“He’s gonna die, man!You gotta help us!”I screamed, dropping to one knee to hopefully sell our dire circumstances better and to let me drop one hand close to Bertha’s holster in case things went sideways.
It says something about my life that carrying my brother-in-law-to-be into an armed encampment in the middle of another dimension while reenacting a scene from a comic book movie and hoping it all turned out okay in real life doesn’t constitute a situation that has already gone sideways, but the bar for “sideways” in my life is pretty high.
Freckles looked at me, looked at the latch for the inner gate, then back at me, then repeated, “Name and unit number.How do I know you’re not one of those monsters pretending to be human?”
“If I was a faerie pretending to be human, would I pick one this damned big?I’d want to looklessintimidating, not more, you jackass!Now open the damn gate!”I yelled.
And in the universal language of most military organizations, a lot of yelling gilded with the tiniest bit of logic worked wonders.Freckles, who looked like he’d graduated high school within the past week, flipped the latch up, yanked the gate open, and stepped back to let us through.
“Help me with him,” I said, panting.“I can’t carry him anymore.”I put Jarvis’s feet on the ground, and when Freckles came forward to help take his weight, I pushed J’s “lifeless” body onto the kid, knocking him flat.I sprang to my feet and yanked hard on the gate’s latch mechanism, bending it out of shape and forcing the gate permanently open.Then I ran back to the first gate and opened it, mangling the latch there as well.
Ash and Geri darted out of the woods and took up positions behind me with their guns raised.I hurried back to Jarvis, but he had Freckles on his stomach and tied up with his own flex cuffs by the time I got there.
“Handy of them to carry cuffs,” Jarvis said.
“Yeah,” I replied.“I just wonder who they’re meant to be used on.”I yanked Freckles to his feet and shoved him ahead of me.“Walk slowly into the camp and tell anyone who asks that everything is fine.If you don’t, the short one will shoot you in the back of the head.”
“Hey!”Geri called out.“I’m not short!”
“But you are the one that’s gonna shoot him,” I fired back over my shoulder.
“Yeah, that part’s true.”
Freckles nodded and walked into the camp, where another guard was already walking toward us.“Who the hell are these…” His eyes widened as he got a good look at me, my team, and took in the fact that we had all the guns and his buddy was handcuffed.“It’s the half-breed!Boss says there’s a month’s pay bonus for everybody that helps bring him in!”
He drew his pistol when he was still about ten feet away from us, but Jarvis had shouldered his twelve-gauge and fired a beanbag round right into his gut.If I’ve learned anything from the rare and unfortunate times Skeeter has gone into the field, it’s to give the scattergun to the guy who can’t shoot for shit.Jarvis qualified as the one who couldn’t shoot for shit, but even he couldn’t miss from that distance.The guard dropped, but the damage was done.
Whistles sounded all over the camp as the alarm went up.“Get help” might have gotten us in the door, but our plan went right to shit the first time we encountered the enemy.Just like Sun Tzu told us it would.I hate it when that old bastard’s right.“Okay, gang,” I said.“Spread out and try not to get dead.”
“Oh, that’s encouraging,” Geri said as she sprinted to my right.
“You want inspiring speeches, watchVarsity Blues,” I replied, drawing Bertha and hoping I could get through this without killing anybody.Or dying.Mostly that second thing, if I was being honest.
13
We had two guards down, and maybe three more to deal with, but we were trying pretty hard not to kill anybody, and they weren’t hampered by those kinds of restrictions, so I didn’t have a lot of faith in our ability to get out of this hastily built prison unscathed.The first guard I saw hesitated when he saw me, obviously trying to figure out whether I was an ally he didn’t know or somebody he was supposed to shoot.I took care of any doubts he had by shooting him in the center of his chest with a fifty-caliber pistol.
The good news for him was that his bulletproof vest stopped the bullet from blowing a hole in his middle the size of a dinner plate.The bad news was that it didn’t do shit to stop the kinetic energy of the bullet.I’m pretty sure I broke his sternum and more than a few ribs, but he was breathing when I disarmed him.I didn’t bother tying him up.I’ve had broken ribs, and I knew exactly how little running around he was going to be able to do for the next couple weeks.I did take away his pistol, his assault rifle, his tactical knife, and his cash for good measure.It was petty, but I was gonna have a lot of extra fees from the wedding venue after this shit.Interdimensional kidnapping of the entire building meant I was never seeing my security deposit again.
I ejected the magazine from his rifle, cleared the chamber, bent the barrel enough to make it useless, threw his knife over the fence into the woods, and holstered Bertha, preferring to use up his ammunition over my own.Rounds for the Desert Eagle ain’t cheap, and I knew there was no way in hell I could get more until I got home, so I held his little 9mm out in front of me as I approached the doors to the event space.
Geri’s submachine gun rang out with a pair of shots behind me, and the screaming I heard told me she’d at least shot to wound rather than kill.This time.Not that she’d do shit to keep the guard from bleeding out, but at least she hadn’t straight up murderized this one.
I yanked the door open and came face to face with a startled mercenary in black tactical gear with a push broom mustache and the telltale bulge of a big wad of dip in his lip.His eyes went wide, but I reacted faster since I fully expected there to be a bad guy on the other side of the door.I punched him in the gut, making his mouth fly open, then popped him in the jaw with an uppercut that knocked his chaw right down his throat.His eyes bugged out, and all the fight rushed out of him, any sense of fear of the giant redneck in front of him completely outweighed by the disgusting sensation of a big wad of chewing tobacco flying into his gut.
He dropped to his knees retching, and I kicked him in the side of the head, dropping him like a sack of pukey potatoes.I raised my pistol and scanned the room, looking for more bad guys, but found none.My eyes quickly landed on Amy, tied to a chair near the front of the room with her hands behind her back.Mama sat next to her, and her parents were on the other side.
“Are there any more in here?”I hollered.
“No, just Major Asshole,” Amy called back.
“Alright.”I ran over to her, dropped the guard’s pistol on the table, and quickly cut her bindings.I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her cheek.“You free the others.There’s at least one more guard running around here, so I wanna make sure Geri doesn’t kill them.”
“Why not?”Amy’s dad asked, his tone belligerent.
I looked him dead in the eyes.“I try not to kill people if there’s any way around it,” I said.“Every life you take, it takes something from you, too.I’ve got enough pieces missing already, and if I can keep Geri from losing any more of herself, I’m gonna.”
“Plus you can’t interrogate corpses,” Amy added.“We need to know how many more of these assholes there are, so we can make sure we get them all.”
