Darren Lemke - Gemini Man

Could he and Danny get to the firearms department before the Gemini guys caught up with them? There wouldn’t be any sophisticated military weapons but kneecapping someone with a shotgun was an effective defense, if rather messy. He might make it alone—

No. A much better idea was getting them both out of here. Danny was more likely to survive escaping than last stand at the Remington counter.

“We should keep moving,” Danny said and started to get up.

“Stay there,” Henry told her. “I walk, you roll.” He held her shoulders to steer her across the aisle.

“Maybe we should find a shopping cart,” she said with a small, trembly laugh.

“No way,” Henry replied. “I always get the one with the wobbly wheel. Drives me nuts.”

She gave another shaky laugh as they came to another cross-aisle and stopped again while Henry checked it out. Still nothing. They crossed the aisle into wiring and electricals. A plastic sign on the shelf showed a smiling cartoon light bulb with a word balloon that said: Always Stay Grounded!

“How zen,” Danny said between clenched teeth.

“If you say so.” Henry brought her to a stop in the middle of the row when they both heard a very faint squeak, the sound of a rubber sole on clean floor tiles.

Henry pushed Danny’s head down so she was bent double and fired through the shelf beside them. Plastic and rubber fragments flew in all directions as the shelving collapsed and he heard two bodies hit the floor. He peered through the wreckage of the shelves; they were gone. He’d gotten them before they could even fire a shot—that was the good news. The bad news: he had just let everyone in the immediate vicinity know where he and Danny were.

Danny tried to stand up but Henry pushed her down again, this time more gently. “Did you hear them come in?” she asked. He shook his head. “Maybe they were already here, waiting.”

“Then why didn’t they take us out sooner?” Henry said.

Danny shrugged. “Not enough of a challenge?”

Henry’s blood turned to ice water. That might not have been as absurd as Danny had meant it to sound. Nobody outside Gemini knew what Verris was really up to, what he was doing with the soldiers under his command. Making a better soldier was a lot different than making a better mousetrap, and how Verris was going to accomplish that wouldn’t be pretty.

“Henry?” Danny’s eyes were wide and worried, more concerned for him than the wound in her thigh. Her face was paler and she was sagging on the step stool. If she didn’t get medical attention soon, he was going to lose her, and she knew it as well as he did. She had to be pretty scared but she was still toughing it out, playing the badass.

He could have used a partner like her, Henry thought. Monroe was good— had been good, he corrected himself with a pang—but Danny Zakarewski was a WMD.

“How many rounds have you got left?” Henry asked her.

She looked apologetic. “Five or six.”

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” Henry said briskly, and rolled her to the end of the shelf, where she had a view of the next cross-aisle through a rack of fuses. “You hold here and watch the choke point. I’m going to find a way out for us—”

Danny caught his arm in a grip that was unexpectedly strong. “Sorry, but you’re not going anywhere unless I go, too.” She unslung her rifle, put it down on the floor, and drew her sidearm. “I’m not letting you die out there alone.”

Henry felt a rush of affection for her. She was really something—a fucking lion.

“But you can check my tourniquet again. That would be okay,” she added.

He did so. It was still secure. She wasn’t losing any more blood but it wouldn’t be getting any less painful. They had to get out of here before the pain became too much for her.

“Danny, I’m sorry,” he said suddenly.

“For what?” she asked him, surprised.

“For dragging you into all this.”

“ I was the one surveilling you ,” she said with a small shaky laugh.

If she hadn’t been injured, he would have pulled her into a bear hug. “Anyway, sorry,” he said, looking down at her wound.

“ I don’t regret it,” she told him.

Now it was Henry’s turn to be surprised. “Seriously? Come on, if you had to do it over again and we were back on that dock, and I asked you to meet me at Pelican Point, you’d still say yes?”

“Hell no,” Danny said with another shaky laugh. “I’m not an idiot. I’m just not sorry that I did, that’s all.” She laughed again. “Now let’s shoot our way out of this so we can go get a drink.”

Henry’s grin was fleeting—he heard a door open at the rear of the store, although he wasn’t sure whether it was the one they’d come in through or another one, the one he might have found if Danny had let him go. He gave her hand a squeeze and she squeezed back. He listened closely and heard the very faint noise of four or five soldiers fanning out. Danny yanked hard on his arm and mouthed, Down , then rolled off the stool onto the floor just as they opened fire from three separate positions.

Merchandise exploded, shelves burst into fragments, collapsed, toppled over, caved in—today was definitely a bad day for retail in Glennville. Henry rolled Danny backwards with him; she was having trouble keeping her bad leg from dragging on the floor. There were five shooters and they kept coming, spraying everything in front of them with automatic weapons fire. The noise itself was punishing, beating his ears, his head, his whole body as the three shooters converged on him and Danny. He had to get her out of this, he thought desperately as they returned fire; he had to get her to a hospital before she passed out, before the goddam tourniquet wrecked her leg so bad they had to amputate.

Unfortunately, he had just fired his next-to-last bullet.

Suddenly one of the Gemini soldiers went down, blood spurting from his neck. Good one, Danny, he thought, and shifted to line up two of the remaining shooters in front of him. If he only had one bullet left, he was going to make it count double. Henry took aim; his last bullet went through the eye of one Gemini soldier and kept going through the eye of the one behind him. And now both his and Danny’s weapons were going click-click-click.

Henry took a breath. “You were a great partner, Danny.”

She nodded, then her face twisted in pain. Her hand found his and they held onto each other, watching the remaining two soldiers advancing on them. They had stopped firing for the moment but their rifles were up and ready. Were they just saving ammo now that he and Danny were out? Or were they supposed to hold them until Verris got there?

Danny deserved a lot better than this, Henry thought. If there was any justice in the world at all, her life wouldn’t be ending before it had even really begun—

Abruptly, there were two new bursts of machine-gun fire from behind the Gemini guys. Henry’s jaw fell open as they dropped to the ground so fast they probably didn’t know they were dead yet. But it was another couple of seconds before it registered on him that it was Junior who had taken the Gemini soldiers out, Junior coming over to him and Danny where they had just been waiting to die amidst hardware wreckage, handing them fresh ammunition.

Henry’s hands automatically reloaded his weapon with no help from his brain; good thing—he was too boggled to think. He’d watched his own death come at him and then veer away more than once, and it always left him shaken.

“Uh… thank you,” he told Junior after a bit.

“What he said,” Danny added, sounding equally blown out.