Rachel Caine - Terminated

They counted down, and as Joe pulled, Riley and Bryn kept the shield over their heads as they moved toward the waiting SUV. From there, Brick’s surviving men—there were at least two down on the road—loaded Patrick in, and then Joe, Riley, and Bryn. One of them tried to hold up the door as a shield, and looked comically surprised when he realized how heavy it was.

Bryn found it funnier than she should have and had to suppress panic giggles. She swallowed them as the remaining mercenaries piled in with them, and pressed her fingers to Patrick’s throat. His pulse was steady and strong, but he had a wicked blow to the head, and plenty of cuts.

“He alive?” the man in charge asked. He resembled Brick a little, but in miniature—small, muscular, and a man who’d clearly been given quality training in mayhem; he was in the shotgun role, and before they could answer he fired out the window of the SUV at the remaining members of the assaulting team. One went down. The others broke for cover.

“He’ll be okay,” Joe said. “Could be a concussion. Hopefully his skull didn’t get fracked.”

“We’ve got a portable med unit I can roll to us,” the man said. “Anybody else got holes in them?”

“Nothing that won’t fix itself,” Bryn said. She wasn’t being flip; she knew she’d taken five or six rounds, but the wounds had already closed, and the bullets had been pushed out. She was, if not healed, well on the way to healing. Efficient things, the nanites. She could almost like the little bastards, except for the side effects.

Like looking at the blood on Joe’s face and having an almost irresistible desire to lick it off and bite into that soft, tender flesh. . . .

She looked away and squeezed her eyes closed. “Riley,” she said.

“Yeah,” Riley said. “I know. Hang in there.”

“Trouble?” the driver asked. He jammed the SUV into reverse, expertly steering around the abandoned vehicle in the way—from the way the engine was smoking, it wasn’t drivable—and hit the gas.

“Nothing you can fix,” Riley said. “What’s the plan?”

The truck was rocketing backward at a terrifying speed—Bryn couldn’t imagine driving that fast in reverse, but the man behind the wheel looked perfectly comfortable with the whole thing. She decided the best thing to do was to not watch, and instead focused on the man in the passenger seat, who was changing out the clip on his military-grade selectable full-auto P90. “We get the fuck out of this killbox and regroup,” he said. “I’ve been around, but I’ve never seen that much firepower to kill four people, outside of diplomats or drug dealers. Jesus, who’d you folks piss off?”

“Better you don’t know,” Riley said. “Classified. What’s your name, soldier?”

“You can call me Harm,” he said. “Everybody does.”

“Seriously?”

He laughed a little, but it was humorless. “Harmon Strang the Third. Harm, for short. Ain’t no brag, ma’am.”

“I don’t think you go in for bragging, Harm,” Bryn said. “Guys like you don’t need it.”

“You say the sweetest things. I almost don’t mind getting shot up for you.” The sarcasm was scorching, and so was the bleak look in his dark eyes. “Can’t say the same for the two men I lost back there.”

“I’m sorry,” Bryn said. “Friends?”

“Coworkers,” he said. “Risk is part of the job. I’m pretty sure they never thought they’d be bleeding out on a side road in Kansas, though. Seems like a fucking waste.”

He wasn’t wrong about that.

The driver got to a wider spot in the road, and performed a bootlegger turn that made a scream of panic rise in Bryn’s throat, but she braced herself and swallowed it, somehow. She could tell Riley was feeling some of that, too, in the glance they exchanged.

Joe, grinning, looked like he was having the time of his life. Adrenaline junkie. He’d probably have a hard comedown later, but for now he’d go off a cliff, screaming defiance and shooting people on the way down. A genuine to-the-bone soldier.

They sped down the access road, did a shrieking sharp turn to get back on the freeway, and rocketed over the arching bridge, beneath which lay the train, the remains of the train-bisected SUV Bryn and her friends had been inside, the exploded car, and the bullet-disabled second escort vehicle. She could see, from this vantage point, the bodies scattered like broken toys. There were a lot more than the two they’d lost. On the other side of the train, the other two SUVs—Brick’s—were off the road and shielded behind the concrete of the gas station—which, Bryn realized, was abandoned and closed. The whole thing had been a setup.

And a well-thought-out one, too.

Brick’s SUVs started their engines and sped out to join them on the freeway . . . and then they were on the road, and accelerating; their convoy was two vehicles lighter, but going a whole lot faster. Harm got on the cell phone to his boss. “Don’t like this road, Brick, it’s too straight and not enough cover. Got any options?”

“Not much,” Brick’s voice came back over the speaker. “Got reinforcements rolling, but you’re right, this whole damn section is all grids. No way to get anywhere out of sight. Everybody good there?”

“McCallister’s down, but not out. Rest of ’em look fight-ready.”

“You keep ’em that way,” Brick said, “because I got the feeling this isn’t over yet.”

Brick was right, and if they hadn’t had qualified combat drivers, all four SUVs might have been junk on the side of the highway, because they hadn’t gotten more than a few miles before two eighteen-wheeler trucks tried to run them off the road. It was almost as hard to negotiate with semitrucks as it had been with the train, but the SUVs had the advantage of speed and maneuverability over momentum, and at least one of the men in Brick’s SUV was a crack shot, taking out one driver within thirty seconds, and putting the other truck out of commission with well-placed bullets to the engine block.

“Brick,” Harm said, as they sped away from the rapidly dwindling shape of the last attack truck, “we’re running on fumes, man. Give me some good news.”

“Refueling stop coming up,” Brick said. “Stay tight on my bumper. We’re about to test the off-road claims on these bastards.”

In half a mile, his driver took a drastic slide off the road and into the soft dirt, and then a sharp right . . . into a cornfield. “Well, shit,” Harm said, and braced himself on the dashboard. “Hope to hell he knows what he’s doing.”

Brick’s SUV was taking the brunt of mowing down the crops, so the rest of them were able to keep right with it, traveling through a newly plowed tunnel in the tall, summer-blown corn. It smelled like dirt and mashed plants—something like mown grass, which was funny when you looked at the size of the stalks being cut down.

It didn’t last long, because the lead truck burst through the corn and onto a narrow dirt path, thick with sun-dried ruts that the farmer and his employees must have used. They took it way too fast for the terrain, sending up a smoke signal that shimmered in the dry, hot air like the finger of God, pointing straight to them. So much for stealth.

“Where are we going?” Joe asked. “Because I’m not loving this plan if it involves some pissed corn farmers with sawed-offs.”

“Relax,” Brick said over the cell. “It’s a safe house.”

And it was.

The farmhouse—typically Kansan, with whitewashed board walls and neat russet trim—sat in a cleared square mile next to a big red barn and a shiny metal tower that could have been feed storage or water; Bryn was no specialist in that. It looked well cared for, and utterly normal.