Hunters, Matt Rogers [pdf ebook reader .txt] 📗

offering a straight shot out the broken window and down the lawn.

At least a dozen silhouettes advanced up the broad driveway.

Silent, ruthless, methodical.

‘Shit,’ Violetta breathed.

She pushed Alexis forward, encouraging haste, and they ran for the garage.

27

Slater saw them coming first.

Like the worst version of a desert mirage.

Silhouettes streaming in through the front gate that he only now realised lay wide open, the controls evidently hacked before the first assault.

In the dark of the garage, King said, ‘You see them?’

Slater said, ‘Yeah. You’ll need to apply your own pressure.’

‘If I have to.’

With an inhuman hiss of pain, King lifted his bad arm and clamped it down on the bullet wound as Slater took his hand away. His palm and fingers were coated in a thin layer of blood, black in the lowlight.

He clambered over King, spilled out of the car, and crept as silently as he could toward the vehicle resting alongside it. It was their second-hand Toyota Yaris hatchback they’d owned since first establishing themselves in Vegas. The most common, nondescript car money could buy. It had served them well.

Slater thanked his lucky stars that they always kept the keys in the ignition for contingencies.

He squatted on the concrete floor beside the driver’s door in the night gloom. His head spun. If the advancing mercenaries saw him, it was a clear shot into the open garage.

You have two seconds, he told himself.

He drilled it in, knowing this was the calm before the storm.

Two seconds.

That’s it.

He threw the door open, then twisted the keys in the ignition, and the interior lights lit up like a beacon as the engine sputtered to life. Before the mercenaries had even registered the sight, he yanked the handbrake off and dove away from the car, scrambling back into the Mercedes with no regard for his own wellbeing. In his haste he scraped his leg on the corner of the door and bumped his forehead on the frame. But then he was in, spilling over King, just as the night came alive with automatic gunfire and the Yaris’ windscreen blew out.

Then the small Toyota rolled forward, carried by gravity and the slope of the garage floor.

It picked up momentum and trundled down the long straight driveway toward the front gate.

The mercenaries unloaded on it. It didn’t deter them that they couldn’t see anyone behind the wheel. Any self-respecting target would have their head down, pressed into the footwell so they could escape.

Violetta and Alexis spilled into the garage from the side passage, sensing an opportunity.

They kept low and ran to the Mercedes. Violetta got behind the wheel and Alexis dived into the passenger seat. Slater reached forward from the rear seats and shut her door for her.

Violetta fired the engine to life, burrowed herself down almost all the way into the footwell, and stamped on the accelerator.

Slater and King were already down.

Slater peered over the centre console and saw Alexis’s hunched back peeking over the edge of the window sill. She wasn’t low enough. If a shot came through the glass and sunk into her spine, she’d be paralysed or dead.

He reached across and shoved her down lower, practically wedging her into the passenger footwell.

The hailstorm of gunfire began.

But Slater could feel the pull in the pit of his stomach, the purring acceleration of the German engine, and they were already halfway to the front gate by the time the mercenaries tore their aim away from the decoy Yaris and sent rounds at the big Mercedes.

Violetta held the wheel steady, but drove blind. She’d lined the trajectory up with the front gate beforehand, and now it was guesswork.

She kept her foot on the gas.

They sped through the open gate, evident from the sound of the front bumper grinding violently on the asphalt as the driveway levelled out onto the street. The whole car jolted, and King slid off his seat, crushing his bad arm against the back of the passenger seat, pinning it to his side. He let out an involuntary yell just as Violetta wrenched herself upright and spun the wheel hard, all the way to the left, so they didn’t barrel full speed into the perimeter fence of the mansion opposite theirs.

‘Shit!’ she screamed.

Slater sat up to see what the problem was.

There was a roadblock.

But it was rudimentary. It hadn’t been designed to enclose the front gate. It was simply the unintentional way the convoy of SUVs had pulled up at the kerb, nose-to-bumper. Silhouettes loomed around the cars, but there was minimal street light to identify them. A couple of the silhouettes sparked with bright flares, which Slater identified as muzzle flashes, but by then the Mercedes was doing fifty miles an hour and Violetta plunged it into the broadest gap between SUVs.

There wasn’t exactly ample room to work with, but it was the best of several bad options.

The impact smashed King harder against the seat in front, and he shouted again. Alexis was all the way in the footwell now, like an amateur contortionist, and Slater threw himself back down below the line of sight as the crash took most of the momentum out of their escape.

Violetta followed suit.

But she kept the accelerator depressed the whole time, and after a terrifying moment of stillness the Mercedes shoved one of the SUVs out of the way and barged through. As soon as she felt the makeshift barricade give way she wrenched the wheel all the way to the right, so when they made it through, their vehicle slid round the back of the SUV they’d knocked aside.

It saved them.

Bullets intended to shred the Merc’s tyres to pieces instead thudded into the SUV she was using as a de facto shield. Then she gave the engine everything it had and they tore away from the quiet cul-de-sac.

The gunfire faded to faint pops, replaced by tinnitus whining in each of their ears.

Mainlining adrenaline, Slater whooped. ‘Violetta, you genius!’

King groaned in protest.

Slater helped him out of the footwell and sat him up on the seat.