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With a nod, Damien turned his full attention to me, and I held up his open shirt with trembling hands.
Once he slid his arms into it, I let go and gave Kate a grateful, grief-stricken hug. “I can’t thank you enough. For everything. We’ll see ya again, yeah?”
Kate didn’t even pretend like that was true. She simply squeezed me tighter and whispered in my ear, “Take care of him,” her voice as broken as the dishes she’d cleaned up.
As soon as I released her, Damien stepped into the stairwell and wrapped his good arm around her tiny shoulders. He couldn’t pretend like this wasn’t goodbye either. The two of them simply hugged in silence until Kate burst into tears and ran back up the stairs.
“It’s the shirt,” Jack said, her eyes still glued to the mirror. “Go on now. It’s movin’ fast. Just take this road behind us north, and you’ll run right into the train station. I hear the rail union’s gonna keeping trains runnin’ to help evacuate folks from occupied cities, so … ya might be in luck.”
Darting over to Jack, I gave her a full-body squeeze, which she reciprocated by patting me awkwardly on the arm. Damien followed with some military fist bump/back slap combo that she seemed much more comfortable with, and before I could thank her for letting us stay, I was whisked into the hallway and out the back door.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Damien had left the back door of the pub unlocked, and inside, it already looked like a crime scene. Broken glass and furniture littered the floor. Tables and chairs were scattered and knocked over. The place reeked of spilled alcohol from the night before. And when we walked past the stairwell, I glanced over at it and screamed.
“Shite,” Damien hissed, escorting me past the man lying face up on the stairs with a bleeding hole between his eyes. “Shoulda warned ya about that.”
I could hear the propellers now. The high-pitched whir of a motor at top speed. It sounded like it was almost on top of us, like it was flying as fast as it could.
It heard me.
Oh God, it heard me.
Placing me in the center of the pub, Damien gripped my biceps and bent down to my height so that he could look me in the eyes. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s gonna be okay. Just … stand here and don’t fuckin’ run.”
“I thought we were supposed to run,” I whispered back, my voice shaking as he released me.
“Change of plans.”
I looked around the pub, but he was already gone. It was just me, standing like an eejit as that mechanical buzzing bore down on me with a speed that made my knees and my bladder threaten to go weak.
I looked around again, Damien’s name caught in my throat, but when I turned back to the window, I found a sleek black machine hovering directly in front of it. Like the head of a predator after hearing a twig snap, it rotated toward me and shone its cold, condemning light directly in my face.
Day turned to night. The broken chairs on the floor multiplied, growing into a pile of rubble. And the still, foggy air began to swirl around me, lashing me like the sea breeze over the cliffs of Howth.
“This is a message from President Abramov.”
Everything was gone.
“Your city has been captured by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”
There was blood. So much blood.
“This is your only chance to surrender. You have ten seconds to raise your hands above your head and follow this device to the nearest encampment.”
Hands. I’d found Sheila’s hand just a few meters away.
“Refusal to do so will be considered an act of—”
The blinding white light and the drone itself suddenly disappeared, and in its place—just like that night on the cliff—I saw him. Only he wasn’t emerging from a lake, beckoning me to jump. He was standing right in front of me, in real life, jaw clenched and nostrils flared like a demon.
He squeezed his eyes shut as the countdown began, and his entire body began to shake.
Looking down, I realized that he was holding the drone so that it pointed toward the floor. All four propellers spun like saw blades between us.
I took a step back.
With a strained growl, Damien’s face contorted into one of pure agony before the sound of cracking plastic shot through the room like a bullet. Two propellers stopped spinning and fell away, dangling from useless wires as the countdown continued.
