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“That was fast.” Leon waited for the current volley of bullets to finish banging against the desk at his back, then popped up and fired three controlled shots through the door. One of the guards spun as he caught a shot in the shoulder.
“Well, things sound a little urgent on your end.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Stop saying that!” Sebastian started breathing harder, and Leon fired a few more wild shots over his barricade before discarding his empty gun and grabbing another. “Alright, I know where the bridge is.”
Leon had a perfect view as the door on the other side of the room opened, and without wasting a second, he raised the gun in his hand and fired a round right into the head of the guard there.
“Shit, nope. Okay, I’m almost to the—” Sebastian went quiet.
A low whine came through the earpiece, just barely audible over the ricochet of bullets off his barricade.
“Is that an alarm?” Leon spun around to face the door that now had three guards in it and fired off two shots that found their mark in the leg and hip of one man and another that went wide. But he’d miscounted their ammo, and one of the guard’s last shots tore through the shirt of his left arm.
“No,” Sebastian snapped back. “Maybe.”
“Sebastian…” Leon growled as he ripped the fabric over his left bicep to see the damage. Just a scratch, a perfectly clean, shallow line of blood. He couldn’t even feel it through the adrenaline.
“It’s an alarm, but it’s fine.” Sebastian’s confidence still had the power to make Leon feel certain even while crouched behind a pair of buckling desks with enemies on either side of him. “It’s not high alert. They don’t know who I am or who I’m in, and they won’t have time to realize.”
Leon started reloading a gun but abandoned it and threw himself down on the ground as another guard appeared at the second door with a barrel trained on him. Bullets pinged off the bottom of the desk he’d just been pressed against. He gritted his teeth and tried to drag the desk closer to him to block off the man’s angle, but it was too damn heavy from this position.
Sebastian’s voice rang in his ear, full of authority and bravado. “Alright, everyone, I need you out of this room! Now, now, now, let’s go! To the security office. My colleague is right behind me. He’ll protect you.”
Leon held his breath during a lull in the hail of bullets. He worried he’d be shot if he poked his head up, and he worried if he’d be advanced on if he didn’t. No good options.
Sebastian continued. “Because if you don’t go, sir, then I will shoot you right now, and you’ll still like it more than what will happen to you if you’re here when that intruder arrives! Now, get going!”
Leon heard the tone of an order being given by one of the guards in the crowded hall, and even though he couldn’t understand the words, he had a bad feeling about what it had been. He steeled himself, waited a beat, then hopped to his feet and pulled his gun. He had only a moment to savor the triumph of seeing the terror on a man’s face as he tried to make it across the room to Leon before Leon stopped him in his tracks with a spray of bullets. Then Leon dropped back onto his stomach.
“I’m in!” Sebastian shouted at him with a mixture of triumph, panic, and urgency. “I’ve taken the bridge. I’ve lowered the security barricades. I’m fucking in. Now, get out!”
Leon was no longer in any position to argue. The question now was whether or not he was in any position to get out. Too many of them clogged the hallways, and they’d proven too well-trained for him to simply kill or scare them off. He couldn’t make it to either door without showing his back to the other and getting gunned down in the middle of the room.
They had him well and truly pinned down, and he racked his mind for how to lie to Sebastian that he had any hope at all of making it out of this.
Then hope dropped over one of the desks and into his trench.
The grenade bounced barely a finger’s breadth off the ground when it hit next to his head. Its counter beeped down wildly, but not near as wildly as if the idiot who had thrown it had cooked it long enough.
With a vicious grin of triumph, Leon grabbed the grenade and lobbed it back to the least crowded door. The second it exploded—ripping the air with a deafening boom so loud Leon felt nearly blind with the shock of it—he launched himself over the barricade and tore toward the door.
He raced through the chaos and the smoke, still certain he’d feel bullets thud into his spine at any second. He cleared the door and jumped over the bodies that may or may not still have been moving. He sprinted down the hallway without a thought of defending his back. He’d never make it out of another firefight if he got caught again.
“Leon—”
“Going!” Leon spat with all the air he could spare. He threw himself down a flight of stairs and rolled to his feet at the bottom. This side of the building was a mirror image of the other, thank god, and he burst out onto the tarmac without once getting himself turned around.
No one met him outside, and he pumped his arms and legs as fast as they would go back to the hole in the fence. Shots rang out behind him, and a few sprays of debris flared up on the ground in front of him, but the bullets landed wildly and inaccurately, as though shot from far away.
He looked up just before he got to the fence and saw a series of lights beside the moon, moving south and away from it. “I can see you.”
“Yeah, this fucker is mine now,” Sebastian growled. “Are you out yet?”
“I’m out.” Leon grunted as he wrenched himself through the hole in the fence, ripping up his clothes and his skin but very much alive and very much out. He leaped back into his land cruiser, flipped it on, and as it rose back up into the sky, only then did he look back the way he’d come to see lights on in the building and not a soul chasing after him on the tarmac.
“Fuck yeah!” Sebastian’s whoop echoed around the room he was in and back through the earpiece to Leon.
