11. Hadley
HADLEY
The hand over my mouth tastes like blood and gun oil and salt.
My brain whites out. Pure static. Every nerve in my body fires at once and the signal is a single screaming word: NO.
Banks comes back to me through the static. Not from some distant memory. From hours ago. From the dark inside the trapper's cabin when he was checking the perimeter and I was wrapping his ribs and he said it like he was reading off a grocery list.
Someone grabs you from behind, you bite first. Bite hard. Bite until you hit bone. Then drive your elbow straight back into the floating ribs. Don't think about it. Don't hesitate. The hesitation is what kills you.
I bite down.
Not a nibble. Not a panicked nip. I clamp my jaw shut on the meat between his thumb and forefinger with every ounce of force my body can generate.
My teeth sink through the tactical glove, through the leather, into the flesh underneath and I feel the skin split and the hot copper flood of his blood hits my tongue and I do not let go.
The man screams. A raw, guttural bellow that flips off the rock walls of the crevice and fills the narrow space with sound and rage and his breath, which smells like cigarettes and freeze-dried coffee. His grip on my skull loosens for a fraction of a second.
Enough.
I drive my right elbow backward. Hard. The angle is wrong and the crevice is too tight and I can't get full rotation but the point of my elbow connects with something between his vest plates.
Lower ribs. The soft spot Banks described.
The spot he showed with his own finger into when he was showing me, pushing against my side until I flinched and said there, feel that? That's where you aim.
The man doubles forward. His hand rips free of my mouth and takes skin with it. I taste leather and blood. My blood. His blood. Doesn't matter.
He drops me.
My knee hits the frozen ground and it is a white lance from kneecap to hip. The Sig. Where is the Sig? I had it. I had it in both hands and then the hand clamped over my mouth and I.
There. On the ground. Two feet to my left. Black polymer against black rock in the dark.
I lunge for it. My fingers close around the grip and the weight is wrong, too light, too heavy, I can't tell because my hands are numb and shaking and coated in spit and blood.
I bring it up. Both thumbs same side. Arms locked.
Point at center mass. That's what he said.
Center mass. The middle of the biggest part of whatever is in front of you.
The mercenary is crammed in the crevice opening.
Huge. Not as big as Banks but big in the way that men who carry seventy pounds of gear and run through mountains for a living are big.
He's clutching his hand to his front and his face is twisted and he's already reaching for the sidearm on his thigh with his other hand.
I pull the trigger.
Nothing happens.
The trigger won't move. It's locked. Dead. Stuck.
My finger is on the wrong part. I'm gripping too high. My index finger is pushed along the frame where Banks put it, above the trigger guard, and in the dark and the panic and the blood I forgot to move it down.
I drop my finger to the trigger.
The mercenary's hand closes around his holstered pistol.
I squeeze.
The Sig goes off and the recoil nearly rips it out of my grip.
The muzzle flash whites out my vision and the noise inside the crevice is a physical assault, a concussive blast that fills my skull with ringing and turns the world into cotton.
The bullet punches into the rock wall six inches to the right of his head and stone fragments spray across his face.
He flinches. I flinch. We both freeze for one insane heartbeat that stretches into an hour.
Then he pulls his gun free and I do the only thing left. I scream.
Not a word. Not a name. Just a sound. A raw animal sound that tears out of my throat and fills the gorge because there is nothing else to do and no one else to help and Banks is in the timber somewhere and he said he'd come back but maybe he can't. Maybe he's down.
Maybe they got him first. Maybe I'm alone here with a gun I can't shoot and a knee that won't hold and a dead phone somewhere and it doesn’t matter, because the man in front of me is raising his weapon and I can see the black circle of the muzzle and it's the same as the frozen waterfall, the same as the men in the clearing, the same black eye staring me down.
I squeeze the trigger again.
The second shot catches him in the shoulder. I see the impact. See the way his body jerks sideways like a puppet yanked by a string. His gun clatters against the rock. He stumbles backward out of the crevice mouth, one hand grabbing at the wound, and crashes to the gorge floor.
I keep the Sig up. Both thumbs. Arms locked.
He's still moving.
He rolls onto his side. One knee under him. Then the other. The shoulder wound doesn't stop him, just slows the arm on that side. His other hand is already scrabbling across the frozen ground, fingers stretched wide, reaching for the gun he dropped.
I should shoot again. I know I should shoot again. My finger is on the trigger and the Sig is pointed at center mass and all I have to do is squeeze. Just squeeze. The same small motion I managed twice already. Muscles contracting. Tendons pulling. A fraction of an inch.
My hands won't stop shaking.
He finds the gun.
His bloody fingers close around the grip and he starts to turn back toward me and I see his face clearly for the first time.
Young. Younger than I expected. Sandy stubble.
A scar through his left eyebrow. His pupils are blown wide and his lips are pulled back from his teeth and there is nothing human in his expression.
Just the cold, mechanical focus of a man who kills for money and has been shot by a girl in pink snow boots and is extremely unhappy about it.
He raises the pistol.
Banks comes down on him like a rockslide.
No sound. No warning. No battle cry or shouted command.
Just two hundred and fifteen pounds of muscle and fury dropping from the cliff ledge eight feet above the gorge floor.
His boots hit the mercenary square between the shoulder blades and the man's face slams into the ground with a crack that I feel in my teeth.
The pistol goes spinning across the rock. The man's body flattens. His breath leaves him in a single, explosive grunt.
Banks doesn't pause. Doesn't assess. Doesn't check.
He grabs a fistful of the man's tactical vest and hauls him up off the ground like he weighs nothing.
The fabric bunches in his fist and the mercenary dangles and Banks pivots and drives him headfirst into the gorge wall.
The impact is wet. Definitive. The man's helmet cracks and his body goes boneless for a second but Banks isn't done.
He isn't close to done.
He rips the man back from the wall and throws him down on the ground and drops on top of him. One knee pinning his spine. Both hands seizing his skull.
I have seen him calm. I have seen him focused.
I have seen him in pain with a gun graze leaking his life into the Alaskan snow.
I have never seen this. This isn't the controlled, calculating SAR operative who navigates by dead reckoning and speaks in clipped tactical shorthand.
This is something underneath. Something older.
Something that lives in the basement of his brain where the protocols and the training and the professionalism can't reach.
His eyes are flat. Gray ice gone to granite. His jaw is locked so tight the muscles stand out like cables beneath his skin. He isn't breathing hard. He isn't breathing at all. He is utterly, perfectly still except for his hands, which are doing terrible things.
The mercenary tries to buck. Tries to twist free. Gets one arm under himself and pushes up.
Banks drives his elbow into the man's skull. The crack echoes off the gorge walls. The man drops flat. Then Banks grabs the wounded shoulder, the one I shot, and digs his thumb straight into the bullet hole.
The scream that comes out of the mercenary is barely human.
"You touched her."
Banks. Low. Quiet. Stripped of everything but the raw fact of what he is about to do. He twists his thumb and the man writhes beneath him and I can see the tendons standing out in Banks's forearm and the blood welling up between his fingers.
"You put your hands on her."
He releases the shoulder. Grabs the man's right arm and wrenches it behind his back at an angle arms are not supposed to go.
The mercenary screams again and tries to roll and Banks adjusts his knee, pinning harder, and keeps wrenching until something pops.
A sound like a branch breaking under wet snow.
The arm goes limp.
I should look away. I know I should look away.
I can't.
Banks leans down. Close. His mouth near the man's ear.
He says something I don't catch. Something low and quiet and meant only for the man beneath him.
Whatever it is, the mercenary stops struggling.
Just stops. Goes completely still like a rabbit in the jaws of something that was always going to catch it.
Then Banks wraps one arm around the man's neck. Locks his other hand against his own bicep. Squeezes.
The man's boots scrape against the frozen ground. His good hand claws at Banks's forearm. His fingers leave scratches in the fabric that fill with blood. Seconds pass. Five. Ten. The scratching slows. The boots stop scraping.
Banks holds the choke for another thirty seconds after the man goes limp.
Then he drops him. Stands. Turns.
His eyes find me in the crevice and the granite cracks. Just a fraction. Just enough for me to see the furnace behind it. The wild, desperate heat that turns his whole body into a live wire as he closes the space between us in two strides.
"Did he hurt you?"
Not a question. A demand. His bloodied hands hover at my jaw, shaking.
"Did he hurt you?"