The guy I’d landed on was gasping and sputtering. He’d hardly been prepared to fend off an attack from above. Taking advantage of his momentary confusion, I captured his neck between my thighs, and as I waited for him to pass out, kicking and clawing at my legs, I secured his gas mask over my face.

The one good thing about the sickly opaque gas was that it rendered my opponents just as blind as it did me. They couldn’t see, but they also couldn’t hear nearly as well as I could. Advantage: me.

As I sucked in a much-needed clean breath of air, I heard competing rat-tat-tats of automatic gunfire and hoped it meant Garth had managed to snag one of their bigger guns.

Even as I was waiting for my first victim to lose consciousness, another of the mercs coalesced out of the poisonous fog, automatic rifle searching for a target. I swung the iron pole like a baseball bat. His knee snapped, and his leg collapsed. I elbowed him in the side of the head almost as soon as he was on the floor, and he went limp immediately. I smacked him one more time, for good measure. The guy I held in a choke hold between my legs followed his buddy into unconsciousness a moment later. I relaxed my legs and kicked him away.

Crawling closer to the guy with the screwed-up leg, I yanked off his gas mask and tossed it in the general direction of the bathroom, then stood, iron rod in hand. Silently, I moved around the room, taking out mercenaries before they even realized I was on them. Like taking candy from a baby. It was almost too easy. The hard part was dispatching them without actually killing them. I had no idea who these guys were or why they were here, but I doubted it was anything more complicated than simply following orders. A simple exchange of money.

I found the final intruder grappling with Garth on the bathroom floor. Neither had gas masks on, and both men’s eyes were swollen shut. Even as they fought each other, they struggled to breathe. Exhausted, a little beat up, and eyeballs and skin raw from exposure to the gas, I whacked the mercenary on the back of the head with my trusty iron pole. He went limp instantly.

Garth lay there beneath the merc for a second, coughing and choking, then rolled to the side, depositing the guy on the floor beside him.

Half blindly, I searched the floor and countertop for the gas mask I’d tossed in there just moments earlier. I found it in the sink and handed it to Garth. The gas didn’t seem to be lethal, just really damn painful, so I figured I’d been right about my tear gas assessment and that he would survive. Not that that meant he had to keep wallowing in the toxic stuff.

“Thanks,” Garth rasped before he secured the mask over his face. He looked like hell, all swollen and oozy. I probably didn’t look much better, if the way I felt was any indication. He practiced breathing, slowly pulling in more and more air until he could take long, full, deep breaths. “What now?” he asked, bleary-eyed and weary.