Static Crush {M/M} ✔

Chapter #49

Hale determines that this is his cue to leave.

He stands. The sudden movement makes Melissa recoil and tap her wrist frantically to pull up her HoloPhone.

Panic is seizing his heart too, but at the same moment there's a release of tension. A relief from the threads of something held tightly to for a long time, then finally let go.

He bursts from Melissa's house, taking long strides, jumping off the porch. They have to go. Hale is still hacked into Melissa's devices and she's dialling a number on her phone. Not the police though. Mark.

Hale has no time to question her thinking. He fires a message through his network connection.

>>Damo?

The garage door to Rayner's home ratchets open in answer, screaming in the cold quiet of the neighbourhood, a motor roaring from inside. The truck peels out, snow turning to sleet under the spinning tires. It fishtails at the end of the drive before Damo wheels it around to pull up in front of Melissa's home. Theo sits in the passenger seat, still fumbling her seatbelt. And Rayner—

Behind him, Hale hears footsteps. In front of him, the door to the pickup truck opens and Rayner leaps out. At the same moment, Mark comes flying out of his home, red-faced, wearing only a wife-beater, boxer shorts, and greying socks. And he's wielding a shotgun.

There should be no time to wonder, but Hale's thoughts run at inhuman speed. In the fraction of a second it takes to register the firearm, he has long enough to question how Mark came to possess a weapon. Why it was the first thing Mark reached for when Melissa called. How it might seem, with everything about Damo on the news, that Hale and his companions are a genuine threat. Dangerous fugitives. Not just survivors fleeing for a chance at freedom, but angry criminals returning for revenge.

All these thoughts and observations speed through his mind, but they don't postpone his instinctive reaction.

Behind them, Melissa breaks her paralyzed silence to wail, "It's him!" Like they're nightmares turned corporeal. "He's back!"

Mark raises the shotgun.

Rayner moves quickly, sliding in the slush to put his body between Hale and the weapon, but Hale sidesteps him and charges toward Mark, toward the shotgun barrel that now has him in its sights. With visual perception processing at a far higher frame rate than a human's, Hale can see in slow motion the squeeze of Mark's meaty finger on the trigger. At the same moment, he hears the firing pin chime as it hits primer. It strikes a chord of terror in Hale's heart. The gun goes off just as Hale bats the barrel aside with his forearm, throwing Mark's aim skyward. The scent of gunpowder stings Hale's nostrils. The blast rings deafening in his ears, and the buckshot explodes harmlessly over his shoulder.

In those feverish few seconds where survival was his only focus, Hale felt acutely aware of every tiny sound, movement, smell. Now his senses abandon him and in their place only fury remains. He snatches the shotgun away and brings it down over his knee with such force that it bends and breaks apart, spring-loaded parts and crunching metal yielding to his superior design. He has a moment of vindication at the mask of shock on Mark's face right before Hale's fist pounds through it. Cartilage crunches in Mark's nose. He goes down leaden, collapsing into the snow like a demolished building.

Melissa's wails of fear persist, but Hale barely registers them. It's time to leave.

He turns to rush back toward the truck. Halfway between, Rayner stands paralyzed, eyes wide, jaw slack, and Hale feels a rush of something far different from fury. The way Rayner rushed out of the truck to haul him to safety, the way he'd moved to put himself between Hale and a short-fused, weapon-wielding asshole, the way he looks at Hale without anger even though Hale's gotten him into trouble again.