Chapter 45
Blood-red light pulsed through Hudson’s eyelids.
His cheek was pressed against the dashboard. Blood ran from his temple, pooling in the hollow of his eye socket. His collarbone was a fiery point of vicious agony. Somewhere behind his left ear, a high-pitched tone sang.
Sound arrived in pieces. The muted tick of an engine cooling. The hiss of a ruptured hose beneath the hood. Julie crying behind the partition. Boots on compacted snow. Outside. Coming closer.
Hudson kept his eyes closed, waiting.
The rear doors shrieked open. Clipped professional orders.
A language Hudson had spoken himself for years.
No shouting. A team, not hired guns. The passenger door handle clicked, and the door swung open.
Cold air poured into the cab, making his diaphragm clench.
He held the spasm in. Let his head rock slightly with the movement of the door. Dead weight.
The operator leaned in. Gun oil, cold sweat, and the synthetic bite of tactical fabric.
The gun barrel touched his temple. The operator’s free hand reached across Hudson’s chest, heading for his holster.
Hudson let him commit. Let the man’s weight shift forward, his balance extending past the point of recovery, his attention split between the weapon he was reaching for and the unconscious man he’d already dismissed.
Hudson’s hand closed around the barrel. The other hooked into the man’s vest. He yanked the operator into the cab.
The confined space stole the man’s room to maneuver. Hudson drove the heel of his palm upward beneath his jaw. The man’s knees buckled. Hudson shoved him backward through the open passenger door, followed him out, hooked a boot behind his ankle and dumped him hard onto the packed snow.
Before the man recovered, Hudson drove a knee into his ribs and ripped the weapon from his hand. The operator curled around the impact. Hudson reversed the pistol in his grip and brought the butt down hard against the side of his attacker’s head. The man went limp.
Hudson tossed the pistol beneath the ambulance then shoved himself upright. The road tilted hard to his left. He caught the ambulance door before his knees followed it.
The cold wrapped around him like a closing fist. His lungs constricted, registering the temperature drop with vicious, intimate precision.
Air shifted. Hudson pivoted.
A second operator brought his pistol up. Hudson caught the barrel with his left hand and ripped it offline. The weapon discharged, the muzzle flash blooming white. Heat seared across his palm.
He seized the man by the back of his vest and drove his face into the ambulance’s side mirror. Bone crunched, blood smearing the glass dark. The pistol dropped into the snow.
The man staggered back, then came at him again.
Hudson stepped onto the running board, and his left leg gave. He hit the ambulance hard with one shoulder, barely staying upright as the operator swung. The punch skimmed past him.
Hudson didn’t try to recover his balance. He stayed low, then drove his good boot into the man’s knee and hauled on his vest as the leg collapsed, using the man’s momentum to slam him into the side panel. The man slid down, leaving a bloody streak.
Hudson sucked in a breath. Too shallow.
The man didn’t get up.
Hudson leaned through the open passenger door and pressed two fingers to Archie’s carotid. Alive.
The ambulance rocked. Hudson was already moving. His hand went for his gun and missed by an inch. His depth perception corrected a beat late.
Concussion.
He got his gun on the second attempt. He flowed along the side of the ambulance, staying low, one shoulder brushing the panel. Red and white lights painted the snow in rhythmic pulses, turning the world into a series of frozen frames.
Movement at the rear corner.
Hudson dropped.
Too late.
The ringing in his left ear had concealed the man’s approach. The round hammered into the ballistic plate beneath Hudson’s jacket, driving him onto his back. His Glock flew from his hand and stars burst across his vision.
Boots crunched closer. “Fucker.”
Hudson rolled as the man closed, got one boot beneath him and came up inside the rifle’s useful range. His left hand trapped the rifle, wrenching the muzzle aside as he planted a boot hard into the man’s pelvis.
The operator staggered back a step. Hudson tore the rifle sideways, ripped it free and slammed the man into the rear corner of the ambulance. The man’s head struck steel with a sickening crack. His knees folded, and he dropped to the snow with a groan. Hudson let the rifle fall.
Fuck.
The man wasn’t out. Hudson snatched up his Glock and kept moving. Cord came first.
His hands shook from adrenaline, and his lungs screamed for a full breath. There wasn’t time. He swung around the open rear doors, his Glock raised.
Two operators inside, shouting instructions. One covering Mercer and Julie. One disconnecting Cord from the monitor, working fast to prepare the gurney for extraction.
Medical equipment littered the floor. Julie was pressed against the far wall, hands clamped over her mouth. Mercer was on his feet, bleeding from a cut above his eye, his weapon on the floor, kicked out of reach.
Neither looked at him, but they’d heard him.
The cover man’s rifle started toward him. Hudson’s sight picture blurred. He blinked hard, forced it back into focus, and fired. The operator dropped where he stood, his rifle clattering onto the ambulance floor.
Julie flinched, her eyes squeezed shut as she smothered a scream. The gunshot snapped the extraction operator’s head around. He dropped Cord’s restraint straps and reached for his rifle.
Mercer hit him before Hudson could call it. A full-body tackle that drove them both into the medical cabinets with a crash that shook the suspension. The operator twisted in Mercer’s grip. A knife appeared, pulled from a vest sheath. The blade flashed bright as it came around.
Mercer got his forearm up. The slash opened a line across his sleeve that bloomed red immediately. He grunted and held on. The operator stabbed again, and the point caught Mercer below his vest on the left side.
Mercer gave a startled grunt. He slid down the cabinets, hands flying to his side as blood welled between his fingers.
Hudson holstered his Glock, vaulted up into the vehicle and caught the man from behind, his forearm locking beneath the man’s chin as his other hand cinched the choke tight.
The man thrashed, driving them both backward. Hudson’s spine struck the sharp edge of a cabinet, pain flaring along his back, but he didn’t loosen the choke. The knife plunged back toward his ribs. Hudson twisted, and the blade scraped across his vest.
It came again—higher this time. He caught the man’s wrist for a fraction of a second.
Not enough. The point drove into the meat of Hudson’s upper arm. White-hot pain skewered through him. Hudson tightened the choke and held. The man’s movements turned frantic, then weaker. Hudson held until the weight against him changed, then another beat before he released.
The man slumped to the floor.
Hudson dropped to Mercer. The stab wound was below the vest on Mercer’s left side and bleeding profusely.
Bad. Pressure first. Everything else later.
Julie stared at Hudson from behind trembling hands, her eyes wide and unfocused.
“Julie. Look at me.”
Her gaze connected with his.
“Mercer needs pressure on this wound. Can you do that?”
For a heartbeat she stared, then the medic surfaced. She dropped to her knees beside Mercer, reaching for the trauma kit. Her hands fumbled once before finding what she needed. Hudson squeezed her shoulder.
She drew one steadying breath, tore open a trauma dressing and pressed it against the wound. “Go,” she said, her voice shaky but certain. “I’ve got this.”
Mercer’s face was gray. His eyes found Hudson’s. “Go.”
Cord.
Still on the gurney. Still alive. His lips were blue and his hands trembled, making the metal gurney rattle. A man who’d survived a cardiac event only to discover the universe had a far worse day planned.
“Stay here.”
Cord stared at him. “There’s nowhere to fucking go.”
Hudson dropped out of the rear doors. Icy air hit him. His lungs seized. A full spasm this time, locking down before he could drag in enough air. He blinked. Steadied himself against the ambulance’s bumper. Snow fell around him in throbbing light.
An operator rounded the corner at a run. Hudson shoved the open rear door into his path. The man hit it shoulder-first and spun sideways. Hudson caught his vest, used the momentum already there, and sent him hard into the road.
Another operator was right behind him.
Hudson drew his Glock. His injured arm shook, his fingers sliding on the blood-slicked grip. Oxygen debt hollowed him out as every breath came up short, his muscles burning through fuel his lungs couldn’t replace.
His vision narrowed to a tunnel. The muzzle drifted right. He couldn’t hold the sightline. The operator’s hand snapped up. Yellow housing registered a heartbeat too late. Taser. The probes hit, and the world detonated.
Every muscle seized. Hudson’s fingers opened and his Glock dropped. His legs vanished beneath him. He hit the snow face-first, rigid, every nerve ending ablaze.
Current ripped through him in violent waves. When it stopped, awareness returned in fragments. Cold. Pain. A breath that wouldn’t fill. He couldn’t move. He lay in the snow as they took Cord.
Boots on packed snow. The rattle of the gurney. Cord shouting something he couldn’t make out. A vehicle door slamming. The throaty diesel engine revving hard.
Hudson clawed at the snow and got one shoulder off the ground. His arms shook under the weight of his own body. His lungs dragged in shallow, inadequate breaths and gave back even less.
Tires bit into the snow. A second SUV swung around the wrecked ambulance, plowing through roadside scrub, branches screeching along the side as it lurched toward a narrow logging road.
The taillights dwindled between the pines.
The ambulance lights kept pulsing.
Flash.
Darkness.
Flash.
Darkness.
Hudson forced himself onto one knee.
Too late.
The forest swallowed them whole.