Chapter 4 Cold-Blooded Killer #2
Hunters marched into private homes on raids, and civilians revolted.
Guns were pried from cold, dead hands as the citizens clung to one of the founding tenets of our country.
It all made obtaining weapons infinitely harder, and for the Defiance, killing became a contact sport.
We still made our own bullets and bombs, we pillaged NAO supplies when we could, but we’d learned to rely on blades and crossbows, and our soldiers tonight were as prepared as they could be.
We set up our medical space in the abandoned kitchen of a nearby restaurant.
The metal tables would serve as beds, and I cleared the delivery door of obstacles.
Once ready, all four of us spied through the small windows toward the apartment building, though we could see nothing in the moonless dark.
“I wonder where they got the information for this,” said Michael, one of our oldest medics. He’d been an ICU nurse before the war, and a damned good one, if you asked him.
“Me too,” said Shari, who fell into the medic game due to a desire to help and a lack of skill at anything else. “This is a large-scale operation they’ve got here.”
I kept my mouth shut tight, afraid they’d see through any lies I tried to tell.
Liliana set her hand on the glass, her gaze heavy. “I always hate this part.”
I did too. The waiting before a mission ate away at my sanity.
Once I was in the thick of it, I was too busy for anxiety, but standing there knowing that people were about to die and nothing I did could stop it grated on my soul.
Sometimes, I felt my humanity had whittled to nothing, but at times like this, I remembered I still possessed a heart.
The four of us settled into a tense silence broken several minutes later by a shout in the distance. The air grew taut.
Two gunshots cracked like bones breaking.
Boots pounded on concrete. Outside the relative safety of our makeshift medical space, shouts and the clangs of metal shredded our nerves.
We tried to see through the dark, but the chaos was faceless.
The succinct voices disappeared as the fight vanished inside the apartment building.
From there, we winced at the occasional gunshot and muffled yell.
Glass shattered. A shrill scream. A sickening thud.
“Christ,” Michael muttered. “Hope that wasn’t ours.”
After belabored minutes, the first soldier burst into our medical unit through the swinging delivery door. A deep gash in his leg spat blood all over the floor.
“Over here!” Shari helped him onto the metal table. I tied a tourniquet around his thigh before he had a second to cry out. With a quick snip of the scissors, his pant leg was gone. I surveyed the injury in his mid-thigh, now only trickling blood.
Combat gauze was a scarcity, but this wound required it. I ripped open a packet and stuffed it into the gash, ignoring the agonized scream he restrained with sheer willpower. Liliana gave him a leather to bite. Breathing hard, he fell back onto the table when I finished.
The door slammed open, and two more soldiers stumbled inside. As the gap swung shut, a sharp, “Fall back!” echoed through the night.
Which side was retreating?
One soldier had the arm of another around her neck. I took the other arm, and we helped him to a second table.
The man’s body convulsed with shivers.
“Where’s he injured?” I asked, patting his body.
“There!” The soldier pointed to the man’s chest.
I lifted his shirt to find a bullet hole. Fourth intercostal space. Mid-chest. Nodding, I slid his shirt back down.
“Make him comfortable,” I told her.
He wouldn’t make it.
Again, the door opened and more soldiers poured through, some with serious injuries and others with none at all.
“They’re running,” one told us. “Weren’t expecting us. We slaughtered ’em.”
Yeah. They kind of slaughtered us, too, I thought as Shari and I worked on pulling shrapnel from the neck of his comrade-in-arms.
The door swung again. “Help!” a soldier yelled. “He needs a medic!”
I left my patient in the care of Shari and joined Liliana to follow the soldier into the night. We ran toward the apartment building. My gaze darted left and right, searching for movement.
“Don’t worry. They’re all gone,” the soldier said.
Sure. Trust but verify.
Near the back of the building, where an alleyway formed a divider between the apartment complex and a strip of stores, one of our soldiers lay writhing on the concrete, the entire left side of his body macerated.
“It was a grenade,” his friend said, choking over the words. “Please help him.”
I squared my shoulders. “Right. Help me get him up.”
Liliana rushed to the man’s side, as did his friend. The soldier groaned, the guttural, exhausted sound of a man too tired for agony.
A sharp pop echoed through the alley. The man went limp, a new hole in his head.
I spun and froze at the sight before me. Four Hunters stood at the mouth of the alley.
My heart leapt straight into my throat, suffocating me.
Liliana and the soldier dropped the dead man. While she backed away, he went for his weapons.
“Come peacefully and we’ll let you live,” said one Hunter, his face a pale smudge in the dark.
No.
Death before slavery.
I would die before I succumbed to what they called living.
The Hunters drew closer, and my switchblade slid easily from its permanent resting place in my bra.
My heartbeat expanded to my throat, my stomach, my fingertips, but I was ready, and I wouldn’t hesitate.
Killing had long ago become an act of survival, and with the Brotherhood Cross stitched into their combat clothes, I found it difficult to find reasons they should live.
“Ah, a medic,” another said, eyeing my red cross armband. “We could use you. Come with us, and we’ll find a nice House for you.”
The others snickered. Beside me, the soldier who’d dragged me to this alley to die spat at their feet.
“No?” the Hunter said. “Alright, then.”
They advanced, and my soldier threw himself in front of me.
The fight exploded in a flurry of arms and legs.
He was a good fighter. His knife buried in the throat of a Hunter, and he spun for another.
I leapt at a third with my switchblade, but he dodged to the left.
In my periphery, Liliana had joined the fight with her own blade.
I swiped my blade and missed. The Hunter grabbed my wrist and whipped a blow to my chin. Stars danced in my eyes as he threw me to the ground.
Pain lanced through my elbow and throbbed in my jaw. My knife clattered away. A foot landed a hard kick in my stomach, knocking the air from my lungs.
My chest spasmed, and I lay helpless, wheezing, as my soldier snapped the neck of another Hunter, then choked when a Bowie knife sliced deep into his abdomen. He clutched the wound and dropped to his knees.
In the dark, his blood was blacker than the night, and by the sheer amount of it, I knew they’d nicked something vital. He fell onto his stomach and didn’t get back up.
I tried to stand, but the Hunter’s boot pressed into my spine, and I was pinned to the ground like an insect. Still, I reached for my blade, lying a yard away.
I needed that weapon.
With it, I had options—continue fighting, bury it in my own stomach, jam it in the eye of this bastard on top of me. Without it, this was over.
I’d be theirs.
Liliana gasped, and I twisted enough to see her fall, a knife jutting from her side.
Despite everything, my heart clenched. “Liliana,” I wheezed through staccato breaths. “Hold on.”
But for what? Why should she hold on? We were both fucked.
Reaching again for my blade, I sensed a stiffening of the soldier above me. He turned toward the mouth of the alley.
“Colonel,” said one of his comrades. “Found some before they could escape.”
Any hope left in me withered at that one word.
Colonel.
If a colonel had arrived, then I had no chance. The best I could hope for was death.
My hand fell to the pavement. The blade was too far. This was over.
Trapped as I was, I could hardly make out the dark figure as he approached with even steps, silent as a panther.
He was dressed the same as the rest of the Hunters—in a black combat uniform—but he wore no helmet, and the telltale scarlet insignia of a Blood Colonel shone bright on his shoulder, even in the darkness.
Lucas Scott peered down at me, expressionless, and my body went boneless.
It hadn’t occurred to me that he might actually show at a mission he’d purposely sabotaged.
A long moment passed in which we stared at each other, him utterly dispassionate, and me speculating whether he’d let them kill or imprison me.
It wasn’t like I was important to him, and he’d maintain his cover by leaving my fate in his soldiers’ hands.
With a simple missive, he’d have a replacement Defiance contact and would be rid of me for good.
Fuck.
He was going to let them have me, wasn’t he?
As I reached this conclusion, anger stirred like hot coals in my chest. My gaze turned lethal, and I hoped he could see the hatred within it. Fine. Let them kill me, you bastard.
He sighed out a testy breath, almost as if this whole situation was a mere nuisance, some unfortunate clerical task that had been dropped into his lap.
The next moments happened in a blur. He moved like a snake, whipping a throwing knife through the air toward the man holding me down.
The other Hunter gasped when Lucas Scott’s blade disappeared into his abdomen and scored a straight line from left to right. He fell, crying out, trying to hold his organs inside his body.
On my back, the man’s foot loosened. He choked and sank to his knees, ripping the knife from his throat.
A mistake.
Blood poured in a waterfall down his neck. The light fled his eyes, and he toppled to the side.