Chapter Eighteen – Kris

 

My sidearm was ten feet away, off to my left.

Another kick.

I spun to face the back door as splinters filled the air ten feet to my right. The door flew open, and two black-clad figures stormed inside in its wake. They had blackened suppressed submachine guns in hand and carried themselves like pros, but not SPEC OPS, as they swept over the room with night vision goggles.

Adrenaline surged in my veins; the blood rushed in my ears. Not sparing a look back at my sidearm, I rushed forward, dropping into a third base slide over the dusty tile of my living room floor, my legs coiled beneath me like a springing cat.

Muzzles swept past me, their owners surprised I was coming right for them.

I stomped out with my foot as I slid in, putting as much force into it as I could, my heel connecting with the side of the first gunman’s knee as I went past.

He screamed as the joint buckled in the wrong direction of its intended use, crumbling to the side and nearly falling over me.

The man’s yells filling my ears, I was already up and moving, bouncing to my feet with the momentum, dancing around the standing man as I struck out with an open palm at his unprotected throat.

The second gunner choked as his throat collapsed beneath my palm strike, his hands coming up by reflex to free his air passage as his mouth dropped open, gasping for breath, the submachine gun dropping to his side in the tactical sling.

I grasped the firearm at his side before he could react, and fired an achingly loud burst, despite the suppressor attached to the muzzle, into his screaming friend.

The gunner, realizing what I’d just done, decided to put up a fight, trying to wrench the submachine gun from my grip.

“Amateurs,” I growled, slamming an elbow up and into his temple, my right leg launching me into the thrust.

The second man stumbled, dazed by the strike as he continued to choke on his own body, and I ripped the strap up and over his head, pulling hard as it caught on his ear, as the first of the bedroom intruders came in through the entryway.

Bedroom Shooter One didn’t have time to react as I opened fire, the submachine gun’s popping and chattering filling the air as I crouched and continued to move sideways, my cheek level on the stock as I fired two semi-controlled bursts of automatic fire into his chest and throat.

Behind me, the second man I’d neutralized crumpled to the ground, gurgling as his body reflexively sucked breath.

Still, I kept moving, keeping my body low and behind an end table as the fourth shooter came around the corner, his firearm at the ready as he opened fire where I’d been standing. The clack-clack-clack of automatic fire filled my house, followed by the smack of bullets into drywall and the shattering of my favorite lamp.

He paused for a moment, seemingly confused at my disappearance.

I smiled grimly as, still crouched behind the end table sitting at the end of my leather couch, I fired low, my bullets biting into his knees, thighs, and shins. It was like the rug had been pulled out from beneath him, and he dropped to the tile in a heap, blood pooling already in his black cargo pants and leaking out onto my floor.

I rose up from behind the table, and went rushing around with the firearm’s stock still pressed to my shoulder. “Don’t move!”

He reached for his firearm, his already pale hand feebly groping at first the stock, then the trigger. He tried to grip it, but his hand slid off and flopped to the ground.

I dropped to my knees, put the firearm out of his reach, and went for his belt. I started to work at the buckle as he tried to push me away. “Hold still!” I growled, slapping his dead-fish hands away. “I’m trying to save your miserable fucking life!”

Still he struggled, even as I got his belt free, my hands moving by battlefield instinct. I looped the belt beneath his thigh, my hands slipping through the too-hot blood, smearing it over the tile as I desperately hurried to fit the end of the belt through the buckle. I pulled it as tight as I could, panting with the effort, every breath a painful burn in my chest.

The cold steel of a barrel was suddenly on the back of my neck. “Careful,” said a man from behind me. “Let it go. There’s silver in this shotgun. Even without it, I think your head would decorate that wall just fine, dragon.”

I let out a sigh, even as my hands tightened their grip on the belt. He must have come in from the same door as the first two. Moved quietly as the sound of my own blood filled my ears, as my vision tunneled. “I’m not letting him die,” I said through clenched teeth.

On the ground in front of me, the man with the makeshift tourniquet around his thigh stopped moving.

Groaning, my arms smeared nearly up to my elbows in a stranger’s blood, I dropped the belt and put my hands behind my head.