Logan slammed the door behind us, muffling the sound of gunfire.
“Glad to see you’re both okay.”
“Okay?” I scoffed as I stood from the floor, trying in vain to dust myself off. “We are the furthest thing from okay right now. What the hell happened?”
A particularly loud gunshot rang out, and a chunck of a nearby windowsill exploded into a shower of splinters. Sebastian took a deep breath before pointing the nose of his gun out the window and returning fire.
One.
Two.
Three.
He pulled the trigger three times, his hands never wavered for even a moment, and the gunfire on the other side of the bunker momentarily fell silent.
“Turns out that new witness, Sam, was a rat working for the bell ringers,” Sebastian said as he used the opportunity to reload his gun. “As soon as he was alone, he slipped back up to the main house and unlocked all the security. There must have been people lying in wait nearby, because we were overrun in minutes.”
Jordy was still pressed against my side, safely tucked under my arm where I could clearly feel him shaking against me. Most of the furniture in the lounge had been knocked over in the commotion, but a few chairs remained upright, and I led Jordy over to the nearest one.
“Here, Jordy, sit down for a minute while we figure out what to do.” Despite saying that, I was reluctant to let him go. My hands practically felt fused to his skin, as if separating from him would be the same as cutting off a piece of myself.
He must have shared the sentiment, because after he sat down, he continued to cling to the hem of my shirt with one hand while cradling my briefcase with the other. Blue eyes looked around the lounge area, their pupils blown wide like he was struggling to understand what he was seeing, until his gaze landed on one of the other witnesses nearby.
“Clay? You okay?”
A few feet away, Clay sat slumped in a chair, elbows braced on his knees. There was a smudge of dirt on his cheek, and his hair was a frizzy mess, but he otherwise looked all right.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, confirming my initial observation. “But Maria wasn’t so lucky.”
He nodded over his shoulder at the twin girls huddled in a corner. One of them, presumably Maria, sat curled up in a ball, blood staining the side of her shirt while her sister pressed a cloth over a wound on her side.
“It’s just a graze,” Maria said through clenched teeth. “I’ll be fine. Let’s just get out of here.”
“Fuck!” Sebastian shouted as he ducked down below the windowsill after a bullet came precariously close to his head. “I second the idea of getting out of here. Where’s Thomas? Has anyone seen him?”
Jordy pressed closer to me, and I wrapped my arm tighter around his shoulder.
“Thomas isn’t coming.”
Thankfully, no one needed me to explain more than that.
The plan to leave ended up being relatively simple. With only one way in and out of the underground bunker, we didn’t have many options. The only real question was how to create a big enough distraction that would let us get up the only staircase that was currently being blocked by an untold number of gunmen.
“I’ve got an idea,” Sebastian said as he tossed Logan his gun. “But I’ll need you to buy me two minutes.”
Logan never lowered his own gun from the window as he shoved Sebastian’s weapon in the back of his belt for safekeeping. “All right. But I can’t hold them back on my own. They’ll push forward in that time, and we’re running out of ammo. I hope your plan’s a good one.”
“I don’t know if it’s a good one,” Sebastian called back over his shoulder as he headed off toward the lounge’s kitchen. “But it’ll give us a chance at least.”
With that vote of confidence, he disappeared into the kitchen, and Logan returned to standing guard at the window. He was more conservative with his bullets than he had been a minute ago, only firing when he was certain he had a shot.
Although I couldn’t see what was happening outside the walls of our hideout, I could practically feel our enemies creeping closer. It was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck.
I hated to separate from Jordy, but I hated the feeling of being hunted even more. If there was something I could do to help, I had to try. After leaving him sitting with Clay so that the two could at least take some comfort in each other, I joined Logan by the window.
“I’m no trained marksman, but I’m also no stranger with a gun. Can I help?”
Logan’s whole body looked as if he were carved from a stone statue, completely unmoving, as he lined up the sight of his gun. Yet, he didn’t pull the trigger.
