18. Void #2
"You need to end this. I get it. We all do." I held his eyes. "Let's do it, Caleb. Together." Something set in his face. Harder than before, and pointed somewhere.
We came up fast and turned our backs to each other. His shoulder blades pressed into mine. His hands hung open at his sides, and I put the Glock out in front of me in both hands, and we started to move.
We spun. Slow, feet crossing, his back to mine, and whatever came into my half of the circle got a bullet, and whatever came into his got a leg.
A man ran at me from the bar side with a chair leg.
I shot him in the stomach and he sat down where he was.
Behind me a bone broke, and a scream went with it, and the weight against my back shifted and came back.
"Left!" Caleb, rasping it over his shoulder. "Jake, your left!"
"Seen." I turned us a quarter and shot the man reaching for a fallen pistol on the concrete.
At my back Caleb's leg went out and something met it, and a body slid past my boot face-down.
Eleven rounds left, then ten. Sweat ran into my eyes.
I could feel his breathing through his back, fast, and I could feel him find the rhythm of my turns and match it, so that we came around as one shape with two fronts and no back at all.
"North door's still dead." Blade, in my ear, low. "Ghost. Report."
"Busy." I said it to the fog with a man in my sights. "Winning."
"Don't get shot, chico."
"Wasn't planning on it."
"Caleb, low!" Two of them came at us together, one high on Caleb's side and one low on mine, and Caleb dropped into a crouch without asking why.
I shot over the top of his head and took the high man in the knee, and he went down screaming.
Caleb came up out of the crouch already turning, and the man who'd been coming for me made a wet cracking sound and went limp against my back before he slid off it.
I'd fought beside Blade for years. Beside Irish, beside Tank. I had never once in my life fought with a man's back against mine, and I understood in about four turns why nobody who'd done it ever wanted it any other way.
"Ghost! Your right, Valkyrie!" Hawk. The bass in his voice went through the floor and up into my boots. In all my time in this club I'd heard him raise it twice, and both times had been tonight.
Caleb and I looked at once. Valkyrie was pinned against the north wall, the wall under the mezzanine, two men on her, and she had her forearms up blocking a boxing combination that kept coming.
Around us the dust was settling, the room coming back into focus a piece at a time, and every piece of it had one of ours in it, locked in a fight of their own.
We ran. I got there first, from the left, and I went in sideways and low, my right shoulder driving up into the man's groin from underneath, and then I stood.
Everything my legs had, straight up through him.
He went back and over the top of me, screaming the whole way because there was nothing under his feet, and he landed on the concrete headfirst.
I looked right. Caleb's kick took the other one behind the knee, the one throwing hands on Valkyrie, and the leg folded and dropped him onto that knee with a shout.
Valkyrie didn't give him time to look up.
Her roundhouse came around and her boot met his temple, hard, and I saw him go limp before he'd finished falling.
"Thanks, you two! Now get out of my way." She was already going, off into the thinning fog at a run, toward a man who was giving Irish more work than Irish wanted.
"Yes, ma'am!" She didn't hear me. I was very glad she was ours.
I took the room in.
There were more of us than there were of them.
Gravedigger's men in black were going down one after another, and every one of them was trained, and every one of them was fighting alone, because the gyms that had built them had never once put two men on the same side.
Whatever number that kid in the parking structure had bragged about, forty, fifty, it wasn't on this floor.
Faro had a man's arm bent up behind his back and was walking him into a wall.
Three of ours on two of theirs everywhere I looked, or two on one, and ever since Montana, the Phoenixes had the numbers.
Caleb's head jerked left. I followed it, and I knew them, and I watched his shoulders come down an inch as he knew them too.
Declan, walking in out of the smoke at the east doors with the rifle across his body and Tyler and Logan behind him.
Vega and Santos coming in behind them. The two who'd put the rockets into the corners, and the three who'd come down off a roof two blocks away.
"Street's empty." Declan, in every ear, nothing in his voice. "Nobody came for them."
"Caleb. They've got this." I said it close, under the noise. "They're outnumbered. Declan alone will probably smash half of what's left, and I saw Irish with a bleeding lip, which means Irish is having a great night. What I mean is?—"
"You want to stop?! You want them to handle it?!" He was looking straight at me, and it wasn't a question. He didn't mean it as one. He wanted me to explain, fast, because he had no patience left for words.
Something was driving him, and it wasn't the thing he'd told me about one night in the dark, the kid who broke things in his parents' house and didn't know why, the strip-mall gym that had taught him where to put it. That thing had a shape he knew. This didn't.
Then I got it, and I hated that I'd taken this long.
He'd never seen this. Ever. Twenty years of gyms and rings, and every fight had ended when a man tapped or a man couldn't stand.
Nobody in a gym had ever fired a gun over his head.
Ten minutes of guns and men dying on both sides of him, and it wasn't rage driving him.
It was too much. Too much noise and too much blood coming in through his eyes and his ears at once, with nowhere to put it, and it was shoving him over an edge he'd walked for twenty years.
"I meant we go for the head." I pointed straight up. We were under the mezzanine. "Gravedigger. We end it. Now."
His eyes went up. Then back to me, and the look on him said I forgot. He nodded, fast, once.
There was no time for breathing drills. No time for calm down, Caleb. The only thing that was going to bring him back was the end of this, so I looked for Hawk.
Hawk was ten feet off the ring with the shotgun at his shoulder, loaded with buckshot.
And three men were coming at him together.
He fired the shotgun once. All three of them jumped and screamed, and the one in the middle dropped to the concrete and lay there, and the two on either side went down rolling and clutching at themselves, howling.
Scattershot. One pull, and the pellets spreading took all three. Dangerous, because it went everywhere, and it was the first time tonight I'd heard it go off.
Every head in the building turned toward the sound. Hawk turned with them, shotgun in both hands, and his eyes came across the room and landed on me.
"Hawk!!" I pointed straight up. "Let's end this, now!"
I felt the eyes move. Every one of Gravedigger's men still standing had looked at Hawk with terror, and now the same eyes came to me, and something else went through them.
They were losing. Each of them had fought alone, and now they looked around and saw how many of us there were, and how few of them.
Two hands went up. Then another pair. A man in black went down onto his knees with his fingers laced on top of his head.
Hawk crossed that whole room in strides, and it looked like two. "To the mezzanine." His eyes went from me to Caleb. "Now."
CALEB
I hadn't cared who the darkness killed next.
That was the truth of the last ten minutes, and in the middle of wanting more damage, I'd forgotten the one man I'd come here for.
Ghost had put sense back in me with one finger pointed at a ceiling.
We end it. Now. Then Hawk gave the order and that sealed it.
We were going up for the man who'd put my brother in a hospital bed, and his men were down and outnumbered.
Hawk covered the ground to the stairs in a few long steps. Ghost and I went after him, and he didn't have to ask twice.
The stairs at the east end of the mezzanine were steel, short flights that turned back on themselves every eight steps.
Grit lay on every tread, and my bare feet slid on it.
The smoke was thicker up here, leaning in off the corner where the rocket had hit, and heat came down through it. Halfway up, I heard the quiet.
The fighting had stopped. I could still hear men, but they were groans now, and boots on concrete instead of fists on faces. I looked down once, fast, through the rail.
Phoenixes stood in the settling dust with their guns out and pointed down at men on their knees.
Some of ours were on the floor too. One of ours lay on his side by the bar with a brother crouched over him, holding a shirt to his head.
At the near corner of the ring, Mateo, Trenza, Cuervo, and Norte sat in a row against the platform, and Mateo's head hung forward onto his chest. Out cold, or close to it.
Renzo hadn't moved off the apron. One arm still hung off the edge, and somebody in a cut stood over him, and that was all I could give him.
"How many of ours are down?" It came out of my throat in pieces, and I asked it to Ghost's back.
"Don't count yet." He didn't turn around.
"I count everything."
"I know you do." One step. "Count them when it's done."
Behind us, Reaper's voice, low, into his earpiece. "Kai. It's clear enough. Bring your table in."
The heat came up my legs again, and I climbed faster.
Sharp turn. Eight steps. Sharp turn. Hawk was ahead of Ghost, moving with the shotgun up, and his voice came back down the stairs to me. "Blade. Status."