gargle.
Jules saw her chance as he dropped like a sack of old shit to the floor.
'Go,' she cried out, pointing at the fire escape door a few feet away. 'Go now.'
The Rhino got moving with surprising speed, accelerating from a lumbering start to a full-throated charge in less than a second. He hit the door with all his mass, and it crashed inward while Jules crouched and fired short discrete bursts whenever she saw color or movement outside. No sooner had the Rhino entered the stairwell than he swung his weapon around the corner and began to provide covering fire for her. Jules ran, heedless of the pain in her shoulder and hip, firing her weapon blindly as she held it across her body. A few shots chased her into the fire escape, but they were poorly aimed and she made it without a mishap.
'So what do we do now?' the Rhino asked.
'We go up, quickly. Come on. Move it.'
They hit the stairs at a sprint from a standing start, or as close to a sprint as they could manage in the extremes of exhaustion and stress. Jules could feel her thighs burning with lactose buildup after three flights. That was enough for her. Dizzy from blood loss, she shouldered open the door and tumbled into a hallway. It was an unremarkable space: elevator doors, dead potted plants, an empty water dispenser, and the remains of the Disappeared everywhere. Something about them caught her eye, but she was too busy to stop and think about it.
'Come on, we got to get ourselves barricaded in,' she puffed.
The Rhino was laboring and wheezing a little bit, too, which was only to be expected given how much more weight he had to haul up the stairs with a bunch of murderous thugs on their heels. It didn't slow him down much, however. He continued at high speed through the doors of an office directly in front of the elevators and the fire escape they had just emerged from. Jules followed him, dodging out of the way as he began to throw desks and filing cabinets up against the entrance. There was no chance of hiding now, no pretense of stealth. He was trying to build a barrier from which they might fight. She tried to help as best she could with her wounds, tossing a couple of office chairs out into the hallway, where they might trip anybody who came out of the stairwell at speed. She kept her gun trained on the entrance, using her injured arm.
After a few minutes, she judged the impromptu defenses good enough and called out to the Rhino, who was about to turn over a heavy, old-fashioned manager's desk as a second line of defense. Julianne took up position covering the fire escape and waited for the next phase of the attack to begin. She expected the Rhino to join her and had one of her spare mags ready for him. After a tense minute, however, she realized he wasn't coming.
'Rhino! Excuse me, Rhino. I thought this would appeal to you. Glorious fucking death in a hopeless last stand and all that. Remember the Alamo? We've even got the fucking Mexicans for it. So do you think I could get a little bit of help out here, you know, with me being a mere lady and having one gammy wing and all?'
'Sorry, Miss Jules,' he said, finally appearing at her side clutching a sheaf of papers. 'I found something.'
'It would want to be something really special to distract you from seeing off this bunch of villains who are… hmm… let's see, oh, that's right, trying to fucking kill us!'
The Rhino accepted the spare magazine from Julianne and took up a firing position behind a couple of filing cabinets and an overturned desk.
'Have a look at these,' he said. 'I'll cover the door.'
'You've got to be kidding me.'
'Rhinos do not kid, Miss Jules. We charge and we gore. And that's about it. Go on, have a look; it won't take long.'
Jules glanced down for the briefest moment at the papers he handed her. One of them seemed to be a hand- drawn map of the midtown area covered in circles and arrows and Arabic writing. She tossed it on the floor.
'Oh, for fuck's sake, Rhino. What do we care about any of this? And where are Cesky's men? They should be blundering in here by now.'
The Rhino maintained his steady aim at the door through which they expected the contract killers to come, but he wasn't letting the issue of the documents go.
'Miss Jules, this place is full of this stuff. And none of it's old. There's ration packs, empty drink bottles, muddy boot prints everywhere, and lots and lots of paperwork like this. Jules, I think this used to be some kind of jihadi pirate command post.'
Julianne's heart had only just begun to slow down after the the shock of the ambush downstairs, but it began hammering away again as she took in the import of what the Rhino had just said. Cesky's crew could not be very far away now. They had to be sneaking up the stairs as quietly as possible, which gave her all the more reason to be anxious. She had been hoping they'd come running through the door like macho fools, pants down around their ankles as they tripped over in front of her so she could put a bullet into each of their skulls with as little fuss and bother as possible.
Not to be, apparently.
A quick reconnaissance of the office confirmed what the Rhino had just said. It looked like it had been occupied until quite recently and abandoned with some haste.
'Rhino, I think we might have made-'
'Put the guns down. Lace your fingers behind your heads. Get down on your knees and shut the fuck up.'
The voice was soft but menacing. Jules almost jumped out of her skin as she spun around.
'Whoa, lady, back off,' the Rhino protested as he turned and saw the figure in black combat fatigues who somehow had materialized behind them, glaring at him with an expression as serious as heart disease. She traversed the muzzle of her weapon, some sort of assault rifle with an underslung grenade launcher, from the Rhino to Jules and back again with a minimum of fuss. Julianne had no doubt that she could and would drill them both in the space of a heartbeat. The only thing that gave her any hope was the woman's American accent and her military fatigues.
'I don't know who you are, GI Jane,' she said, 'but some very unpleasant characters are going to come spilling through that door behind us any moment now, and they will be shooting at everything on this side of the room.'
'Not gonna happen,' said the woman. 'And I said get down on the floor. I will shoot you in the knee if I have to.'
'But…'
The muzzle of the assault rifle dropped until it was pointing at the Rhino's kneecap.
'You look like a fucking Minnesota fan in that dumbass helmet,' the woman said. 'I lost money on those useless fucking Vikings once. Just so you know.'
He didn't need telling twice, laying down his weapon as he quickly knelt and placed his hands behind his head. 'Just get down, Jules,' he said. 'At least that way you'll be behind cover when they get here.'
The woman shifted her aim to Julianne, who decided the Rhino was right. She quickly followed his lead and dropped to her knees, laying down her P90 and trying to raise both arms above her head. She winced as her injured arm and flank flared with pain.
'It's okay,' the woman said. 'The arm in the sling you can leave.'
'Lady, really,' said the Rhino. 'You're making a big mistake. What are you, some kind of forward air controller? We're not the bad guys here. They're coming up the stairs after us.'
The woman adjusted her position slightly to put more of the impromptu barricade between herself and the fire exit. But she didn't seem particularly concerned.
'If you're talking about the comedy relief downstairs, you can relax. They're all dead. Eight hostiles. Two of them neutralized in your first exchange of fire. One more as he tried to enter the building-'
'Hey, I got him,' Jules said.
'Congratulations,' the woman replied. 'You killed a moron at close range with an extremely powerful submachine gun. I'd give you a gold star, but I'm fresh out. And… there's five more dumbass mantones deader than disco down in the lobby. Was that all of them?'
Jules felt the muscles in her back relax just fractionally as the threat of being shot down from behind by Cesky's men seemed to recede a little. An even greater threat appeared to have materialized in front of them, however, in the form of this crazy ninja bitch with the boiler suit fetish.
'We don't know how many of them there were,' Jules said. 'They ambushed us. There wasn't time for taking roll call. I'm sorry.'
