Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
There were moans, too, of injured staff members.
Unfortunately, this was only beginning—and at least one or more stairwells, somewhere, had been properly bombed. That was the only reason they could have felt such shock waves in that patient room.
Hurrying on his way, heading to the right, Blade’s nose stung from the chemical burn—
The robotic soldier came out of a boardroom made of sheets of glass, and Blade had the advantage of first sight. Raising the muzzle of his gun, he let off one round directly into the thing’s chest, the bullet entering the torso—but barely having any effect other than to announce Blade’s presence.
The return fire was instantaneous, and accurate to a rattling degree. As Blade ducked, a bullet went into the wall right where his head had been.
No torso, big-target aiming for these things.
As another bullet sizzled by him, Blade had to ration his counter-firing as he jumped behind a support column. He could spare only one trigger pull in response, and the humanoid ducked easily, the lead slug penetrating through one of the floor-to-ceiling glass panels, the entire wall shattering and crashing to the ground.
Which brought the other soldiers unto him in an efficient fashion.
The units came from every direction, and Blade broke cover and bobbed and weaved to avoid getting shot. Still, something went into his shoulder, but he ignored the blaze of pain—and given that he didn’t know the layout of the lab, there was no strategy to his route as he kept going.
All he wanted was to draw everything away from that hallway.
As he passed the elevator down which the blond woman in black had taken him, he thought his assailants’ strategy of trapping everybody underground was a good one. Bombs made noise and attracted attention, and the small town might not have had much on population, but there were people who would have noticed an aboveground altercation with this many pyrotechnics.
Down here, anything could happen. And with the elevators disabled and the stairwells compromised? And those cyborg soldiers having no pesky sense of self-preservation?
Kurling could wait anyone out.
On the far side of the elevators, he jumped over the dead body of one of the guards who had escorted him and the blonde down herein. And another who was gravely injured. Bullets continued to flash by Blade, pinging into the walls, skipping across the concrete floor with sparks, some more hitting him.
He kept going, and when he made a turn and an “EXIT” sign appeared over a steel door, he knew his instincts had been right. Clandestine labs needed fire escapes, not for building code purposes, but as a practical consideration, and every one he had ever been in over the last twenty years had had more than one satellite escape.
As he came to a halt, the footfalls of what was pursuing him were the heartbeat of his demise, but he felt no fear. He concentrated on the keypad and punched in the code the blond woman had given him.
“Come now, come now…”
Just as he caught a major whiff of his own blood, the dead bolt gave way, and he punched at the bar. The second steel weight opened, he slipped through, re-shut things, and listened to the lock reengage.
A staircase, good lighting, and fresh air greeted him, as if he had entered a luck lottery and come out a winner. Plenty of those units had seen him go in here, so they knew where he was—and that meant Kurling was going to order a takedown and put all his resources into the effort. Pulling clean oxygen into his lungs, Blade’s thoughts began to fragment, likely from the blood loss, but he couldn’t let his concentration slip. He needed to give himself a flight’s worth of head start before he let them close in—
The steel door was blown off its hinges directly in front of him, the panel flying at his body, only his quick reflexes sparing his life as the woof! of the shock wave tossed him to the side and the heat singed his eyebrows and hair.
Without missing a beat, he spun for the stairs and took them two at a time, his left leg hindering his ascent—whilst down below soldiers that had the advantage of not needing oxygen to power their muscles came after him at breakneck speed. Thinking of Lydia, he ran even faster because he needed to survive a little longer, so he could draw the fight farther away from her. As the zenith of the ascent was reached, he struggled to punch in the code to free the lock—
The release took many seconds longer than he’d wanted, and he had no idea what he was getting into when the door was finally able to open—
He burst out with gun forward and head swiveling, as he made sure the stairwell’s exit closed and locked behind himself.