Good Intentions 3: Personal Demons (31 page)

A skull stared back at Alex from amid the pile. That did him no good. Other bones proved more immediately useful. He had only a split second to examine and evaluate. It was enough. The enemy looked on in horror as Alex surged back swinging an ancient femur.

His first blow collided with Carter’s cheek, knocking him onto his butt on the floor. His second, reaching further forward, swatted the pistol from Rico’s hand before he could fire. That reminded Alex of his own weapons, but as long as he had the initiative, he could keep bashing away with his improvised club. Somewhere amid the chaos, Alex gasped his way to a full breath, and then another.

More gunfire rang out all around. Alex heard the popping noises of rifles in between bursts from the Humvee’s machinegun turret. A few bullets struck the vehicle’s armor, but none hit the remaining windows. Wes put the Humvee into a violent swerve. “Shit, they’re tryin’ to run into us!” he yelled. “That fucker looked like he was gonna jump!”

With a glance outside the broken passenger side window, Alex saw what Wes meant. A pair of white pickup trucks tried to keep pace with the Humvee. Men clung to the roll bars on each truck while others leaned out of the windows to fire their rifles.

The vehicles outside presented a terrible danger. So did the men inside this vehicle. Alex had no chance of talking the soldiers down now, nor could he take control of the Humvee. Not with enemies closing in.
Literally everything I could do here is a terrible idea
.

Alex reached for the handle and flung the door open, only for a man’s face and body to slam it shut again. The moment happened so fast Alex would have missed it if he’d blinked, but he surely saw a face and beard crushed against the window. The man fell away again just as quickly as he’d appeared, doubtlessly tumbling away in the dust. Alex pushed the door open again, this time to the sight of a white Toyota pulling up alongside the Humvee.

A masked man leaped from the cargo bed toward the open door. He caught the lip of the Humvee’s roof and lifted his feet up to keep them from dragging on the ground. His ski mask muffled his wild cry, but it didn’t cover up the crazed look in his eyes.

“Holy shit!” Alex blurted. He clobbered the boarder with the femur, crushing his nose and sending the man falling away in the dirt.
Jeez, and I thought I had a crazy plan
, he thought in a flash—and then realized the pick-up’s cargo bed was now empty.

Alex promptly threw himself out of the Humvee, unwittingly escaping a bullet in the back of the head from Rico. He dropped the femur as he jumped, wanting both hands free to cling to the side of the Toyota. Right away, Alex found himself preoccupied with the problem of keeping his feet up out of the dirt. He had to fight more than just his own body weight to haul himself up over the edge. Predictably, he realized now that this nonsense was much harder than it looked in the movies.

Bullets flew. The men in the pickup’s cab shouted. Dust permeated the air, threatening Alex with more choking right when he’d finally gotten breathing again. With desperate effort, Alex flung one leg up over the side of the cargo bed and pulled the rest of his body over the edge in more of a flop than a landing. The pickup swerved hard and sent him rolling over to slam into the opposite side of the cargo bed.

I am easily the dumbest person here
, he thought.

The pickup kept rolling. Alex looked up in time to see the hooded man in the front passenger seat slide open the rear window. A rifle barrel poked out of the window, but by then Alex had his hand on his pistol. Given the easier angle, Alex got his shots off first. At this range, he could hardly miss, even if it meant shooting through the passenger cab. The man jerked in shock and fell forward.

The driver turned his head frantically to try to keep track of Alex. Amazingly, the pickup kept moving. “Why the hell don’t you stop?” grunted Alex. Staying on his hands and knees, he looked up and around to get some sense of the situation.

Four pickup trucks pursued the Humvee, all of them manned by guys in hoods and ski masks. “God damn,” Alex muttered. “It’s just like on TV. They really do all drive Toyotas.” He saw all the other things he’d seen in the news, too: AK-47s, RPGs, and even a billowing black flag mounted at the end of one truck. Only a couple of the men in one of the trucks seemed to notice him, though they now banged on the passenger cabs and shouted warnings to their drivers. Everyone else appeared obsessed with stopping the Humvee—including the man still driving for Alex, though he now shouted something in Arabic into his truck’s radio.

The wild chase continued. From the Humvee’s turret, Austin tried to ward off a vehicle from pulling alongside. That kept him distracted from another pickup drawing in close behind. One of the men in the back climbed over the pickup’s cabin and ran along the hood to dive onto the back of the Humvee.

Alex couldn’t let the chase distract him. He knelt down behind the passenger cab of his truck and banged on the window. “Pull over!” he demanded. The driver glanced back at him before producing a pistol. Alex yelped and shot first, once again too close to miss. Blood exploded all over the passenger cab and its now broken rear window. A worse problem resulted when the driver slumped over and the vehicle went into a hard left turn.

The roll bar offered a good place to hang on. Alex clung to it with his heart in his throat, only to realize after a couple of seconds that the truck was slowing down. The driver had died with his foot on the brake while intending to shoot. Sand and scrub plants helped bleed off the remaining momentum.

He glanced up ahead. The chase hadn’t moved too far away. An armored Humvee could only go so fast, particularly off-road. Unfortunately, the small swarm of vehicles also pulled off to the left as the Humvee tried to evade them. Austin blasted the one-man boarding party off the back of his ride with his pistol. Nothing was resolved, nor did the pile of problems leave Alex behind.

“Fight or run,” he huffed, though it was no real choice.

Alex stuffed his pistol back in its underarm holster. “Please don’t have auto-lock doors,” he muttered as he leaned hard around the side of the cab to reach the handle. Though he had to stretch further than he wanted, the door came open without much trouble. His luck held further as the dead driver, already slumped against the door, fell out of the truck entirely.

Gunfire and roaring engines continued up ahead. Alex put it out of his mind, focusing on the brief but daunting task of climbing from the cargo bed to the driver’s seat. He grunted in pain and frustration as the door came back on his shoulder and outstretched leg, but counted himself lucky again in that the door didn’t catch his fingers. Adrenaline kept Alex from second-guessing himself into clumsiness.

The “oh shit” handle above the driver’s seat offered him something to grab onto. The step-up mounted beneath the door gave him a place for his foot. The rest came down to a deep breath, a lunge, and a sudden swing that left him sitting in a pool of blood.

“Ugh,” Alex grumbled. Without any conscious thought, Alex found the brake and pulled the door shut. He quickly fastened the seat belt, too, refusing to make the same mistake as the driver—or the passenger. “Aw, man,” he complained when he remembered he still shared the cab with a dead guy in the shotgun seat beside him.

With the Toyota under control, Alex found the Humvee and its pursuers all coming straight for him. He floored the accelerator, pointing his truck directly westbound out of a southbound chase. A great cloud of sand and dust emerged in his wake.

He didn’t get very far before the Humvee roared past, but at least he avoided a crash. He felt good about that. The cloud he left behind made looking in the rearview mirror pointless. He tried it anyway, though, and made out the blurry images of at least two trucks chasing him. “Oh, come on!” he shouted. The Humvee was already out of sight again.

Alex turned his eyes front. He noticed the gleam of sunlight against metal in the clear blue sky above, and the puff of white smoke that appeared under a wing.

He didn’t see the missile in flight. It shot toward him much too fast to track. Alex only realized what had happened when the world exploded in fire and smoke behind his truck. He felt the back end lift up in the blast, but that was nothing compared to the sensation of his heart and his stomach both trying to leap into his throat. He clutched the wheel and hit the brakes as if either move mattered. Like so much of this insane day, the moment lasted only a couple of seconds but felt much longer. The sensation of the back wheels slamming back down to earth gave him some measure of relief.

He’d escaped the blast. He drove out of the smoke. The pickup still ran fine. The back end was barely on fire at all.

Then the Humvee appeared out of nowhere and sideswiped the Toyota hard, throwing it over instantly. The truck rolled in a cacophony of shattering glass and bending metal that drowned out every frightened yelp of its driver. It came to a stop on its roof, leaving Alex battered, disoriented, and tangled in his seatbelt. His limbs dangled. His head throbbed.

Through the broken windshield, Alex took in an upside-down view of the Humvee rolling off further away. The machinegun kept firing, finally reducing one of its pursuers to a smoking, rolling ruin. Only one more pickup carried on with the chase.

Though his body ached with five kinds of pain, Alex fumbled to unlatch the seatbelt. He made a sensible attempt to brace himself against the roof of the cab before pressing the release catch. In the end, he still fell onto a hard surface covered with broken glass.

Everything still moves
, he thought.
I didn’t break any oh fuck wait no, my foot. That’s bad. Oh shit my foot and my…ow ow ow!
Sharp pain shot through his leg and his left shoulder.
My brain feels broken, too. Ow
.

Blood dripped freely from his hand as he pushed the door open. His leg felt wet. So did the collar of his shirt.
One thing at a time
, he decided. Daylight and dusty air came through the open door. He dragged himself halfway outside.

The sharp reflection of the sun glinted off something in the sky directly ahead. Alex winced.
Oh no
, he thought, remembering where he’d seen that same effect less than a minute ago.

Something white and broad flew overhead to intercept the gleaming craft. Alex blinked. No. Not something. Someone.

Rachel soared straight onto the drone. She caught its wing with both hands and yanked down hard. The Predator didn’t fare well from such treatment. It spiraled free of the angel’s grasp, veering well off course before falling into a nosedive.

The burst of metal and dust as it hit the ground seemed somehow anticlimactic. Alex saw no fiery explosion, nor did he even hear anything all that loud. He slumped to the ground on his right shoulder. That was good. His left shoulder didn’t feel up to the job.

A moment later, Alex woke up. He didn’t remember falling asleep.
Blacked out
, he realized, but now he saw sandaled feet and shapely legs sticking out under a white dress right in front of him. “Lover, you look like fucked-over dumpster meat,” Rachel declared.

“Izzat an actual thing?” he slurred.

He felt better the instant he saw her. More so for hearing her voice. Rachel made everything better. In the back of his mind, Alex wondered if he’d become so used to the healing quality of her touch that he’d developed a Pavlovian response to her presence. Then he wondered just how fucked up his brain must be to throw out thoughts like that in a time like this. “I think I got a concussion,” he mumbled.

“Only one?” she asked. “Hold on one sec.”

Alex squinted up at her as she stepped past. The angel reached into the overturned passenger cab to pull out a rifle from amid the mess. She looked around the other side of the truck, reached back with the rifle, and flung it hard.

“Whuz a perfe’ly good rifle—?” Alex managed, but then he heard the shattering sound of glass. An engine roared, followed by the loud crash of another truck. A hubcap rolled through his field of vision. “Oh.”

“Think we’ve got a minute now,” said Rachel. She slipped her hands over his shoulders.

Relief coursed through his body, chasing away pains his brain hadn’t even registered until other problems stopped drowning them out. A single stroke of her hands along his neck unraveled tension all along his back. He let out a heavy breath, and along with it much of the stress of the battle, the chase, and so much else.

“Oh wow you’re the best,” Alex declared.

“Okay, we’re both fucking the same woman, so I know that’s not true.”

“I thought we didn’t play favorites?”

“Uh-huh. Tell me I’m the best next time she’s sitting on your face and maybe I’ll believe it. I only wish I’d gotten here sooner.”

“I’m alive, right?” Alex sighed again. “Works for me.” He sat up, feeling odd sensations in his leg and hip as he came to rest against her shoulder. His head felt much clearer already, along with his ability to speak. Rachel’s touch muted whatever pain he might otherwise suffer from his injuries.

His gaze fell on the hubcap. “Aren’t you forbidden from hurting mortals?”

“What? Nah. You don’t even know how many mortal assholes I’ve fucked up for messing with you. Just weren’t watching. Anyway, it’s not like any of these shitstains have guardian angels anymore. Nobody’s gonna bitch at me on their behalf.”