Rachel Caine - Terminated

She was looking out for everything, but somehow, she forgot to watch out for roadside IEDs.

Bryn saw the car abandoned by the side of the road, half in the ditch about twenty-five feet from the tracks, and even with her experiences in Iraq, her personal experience at being nastily surprised by such things, she didn’t immediately key in on it as a threat. It was positioned crookedly, one tire off, and there was one of those Day-Glo stickers on it that showed the local police had tagged it for towing. Entirely normal, and any other time and day in the USA, entirely safe.

But not today.

She didn’t even see it go up; her head was turned away, checking the other side of the road. She didn’t hear it, either, because before the sound reached her and rolled over her like a tank, the impact had already thrown the SUV up in the air and flipped it partly over, and her body was too busy trying to sort out all of the unnatural inputs—sound, light, heat, gravity twisting out of shape, pressure, pain.

And then the SUV landed on its side with a boom like cannon fire—tinny in her shocked ears—and rolled over on its top in a gritty chorus of bulletproof glass warping and cracking. It didn’t have enough momentum to keep tumbling, so it rocked to a stop, and for a second Bryn held still, waiting for her body to tell her its status.

Good to go, apparently. Aches and pains that she’d have normally felt faded under adrenaline, and besides, the nanites were good for one thing, and that was healing damage.

The cabin was full of smoke, and she heard coughing. “Patrick?” Her fingers scrabbled for the seat belt release, and she found it and pressed. That dropped her onto her neck and shoulder, and she slithered around over the broken glass to ease the strain. “Joe? Riley?”

“Riley’s good,” came the agent’s voice, and then Riley’s body slipped out of the upside-down restraints and rolled next to her.

“Joe here,” Fideli said, and coughed again. “Fuck. Hey, Pat, you sleeping in? Because we’re in some trouble here.” While he talked, he was working the release on his seat belt. It was stuck, but in seconds he had a combat knife out of its sheath and was slicing through the thick fabric like silk. Riley squirmed back to give him room to drop; he did it more elegantly than either she or Bryn had done, but then, he’d probably had more practice.

Patrick didn’t answer. He was hanging limp, bloodied arms dangling. Joe cursed under his breath, rose to his knees, and cut the man free. Bryn, without prompting, helped ease him down. Behind her, she heard more glass breaking, and metal groaning; Riley was forcing open the driver’s side door with muscular kicks.

There was a firefight going on outside the toppled SUV, a thundering chatter of bullets punctuated by a low rumble and a loud blatting horn, and what the hell was that . . . ?

Joe had taken hold of Patrick beneath the arms and was crab-walking backward, dragging the other man with him. Bryn shook the lingering fog out of her head and turned to the cracked window next to her. Impossible to see what was going on, so she smashed it out with a flurry of quick punches. Cuts and breaks didn’t matter.

There was a spotlight rushing toward them, and the sound of metallic screeching pierced the noise of combat, and Bryn had time to realize that the vibration was coming from the railroad tracks, the railroad tracks underneath the SUV that she was in , and the headlight was from a black locomotive rushing toward them with the pulping force of God’s biggest hammer.

Riley realized it, too, and from the other side of the SUV she grabbed Joe and heaved, hauling him and Patrick out with one bone-shaking pull and dragging them at an angle backward to a ditch.

Bryn bailed out of the window she’d broken, hit the hard, vibrating metal of the tracks, and didn’t have time to get out of the way . . . just enough time to roll off the metal and onto the wood and gravel in the center.

The train went over her like a storm, a roaring black hurricane of steel and smoke, burning metal and sparks. She was facedown, cheek pressed onto the sharp chunks of rock, and the smell of burning oil overwhelmed her.

She didn’t hear the train hit the SUV, but it must have, because it kept moving, thundering over her and gradually easing to a stop still parked on top of her.

She made sure it was stable, then shakily crawled out between the smoking wheels, slithered down the embankment and rolled into a weed-filled ditch that was smoldering with pieces of the exploded car.

The battle was in full force up on the road.

Half the escorting SUVs were trapped on the other side of the tracks, barred from them by the train; Brick’s two other teams were still in the game and laying down hot fire to keep the attackers—from the goddamn train now—from firing down on Riley, Pat, and Joe, who needed cover badly. Bryn took only a couple of seconds to take the situation in, and focused on the body-armored assault team in the boxcars of the freight train, who’d slid aside the doors and were pouring semiauto fire at the guardian SUVs, trying to take them out first.

Bryn lunged back up out of the ditch, grabbed hold of the back passenger door of their wrecked, mangled, chopped-in-half SUV, and braced herself. All about leverage, she told herself. The door was twisted and hanging loose anyway. Go.

She yanked, and metal groaned and shook, but the door held.

One of their attackers turned his fire on her. She felt the bullets striking but ignored them; pain was pain, the nanites would fix it. Her world narrowed to the door.

She yanked violently, twisting down, and the one remaining hinge snapped at its stress point, leaving her holding a thick armored door.

She picked it up and ran to the opposite side, around the still-smoking SUV, and rolled into the ditch that held Joe, Patrick, and Riley. She and Riley got the door up and above them, protecting the two men, seconds before the concentrated fire bore down.

“Ladies,” Joe said between gasps for breath, “you’re making me feel kinda useless here.”

“You’re the only one who can shoot right now,” Bryn panted. “How’s that for feeling useful?”

He grinned. He was bloody from a cut on his head, and his smile looked wild and warlike. He still had his sidearm, though Bryn hadn’t had time to grab her weapons bag, and he crawled to the edge of the sheltering door. “Go,” he said, and they shifted it a few inches down his body. He fired six shots in about three seconds, moving his aim with tiny, precise ticks. “Clear.” They moved the door back to cover him—and the answering fire was less—a lot less. “Got five out of six. Last bastard twitched.”

“Vest shots?” Riley asked.

“What am I, an amateur? Head shots, thank you very much.” He took a couple of deep, pumping breaths, and nodded. “Go.”

They repeated the maneuver, and he did six more shots. When he signaled clear again, there was only a desultory rattle of fire on the steel, and then silence.

They were retreating.

Joe wasn’t assuming anything, though. He ejected his clip, slapped in a new one, and racked the slide so fast that it was one blur of motion. Ten seconds passed. Fifteen. Twenty. Bryn’s arms were starting to burn under the strain, and she could see that Riley’s were shaking, too.

Then she heard a shout from behind her, and saw that one of Brick’s men was gesturing at them from his bullet-pocked SUV. “Guys, I think we’re leaving,” she said. “Joe, can you carry Patrick?”

“Better if I drag him,” he said, and holstered his weapon to take hold of the still-unconscious Patrick beneath his arms. “On three?”