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She yanked, and metal groaned and shook, but the door held.
One of their attackers turned his fire on her. She felt the bullets striking but ignored them; pain was pain, the nanites would fix it. Her world narrowed to the door.
She yanked violently, twisting down, and the one remaining hinge snapped at its stress point, leaving her holding a thick armored door.
She picked it up and ran to the opposite side, around the still-smoking SUV, and rolled into the ditch that held Joe, Patrick, and Riley. She and Riley got the door up and above them, protecting the two men, seconds before the concentrated fire bore down.
“Ladies,” Joe said between gasps for breath, “you’re making me feel kinda useless here. ”
“You’re the only one who can shoot right now,” Bryn panted. “How’s that for feeling useful?”
He grinned. He was bloody from a cut on his head, and his smile looked wild and warlike. He still had his sidearm, though Bryn hadn’t had time to grab her weapons bag, and he crawled to the edge of the sheltering door. “Go,” he said, and they shifted it a few inches down his body. He fired six shots in about three seconds, moving his aim with tiny, precise ticks. “Clear. ” They moved the door back to cover him—and the answering fire was less—a lot less. “Got five out of six. Last bastard twitched. ”
“Vest shots?” Riley asked.
“What am I, an amateur? Head shots, thank you very much. ” He took a couple of deep, pumping breaths, and nodded. “Go. ”
They repeated the maneuver, and he did six more shots. When he signaled clear again, there was only a desultory rattle of fire on the steel, and then silence.
They were retreating.
Joe wasn’t assuming anything, though. He ejected his clip, slapped in a new one, and racked the slide so fast that it was one blur of motion. Ten seconds passed. Fifteen. Twenty. Bryn’s arms were starting to burn under the strain, and she could see that Riley’s were shaking, too.
Then she heard a shout from behind her, and saw that one of Brick’s men was gesturing at them from his bullet-pocked SUV. “Guys, I think we’re leaving,” she said. “Joe, can you carry Patrick?”
“Better if I drag him,” he said, and holstered his weapon to take hold of the still-unconscious Patrick beneath his arms. “On three?”
They counted down, and as Joe pulled, Riley and Bryn kept the shield over their heads as they moved toward the waiting SUV. From there, Brick’s surviving men—there were at least two down on the road—loaded Patrick in, and then Joe, Riley, and Bryn. One of them tried to hold up the door as a shield, and looked comically surprised when he realized how heavy it was.
Bryn found it funnier than she should have and had to suppress panic giggles. She swallowed them as the remaining mercenaries piled in with them, and pressed her fingers to Patrick’s throat. His pulse was steady and strong, but he had a wicked blow to the head, and plenty of cuts.
“He alive?” the man in charge asked. He resembled Brick a little, but in miniature—small, muscular, and a man who’d clearly been given quality training in mayhem; he was in the shotgun role, and before they could answer he fired out the window of the SUV at the remaining members of the assaulting team. One went down. The others broke for cover.
“He’ll be okay,” Joe said. “Could be a concussion. Hopefully his skull didn’t get fracked. ”
“We’ve got a portable med unit I can roll to us,” the man said. “Anybody else got holes in them?”
“Nothing that won’t fix itself,” Bryn said. She wasn’t being flip; she knew she’d taken five or six rounds, but the wounds had already closed, and the bullets had been pushed out. She was, if not healed, well on the way to healing. Efficient things, the nanites. She could almost like the little bastards, except for the side effects.
Like looking at the blood on Joe’s face and having an almost irresistible desire to lick it off and bite into that soft, tender flesh. . . .
She looked away and squeezed her eyes closed. “Riley,” she said.
“Yeah,” Riley said. “I know. Hang in there. ”
“Trouble?” the driver asked. He jammed the SUV into reverse, expertly steering around the abandoned vehicle in the way—from the way the engine was smoking, it wasn’t drivable—and hit the gas.
“Nothing you can fix,” Riley said. “What’s the plan?”
The truck was rocketing backward at a terrifying speed—Bryn couldn’t imagine driving that fast in reverse, but the man behind the wheel looked perfectly comfortable with the whole thing. She decided the best thing to do was to not watch, and instead focused on
the man in the passenger seat, who was changing out the clip on his military-grade selectable full-auto P90. “We get the fuck out of this killbox and regroup,” he said. “I’ve been around, but I’ve never seen that much firepower to kill four people, outside of diplomats or drug dealers. Jesus, who’d you folks piss off?”
“Better you don’t know,” Riley said. “Classified. What’s your name, soldier?”
“You can call me Harm,” he said. “Everybody does. ”
“Seriously?”
