I pulled back, knocking Axle backward, just before I would have gotten mowed down.
“Same shit, same principle,” Axle said. “But with bigger stakes. Nothing we haven’t done already.”
That was reassuring. Somewhat.
I turned and laid down fire first, but I didn’t even bother to let Axle move forward. I was trying to piss in the direction of a monsoon coming my way; asking him to move while I covered would be like asking him to dodge a storm of bullets. The principle might have worked in uneven situations, but it seemed like a tall fucking order to do it against a bunker’s worth of defense.
“Fucking pinned,” I growled. “Like the bastards knew they were making their last stand here.”
Axle grimaced. He scanned the environment as if looking for a way out.
“Heads up!”
I looked back toward what had been the office lobby. And then I saw it.
Brock.
He’d suffered a few wounds, but he was still carrying forward. More than even me, he had to be taking this mission seriously. He, after all, felt he bore the most responsibility for what had happened to Rachel.
In his right hand was a grenade. The pin had already been pulled.
“Shit, get down!” I yelled, covering up.
Axle did the same. I heard the grenade clang to the ground a little too close for comfort. I heard the Bandits screaming.
And then I heard an eardrum-rattling explosion that seemed to knock everything back.
I lost hearing for the moment, only hearing a high-pitched shrill scream in my ear, like a TV broadcast station showing its emergency broadcast, but I had all my other senses. Axle did too because he made some sort of hand-motion that I somehow intuited as cover-and-move. We had our opening, and if nothing else, we had some cover with the smoke.
What had once felt like charging a World War II bunker with just two people suddenly had become a much easier run. A few Bandits still lived, but they were so badly wounded that I didn’t even waste the ammo on them. I just took their weapons and butted them with the rear of my rifle; they’d perish anyway.
Slowly, my hearing came back. We got to the last door.
And then I heard the first words since it came back.
“No, stop!”
I cocked my leg back, stomped the door down, and stood in horror at what I saw.
Rachel
When Eduardo had moved me, he’d only moved me a room down. That hadn’t been so bad.
But then the explosion came sometime later—I wasn’t sure how long; everything felt both forever and so compressed that all ideas of time were just thrown out the window—and Eduardo entered. This time, judging from the angry look in his eye, I wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, I was probably going to die here.
I at least wasn’t tied down to a chair anymore, but what was I going to do, break the window with my bare hands? I certainly wasn’t going to run into gunfire and risk getting killed. Not when I was betting on the Reapers to win.
Not when I was expecting Mason, Brock, Connor, and all of the other guys to come and rescue me.
But when Eduardo entered the room, for the first serious time all night, I not only began to doubt that I wouldn’t be rescued before he raped me a second time. I began to believe that that was inevitable. He had a look in his eye that suggested he was willing to let the last thing he did before he died be taking me.
It was sickening to think someone was so hellbent on making other people’s lives so miserable, but such was the face of evil that had haunted my life for more than a decade.
“You’re fucking mine now,” he growled as he moved forward.
His face was covered in grime and dirt, giving him an even more menacing look than before. Gone was the “playfully” arrogant asshole, and in his place was just the fucking devil. I could no longer act courageous in this face; it was outright terrorizing seeing him like this.
I retreated to the wall, but he grabbed me by the hair and ripped at my clothing.
