Will Staeger - Painkiller

In this ten-millisecond instant, Cooper was not present on Mango Cay, but instead became lodged in an endless nightmare from which it seemed he would never awake or emerge, and in this endless instant he realized there was no other explanation except to admit that he and Marcel, both dead, had become enjoined, then arrived in hell, where Cooper had no doubt they would remain for eternity. Assuming it was his fault, not Marcel’s, that hell was the prison to which they’d been sentenced, Cooper’s mind burned through a thousand-year loop, a trap, an inescapable sentence stretching into a hideous, burning eternity, and then, in stubborn objection to this impossibility of instantaneously occurring eternal damnation, his physical being generated a counter-eternity of opposing energy.

His rage at the absurdity rose up against the images confronting his mind-the equivalent of the jerking twitches made by a sleeping man in his attempt to awaken from a frightening dream-and Cooper’s body, starkly aware of the importance of this single moment of eternity, channeled its counter-energy back into and out through the same instant of real time through which the altered-reality vision of hell had come.

In a flash of bloodred blindness, Cooper burst from his nightmare with the propulsion of a shell launched from a firearm, and he made, at least for the moment, an escape from damnation. In the eleventh millisecond following the golf cart’s dip in the rut, Cooper’s body shot forward, flying, more catlike than human, across the three and one half feet separating him from Lana. His body covered the distance in so short a time that, for Lana, time did not pass between her depression of the trigger and the impact of two-hundred-plus pounds of conch-fritter-filled human projectile against her solar plexus.

Cooper’s leap was not quick enough to escape the pummeling strike of the first two bullets. As he got himself airborne, one struck the edge of the sheath-thin SLK-issue body armor; partially ricocheting, it plunged into the flesh of his shoulder but delivered no permanent damage. The other succeeded in burrowing into the meat of his upper thigh.

A pair of Lana’s ribs snapped on impact and her body flew backward over the cart’s steering wheel. Landing on the floor of the cavern, her head bashed against the unforgiving lava rock. The injuries would not have kept a soldier of Lana’s constitution from fulfilling her intent to kill were it not for the speed with which Cooper then got his hand around Lana’s fingers, spun the MAC-10 into her bosom, and put thirteen shells into her broken rib cage, thereby extinguishing the light that had, until now, burned within the muscle-bound maid.

At that point Cooper collapsed, landing facefirst beside Lana’s body on the damp stone floor beside the doorway to the cargo cave.

Rusty since her training days at The Farm, Laramie still possessed a loose familiarity with the weapons they’d trained her to recognize. Stumbling past the golf cart over the prone bodies of Cooper and Lana, acting without conscious thought, she lifted the assault pistol from Cooper’s bloody hand, found a loaded clip on Lana’s ammo belt, switched it with the clip Cooper had just emptied, stepped out from the doorway into the cargo cave, took aim, and let loose.

Spike Gibson had been working the controls of the yellow crane to bring it over to the doorway, and while he’d ducked and drawn his weapon at the sound of the initial shots, he returned to his seat in the brief lull that followed. He’d got the crane back in motion when Laramie stepped out from the transport tunnel and threw down on the yellow machine with Lana’s bequeathed MAC-10.

The automatic pistol’s stream of bullets honed in on Gibson after Laramie’s initially terrible aim. She wasn’t sure whether she scored any direct hits by the time Gibson, aiming at her muzzle flash, pelted her first in the thin flesh of the upper arm just beneath the lip of the body armor she wore; Laramie’s bone fragmented and she spun and fell from the impact, gasping as the breath shot from her lungs. On Laramie’s way down, Gibson caught her with a second shell in the lower-right portion of her back. The thin body armor caught and deflected much of the bullet’s force, but the shell was still able to penetrate Laramie’s abdomen, and ultimately ripped an exit wound the size of a Ping-Pong ball just above her right hip.

The concussive momentum of the dual strike knocked her unconscious; Laramie, bleeding badly, was out by the time she hit the ground.

Once pushed through the doorway from the tunnel, Lana’s all-terrain golf cart set forth on an independent, slow-motion journey across the cavern. Its accelerator still pinned to the floor, the cart propelled itself across the cave one inch at a time, the warhead load dragging its axles. The vehicle wasn’t able to establish significant momentum along the way but still made steady progress and, in due course, passed through the open doorway of the pocket cavern normally belonging to the Ukrainian sub.

Once through the door, the cart encountered an impassable mound of industrial debris. Its electric motor hummed on, pressing stubbornly but to no avail against the stack of I-beams and engine parts.

Disengaging the crane hook from the container’s eyebolt, Gibson reassumed the control seat in the crane and tracked the machine to the far end of its twin rails. He locked the arm in place, came over to the cart, affixed the hook to the harness wrapped around the warhead, retreated to the crane, and lifted the warhead out of the pocket cavern and into the container. He worked the levers until he’d managed to dunk the warhead into the fourth and final slot in the foam padding, then locked the arm and came around to switch the hook from the warhead harness to the eyebolt. Performing a reverse military press with no apparent effort, he lowered the lid into place. In the interest of time, he flipped and locked only three of the eight latches, leaving the rest for when he’d loaded the container into the submarine.

With Gibson back in the control seat, diesel engine whining like a possessed lawn mower, the crane’s hydraulics tautened the cable holding the weight of the crate, and the sagging arm lifted Gibson’s precious cargo from the cavern floor.

Face plastered against the soggy grit of the mud-coated lava, Cooper opened his eyes and observed the inert body of Gibson’s maid-and, beyond the maid, Laramie. Laramie lay prone on the tunnel floor beneath the door-way. Through the doorway, he could see what appeared to be another cavern. The maid, he thought, had been trying to take them in there. The cart was now gone.

He could see that Laramie was unconscious. Fighting a spasm of pain from the movement, he crawled over to hold a hand above her nose and mouth. She was breathing, but he could see that she’d been shot: there was an exit wound above her right hip, and, from what he could see from his place on the floor, she was bleeding badly. He would have to find a way to stop the flow.

The booming thrum of distant engines throbbed through the cavern, the same rumble he’d heard during the journey over. He could taste the same layer of foul, black exhaust and saw that it hung lower now.

Cooper found he could move all of his limbs, which was good, but even the smallest motion caused searing bolts of pain to assault him from his two bullet wounds. He could move; that was all he needed to know, Cooper thinking that in the last ten years he’d sucked down enough medicine to last a hundred men a hundred years, so he shouldn’t feel one bit of the pain.

Lifting his head, he felt such a crackling shock of agony that he determined his theory to be bullshit. Persevering, he crawled to a place on the tunnel floor from which he could see into the cavern.