Playing God (Helford #2)

(36) Cold

We all sat dead silent in the living room. I was the only one moving—I was nervously field-stripping my weapon again and again, putting it back together and taking it apart and cleaning it, although it couldn’t have possibly gotten dirty in the couple of seconds it was being held together. I put the weapon back together again and set it on the table in front of me carefully, breathing in and out like I was afraid to disturb the air, not looking around but instead staring straight in front of me. The others were doing about the same—we were all watching the sun change positions in the sky, watching as the light got dimmer and dimmer. It was around dinnertime now, but none of us felt the urge to eat. We knew it would come at nightfall, that they would wait until the cover of darkness came. We knew that our reinforcements would not be arriving until tomorrow morning. We knew that this was our fight and ours alone.

I had woken them all up at once and brought them into the living room to tell them. I explained to them what had happened and how sorry I was, how I never meant for them to have to go through something like this. They faced it, in my opinion, with great grace. Parker called for Interpol’s help, and they planned to send troops with Woodburn’s. Valerie didn’t blink an eye. Meade didn’t look angry or upset—he looked oddly at peace, like it was only poetic that him and his brother would both go down in the same city, fighting the same war. Jonathon had paled and stepped out to call his father; I don’t know what was said, but I assumed it was something like a terrible goodbye, and I was glad that I hadn’t been able to hear his murmured words. When he came back into the room, he had sat down next to me and put a reassuring hand on my knee, and I was relieved at least a little to know that he wasn’t mad. But it also didn’t seem healthy for him to be not much of anything.

We had been staying stationed in the living room for the majority of the day, stock-piling the weapons that we had and saying all of our silent goodbyes, mentally praying to any god in any culture or belief to deem us worth of salvation, but there wasn’t much left for us. We just sat quietly, getting our ordeals in order, taking deep breaths in and out and wondering how many of them we even had left.

Jonathon had asked a couple of hours ago what our plan was.

“Are we going to fight our way through them until we start dropping like flies?” he demanded, a little hysterical, only falling apart a little bit. “Or are we going to let them come to us and hole up here?”

“We’re going to fight,” Meade had told him, slowly cleaning a gun in front of him, not even looking up. “We’re going to fight like hell and take as many out as we can. We just have to hold them off until morning.”

“Nighttime is a lot longer than some people think,” Jonathon said uncertainly, unconvinced.

“It will be long enough,” Valerie reassured him, her voice small but so certain, so confident in our hopeless situation that Jonathon nodded, going back to sharpening a knife, keeping his eyes down at his work instead of looking around at both of us. I had looked at him until I was sure he could feel my gaze through his skin, but I couldn’t stop looking at him, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I had doomed him to so many things, and how he had followed me confidently into them all, and I was ashamed of myself for leading him into what would most likely be his death.

I clenched my hands together so hard that I wanted the skin to start tearing apart. I wanted to save Shawn the trouble of killing me by ending it all myself, but I knew that there was still enough hope that I would hang on, that I still had enough faith to try. I had Geronimo, the most dangerous mission of all of them and the only mission that I would die for, if I had to. I had to finish Geronimo. It had to be done, or this would never stop.

Knowing that was the only thing that kept me safely and calmly where I was among friends, among family. Knowing that I still had a part to play and a purpose in this war kept me grounded enough that I didn’t fall off the edge of my mind.

But the nighttime came quickly. Before we seemed to realize it, the day was gone, and some of us were watching the end of the last day we would ever live, sick to our stomachs. I glanced around at them and they were pale, but strong, still staying seated and sitting straight and facing it head-on. Parker gripped Valerie’s hand like a lifeline, and my heart hurt thinking that the two of us never got to talk about their relationship, never got to giggle or blush or talk about the boys we loved because we weren’t that kind of close. There were so many stories I could have told Meade about his brother, and there were so many lost moments in the past that I could have shared with Jonathon if I had opened up.

But I hadn’t allowed myself to be a person—I wanted myself to be the monster. In the end, though, it counted that Jonathon wouldn’t let me, and I think I was a little more human again because of it.

It was about two hours into the night when I spoke some of my first words of the day: “Get on the ground.”

“What?” Parker demanded.

“Get on the ground!” I shouted, grabbing Jonathon and Meade, the two sitting beside me, and tugged them with me as I threw myself to the ground, and I saw Parker and Valerie follow. No sooner did we collide with the hardwood than the gunshots began, firing loudly through the windows and walls, tearing through the building without caring about the noise and disturbance. I kept my hands over my head, squeezing my eyes shut as glass shattered and furniture groaned, holding my breath.

And then it stopped.

“Caitie?” a familiar voice called out from outside, sounding like he was laughing, and never before had I wanted to kill Shawn as much as I did now. “Caitie? You alright in there?”

I didn’t respond, but Shawn knew, because he trained me. He knew I would sense his tricks, that I would have plenty of time to get out of the way. I heard him laugh outside, and my hand tightened on the gun, but I couldn’t stand up, not without getting a bullet through my brain. I felt a tug on my sleeve and I turned to find Jonathon staring at me, putting his finger over his lips to keep me silent before pointing to a wall, and it took me a moment before I remembered that night with the alarms, Parker’s fake test, when Jonathon led me to a secret hallway with no light and I stood there breathing in tune with Parker as he gave me the chance to kill Jonathon, and I didn’t take it, because it would have been the death of me, too.

“Can you hear me, Caitie?” Shawn called, his posse laughing in chorus. “Are you scared yet, Caitie?”

My head was pounding. Knowing Shawn was a wall away made my skin itch. I wanted to scream but I knew I had to keep fighting, so I held my breath and I stayed silent, stayed on the ground, my heart beating out of my chest. Although I didn’t look up, I could feel Jonathon looking at me, and I think he could see it on my face.

Parker led the way in a slow crawl, barely disrupting the glass or fallen decorations, and we paused only when the gunshots started for another moment to the sound of assassins’ laughter as they enjoyed this game of cat and mouse. Parker opened the compartment and peaked in before nodding us through, letting Valerie go and then me and Jonathon and Meade before he locked it up behind us, sealing us away from the gunfire, locking us into a dark place, cutting off Shawn’s voice mid-taunt.

“We could just stay here all night,” Jonathon offered weakly, but we all knew it wasn’t that easy. “We just have to get through the night, right? What if we just waited them out?”

“It wouldn’t taken them long to figure out that this is here,” Parker told him slowly, surely. “And, if they found it before we found out they did, we would be the easiest possible targets for them.”

“Where do we go from here?” Meade demanded, following Parker as we all walked slowly, one step at a time, through the pitch-black panic hallway built for an event just like this. At first, no one answered, because we hadn’t really thought that far yet. But we reached the end of the corridor, and it was the beginning of the end, and the only chance we had at surviving the night was to escape Shawn, and the odds were smothering us.

You wouldn’t have known it from the look on Parker’s face, though. We stepped into a room with a red emergency light over the door to the outside, and Parker turned to face Meade, a determined grin on his face. Parker reached out and took Valerie’s hand, grinning around at us.

“Now,” he said, “we run.”

He pushed open the door, and we ran.