Special Forces: Operation Alpha: Marking Mariah (Kindle Worlds Novella) (11 page)

As he watched the screens re-populate themselves, something made his scalp tingle. Something he’d not felt in a long time, not since his time as an Operator when his finely honed intuition had been all he had between life and death. He leaned forward, pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose, and then reached for his phone, recalling his friend’s wigged out conversation that morning.

The phone had stayed quiet all morning, he thought. So all must be well.

To reassure himself, he reached into the inner pocket of his leather jacket so he could stare down at the comforting blank screen.

But his phone wasn’t in its usual place.

“Shit,” he muttered, getting up to check all the work surfaces in his office.

No phone anywhere.

Commanding the tiny blip of worry beating the base of his brain to be silent, he took a breath and walked out to his truck. The sun was blazing hot. The muggy air in late April not boding well for a comfortable summer. He wrenched the door open and reached into the console where he kept the damn thing when he was charging it.

His hand shook. His scalp tingled again. A drop of sweat hit the black screen as he touched the button to power it up.

“Fuck,” he yelped as he jumped into the seat, and roared out into the street, mentally calculating the time it would take for him to drive to the school at ninety miles an hour.

He’d seen 9-1-1, six times. When he’d tried to call back while he drove like a dozen bats out of a dozen hells he’d gotten no answer.

“Mariah,” he whispered, his jaw clenched, his brain slipping into Operator mode. “Fucking-A Kieran answer the mother fucking phone now,” he yelled so loud it made his throat hurt.

“Terry,” his friend’s voice came through at last, whispery, breathy in a way that made Terry’s gut churn. “Police are…” he stopped and coughed. “They’re on their way. Stay away. Don’t…it’s….shit.” A loud blast hit Terry’s ears and the phone went dead.

He punched it through a red light, tires squealing, horns honking all around him. When he looked down at his phone buzzing in his clenched hand, the name there made his heart nearly stop.

Mariah.

“Where are you?” he barked. “Are you safe? Behind a door? In a closet?”

“I’m in the music room with about two dozen kids,” she said, her voice calm. But he heard the tension in it, could taste her terror as if he were experiencing it himself. “They entered the building here, by the theater, that door… you know where. I think they’re in the gym now.”

“Okay, I need you to do me a favor, baby. You up for that?” He roared across a berm to avoid one of the bigger intersections and took a side road, nearly tilting his truck over on its side, not touching the brakes through a sharp curve alongside the Lucas River.

“Yes, okay.”

“Go to the door and look down the hall. See if there are any unfriendlies…um, teenagers with weapons…in your quadrant…uh, your area. The hall. If they’ve moved away from there, I need to get to them, but I won’t, until I know you’re safe.”

“Okay. Hold on. Are you c-c-c-c-close?” Her stuttering soft voice made his pulse race like nothing ever had. “Terry?”

“I’m close, baby. Ten minutes, max.” He floored the accelerator, tearing through somebody’s tulip patch with an apology on his lips, turning the actual twenty minutes he had left closer to ten.

“I don’t see anyone,” she said. “It’s smoky though and it’s hard to breathe in the hall.” She coughed. He could hear sobbing in the background.

This centered him. This he understood. This he could fix. Hostage rescue was one of Delta Force’s prime directives. He’d trained for hours using live fire and had participated in four real hostage extractions. But he was shaking as he said, “Mariah, honey, can you lock the door? Are all the kids in your wing with you?”

“Yes. To both.”

“Good, go back inside, lock it and shove the heaviest furniture you can find in front of it. Do that now. I’m gonna enter by the other side, at the gym.”

“Terry, don’t, it’s not safe there.”

“I know. That’s why I have to go there. Barricade yourself and text me when it’s done. I’ll come for you I swear it. I won’t let you get hurt.”

“Okay. And Terry,” she said, her voice on the verge of tears. She hesitated.

“What is it? I’m almost there. I see the cops behind me, a shit ton of them. But I want to get there first. I can sort this out with a minimal loss of life but if those assholes go in guns blazing there’s no fucking telling—”

“I love you,” she said, with a sob, before she hung up.

“God damn it, move out the
fuck
out of my way,” he roared as he laid on his horn and drove up the side of the road past the roadblock the locals were setting up. Good, a perimeter, he thought, as his brain shifted away from Mariah and into Operator mode.

He tried Kieran again. This time his friend answered on the first ring. “We’re in the gym,” he said, his voice even breathier than before. “There are two of them in here, and both have guns. Big guns. Not shot guns. Semi-automatics.”

“Okay. All right. I’m gonna come in through the locker rooms. I still have my key. I’ll get them, Kieran, I promise you that.”

“No! I mean, they’re just kids, Terry. Let me handle it in here. I think there’s another one out roaming the halls and tossing smoke bombs.” He coughed. “The building’s full of smoke.”

“Why are you in the gym? Who’s in there with you?”

“Assembly,” Kieran whispered. “Honor roll kids, talking about their responsibilities during graduation.”

A scream broke through their conversation. Then a blat of gunfire. Then silence.

“Mother fucker!” He wrenched the steering wheel to the left and drove across the large front lawn of the school, barely getting the truck stopped before he jumped out, gun pulled and ready, wishing for his fellow Operators but knowing this was up to him now.

A third unfriendly, he remembered Kieran saying. Someone else roaming the halls, perhaps heading down the wide music wing and hearing the kids in the choir room with Mariah. His Mariah.

Ignoring the locals—something he’d gotten used to doing in the godforsaken desert—he snuck around the athletic entrance, pondering his next move. Torn between wanting to take down the unfriendlies and running to get Mariah the hell out of the building, he used his key and ran silently down the steps to the locker rooms, underneath the big gym. He could her the murmur of voices above him, but no gunfire, no screams. He crept up the tunnel flight of stairs that opened into the northwest corner of the gym and waited, counting his breaths, feeling his steady, calm pulse.

“We can work this out,” he heard Kieran say.

“Oh we’ll work it out all right, Principal Love,” someone replied, a sneer of disgust in his voice.

Terry risked a peek around the corner to get his bearings and sort out the configuration of the players. Kieran was in the middle of the gym floor with two other teachers and a handful of kids. The gunmen, two of them, stood facing them. The bleachers behind were filled—forty or maybe fifty kids all together. He ducked back into the dark tunnel hallway. He could get off two shots fast and take those punks down one by one.

“They’re just kids,”
Kieran had said.

Fuck that. They took up arms and stormed their own school with malice and ill intent. He was gonna frack the little assholes. One hit to the forehead each. They’d never know what hit ‘em. He counted to ten to steady himself.

When he hit five he heard someone yell, “Hey! This shitwad’s texting.”

“No, no,” some other kid, presumably the shitwad in question, bleated. “No, I’m not. I promise. Please don’t…please!”

Several screams and gunshots sounded all at once. Terry rounded the corner in a crouched and ready stance, his eyes seeing but his brain not even half-believing. Just then, the main gym doors blew open, revealing the locals.

Kieran lay on the floor, but not where he’d been sitting before. He must have run at the gunman and taken a full frontal hit. He was crumpled on the floor in front of the bleachers full of screaming, crying kids.

Terry frowned, took aim and squeezed the trigger at the precise moment both of the punk ass, gun-toting kids’ heads exploded forward. Someone else had nailed them from behind. Shaking, he ran past the melee and into the hall, down towards the music wing. At one point, the smoke forced him to crawl on his belly, but he didn’t care. He had to get to her.

When he reached the hallway alongside the theater that housed the band and choir rooms, he bolted down the short flight of steps, seeing the open choir door before he got to it, knowing what that meant.

“Everybody, show me your faces,” a voice inside the room was saying. Whimpering and movement followed. Terry stood once again with his back to the wall, listening around the corner to some snot-nosed, spoiled brat punk threaten a bunch of his peers—and Mariah. He closed his eyes for a second, then rounded the corner.

“If you don’t drop that gun and fall on your face right now I will blow your mother fucking brains all over this room,” he bellowed, moving closer, holding the Beretta level with the kid’s head. He spotted Mariah standing in front of the group with both arms out, as if she could protect the entire room from that punk’s weapon. An impressive weapon, he noted, as it dropped to the floor the way he knew it would. He snagged it and shoved his knee into the punk’s back, then into his neck good and hard once he’d collapsed to the floor.

“Your buddies are dead, asshole. Stay still, or you’ll be joining them in hell, get me?” He ground down. The kid sniveled, and nodded. Terry motioned for Mariah to get the kids out. “Go down the side hall, get them onto the lawn. Now. We don’t know who’s left.” He grabbed her arm. “Stay outside with them. If you never do another god damned thing I tell you to, do that, please.”

She nodded and helped shoo the frantic kids out and down the hall. He yanked the kid up by his arm and shoved him up against the wall as he looked around for something to secure his wrists.

Duct tape.

Perfect.

He wrapped the shooter’s wrists tight and tugged him out and down to the main hall, now clearing thanks to open doors at either end of the building.

“Kieran,” he yelled, wanting to hear his friend’s voice so badly he could barely stand it. An EMT crew dashed past him. A quick glance through the open doors revealed cops, firefighters, and a news crew, naturally. And a ton of anxious faces held back at the barricades. “Oh hell, Kieran,” he muttered under his breath as he shoved the kid into the gym and motioned for a cop.

“Holy shit, is that you Terry?” The officer who approached him was someone he knew, but at that moment, Terry’s eyes were on the tall, redheaded man splayed out on his back, being attended to by four paramedics. The floor underneath him was crimson with blood. The room was awash with uniforms, but it had been cleared of kids. Two blue tarps had been tossed over the assailants. Five more blue tarps covered other bodies, people he likely knew, had worked with or coached. His jaw ached from clenching it.

He shoved the duct-taped kid at the cop. “Here. This one had the music room held hostage.” He holstered his gun and dropped to his knees as close to Kieran as he could get. “Oh God, my friend, I’m sorry I didn’t have my phone on me. Shit. God damn it. Kieran, open your eyes.” Tears blurred his vision as the EMTs lifted his friend’s body onto a stretcher, popped it up and ran out of the gym, one of them holding an IV bag aloft, another one straddling him on the gurney, giving continual chest compressions.

Terry stood amidst a familiar sort of carnage—odors of smoke, spent ammunition and blood up in his nose. When he spotted Mariah at the open gym doors, he ran for her, furious at her for not doing what he said, but never happier to see anyone in his entire life.

She leapt into his arms, sobbing against his neck. He soothed as best he could, while he kept an eye on the team transporting his friend’s bloody, lifeless body down the hall of the high school to the waiting ambulance outside.

She pulled away from him, tears running down her dark, beautiful face. “I love you, Terry. I love you so much. Please forgive me. Please, ask me again, ask me right now.”

He blinked and sucked in a breath. “I love you too, Mariah,” he said, brushing at her tears with his thumbs, his heart thudding in his chest. “But I need to go with him right now. Come with me? He’s my friend and his family is gonna need me…need us. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said, taking his hand and running with him out into the hot, muggy, April air. As they jumped into his truck the heavens broke open with a flash of lightning and an ear-splitting clap of thunder. The rain hit the windshield hard and fast, but he focused ahead and they made it to the hospital right behind the ambulance.

“Wait,” Mariah said, grabbing his hand and putting it to her face. “Terry, listen to me.”

He turned to her, his neck stiff, jaw still clenched. She blinked fast and kept his hand pressed to her chest. “I love you. I want to marry you. I want us to be together. Please tell me I’m not too late.” Tears streamed down her face. He leaned over the console, pulling her to meet him halfway. “Please,” she whispered, her lips mere inches from his.

He kissed her then, going deep, needing to feel it, wanting her to feel it. She grabbed his shirt, closing her fists in the fabric. When he broke from her, he was dizzy, but not just from lust, not this time. “You’re sure?” he asked, his voice hoarse.