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She darted off again, but I couldn’t move that quickly. Instead, I turned back to the room and raised the gun again to try to find the shooter while I walked backward. The familiar whine of a bullet buzzing right by my head suggested we were being shot at from somewhere to my right, which was the eye that I couldn’t see out of anyway. I fired two rounds in that direction blindly while I walked, and it was enough to make the other shooter pause and retreat to hide momentarily. The commotion only resulted in more shooting from more directions, with the addition of everyone deciding to start yelling and screaming simultaneously. Some sprinted for cover, others sprinted for weapons, while everyone turned the volume way too high for my aching brain. I abandoned the possibility of defending us and put all my effort into just moving faster.
Trista’s mother made it to the door first and held it open for me while I blew past her and into that hallway. I turned back to make sure she was in the hall with me, but she was already staring over my shoulder in a wide-eyed panic.
“Bryson! Don’t!” She screamed. She rushed at me as quickly as she could to shove me against the wall as another shot was fired. She collapsed straight to the floor while I spun to raise my own weapon and the round that I fired back hit Bryson right in the center of his chest.
I knelt beside Trista’s mother, while she bled from a bullet hole to her chest. She coughed out more blood when she tried to speak. She reached a very shaky hand up and I slipped my own mangled hand right into it. I nearly blacked out on the spot when she squeezed it. I’d spent my fair share of time in the presence of dying people, but this one felt different. The dying people I was around were usually dying because of me and weren’t normally women. Let alone women I thought I hated but suddenly had very mixed feelings about.
“She deserved better,” she choked out before her hand went limp.
She did.
That was no lie.
I’d never be able to carry another body out of here with me, so I laid her hand back across her chest and closed her eyes. I had to keep moving. Someone else had Trista. And I hadn’t even made it out of the fucking building yet. Coughing from just a few feet away caught all my attention immediately. While I really was in a hurry to get out of that place, I was prepared to spare an extra minute using my decent hand to pound the remaining seconds of life out of Bryson Evans.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
trista
I felt sick while I followed Utah toward the sounds of gunfire and men screaming. It hadn’t taken anywhere near the amount of effort to get inside as I would’ve imagined. We watched people sprinting to get away from the building as we went toward it; like they didn’t even notice we existed. I could hear Utah’s voice. He was saying something to Indy through the radio in his ear, but I was wholly unable to focus on it. We made it to a small door at the back of the building after Utah used a knife to quietly kill two men who’d been between us and it. I heard the lock on the door release as we got closer, and my hand went right to the gun that was strapped against my own chest. Utah grabbed that hand to hold it right in place.
“That’s the one, Indy. I heard it unlock. Cameras inside this door?” Utah asked.
He released my hand the next second while he listened to whatever Indy was saying, but he stopped to look at me before he opened the door. He tapped his finger against the gun.
“I don’t care how loud it already is or what’s happening in there,” he said. “You don’t use this unless it’s going to save your own life. Got it?”
I nodded and he opened the door to lead me into the building. He had his gun up in both hands and moved down an empty hallway slowly. A woman burst around the corner in front of us. The moment that she spotted us, she screamed and raised both her hands. She was crying and screaming something in Spanish. She tried to press herself flat against the wall and kept both her hands up while she pushed her chin into her own chest as hard as she could.
“Afuera. Ahora,” Utah said and nodded his head toward the door behind us. He kept the gun on her while she tried to slide by us without ever moving her body away from the wall. He waited until the door closed behind her and she was gone before he turned back in the other direction. The sound of that door slamming closed brought a man out of one of the doors that lined the hallway and Utah didn’t even hesitate to shoot him. I watched him topple right into the hallway and a gun that I didn’t even see on him slid across the floor. When we got closer to where the hallway turned, the corner from where the woman had come, Utah’s arm swung out to hold me in place behind him. He was listening for something. I couldn’t for the life of me guess what he was able to hear. I couldn’t hear anything beyond the sound of my blood rushing through my own body like a fucking cyclone. Utah’s hand returned to the gun in a split second to have it stabilized in both hands when another body stepped around that corner with a gun already aimed at him.
“Jersey!”
My hand flew out to grab the barrel of Utah’s gun to try to force him to lower it. It didn’t do any good. He didn’t budge, and neither did Jersey or his weapon.
“J,” I tried again. Neither man moved. He was in that crazy place in his head, the one where I usually slapped the shit out of him to pull him back out of it. But his face was so swollen, so broken in so many places that I couldn’t bring myself to even try that. I shifted in between the men, in between their extended weapons to get closer to Jersey. I tried to keep my hands from shaking while I reached for his face with both hands. The one deep blue eye that was still open shifted down to me the moment that I touched him.
“He’s with me, J,” I said. “He’s here to help get us home.”
“Fancy Face.”
He glanced back over his shoulder before he lowered the gun and stepped the rest of the way into me. His other arm wrapped around my shoulders to pull me against him, gently at first and then his fingers dug into my shoulder like he was trying to reach into my skin to make sure I was real.
“Back out the way we came, Trista,” Utah said from behind me. “Now. Take him and get moving.”
I had to pry myself away from his chest to slide under the arm that was around my shoulders to get him to walk beside me. I heard doors opening and slamming shut behind us as soon as we were moving back down the hall. I slowed for just a second to try to look behind us.
“Don’t,” Utah barked immediately. “Just go. I’ve got it.”
I jumped at the sound of gunshots that were very nearby, but I finally had Jersey and Utah told me to just keep going, so I did.
“Pick up the pace!” Utah said from behind us with way more force than I’d ever heard in his voice.
“He’s not exactly a toothpick,” I grumbled back, like this was an appropriate time to argue with the man who was doing everything he could to keep us alive.
“Trista,” he snapped back.
Jersey tried for a split second to glare over his shoulder at Utah just for the way that he’d said my name.
