Page 39 of Exposing Adonis

Pop! One went down.

Leo was shooting with the same level of accuracy, but we were human. Sometimes we’d take two shots to take a person down, and my count of the number of bullets we had was ticking down in my head.

“As you should be.” Leo looked out the door. “Either way, go upstairs, get some distance between yourself and these guys.”

“Go with her.” I told him.

“Arguingnow?Really? You and Lea really are made for each other.” Leo repeated.

“Okay,rochambeau.” I put out a fist to him.

“Ok, do we go on three, or do we go to three, then hit?”

“Seriously?” What the hell was with these twins?

“Okay, on three.” Leo said, before he started counting. “One, two…”

He put his hand out in a scissor shape. I kept my fist. Not because I wanted to choose rock, but I forgot if we were going on three, or after.

“Fine,” Leo relented. He grabbed Chloe, and pushed her to crawl up to the staircase. “We’ll get to the roof.”

That was the last thing he said, before he collapsed on the floor, his legs giving out. He grunted, and grabbed his thigh, falling on top of Chloe. She let out a wail as he fell on her, her medical instincts trying to get to the wound.

I sprung up and popped a shot, but I knew I had only one more magazine left. We were dead if a miracle didn’t happen.

The KNF were slamming into the gate, and despite the hastily erected barrier of desks and furniture, it swung open, undefended. They were ready to storm us.

“Are you alive?” I yelled to Leo, but Chloe answered.

“He’s shot!” She was pulling off her shirt and turning it into a tourniquet. “I can get us to the roof. But what about you?”

“Just go, and I’ll worry about that later.” I looked out at the gate that swung open, undefended. A truck stood, and the men were gathering. Danger was a noose tightening around my neck.

Leo crawled, his one leg limp as he bled and dragged it along. Chloe tried to pull him along by the arm, but I didn’t have time to see if she was doing more harm than good.

I laid down suppressive fire, shooting out the window with carefully calculated shots. I stared as men on the other side of the open gate faced one another. The new people coming at our position didn’t have red armbands. What had Leo said about that?

I didn’t have time to think about it. Purposeful with the few shots I had. I knelt down to reload. As I took aim, I felt the jolt, like a puff of air at my shoulder, right at the neck where the armor dipped at the collar. A spot I fondly touched when I thought of Lea, and how she had stuck a scalpel there when I first experienced her as the Ferryman.

I knew it before I felt it.

This had gone right through me. Like a knife through butter.

I barely noticed the pressure of it traveling through my body.

Next was the explosive pain in my chest that slammed me backwards across the floor, my head knocking into a school desk, right at the temple. A second shot had hit my armor, and knocked me down.

I had been close to death three times in my life. The first was in Kandahar. A bullet hit my thigh, close to my femoral artery. I was kept alive by a half inch Israeli tourniquet. The second was a helicopter crash near Kabul. A rocket took us out. I didn’t walk away. I limped away and was rescued by the Quick Reaction Force.

The third was by far my favorite. A little woman clad in gray from head to toe stuck a scalpel into my shoulder. As I bled out on the ground, she called an SOS so that I could be rescued in time, which set the dominos clattering to the ground, leading to this one moment. And did I regret it? No.

I couldn’t regret her taste, or her feel. I couldn’t regret the way she whimpered in my ear, and the new, and powerful need to make her mine. She had pulled me from my boredom, my stillness. I ceased to be a shell that simply moved through the world playing the approximation of a civilized man. And that fire was frightening, and thrilling, growing every day into a massive inferno.

I was dying. But Even as the darkness closed in on the edges of my vision, I saw her like a modern avenging angel in the door of a helicopter, a rifle in her hand. She was Atalanta, and Artemis, and Penthesilea… every goddess of war, beckoning me home.

Chapter 18

Lea

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