2:26 am

They are the only three people still standing when the noise ends. They have not fallen, have not hidden, have not run away. The bodies underfoot are soft and damp, and some of them groan still, weakly, or scream the horror of death. Most are silent.

For a moment, when the lights stop flashing and the last shot is fired, a silence overtakes everything, the kind of shock that even the dying and wounded can appreciate and respect.

Emery is the last gunshot. He yells and shoots at the dark, retreating figures of the other guys. Two of them are dragging a limp body, a limp, female body covered in blood and brains. He knows she’s alive, because he saw them hit her to knock her out. But he doubts it’ll last.

He is the first to speak, a gasp of unbelieving breath, almost a sob. Furious. “They took her.”

The other man looks at him, rubs his grizzled chin. “They shot everyone else,” he points out.

Emery’s first reaction is to turn, to train his gun on the man’s unprotected head. This guy must be crazy, he thinks, because the guy’s in combat boots and a red-and-white beater. No armor, no Kevlar, not even a leather jacket. He’s furious, he wants to shoot something, wants to take out the fury on someone, and that guy went and spoke, so he looks like a good choice through the red blur that is Emery’s vision.

But the guy grins, or rather, he smirks, because only half his mouth grins, and wipes his hands on his jeans. And pulls out a pack of smokes and lights one.

Emery presses the trigger. A click. Nothing happens.

“Nice shot,” says the guy, shakes his head.

The girl moves forward now, rolls her eyes. “Quit your cockfighting,” she snaps, slaps Emery’s gun downward. She’s almost as short as Katya, brunette and grouchy-looking. Her jacket creaks as she crouches down and checks the pulse on a body.

“Do you got some great plan?” snaps Emery. He keeps seeing them carry L away, over and over in his head. Her going down, them dragging her away. Going down, dragging away. A pinpoint of pain sparks in his forehead, between his eyes, and he can feel it starting to radiate outward.

She turns to stare hatefully at him. He’s willing to bet that she wore black nailpolish and black lipstick and loads of black eyeliner in high school. “Do you have one?”

He doesn’t. Just an idea. “Jack a truck and go after them.”

The other man snorts, just as the girl does. “You either crazy or in love,” he says, clapping a hand heavily on Emery’s shoulder. Emery shrugs it off violently.

“So call me fucking crazy.” He loads a new clip into his gun, checks the others, reloads them and secures them.

Then he starts picking through the rest of the bodies, taking weapons and ammo. Most of them are already dead.

One, a kid, big eyed, blood trickling from his mouth, tries to shout and grabs his wrist. It’s the desperate vise-grip of the dying, someone clinging to what remains of life with dug-in fingernails. Emery blinks, watches as the kid starts choking on his own blood. Tears run down the boy’s cheeks helplessly; he clutches at his throat, drowning.

Emery’s not a bad person, not entirely. So he puts one hand over the boy’s eyes and shoots him in the head. The kid stops struggling and choking.

The man comes up behind him. He’s very quiet, and he just stands and watches as Emery shoots the kid. Waits while he stands up.

“You ain’t gonna last five seconds at their base,” he says.

He’s right. Emery’s dumb as shit to even try this, but he has to, doesn’t he. This is L, for fuck’s sake, she’s been dragged off. Jeff’s dead, and he doesn’t even know where Katya and Dahmer have gone. He knows where she is, or at least partially knows, and so he has some direction.

“And she’ll last longer?” he asks.

The man pulls a fresh cigarette out of his jeans and uses the burning filter of the first one to light it. He shrugs. The woman makes her way over, still holding her AK at the ready.

“She’s pretty. They might keep her alive for a while.”

Emery chokes on something, somewhere between his throat and abdomen. He doesn’t say anything because he can’t, he’s just opening and closing his mouth helplessly. Some very tiny, very pathetic noise escapes, and he turns around. His stomach lurches upward and he fights it back, but a spray of bile escapes his mouth.

“He’s in love,” says the woman matter-of-factly. She sounds like she’s studying a bug under a microscope.

Emery turns, aware he looks like a wounded dog, somewhere in the region of his eyes. But he looks at them anyway, at the stubble on the man’s brown skin, the cold lines of the woman’s face.

“Yeah,” says the man, before he can speak. “I’m in.”

2:31 am

The dark truck comes to a halt, and the underlying hum of the motor cuts out. She keeps sitting there, waiting calmly in the truck. They might have all of her weapons, they might have done their damnedest to steal her dignity, they might have ripped her clothes apart when they searched her. But they forgot her boots.

L has been a fan of steel-toed boots since she was thirteen, since she got a pair of Doc Martens and scuffed them up on a football player’s ribs. That had been the first time she was expelled from school, that had been the day she decided she wanted to be part of the biz. And she’d never worn anything but steel-toes after.

So when the truck door opens, and they send a single lone guy around to get her, she almost grins. Apparently her captors are dumber than her employers.

There is a sickeningly satisfying crunch when her foot hits his jawbone, just below his chin. He chokes and drops, eyes wide. He can’t scream, though, can’t call for help because his jaw is broken and the impact of her heel has temporarily disabled his vocal cords.

She jumps out of the truck, onto her feet, and kicks his face with that all-star soccer player style, as if it will bounce between two shiny white goalposts. And then she stomps on him, her breathing heavy and slightly shrill as it whistles between her teeth. She stomps and stomps, unable to see anymore, and when she stops stomping, there is a body, and a red and gray and white lump of bone chips and blood vessels and brains.

Her boots are dirty.

She crouches down. The keys are in his hand, and there’s a cuff key there. Her fingers fumble with it for a few minutes, jingling, and then her wrists are free.

L is not much for planning. She improvises everything. It won’t be long before they figure out something’s up. She’s smart, she can think fast in a pinch. And damn is this a pinch.

She steals the guy’s pants, and all of his weapons, and then she gets in the truck.

She drives. She has no idea where she’s going, but she drives.

2:34 am

The pretty lesbian and the kid don’t speak. They just stare blankly at Dover as he tells them what to do. But they do it. They take as many guns and ammo as they can hold. They are about to go upstairs and demand their paychecks. Dover is fairly certain that the idea behind this little gunfight of theirs was that their employers wouldn’t have to pay a single red cent. He is not about to take that kind of shit.

A group of six people walks across the loading dock. The kid watches them approach, eyes wide, but they don’t draw any weapons. Dover walks up to them, sees that three of them are kids. One’s scared shitless, limp arm with two bullet wounds in it, and tears still run silently down his face. The other two stand near each other, stare through hooded eyes at everyone. A boy, soaked in blood, and a girl who looks like an Asian dropped in a vat of bleach.

He looks at the adults; a woman with tattoos on her face and pink hair, a biker with a beard and sunglasses, and a muscular black man sucking down cigarettes.

“Who’re you all?” he asks.

The black man glances at the other two and tosses his cigarette aside. “Name’s Sesson,” he grunts. Doesn’t offer a hand. “The kids are Dahmer—” he points at the boy, “And Katya.” He doesn’t introduce anyone else, so Dover turns his gaze on the other three, waiting for them to speak.

“Jute. That’s Andrew, and the boy’s Bobby,” the woman answers. “You guys got names?”

Dover shrugs, glances at the terror-stricken kids. “I’m Dover. Don’t know their names,” he says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

For a moment, awkward silence descends, everyone looks expectantly at the teary pair. The kid speaks up first, finally, breaking the eerie spell.

“Mark.” He points at his chest, eyes still sort of blank, still dirty and stained, his pant leg crusty with vomit. The hand on his chest slowly slides down, wrinkling his tee-shirt beneath.

Dover and the black man, Sesson, nod without comment. Sesson turns to raise his eyebrows at the girl.

At first she doesn’t appear to see anyone, anything, and then, finally, she blinks, snaps her bewildered gaze onto the group.

“What?”

“What’s your name,” Jute demands, over-enunciating the words as if she’s speaking to a child in the Special Education class.

The woman glares, hands tightening on her gun. Then she whispers, “Go.”

Dover sighs internally. “We’re gonna go, and they’re gonna go with us,” he explains, faintly impatient. “Now what’s your name?”

“Go,” she repeats. Her thumb arcs up to indicate herself.

“Oh, okay.” He laughs, tense, relieved laughter. Just a short noise.

Sesson turns to look at him, folds his arms beneath the burning cigarette in his mouth. “Where we going, huh?”

Dover cocks his gun and grins, looking around the assembled group. “We’re going,” he says, checking the weapons in a swift patting motion, “To go and get our paychecks.”

2:47 am

Emery scowls at the passing flashes of shadowy buildings, of the scant other cars, of the guardrail as everything moves below the glassy surface of his window. The man, who named himself Runner, wouldn’t let him drive.

So he’s sitting in the passenger seat, glaring at the passing world. They don’t know where the other guys are. They only know what the trucks look like. It’s not any kind of help.

“How the fuck are we planning on finding their base?” demands Marilyn from the middle. Her small frame is crushed between the two men, her rifle propped between her knees. She looks more pissed-off than ever in her current position.

Emery snorts softly under his breath. “We look.”

“And what the fuck kind of good will that do us?”

He shrugs. He feels dull, lifeless. The only thing he’s certain of is L, that she is missing, hurt, that he might be able to help her. He knows that he has to try.

Marilyn is jerked into his side by a turn before she can open her mouth again. She makes a muffled, angry noise and sits upright, glaring at him as though it’s his fault. Runner slows the truck.

“This look about right?” he asks, stopping and lighting a cigarette. It looks like a closed-off industrial park, strips of offices and warehouses, flat and ugly, the concrete dim under faded starlight. There are a few trucks visible in large parking lots, a grouping of them that matches the one they’re in. Headlights flash on in the dark, come shooting toward them.

“Holy shit,” murmurs Emery, staring out the window. It’s a truck, roaring forward, the back doors flapping open.

The truck comes crashing through the chain-link gates in a clang of metal and sparks.

For a moment, the driver stares, frozen, at their truck.

Emery fumbles for the door, vaults out into the street and sprints for the escaping truck.

“L!” he shouts, grabbing her door handle and wrenching it open.

She’s trembling when he pulls her out, the body he always thought of as tough, angular muscle suddenly frail in his tightening arms. He wants to protect her, to keep her safe, wants to hug her again and again. Or maybe to not stop hugging her. He can’t tell, he can’t care, he can only keep gasping her name, and some nonsensical mantra of worry and searching and fear as he holds her.

Her face is against his chest, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. He presses his mouth against her hair, closes his eyes. Breathes, lets the relief surge through him, lets it replace all other feelings because he doesn’t know where to begin with them.

He doesn’t hear the pound of feet on the pavement, doesn’t know until Marilyn grabs his arm and jerks that they’ve been shouting at him.

Pulling L along, safely knotted under his arm, he lets Marilyn drag him to the truck. She shoves them into the back row of the cab, a place too cramped to sit properly.

It suits Emery just fine, lets him curl up with L, adjusting until she’s half in his lap, her head limp on his shoulder, her arms around his neck weak and lifeless. He doesn’t want to imagine, to think what’s happened to her. Some part of him knows, deep within, knows how she’s been hurt and that she’s in shock and can’t think or feel or see.

He plants his mouth against her temple, keeps murmuring over the screech of truck tires, the bang of gunshots, as oblivious as she is.