He flung himself away from Verris, who was on him immediately, trying to grab his shoulder again. Junior heaved him off, rolled away, and started to push himself to his feet when his side exploded in an agony that made the world disappear in a momentary whiteout. For a second, he thought his father had used a cattle prod on him, then realized it had actually been a hard punch to the kidney.
Junior fell over and Verris gouged his injured shoulder with his thumb again. Blood saturated the bandage and soaked through his shirt as the wound opened a little more but Junior still refused to cry out. He hit the back of Verris’s elbow, forcing him to straighten his arm and let go. Junior grabbed for him, intending to put his arm in a bone-breaker, but Verris’s other hand came up and threw a handful of gravel and dirt in his face.
Rubbing his eyes frantically, Junior kicked out with both feet at where he thought Verris was and connected only with air. Ignoring another bolt of pain in his shoulder, he rolled away and started to get up, only to have Verris horse-collar him again. His head hit the gravel, which broke the skin in several different places. Junior sat up, blood running down the back of his neck. Verris elbowed him in the face and everything went black as his jaw slid sideways.
When his vision cleared he was flat on his back and his dedicated, loving father was present on his chest, punching his face into mincemeat. “—trying—” punch “—to make you—” punch “—a man—”
Father of the year, Junior thought, and dug deep for the strength he needed to show Verris he’d already done that himself.
Junior brought his legs up, twisted the right one around Verris’s neck and torqued him away. Scrambling to his feet, Junior saw the assault rifle he’d dropped earlier. In one continuous motion, he swept it up, pivoted on the ball of his foot and met Verris’s lunge by planting the butt end squarely in the middle of his grinning face.
Verris staggered back, wobbled, but stayed upright. Junior flipped the rifle and pointed the business end at him.
“Well?” Verris said. “Go ahead. You’ve got your target in your crosshairs! Do it!”
He deserved it, Junior thought. Hell, Verris was literally asking for it—and yet he couldn’t.
Why the hell not? What the hell was stopping him?
Screw it. Junior flipped the rifle and slammed the butt into Verris’s face again. Verris crumpled to the gravel without a sound. Junior slung the rifle, sprinted for the edge of the roof and parkoured down to street level.
As soon as the kid was gone, Verris pushed himself to his feet. That last blow had stunned him a little but it hadn’t been full force. Right before impact, Junior pulled his punch. The kid couldn’t even hit him with all his strength, let alone shoot him. Obviously his duties as a father weren’t finished.
Verris turned to his left. Another Gemini soldier stood alone on a neighboring roof. He was dressed in a full-body suit made of next-generation Kevlar, his face covered by a more compact version of Junior’s night-vision gas mask. Here was the soldier that military commanders dreamed of but never imagined could actually exist—the perfect fighter. And this was the perfect time to turn him loose. Verris nodded, then jerked his head toward the street.
The masked soldier hopped over the edge of the roof and bounded down the wall as easily as an athlete might have sprinted along a road. He hit the street and kept going, his strides so long that he hardly seemed to touch the ground. When he came to the hardware store, he ran up the outside to the roof without breaking stride.
Verris smiled. Everybody was going to learn—or, in Junior’s case, relearn—a lesson tonight. It remained to be seen who would live through it.
For a small town, Glennville had one hell of a big hardware store, Henry thought as he finished Danny’s tourniquet. It was makeshift—a ripped-up apron with a screwdriver for a windlass, secured with a piece of rope. A store of this size probably had a first-aid kit with a commercially made tourniquet but there was no time to look for it.
He got Danny on her feet and helped her limp away from the exit and farther into the store. There was at least one more rear exit as well as a loading dock—more than the two of them could defend. They had to find a place to hole up until he could get Danny to a hospital. That was assuming they got out of here alive, of course, something Henry had categorized as extremely difficult but still possible. Then Danny had been shot in the thigh and that changed everything.
Henry sneaked a look at her; he knew from experience that a tourniquet hurt like hell but she didn’t make a sound except for an occasional short intake of breath.
At the end of a long shelf of flowerpots and bags of soil, Henry spotted a step stool on wheels. “Take a break,” Henry said. He eased her down onto it, then crouched low to peer left and right along the wide aisle running crosswise in front of them. The store seemed empty—he didn’t see or hear anything to indicate otherwise—but Henry was sure they weren’t alone. If he’d been in command, he’d have stationed a couple of guys here. He and Danny hadn’t exactly sneaked in without a sound so whoever was in here probably had a fairly good idea of their locations. Dammit.
Could he and Danny get to the firearms department before the Gemini guys caught up with them? There wouldn’t be any sophisticated military weapons but kneecapping someone with a shotgun was an effective defense, if rather messy. He might make it alone—
No. A much better idea was getting them both out of here. Danny was more likely to survive escaping than last stand at the Remington counter.
“We should keep moving,” Danny said and started to get up.
“Stay there,” Henry told her. “I walk, you roll.” He held her shoulders to steer her across the aisle.
“Maybe we should find a shopping cart,” she said with a small, trembly laugh.
“No way,” Henry replied. “I always get the one with the wobbly wheel. Drives me nuts.”
She gave another shaky laugh as they came to another cross-aisle and stopped again while Henry checked it out. Still nothing. They crossed the aisle into wiring and electricals. A plastic sign on the shelf showed a smiling cartoon light bulb with a word balloon that said: Always Stay Grounded!
“How zen,” Danny said between clenched teeth.
“If you say so.” Henry brought her to a stop in the middle of the row when they both heard a very faint squeak, the sound of a rubber sole on clean floor tiles.
Henry pushed Danny’s head down so she was bent double and fired through the shelf beside them. Plastic and rubber fragments flew in all directions as the shelving collapsed and he heard two bodies hit the floor. He peered through the wreckage of the shelves; they were gone. He’d gotten them before they could even fire a shot—that was the good news. The bad news: he had just let everyone in the immediate vicinity know where he and Danny were.
Danny tried to stand up but Henry pushed her down again, this time more gently. “Did you hear them come in?” she asked. He shook his head. “Maybe they were already here, waiting.”
“Then why didn’t they take us out sooner?” Henry said.
Danny shrugged. “Not enough of a challenge?”
Henry’s blood turned to ice water. That might not have been as absurd as Danny had meant it to sound. Nobody outside Gemini knew what Verris was really up to, what he was doing with the soldiers under his command. Making a better soldier was a lot different than making a better mousetrap, and how Verris was going to accomplish that wouldn’t be pretty.