“Miki!” Connor shouted, throwing his arm up to fend off the blow. It came anyway, and Con felt his right arm shudder when the metal stool hit. A sharp pain shot up to his shoulder, and his hand went numb, his fingers tingling.
The barstool rose again, then faltered. Miki peered through the smoke, and Connor spotted a thin trickle of drying blood streaming down from a cut on the musician’s cheek. The fierce look on the man’s face eased somewhat, and he slowly tilted the stool sideways.
“Connor?” Miki’s querulous rasp was broken by a series of coughs. “That you?”
“Yeah, you stupid—” Con cut himself off, remembering the mercurial singer still wielded a lethal weapon. “Are you okay? Where’s Damie? We’ve got to get you guys out of here.”
“Yeah, I’m okay.” The stool dropped to the floor with a clatter. Then Miki bent over, grabbing Connor by the arm to help him up. “But fuck, I’m glad to see you. Damie’s been shot.”
Chapter 18
I don’t know, Miki. The words… hurt too much, you know?
Dude…. Forest, trust me, man. I know.
And you still write them down. Why? Why the fuck go through it again?
So maybe someone else who’s out there doesn’t have to feel so fucking alone.
—Home Studio Session #5
“SHOW ME where he is. Then get out into the fresh air.” Connor tried shaking the feeling back into his arm, but it was stinging from Miki’s attack. Shit, his forearm hurt, all the way up to his teeth and into the base of his skull. “We need to get you guys out of here.”
The studio was a mess of cables and equipment. If he hadn’t known better, Con would have thought it’d been tossed, but the Sound’s space became a storage area for the damaged coffee shop, and he dodged more than one stack of paper goods to get to the recording area’s open door. The smoke was thinner in the recording studio, but the air was still cloudy and astringent.
Miki stumbled as he walked, and Con caught him by the shirt before he fell over. The man snarled softly, yanking himself free, and continued to pick his way through. His knee was obviously giving him trouble, and he was a bit unsteady as he wove through the boxes, but Connor kept his hands off the man. Miki kept his head down, coughing a few times as he went.
Connor was unfamiliar with the Sound. Other than helping Forest move a few boxes into the back room, he’d not been to the space. He got turned around once after losing Miki in the shadows. The lights in the Sound were off, and if not for the clatter coming through the broken window, the place would have been quiet. At some point, probably when the fire crews arrived, someone’d turned off the power, because the Studio’s windowless interior was pitch black.
“My phone’s broken. Guy jumped me, and I went down. Must have hit something hard,” Miki said as Con was digging his phone out of his pocket. “Can you turn yours on? I need the light.”
“Yeah, getting it out now. Tell me where he is and call out. Get us some help.”
“Down the hall, to the right.” The man’s face appeared saturnine in the yellow glow coming from Connor’s screen. “Come on. Reception’s shit there. Too much steel and crap inside the building.”
The hallway was clear enough. Certainly wide enough, but then Connor figured it would have to be to get equipment in and out of the area without too much difficulty. The door at the end of the hall was open a bit, and a very faint glow shone through the crack, nearly too faint to see except for the deep shadows in the enclosed space.
“Miki?” Damie’s voice reached them, a soft, wavering call. “Fuck, dude. I hope that’s you.”
“Yeah, Con’s here.” Miki moved faster, then disappeared into the room with a quick slide of his body through the door.
Connor reached the door and tried to pull it farther open, but it refused to budge. A fast sweep of his phone’s screen around the area told him why. The mechanism was damaged, and there were bits of wood planks hanging from the frame, thick, heavy nails poking out from the broken pieces.
He couldn’t think about what could have happened to the men if they’d not been found. The smoke was bothering him, and he coughed again, his lungs struggling to get air. With each jerk of his breath, his chest burned, and the watering in his eyes blurred his vision. Blinking, Connor realized he was seeing double, and his face’d begun to itch, prickling fires spreading up from his nostrils and lips. He definitely had to get them out of there before they all suffocated from the spreading smoke.
The fog in the room was good for one thing. It refracted the waning light coming from Damie’s phone, illuminating the man sprawled on the floor. He held a towel up near his face, and Connor saw water dripping from its edge, a drop hitting Damien on the throat. An empty Evian bottle crunched under Con’s foot as he approached, and he kicked it aside, bending over the young man to check his wounds.