Ciphers, Matt Rogers [a court of thorns and roses ebook free TXT] 📗

of them had the chance to fire a shot. Slater had been waiting there, zoned in like a madman, and he’d put a bullet in each of their skulls before the four of them could blink. He was standing over them now, panting with adrenaline, checking each corpse for signs of life.

His back was still turned to King.

King said, ‘Are you hurt?’

‘No.’

It was all that needed to be said. Neither of them were in the mood for prolonged conversation anymore. The stakes had become horrifically real. There were people coming to kill them. It wasn’t a foreign sensation for either of them, but it never failed to put them in a savage mindset.

Because, at the end of the day, that’s what they were.

Savages trying to stay alive in a brutal world.

King heard something. The clatter of a footstep, echoing off concrete walls. Coming from behind him.

The stairwell.

He called to Slater, ‘Gun. Now.’

Slater understood. He darted into the elevator, picked up one of the G36C rifles, twisted and threw it underhand down the carpeted hallway. King tucked his Sig Sauer into his waistband and, a moment later, caught the rifle double-handed. He made sure the thirty-round magazine was locked and loaded and ready to go, then pivoted toward the stairwell and thundered a boot into the door frame.

Perfect timing.

He caught a man on the other side of the door as it swung into the stairwell, awkwardly pinning the assailant in place, halting his momentum. The guy shouldered it back in King’s direction, but by then King had the advantage. He threw his full weight into the door and sent the man tumbling off his feet. Then he stepped into the narrow gap created in the doorway and brought the G36C up to his shoulder and seized hold of the foregrip and took careful aim and pulled the trigger.

Put three rounds into the guy’s throat, because he was wearing the same Kevlar vest as his buddies in the elevator.

The rounds tore through his neck and killed him instantly, and the momentum sent him toppling back over the railing. He plummeted into darkness.

King swept the barrel over the rest of the spiralling stairwell and found three men racing up toward him. Two of them had already drawn a bead on him with HK rifles of their own.

Move.

King fell back, reacting in a split second, his brain firing on all cylinders. His reflexes barely saved him. Rounds tore up through the stairwell and shattered the plexiglass window of the door beside him. He landed on his rear in the corridor and vaulted backwards, using his own momentum to roll to his feet.

Behind him, he heard Slater snarl and charge forward.

Slater tore past him, dropped to one knee, leant round the corner, and unloaded the ammunition of another stolen G36C into the stairwell.

19

King probably thought Slater had elected to spray-and-pray, but he was far from the type to throw caution to the wind unless it was absolutely necessary.

He’d fetched one of the compact HK rifles off another body in the elevator, and as soon as he’d turned around to help, he’d seen King tumbling back out of the stairwell amidst a wave of gunfire.

So he’d sprinted forward, putting his own wellbeing aside to protect his closest friend. It was second nature for both of them. If they couldn’t rely on each other in the pulse-pounding heat of war, they were as good as dead. He was now in the line of fire, as close to death as humanly possible. And some small part of him relished it. He was maximally alive, filling a doorway that could be riddled with bullets at any moment. Focus like this simply wasn’t possible without external stimuli — in this case, a stairwell filled with armed hostiles looking to pump lead into him until he flatlined.

So he zoned in and aimed and fired. He took the utmost care with his shot selection, even though a couple of bullets missed him by mere inches the moment he stepped into the doorway. He ignored them — they hadn’t struck him, and therefore they didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except—

Aim.

Fire.

He killed one man, then a second, then a third. Bodies collapsed against walls and blood flecked the concrete. The gunfire was deafening in the stairwell. Every unsuppressed shot sounded like a bomb going off. Slater temporarily lost his hearing, but he didn’t need hearing.

Just sight.

A fourth man tried to leapfrog his buddy’s corpse a couple of flights down. But he was jumpy and nervous and deafened, and he certainly hadn’t been expecting a firefight in such a tight enclosed space. He’d seen his coworkers die, and if this was a mercenary force then the guns-for-hire had probably been working together for years. Even if you had no morals and sold your soul to the highest bidder, you still formed connections with your fellow brothers-in-arms.

Even the bad guys have attachments.

Slater knew that all too well. Which explained why the fourth man panicked and stumbled and tripped over his friend in his haste to get upstairs. He was probably angry, trying his hardest to get his hands on the men that had killed his friends.

He didn’t get the chance.

Combat is a ruthless game.

When he tripped and fell forward and splayed across the cold stairs, Slater didn’t show him mercy. Instead he shot the man through the top of his head with a single well-placed round from the G36C.

Not the movies, he thought.

No time to consider taking prisoners and debating what to do with them for hours on end.

No, this was the real world, and in the real world, you focus on just one thing when there’s bullets coming at you.

Survival.

Four men dead. A fifth lay at his feet, shot by King before Slater had even got to the stairwell.

The coast was clear.

Slater moved like an automaton, going through the motions in the only way a man well-accustomed to putting his life on the line could. The usual reaction to getting shot at by automatic rifles