“Then that works. Good! Perfect! Cool.”

“We’ll be in touch,” I told her.

There was no time for niceties or farewells.

Chris and I ran through the doors, hurrying to catch up with the team.

Last 20.3

This facility has been raided twice, I thought. Now we need to defend it.

A woman lunged out of a hallway, catching Hookline off guard. She got in two quick cuts with her knife.

“Fucking—!” Hookline drew his chain around himself, forming overlapping ‘x’s of shifting chain that blocked two more swings. He grabbed the hook that was attached to the end of the chain, ready to swing.

Byron kicked her with a metal boot instead, which got her away. Clockblocker bent down and touched her.

“Fucking hell,” Hookline muttered. Blood ran down from his lacerated arm to his elbow.

Win hurried to catch up. “There was a group in a side hallway. I would have warned you.”

“It’s okay,” Clockblocker said.

“Real fucking okay,” Hookline swore, pulling a bloody hand away from the knife wound, “Fucking…”

“I’ve got bandages,” Gibbet said.

I took a second to make sure we weren’t inadvertently letting ourselves get split up, while she got the bandages out. She began walking with him while wrapping his hand.

“Shit,” Clockblocker muttered. “She’s holding on too tight.”

He was trying to pull the knife out of the woman’s hand.

“Heads up, coming down,” I told him, before floating down, being careful with the gun I was hauling. In real life, there was no slapstick when a twelve-ton weapon was swung around haphazardly, only tragic brain damage. I took hold of the woman’s knife and snapped it off at the handle.

“That works, except, uh, hm. I don’t even want to know how your forcefield works now,” Clockblocker said.

“She works very well right now. I’m hoping she stays that way,” I said. I pushed the blade into the wall to the point there was nothing sticking out that could be pulled free and used against us.

I was fully aware that there had been a few slips in my forcefield’s performance, and it seemed to be tied to my mental state, and right now, my ‘mental state’ was me enduring a lot of nerve-jangling screaming.

Speakers at the end of each hallway weren’t helping, as they joined the screaming in my head to form a kind of chorus of emitted screeches and screams. Here and there, one person or another got access to a microphone and tried to transmit to a location.

“Someone’s at the door, we—” A bang could be heard over the speakers, several people gasping our shouting in response. “—at hospital, area—”

The sound cut out, replaced by an electronic screech.

Another voice came in, from a more distorted microphone, whispering, “It gets easier if you listen between the words.”