Tiffany looks at her bloody arm, and drops like a sack of potatoes into a dead faint.
“How did they get my secret video?” John screams, his voice climbing into high registers of the doomed.
“Your video?” I ask, balancing ten thousand threats on the head of a pin as I try to get him to keep talking just long enough for me to disarm him.
Lindsay looks at Jane, then grins maniacally at John. She has blood in her teeth.
“Jane did that. Hacked your system. Funny how a ‘dumb bitch’ outmaneuvered you.” She makes a weird, over-the-top huffing sound. “Two dumb bitches.”
She looks at me. “I told you I had a plan.”
My God.
She’s luminous.
John looks around the room as sirens peal in the distance.
He’s at his most dangerous now. I have to act.
He pauses. Catches my eye.
And then he pulls the trigger on the gun pointed at Lindsay.
Chapter 10
Lindsay
I think that memory is like a mother.
It protects you when you need to be sheltered from a cruel world.
It forces you to face reality head on and develop a tougher skin.
It tells you that all that really matters is being kind and good and decent.
And reminds you that you are more than the sum of all your parts.
The bullet rips into my shoulder as I drop to the ground, sensing what John’s going to do before he does it, a mantra of Fuck no you don’t whipping through my mind like blood in a centrifuge. I fall on poor Jane, who is a warm lump under me.
A body – Drew! -- arcs over me, just like Superman, arms outstretched, torso elongated like he’s faster than a speeding bullet.
Except Drew isn’t.
The bullet got me.
Drew crashes into John, who falls on top of me. John’s hand goes to my throat, then all his weight is off me. He’s dangling in air like a puppet, his head snapping to the right at an unusual angle. A horrible, deep crunching sound vibrates into my back teeth. How does he do that? It’s like a special effect, only this isn’t CGI and when John falls to the ground, Drew is behind him, arms pumped, face berserk and ferocious, eyes on me.
That’s where my memory steps in and says enough.
Wood splinters in the distance and then the room is filled with men in black and heat, an impossible number of guns, and they’re all crowding around us, Silas and Mark Paulson barking orders, Drew screaming my name as the men in black fatigues cover the room with their red lasers.
If I weren’t in pain, so hot, so cold, so wet, so tired, the bouncing red dots would make me laugh.
And then I’m off Jane, on the couch, a blanket on me, someone pressing hard on my shoulder, making me scream. Drew’s above me, his mouth moving but the words aren’t there. Who pressed his mute button? Someone turned off all the sound in the world.
Stretchers appear in my peripheral vision and then the warm blanket is off me, cold air stinging the lava-hot part of my soul. I don’t have a shoulder anymore, just a place where the heat all lives. I open my mouth to scream but I stop, bracing myself.
Then I exhale, so slowly it’s like blowing through a straw.
And I don’t care.
The pain doesn’t matter.
Drew’s staring intently into my eyes but I can’t look back. It hurts. He thinks I’m here but I’m not. I left. I left back in that bedroom with my mouth on John’s, his lips a sick caress of the damned.
I close my eyes.
“We’re losing her!” Drew says.
Are you? You’re losing me?
Good.
I don’t want to be found.
Drew
I let Paulson grab my arms and pull me back only because the med crew is there to put oxygen on Lindsay, to stem the flow of blood from the gunshot wound, to save her.
“You saved her,” Paulson says in a voice meant to shake me out of my reactive mode.
“She’s unconscious!”
“She’s in shock,” he says, shifting to a calm civilian tone. “She’s not going to die, Drew.” He looks pointedly at Stellan’s body, the section from the waistband of his jeans to mid-thigh a blanket of blood, the handle of the knife poking out from his crotch like an obscene joke. He looks like an extra from Bad Santa. “Unlike some people in this room, she won’t die.”
I follow his gaze and watch Stellan’s chest.
No movement.
He’s definitely dead.
Jesus. Lindsay did that. I watched her stab him. I helped by kicking the knife home. There is a reservoir of pure strength inside her. I’ve always known it, but to watch it in action is a form of strange beauty.
They’re all dead. All three of our tormentors. A group of SWAT officers, Mark, and Silas start talking to me in serial, each question too loud, too swift, too perfectly pointed for me to focus.
The medical personnel wrap Lindsay in thick blankets and prepare to move her to a backboard. Once she’s secured, they put her on a stretcher, one person applying pressure to the gunshot wound, the others pulling her away.
I gravitate toward her.
I meet a wall of men.
I go around them.
Mark’s hands are on my shoulders, rock solid, unyielding. His hold communicates a distinct message.
You’re not going anywhere, Drew.
A high-pitched whine fills my ears, an industrial sound like a pneumatic wheeze, the sound of machinery and motors functioning in the distance. It’s louder and louder, and soon I don’t understand Mark’s words.
Instead of focusing on him, I watch the television, which has cut away to an aerial view of my apartment. Tiffany is next to the television, surrounded by paramedics, and she’s breathing into a paper bag. The look she gives the female medic who hands her an oxygen mask should make my heart hurt.
Can’t hurt something that’s locked away in a box, though.
“You did it,” I hear. I turn sharply, following that voice.
It’s Silas.
“You did it, Drew. You said you’d get them, and you did.”
“We did.” I look toward the doorway where the paramedics are maneuvering the stretcher with Lindsay on it. I step forward, but Silas gently blocks me.
“You can’t go with her.”
“Why not?”