Page 97 of Homebound
“Go where?” she whispered back, a little garbled in the aftershocks of being tased. She could hear the decisive stomp of boots from the stairs. Guards were on their way and coming up fast.
“Escape. They won’t let me live. Can you stand?” Simon asked her.
She nodded and he carefully lowered her to the floor allowing her to find balance before letting go. Scooping up the tattered remains of her shirt, Simon draped them over her shoulders covering her breasts.
“Thank you,” she said, polite, the sense of reality temporarily a foreign concept.
“I can’t take you with me now.” He was implying that she’d be a dead weight to him now when every second counted. She would be, no argument there. “But I’ll come for you soon.”
She nodded in a daze.
“We can’t go on as we have at the prison. It’s a dead end,” he continued as if trying to convince her that their parting was a good thing.
It wasn’t.
“You’re right,” she said automatically. A small black hole opened up in Gemma’s heart and began growing. She was losing him.
“You’re crying,” he said with surprise.
“I’m not.”
“I can see your eyes leaking.”
“It’s not tears.”
“Can human eyes leak something other than tears?”
“No, of course not. Don’t be silly.”
“Then what is it, Gemma?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
A muffled beep of the scanner sounded from the stairwell, the door being unlocked by reinforcements from the other side. Gemma stifled a sob.
Simon took two steps towards the door and turned to look at her. His eyes were cold black, betraying nothing.
“Stay strong for me, Gemma.”
“I’m trying, Simon,” she managed through the throat so tight it threatened to choke her.
“I won’t leave Earth without you.”
The door burst open. The guards flowed in like hot lava, tasers at the ready. Several stung Simon at full blast. He shrugged off electricity as he twisted and turned amid the uniformed mass, striking the guards’ faces with his bare hands, busting skulls like water balloons, clawing out eyes. He fought his way to the door with a single-minded focus. He hopped over some of the felled bodies, stomped on others, pushed guards out of the way by ripping out their guts.
Another second - and heaps of gray prostrate forms were all that was left in the suddenly quiet corridor. The smell of blood and death hung heavy in the silence. Pulled by the spring, the heavy door slowly shut.
Chapter 23
“Igot fired.”
Aunt Herise whirled around. Her eyebrows came down low making her pinched face look like a disgruntled prune.
“Why?”
In a nutshell? “An inmate escaped on my watch.”
Gemma wearily lowered herself in a chair by the door keeping her coat tightly buttoned to avoid giving the family an eyeful. She was bone tired and hungry, and her bruised body hurt.
