Page 61 of Red Rabbit
“Yeah but—but I saw—I thought you were—” She couldn’t finish the thought.
“I’m harder to kill than that, pretty girl,” I said gently, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear.
Alarm crossed her face and she looked frantically around the room, pressing closer to me.
“Where’s Paxton?”
“The tattooed bastard?” I growled and my hands tightened around her. She flinched and I took a breath, knowing I was scaring her. “Dead. He’s over there.”
I nodded to the other side of the bed. I wasn’t about to tell her I came in to see the guards watching him rape her when she was unconscious. I killed them first, then dragged him off of her and beat him to within an inch of his life and finally shot him.
She didn’t need to know that.
“We do need to go now though. Can you walk?”
I helped her to her feet and she winced, her face pinched in pain. I didn’t know the extent of her injuries yet but the ones I could see made me want to kill that bastard all over again. I pulled a pair of her pants and a pair of shoes and socks from my pack and helped her into them. Then I grabbed my flannel and wrapped her in it. She buried her face in the fabric and nearly broke apart all over again as she became surrounded by my smell. At the door, I turned and handed her a gun.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” She asked.
She held it between two fingers like it was a live snake.
“Shoot people,” I said simply.
I felt better with her having something to defend herself with. She didn’t seem like she liked that idea but she didn’t object again. Once we were in the hallway, she clutched my sleeve.
“I need to get to the command room.” It looked like it was difficult for her to think clearly and her eyes were still glassy from whatever drug she’d been given.
“We don’t have time,” I said.
“It’s the only way to get out of here. I can close some passageways and limit the number of guards who come after us. Otherwise, the minute they figure out we’re trying to escape they’re going to trap us.”
I frowned but she had a point.
“Which direction?” I asked.
“It’s near Cooper’s office,” she said. She still seemed unsteady on her feet but she set off down the hallway.
We didn’t encounter any trouble until we were almost there and a door opened and two guards came through. They looked at us in shock and hesitated for a second too long in their surprise. I shot them both in quick succession and they dropped heavily to the floor. I heard Kaelin inhale sharply but she didn’t say anything and I went over to the bodies. I quickly stripped them of their weapons and grabbed a radio set. I put it on and immediately heard chatter in my ear.
I motioned for Kaelin to follow me again and we rounded another corner and ran straight into more guards. I pushed her back around the corner, opening fire as I did. I heard the radio light up and cursed. We weren’t flying under the radar anymore.
I poked my head around the corner and fired off a barrage of bullets. Pulling back I heard over the radio they were coming up behind us. I looked around the corner again and killed the remaining guards. I heard a gasp and a gunshot and turned and Kaelin was pointing the handgun at a guard behind us. She didn’t hit him but it made him pause and the second was all I needed to quickly shoot him.
“Come on,” I said.
I grabbed her arm and we ran through the dead bodies. The radio was going crazy now and I heard Cooper giving orders. He was as methodical and calm as always. I threw open a door and we ran through a lab. I didn’t have time to look around before I was shooting the guards blocking the door ahead of us. I rushed through that one, checking to make sure Kaelin was still with me and then we charged into the command center. The close space made shooting the guards tricky. They rushed me and I punched one, then shot the other. The third threw himself at me but his fighting was sloppy and I threw him in front of me and snapped his neck. Kaelin was pressed against the door, watching me with something close to awe and fear. She was seeing me for exactly who I was.
A methodical killer. A cold blooded murderer. A broken man.
I saw her overcome her brief fear at the violence and she hurried past the bodies and sat down. She seemed to have to work hard to focus for a moment but once she locked the command center door and the two external ones outside of that, she seemed to have found herself again. There was a determined look on her face and her fingers started to gain speed as they flew across the keyboard faster than I could follow as she shut down passageway after passageway.
“How do you know how to do that?” I asked, watching over her shoulder.
“Graham—” she breathed.
She stopped on a surveillance camera focused into the lab we passed through. Several humans were on the operating tables with scientists moving around them. We both looked at each other.
“He’s doing some sort of human testing,” she said.
