Page 54 of Fight or Fly

“Hey, fucker,” I snarled. “Try it, and see what happens.”

Alex chose that moment to explode into life. She wrenched her upper body forward and drove her elbow back, twisting like a snake to get her unbroken right hand around Goon Number Two’s wrist, jerking his gun hand up. The pistol went off, the bullet embedding itself in the ceiling and sending chips of concrete shrapnel raining down. A heartbeat later, the weapon was in Alex’s hand and pointed at her captor’s head. Another explosion of sound, and Goon Number Two’s brains splattered against the wall behind him.

I gave her a quick onceover. Then I gave Jax a quick onceover, taking in the wet patch on his left thigh. “You’re bleeding, asshole,” I said, jerking my chin at the shiny stain.

He glanced down. “Motherfucker,” he said, and shot the unconscious goon he’d tackled to the ground earlier. The gun swung toward Lab Boy, who was hunched against the wall now, holding his clipboard in front of his chest like he could use it to stop a bullet.

“You,” Jax said. “Get him out of those chains.”

Lab Boy froze for a second, his eyes as wide as dinner plates. Then he pointed at the man Alex had killed. “That guard had the keys.”

“Then I expect he still does,” Jax snapped. “So fuckingget them.”

The tech scurried into motion, every gun in the room trained on him as he fumbled through Goon Number Two’s pockets and came up with the keys. His already pale face whitened further as he cautiously approached me and reached for the first wrist shackle. I grinned down at him, showing teeth, and his pale eyes darted away nervously. The second wrist shackle followed the first. I stood still and docile as he crouched down to get the ankle shackles.

When I was finally free, I pulled the electrical leads off my nipples and tossed them aside. Next, I reached down and grabbed Lab Boy by the neck, spinning him to face away from me. I ignored the pain of abused muscle and bone as I got a grip on his chin with my other hand and twisted. His startled yelp cut off in a crunch of bone and cartilage. I let the body slump to the ground and stepped around it, since I hurt too fucking much to step over it if I didn’t have to.

Crouching down to pick up Goon Number One’s gun was agony, but damned if I was walking out of this room unarmed. I managed to regain my feet without falling over and turned a scowl on the soldier who’d threatened to shoot through Alex to get to his target.

“Are you and me gonna have a problem?” I asked.

“Stow it,” Alex croaked, cutting me off. “Exit plan?”

“Choppers on the roof,” Jax said. “We need to move.”

He didn’t ask if we could make it under our own power. Bastard knew us too well for that. One of the other soldiers knelt to check the pulse of the guy who’d been shot in the doorway and shook his head.

“Leave him,” said the guy who’d called Alex a hyena. Apparently, he was a cold-hearted bastard all around, then—not that I was about to argue the call. Last thing we needed was to have to haul a corpse through a battle zone.

The others cleared the corridor and set a rapid pace. Jax hung back to make sure Alex and I were keeping up. I wondered when that bullet wound was going to catch up to him, and hoped it happened after we reached the promised choppers rather than before.

Alex was gray-faced and stoic as she stalked along next to me, gun held steady in the hand that wasn’t a twisted mess of broken bones. I was mildly jealous that she at least had a prisoner’s uniform to wear. Breaking out of a Committee torture facility buck-ass naked might make for a good drinking story someday, but the actual reality kind of sucked. For one thing, it was goddamned cold in here. Or possibly I was going into shock. Hard to tell which.

We met a few guards along the way, alone or in pairs, but there wasn’t nearly as much of an organized defense as I might have expected. It made me wonder how many Jax and the others had killed on the way in. I also wondered how long it would take Sloane to call for outside assistance. I didn’t know enough about the distribution of Committee assets in this part of the country to even hazard a guess.

After a more intense shootout that winged the hyena guy on the right arm, we broke through and entered what looked like an administrative area. It seemed to be deserted—at least until we came to the open door of a stairwell and saw the bodies piled inside. All but one was wearing the blue uniform of prison staff. The other was dressed in black.

One of the soldiers who hadn’t spoken before cursed sharply in a foreign language, and I guessed it was someone he knew.

Above us, the way appeared to be clear. We just had to climb god knew how many flights of stairs to get where we were going. I was already operating in that physically detached sort of way where your muscles did their own thing, despite whatever injuries your brain was ignoring in the heat of the moment.

There were limits, though—and after we’d made it up three flights and part of a fourth, Alex gasped. She was behind me and in front of Jax, who was bringing up the rear. By the time I whirled to see what was happening, Jax had already caught her around the waist and was hauling her right arm across his shoulders to support her.

“Go,” he growled, dragging her up the stairs with no regard to the bullet hole in his thigh or the nerve damage that had weakened his left side.

I went, ignoring the gray fog edging into the corners of my vision. The bruises on my face throbbed, and my legs were getting the numb, rubbery feeling that meant they weren’t going to keep working forever.

After what felt like an eternity, we burst through a twisted metal security door and into daylight. The sudden brightness brought tears to my one functioning eye. While I tried to blink the blurriness away, a familiar hand clamped around my shoulder and propelled me in the right direction, toward one of the looming dark blurs. The engine noise was deafening, and the rotors had already spun up, generating a powerful downdraft as we crossed the final few yards.

More hands grabbed me and pulled me inside. I twisted to make sure Alex and Jax were aboard as well.

“Where’s Beckett?” Jax shouted, pitching his voice to be heard above the racket.

“On one of the other choppers!” someone shouted back.

“These two need stretchers!” Jax said.

After the confirmation that Beckett was safe, I’d already heard everything I needed to hear. With a sense of exhausted relief, I let my knees buckle. My surroundings went black before my body had a chance to hit the metal deck.

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