by Cherry Adair
Taking off his NVG's, Daklin closed his eyes in the unrelieved blackness, letting his head drop back to the soggy ground as he listened to the beat of his heart echoing in his ears. Water seeped into his hair as he lay in a puddle formed by the constant drip of moisture from the earthen ceiling. He could roll over and drag himself by his elbows, as he'd done to get under the fence. His leg was a fiery mass of excruciating pain, and even the slightest movement threatened to knock him out cold. It was something he was seriously considering.
Moving was redundant at this point. His rusty laugh bounced off the rough-hewn walls. Nope. The fucking water wasn't what was going to kill him. The LockOut kept water and cold from his body, but Daklin was cold anyway. Cold to the bone.
He'd never cared about living as much as he did now that living was no longer an option. The only good news was that River was far from the blast and safe. He felt for his pack. That monkey had crapped on pretty much everything inside, but his flask was tucked into the outer pocket. Pulling it free, he ran his thumb over the worn leather.
He carried his father's flask with him wherever he went as a reminder. Think you won't love this bitch as much as I do, Junior? His father's slurred voice sounded crystal clear in his head. Think she won't comfort and love you like no other? Think again. You and I have the same DNA. Addictive personalities both of us. Go ahead, take a drink. You'll feel better for it.
Daklin had been eight the day his father offered him his first drink. Vodka had been his friend ever since.
He unscrewed the silver cap.
You can beat this, Ash. Josh’s pleas had resonated, tears sheening his eyes as he’d come to get Ash from some shit hole bar for the umpteenth time. You aren't Dad. Please. If not for yourself, then for me. For T-FLAC, damn it. They'll fire your ass.
"Yeah, well, this was my last chance. I'll save them the trouble." His voice, low as it was, bounced off the walls and echoed back to him.
He'd set the automatic timers on the charges. There was no turning back. No way to prevent detonation. Destruction was now in motion. The next thirty-five minutes were going to be the longest goddamn thirty-five minutes of his life.
Bringing the flask to his lips, he dragged in a shuddering breath, his lips an inch from the rim. The faint smell of alcohol made him salivate, and he squeezed his eyes shut on a shudder of need. But was this how he wanted to be greeted on the other side by his baby brother?
Drunk as a fucking skunk on arrival? The curved side of the flask buckled as his fingers tightened. Could he do this sober?
Or not?
Maybe this was the ultimate test, to see if he was capable of maintaining sobriety.
Done debating with himself, Daklin did an overhand pitch, throwing the open flask into the darkness. Considering the weight of the decision, the small container pinged lightly against the rock wall with no fanfare, dropping with a small splash to the ground.
He scrubbed his hand across his mouth, throat aching with the loss. Fuck it. Nobody was going to say Ash Daklin didn't fucking well try.
He started pulling himself along on his elbows.
Sweat dripped into his eyes. Hell, he couldn’t see worth shit anyway. The flask was somewhere in the dark, but now, all his concentration and effort was making it through the heavy door at the mouth of the mine. When he died, it would be breathing fresh air, and imagining River's face.
He didn't stop for the galaxy of spinning stars, or the abnormally loud flub-dub-flub-dub of his heartbeat. He just kept dragging his ass through mud, and over rock.
A foreign sound—-a combo of a creak and a thud—-stopped him. He reached back for the Glock. Someone had just opened the tungsten steel door blocking the entrance to the mine.
Cocking his head, he heard running steps. Two people. Light steps, heading towards him. His men coming back to haul his ass out of there, whether he wanted to go or not? Daklin flattened out in the slime on the hard, uneven ground. The movement sent excruciating pain into his thigh, piercing like a lightning bolt directly to every pain center in his brain.
Bright silver stars sparked before his eyes. Nausea welled in the back of his throat. His fingers tightened reflexively on the trigger, although now he couldn’t hear a damn thing, and couldn't see anything because his NVG's were somewhere back there in the mud of his almost final resting place.
He hesitated. Death by bullet beat death by falling mountain. Fuck that. He had thirty minutes. He was taking them.
"Stop where you are!" he yelled in Russian, then repeated it in Spanish, and again in English for good measure. He selected Russian for, "You shoot and we all blow up."
By now, he would’ve normally fired off a round to hold them off, and his finger flexed in anticipation, but he didn't fire. One spark would precipitate the string of explosions he'd set deep into the mine. "Get your asses out of here—-"
"Ash?!"
Daklin's veins flooded with ice as his worst fear was realized. Dear, God. He’d killed her. As sure as if he'd fired a bullet through her heart. "River," he breathed soundlessly.
No! She was in Abad. He knew she was. Marcus would never leave her behind. Daklin expelled a tight breath, and the tension left his shoulders. Warmth returned to his veins.
A hallucination. Thank God.
If he didn't make it out, this wouldn't be so bad if he had her voice in his head.
"Asher Daklin, damn it! Answer me! Where are you? You said he was about quarter of mile down this shaft. He must be close, right, Oliver?"
What the fuck?!
"Or not. I might've been mistaken. Damn you for always being so stubborn, River," a man snapped, clearly pissed. His annoyance bounced off the walls. "We're going to die here tonight."
How had she found him? How the hell had she passed through Xavier's crack security army? Why the fuck was she here at all?
"Asher?" River's voice broke, and the sound of running footsteps, splashing through water, and squishing in the mud, came closer and closer. The darkness up ahead was broken by light as she ran toward him.
"Get out, River," Daklin yelled at full volume, his throat tight and aching with fear. "Run! Detonation’s set. You’ve got precisely twenty-seven minutes to get off this mountain. Turn around and go! Get the fuck out before it's too late." It was already too fucking late.
"You were right. He’s down this way. We're coming, Ash."
"I don't want you to come to me, goddamn it!"
“That seems to be a popular freaking theme tonight. Too damn bad. I'm here!”
“Can't you take a fucking hint?" he yelled, hoping like hell to piss her off enough that she’d turn and run from him, instead of to him. "You were a great diversion, but this is my job, and I don't want you around anymore. Fuck off. I have work to do."
"We're not leaving without you." Calm, rational, too damned close. Not fooled in the least. He checked the dimly lit dial on his watch.
Detonation - 27 minutes. No turning back.
She didn't have enough time to get out and return to the valley, out of the destruction zone.
Daklin's eyes squeezed shut, and his cold, dead heart hurt so bad he thought this pain would kill him. Fuckfuckfuckfuck. "Don't!"
Then she was there.
Right.
Fucking.
There.
He was engulfed in the sweaty, summer-flowers-in-the-rain, smell of her as she dropped to her knees beside him in the mud and filth. The light brush of her warm fingers on his cheek felt like a benediction. "Oh, Ash!"
Wanting to nuzzle her hand, he jerked his head back, and said harshly, "I don't want you here, River."
"I know. Can you get his other arm, Oliver? That's the side of his bad leg. Be careful."
Somehow, River and the person Daklin presumed to be her brother got him to his feet. So the brother had been on the property all along. How the hell this reunion had happened, Daklin couldn’t imagine. Not that it mattered now. The three of them were walking corpses.
River and her b
rother staggered under his weight. "I'm not going anywhere. Get it through your goddamned head. I don't need or want you, here or anywhere else."
"Up you go. Don't put any weight on that leg. We'll help you." She held a light to the ground. Her phone's flashlight.
"Get lost." Stubbornly, Daklin planted his good leg so they didn't have his help. "You have minutes to get to safety. And you’ve got to move. You understand? Run as fast as you can, get in a fast car, and floor it. You don’t have time to waste helping me."
"You said twenty-seven. We need to speed this up, Oliver. Are you good?"
"No. I'm not fucking go--"
"Shh! I wasn't talking to you. Save your strength."
He was walking. By the beam of her phone, his weight dragging down her slender shoulders, he was walking. Limping. Mobile. "What about I don't want or need you here or anywhere else?"
"I tried telling her."
"What if I'm the woman of your dreams, Ash? Don't you at least want to explore the possibility?"
Shitfuckdamn. A boulder of need weighed down on his chest, heavy enough he barely felt his bum leg. "No. I stopped dreaming a long fucking time ago. Trust me."
"Almost there." To her brother she said, "Are you sure this is the right way, Oliver? We don't have time to get lost."
Daklin's eyes had adjusted well to the faint light. The massive door was straight ahead. Looking at River beside him, so close he could've counted her lashes, made his heart clench, and his breath uneven. He'd never smell summer rain again without thinking about how she looked right now; her jaw grimly determined, lips a hard line of concentration, clothes and face covered with mud and smudged with dirt, sweat spiking her hair.
Aw. Hell. He never would smell summer rain again.
He tried adjusting his weight so that he took some of it himself, but his leg caved, and he had to hold onto both of them to maintain his balance.
Sullivan grunted when he adjusted his weight again.
The scientist was tall, skinny, and blonder than his sister. Wearing muddy chinos, a short-sleeved plaid shirt, and black-rimmed glasses with a crack across the lenses, he looked exactly like what he was. Fortunately, or unfortunately in this case, the guy was fairly strong.
"We don't have time," Daklin reminded them. "Period."
River's blonde hair stuck to her flushed cheeks, and her mouth was set in a tight, grim line. Daklin had never seen anything, or anyone, more beautiful. "I'm not leaving without you."
"You wouldn't be so goddamned brave, if you got it through your head that we're all going to be dead and buried soon."
He'd killed Josh and now he was going to have River's death on his conscience for all fucking eternity.
"I'm not brave at all. Inside I'm terrified and sobbing like a th-three year old," she said tartly, bravado leaking out when her voice hitched. "Shut up. Just shut the hell up, Ash. If you can't say anything positive, I don’t want to hear it. Is that the door up ahead? Yes. It is! Almost there."
The door sealing off the mine was just one of a dozen obstacles they’d have to face to get out of there. "Almost where? We're not going anywhere."
Twenty-four minutes. "River."
"What's the protocol here?" Sullivan interrupted, not breaking stride as the passage widened and they navigated ruts and standing water, small equipment, and a half-buried railway line no longer in use.
The pain was so bad, it took every ounce of will Daklin had to remain upright and put one foot in front of the other. Lightheaded, he knew he was about to puke or pass out. Neither was acceptable. He swallowed bile, and blinked away the sparkling lights from his darkening vision.
"The protocol is the fact that the charges have all been set." Daklin's voice sounded as weighted down as he felt. "There isn't a hope in hell of us not taking the full brunt."
"The door is blast resistant," Sullivan told him. "Not proof, of course, but resistant." With a frown, he shoved up his glasses as they saw the cracked open door up ahead. "Sealing the door from the outside will buy us time. Not a lot, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, give or take. Made from tungsten steel, its hollow core filled with six feet of shockproof concrete.
Daklin knew from the weight of the door that was the case, but he hadn't realized to what extent Xavier had gone to contain any accidental explosion from inside the mine. Logical, since the processing plant for the finished product of E-1x was just a few hundred feet across from the mine's main entrance.
"It’s engineered for high-pressure blast waves by anything up to and including nuclear detonation." Sullivan breathed unevenly with Daklin's weight dragging him down. "The blast will expand radially from points of origin until it takes the path of least resistance. The frame is bolted to the rock with high strength concrete wedge anchors, as are the anchor bolts. But E-1x is unstable. It’s never been tested on this scale."
One Nut had decimated T-FLAC's bomb lab and flattened everything within a one-mile radius. The mountain contained tons of the shit. The sealed door would give them a little more time to get as far out of range as possible.
Breathing hard, River hitched her shoulder under Daklin’s armpit.
The three of them shoved the door shut. It still fucking weighed a ton, despite the hydraulics. Sullivan activated the locks.
Daklin leaned against the door to drag in a few breaths of night air as River instructed, "Bring the car closer, Oliver. I don't think he can walk anymore."
Her brother moved toward a black Jeep parked at the mine entrance. How it came to be there, and any explanation on why bullets weren’t flying and the security forces weren't raining Armageddon down on their heads could be saved for later. If there was a later.
"Security forces won't allow us through. And even if you somehow parked a car right outside the front gate, we’ll be shot in the process."
River licked perspiration from her upper lip. "The soldiers are gone."
"What do you mean gone?"
"Gone as in there’s no one here. Anywhere. Ah, here's my brother with the car. Not that I want to scare you or anything," River said, "But Oliver can't drive."
This was evident by the way the other man hunched over the steering wheel; he drove as slowly as a grandmother did on her way to church, without turning on the headlights.
River pounded on top of the car the second her brother pulled up next to them. "Out, out, out!"
"Jesus, River." Her brother's scowl reminded Daklin of River when they'd first met. She was fearless, brave, sassy, and just about perfect.
They were going to die here. She was going to die here because she was dangerously impulsive and shouldn’t have come in the first place. If there was a time to get something off his chest, this was it. Daklin opened his mouth just as River yanked open the passenger door, then ran around the front of the vehicle.
The high beams came on, illuminating the next massive, impenetrable obstacle.
"Help him into the front seat, Oliver. You can ride in the back."
Sullivan grabbed him none too gently by the arm and pretty much shoved his ass into the seat, then left Daklin to figure out how to get his legs inside as he climbed in back.
River put her foot flat on the accelerator before his door was closed. It slammed shut, almost taking Daklin's good leg with it. He grinned.
"Take it easy, will you?" her brother snapped from the backseat, gripping Daklin's headrest in both hands to anchor himself.
The Jeep rocked as River increased her speed.
"Are we playing chicken, here?" Daklin asked as the gate loomed ahead. Thirty feet high, tungsten steel. It was a hundred and eighty feet and closing. He glanced over at the speedometer. Ninety miles per hour. They had two minutes before they hit.
Man, he was racking up multiple ways to die tonight. Surely, one of them would take, especially now that he had decided he wanted to live. He didn't bother bracing himself. Instead, he just relaxed back and drank in River's pale profile.
"I'm not slowing down, and I never liked chicken.
Stop messing around. Open the damn gate, Oliver!"
River didn't slow down and the gate finally slid open. She passed through the opening when it was barely wide enough for the vehicle, like threading a needle, and shot through the other side like a racecar driver. The tires sprayed gravel as she wheeled out of the compound.
She shot him a cocky, strained, grin. "You were saying?
#
River wondered how long it would be before they were blown to smithereens. "How much time?"
"Twenty-three minutes," Ash responded without looking at his watch. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his fingers, bracketing his thigh, tighten, relax, and tighten again.
Her heart, already racing, galloped unevenly. Twenty-three freaking minutes? It would take almost that long to reach the valley, five times that long to get to Abad.
"Where the fuck are all the security people?" Ash demanded as River floored the accelerator pedal. Oliver, not fond of speed, remained mute in the back seat.
"I think they were leaving when I arrived." She had to concentrate on her driving moving at this speed on the winding mountain road. "They were having a party, then I heard cars leaving about half an hour ago."
"Know anything about that, Dr. Sullivan?"
"No."
She saw Asher's jaw clench. He wasn’t used to Oliver's monosyllables, and she had a very good idea that he wouldn't be as tolerant as she was. Armed to the teeth with a machine gun, a handgun ready for action in his lap, and a knife strapped on his injured leg, Ash was dressed all in black. Shocker. But it wasn’t just his clothing that made him darker against the night. He was covered from head to toe in black mud. Even his hair was stiff with it.
River’s jaw hurt as she ground her teeth, biting back words she knew would be counterproductive. She’d been stunned to find Ash alone and incapacitated. He'd been lying on the cold wet floor of the mine for how damned long? Too long. She was absolutely livid that he was so cavalier about his own life considering how much his life meant to her.
She also wanted to aim a few strong words at the men who'd left him behind to die. The mother lode of all questions she would aim at Ash: if he’d sent them away because of the risk, what made him so damned special that he had to stay behind to be blown to hell?
