldier lowered his rifle ever so slightly, but the one in command didn’t seem ready to let anyone boss him around who wasn’t clearly above him in the chain of command—but the way his eyes kept flickering to the body on the floor spoke of a great deal less bravado than he showed otherwise.
“Just because you—“
“The building’s gonna blow in less than seventeen minutes,” Nate informed him succinctly, his gaze never straying from the soldier’s face. “Even if you try to make it through the rubble that used to be the tunnel down to the BSL-4 lab, you’ll never disarm all the charges we’ve set down there.”
Part of me wanted to protest getting so openly included in the ongoings, but that number—seventeen—was much more alarming. That neither of the three soldiers looked particularly disturbed just hammered down where the focus of their efforts lay—and it certainly wasn’t in rescuing anyone.
Nate’s radio went off again, giving a burst of static that made me jump before I could make out words in it.
“We have issues, boss,” an undefined male voice reported between heavy pants, cutting off when several bursts of gunfire drowned it out. “Get that fucking thing off—argh!” More gunfire followed, interspersed with a disturbing amount of wet, crunching sounds, then steps echoing through a hallway as a different voice came on. “Several unidentified hostiles incoming! I repeat, hostiles incoming! The parking deck and loading bay are breached. We’ll try to seal them off again but—“
The radio went silent, and I wasn’t sure if that was a relief or not.
Martinez and the third soldier exchanged glances, then both stared at their comrade.
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 25
