Lydia crouched behind a machine. The bullets struck the metal by her ear, dampening her hearing the more the mercenaries fired. Aidan tapped her leg and pointed at the mercenaries, yelling at her. She shook her head and he pulled her closer, shouting in her ear. “I think they’re retreating!”
She peered out for a moment. He was right. Some were climbing down the catwalk and running outside. The backup must have arrived. Up ahead, Sylvia signaled to the few remaining guards to move closer. They did so while Jando kept them invisible, hopping back and forth as the guns focused on him. Lydia and Aidan moved forward as well, ducking behind a crate.
“What now?” Lydia yelled. One of the BEPs still led four mercenaries on the catwalk, all of whom were hidden behind beams and machines.
Ahead, Heather burst out of the foreman’s office, landing behind the attackers, with a rifle in her hand. She rushed one mercenary, leaned in close to her face, and breathed a spurt of black, deadly toxin into her nose and mouth. The mercenary dropped her gun and Heather picked it up, firing both rifles at the other enemies. Caught in the middle, two more mercenaries fell, and Sylvia hit the last with a barrage of bullets.
The mercenary BEP leader unloaded her rifle on Heather, missed, and lunged at her. Heather dropped her guns and kicked the BEP off and over the railing, and she headed straight for an open machine with rows of running saws. Lydia jumped forward and caught the BEP, helping her hang onto the railing.
“No!” Heather said as Aidan helped Lydia. “Let her drop!”
“And kill another one?” Lydia said.
“You don’t understand!” As Lydia and Aidan lifted up the BEP, the BEP produced a pistol from behind her back. She was close enough to shoot them point-blank. Her aim drifted to Aidan. Lydia let go, tackled him to the ground, and they dropped the woman. She fell into the saws, and the jagged teeth lopped off her head and one hand, throwing them out of the machine and to the ground. The blades gobbled her body and Lydia turned away.
Surprisingly, a string of curses flew up at Heather. Lydia looked back, and the hand spun the head around to face them. Then it walked off, grabbing the body parts as the machine spat them out. “I will throw you in here, Heather!”
“Don’t go to pieces because you lost, Val,” she said, chuckling. Heather gritted her teeth, holding her ribs with one hand and picking up a rifle with the other. She rested on the railing and aimed the gun at Valerie’s head, firing. The hand came back with its twin and dragged Valerie out of the way. “Told you to let her drop,” she said to Lydia.
“How was I to know she would do that?”
Sylvia and the guards came out of hiding. She was looking rather pale, holding her hip as blood poured down her arm. “Who let you loose?” she asked Heather. Her eyes snapped to the broken chains and she frowned at Lydia.
“We needed her help,” Lydia said.
“That’s right,” Aidan agreed. It was only then that Lydia realized that she was on top of him, pressed awfully close against him. They stood and brushed themselves off. “Thanks,” he said, clearing his throat. She nodded.
Sylvia’s phone rang. “Hello? Rogers? Yeah, yeah. Okay, thanks.” She turned to the guards. “Get to the transports. Rogers will cover us. We need to get back to the Cave this instant. We can’t risk them getting Heather.” The guards led the group downstairs, running past charred bodies of mercenaries, as if they had been recently burned. One guard held a pistol to Heather’s shoulder and dragged her as Jando supported Sylvia, who grabbed the discarded filter along the way.
However, a couple of mercenaries were posted by the front door, ducking behind the smoldering pile that used to be their dead. They fired on the group and everyone took cover. “Of course it wouldn’t be that easy,” Aidan said.
“I got an idea,” Lydia said. She sat down in a narrow space between a saw machine and a metal bin separated by a short conveyor belt and close to the door. She lifted her legs, pressing them against the bin. The bolts and screws holding it in place popped out. With a mighty burst, she pushed it for all its worth and chased after it. The bin rammed into the entrance and crashed through, creating a wider opening and bowling over the mercenaries.
“Go!” Lydia said.
Jando whispered to Aidan, and the latter picked him up and flew him to the door as the two mercenaries outside rose. “Look alive!” Jando said.
“Bombs away!” Aidan dropped Jando onto one of the mercenaries, and he speared the second in the chest hard with his head. Together, they punched and elbowed the mercenaries into submission. Aidan rolled off his, holding his own noggin. “Ow. That hurt a lot more than I thought it would.”
“Looked kind of cool though,” Jando said. “Or as cool as you can be anyway.”
Except for the destroyed vehicles, the mercenaries and BEPs had driven the working Humvees and APC out to the road, meeting the reinforcements head-on. A third mercenary left behind near the wrecked APC loaded an RPG. He fired at one of the transports, destroying it in a large explosion. The blast knocked everyone off their feet. He prepared to fire another round, but Sylvia and the guards shot him. He cried and his aim went too high, hitting the trees. One treetop burst into fire and wood and rained down on them.
The mercenary weakly lifted a pistol, but Sylvia unloaded her clip into him. Then she ordered everyone into the last transport. “Go, go, go!” Two of the guards climbed into the front, with everyone else in the rear. As best she could, Lydia tried to close up the crawlspace she had created earlier, and the transport rumbled down the dirt path, veering sharply onto the road and toward the Cave.
Sylvia’s phone rang. “Hello?” she answered. “Agent Rogers?” She set the phone on speaker. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. We got them outnumbered easily. Looks like we got here just in time.” Gunfire crackled in the background.
“Yeah, you did.”
“How many do you have left?” he asked.
“Only three guards, myself, Heather, Lydia, Aidan, and Jando,” she said, grimacing.
“Sorry.” The gunfire sounded closer now and Rogers yelled at some of his people. “We’ll hold them off. Get back to the Cave quick.”
“We will,” she said. “Thank you.” The call ended and she turned to Heather, grabbing a pair of handcuffs from one of the guards.
“Is that really necessary?” Heather asked. “I helped you.”
Sylvia stared at her for a long moment. “Did you?”
Frowning, Heather said, “They wanted to kill me, too.”
“Maybe. Although it’s funny how they found us in the first place,” she said. She checked Heather, patting her down for any hidden objects. “Was she checked before we left?” she asked a guard. He nodded. Yanking Heather forward, Sylvia slapped on the handcuffs and filter and then collapsed into a seat and phoned Arthur. “We ran into some trouble. We’re coming back to the Cave. Was Heather’s cell already cleaned?...It was? Well, can you search it? Very thoroughly? I’ll explain when we arrive.”