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Tiffany looks at her bloody arm, and drops like a sack of potatoes into a dead faint.
“How did they get my secret video?” John screams, his voice climbing into high registers of the doomed.
“Your video?” I ask, balancing ten thousand threats on the head of a pin as I try to get him to keep talking just long enough for me to disarm him.
Lindsay looks at Jane, then grins maniacally at John. She has blood in her teeth.
“Jane did that. Hacked your system. Funny how a ‘dumb bitch’ outmaneuvered you.” She makes a weird, over-the-top huffing sound. “Two dumb bitches.”
She looks at me. “I told you I had a plan.”
My God.
She’s luminous.
John looks around the room as sirens peal in the distance.
He’s at his most dangerous now. I have to act.
He pauses. Catches my eye.
And then he pulls the trigger on the gun pointed at Lindsay.
Chapter 10
Lindsay
I think that memory is like a mother.
It protects you when you need to be sheltered from a cruel world.
It forces you to face reality head on and develop a tougher skin.
It tells you that all that really matters is being kind and good and decent.
And reminds you that you are more than the sum of all your parts.
The bullet rips into my shoulder as I drop to the ground, sensing what John’s going to do before he does it, a mantra of Fuck no you don’t whipping through my mind like blood in a centrifuge. I fall on poor Jane, who is a warm lump under me.
A body – Drew! -- arcs over me, just like Superman, arms outstretched, torso elongated like he’s faster than a speeding bullet.
Except Drew isn’t.
The bullet got me.
Drew crashes into John, who falls on top of me. John’s hand goes to my throat, then all his weight is off me. He’s dangling in air like a puppet, his head snapping to the right at an unusual angle. A horrible, deep crunching sound vibrates into my back teeth. How does he do that? It’s like a special effect, only this isn’t CGI and when John falls to the ground, Drew is behind him, arms pumped, face berserk and ferocious, eyes on me.
That’s where my memory steps in and says enough.
Wood splinters in the distance and then the room is filled with men in black and heat, an impossible number of guns, and they’re all crowding around us, Silas and Mark Paulson barking orders, Drew screaming my name as the men in black fatigues cover the room with their red lasers.
If I weren’t in pain, so hot, so cold, so wet, so tired, the bouncing red dots would make me laugh.
And then I’m off Jane, on the couch, a blanket on me, someone pressing hard on my shoulder, making me scream. Drew’s above me, his mouth moving but the words aren’t there. Who pressed his mute button? Someone turned off all the sound in the world.
Stretchers appear in my peripheral vision and then the warm blanket is off me, cold air stinging the lava-hot part of my soul. I don’t have a shoulder anymore, just a place where the heat all lives. I open my mouth to scream but I stop, bracing myself.
Then I exhale, so slowly it’s like blowing through a straw.
