His long hair obscured his features, stringy from sweat and slightly curling at the ends. He swayed slightly on his feet.
I reached for my gun again. “Don’t.”
If this fucker even thought about?—
He lunged forward, slamming his entire body weight into me and taking us both down to the floor. My shoulder connected with the ground first, pain radiating up my entire spine and shooting right to the base of my skull from the force, leaving me with little room to breathe through the pain while his weight shifted on top of me.
Pinned at an awkward angle like this made it fucking impossible to reach for my gun strapped to my right hip. Mere seconds into this fight and I was already losing, getting my ass handed to me by a goddamn junkie.
One of his hands fisted in my hair and held me down while the other rose above us, metal glinting out of the corner of my eye.
Oh, fuck.
The snap decision to ram my fist into his side and knock him sideways was the only thing that saved that knife from connecting directly with my skull at the last second. His pained grunt telling me when to twist and flip us both over, upending things in my favor for once. The moment his head thumped against the floor, I reached for my handcuffs, fisting my free hand against his shirt to pin him down.
“You’re under arrest.”
The one thing I neglected to remember, was securing the weapon above anything else. A training module from my first weeks at the academy flashing in my mind mere milliseconds before I felt the dull sensation of something colliding with my stomach.
There were a million things to remember on this job, ranging from reading off rights to making sure a crime scene was properly taped off in the event of a crisis. So many, in fact, that they often had me waking up in cold sweats at night, the recited words from those practice exams still lingering on my tongue.
How ironic that of all times, this is when I forgot the most important step.
My body froze out of sheer shock, my gaze flicking down to where Thomas’s fist was pressed up against my stomach, the knife buried deep enough into my body that only the hilt was still visible.
Gruesome and yet impressive. The kind of strength it took to actually force your way through clothingandskin like that was actually a lot harder than many people knew. Our bodies were made to survive the worst conditions, sharp knives included.
“Terran!”
My vision swam the second I registered TJ’s voice.
Blood coated Thomas’s hand, thick trickles that grew worse the second he twisted the handle and then forced it out of me, taking my entire lung capacity with him.
There wasn’t much that scared me these days when I was constantly putting myself into dangerous situations for a job. Dealing with people that could suddenly turn on you in an instant was always a risk and one I’d whole-heartedly signed up for the moment I graduated from the academy.
Plenty of times in the past, I’d come face to face with a situation that had the potential to result in death, but somehow with my luck, it’d never seemed to come to pass.
Until now, apparently.
Blood spurted out of me in gushes, wetting my uniform along with the blade that had been used to do so. Another blow came a few inches to the left of the first one, this time closer to where my appendix was.
All at once, my body caught up with time and soon, the agony of a knife being ripped out of me for a second time sent me doubling over and landing on the floor by Thomas’s side.
“Shit.Terran! Get away from him, you son of a bitch!”
“Units 5, 7, and 9 arriving. Unit 12, what’s your status?”
Dying before I could say goodbye to my sister was one of the only things I was truly scared of. Leaving her behind, leaving my niece behind, was the last thing I ever wanted.
We’d moved to this area because it was safer than the city and had the opportunities my sister needed to raise her daughter without the fear of some opportunist coming along and taking away one of the only things that truly mattered to her.
Who knew people like this lived here of all places?
Wasn’t this a working community?
Shots rang out a ways from me—one, two, three, and a forth, all in rapid succession, connecting with a solid form close to me. My eyes were already starting to close when the body dropped to the ground next to me, the sounds of the death rattle chilling me to my core.
“Unit 12, what’s your status?”
