Trouble Strikes Back
25 NOVEMBER 2007
HEARTBRAKE HOTEL ROOM THIRTEEN16:12 PST
Casey and Jill both looked up as Sarah, juggling a shotgun, an FGM-172 SRAW, and Chuck, pushed the door to the motel room open. Jill's eyes widened; Casey looked vaguely impressed. "What's up?" he asked, rising to his feet from the desk chair.
"Team Bartowski's got company." Sarah handed him the rocket-launcher on the way by and dumped the rest of the loot on the bed, out of Jill's reach.
"Ours?"
"Not unless the Marshals are issuing Uzis." Sarah yanked on Chuck's sleeve to pull him over to the bed. He went. It wasn't that he was scared speechless, even though there was a healthy amount of fear pumping through his veins. He suspected it had more to do with the fact that there were only so many hits his system could take before he wanted to lie down on the ground and start gibbering like a madman. Since that would do absolutely no good, he just did as he was told. In this situation, it meant loading shotguns while Casey called for backup and Sarah peered out the window through the sniper scope. His hands didn't even shake as he shoved shells into the chamber of the gun.
"What's going on?" Jill asked, the words a little slurred through her injured jaw. She'd changed into fresh clothing, Sarah's clothes hanging off of her petite frame a little bit.
Sarah didn't look at her. "Your friends are here," she said.
"They look real friendly, too," Casey said, moving the curtain an inch to peer out the window. He hung up the phone and picked up the rocket-launcher. "Backup's seven minutes out. I told them to step on it. Any idea how they found us?"
"No, and right now I don't care."
Chuck finished loading the first shotgun and set it on the stripped mattress, out of Jill's reach. She was handcuffed, and maneuvering a shotgun with her wrists bound would be difficult, but her confession still sat heavy on his mind.
Casey checked over the rocket-launcher. "I'll need a spotter," he said, begrudgingly. "Walker?"
"Got it. I need a minute."
"They'll be in range in ninety seconds."
"Which is, amazingly, more than a minute." Sarah grabbed a shotgun even as she pulled Chuck away from both Casey and Jill. In an undertone, she asked, "Are you okay?"
Chuck forced his head to move up and down in what might have passed for a nod.
"Okay." Sarah took a deep breath, and inexplicably, an impish smirk broke out over her face. She didn't look like there was a legion of enemies—enemies carrying Uzis—racing at their dingy motel room. She looked like a woman sharing an amusing secret. "You owe me a dollar."
"Wh-what?"
"You said you'd give me a dollar if I used 'Team Bartowski' in front of Casey," Sarah said, as Chuck gaped at her. "Which I just did. So, pay up."
"N-now?" How could she smile like that? They were likely about to die in a horrible, bullet-ridden way in a motel in need of a serious roach-bombing.
"Yes, now." Sarah's eyebrows went up.
"Uh, okay." Chuck fumbled for his pocket, where he had the rest of the money Sarah had given him for the vending machine earlier. His hand came up empty. Puzzled, he switched pockets. "I, uh, seem to have—oh. Figures."
Sarah unfolded the wad of bills she'd lifted from Chuck's pocket. "What's the matter, Chuck?"
"Thief," Chuck grumbled.
"You don't have any singles," Sarah said. She plucked a five from the stack.
"Hey!"
"What? Interest." Sarah gave him an impertinent look as she stuffed the bill in her jeans pocket. Abruptly, her expression turned serious. She pushed the shotgun toward him. "Ever fire one of these?"
"Not counting 'Resident Evil,' no, but I've got it." Chuck took the gun and racked it.
"Okay. It's a last resort and a last resort only, got it?"
"Okay," Chuck said, his voice surprisingly steady given that he was now armed with two guns, and freaking out.
"Get Jill to the back of the room, and stay down," Sarah said. She pushed something into his hand: a handcuffs key.
"Walker," Casey barked, sounding more impatient than usual.
"Go on," Sarah told Chuck, grabbing the other shotguns from the bed. She took her place at the window, peering through the sniper scope. Chuck, meanwhile, swallowed hard before he grabbed Jill's elbow to pull her to her feet. As he led her to the back of the hotel room, he could feel the tremors up and down her arm, and he more than understood.
But he couldn't find it within himself to offer reassurances.
He pulled her down so that they crouched between the bed and the bathroom. "Sarah says we have to stay down," he said unnecessarily, since Jill had always had good hearing.
"And we have to do what she says?" Malice burned across Jill's face.
Chuck let her have that one, since Sarah had clocked her. He shrugged and set the shotgun behind him, out of her reach. "She's the trained agent here, and I'm fond of, you know, having a life."
"I won't have a life after this," Jill said.
"But you'll be alive to not have that life. Hold still." Even without shaking hands, it was hard to work the key and unlock the handcuffs. Since he wasn't sure what he should do with them, he stuck the cuffs in his back pocket and picked up the shotgun again. Surprisingly, it didn't feel exhaustingly heavy like the other guns he had handled. He kept his finger off of the trigger and tilted the muzzle toward the floor just like Casey's lessons had taught him. As he did so, his thumb brushed against the knife Sarah had tossed him for ripping up sheets. He hadn't had the chance to return it, so he had stuck it into his belt buckle.
He could only hope it didn't somehow work its way loose and stab him in the stomach. That would really put a cap on today's activities.
By the window and the door, Sarah and Casey were holding a hushed conversation, Sarah still peering through the scope. "Twenty seconds," Sarah said. Without lowering the scope, she grabbed the doorknob with her free hand. "Fourth quadrant, thirty two degrees. Ten seconds."
"Okay."
Chuck crouched forward. It seemed a little excessive, he thought. Fulcrum was sending an entire convoy to deal with two, maybe three agents of an unknown agency? Talk about overkill.
Maybe Fulcrum wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.
Sarah threw open the door. Casey stepped into the open space, took a split second to aim—
BOOM.
A shockwave of heat and sound slammed into Chuck, knocking him back as Casey hit the trigger. Chuck grabbed the underside of the bed frame to steady himself and prayed.
The explosion made the ground dance. The shock jolted through him, making him curl forward. At the door, Casey tossed away the launcher, caught the shotgun Sarah threw his way, and took aim. The gun barked once, twice, three times. Though Chuck longed to clap his hands over his ears, he stayed rigid, his body twitching in time to the gunfire.
Casey fired a fourth time, swore, and dove to the side. He hit the ground with a laugh and a roll. "Jackpot, suckers!"
Sarah slammed the door. A volley of gunfire rattled the walls nanoseconds before holes appeared in the front wall, sprinting along in a demented race. Chuck immediately dropped to his stomach and curled up around the gun almost like a shrimp. Uzis, he remembered. The bad guys had Uzis, and they were using them to chew the walls to literal shreds. Splinters rained down into the hotel room like demented snow.
Though terror whitened his vision at the edges, he risked a look at Jill. Like him, she'd hit the floor, but he could see her face, colorless save her eyes, which were wider than he had ever seen them. They were almost black. He didn't give her a reassuring smile. They were probably going to die.
"Overkill much?" he called over the com when yet another torrent bit into the walls.
"They're preparing for an assault! Just keep your head down."
That didn't make him feel better, but Chuck could see the value in Sarah's order. He tucked his head close to the floor even as he crawled sideways, using his arms to pull him across the carpet. Around the edge of the bed, he could see Casey and Sarah. They were both flat on the floor, facing each other and they seemed to be communicating in hand signals. Even as he wondered what they were saying, Chuck's brain translated.
Five seconds.
You take lead.
High or low?
Low.
A nod. I'll take high. Three, two.
One.
As one, Casey and Sarah surged to their knees in the middle of the broken glass, guns ready. Chuck gaped as they took opposite sides of the window, firing into the bright daylight. Each round seemed louder than the Fulcrum gunfire, more commanding and powerful.
Outside, somebody screamed.
Direct hit.
Casey and Sarah dropped in unison. Chuck flinched, hoping the Kevlar was enough to protect them from glass shards. They didn't bother with hand signals this time. "How many?" Casey shouted over the com.
"Six on my side."
"Seven on mine. Hell. I got one. Make it six."
"I clipped one."
"Eleven and a half against us, Bartowski, and the prisoner?" Casey laughed. "Piece of cake."
Another volley of shots riddled the walls. Given that these weren't staccato and one on top of the other like the first few rounds, Chuck figured somewhere in the rational part of his mind that they had switched from the Uzis to pistols.
Still as deadly, Chuck told himself.
"I'm winning." Casey sounded smug.
Sarah propped the shotgun against the wall, grabbed her S&W, and checked the chamber. "I clipped one."
"Doesn't count."
"Loser buys everybody dinner?"
"You're on."
It was at that point that Chuck realized he wasn't the only one on the team with mental problems. Especially since Casey let out a belly laugh as he charged the window. Sarah rolled gracefully onto her knees, like a lethal dancer. The gun jerked in her hand, controlled motions like Casey preached to Chuck during their shooting lessons. She fired off rounds for what felt like forever, and dropped to the floor, safe.
Chuck let out the breath he had been holding.
"ETA on backup?" she called. Shots ripped into the room sporadically, no longer steadily destructive like the Uzis. Of course, all one had to do was go through one of the holes already present, hit a vital organ, change Chuck's life forever…
His grip tightened on the shotgun.
Casey opened his mouth to reply, but before he could say anything, a new round of percussion shook the motel, sounding both farther away and still all too near. Casey's mouth snapped shut. He nodded once. "About damn time."
"What was that?" Chuck demanded. Though he expected his voice to rise and fall due to panic, it was surprisingly steady.
Sarah turned her head and glanced his way. The look was fleeting, split-second at most, but it packed all of the punch of a thousand-second stare: worry turning to relief when she saw him unharmed, a little fear, reassurance, respect, even a little fun.
Of course, Sarah wouldbe the type to find amusement in a gun battle. She liked him, after all. Clearly, Sarah Walker and sanity weren't as close friends as he had thought. And oh geez, if they survived today, he was going to have to reevaluate everything having to do with women.
"Backup's here," she said over the com, turning back to look at Casey. "Time to move?"
"Grab the kid and go."
"Kid?" Chuck said, offended.
Neither of his partners answered. Casey took a knee and began firing Sarah's discarded shotgun out the window. Sarah, meanwhile, ran back toward Chuck and Jill at a crouch.
Chuck immediately grabbed her wrist and yanked her behind the bed and out of the line of danger, onto the floor with him and Jill. She yelped as she landed. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?" he shouted, forgetting he had the earpiece in.
She winced at the volume, but glared. "No, I'm trying to get us out of here safely. We're getting mobile now that backup's here."
"What?" Chuck blinked as Sarah reached down and pulled something off of his vest: one of the grenades. She tossed this to Casey, who caught it easily. "How? I feel like this is pointing out the obvious, but they're shooting at the door!"
"Which is why we're going out the bathroom window. C'mon."
"What if the Fulcrum guys are already out there?"
"Then I shoot them. Move." Sarah reached around Chuck to grab Jill's arm, but the Fulcrum woman shook her off. Sarah shrugged: suit yourself. "Chuck, go first, get the window open, and get down."
"Okay." Chuck glanced once more at Casey, who was still laying down a round of cover fire, and crawled toward the bathroom, flinching with every new shot. When he scurried into the bathroom, he cringed for an entirely new reason: he was positive the floors hadn't been cleaned since the days of the Reagan administration. "Gross, gross, gross."
He hopped up and tried to pry on the pebbled-glass window. It didn't budge.
"Get the window open, she says," he grumbled under his breath, hauling on the window with his free hand. It was more than painted shut. The damned thing felt like somebody had used iron rivets to bolt it to the frame. "Sure, like it's easy."
He set the shotgun down so that he would have both hands free—and froze. Get the window open, she'd said. She hadn't said how, and with the amount of bullets turning the Heartbrake Hotel to splinters, what did one broken window matter? Before Chuck could talk himself out of it, he snatched up the shotgun and swung. Cracks shot across the glass, but it didn't break. Frustrated, Chuck hit the glass again. A couple of cracks joined the first.
He set the shotgun down, balanced his palms on the sink, and kicked up with both feet.
The window exploded outwards. Sarah and Jill crawled into the doorway right as Chuck's chucks hit the grimy bathroom tiles. Sarah's eyebrows went up. "You got it?"
"Yep." Chuck used the shotgun to chip away the jagged shards of glass still in the window while Sarah grabbed the thin motel towels from over the toilet. She threw these over the bottom of the window.
"You first, Chuck. Go straight to the van, and get down."
Chuck, about to quip about ladies first, saw the look on Sarah's face. He hurriedly shut his mouth and nodded. Though Sarah offered him help up, Chuck just handed her the shotgun and pulled his weight through the window on his own. He caught the shotgun as Sarah tossed it to him and raced for the car.
Jill came through the window next, this time with Sarah's help. Instead of diving into the van and following Sarah's orders to the letter, Chuck took a knee and raised the shotgun, staring hard into the distance. He wasn't sure he could shoot a Fulcrum agent, even if they were going to shoot him, but he could fire in that direction and make them go for cover. He could buy Sarah and Casey time to get in the van.
Another boom shook the ground, much quieter than the rocket-launcher. Chuck winced and looked over; smoke curled over the top of the motel from the other side.
Casey had thrown the smoker.
Definitely time to go.
Chuck turned to look at Sarah, who was halfway out the window, but gunshots, much closer than those currently turning the front of the Heartbrake Hotel into a cheese-grater, made him drop to the ground.
The window frame inches from Sarah's left hand exploded in a fountain of splinters. She dropped back into the bathroom.
Chuck was on his feet with no idea how he got there. "Sarah!"
"Chuck, RUN!"
He might have disobeyed, except as he turned to sprint back to the motel, holes thudded into the van where his head had been. He didn't even stare. He just grabbed Jill's hand and hauled. He sprinted along the back of the hotel, feet miraculously dodging the ancient carpet of faded beer cans and other debris. Behind him, Jill stumbled, but Chuck just continued to race forward. He could still hear gunshots, and they sounded too close, even though Sarah was no doubt laying down a round of cover fire to help them get away.
A shot missed him by inches, shattering a window.
Chuck pushed his legs faster.
Bullets smacked into the walls of the hotel room.
Holy crap. They were going to die. He couldn't see where the shooter was, had no idea what direction the bullets were coming from. All he knew was that there would be no more Chuck Bartowski after that. Just like there would probably be no more John Casey, or Jill Roberts, or Sarah Walker.
His hands shook.
He risked a glance over his shoulder, saw Sarah drop from the window fifty yards behind them. She raced forward at a crouch, gun up and pointed at a shooter Chuck couldn't see. He sprinted harder for the motel office. If he could just get inside, there would be cover, and maybe they weren't all dead. Sarah would take care of the problem and—
A bullet smacked into the window so close behind Chuck, he almost felt it tear the air between him and Jill.
FWOOSH.
Chuck's entire world exploded. He went from a dead run to flying through the air, the ground gone, the sky gone, gravity completely out of the question. For one perfect moment, he was suspended, a wall of heat at his back and nothing but an abyss in front of him waiting to be explored.
He landed and almost-forgotten Army training sent him into a roll, tucked around the shotgun. The jolt slammed all sensation back into him. Dust spewed everywhere, filling his mouth and eyes with grit even as his tumble wound up with him on his butt, facing away from where he'd seen Sarah seconds before. He coughed, unable to see, his ears ringing from the sheer rush of sound. His skin felt stiff and raw, like he'd been tossed into the desert with no cover and no sunscreen. He tried to stand, and the world, just a bright blur of whites and yellows, tilted dangerously.
He swiped at his eyes with his sleeve and the world grew a little less blurry. Other details filtered in: heat against his skin, no longer a blast but a slow, steady pressure making everything uncomfortable, the cough of gunfire that sounded incredibly distant, the crackle of something, a noise video games and the movie Firestarter would never let him forget.
The hotel had exploded. Maybe not the whole hotel, but something had definitely blown up.
Chuck's vision cleared enough and he turned his head to stare. He'd been thrown clear of the explosion by the first percussive wave, as far as he could tell, but debris from the explosion scattered across the parking lot like buckshot.
"Chuck!"
Sarah's voice sounded tinny, like it was coming to him through a tunnel from a long way away. Confused, he turned his head, but he couldn't see her through the smoke. "S-Sarah?" Her name came out as a cough, and barely audible, even though he was sure he'd talked at a regular volume.
There was a pause before she answered. Her voice was coming through his earpiece, Chuck remembered. That was why he couldn't see her. Well, he couldn't see anything, really. "Thank God! Are you okay?"
Chuck coughed hard, the smoke and dust and grit coating his lungs with their own version of fire. "I'm fine," he managed. "Where are you?"
"I'm—"
Abruptly, the gunshots stopped sounding far away.
"Run!" Sarah shouted needlessly.
Still coughing, Chuck scrambled to his feet, dropping the shotgun in the process. He didn't bother to pick it up, but instead sprinted away from the site of the explosion. He got three steps before he stumbled over something: Jill.
She'd been thrown farther than him, and she evidently hadn't had the chance to roll on impact. When Chuck tripped over her, she grunted, and rolled over.
There was a crack in the left lens of her glasses.
"Chuck?" She blinked up at him.
He didn't have time to explain, not with people still firing at them. As carefully as he could, considering the situation, he reached down and pulled Jill to her feet. "We've got to move, c'mon."
He pulled her, stumbling and running, his eyes still ringing and his eyes blurry, toward the office. If they could get inside, he thought again, there would be cover. Places to hide. Somewhere to curl up into as small a ball as possible and just hide until all of this terrible, terrible nightmare just faded.
"What the hell are you doing out there, Walker?" Casey's voice, like Sarah's, sounded distant over the earpiece. "I didn't bring anything fun enough to cause that sort of blast with me!"
"It wasn't me!"
Chuck hurdled the curb and hit the back door to the office at a run. "Meth lab!" he yelped, remembering an errant thought from earlier. He yanked Jill inside with him. "They must've hit it when they were shooting at Jill and me."
There was a pause. More gunfire erupted. "How the hell did you know there was a meth lab?"
"Because it went boom! Quick, hide." The last, Chuck said to Jill. They'd entered a kitchenette that hadn't been cleaned in this century, but at least there were no holes in the walls to show that Fulcrum had arrived before them. Jill raced on through a hallway. Chuck caught flashes of rooms as they ran: a pantry used for storing towels, a laundry room. They burst into the main office, and immediately had to dive for the floor. The windows here were smashed, the walls Swiss cheese. Chuck could see rays of sunlight stand out in the room's natural dust.
He crawled over to the front desk and found the unfortunate desk worker cowered there. The man yelped at seeing Chuck, until Chuck put a finger to his lips and crawled over. He couldn't be worried about things like unpleasant body odor right now.
"You okay?" Chuck asked.
The desk worker nodded. His face was the color of bone.
"You're not hit anywhere?"
A shake of the head.
"Good." Chuck rubbed a hand over his face, wishing that his ears would stop ringing. He had to get this guy to safety, as the worker was an innocent bystander. Right now, however, safety was in scarce supply. He glanced around, but Jill had taken the only other hiding place, behind filing cabinets that bore bullet holes just like everything else in the Heartbrake Hotel.
"What the hell is going on?" the worker hissed, apparently finding his voice.
"Trust me, that's way above your pay grade. There's a laundry room back there, right?"
A hurried nod. The worker swiped at the sweat on his upper lip with the back of his hand.
"Okay. Does it have a lock on it? Yeah? Good. Go back there, lock yourself in, and hide. Stay down. I don't know if they're shooting in here anymore, but let's not risk anything, okay?"
"Who are you talking to?" Casey demanded. He sounded like he was running.
"Desk worker. Jill and I are in the office," Chuck said. When said worker gave him a strange look, he waved the other man off to the closet.
The clerk got all the way to the end of the desk, toward the hallway, before he turned and gave Chuck a panicked look. "Just out of curiosity," he said, "but what the hell kind of hookers are you buyin', man?"
"Do yourself a favor," Chuck said. "If you see the blonde? Don't call her a hooker. She's armed. Go!"
Casey's laughter burst out over the com, followed by some swearing as yet more gunfire ensued. Did Fulcrum just have endless wells of bullets? Sarah sounded less than amused. "The blonde?" she asked. "Hooker?"
Chuck winced.
Casey put a stop to Chuck's apparent doom. "What's your twenty, Walker?"
"Trying to get to Chuck, but I'm pinned down. Two shooters. You?"
"Same. I'm outside room seven in front."
"Does anybody else feel like we're two seconds from Abraham Lincoln showing up with a machete?" Chuck wondered.
"Chuck, keep your head down, got it?"
"Yes, sir," Chuck said, even going so far to give a mock salute, though he knew Casey couldn't see him. He ignored Casey's grunt and crawled toward the end of the desk to look at Jill. Though she was hidden from most of the room, his vantage point let him see her clearly. She curled forward, her face still white beneath the grit and soot from the explosion.
She was the enemy. These were her people that were shooting at them. All of them, Chuck remembered. They'd shot at Jill, too.
She looked as scared and as exhausted as he felt.
"Are you okay?" Chuck mouthed at her.
She shook her head and curled closer to the floor. Chuck debated briefly if he should go over to offer reassurances—what he would say, he had no idea, as Jill was Fulcrum and therefore a traitor, and she would be facing the consequences soon if they survived—but before he could move, both of them heard the heavy tread of a man's step in the hallway.
Everything inside Chuck went still.
It was Casey, he told himself, even while his mind rejected that logic. Casey would have announced himself. Casey would have come in through the front door. It wasn't Casey.
Maybe it was another one of the good guys. Maybe it was the mysterious backup that had been shelling the motel to pieces.
"Agent Sandstorm?" an unfamiliar voice called.
Chuck had precisely two seconds to wonder why the agent would be calling him that when his name was obviously Stargazer before the flash hit.
A sand dune in the middle of a blue-sky desert.
SANDSTORM.
IDENTITY: JILL ROBERTS.
Scrambled computer code.
The dune again.
"Oh, crap," Chuck whispered.
Jill really was Fulcrum. Hearing her confession to Sarah, her apologies to him, details of how she worked, none of that had hit home. But now…Chuck swallowed hard. His hand shook as he unsnapped the holster holding the stolen Fulcrum pistol.
Before he could pull the gun out, though, Jill climbed to her feet. "Leader?" she called, sounding genuinely relieved. "Leader, is that you?"
The man in the hallway, still out of Chuck's sight, paused. "Roberts?"
"In here!" Though Chuck put up a hand to stop her, Jill ignored him and stepped out into the main part of the room. "I'm so glad that you're—"
The gunshot was so much closer than those outside. Even with his ears possibly damaged for forever, it sounded unbelievably loud, like somebody had just fired a gun right next to his head. Chuck jerked backward, his hand automatically flexing on the hilt of his gun.
Jill fell in impossibly slow motion. Unlike the movies, it wasn't graceful. She just went from standing to collapsing inward like a building that had been demolished. There was absolutely no sound as her body hit the ground.
She looked like a corpse.
Chuck's breath caught in his chest. He didn't move. He didn't breathe. He didn't blink. Jill was dead.
"You caused a lot of trouble, Agent Sandstorm," the voice from the hallway said, and Chuck's mind translated the words through the fuzz of shock. "My sincerest apologies. You could have been one of the best, but now…"
The man stepped into the room. Chuck slowly, slowly turned his head to stare at expensive boots. The man was four feet away, but he hadn't looked around. He was huge. Casey-sized at least, broad-shouldered, dressed in black leather and black pants that couldn't have screamed his villainous intentions any louder had they tried. Bald as Captain Picard.
He was also holding a very, very big gun.
Oh crap.
It wasn't actually that big. It was a handgun, probably the brother or sister to the gun Chuck now held in his own hand. But that gun had killed Chuck's ex-girlfriend.
She lay on the floor, dead. Living—not living, dead—proof.
Except she coughed.
Chuck's head cut to the left. Dead people didn't cough. That wasn't one of the many traits of Rigor Mortis. Neither did they writhe about, nor did they stare up at their shooter with disbelief borne of betrayal.
"Now," the man with the gun went on, "it simply means I have a mess to clean up. Fulcrum thanks you for your services."
He pointed the gun right at Jill's head.
In that moment, Jill Roberts was no longer an ex-girlfriend. She was no longer a traitor, or the reason he and Sarah had been taken out to the middle of the desert and nearly killed that morning. She hadn't dumped him in a letter two weeks after promising to visit him during a free weekend of OCS. She hadn't gone on hour-long raids in Everquest with him and Morgan and Bryce. She was just a woman, bleeding on the floor, and she was about to be shot in the head right in front of him.
Something roared through Chuck, shouted out of him, and he hit so-called Leader from the side with a body-slam that had more power than finesse. Leader went flying. Chuck stumbled forward, nearly tripping over the front of his feet, but kept his balance.
Leader hit the ground hard enough to shake the walls. He rolled, one easy, streamlined motion, and gained his feet.
It occurred to Chuck then that he had no plan.
"Chuck? What's going on?" Sarah's voice, in his ear, panicked.
Chuck ignored her. "Don't move!" he said, and belatedly remembered the gun in his hand. Miraculously, he hadn't dropped it, though it jittered when he pointed it at Leader. "Stay right where you are!"
"Bartowski, what the hell is going on?"
Leader took a half-step forward. Chuck's hand abruptly stopped moving. "I said don't move!" He turned his head slightly, but kept his eyes on Leader's brutish face. "Jill? Jill, are you okay? Can you hear me? Jill?"
She whimpered.
"Chuck, what's happening?" Sarah again.
Chuck turned his gaze back to Leader, swallowing hard. "Some Fulcrum guy shot Jill. I've—I've got him at gunpoint."
"What?"
"I—"
"Walker," Casey interrupted. "I'm still pinned."
"Yeah, I got it, Casey!" More gunfire from behind the hotel, this time faster and harder. "Keep your gun on him, Chuck! I'll be there in a second."
The com went silent.
Chuck swallowed again, his eyes never leaving Leader, who hadn't moved. He had started smirking, though, behind silly-looking sunglasses with yellow lenses. "Who are you?" Leader sounded both condescending and smug.
"It doesn't matter." Abruptly, Chuck remembered the handcuffs he'd stuffed into his back pocket. He used the gun to gesture from Leader to the floor, his left hand sliding into his pocket. It should have felt like a video game or a movie, pointing a gun at somebody, but there was too much nausea boiling through his system for that. "Get on the ground now. First, drop the gun. Away from you. Drop the gun away from you."
"You're not going to shoot me." Leader didn't move.
Though it made him literally want to vomit, Chuck thumbed the safety off.
Leader's eyebrows went up. His movements slow, careful, and deliberately condescending, he stepped forward and made a show of tossing the gun from his right hand down the hallway to his left, his arm sweeping across his body.
"Good," Chuck said. "Now—"
Leader's arm chopped into Chuck's hand, sending the gun flying over Jill's prone body. Pain smashed through Chuck's hand.
Chuck didn't get a chance to cry out. Leader whipped forward, his left arm striking out. His palm slammed into Chuck's hip. Chuck crashed backward and bounced into the bullet-shredded wall, the Kevlar padding his shoulder-blades. It still hurt.
He only had time to blink before Leader seized him by the straps of the vest, yanking his torso forward. His head jerked forward. Leader's knee hit him squarely in the middle of the vest, in the fleshy part beneath his sternum. The knee-strike rattled through him, pain rupturing through his chest. All of the air left his lungs in a whoosh.
Leader grabbed Chuck's knee, his other hand still gripping the vest. There was a lurch and Chuck was flying through the air. He had a split-second of complete clarity in which every detail in the room stood out perfectly. It was almost serene, even though the décor was still uglier than sin, the walls bore a few new holes, and Jill's blood was seeping across the grimy carpet in a scarily spreading pool. He could see dust motes drifting on the air, wafting along gently. He flew through the air like Superman, and it was almost fun.
Until he hit the ground.
He landed on his palms and knees, like he'd just decided to fly across the room and do a push-up. Pain erupted. Automatically, he lowered toward the disgusting shag carpet, just as automatically pushed back up, even while his hands and knees screamed.
Leader stepped on his back. Chuck's stomach hit the ground, and he grunted. Something pushed against his belly. His belt buckle? Blindly, he groped for it. He had no idea what he was doing, why he was here, what was going on. Leader stepped over him and picked up the gun he'd knocked from Chuck's grip.
Without any prompting whatsoever, he pointed it at the CIA agent.
Oh, God, Chuck thought for the millionth time that day. I'm going to die. This really is it.
He worked the object digging into his stomach free.
"Good-bye," Leader said, pointing the gun at Chuck's forehead. If Chuck imagined it, he could feel the laser sight searing into the skin between his eyes like a brand.
He did the only thing he could. He threw whatever it was that was in his hand at Leader and he threw it hard.
There was a thunk.
The gun went off.
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