Page 79 of Undertow

Weapon raised, Voss shouldered his way back toward the desk and fired.

The explosion filled the office like a physical thing. Gabe was already moving as the sound hit — a quarter-second head start that felt like nothing and would matter for everything. Whitfield's chair rolled backward and struck the wall. The man's hands went to his chest — reflex, not decision. He slid sideways in the seat, mouth agape, blood already seeping from the center of his chest.

Cara gasped.

Nothing they could do for him now. Gabe cleared the thought as it formed. The man had chosen wrong at every turn and finally run out of room.

From the hallway, someone screamed.

Weapon still in his hand, Voss turned toward the sound.

Gabe caught Cara's eye. He mouthed the word. "Door."

Then Wade exploded off the wall and Gabe went for Voss.

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"Door."

Gabe didn't say it out loud. His mouth shaped the word and his eyes held Cara’s.

The gunshot was still inside her head, a high, thin tone behind everything else. Whitfield was sliding sideways in his chair. There was a smell she didn't want to name — burned powder and something organic underneath. Derek was turning toward the hallway scream, the gun still in his hand.

From the corner of her eye Cara, caught Gabe's shoulder dropping into the angle that meant now.

She flew out of the chair and sprinted for the door.

Behind her — at the edge of her vision, at the edge of what she could process — Wade came off the wall. She felt it more than saw it, the way you feel a truck pass on a narrow road. Two hundred plus pounds of unfolding motion.

One of the guards went down underneath him with a sound she would still be hearing tomorrow. A weapon hit the baseboard and skittered.

Gabe was a blur on her left. Two strides covering ten feet. Then the awful crunch of bodies meeting at full speed, and the barrel of the rifle swinging up between them toward the ceiling. For one terrible second Derek's face was inches from Gabe's with no mask on it at all — just a man fighting to keep a gun.

The second guard reached for them.

Tom moved before Cara registered him moving. Not gracefully — Tom wasn't built for it — but he came in from the side hard enough to send the man stumbling into the desk. Tom, no. The thought arrived bright and useless, and then the guard's elbow caught Tom across the jaw and Tom went down. The guard's hand reached for his holster.

Wade was already there. He came across the room in three strides and put the man on the floor with a sound that made Cara's teeth ache.

Her hand found the doorknob. Cool brass. Real. She pulled.

Elena was pressed against the opposite wall like she meant to push herself through it. Hands flat on the plaster, face the white of paper. She stared at the open door and the room beyond it — at Graham slumped sideways in his chair, at the blood on the mahogany, at the uncle who'd let them erase her now bleeding out on the carpet where his chair had rolled.

"Elena." Cara grabbed her arm. "Look at me."

Elena’s eyes found her. Slowly. Like surfacing.

“Which way out?”

Elena blinked. Then something shifted behind her eyes—the same thing Cara had seen at the kitchen table in San Francisco when Elena had said I need to walk back in there standing up. Not courage, exactly. Deciding.

“Left,” Elena said. “End of the corridor. Fire exit. It doesn’t lock from inside.”

“Show me.”

Elena pointed left and headed off. Cara stayed on her heels. Behind them the sounds from the office were getting worse—something heavy hitting a wall, a man grunting, Wade’s voice low and dangerous—and then Gabe’s voice, clear and controlled, the voice he used when he was in charge: “On the ground. On the ground now.”

Elena hit the fire exit at a run. The door banged open into white coastal daylight and salt air and the parking lot where they’d left the trucks an hour ago in another lifetime. Cara pulled Elena behind the nearest vehicle and made her sit down.