Lisa Gardner - Touch & Go

He leveled the gun first. Aimed it straight at me while I stood, still rooted in place. He pulled the trigger. Forty feet back, an easy distance for a man of his training and marksmanship. The gun clicked empty.

I couldn’t help myself. I smiled at the irony.

Then, Mick threw the gun to the side and charged.

I ran, following my daughter’s lead to the front doors. If we could just get outside, so many places for cover. And the police had to know. They’d been on the phone, they had to have seen something, heard everything. They’d be coming.

If we could just get outside.

Ashlyn hit the double-glass doors first. She was running so hard, the doors parted like water before a diver. I spotted a thin seam of brighter daylight, then she was through.

Mick’s heavy-booted footsteps, growing louder and louder behind me.

I tried to pour on the speed, a forty-five-year-old woman, suffering from withdrawal, nearly completely broken down, trying to reclaim some of her lost youth.

I wasn’t going to make it. Mick was fit and well trained. And I was just me, a middle-aged woman whose heart was already pounding too hard in her chest. I felt simultaneously light-headed and nauseated, trying to find that inner gear, realizing there was nothing left. This is your body on drugs, I thought inanely. Apparently, a four-month diet of prescription painkillers did not do a body good.

The glass doors, so close, if I could just get through…

Then, daylight magically appeared before me. The door opening all on its own.

Z stood directly in front of me, face impassive as I raced straight for him. He had Ashlyn’s arm in a tight grip, twisting it behind her back as she grimaced in pain. Beyond him, Radar waited in the idling van, side door open.

Of course, I’d seen them pull up. How stupid of me. We’d run right toward them, straight into the waiting arms of our captors.

I couldn’t help myself. I screamed. In rage, frustration and sheer exhaustion.

Then, because I had nothing left to lose, I hurled myself at Z, the man who held my daughter, and went for his eyeballs.

“WHERE IS IT, where is it?” Tessa demanded to know. They had hit the first sign advising motorists not to stop for hitchhikers. Then, a sign notifying them they were on state property. Next should come the perimeter fencing, topped with rolls of razor wire, to be followed finally by a guardhouse marking the turn into the six-hundred-acre compound.

But so far, nothing.

Sky remained quiet overhead. No sign of the FBI chopper, which had probably launched from Concord. No roar of other sirens, though the local PD had to also be en route, not to mention the activation of the state’s SWAT team.

Then, up ahead, the first glimmer of the sixteen-foot-tall, razor-wire-topped, fully electrified double-lined fence.

“Rifle,” Wyatt ordered.

She went to work removing it from its rack, as he shot past the fence, made a squealing right-hand turn and finally entered the prison grounds.

Z WENT DOWN. I’m not sure what he’d expected. That I’d surrender, give up, fall apart. But certainly, not that I’d attack.

Ashlyn stumbled to the side, then I was on him, raking my ragged nails across his face, trying to dig my thumbs into his eye sockets. The fanged cobra around his left eye hissed at me, but I ignored it, intent on my mission. Maim. Hurt. Make him bleed.

Then I was unceremoniously plucked from Z’s body. Mick had me in his massive arms, lifting me up. I heard the fragile fabric of my fine wrap top tear; so much for Boston clothes. Then, Mick tossed me through the air. I landed hard on the asphalt drive, gasping as the breath was knocked from my body.

Z leapt to his feet, clutching his left eye with one hand, while Mick yanked his knife from his leg holster and squared off against me and my daughter.

I’d been right earlier. The blade was huge and serrated. And Mick was looking forward to using it. Very much. He wiped the last of the blood from the gash on his forehead, and grinned at us.

My daughter was still on the ground beside me. She hiccupped slightly and I could see the fear on her face as she scrambled to her feet.

Mick tossed his knife from his right hand to his left, then back again. Putting on a little show.

Z, on the other hand, walked slowly backward to the waiting van, hand still covering his eye. Clearly, he thought Mick could handle us.

“When I tell you to go,” I murmured to my daughter, “I want you to head back into the prison. Disappear. Hide anywhere you can. The police are coming, you just need to buy time.”

Ashlyn didn’t speak. I could tell she understood the decision I’d made. And maybe she would’ve protested or hedged, but that knife, that giant, stainless steel blade, flashing from hand to hand…

I wish Mick hadn’t run out of ammo. I would’ve much rather faced a bullet. But a knife attack was up close and personal. He was going to have to approach, then assault, and the ensuing struggle would buy the time for Ashlyn to escape. Justin had done his part in the control room. Now I would do mine.

But I wondered, just for a second, if Mick had any other guns tucked into that vest. If I could just put my hands on a trigger. A single, up-close shot…

I’d just started to take inventory when Mick charged.

No roar this time.

Just a swift, silent lunge that caught me flat-footed and completely unprepared. I saw the knife arc out, heard Ashlyn’s startled scream, then suddenly my vision was filled with two hundred pounds of snarling menace.

Was my daughter running? I hoped she was running.

I did the only thing I thought I might get away with, a brief memory of some article I’d read on a website, or maybe a story once relayed at Justin’s gun club, but when facing a larger opponent in hand-to-hand combat, close the gap between you. Actually move inside the kill zone, where your opponent can no longer hit you with the full force of his windup.

In this case, I stumbled toward Mick. He was forced to stop short, his forward momentum and wildly swinging arc twisting him off balance. In that split second, I was beneath his arm, knocking against his chest. It must’ve looked like I was locking him in a lover’s embrace, but really I was frantically running my hands down his weapons vest, searching out anything that might help me.

I was an experienced shooter. If I could just get my hands on a firearm, anything at this point-blank range…

Mick grabbed my shoulders and savagely ripped me away from him. I stumbled, tried to counter with my own body weight, but at a mere hundred and ten pounds…

He threw me across the covered causeway and I felt the instant burn of a hundred tiny rocks ripping the skin from the palms of my hands. I was still trying to climb to my feet when Mick once more assumed the position, legs crouched, blade flashing brightly as he tossed it expertly to his right hand.

I didn’t have any more tricks up my sleeve. I simply raised my head and watched death come for me.

The glass doors of the prison burst open.

Justin lurched into the open space, bright red blood drenching his favorite blue dress shirt, his lips peeled back into an inhuman grimace. Twisting right, spotting me. Twisting left, spotting Mick.

Then lunging head-on at the knife-wielding brute who’d attacked his family.

“Noooo!”

Justin’s scream. My own. Eighteen years of our lives so entangled, including this one final moment.

Mick brought up his blade, half surprise, half defense.

Justin continued charging. And Mick stabbed my husband straight into his chest.

A gasp. A fresh scream. Ashlyn’s this time, from the doorway of the prison, where she’d reappeared, a fifteen-year-old girl still certain her father could slay monsters.