Exclusive Excerpt
“Get her!” somebody shouted,
from a completely different direction, as soon as I set foot into a four-way
intersection. Gunfire erupted, and I just kept right on running, wondering what
kind of moron thinks that ‘Get her’ is the way to start an ambush. I reminded
myself that crime at their level didn’t attract the best and brightest minds
available.Thank Christ for that.
Stairs. Stairs leading up.
Hell to the yes. I bounded up them, stumbling with uneven concrete steps, and
hit the door full-on, bouncing it nearly out of the warped wooden frame and
bursting into a storage room. I saw another door on the other side and didn’t
even pause to slam the door all the way shut before pulling a set of shelves
down over it. People that would slow down. Mephits would torch through so fast
it wasn’t funny.
“This is Squid, Squid to
Eagle, come in Eagle!” I shouted, hoping that wherever I was now, it wasn’t
going to be so lethal for my radio. The storage room was full of shelving units
like the one I’d just toppled, and aside from a couple lights on the ceiling
and a fire extinguisher mounted next each door there was nothing else in the
room.
Static fed back, and then,
“This is Eagle, we read you loud and clear.” Oh man, small miracles are the
best miracles. I was at the second door, and this one was sturdier, metal, and
locked. I set the case down, and pulled out a toolkit from my belt.
“I have the package with me,
have encountered hostile natives and even more hostile tourists,” I said,
trying to keep my gasping breath out of the transmission. Blood fell in fat
drops onto my hands as I undid the paneling around the door’s push-button lock.
“Location, unknown. Out of the sewers, in a storage room.” I glanced around for
a moment and turned my attention back on my work. Trying to work fast was a
good way to get no work done, but it was hard when I knew that the pursuit
wasn’t going to give up because I’d gone through a mere door. “No indication of
location or purpose of storage.”
“We copy that. We show you
in a junction within the waste treatment plant.Confirm location?”
“Negative. Tracking device
was part of inoperable equipment, no longer on person.” I eased a lock pick forward, touching one pin after the other as I held
them in place using a tension rod. . Simple lock. Easy to open under ideal
circumstances. It didn’t help that now I needed both hands and one of my eyes
was effectively glued shut with bloody slime. Just my kind of ideal circumstances.
The goons didn’t even have
the decency to knock before they slammed into the meager barricade, and I heard
one let out a yell as he bounced off. He must have tumbled off the stairs and
back down into the cesspool because his yell cut off abruptly.Then the banging
continued at a more subdued pace.
