M Sellars - The Law Of Three

I threw my left arm up to block and felt his connect. I was too late to halt the stab or even deflect it, but I did manage to slow it somewhat. Still, it kept coming, and I closed my eyes. Dull pain erupted through my chest as the large blade came down straight where my heart was thumping wildly. I felt a tingle through my flesh somewhere just to the left of my sternum, and I winced. I wondered for a brief second if this was how it felt to be stabbed because I had expected it to be far more acute.

I exhaled and opened my eyes slowly to see that the knife was still clutched in his hand with the shiny blade lying horizontally across my chest. I sucked in a quick breath and immediately balled up my fist.

I slammed my right hand hard against the side of Porter’s face as I fought to kick away from him. I felt my own pain as my knuckles glance downward, grating across his teeth and ripping a gash in them. He howled as I quickly seized his left wrist and twisted the appendage as hard as I could.

He rolled away, and I scrambled to my feet. Behind me I could hear footsteps as the SWAT team made their way up the stairwell. Only a few more seconds, I mutely told myself. A few more seconds, and this will all be over. I started again toward the rope holding Star aloft and heard Porter’s near breathless voice wheezing as it came toward me.

“As you, Rowan Linden Gant, are damned in body and soul, your sentence on this day is death.” He inhaled with an audible heave.

I spun back toward him and steeled myself. He was standing a few steps away with the knife raised over his head. Standing as tall as Ben, he towered over me, but I held fast, still reaching behind me for the rope.

“The sentence…” he sputtered, then coughed. “The sentence to be executed immediately and without appeal…”

He launched himself at me and brought the knife downward. I tried to sidestep him but still caught the brunt of his force against me. I let out an agonized scream as the blade ripped through my coat sleeve and bit into my upper arm. I screamed again as he wrenched it back out and made a second attempt at aiming the weapon.

Out of reflex, I stretched my hand up and grasped his forearm, locking my elbow so that he couldn’t thrust the knife downward. We struggled in a violent twist as we pushed against one another.

Shouts from the SWAT entry team sounded from across the room as a flurry of footsteps vibrated through the wooden planks that made up the floor.

We stumbled backward in a clench, and as we began falling, I heard the sound of something wet splattering nearby. Somewhere in the back of my mind, my olfactory sense absently registered the pungent odor of urine and bowel.

I crashed downward with Porter on top of me and immediately heard a loud creak followed by a sharp crack. A fraction of a second after the disturbing noise bit into my ears, the section of floor we occupied gave way and opened up on the room below.

The sensation of weightlessness I had experienced earlier when I vaulted from the back of the van was now magnified tenfold. We seemed to float in place for a brief moment, and then we plummeted downward in a tangle of arms and legs.

When we hit bottom, we were engulfed in a cloud of dirt and dust that had collected over the years. We had started rolling to the side as we fell, so the detritus that was once the floor above now rained down on and around us. There was enough trash covering the floor to cushion a portion of our fall, but as we hit I felt my left forearm snap. The sharp pain shot up into my shoulder, and I let out a yelp. I think I would have passed out had it not been for the adrenalin coursing through my veins.

Porter had rolled almost completely under me before we hit, and he had taken the brunt of the impact. He was definitely injured, but he was still alive.

He was still struggling to regain his breath as I pushed myself up onto my knees with my one good arm. I groped through the debris with my good hand and felt the handle of the knife. My fingers closed around it automatically as the rage once again took control.

I felt myself raising the knife as a swath of light fell across us. I heard a commanding voice call out, “Police! Drop the weapon!”

I hesitated for a moment, a dim pinpoint of logic winking at me from behind the curtain of rage that shrouded my mind.

“DROP THE WEAPON!”

The light of rationality faded to black, and I felt my hand begin downward.

I only remember three things after that: a bright flash, a loud explosion, and the feeling that my chest had just caved in.

The first thing I did was cough.

The second thing I did was groan.

The third thing I did was open my eyes.

When my vision started to clear, I could see that there was a white ceiling above me-but not too far above. At least that is how it looked. My depth perception seemed to be a bit off for some odd reason.

There was something resembling artificial light filtering in to aid my sight, which was a far cry better than darkness. Why darkness stuck out in my mind I didn’t know, but I didn’t need to give it much thought to decide that I preferred the light.

There was a lot of noise too. Things like distant voices and staticky radios. I picked out the rumble of a motor and even a few electronic sounding beeps. There were countless other things, both identifiable and not, but I very quickly grew tired of trying to associate names with them.

Everything in my head was a jumbled blur. I had no idea where I was or why. There wasn’t an inch of my body that wasn’t killing me, but at the moment the real pain seemed to be centered on my chest. Just the very sensation told me that I had been hit by something, but I couldn’t begin to say what. I knew what it felt like, and that was a freight train; but since I appeared to still be in one piece, I decided that might be an exaggeration on my part.

I lay there for a moment trying to remember. There seemed to be something important stuck in the back of my head, and it was fighting a desperate struggle to be released from its holding cell. It felt like an imperative, something urgent, but I couldn’t connect with it and that just brought on a feeling of frustration.

“Hurts like a motherfucker, don’t it, paleface?” Ben’s words worked their way into my ears over the multitude of ambient sounds.

I rolled my head in the direction of his voice and blinked, then I blinked again. When I was still unable to focus, it dawned on me that I wasn’t wearing my glasses. Somewhere in the dark ball of memories that was bouncing around inside my head, I seemed to recall having lost them. But at the same time, I remembered having another pair. The attempt at reasoning just made me hurt even more, so I gave up and centered on his blurry face.

“What?” I croaked.

He started to repeat himself. “I said, hurts like a motherfu…”

“Yeah,” I eked out the gravelly word to cut him off. “I got that.” I cleared my throat and coughed again before continuing. “What hit me?”

“Piece of lead,” he said. He held up his hand, thumb and forefinger spread slightly apart, then added, “About so big, actually. But it was movin’ pretty fast.”

“Porter shot me?” I asked.

“No, not Porter.”

“YOU shot me?!” I half yelped then immediately regretted it.

“Hell no,” he returned. “SWAT did it. If I’d shot you I probably woulda aimed for your goddamned hard head.”

“They shot me?” I muttered.

“Hey, look at it this way, white man,” he offered. “You just joined an elite club. That friggin’ vest you were wearin’ saved your ass.”

“But they shot me,” I said again, confusion permeating my voice. “Why?”

“Row, what the hell? You got amnesia or somethin’? They didn’t have much choice. You were gettin' ready to stab Porter to death with a big ass butcher knife. Don’tcha remember?”