Hellbent

Three husky men emerged from the van. They wore commuter clothes, Dockers and button-ups. Muscle swelled the fabric. There was no way around that. Loose-fitting jackets to conceal their builds and their pistols. They entered the waiting room and spread out immediately, fighter jets peeling out of formation.

The driver in the sedan stayed put, his head rotating as he scanned the parking lot and roads leading to the train station. The lookout.

The men streaked through the waiting room, sidling between passengers and heavy oak benches. They stepped out of three different doors onto the platform and into the shade of the overhang. In the distance a freight train approached, woo-wooing a warning, rumbling the ground.

The whistle would provide good audio cover for a gunshot.

The men looked through the clusters of waiting passengers on the side platform and the two island platforms beyond. One of the men spotted a rucksack tilting into view from behind a wooden post at the end. And part of a girl’s leg.

His head swiveled, and he caught the eye of the man in the middle, whose head swiveled in turn to pick up the last man. They shouldered their way along the platform, closing the space between one another.

Woo-woo.

The freight train wasn’t slowing. It would blow right through the station, giving even more sound cover. The girl was isolated there at the end of the platform. That provided relative privacy to get the job done.

Woo-woo.

They converged on her, now shoulder to shoulder, linemen coming in for the sack.

Fifteen yards away.

Woo-woo.

She saw them only now. Alarm flashed across her face, but even so she stepped back into a fighting posture, hands raised, jaw set.

The man in the middle reached inside his loose-fitting jacket.

They swept forward.

Ten yards away.

Behind them a form swung down from the metal overhang and crouched on the landing to break his fall, one hand pressed to the concrete.

Soundless.

* * *

Evan couldn’t fire his ARES. Not with Joey in the background. But that was okay. He was eager to use his hands.

Joey spotted him through the gap between the advancing men. They read her eyes, the change in her stance.

They turned.

Three men. One pistol drawn, two on the way.

Evan moved on the gun first.

A jujitsu double-hand parry to a figure-four arm bar, the pleasing snap-snap of wrist and elbow breaking, and—

— Jack sways in the Black Hawk, hands cuffed behind him, wind blasting his hair when—

— the pistol skittered free across the tracks, the guy on his knees, his arm turned to rubber. The second man gave up on the draw and came at Evan with a haymaker, but Evan threw a palm-heel strike to the bottom of his chin, rocking his head back. He firmed his fingers, drove a hand spear into the exposed throat, crushing the windpipe. The man toppled, crashing through a trash can, and made a gargling sound, his access to oxygen closed now and forever and—

— Jack reeled back, a parachute rip cord handle clenched in his teeth, his eyes blazing with triumph, when—

— the third man’s gun had cleared leather, so Evan grabbed his wrist, shoved the pistol back into the hip holster, hooked his thumb through the trigger guard, and fired straight down through the tip of the holster and the guy’s foot. The man was still gaping at the bloody mess on the end of his ankle when Evan reversed the pistol out of the holster, spun it around the same thumb, and squeezed off a shot that took off half the guy’s jaw. Evan blinked through the spatter and the image of—

— Jack’s parting nod to the men pinballing around the lurching Black Hawk, a nod filled with peace, with resignation, before he stepped out into the abyss.

People were screaming now, stampeding off the platform, the express train bearing down. Two corpses on the concrete, a glassy puddle of deep red spreading, smooth enough to reflect the clouds in the sky. The first man remained on his knees, straddling the yellow safety line on the platform, gripping his ruined arm as the hand flopped noodlelike on the broken stalk of the limb. Despite all reason he was trying to firm it, to make his wrist work again, when Evan wound into a reverse side kick, driving the bottom of his heel into the edge of the man’s jaw and sending him flying over the tracks just in time to catch the—woo-woo—freight train as it blasted through, flyswatting him ahead and grinding him underneath in what seemed like a single hungry lunge.

Joey stared at Evan across the expanding puddle and the sprawled legs of the third man. Furrows grooved the skin of her forehead. She had forgotten to breathe.

The engagement had lasted four seconds, maybe five.