Joe Schreiber - Perry's killer playlist

But I knew him too well.

And Gobi did too.

I tried to make my voice as calm as possible. “How much more time until you can pinpoint where this was sent from?”

“Not much longer,” Erich said, clicking in a new set of commands and watching the screen flash back at him. “They’re somewhere in western Europe. I’ll have the location soon. We may have to wait a few more minutes.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Now I really do want to hit something.”

The plank in Gobi’s hands was three inches thick and just wide enough for me to picture my dad’s face on it. I watched it turn into Armitage’s, then Paula’s, then back to my dad’s, then a screwball combination of the three. I curled my fingers into a fist. With every second I waited, I could feel the desire to lash out and punch it building up inside me, all the way from my shoulder down my arm until it had formed a buzzing electrical current.

Erich stood next to me, his voice patient and unhurried. “With tae kwon do,” he said, “the key is to focus on a point beyond your target, so that you are actually punching through it. In order to break that board, your hand will have to be traveling about thirty feet per second when it makes contact. Think of your fist as a bullet fired from a gun. Visualize it passing through the board. Are you ready?”

I nodded, checked my stance, and made a fist, cocking one knuckle out slightly like he’d shown me. I could feel the blood pounding in my temples. Putting all the force of my body into the punch, I swung at the block of wood. There was a sharp thwack as my knuckles smashed into it, and a bright bolt of pain ricocheted back up my arm to my shoulder, where it erupted into a throb of pure agony. I doubled over, clutching my hand and trying not to pass out or pee myself.

“You are not focused.” Erich’s voice floated in from far outside the pain. “Anger is not focus.”

“Yeah,” I managed. “Thanks.”

“Check your pulse.”

I put the fingertips of my good hand to the side of my neck. It was throbbing almost too fast to count. I took deep breaths, willing myself to slow it down, until it was in the sixties.

“Try again.”

“No thanks.” I shook my head. “That plank is unbreakable.”

Erich looked at Gobi again, then set his feet parallel with his shoulders. An expression of absolute focus, almost serenity, came over his face. I saw him draw back and swing his fist directly at the plank.

The whole wall exploded in front of us.

“RPG,” Erich shouted, his voice barely audible over the aftershock.

I scrambled backwards, and all the geek inside me could think was, They’re attacking us with role-playing games?

Gobi shoved me out of the way as a wide sheet of orange flame erupted through the gym. Bits of plaster and shreds of steel and glass fragments drifted through on a bitter cold wind, and through the hole in the wall, I saw it was dark out. Night had fallen. There were no windows here, and until that moment, I’d had no idea what time of day it was.

Erich again: “These outer walls are reinforced eighteen-centimeter steel. This is not supposed to happen.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Stay down.” Without bothering to glance back in my direction, he unlocked the wall rack of automatic weapons and started taking down what looked like an AK-47 and a banana clip of ammo, then jammed them together and tossed the loaded gun overhand across the room at Gobi. She caught it one-handed without so much as a backwards glance. Erich reached for the rack again and selected an even bigger machine gun for himself, snapped on the night-scope, then grabbed a pair of tactical vests and handed one to Gobi and held the other out to me. “Put this on if you don’t want to die.”

It sounded like a good plan, at least the not-dying part. I reached for the vest and almost dropped it, then pushed my arms through its webbing, feeling twenty pounds of high-impact synthetic polymer settle on my shoulders and neck like a yoke. Maybe that was how they saved your life-once you put it on, you’d never be able to leave home.

A second rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the already half-demolished gym with a lung-vibrating BOOM, this one coming directly up from below, and I felt my knees turn to Jell-O, shifting me off-balance. Somewhere to my left, a tall rack of barbells fell over, crashing against the floor, sending hundreds of pounds in weights rolling sideways toward the hole in the floor that hadn’t even been there ten seconds earlier. Whoever was down there, I hope the weights landed right on top of him.

BOOM! A third blast, and all of Europe jumped and shook itself off like a wet dog. When my vision steadied I saw that Gobi and Erich had positioned themselves on either side of the hole in the wall, which was still actively blazing like a burning circus hoop about to spew a stream of Bengalese tigers. As if on cue, they both pivoted and started shooting down on the street. I’d seen them square off against each other, but I hadn’t seem them fighting together. It was like watching a soldier and his shadow moving at the same time in tight, concise, almost choreographed maneuvers. I couldn’t tell if I was more grateful or jealous.

After emptying the first clip, Erich ducked back to reload, slinging a machine pistol over his shoulder, and I saw Gobi step in and fire off another thirty rounds into the darkness. For a second or two, everything was hugely, ear-ringingly silent. I couldn’t see who was down there, but whoever it was seemed undeterred by the counterattack, because the third fusillade of grenades came harder than ever. From overhead I heard the shriek of splintered metal as the ceiling caved in over Erich’s gleaming display of Samurai swords and masks.

Gobi threw me a coat. “Time to go,” she shouted, while Erich took up his post at the wall.

“Why do I need a-”

“It’s flame-repellent.”

I shoved my arms through the sleeves. “Where are we going?”

“Down.”

“What?”

She grabbed me by the collar and we jumped through the hole in the floor. The twenty-foot drop turned gravity into a car crash, smashing us feet-first into the old wine shop, which was already on fire, empty glass bottles and wooden shelves splintering everywhere. Panic got me staggering to my feet, where I took in a lungful of smoke, doubled over, and suddenly forgot how to breathe, walk, or think properly.

“Idiot!” Gobi shouted. She made the word sound like an exciting new energy drink, something maybe mixed out of equal parts taurine and extreme annoyance. “Where are you going?” Grabbing my arm from out of nowhere, she yanked me forward, my feet blundering through the debris. In the smoke, all I could see were chaotic splutters of automatic gunfire among the broken bottles, like a garden of strange orange and red flowers.

We fell backwards through a hole in the wall, coughing and choking out onto wet concrete.

“Come on.”

I stared up at the blazing skeleton of the storefront, dizzy from the fumes. My consciousness was already wavering in and out. “What about Erich?”

“He will be fine.”

But she didn’t sound like she meant it.

Don’t black out, I told myself. Just hold on.

I tried to say something, and the world went dark.

“I’m here.” I lifted my head, cringing. “You don’t have to keep hitting me.”

“That is inside of car door.” Gobi’s voice from far away, drifting in from somewhere on the far side of Greenwich Mean Time. “You keep knocking your face on it.”