Selena watched Decker sprint up the corridor in pursuit of Diablo and darted out after him. The Mexican gangster was already at the far end, grabbing at a door handle. She pushed her legs faster to catch up with the former US marine pilot just as he reached Diablo. The gangster wrenched open the door and jumped into an adjoining room, twisting his upper body around as he ran and lifting his gun into the aim.
“Down!” Decker yelled.
Selena couldn’t see past Decker to see for herself why he had told her to get down, but there was no need. After so many adventures and close-calls together, she knew she could trust him in an emergency situation. She dived down, hitting the corridor’s carpeted floor at the same time as Decker just as Diablo’s gun exploded and sent a bullet tracing inches over her head.
The round punched a hole in the safety glass of a door at the other end of the corridor. She screamed and covered her head, peering through a gap in her arms just in time to see the Mexican running to the next door. He laughed and raised his gun a second time.
“Cover!” Decker called out, and rolled behind an antique chest covered in old books.
Selena copied what he did and found herself behind a heavy wooden bookshelf.
“Are you okay?” Decker called out.
“Yes… at least I think so! That one nearly hit me. Where is he now? Can you see?”
“Yeah, I can see under the chest. He just left the corridor and went into another room. He has nowhere else to run.”
“That makes him even more dangerous, Mitch!”
Decker peered over the chest. “I see him!”
He fired and hit Diablo in the back three times. The bullets buried themselves between his shoulder blades, shattering the bone and digging deep inside his lungs. The Mexican gangster went down hard, not even having time to reach out with his hands to soften his fall. His face ploughed into the plush pile, and the rest of him came crashing down a second later, dead on touchdown.
“That’s another one down,” Charlie said. “Now for the others.”
37
Decker had paused on the landing not far from Diablo’s cooling corpse. A narrow window threw some dull light on the carpet. He walked over to it and saw they were now on the north side, overlooking Central Park. The endless citizens of Midtown Manhattan were innocently going about their business, spending their days without a care in the world. And not a hint of the horrors the Snake King had in store for them.
A deep, violent roar shook the building.
“What the hell was that?” said Diana.
“Looks like Danvers is powering up the Stormbringer,” Decker said.
Selena ran to his side and peered over the window ledge. For now they both saw only order and peace, but they each knew how quickly this would fall apart if they failed to stop the Snake King and his men. If they had learned one thing since their hunt for Shambhala, it was how thin the fabric of polite society was, and how easily it could be torn apart by a man like Nathaniel Danvers.
Far below, a couple of cop cars cruised past, no lights, no sirens. Just driving around waiting for the next dispatcher to call them to a job. A fire truck trundled north on Seventh Avenue, again no hurry at all. Maybe they were going back to their station after a job somewhere south. Pedestrians were slowly starting to notice the clouds. Some pointed and stared but most were still unaware. For now. Decker tried to imagine what a hurricane several magnitudes stronger than the wildest Category Five storms, would be like. He saw it ripping through the city and shredding all of this civilization to pieces before spitting out into the Upper Bay.
“C’mon, let’s get on with it,” he said. “It’s up to us now.”
“Next time we do this, someone please talk me out of it!” Charlie said.
“There’s not going to be a next time,” Selena said.
Decker was already three steps up the next staircase. Now he stopped and looked at her. “What does that mean? You’re throwing him off the team?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll talk about it later, Mitch! We have to stop Danvers!”
He was already running back up the steps to the penthouse’s top floor. “You think I don’t know that? You think I'm some kind of idiot? We’re running up the stairs to get a man who calls himself the Snake King and then you go and drop another cryptic hint about the Avalon team not having a ‘next time’!”
“Hey,” Charlie said, pounding up the stairs with a gun in his hand. “We’re just talking about a short break, right?”
“I'm not talking about it at all!” Selena said, struggling not to lose her breath. “I’m focussing on stopping a barking mad apeshit wackadoodle who thinks he’s descended from the lizard kings from wiping out twenty million people!”
“Hey, haven’t I heard that somewhere before?” Riley asked.
“Keep running, Carr!” Selena said, rapidly running out of breath. “If I don’t make it, this could all be down to you.”
“Heaven help us,” Decker said. “Imagine the fates of twenty million innocent people resting in the hands of a man whose claim to fame is farting the Australian national anthem.”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, Mitch,” Riley said. “It raises a real good laugh with the boys from the regiment, every single time.”
“Look out!” Diana yelled, pointing ahead.
They had turned into the main room of the penthouse, and now Miguel Mercado was standing on the mezzanine with a submachine gun in each hand. He screamed in Spanish until he was hoarse and opened fire, sweeping the two muzzles in opposite directions and spraying the entire room with
