CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Laura had never closed the basement trap door behind her. Robert must not have done it, either. Whoever came into the church would have seen it, and probably decided it was the obvious place to climb down.
Especially given that the person who had come into the church was Agent Won – and he had been expecting to meet Laura there.
Laura opened her mouth to call back to him, but a flash of movement caught her eye – Robert, holding the blade right at Cherry’s throat, fixing her with a sharp look. She understood his meaning well enough. It was a warning.
Shout, and Cherry dies.
Laura clamped her lips shut, her palms sweating as she turned them against the arms of the chair, trying to get some purchase on something. This was going to end badly, she knew. How could it not?
Agent Won didn’t stay put near the stairs, simply waiting for her to reply. As much as she prayed he would, apparently you had to be inside the actual church to have your prayers heard and answered, because she heard his footsteps coming closer across the plastic sheeting in the room next door. He even muttered a quick, “What the hell?” half under his breath as he took in the sight; there was a moment of pause in his movements, then a couple of quick crunches, and Laura could picture him spinning in a circle, looking around at everything.
No, she realized: she didn’t need to picture it. Even though the light was shifting and deceptive, she could just about make him out on the other side of the plastic curtain. A dark shape, moving, pausing for a moment longer, and then –
And then moving forward, towards the curtain that separated them.
Laura squeezed her eyes tight shut for a single moment and then opened them again, the physical violence of the movement sending a fresh wave of pain through her head that she barely felt. She was too focused on him. On trying, mentally, to send him some kind of message to go back. To stop. To call for help, or something.
Or to be smart, somehow, and stop all of this from happening. But not even Laura could see how he could make that work.
He was walking too fast for her to think, coming through the curtain too fast for her to know what to do – and then Robert was springing up from where he was crouched over Cherry, moving even faster towards Eric, putting them on a collision course –
There was a sickening crunch of plastic and metal and bone as they came together, and for a moment Laura couldn’t even tell what had happened. Then there was a shot, echoing so loud in the tiny space that she couldn’t hear a single thing afterwards, and a clatter, and by the time she’d blinked her eyes to realize what was going on they were both on the ground. Eric had blood streaming from his left shoulder, and his gun had fallen out of his right hand – not near him, but over near Laura, where it had dropped and then skittered along the wooden floor. The shot he’d fired had gone wide, no doubt embedding itself somewhere in the thick floorboards. Robert was uninjured, but they were fighting, and Eric was already at a disadvantage with his wound, and Laura was helpless to do anything but watch.
No… not helpless.
She could move the chair.
She shuffled it hard, pushing as much as she could with her feet, even lifting her body off the seat momentarily with the force required to move the chair more than a hair’s amount at a time. She pushed and strained with everything she had, glancing behind herself and then at the two fighting men, behind herself and then at them…
She reached the spot she was aiming for and swung to the side, spinning the chair a good ninety degrees to get alongside it. The candle. One of many that were burning around the sides of the room. It was just at the right height, though that had hardly been intentional – it had burned down almost to a stub. If she could just position herself exactly right…
Eric grunted with pain as Robert got a shot into his face, the unmistakable crunch of a fist meeting a nose, and Laura redoubled her efforts. She couldn’t stop herself from crying out as she overshot with one last heavy shuffle, the flame touching her skin. She jerked her hand back as much as she could, though with the restraint of the ropes it wasn’t enough. The heat was almost unbearable. It took everything she had, everything, not to move. She thought of Lacey’s face. She held the image for as long as she could before the burning of her skin took it away from her.
Laura focused on the sounds coming from the other side of the room, the dull thud of fists hitting flesh, trying to let that distract her from the pain. From the burn. Her head whipped round to look at them, not at the damage she was doing to herself. Eric got a punch into Robert’s side, but Robert simply rolled and pulled away and, when Eric tried to follow, Robert used his momentum against him to throw his bleeding shoulder against the floor, making him cry out. She kept pulling her wrist, pulling it as far away from the candle as she could –
It gave way, her whole arm flying across her body with the momentum of her pressure, free at last. The candle had burned through the rope that was holding her.
There was a nasty blister already forming on the side of her hand, but she ignored it, sparing just one glance for Eric and Robert and then renewing her efforts to reach for the rope around her other wrist. Eric was on his back now, struggling, trying to fight one-handed while he clutched the injured arm against himself. There was blood everywhere, everywhere, impossible to tell what was his and what was Robert’s, what came from his shoulder or what came from their faces or even their cut knuckles.
And Robert had him pinned down –
And Robert was reaching for the knife that he had dropped a moment before, which had fallen close by them.
No.
She couldn’t let it happen.
Laura pulled the strand that would loosen the ropes on her other arm and yanked her wrist free with so much force it hurt, even as the ropes gave way, and she reached for her gun. The holster was empty. Of course the holster was empty. There wasn’t time to figure out where her gun was now. Eric’s was lying on the floor. She dove, going down on her knees, letting the chair clatter after her where it was still tied to her ankles, not caring, not paying attention to the pain as it fell on her legs, just grabbing the gun –
Lifting it –
Aiming –
Robert’s hand on the knife, the flash as he raised it high, the last struggle as Eric fought to upset his balance and push him off –
The recoil from the gun ricocheted through her hand, and for a moment after the loud bang and the smell of smoke and the flash, Laura wasn’t sure she’d done it. Robert was sitting there, like nothing had happened, the knife still in his hand. He swayed slightly. In the moment, all Laura knew was a dreadful fear that she’d missed, that the knife would plunge down into Eric’s chest or throat before she could aim and fire again.
And then, slowly, like she was watching some melodramatic movie, Robert toppled sideways to the floor, and Laura knew that he was dead.