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And if that actually happened, I would do a little song and dance number and cover myself in glitter.
Beside me, Dan pulled out his weapon. “Ready, Hart?”
I did the same. “As I’m fuckin’ gonna be.”
“Then let’s do this.” He slipped around the side of the building, dropping into a half-crouch as he ran across the lot to settle behind a graffitied jersey barrier. After a moment, I followed, grunting as I settled into the gravel, my knees basically up to my ears.
“You okay, there?” Dan asked.
“Why don’t you grow a couple inches and talk to me about it?” I snarked back.
Dan smirked at me, then pushed himself back into his running crouch until he was lined up behind the breach team. Again, I followed, putting my back against the crumbled cement wall.
I had enough time to take a couple bracing breaths and tuck my sunglasses in the neck of my vest, and then the line was moving in, feet crunching on the gravel as they shuffle-ran toward the metal doors.
It’s funny how time kinda slows when you’re waiting to find out if all your raid preparations weren’t really necessary or if you’re about to walk into a firefight or an explosion. People talk about that, but until you’re sitting on the razor’s edge of something that could very well kill you—and everyone around you—you don’t really experience it. Sometimes, movies do slow-mo building up to action or fight scenes, and that’s honestly what it’s like.
You see and hear weird details—the shine of sunlight off some guy’s hair that glints just a hint of red in the brown, the rasp of a sleeve against a Kevlar vest, one shiny stone that’s just a slight shade of pink in the middle of all the beige, the rattle of a dozen gun-belts like the sound of dry bones and horse tack.
And then time and sound rush in like a crashing wave, and it’s all you can do to manage to keep your lungs working and your feet moving as you push through the steel door and into a cement room that smells like stale corn, moldy hay, and blood.
One of those things is definitely not like the others.
I felt my heartrate pick up, air rasping in my ears, my gun in my hand as my eyes scanned the dusty, dusky haze inside the warehouse.
“Jesus,” somebody said.
“Spread out,” Dan barked from beside me. “Check everything.”
The scuffing sound of tactical boots on grimy cement layered over the sound of a dozen or so cops all breathing through their masks, muffled and heavy.
Calls of “clear” echoed through parts of the building as Dan and I walked up to the thing that had caused the first cop to speak.
My stomach churned, but I forced myself to breathe deeply—through my mouth, because I didn’t want to smell it.
Three animals had been strung up on chains, hind paws tied overhead, throats slit, blood having long since pooled beneath them, congealing into a thick, almost jelly-like consistency on the floor.
There was a lot of blood, which most likely meant they’d been alive when their throats had been cut.
Bled out. Butchered.
One was some sort of dog, maybe a coyote, although I’m not real clear on what a coyote actually looks like. Another was clearly a wolf. The third looked like a lynx.
I would have bet money none of them was actually an animal.
Especially once I noticed the nose piercing in the wolf.
Fuck.
“Dan.”
“What?”
“Look at the wolf’s nose.”
“Oh,fuck.”
“Yep.”
