Glenn Cooper - Book of Souls

He ran around the building, looking for escape routes, figuring the angles, returning to the office with each circuit to check on the lobby crew.

There weren’t any attractive options. He thought quickly and steeled himself for violence. He was BTH, but for all he knew, the next time Nancy saw him, he’d look like Shackleton. Fear left a coppery taste in his mouth.

DeCorso heard Frazier in his earpiece demanding a status report. He started to whisper back, “It’s quiet, no signs of…” when all hell broke loose.

The office lights went blazing on and an ear-piercing siren started blaring, almost too loud to stand without clamping hands over ears.

“The fire alarm!” DeCorso shouted, loud enough for Frazier to hear above the din.

“It’s got to be central-alarmed!” Frazier screamed back. “The fire department’ll be here any minute! Go in now! Take him! My team-maintain your positions at the exits.”

“I copy!” DeCorso shouted. “We’re going in!”

DeCorso ordered his man to unlock the door, and the three of them flew into the warehouse and immediately spread out.

They almost stopped dead at the sight before them.

The entire row of robots was dancing in a conga line of animation. Robot arms were turning pages. Flashes of blinding light illuminated pages. Digitized images of text appeared on computer displays.

DeCorso saw something. Through the scanning box of one of the middle robots he thought he picked up a glimpse of black steel. He shouted over the pulsating blare of the fire alarms, “Gun!” and raised his own to fire.

Will was in firing position behind a robot. He squeezed off two shots and placed both of them in the center of DeCorso’s chest. The man blinked once, fell straight to his knees, then pitched forward hard. The two other watchers were very good, probably ex-special ops guys, and in the next few seconds, Will was conscious of their coolness under fire.

Neither was distracted by their team leader going down. The man on Will’s left dove behind a metal cart and began spraying fire at all the middle robots. It was clear he didn’t know exactly where Will was. Paper shredded, glass shattered, but the robot arms kept looking for pages to turn.

Will concentrated on the man to his right, who was in a low crouch, searching for a target, more exposed. He aimed for central mass and let loose a three-shot volley. The man grunted and slumped, blood spreading from under his jacket.

Will’s muzzle flash was an unavoidable beacon, and the third man fired into his robot. Will ducked behind the machine and felt a searing pain in his inner left thigh, as if someone had laid a red-hot branding iron across his flesh. His pant leg quickly soaked with blood. He couldn’t deal with it now. If his femoral artery were hit, it was over. He’d know soon enough. Things would go gray, then black.

The robots were closely enough spaced to form almost a solid wall. Will dragged himself to his left until he was behind the farthest one. He no longer knew where the last watcher was positioned. His leg was bleeding heavily, but his senses were all operating. If it were arterial, he’d be struggling by now.

Then the last watcher mistakenly obeyed an order.

Frazier was shouting into his earpiece like a lunatic. “What’s your status! Give me your goddamn status! Now!”

The man shouted back. “Two men down! Under fire! Front of the building!”

Will put his weight on his good leg and popped up through the robot’s scanning box like a whack-a-mole at a fairground. He aimed at the direction of the voice and put six rounds into the metal cart. The last watcher tried to rise but fell over, leaking blood from his abdomen.

Will quickly pulled his own belt from its loops and wrapped it around his thigh, cinching it as tightly as he could stand. He could just about bear weight. He made a mad dash over the bleeding men, limped through the lobby, and emerged into the moonless night.

There were fire-engine sirens in the distance, getting louder.

He didn’t know how many more watchers were out there, but he knew they’d have to cover the other exits at least for a while.

His car was only yards away.

He was going to make it.

The blood oozed from Will’s thigh onto the car seat. He was buffeted by ripples of light-headedness, then slammed by a wave of nausea that forced him to pull over. He leaned out the open driver’s door and vomited onto the side of the road.

He had to deal with his wound quickly. He needed his mind to keep working crisply. Without that, he was lost.

Frazier knelt over DeCorso’s body, checking for the carotid pulse he knew would be absent. Piper two-DeCorso zero, Frazier thought. Shot twice by the same guy, the second time fatal. Guess who was the better man? DeCorso’s wife was friendly with his. She’d get a good payout for a death in action, so it wasn’t a complete loss.

He’d have to get Piper himself.

The other two men were alive but not by a lot. He had his team call for an ambulance. There wasn’t anything they could do for them. He knew one of them was going to die. He knew the DODs for all his men, an operational imperative as far as he was concerned.

He didn’t know his own.

He could have broken the rules and found out, but he was always by the book. And besides, in his marrow, he was sure he was BTH.

The fire sirens were almost on top of them. On his way out, he noticed a blood trail back through the lobby. Good, he thought. I hope it hurts.

He drove away with his two able-bodied men before the fire department arrived. Piper could be anywhere.

At a red light, Will readjusted his tourniquet and kept driving. He was on Vernon Avenue, heading east, looking for open stores. He needed a drugstore. He needed a new pair of pants. He needed a computer. He needed to find Dane. He needed to ditch his car. He needed to talk to Nancy. He needed more bullets; he only had seven left in the mag. He needed a lot of things in a little time.

He called Dane’s cell phone again and got voice mail one more time. There was no pickup at his motel room, and when Will pushed the front desk, someone ran over to pound on his door and open it with a pass key. It was empty. Finally, he called the general aviation terminal and was told that Dane’s plane hadn’t been touched since midday. The pilot hadn’t been back.

That’s that, Will thought. The watchers got to him. He was on his own. He looked at the phone in his hand and swore at himself in disgust.

If they had Dane, they had his phone, and they had his prepaid phone number. If they had that, they had him. He opened his window, dropped the phone onto the street, and said good-bye to his lifeline.

Frazier was in constant contact with the Area 51 Ops Center. He was driving east on Vernon, being guided by the location of Piper’s mobile signal. The tech shouted into Frazier’s earpiece, “The signal’s gone!”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“It’s gone dead. He must’ve turned it off or pulled the battery.”

Frazier banged the dashboard in frustration. “We were less than a mile behind him!”

His driver asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Keep driving. Let me think.”

Will was on Crenshaw, aimlessly driving north through the dark urban sprawl. The pain was making him crazy, and the dizziness was getting hazardous. In the distance, there was a sign for Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, and he pressed on until he got there. When he saw there was a Wal-Mart, he pulled into the covered parking garage and grabbed a space as close to the entrance as he could find.

He painfully pulled himself out of the car and clamped his hands onto the first shopping cart he could find, to give him support and to hide his bloody trousers leg as much as possible. Grimacing, he hobbled into the store, passed an elderly man in a smock, the Wal-Mart greeter, who immediately saw his red-stained pants and red footprints but minded his own business, something you did in that neighborhood.