Anthony watched as Ian pulled the woman out of the car—not roughly, he noticed—only getting some weak resistance from her. She looked pretty dazed from the crash.
Ian let her sit down, leaning her back against the car door. She tried to shove him away, but had next to no strength to do so. "Stop fighting me," he told her firmly but gently. "You're not doing yourself any good."
She blinked hazily, glowering, and her eyes slowly focused on Ian's face. She spoke in a surprisingly deep voice that held a hint of an Indian accent. "Who—who are you? What do you want?"
Anthony knelt down beside his friend and holstered his gun.
Ian answered only her second question. "You have a stolen case somewhere. We want it back. Is it in the car?"
She seemed to be slowly losing consciousness, and her head started to loll to the side before Ian caught the side of her face and held it upright. His movement and touch seemed to temporarily bring her back around, and she sneered slightly.
"I don't have it. I was the diversion."
Ian hesitated for a moment, glancing to Anthony, and muttered "fuck" under his breath before looking back to her. "So where is it? Who has the case now?"
She smiled vaguely and looked to her left, out the closest end of the tunnel and past Mark's car. "They do."
With a sudden curl of dread in his stomach, Anthony whipped his head around to see what she was referring to.
It was a mail delivery truck, heading toward the tunnel at highway speed.
From what Anthony could see, the driver wasn't going to slow down.
"Oh, shit," Anthony said, having a moment of stunned immobility before he started to panic. "Ian—"
"I know, I know!" Ian was already moving, grabbing the injured woman under the armpits and starting to drag her toward the mouth of the tunnel.
"No," Mark Fischbach finally spoke up. "You don't have time. Get to the front of the Cadillac—if you're anywhere else, you might get crushed."
Anthony distinctly didn't like the way he said 'you' and not 'we,' but he didn't have time to think about it. He helped Ian pick up the woman, who was as good as unconscious now, and drag her deeper into the tunnel. Anthony set her down and turned back to find where Mark was.
He was still in the middle of the road, his pistol out and aimed at the oncoming truck.
"Mark, move!" Anthony shouted at him over the truck's blaring horn and squealing brakes.
Mark ignored him, remaining completely focused as he fired twice, aiming probably to take out the vehicle's tires.
At the same time as the first shot, the truck crashed into Mark's little sedan.
At the same time as the second shot, the sedan went sailing forward into the Cadillac, which rolled toward Ian and Anthony.
Mark dove out of the way of the truck, throwing himself in front of Ian, Anthony, and the collapsed woman on the ground.
Anthony instinctively threw his arms up in front of his face as shrapnel exploded from the collision. He heard something sudden and loud—maybe the sound of something blowing up—and felt a wave of heat sweep across him.
Then everything went silent.
Anthony slowly brought his arms away from his face and opened his eyes. Mark was in front of him, his back to Anthony and Ian and his arms outstretched as if to protect them. The mail truck was stopped in the tunnel only a few feet from where the three of them stood.
"Mark?" Ian said, his voice the first sound to break through the silence and the ringing in Anthony's ears.
Mark's arms slowly dropped to his side, but he didn't answer.
Anthony stepped out from behind him, trying to see his face to detect what was wrong.
"I'm fine," Mark gasped, suddenly unfrozen, as he stepped back to lean against the concrete wall.
He was anything but fine. Much of the debris that had flown out when the delivery truck had hit the two cars had found its way to somewhere on Mark's body. He was streaked with blood and he had a burn running from the back of his left hand to his elbow. The surface of his black mask was torn, revealing the brown insides of the leather.
Anthony realized immediately that if Mark hadn't made that idiotic move, all of that would have hit him and Ian.
"Jesus Christ, you dumbass," Anthony said, an inexorable sense of guilt washing through him. "W—Why?"
Mark shook his head and waved Anthony off, cringing as he tried to shift his weight off of his left leg. Glancing down, Anthony could see that the front of the Cadillac must have hit him in the side of the leg. He was probably fortunate it wasn't broken—assuming, of course, that it wasn't.
Ian spoke again before Anthony could. He did so while putting a hand on Mark's shoulder. "You don't have to stay around, Mark. If you want to get out of here now, you can do that."
Mark nodded, not really giving an answer, and dropped himself down to sit on the ground. He leaned his head back against the dirty wall, taking a deep breath before saying, "I'm fine. I'll be fine. I'm just—still processing everything."
Still trying to cope with the pain, more like.
_v_
Ian regretted pretty much every decision he'd made on this mission so far. But he didn't let himself think about it. He allowed all his passing regrets to be swept away around the stationary focus in his stream thoughts. The focus—that was, the mission objective.
Before he could get anything else done, Ian checked on the Indian woman, who was still unconscious on the ground.
He picked up her wrist and felt for a pulse. Nothing.
No. Oh, god, no.
He reached up to her neck and felt for a pulse there. He could feel one along her jugular vein, but it was faint.
"Anthony?" he said, his voice coming out meeker than he wanted it to.
"What?" his best friend replied, coming to kneel next to him.
"I—she—she's dying. I don't know what to do. Sh—should I call an ambulance? Shit. If I do that, our mission is fucked. What're the repercussions if we don't get those stolen documents back?"
Anthony looked at him as if he were insane. "Ian, if anyone gets into that case, our entire organization is dead. You, me, the other agents, management—everyone. We're all either dead or, best-case scenario, in prison."
Ian looked away to hide the anguish in his expression. He already knew the decision he was going to make. He just loathed himself for it.
He took a deep breath, letting his feelings sweep past the rock in the stream. "Alright. I'm leaving her here. We need to go raid that truck and find out where the case is. The driver's probably not terribly injured, though, so we'll have to make sure he doesn't try to stop—" Ian's brain processed too late that Anthony was looking wide-eyed over his shoulder.
"Ian m—" he didn't finish before lunging forward and knocking Ian to the ground as bullets whizzed over their heads.
"Jesus," Ian said, his heart racing. "Movemovemove. We've gotta get behind something."
Trying to stay low to the ground, the two untangled themselves and dove over behind the Cadillac, where Mark had already taken cover.
Their assailant seemed to be the person who had been driving the truck. From what Ian could make out, looking through the half-broken windshield of the red coupe, the man was uninjured. And….
There were more of them. It seemed the back of the truck had held at least four people.
Apparently this had all been rather planned out, and whoever had planned it had considered the possibility of fierce opposition.
"We can't hide back here," Ian decided. "We have to actually fight."
"Ian, is your shotgun in the car?" Anthony asked immediately.
"Yeah, I think so, but you can't—"
Without hesitation, Anthony leapt over the trunk of the coupe and sprinted toward Ian's Subaru, still crashed outside the tunnel. Some shots followed him, but most were still focused on Mark and Ian.
The men with guns weren't just going to stand back and shoot the whole time. Two of them were striding up to the Cadillac, not bothering to shoot since they had yet to be threatened.
Ian pulled out his pistol and fired a shot at each of them. One shot missed completely, while the other must have grazed one man's shoulder, since blood started to seep through his clothing shortly after.
He tried to fire again, but his magazine had run out of rounds. He ducked down to reload—which only took a few seconds—and it was then that he noticed Mark wasn't shooting.
"What are you doing?" he hissed. "If you're here, help me!"
Mark's expression was completely determined as he said, "I'm not shooting them."
Ian finished reloading and fired again. "Then give me your pistol and get out of my way," he growled.
"Ian," Mark said in his deep voice, putting a hand on the arm Ian was using to hold his pistol. "You don't have to shoot them—"
"Fischbach," Ian said, his eyebrows knitting, "if there were a different way to do this, I would do it. Okay? We don't have time for this." He pulled away and peered over the car's hood to fire again.
"Ian!" Anthony called from somewhere a few yards away.
Ian ducked down again, having incapacitated one of the people, and looked to the source of Anthony's voice. He seemed to be behind the crushed carcass of Mark's blue sedan.
"Catch!" Anthony called, and appeared from behind the vehicle briefly before tossing Ian's shotgun at him and crouching again to avoid getting shot.
Ian tracked the shotgun with his eyes and stepped forward when it came to him, tossing his pistol aside in order to catch it. The weapon landed heavily in his arms and he swung it around to his shoulder. He loaded a magazine—which he had on his belt with his pistol holster—into it and shot at the men in front of the truck again.
"Anthony, take this," he called, and swept his pistol off the ground. He waited for his friend to appear, and as soon as he saw Anthony's head pop up above the roof of the sedan, he put the safety on the gun and tossed it over.
Anthony had caught it and shot a man down in less than two seconds.
Ian knew he and Mark couldn't hide behind the car forever. The men from the truck were closing in on them, and if they got to the other side of the car, things would get tricky.
Unfortunately, Ian never got time to think about it.