Page 129 of Kept in the Dark
I quickly calculate the best approach. The odds of six on one are not favorable, and they likely all have guns. I will need to surprise them. I will need to time this perfectly. “I will get into place around the corner. Tell me when the last man moves into the elevator—I will only have seconds before those doors close.”
“Fish in a barrel, I like it. Roger that.”
Silently, I creep into the hallway, using the corner as cover. In the silence, I hear a gruff Russian voice order, “Milo, you will stay here to stand guard. Boris, we leave you on the last floor before the top.”
If Milo will not be getting into the elevator, I need to drop him first.
“Okay, they’re getting in.”
I peer around the corner, heart thumping. Am I going to lose my chance? Milo’s back is to me, and he is standing between me and the closing brass doors. In a fluid motion, I toss a knife at the back of Milo’s head.
Yet another instance of a knife’s superiority to a gun. He dies instantly and nearly silently.
In the time it takes his body to hit the floor and for anyone to realize he has fallen, I have palmed another knife and made it down the hallway to the elevator. The doors are closing, but stop as I throw my boot in the way.
In the dim elevator lighting, five surprised faces greet me. I punch the one closest to me, feeling his nose crunch under my hand. With my left hand braced on his shoulder, I lift my leg and kick back towards the next closest man, who is wearing a red tie, sending him into the side of the elevator car. He hits the wall, cracking his head against the mirror, splintering it, and the other three respond as one, each reaching for a gun in his waistband as I step inside.
I shove the man with the broken nose towards the two in the corner, and they all fall like bowling pins. My knife goes into the last man standing as he reaches for his gun, sliding through the bones in his hand and straight into his stomach, halting the removal of the weapon from his pants. He screams, and my left arm comes up to slash his throat.
Four to go.
As the doors to the elevator close, the man with the red tie recovers and tackles me from behind. We go careening into the wall, and he delivers a few good punches to my kidneys that have me wheezing and breathlesswith the sharp pain of it. I throw back my head, connecting hard skull to soft cartilage, and his newly broken nose throws him off balance. I spin with my armed hand outstretched and catch his stomach in a long, deep slash that makes him choke and stumble backwards.
Three left.
Movement in the broken mirror catches my eye, and I turn back in time to see one of the men on the floor—the smallest of the group by far—in the corner raising his gun. A hard kick knocks it from his grasp, just as one of the others gets his feet under him enough to charge at me. His long ponytail smacks me in the face as his shoulder in my stomach knocks the breath from me long enough to drive us towards the wall. I hear glass shatter behind my head as the man with a ponytail delivers poorly supported blows to my torso.
If I were unarmed, this would be a terrible position for me, but I am not, and his entire spine is unprotected. I switch the knife to my hand with more freedom of movement and jam it down into the ridge in the middle of his shirt. With the significant downward force, the thin blade of my knife slides right between two vertebrae, and he goes down like a stone thrown into the river.
Only two now.
I kick the ponytail man’s body away, forward at one of the remaining men coming towards me—the very thin one. He knocks the body of his comrade aside and points his gun at me. I am a large target in an enclosed space, but that also means he is too close to recover quickly when I duck down and spring towards the other man. I bring my knife down into the thin man’s leg above the kneecap with one arm and grab behind his hip to swing him down and around to cover myself just as the last man fires his silenced weapon. It hits my bony meat shield in the back, jerking his whole body and making my ears ring with the noise. Silencers do not make guns completely silent.
One man remains. The largest of them.
My position is less than optimal. I am on one knee, the last man has a gun, and there is a body between us. My angle is terrible, so when I throw the last knife I am holding, it clips the side of his face when I was aiming for its center. But it is enough to make him turn his head, and that gives me the second of distraction I need. A blow to the solar plexus, one to the throat, and a kick to the knee, then he is down and cannot get up or take in a breath. I pull a knife from one of the other bodies where I left it, find another on the ground a few feet away, and use that one to slice his throat for a quicker death.
During the heat of the moment, fights like this feel like they take hours. In reality, it is done before the elevator reaches the top. Seconds, perhaps a minute at most. My chest is heaving as I try to take in enough air, but I can barely feel anything through the rush of adrenaline. I am a creature of instinct and survival, halfway between a cornered animal and a predator on the hunt.
The elevator comes to a smooth stop, makes a cheerful dinging noise, and I can hear a muffled voice through the doors, “And here they are.” At the sound of his voice, I squeeze the handles of my knives so hard my arms shake.
I settle into a soft-kneed position. I am ready.
The doors part.
41
Nicole
A couple that stabs together
One time in New York, I got clipped in the eyebrow by a patient’s elbow when he was fighting being sedated. I remember the crack of pain—how the sound registers long before the feeling of the impact—and how my vision swam. Even a glancing blow makes your ears ring, blinds you, and makes it hard to think through the agony.
Before today, that’s the closest I’ve come to being intentionally hit in the face.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I started crying as soon as I could get a full breath in after his first blow landed on my cheek. The pain was white-hot. Unreal. Even now, moments later, it throbs and burns, too sharp to ignore. I can feel blood trickling down my cheek from where he broke the skin with the butt of his gun. The cocaine seems to be making Kyle strong, but wobbly and imprecise—while painful, he didn’t break more than just skin.
The second blow to my stomach didn’t hurt quite as bad, but it did knock the wind out of me and cause panic to set in when I couldn’t draw a complete breath for several long seconds. The fear that instilled hasn’t dulled. My heart is going to explode out of my chest.
