The Mindf*ck Series

Chapter 15

𝘐 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘴.
—𝘝𝘰𝘭𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘦

𝗟𝗔𝗡𝗔

Pain shoots through my body, and my hearing is nothing more than a constant roar of never-ending gunfire.

I cry out as I tie off my leg to help stop the bleeding. My chest and back ache with the amount of bullets that have pounded into the vest, but they didn’t break through. My shoulder burns from the graze, but it’s overshadowed by the bullet that passed through my hand earlier.

I wrap my hand next, struggling with shaking hands as I fight through the pain. Jake’s voice comes through my earpiece, and I take a breath, firing back at the men behind me.

“You have to get the fuck out of there, Lana! They know about the basement!”

“I can’t,” I say through strain, shooting around the corner and clipping a guy in the knee. He falls, his MK 47 spraying bullets wildly as he collapses.

A stray bullet hits one of the other deputies, but not enough to kill the fucker.

“You have to!” Jake barks. “You didn’t come this far to fucking die!”

I refuse to let the tears fall as I jerk my head back in time to avoid a new onslaught of bullets. The desk barrier I’ve built won’t continue to hold back the bullets. The three pushed together will only stop them for a little while longer.

“I need to talk to him,” I say quietly, choking back a sob as I try to stand up, only to fall back down again when my leg hurts too much to cooperate.

“No! You’re not fucking saying goodbye, Lana. I’m not letting you talk to him. Get out of there! The charge can’t be stopped and you know it. It’s a fail-safe. You have nine minutes and fifty-four seconds.”

I bang the back of my head on the desk, my vision clouded by the tears teeming in my eyes. I stare at the door in dismay. Those twenty feet seem so much farther with the never-ending spray of unrelenting fire.

They’re harder to kill than I was expecting. Not as cowardly as we’d predicted.

We’ve been so right about everything else.

“I love you,” I say to Jake, biting back the pain as I twist around to fire more.

“I’ll hate you if you die,” he says angrily.

I hear the tears in his voice, taste his pain from here.

“The fire is coming, Lana. Nine minutes exactly now. Get. The fuck. Out of there.”

“Remember that time when we were kids and we found that stick of dynamite in your father’s basement?”

“Don’t, Lana. Don’t fucking do this!” he begs as the tears start to leak from my eyes.

I fire blindly just to keep them from getting closer, lifting the gun up.

“You told us it was too dangerous to mess with, but I convinced you it’d be fun. Marcus and you tried to stop me, but I refused to listen.”