Chapter Thirty-Five

Collin

“Hold on!”

“Jesus, Luke you’re taking this turn too hard!”

“I said hold on!”

They called it the ‘oh-shit-bar’ for a reason.

Holding on for dear life, I tried to lean toward the door as Luke took the right turn hard at about a hundred miles an hour. The wheels on my side of the truck felt like they came off the ground, and all three of us let out a sound in surprise and anticipation of a possible horrific crash.

Mine came out as a warbling yell.

Luke’s came out as a frustrated grunt of concentration.

Jesse’s came out as the most excited, little-boy laugh I’d heard in many years.

“Yee haw!” Jesse shouted as the truck came slamming back down on all four wheels and we straightened out on the exit ramp.

“Good Lord almighty,” Luke said. “That was close.”

“Next time we have an emergency, Luke drives,” Jesse cackled. “That was awesome!”

Luke exhaled loudly and punched the gas again, picking up speed as we barreled down the ramp toward the main road running through town.

“Turn’s up here somewhere,” I said. “Lord Blears Road.”

“Ah, shit!”

Luke slammed on the brakes, and we lurched to a stop. I pointed to a right turn that we had just blown past.

“That it?”

“That was it,” he said.

“Ah.”

Backing up and turning slightly, he then hit the gas again, and we went down the road toward the office park in the distance. There were quite a number of cars there, which seemed odd. For midnight, the place was rather busy. They must have had a hell of a night cleaning crew.

“What the hell?” Luke muttered as he pulled in behind Amber’s car. “There’s a lot of cars here.”

“That there are,” I said. “Which means something is up.”

“I would say so,” Jesse said. “Look. Is that one of the production trucks from the show?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t really have much interaction with them.”

“It’s a production truck of some kind,” Jesse said. “I know one when I see it. I wonder if the production companies’ office is here?”

“Then that means we know who was behind it,” I said. “And if that’s the case, I might need you to be prepared to go get bail money. Because I am going to beat the ever-loving fuck out of him.”

“The producer guy?” Luke asked. “The one you said she fired?”

“That’s going to be my guess. Unless Logan fell asleep and Eugene got here before we could, that’s who makes the most sense.”

“Well, come on, let’s see if we can help Owen get in there. I see him on the other side of the building,” Jesse said.

We got out of the truck and hauled ass over to the building, which looked alive and buzzing, but the doors were shut and blinds had been drawn over the massive windows of what I assumed was a lobby. We met up with Owen on one side of the building, Charlotte chasing after us.

“There’s no way in that I can see,” Owen said. “All the doors are locked, and no one is answering when I pound on them.”

“Is there a fire escape to get up to other floors or anything?”

“I don’t see one accessible from the ground,” Owen said. “We aren’t going to be able to get in there without breaking something.”

“Oh,” I said.

Calmly, I walked back to the parking lot and found a specific spot I’d seen when I was running over. In that place, the normal cement bumper that delineates the end of the parking space was missing, and in its spot were two cinderblocks, spaced so they would be roughly where the wheels of a car would be. Bending over, I picked one up and hauled it over to the closest window.

I didn’t bother to aim much. I just threw it as hard as I could.

Glass shattered, and a wooden frame fell apart as the cinderblock went through the window and into the building. Only then did I think that someone might be in there and I might have squished them, but we heard no screams, no cries of pain.

I turned to look at my brothers, knowing my face was expressionless. Jessie was pumping his fist in the air while Owen held his head in his hand and Luke gaped at me like I had six heads.

“We can get in now,” I said evenly.

“Yeah, we sure can,” Jesse said.

The sound of an alarm was going off inside the building, but I wasn’t bothered by that. My sense of urgency was far more emboldened by my desire to get to Brandy. I needed to know she was still okay. That I still had time.

I dove through the window before anyone else could reach me and didn’t stop to wait for them. I was going to complete my mission. By myself if I had to.

It was as if twenty years rewound on itself. I wasn’t in a building in Texas, but in a collapsing husk of a building in Fallujah. Offices became small campsites, and chairs were soldiers, ducking low to avoid snipers and firing out at the battalion of barely trained, barely adult young men, brainwashed to fight.

We weren’t all that different, when I thought about it.

I didn’t have a gun, and the visceral memory of the panic I felt when I was being hunted down kicked in. I dove through halls, trying to stay a moving target. I was harder to hit that way. I’d be harder to kill.

A door ahead of me promised a hallway heading in the direction of the lobby. I hit it full speed and yanked it so hard that it nearly came off its hinges.

It was dark in the hallway, the only illumination coming from an exit sign in the distance. What seemed to be beige walls had doors every few feet, tiny offices for tiny acronyms. VP of this. COO of that. EVP of this thing.

None of it mattered. It was all just one executive giving another executive a title to put on their resume and justify the massive bonuses they took. The salaries that had so many zeros while the people on the ground of their business had food stamps. I had grown to despise the corporate world immediately upon stepping foot in Iraq. The fat cats and elected officials who never wore sand-filled boots who wanted us to fight to protect their investments in oil fields… I despised them.

Politics was a zero sum game. They were all snakes wearing suits. They sent us to war and let us die to keep the gravy train going.

But the flag on my arm meant something to me. I was going to do right by it, by God. I was going to do what good I could do. I was going to protect my brothers. I was going to go home and hopefully not in a box.

I snaked through the corridor that was at once an empty hallway in an over-priced office and a hollowed, smoking, empty frame of a building that had housed educators and students in days before the dictators drew lines in the sand, believing they would never be called on it.

A door opened suddenly, and a man came through. He wore a white shirt and a tie, but as far as I was concerned, he was dressed in an andura, and I threw him against the wall.

“Don’t scream.”

He didn’t scream, but his voice made little peeping sounds as he gasped in tiny, short breaths. Each breath was punctuated by a little sound. I held him against the wall tightly and listened for the sound of anyone else.

“I’m looking for someone,” I said quietly. “A girl. Red hair. Beautiful. She came here tonight to meet someone who means to hurt her. Tell me where she is.”

“L-lobby,” the man said. “I had nothing to do with it. We didn’t know what he was planning. We’re quitting. All of us!”

“I believe you,” I said. “But I need to find them. How do I get to the lobby?”

“Through this door,” he said, pointing to the door he came through. He was terrified, and his voice warbled. “J-just go that way, then to the right, then to the left. It opens in the l-lobby. Right behind…”

“Right behind what?”

“Right behind the desk. The check-in desk.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You can go.”

I released him, and he took off in one movement, brushing past me and heading the way I’d come. I only hoped he didn’t surprise my brothers. They might not be as nice as I was.

Carefully, I opened the door. A soldier never took directions at face value. There were many double agents. There were many oppressed citizens. There were many True Believers. Often, we would be given directions to a trap. We had to take them all with a grain of salt. If I had been more careful, if I had been more skeptical, maybe they all would have lived….

There was no tripwire, no alarms that sounded when I went through the door. Taking long, careful steps, I made my way down the hall, following the directions I was given. To the right. To the left. Through the door.

I touched the handle of the door that would lead me to the lobby and centered myself. If this was it, I was going to have to make a move quickly. It helped to visualize it.

I had no gun. I needed to tackle, to put them down with extreme prejudice but without a weapon. I needed to be ready for a fistfight.

Yanking the door open, I let out a war cry, something to distract and disorient. It bellowed out of me like a cannon. Meanwhile in my mind, I was as calm and collected as my appearance looked deranged and wild. I scanned the room for a target, and I saw it.

People were streaming out of the room, going through every door available. There were only two people who were stationary. One of them was Brandy, her furious eyes trained on the person in front of her, tears streaming down her perfect cheeks.

The other was a man, facing away from me and familiar.

Suddenly, the man turned, confused and curious as to the sound coming from my belly.

I leapt.

And I hit him right in the stomach with my shoulder, sending us both toppling over the reception desk and to the floor below. He made a surprised sound, followed by the air leaving his body forcefully.

When we hit the ground, I got to my knees and looked him in the eye.

It was Phil. The producer.