The Law of Nines

His heart came up in his throat.

It was Jax.

58.

ALEX COULD SEE JAX STANDING in the middle of a broad area of white sand. The place looked to have once been a cavernous dome but the center of the roof seemed to have eroded away and partially collapsed over time to leave a room that was open to the sky. Here and there boulders that looked possibly to have once been part of that domed ceiling sat littering the room.

Jax, standing in the center of the sand under that opening, watched him come. He could tell that her hands were tied behind her back. Tears stained her face. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth.

With his gun held in both hands and at the ready, Alex inched into the open area. As he emerged from the passageway through the rock, hundreds of men came into view. They stood silently around the outside near the walls or in other caves and cracks leading into the room. They were all watching him. None made a move.

They were dressed in clothes that would be familiar anywhere—mostly jeans and oversized T-shirts with words on them. A number of them wore baggy, knee-length shorts and sandals, just like a typical guy at the mall or out getting a pizza. Alex spotted what looked like knives under the shirts of some. He was sure that all of them had weapons concealed somewhere on them.

Despite their ordinary dress, they weren’t especially well groomed, with ratty hair and scraggly beards or stubble. Alex supposed that even that wasn’t too out of place anymore with their everyday outfits. They all had hard eyes and wore grim expressions. They looked like thugs. That, too, was a rather conventional look that seemed to be cultivated by many men and had become accepted.

Walking down the street these men wouldn’t warrant a second look from most people. Any one of them, carrying a knapsack, could walk unnoticed through any airport. Seeing them gathered all together as they were, though, on a remote wilderness mountaintop, looked bizarre in the extreme, as if they had all been transported there from the bleachers of a basketball game.

Alex knew that they were chameleons, killers intended to fit in and be unseen—until they struck. That, in itself, was what was so frightening about them. They would be invisible out among innocent people.

A glance back showed that the way he had come in was now blocked by dozens more men just like them.

“Alex,” Jax said in a shaky voice, “give them your gun.”

“No.”

“Please . . .”

“I’m not—”

“You can’t hope to change things,” she said. “Don’t make it any more difficult than it already is. Please?”

The audience of killers all silently watched. Alex knew that even if he hit his target with every round, and he managed to reload with every one of his spare magazines, he wouldn’t have enough bullets to take out all the men gathered. When he ran out of ammo, they would have him. But he knew that in reality it would never come to that. They would all simply rush him at the same time. They’d be on him before he could empty the magazine in his gun.

“Talk to me, Jax. What’s going on?”

“Give them your gun, or they’ll just hurt me until you do, or take it away from you after you run out of bullets.”

As if to demonstrate, one of the men heaved a fist-sized rock. It struck Jax in the back of the shoulder. She cried out as she went to a knee, bent by the pain of the blow.

Alex put two rounds into the man, dropping him almost instantly. None of the other men so much as flinched at the loud sound or the flash.

Dozens of other men all around the cavernous room lifted rocks to show him that he had no chance to change the outcome. Jax staggered back to her feet. If all of those men threw those rocks she would be stoned to death before he could do anything effective to stop them. Alex’s vision was red with rage. He wanted to strike out at all of them.

But he knew that doing so would only get Jax hurt.

Violating a rule that had been drilled into him from the first time he had learned to shoot, he squatted down, laid the gun on the ground, and slid it across the granite toward Jax. It stopped right before the area of sand.

Ben had always told him that you never give up your gun. But a gun was merely a tool of self-defense. If it couldn’t defend him, or protect Jax, then it ceased to be a tool and became nothing more than a useless hunk of metal.

Alex was enraged that he had no choice but to give up the weapon.

He was ashamed of himself for not thinking of something to keep it from coming to that.

He reminded himself that it wasn’t over yet. He might have had to give up his gun, but he wouldn’t quit as long as he had breath in his lungs.

Sedrick Vendis stepped out from behind some of the men in a dark cave opening to the left and walked out to retrieve the weapon. He picked it up and stuck it in his waistband.

“That’s better, Alex,” he said with a smirk. “Sorry I missed the show at the hospital. I hear it was quite the event.”

Alex ignored him. “Jax—what’s going on?”