Callsign: King (Jack Sigler) (Chesspocalypse #1)

Stupid, Jack. Very stupid.

He shook off the hurt and took another look at the partition. It was mounted on tracks, one on the floor and another on the ceiling, similar to a sliding patio door, and secured in place with a flush-bolt. He thumbed the latch mechanism and heard a click as the bolt released, allowing him to slide the partition away with almost no effort.

Lesson learned, he thought. Think next time.

He sprinted through the adjoining room to the door in the corner, and with his MP5 ready, pushed it open.

Beyond was a scene of total chaos as people fled in response to the fire alarm. He peeked out, looking down the hallway, and saw two black-clad figures lingering at the doorway to the other half of the conference room, a good thirty meters away. Their very presence only intensified the general hysteria, but they seemed oblivious; their attention was fixed on the doorway.

He considered taking them out but quickly dismissed the idea. He knew they were wearing body armor, so the only way to guarantee a kill was a head shot. He might be able to get one of them, but if he failed to get them both, it would mean a firefight, and that would only keep him from his real objective, to say nothing of putting a lot of innocent lives in jeopardy.

He took a deep breath, and then strode out into the hallway, moving into the crowd of people evacuating from deeper within the hospital. The urge to look back at the gunmen was almost overwhelming, but doing so would risk drawing their attention. Instead, he focused on searching the crowd for Sara. She wasn’t there, but as he moved through their midst, he soon located a stairwell packed with people escaping the upper levels. Like a salmon thrashing up the face of a waterfall, he muscled into the mass of people and started climbing.

He recalled what Frey had told him, just before the attack. Sara had gone to the fourth floor. Was she still there?

Is she still alive?

King abandoned all pretense of being polite. We waved the gun ahead of him, and the crowd parted like sea in some biblical miracle. He reached the fourth floor a few moments later and burst through the door.

Most visitors had already evacuated, but the medical staff was busy moving patients, beds and all, to the elevator. Hospitals were one of the few places where using elevators in a fire was an absolute necessity. King caught the eye of one of the nurses, and was about to ask for Sara’s whereabouts, when a bloodcurdling shriek from down the hall startled them both.

“Never mind,” King breathed, and took off in the direction of the noise.

It wasn’t Sara. That wasn’t just wishful thinking. It hadn’t been Sara’s voice—he knew that with complete certainty—but more to the point, he couldn’t imagine any circumstances where Sara would scream. That knowledge however didn’t necessarily make him feel any better. Whatever was causing the persistent howl couldn’t be good.

The shriek led him to an open door, and he charged through with the MP5 at the ready. The scream was issuing from the woman thrashing in the single hospital bed in the room, but King barely noticed her. His attention was fixed on the two men in black assault gear that stood on the far side of the bed. One of them was in the process of sealing a plastic biohazard bag over what looked to King like a skull. The other was raising his gun.

King shot him between the eyes, but even as his finger released the trigger, the full impact of what he had just seen landed on him like a ton of bricks. That gun….

He shifted the machine pistol to the left, ready to take out the other attacker, but withheld fire when he saw the incendiary grenade in the man’s outstretched right hand. The pin was out and only the pressure of his fingers, covering the trigger spoon, kept it from deflagrating.

“Kill me and we all burn,” snarled the gunman.

King kept the weapon trained on the man and weighed the consequences of simply taking the shot. He knew he could escape the room before the grenade started burning, but there were other considerations, not the least of which was the hysterical patient.

The shooter edged away from the bed, the biohazard bag with its mysterious contents tucked under his left arm. He glanced down at his fallen comrade, and then met King’s stare. Although the balaclava concealed his visage, there was no mistaking the rage burning in his eyes. “Maybe not today, but you’re a dead man.”

King ignored the bluster, keeping his gaze and his MP5 steady as the man backed toward the door, but both of them knew exactly how it would end. The man took one more step toward the door, and then threw the grenade.