by Matt Rogers
That suited him just fine.
So he hit the guy on the left twice in the chest, and sent a third round through the throat of the guy on the right. All three bullets did obscene damage, and they sunk home before either of the pair had the chance to fire a shot. The rapidity with which events were unfolding, coupled with Slater’s constant movement and complete lack of hesitation, resulted in a strange, dream-like experience for the hostiles. They would have barely registered Slater’s presence before he fired rounds into them and dropped them where they stood.
Which was exactly what happened to the pair he targeted.
They collapsed — one of the gangsters crumpled into the side of the kid he’d been pulling to his feet, a small boy no older than eight. The child screamed and jerked away from the body, wrapping his tiny arms around his mother standing only a foot behind him.
Slater couldn’t pay the situation any attention.
He couldn’t afford to waste a millisecond.
Two left.
It was strange to even attempt to process what was happening. Slater knew he was moving, and he knew his life was on the line, but the speed with which he had to react took its toll, transitioning him over to an impulsive, reactionary state he couldn’t control. He relied on the years of constant training and discipline to carry him through. He simply isolated the next targets, and surged toward them.
Too late.
He saw the gun arcing in his direction, but this time even his unfathomable reflexes couldn’t save him. The big Eastern European man behind the Kalashnikov was going to let off a couple of shots, and Slater’s charge into the room had taken him directly into the line of fire. He had sprinted forward with such brazenness that he ended up only a few feet away from the big man when the muzzle of the Kalashnikov flared and bullets spat from the rifle.
Pain seared through Slater.
He’d been directly hit.
23
He didn’t have time to discern the damage.
In that moment in time all other thoughts fell away, replaced by the sheer instinct to survive. He zigzagged from left to right like a madman, putting all his momentum and energy into acting as wild as possible, but even the most efficient movements couldn’t dodge bullets. The thug would manage roughly three or four shots by the time Slater closed the gap and surged out of the line of fire.
He needed to survive for the next half-second, and prevent himself from succumbing to any life-threatening injuries.
Which proved harder than he originally anticipated.
The rifle cracked four times, shockingly close, aimed right in Slater’s direction. Pain exploded in his hand holding the Glock, and the weapon fell out of his hands as blood spurted. He didn’t have time to check where he’d been hit, because another round grazed his hip, running a thin red line across the side of his jeans. The third must have missed, because Slater didn’t feel any hot burst of fire, and the fourth came within an inch of his throat. Any kind of connection with that sensitive area would have left him bleeding out on the floor, but by the time he hurled himself into the man with every last ounce of effort in his body, he found himself flabbergasted that he was still alert and breathing.
Bleeding, sure, but alive.
The two spilled to the ground and Slater descended into a rage, tapping into the natural high that came from surviving a situation he’d considered unsalvageable. He’d fully expected to take four rounds to the chest or head and find his synapses cut off as he sunk into an early grave, but the thug must have been jittery with his aim and missed the bulk of his shots. Slater caught a fleeting glimpse of his right hand and saw blood flowing from the webbing between his thumb and index finger — the bullet had torn straight through the skin. With both his hands mangled, he had no hope of using them to throw punches.
But he didn’t need his fists to finish a fight.
He drove a knee down into the guy’s stomach, pinning him against the dusty concrete, and smashed the Kalashnikov out of his grip with a side-swiping elbow. The rifle skittered away, now useless, and Slater changed direction with the same elbow and dropped it into the thug’s unprotected face. Red hot anger took over and Slater used the shift in momentum to deliver another elbow, then another, then another, pumping his left arm like a piston until the man underneath him offered no more resistance.
He wasn’t dead, but Slater had smashed him unconscious in the space of a couple of seconds, no thanks to the burning intensity running through his veins.
The thug had come within an inch of ending Slater’s life.
That deserved retaliation.
Slater fell off the thug. Pain seared in his hip, and his hands throbbed uncontrollably, but he didn’t pay any of his injuries a sliver of attention. They were superficial, and they meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. What mattered above all else was the last remaining hostile in the room, the sole guy up the back of the concrete box that Slater had glimpsed earlier. Slater’s vision was a blur but he rolled like a madman toward the loaded Kalashnikov, wondering how the hell he was going to fire the gun with a pair of hands that had suffered grievous injuries.
He didn’t have time to think about it.
At any moment, he expected to catch a bullet as he moved. He vaguely sensed cowering innocents all around him, pressed up against each of the respective walls with their heads bowed as chaos raged in the room, but Slater couldn’t spot the last guy anywhere. Admittedly, he hadn’t stopped to look yet, madly scrambling for the dormant rifle he’d elbowed away, but the guy could be anywhere.
Slater clamped a bloody hand down on the Kalashnikov and finally took the time to dart his vision around the room, searching for any sign of…
No shots came. No bullets struck the dusty ground around him, or punched straight through his clothing and sunk into his flesh. He heard no crack of automatic weaponry, or even so much as a string of Russian cursing.
In fact, he couldn’t have heard a thing if he tried.
The four shots the last thug had fired from the AK-15 had effectively deafened Slater. Besides the fact that most of them had grazed him, they had burst from the barrel of the rifle at such close proximity that his eardrums might have been permanently disabled. He could hear nothing over the heartbeat pounding in his ears.
But where the hell is the last guy?
Then, in the tunnel vision that had settled over him, he saw it.
The cluster of three people, their backs turned to Slater, fleeing at breakneck speed from the room.
Hustling straight through the same doorway he’d entered moments earlier.
The last thug, barrel-chested and broad-shouldered, with big pasty hands the size of dustbin lids, had a frail thirty-something woman with brunette hair and a young girl no older than ten in a vice-like grip, holding them by an arm each. With both hands preoccupied, the assault rifle on a shoulder strap was swinging uselessly across his burly frame. He didn’t have the resources to use it.
But he didn’t need to.
He was fleeing with his precious cargo.
Slater only caught a glimpse of the trio, and by the time he brought his own weapon up to aim at the doorway, they had vanished.
24
The gun.
His brain switched over to autopilot.
Get the goddamn gun, and move.
He reached down and snatched at the Kalashnikov, wrapping one hand around the stock and one hand around the grip. He wrenched it off the ground. Crimson blood ran slick between his fingers and the cold steel of the weapon, and the rifle slipped from his grasp. It clattered back to the dust.
One second ticked by.
Veins straining in his forehead, Slater made another wild grab for the rifle. Pain tore through both his hands, blood flowing from the pair of wounds. Neither bullet had lodged in his hand, but the skin had been shredded all the same. Grimacing, he wrenched the AK-15 off the ground.
It slipped again.
Another second ticked by.
You don
’t have time.
You can’t grip anything.
You need to move.
The primal, instinctual part of his brain that was permanently set to fight-or-flight begged him to stay where he was. It pleaded with his common sense, demanding that he was too injured to continue. Any kind of pursuit he could make would only result in his own demise. There was no point. He was already woozy from blood loss, and he had no idea how badly the bullet had cut his hip. For all he knew, he could only have seconds of consciousness left.
So he stayed on one knee for the briefest of moments in time. He looked around, spotting the two separate families on either side of the giant space. Both mothers were cradling their children against their chests, protecting them from any further harm.
And the last remaining thug had just run off with the final pair.
Slater clenched his teeth. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t stay put. It went against everything he stood for, everything he’d worked toward over the course of his career.
He had to move.
Even if it resulted in his own death.
He made one last snatch for the gun, and again it slipped — this time he barely got his fingers around the Kalashnikov before crippling agony arced up his wrist and made him involuntarily let go of the rifle.
Useless.
He couldn’t grip anything.
Go.
Unarmed, reeling from the chaos, he took off at a flat out sprint across the space, surging after the trio that had fled the room seconds earlier. He couldn’t quite fathom how he was even standing, but he somehow managed. He was a twenty-three year old athlete in his prime, and the big Eastern European brute would be burdened by the two resisting hostages he was dragging along with him.
That was enough to convince Slater that he had a chance of catching them.
But then what?
The guy had a rifle, and Slater had nothing. He couldn’t even use his hands.
Cross that bridge when you come to it.
So he pushed himself faster. He raced back out into the corridor and turned left, pumping his arms and legs like pistons. Blood dripped off his hands but he ignored it. He covered distance as fast as his legs would allow, battling down the natural urge to stop and tend to his injuries. He didn’t have time to do anything but put one foot in front of the other and barrel toward his target.
It was the only way he’d ever done things.
If he came across the trio and slowed down, he would die. He had nothing to defend himself with except his own body, and he couldn’t use that unless he closed the gap between himself and the last thug in record time. He wouldn’t get lucky twice — if the thug had a beat on him with the Kalashnikov, it would only take one squeeze of the trigger in such a confined space to finish Slater off.
He had to hope for a miracle.
He had to hope the thug would be distracted.
He reached the entrance to the giant stairwell, and even from a distance he could see the vast vertical tunnel lay shrouded in shadow. It would be close to four in the morning, if Slater’s calculations were accurate, and the night pressed down on everything. It helped him forget what kind of state he was in — it was hard to notice the blood in the darkness.
Slater heard motion — the sounds of struggle — coming through the open doorway to the stairwell. He didn’t think twice.
He hurried straight through.
25
Slater sprinted out onto the same concrete platform as before, facing the same precipitous drop that speared eight storeys down through the centre of the stairwell, culminating at the ground floor. With no central partition to split up the stairs, the descent to the ground floor consisted of the concrete spiral arcing around the perimeter walls, heading down into the darkness.
Directly ahead, the trio were ready to descend.
Slater could barely make out their silhouettes in the lowlight. Above his head, the night sky hung overbearing and grim, providing the slightest natural illumination. He’d caught the thug at the final hurdle — the man was wrestling with the woman and the child, who were doing everything they could feasibly manage to break free. He had them both by the arms, hurrying them toward the first flight of stairs, dangerously close to the unobstructed edge of the eighth storey platform.
If they struggled too hard, either of the hostages might take a step too far to the right and plummet to their deaths. There was threadbare scaffolding and steel supports intersecting across the central drop, but it wouldn’t be enough to break their falls.
If they did manage to crash to a halt amidst one of the erected wooden platforms, it would result in such a shocking list of injuries that death would be inevitable.
Slater slowed his pace.
He had to.
He couldn’t immediately work out which of the silhouettes was the thug. The child was immediately recognisable as a young girl, tiny in comparison to the other two, but even though the woman and the giant gangster were vastly different sizes, it was still hard to fathom in the dark. It took a vital half-second to deduce who the enemy was — the last thing Slater wanted to do was target the wrong outline.
He got his target sorted, and broke into an all-out sprint.
There was less than ten feet between them.
Then everything changed.
Almost in slow motion, Slater spotted the thug’s head twist as the man looked over his shoulder. In the darkness the pair locked eyes as best they could, and Slater saw recognition spread across the man’s face.
He knew Slater was coming for him.
The dynamic shifted.
The guy immediately stopped trying to wrestle with the hostages. Slater could almost tell what he was thinking. This mysterious dark-skinned intruder had mown through their entire force, decimating them with apparent ease. The thug didn’t know how hurt Slater was.
He must have imagined his own time was up, his death inevitable at the hands of this phenom.
But one thing was certain. Slater was desperate to protect the hostages.
And that was the one minuscule victory the thug could seize before he died.
He could strip Slater of his success. He could tear the one thing away from him that he valued above anything else.
The protection of the woman and her child.
Slater sensed all of this in a heartbeat, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. He was already sprinting full pelt toward the trio — there was no way to increase his pace, nothing that shouting a warning would achieve. He saw the thug reach down and gather up the Kalashnikov AK-15 swinging from the strap on his hip, but instead of trying to point it in Slater’s direction he sent the barrel scything upward to aim at the pair of hostages.
Just like that, everything became clear.
Slater knew what he needed to do.
He couldn’t slow down. If he had any hope of succeeding at the last second, he would need to sprint directly into the side of the thug, which would send both of them tumbling off the side of the enormous stairwell with uncontrollable momentum. He would need to carry them both into the abyss, falling eight storeys through a mountain of scaffolding to their deaths.
Did he have it in him to sacrifice himself, right here and right now?
Could he do that?
It didn’t matter.
Even turning his mind to the question made him hesitate, so imperceptible and unnoticeable that no-one would have ever known that he slowed down, even if they’d been staring directly at him.
But he knew.
Deep in his mind, he knew that he slowed.
He was going to commit. He told himself that. He accepted the fact that he would die for this woman and this child that he’d never met. He knew he had that capacity, and he barrelled straight onward.
But that split second of questioning, that tiny shred of time in which he had to ponder whether he could…
…that was all it took.
The thug pulled the trigger of the Kalashnikov before Slater could reach
him. He was only a couple of feet away by that point, but the muzzle flare burst into life all the same, and the bullet left the barrel all the same, and the frail woman no older than thirty-five crumpled all the same.
Lifeless.
Unmoving.
Dead.
Slater’s insides melted. Crippling anguish rolled through him, even as he continued his feverish pace toward the thug.
Now they were a foot apart.
Half a foot.
The thug swung the aim of the Kalashnikov around to aim at the young girl, the barrel slicing through the air to line up with her head.
She screamed, a piercing shrill that cut through the night and echoed down the stairwell.
No.
Slater knew what he had to do.
This time, he didn’t slow down for a millisecond.
He ran into the side of the thug at close to the speed of an Olympic sprinter, crash-tackling the guy with enough bone-crushing momentum to send them both sprawling off their feet, carried through the air and over the edge of the precipice. The impact rattled Slater’s brain inside his skull and he gave thanks to the semi-conscious state he slumped into as he used his own body as a battering ram.
Together, they plunged into the darkness.
And the gun hadn’t gone off a second time.
26
For what seemed like forever, Slater felt weightless. His stomach sunk into his feet, overriding all the superficial pain racing through him. He lost touch with the thug and the bulky Eastern European man spiralled away in the darkness, crashing into a mass of scaffolding with enough of a sickening squelch for Slater to recognise the guy as unquestionably dead.
