Page 109 of The Circle

“No, bru, I got it.” He pulls me back again.

I feel like I’m in a goddamn action-comedy from the 1980s or some shit. “Alec, fuckin’ let me go. I got this.”

“It should be me, bru.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going to be a father.”

It’s a weird thing to hear. It’s an untimely thing to hear. It’s a sobering thing to hear. And in the middle of all this bullshit, it lands like an anvil.

“Fuck that,” I spit, tossing it off along with any consideration I have of the truth and gravity of what he’s saying. “It’s fine. You’re already a father. So don’t start—”

“Fokken listen to me, man. I ain’t no father. And I wouldn’t know how to be if my very life depended on it. You may have noticed that I don’t have particularly stellar modeling in that regard.”

“Eliza’s not going to make it.” It’s harsh, but it’s also the facts and he needs to hear me. “You’re the only parent Andra has left.”

“She has her uncles.”

“It’s not the same.”

“I’m going.”

“I’m fucking going.”

“I won’t let you.”

“You can’t stop me.”

We’ve gone from dopey action-comedy to a fuckin’ Laurel and Hardy routine.

Just as I’m about to knock him off me and do what the fuck I want, like the goddamn adult human person I am, I hear a sound coming from the other side of us.

Footfalls. Pounding down the hall. With intention.

I jerk my head to look and through a nightmarish Vaseline lens of gauzy red distortion, I make out Christine, coming fast, raising her weapon.

“What happened with—?” I start to ask about Eliza, even though I already know the answer. Christine doesn’t look at me and Alec, just keeps her eyes on a wounded Liam as she thunders toward us.

Then, as she’s just upon where we remain crouched, she shifts her gaze to Alec and then me, and that’s when I realize she’s not slowing down. She’s not skidding to a halt to reconnoiter with us and find out what’s waiting down the hall. She’s going to hit her next unknown full tilt, guns blazing. With my bad eye, I can see the fury in hers. She’s non-negotiable.

“Ay!” Alec yells out as she slides to a stop in the open expanse of the corridor that the one we’re currently in T-bones into. If this were, in fact, a movie it would all happen in slow motion. But it doesn’t. It plays out in real, horrifying, fucking time.

“Christine!” I scream as the bullets from the two guns she’s facing pour toward her in a horizontal shower of unnatural rain.

And…

They miss her.

They all just miss.

She is not thrown back, driven to the ground by the torrent of hot metal.

I don’t believe in… well, anything really except me and the two people holding rifles with me. But maybe there is some universal power looking out for us right now. Or maybe it’s just looking out for Christine, full as she is with the unusual biological magic that is creation. Or maybe the guys are, like Zander, just really shitty shots. But whatever the reason, she simply skids to a stop, the projectiles wing past her, and she squeezes the trigger on the AK she’s holding, responding in kind.

And she doesn’t miss.

I don’t peer my head back around the wall in time to see the bodies drop, but by the time Christine has stopped firing I know they’re down because there is a shocking and abrupt silence. “Where are they?” Christine asks, turning her head to us quickly before spinning it back to scan the hall in front of her for more threats. That’s when both Alec and I hazard a look and see all three of the uniformed guards dead on the ground. The two who were doing the shooting and the one Zander used as a shield. All fallen to the castle floor. All bloody and dead. “Where are they?” Christine repeats.