In all probability, our new friends didn’t really care, but like all employees, they would be expected to explain inventory breakage, and nobody wanted to have to say that they’d let me bleed out on the floor without some kind of due diligence.

They opened the door, came in, and I passed Pete the rusty piece of metal I’d used to cut my head open as he bent over me, hands pressed to my neck. ‘Come on, man, hurry up, he’s losing too much blood!’ he said to the two guards who entered. One came toward me, holstering his gun. The other stood at the door and kept his weapon out and ready.

Pete stood up and backed off to make room for the guard, who touched down one knee next to me. Eve was screaming and crying, and kept saying that she couldn’t find a pulse, which was nicely distracting. Pete kept backing up, and put his bloody hands over his face as he did; his shoulders shook with what looked like genuine tears. I was impressed. The guy had a future career on the stage. It looked so much like real grief, and there was so much chaos going on around my limp body, that the guard who was at the door missed how close Pete was getting until it was too late.

Pete whirled around, grabbed the man’s gun arm and shoved it up as he jammed a knee up into a region that made me wince. That guard doubled over. Eve, at the same time, lunged across my body at the guard checking me out, and I came alive to wrestle him down as she pulled his gun free and rose to point it at him.

The other guard’s gun went off as he and Pete struggled, but Pete put him down hard with a blow from that rusty piece of metal, and scooped up the weapon. ‘Get her!’ he yelled, and pointed at Liz as he threw himself to one side of the doorway. I scrambled up, grabbed Liz, tossed her over my shoulder, and was immediately thrown off balance as she started to struggle.

Dammit, this was not the time for the girl to be waking up. ‘We need out of this room!’ I said to Eve, who nodded and joined Pete at the door. She tapped him on the shoulder to let him know she was behind him, and he moved fast, out of the room and firing. Turned out that he was firing deliberately high, because when I followed him and Eve out, the guards were down behind overturned steel tables. There was a lot of confused shouting going on.