In the darkness of the shadow, she couldn’t see if Johnny looked angry or overly concerned. Either way, it didn’t matter. The emotions roiling through her needed to be suppressed, or she might get careless. “Okay, then,” Lucy said, standing up and catching her breath. “Let’s get this over with.” Lucy shrugged on her backpack, took out her .45 cal from its holster on her hip, and lifted her other bags off the ground with one hand.
No more tap dancing around. She was low on darts. If she met up with any more bad guys they would be sleeping permanently. Her patience was thinning into transparency, as was her empathy.
While Johnny half-carried Adam in the opposite direction, Lucy quietly moved around the back of the mess hall building, pausing to blacken the lens of a security camera pointing in her direction. Lucy could hear, even feel the thrum of the men inside the building, like a thriving hornet’s nest while they ate, talked, and laughed. She couldn’t get an accurate count of how many men actually occupied the camp.
According to Brockway, a dozen armed men had jumped Adam and Sunny, but that probably wasn’t everybody. Lucy took out eight men already, which brought down the odds somewhat. Helga said that two men replaced her and her colleagues after they ate their evening meals. She had given Lucy the layout of the room, too.
The lab building was positioned at the end of the pinwheel configuration closest to the gate and directly adjacent to the jail building. The front door faced the gate near the courtyard, the back door towards the mess hall near the fence. From what Helga had told her, Lucy knew she couldn’t barge inside the room, or she might lose easy access to the computers. She had an idea for a distraction, one that Johnny may not appreciate but didn’t need to know about, either.
Quietly unzipping her tactical vest, Lucy knelt in the sand and peered around the corner. The front gate wasn’t being guarded. It seemed, at dinnertime, security was nonexistent, which obviously worked in her favor. She slipped off the backpack and then her vest. Lucy lifted up the hem of her shirt and pulled if off over her head, leaving on only her black sports bra.
“Johnny, are you safe yet?” Lucy asked as she pulled out the rubber band from her hair and began tugging her fingers through her braid, fanning the strands out down her back.
“They’re coming up to the door right now,” Dusty said. “Don’t worry about them.”
“Good. Good. I’m about to go inside. I’ll let you know when it’s clear and I’m safe.”
“Okay, Lu,” Johnny said, his voice sounding a little winded. “We’re inside with the others.”
“Good.” After picking up her equipment and the clothes she shed, Lucy stretched her neck to the side until it crackled and then peeked around the corner before taking off. When she neared the window, she paused to try to look inside, but they had curtains too. Their camp “director” had a weird sense of security: covered windows, unlocked doors. At least it made it easier for Lucy to make sure he’d regret ever shooting Gabe and then coming after her.
She set her bags on the ground near the door. Entering a room with her hands full, where enemy combatants sat plotting against her country, was stupid, at best. One more minor adjustment to her hair and then Lucy pushed through the front door of the lab. Just as Helga described, the two men in white lab coats sat at the computers reviewing their day’s work. When they saw Lucy, their stare never made it all the way up to her eyes—or down to the gun in her hand before they stood up. They had smiles on their lips when she fired her gun, smiles that disappeared as they slumped to the floor.
Lucy kept her gun up as she walked to the back door. She peeked into closets and into the bathroom along the way, making sure they were empty. After she locked the back door, she retrieved her bags and clothes from the front step, and then locked herself inside. A sudden course of chills sent goose-bumps along her skin.
“I’m inside and safe,” Lucy said out loud, as she pulled on her turtleneck shirt. No need to tell Johnny she’d shot anybody. She shrugged on her tactical vest and zipped it up before she sat down at the nearest computer. “Good. He didn’t have a chance to log off the computer.”
“Who didn’t?” Johnny asked.
“Nobody.” Taking out a blue 128 gigabyte USB flash drive from her pants pocket, Lucy inserted it into the CPU and began downloading all the files contained on the hard drive. From the little red line slowly crawling across the screen, the information transfer would take a minute. She rubbed her arms, trying to chase away the chills.
When the transfer was complete, she plucked out the flash drive and pocketed it before inserting a red drive containing a pervasive worm that should cannibalize any other computer that tried to access the community programs.
She ran her hand around the back of her neck and swept her long hair from the inside of her shirt. While her thumb drive downloaded the worm program, Lucy stepped over one prone body and went over to the pile of bags.
Finding just the right place to plant twenty-five pounds of plastic explosives took a little consideration. It was too large to set out in plain view. Anybody coming into the room could see it and take out the detonators before she could set them off, thus eliminating the big explosion necessary to level the building, and the next one, and the next. In order to keep her package a true surprise, she needed to conceal it. The long counters beneath the laboratory equipment would do nicely.
Opening the closest cabinet, Lucy pushed aside several glass beakers, making room for the bag. Reason told her that only one detonator was needed, but she carefully inserted all eight—just because she felt like it—and switched them on, connecting them to her phone.
Without sitting down, she checked the progress of the download.
Complete.
She pulled the red thumb drive out of the computer’s CPU tower and shoved it into her pocket on her way to the door.
“I’m done and on—” Lucy didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence before an icy wind blew across her face, steeling away her breath in an instant.
The lab’s color faded to the flat black and slippery silver tones she’d seen too many times within the last hour. Everything around her was as still as death.
It’s happening!
Lucy’s perspective changed. She could see inside the jail building and the gunfight between Johnny, Dusty, and a man from the camp. More men came inside, and Adam died trying to shield Sunny and Helga.
Johnny died in a hailstorm of bullets.
Then things changed.
It was like it never happened.
When her surroundings rebounded in unnatural, brilliant colors, hurting her eyes, Lucy lost her balance and ended up falling onto her hands and knees, her breath knocked out of her lungs in a whoosh.
“Lu—what happened?”
“What happened?” Dusty asked.
“Keep everyone very quiet,” Lucy whispered, trying to regain her balance. “Don’t let the doctors talk anymore. There’s a man on his way over. We’re going to need to get out of here very quickly.” She pushed up from the floor and rushed outside.
“Did you see a window?” Johnny asked.
“Yes,” she hissed. “Stay quiet!”
From her vantage point outside the door, she could see the man had already made it to the other side of the courtyard. He had a tray in his hands. He must have been bringing dinner to the two guards, but considering she had knocked them out and dragged them behind the building, the man knew something was amiss. As he reached for something on his hip, Lucy had no other choice but to shoot. The only sound she heard when he went down was the soft pop of her silencer and the contents of the tray hitting the dirt as he fell.
Taking off across the courtyard, she didn’t try to stay in the shadows, but went straight over the sand and by the bigger rocks encircling the fire pit. Time was more important than stealth. Johnny met her at the front door. Everyone stood clustered together in the foyer.
“Is it over?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. I don’t feel cold.” Lucy pushed him inside and closed the door, but he’d wrapped his hand around her neck. Before she could stop her thoughts, she remembered her window again. Anger and fear flowed through her, and her heart felt like it had been electrified. She’d sensed his emotions! Back in the interrogation room after she had seen Johnny die through her last window, Lucy didn’t have the overwhelming, almost debilitating, anxiety and anger until after he’d touched her and he knew what happened. His fears became hers. She felt his sorrows. Did she feel his desires too? Were her feelings for Johnny hers at all, or just emotional bounce back about the way Johnny felt about her? A new side of Lucy’s life emerged—one she didn’t know how to control.
Lucy pulled from his grasp. “We need to hurry. Take everyone out the backdoor and into the desert as far as you can and hide—”
“What about you?” Johnny touched her arm. She stepped away from him, not wanting the physical contact.
“I’ll stay until you tell me you’re back at the Jeep. I don’t know how long before that man will be missed.”
“No—” Johnny turned to Dusty. “Take the doctors to the Jeep and drive them straight to the plane—”
“
No
!” Sunny cried. “I—I can’t leave Lucy—”
“And I’m not running from a fight,” Dusty said, checking his weapon.
“There’s nothing wrong with my trigger finger,” Adam said. He was leaning against the hallway wall, holding one of the confiscated rifles. Herman Klemple, the younger German scientist, had the other rifle.
“Does everything have to be an argument?” Lucy snapped loudly. “Sunny, I need you to get out of here—” She was interrupted by a yell. The voice sounded like it came from the mess hall, and he might’ve been angrier than even Lucy felt—if they were her feelings to begin with. At this point, she wasn’t certain if they were hers or Johnny’s. But one thing Lucy knew was that she was furious it had come down to a shoot out.
“It’s too late.”
“Take Helga and Klaus to the back of the hallway, Sunny. Lay on the floor,” Lucy said as she stepped out the front door. “Keep them as safe as you can.”
Another man quickly joined the man who shouted from across the courtyard. Both wore light colored shirts and khaki’s, which, along with the outdoor lamp hanging from the eave, illuminated their clothes, giving her a perfect shot. The light next to the door where Lucy stood gave away her presence. It needed to go. “Dusty, kill that light bulb above us.”
Glass breaking preceded the sheltering darkness as Lucy moved to the front edge of the building and then dropped to her knee and took aim. Her all-black clothing made her virtually disappear, but knowing that didn’t stop her heart from accelerating behind her ribs or take her fear away—or was it Johnny’s? Did she need to actually touch him, or just be near him to share his emotions?
Dusty knelt on her left and waited with his weapon out.
While the first guy by the door didn’t have a gun, the second guy clearly did. Lucy took her shots before he was able to lift his rifle. It didn’t end there. All the men she saw in her window were still inside, and now they came out one, then two at a time. She knew the window she had involuntarily peered into had already changed, that it was evolving even further with every additional exchange of gunfire. Things couldn’t stay the same. It was like a football rolling down a rocky hill: unpredictable. Lucy just wished she knew what the final outcome would be.
“Vatch out—on other side of building.” The deep voice with a heavy German accent had come from beside Dusty, down very low to the ground. Lucy glimpsed at Herman lying prone in the dirt, firing on targets coming from the backside of the mess hall. The scientist’s blue scrubs weren’t as concealing as black, but at least now there were three guns shooting at the enemy, and then four when Adam landed beside him and began taking his turn.
Johnny stepped to Lucy’s right and started firing. She glanced at him. He didn’t hold the gun right, but just as she opened her mouth to tell him to kneel down, to make him a lesser target—he grunted and fell.
“Are you hit?” Lucy asked immediately, her pulse pounding in her throat. It was a stupid question, yet she couldn’t keep the words from tumbling out of her mouth or her body from standing up and stepping in front of him, shielding him from anymore bullets. “Dusty, get Johnny inside the building. I’ll cover you.”
“No, Lu—”
“Don’t argue with me,” Lucy said as she put a fresh magazine in her gun. She strained to maintain control of her voice even though she had lost control over the scene. She walked forward, closer to the few armed men stepping out of the mess hall. As each man appeared, she took her shot and stepped closer. She wanted to scream at them, tell them to stop shooting. Lucy was sick of killing. She was tired and wanted to go home and sleep for a week.
Then the firing did stop. Lucy knew her people couldn’t fire with her standing in the way, but why would the remaining men in the mess hall pull back? Were they all dead?
When a man partially appeared from around the corner holding a long tube on his shoulder, Lucy had her answer. He didn’t have a rifle like the other men, and he was smart enough to keep himself concealed. With all the dead bodies building up on the ground, he probably thought twice about displaying his bravado.