Unbreakable (10 page)

“I’ll miss sleeping against your shoulder tonight.”

Cory nodded, that crooked smiled ghosting over his lips. “Me too.”

#

“I need to use the bathroom,” I whispered to Wolfman in the hallway after he’d closed and locked the door.

“I’ll bet,” he muttered dryly, and jerked his chin to the employee restroom across the hall. “Two minutes and that’s it. Then back to your place. No more conjugal visits.”

Safely alone, I gripped the sink with both hands, head bowed, trying desperately to find a measure of peace amid the turmoil that churned like a squall, tossing me around until I was dizzy.

I felt alive, awake, my senses both satisfied and clamoring for more of the touch that had been so long denied me. A pleasant ache throbbed between my legs and I wanted Cory’s mouth there to kiss and soothe, and then stoke the fire anew.

My body was coming back to life, thawing from the longest winter, but at the same time, the thrill of it was tainted by my betrayal. I raised my head. The woman in the mirror looked stricken, guilt-wracked, but her eyes held a spark I hadn’t seen in years.

“You traded Drew’s ring for ten minutes with a total stranger. You cheated on Drew. You cheated…”

It was true but did it matter? Drew hadn’t touched me in months and he seemed so far away. It felt like a lifetime since I’d seen him or anyone else outside the bank. But Cory was right here, protecting me, holding me, making me feel alive in a place where we were surrounded by death. I splashed cold water on my face, over my lips, which were red and swollen from Cory’s kisses.

“Drew doesn’t need to know,” I declared to my reflection. “This isn’t life, anyway. It’s a step out of time. A parenthesis. What happens here doesn’t count. And when it’s over…”

After that, there were no more words. Only the deafening silence of the unknown. Something was going to happen tomorrow, it all
ended
tomorrow, though I couldn’t see how. I might live to return to Drew or I might die with Cory and there was no arguing my way out of it. No jury to persuade. No control.

I touched my lips.
I had one night, at least. No matter what happens, I had one night of fire…

I returned to the meeting room where the other five still slept. Without Cory’s shoulder to lean against, sleep eluded me and I waited out the night, watching sourceless gray light saturate the room until my eyes drooped.

I must have dozed because I dreamt of gunshots and screaming, only to jerk awake and find I wasn’t dreaming at all.

Alex

The door banged open, jerking the hostages awake, and Wolfman stormed in. His kind eyes were filled with fear. But then he slipped his werewolf mask down, almost as if to protect himself, and his eyes hardened beneath.

“Get up. Everyone. Move out.”

We all got to our feet slowly until he screamed at us to
move,
and then even Roy hustled out the door. Carol came last and I reached behind to grasp her hand.

We were ushered through the long hallway and then turned into the lobby and I was suddenly blinded. When I could see again, the full impact of the robbery was finally before us.

The bank lobby was flooded with light. Its two walls of front windows streamed with stark white beams blasting in from banks of tall floodlights. Squad cars and armored S.W.A.T. vans ringed the corner, and dark shapes squatted behind and between them. A high window—that showed dawn’s wan gray light—was busted in. A puddle of glass glittered on the marble floor below it. Another light, this one from a roving helicopter, roamed the lobby, landing on hostages as we were all gathered and made to sit in front of the teller banks in two rows. Behind the tellers, the monster squad—masks down—crouched low, their weapons level with the counter, trained on our backs.

I ended up close to the aisle, across from which were the desks where people, in another lifetime, had come to discuss mortgages and loans. I glanced around frantically, but couldn’t see Cory anywhere. He wasn’t among us. I prayed he was still locked in that room and that they’d forgotten about him. Or maybe Wolfman had neglected to have him join us. Either way, I was glad.

But mind-numbing terror was winning out over any other emotion as Dracula, his face bare, strolled in front of the frightened hostages in the full glare of the police lights. He looked worse for wear, I thought. Bags hung heavy beneath his dead eyes and his dull brown hair was mussed and greasy. When he spoke, his flat voice was hoarse and I supposed he’d been on the phone negotiating for much of the three days.

“I warned you, Sergeant,” Dracula croaked. “Zero tolerance.”

A voice over a megaphone came from among the multitudes outside. A tall, paunchy, silver-haired man in uniform stood at the forefront. His words filtered down from the broken window near the ceiling. “Now, hold on, Connor. Don’t do anything you can’t take back.”

“I strongly recommend you take your own advice, Sergeant.” Dracula—Connor—faced the small army outside as calmly as if he faced an adoring audience instead. From somewhere deep in the bank, glass shattered, making Connor pause, but only for a moment.

I realized then that Frankie was not among us, either.

“Are the cameras rolling?” Connor asked. “You can keep the media out but I know someone’s got a cell phone. Someone’s always got a cell phone. Pay close attention because I’m only going to say this one more time. A van. In the alley out back. Safe passage. No fucking around. I take four hostages with me. I release one at a time along the way. When we hit Mexico, the last one is yours.

“If that doesn’t happen…” He paused to pull out a handgun—a Colt-something semi-automatic—and continued strolling…toward me. “If that doesn’t happen, we’re going to go one by one, right down the line. One hostage per minute until I get what I want.”

His speech ended with him standing next to me. He glanced at me briefly and stroked my head as if I were a dog at his feet. He fingered a lock of my hair. “Like a beacon to guide me home,” he said with a vague, mocking nostalgia. “Yes, you’ll make a strong first impression. Get up.”

He didn’t wait for me to comply, but made a fist in my hair and yanked. I bit back a scream and scrambled to my feet. The roving helicopter trained its spotlight on us, Connor shielding himself with my body from sniper fire, his hand buried in my hair and the handgun pressed to behind my ear.

Gunshots—a rapid series of them—erupted from the bank hallways, making everyone shudder and gasp. The megaphone man starting demanding answers, but Connor didn’t relent. The safety clicked off—it sounded as loud as death—and his voice boomed in my ear.

“Pay no attention to the tweaker behind the curtain,” Connor laughed dryly, and then jerked my head. “Tick-tock, Sergeant. One minute starts now.”

The man with the megaphone said something but I hardly heard it. It wasn’t swift agreement to get Connor what he wanted, I knew that. My limbs were watery with terror and I struggled to think of something profound, to recall my fondest memories from a life that was rapidly ticking away to its end. Instead, all I could think about were those seconds, slipping out of my hand like sand. I tried to count them and lost track. How many did I have left? Forty? No, thirty?

And then that low, gravelly voice I’d come to know so well over the last three days came from behind us, cutting through my panic.

“Let her go or I’ll kill you.”

#

Cory, ten minutes earlier

It was happening. I heard footsteps, muffled cries, doors opening and slamming shut. It seemed as if the fear of fifty people was unleashed from the enclosed offices in which they’d been held. And I was stuck in one, away from them. Away from Alex.

No one came to get me. I suspected Wolfman was behind the oversight but there was no time to think. The doorknob had been taken off and turned around, rejigged so that it locked from the outside. If I had a screwdriver, I’d be free in a minute. I thought about trying to make one out of the pens on the desk or something, like a low-budget MacGyver.

I threw the desk chair through the window instead.

The cacophony was deafening, and I expected a monster to come and get me. But the hallways were empty. Everyone was out front, in the lobby. I heard a megaphone voice and Drac replying. I heard the ripple of fear sweep through a large body of people. Alex was among them.

I crept down the hallway, hoping to find some monster squad goon had conveniently left a gun lying around for me to stumble upon. Not that I was in a big hurry to ever use one.

Instead, I found Frankie.

He stepped into the hallway ten yards in front of me looking like an extra from The Walking Dead. His clothes hung off his bony frame as if he’d somehow lost another few pounds since the night before. His eyes were ringed, and he trembled as if we stood in an ice storm. In his swollen, misshapen hands was a semi-automatic handgun. He held it awkwardly, cupped in the palm of his right hand where his broken fingers stuck out like the branches of a stripped tree. The middle finger of his left was on the trigger as that hand’s thumb and index were purple and white sausages. Both hands shook so that the gun rattled.

“Fucker,” he whispered. “This one’s loaded.”

With a pained shriek he pulled the trigger. I dove into the nearest empty office as bullets lodged themselves in the ground, the walls, even the ceiling. A series of spectacular misses.

Except for one.

A heavy, burning pain punched into my back, below my right shoulder blade and I suddenly felt as if the room’s oxygen had dropped by half. I sucked in a breath, astonished that one body could experience so much pain, and scrambled to just inside the office door. I pushed the suffocating agony and terror down, willing my screaming body to move, as Frankie stormed into the room, gun blasting.

I grabbed his arms as he started past me, shoving upward so that his next shots hit the ceiling. Chunks of plaster rained down. I slammed his hand into the wall, breaking more fingers and eliciting a scream. The gun tumbled to the ground. I gripped a handful of greasy hair and drove Frankie’s head down while driving my knee up. With a sickening crunch, I felt his nose flatten against my thigh and then his body went limp.

I let him go and bent to pick up the gun. My vision grayed out as pain swamped me. It felt as if I was being ripped in half in an airless chamber. My lungs—particularly my right—felt impossibly heavy and I had the most peculiar sensation of breathing and drowning at the same time.

I dropped to one knee to get the gun. My hands were shaking as badly as Frankie’s had, and I tried to breathe to calm myself. But my breath only went halfway.

I stumbled out of the office, stopping to press one hand against the wall until the dizziness passed. The back of my shirt and jacket were wet. I could feel my blood warm on my skin, and it wasn’t stopping. Bones ground together when I breathed, which was becoming harder and harder to do.

I didn’t have much time left.

Not yet,
I thought and forced myself to hurry to the lobby, where I saw Drac holding Alex, pressing a gun to her head in the glare of a small army of police outside the bank’s walls.

I held the gun in steady hands and strode up to Drac. I had one more promise to keep.

#

Alex

Relief and terror warred within me to know that Cory was there. I didn’t dare try to move but I could just see him in my left eye’s peripheral vision, as he stood behind Connor but with his back to the empty bank, out of the line of the monster squad’s fire. Somehow Cory was holding a gun to Connor’s head the same way Connor held one to mine.

I felt Connor’s body tense. “And to whom do I owe this lovely surprise? Nick? Your best buddy, Wolfman?”

“I said, let her go.”

Cory’s voice sounded strange now. As if he were choking. Probably from fear. I couldn’t blame him, I could hardly think for the terror.

“It’s over, Connor,” said the megaphone. “You’re done. Put down the gun and let the hostage go.”

Behind the teller counters, I heard mutterings from the monster squad. It felt like the moment before lightning strikes, or before the starting gun for a race blasts.

I felt Connor loosen his grip on me and I started to sink on watery limbs.

“This is far from—”

A sound like something tearing the air whizzed over my head. Connor’s body jerked, the remainder of his words unsaid. For half a second I thought he’d pulled the trigger and this moment was my last. A drawn out heartbeat of life before the darkness descended. Instead, his painful grip on my hair fell away, and I was free.

One heartbeat.

Two.

Then my world imploded.

Heavily armored S.W.A.T. team members stormed the bank lobbing cylindrical objects that whizzed over the hostages’ heads to land behind the teller counter. Soundless explosions erupted—as if the bank had been hit with voids of airless nothing. Concussion grenades, I would later learn. My ears rang and I stumbled, suddenly drunk and clumsy.

Cory tackled me to the floor, shielding me with his body as a cacophony of gunfire, shattered glass, screaming and cursing erupted all around us. An armored S.W.A.T. team member jogged toward us, shouting “Stay down! Stay down!” through his plastic face guard, though I read his lips more than I heard him. My hearing was tinny with a reverb, as if someone were playing a Theremin in my brain.

Cory drove me to the left, toward the area of desks and chairs, keeping me beneath him, as we half-crawled, half-ran, to duck for cover. The S.W.A.T. team members streamed past us, fanning out to all corners of the bank.

We were nearly there—only five feet or so—when I felt Cory’s body shudder and I was buried under him as his body went slack.

“Cory? Cory!”

I crawled out from under him and the first thing I saw was hole in his jacket on the right side of his back, under his shoulder blade. A dark swath of blood had spread around it, down to the waistband of his jeans. My blood rushed to my ears, drowning out the tinny sounds in terror.

“Oh my god!” I grabbed his arm and helped haul him to his knees. “No, no, no! Get up! Come on, we’re almost there!”

With agonizing slowness he made it to his hands and knees, and then I nearly screamed as he coughed and a spray of blood stained the floor beneath him.

“Can’t…breathe…” he croaked.

“Keep moving.” I sensed the chaos was subsiding, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I sat him up, and maneuvered my way between he and the desk, trying to ignore how ashen his face had suddenly become, and the blood staining his lips.

I wrapped my left arm around in front of him, holding him upright and pressed my right palm to the gunshot in his back. The blood was hot and there was so much of it.
Punctured lung
, I thought, remembering a case I’d once had over a botched tracheotomy. Cory struggled for breath and frothy pink spittle leaked from the corner of his mouth. I pressed harder, as if I could prevent the life from leaving his body.

“Stay with me,” I murmured into his ear. “You stay
right here
.”

He said nothing. He couldn’t. Judging by the harsh, labored wheezing it was all he could do to draw breath.

“Help! Help us!” I screamed, my voice ragged with fear.

S.W.A.T. members were now milling around without the urgency of before, calming frightened hostages who had scattered like birds all over the lobby. The battle had ended and it looked as if the monster squad had been defeated. Connor lay in the center of the lobby where the sniper had taken him out. I averted my eyes from the exploded mess of his head.

“Help us! Help him!” I screamed again, and could have wept with relief as officers started my way. “You’re going to be okay,” I told Cory. “You’re going to be
just fine
.”