“What can I do?” said Arthur.
I badly wanted to know if he’d made the call, but I couldn’t ask. “Watch the door,” I said instead.
He moved over and did so, Mossberg at the ready. “We going to have to move all what you’re working on over there?”
Shit. I hadn’t actually thought that far ahead, given that this was a fake plan and all. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “Or, no, not all of it. I’ve got to find the pieces here still working. Some bits are fried more than others.”
“You can do that without power?”
“The laptop batteries still have juice,” I said quickly.
Fortunately he seemed to accept that.
I tinkered pointlessly with the components for another twenty minutes, long enough to begin resigning myself to suspecting we’d underestimated Arthur after all. But then he straightened in the doorway with a roar of “Incoming!” and the corridor exploded with gunfire.
I leapt forward, hurled a grenade out into the hallway, and yanked Arthur back into the room with me. The blast thundered against our eardrums and made the wall buckle and shudder—I’d thrown just far enough down the hall not to tear open the conference room. “Get behind me!” I shouted at Arthur over the ringing in my ears.
I risked a glance into the corridor. Hulking, dark shapes swarmed from wall to wall, the stairwells disgorging more of them. Dawna’s mooks.
I could tell within the first split-second that they had been ordered to avoid killing me. To my mathematically-guided vision, they were aiming so far off line that it was laughable, their rifles jerking to the side almost comically as I poked my head out. After all, I had the fabled antidote their boss needed to live, so their plan must have been to overwhelm me physically or intimidate me enough to force my surrender. I also saw some of them packing Tasers and glimpsed at least two with riot guns—apparently the total nonlethal force they’d been able to muster from their armory in a few minutes’ time.
I, however, was not constrained against killing any of them—even my promise to Arthur had only been about the Air Force base personnel—and they never got close enough. The G36 jerked madly in my hands; it took less than half a magazine to take down everybody in the hallway. I was too good to miss, especially when I could see that the guns pointed in my direction weren’t targeting anywhere near me.
Arthur gaped at me. But only for a moment, because then Dawna sent a second wave.
By the fourth offensive, it was becoming clear that her new plan was to run me out of ammo. She probably thought that would force me to surrender.
Well, she was about to find out how wrong she was. I ran out of 5.56 rounds and dumped the G36 to swap out with Arthur for the shotgun; when I ran through the shells for that, I switched to the handguns. I’d long used up the grenades, but setting off any more would likely have taken out the building’s structural supports anyway.
Arthur was doing a good job of backing me up, firing above my head, and if his batting average wasn’t quite a thousand, it was nice to have the cover when I had to reload. Though when I caught a glimpse of the grimness in his eyes, I almost felt bad: Arthur hated killing people, and thanks to my perfect marksmanship, the bodies were piling high enough in the hallway to provide flesh-and-bone cover for each following wave of troops, the blood seeping from beneath them into expanding black pools in the dim light. The Los Angeles Air Force Base was becoming a mass grave. And worse, who knew how many of Dawna’s troops were only here because she’d told them to be in words they couldn’t disobey.
I’d never felt any twinge of regret at defending myself before.
One of my handguns clicked to empty, the slide locking back. I dashed from the doorway, neatly dodging the Taser leads one grunt desperately shot at me and spinning to pistol whip him in the head while I fired the last two rounds out of the gun in my other hand. Then I dove into a slide, the soles of my boots skidding on the wet floor, and came up with one of the dead soldiers’ Berettas. By the time it clicked open, I’d taken out the remaining seven attackers in the hallway.
I snagged a few more weapons off our downed enemies and returned to the doorway, handing Arthur a share of the new munitions. My boots left wet, red footprints behind me. The crisp burnt scent of gunpowder clogged the air and stung my nostrils, the hazy smoke from the fray curling through corridor.
“What’s the plan?” Arthur asked, holding a Beretta at high ready and not taking his eyes off the death-wrapped hall.
“We fight,” I said.
“Can’t fight forever.”
“I can.”
His eyes strayed to the bodies, skittering across the blood. “God help me, I maybe believe you,” he mumbled, so softly I wasn’t sure he knew he said it out loud.
I had a stolen M4 settled against my shoulder, waiting. But this time the building stayed quiet.
One minute.
Two minutes.
“Get back into the room,” I said, taking my own advice and retreating to the table.
“Ain’t got a vantage point,” Arthur objected. “When they come—”
“They aren’t coming,” I said.
“Wait, what? Russell—”
“You can watch and wait if you want,” I said. But I couldn’t. If I did, I might compromise the whole plan. My eye fell on the scattered computer components. “I have to fix this,” I said, putting down the gun.
“Russell—” started Arthur again. His tone clearly thought I had gone insane.
I forced myself to turn my back to the door. “It’s important,” I said, and picked up a circuit board as if it had meaning. It was a PCI card of some kind. I didn’t even know what it did.
I took the utility knife and started prying tiny microchips off it. They went flying into the chaos of components with tiny pings.
They weren’t so loud that I couldn’t hear the footsteps in the hallway.
It was only one set of footsteps this time. One light, quiet set of footsteps.
Arthur was silent, and didn’t fire.
I was gripping the utility knife so hard my hand was shaking. I still held the PCI card in my other hand, but my brain was buzzing so madly with something I was fairly sure was terror that I couldn’t even remember what I was pretending to be doing with it.
Arthur moved back from the doorway. The footsteps entered the room.
“Good evening,” said Dawna Polk.
Chapter 35
I kept my eyes on the circuit board in my hand, as Rio had told me.
“You have something I need,” said Dawna.
Rio had also cautioned me not to speak, but she was impossible not to respond to. “You came all alone?”
“You won’t kill me,” said Dawna, her voice a low, even purr. “On the other hand, you are unusually effective at dispatching my people. I would hate to be caught in a crossfire.”
I heard her take another few steps into the room. Felt her eyes on the back of my neck.
They pierced me. Observing. Studying. She knew.
Rio’s voice echoed in my brain, telling me under no circumstances to let her see my face, making me promise, impressing upon me that the slim probability we had of this working existed only as long as I kept my head down—I felt myself turning and tried to stop, tried to deny her, to keep her limited to my body language—don’t look up, keep your eyes away, don’t ruin everything, we’re so close—!