A/N: Again, thank you all very much for the reviews. I really do love getting them, they're great motivation! This is a shorter chapter, I know, but I didn't think it worked as well when it was longer.
Hawkes dived for the protection of the nearest pillar, the roar of gunshots slamming and ricocheting off the walls, the bullets themselves lost in the confusion. His own gun ready, but unsure as to the location of his target, he paused for a second, needing the rebounding echoes to die away, leaving the waiting silence behind.
He slid the top half of his body sideways, to look. "NYPD! Drop your weapon and come out!" he shouted again. He didn't want to resort to shooting unless he had to, and he couldn't see any movement to give the shooter's position away.
He jerked backwards, away from the searching bite of gunshots which were his answer. Whoever he was chasing seemed to have poor aim, he thought, with grim humour.
He risked another glance. There. A flicker of colour, just for an instant, out of place among the dull greys. For the first time, the odds began to even for him. He locked the position into his mind.
- - - - -
"I'm going to go and see where Hawkes has got to," Stella said, with a slight frown. "He's been gone for a while, he might have found something. You ok on your own here for a bit?"
"Sure," Adam said, shooting a slightly uneasy glance at the body. He repeated his question. "What do you want me to do here?"
She glanced around the room. She'd watched Adam for a while earlier, out of the corner of her eye mostly, although he had quickly become so absorbed in processing that she'd doubted he'd have noticed a marching band parade past the door as long as they stayed out of his way. Maybe even if they hadn't stayed out of his way; the day before she'd watched with amusement as he'd walked straight into a glass wall at the lab while absorbed in examining trace reports, and he'd simply rebounded off and corrected his course without looking up.
Considering his question, she looked at the body again. "I need you to do a once-over on Allan, check if I've missed anything. A fresh pair of eyes'd be useful." Despite the task seeming superficial to her, even as she said it his face lit up, and she found herself smiling back at his obvious pleasure that she was asking him to scrutinise her work, rather than the other way around.
Turning in the doorway, she watched him crouch down next to the body, the trepidation that being alone with it was causing him obviously matched and outweighed by the pride installed by her trust in him. She found herself smiling again. It was nice, having someone around who accepted so unconditionally any small offering metered out to him.
She began to walk down the corridor, towards the stairwell. "Hawkes?" she called.
No answer.
- - - - -
Another thunderstorm of flying bullets, this time with no chance of hitting him as he was still protected by the concrete. When a pause came, he returned fire for the first time, ducking back for the returning wave. He glanced behind him, instinctively recording data, possible trajectories, final locations of the deadly pieces of metal.
And his mind suddenly seemed to freeze and leap ahead of him at the same time as he realised fully what was in a direct line from him, at the far corner of the basement.
In a direct line from a man who would be unable to continue missing that unintentional target for very much longer.
Facts and figures. Inescapable facts he wished he didn't know, but they were branded onto the surface of his mind. Average speed of a bullet in air, 800 m/s. Average weight, thirty grams. Kinetic energy, which transferred to heat energy as it traveled and upon contact. More than enough to strike a spark, incite a momentary current as it sheared though a package of volatile and only temporarily stabilised chemicals to hit a wire, the metal of the blasting cap, but there could be enough energy even if the bullet missed the metal altogether, searing through the closely packed nitroglycerine molecules. A millisecond of heat from the burning bullet, the millisecond needed to reach flashpoint.
- - - - -
"Hawkes?" Stella called again, the corridor of the floor below where she had left Adam stretching out in front of her. The staircase wound up and down to each side of her. She hesitated for a second, and headed past closed doors, checking this floor, just in case. She opened each door as she passed it and stood under the lintel while her eyes briefly examined the now unconcealed room beyond.
- - - - -
A building scheduled for demolition.
And just one bullet, missing its intended target, but greedily latching to the bearing that would find it a better one.
- - - - -
Adam straightened up, camera held in front of him, taking a last wide-angle shot of the body. The light flashed. The shutter clicked.
- - - - -
Hawkes was very still. His muscles and brain froze. There was no time to do anything, no time at all.
The picture which flashed into his mind was Danny. Danny saying, "Boom."
Prophetic.
- - - - -
Blinding heat. Burning light. A flashpoint of sound.
The pillar crumbled and shattered apart in the force of the explosion, molecules of air and dust hurtled outwards, a tsunami of volume and pressure to smash everything out of its way, picking up paper-light dolls and flinging them recklessly ahead, scraping and clawing at the skin of the walls, the metal ribs hidden in the floors above.
Joints slipped, joins cracked open. The steel bones, weakened for this purpose, bent and snapped under the strain, the weight above pushing down and falling faster, faster, the whole acceleration of gravity pulling. The room folded at the corner, floors bending, stressing, reaching breaking point, passing it. The shockwave rippled up through the walls, deforming, tearing, flaking the structure, a tower built of ashes blown apart in a storm.
The building from the outside folded into one corner as it collapsed, buckling and rippling down in the shockwave as if built from playing cards. Paint and plaster sheared away, flakes spinning and flittering in the air, a maelstrom of pale locusts swarming amid the destruction. Glass shivered into liquid sheets, joining with and falling with the splintered sheets of glassy rain. Shattered breezeblocks gusted though the whirlpool of air currents, smashing, crashing, and concrete thudded down to the earth where it took root. Flat cracked to jagged splinters, angular was sheared to smooth, solid disintegrated to ricocheting, barraging particles, gaps of air solidified to chaotic tangled barricades.
Dust liberated from the building and stolen from the earth flew up in clouds, billowing, rolling, and was compressed back to mud by the fierce pounding of the oppressing rain.
The building demolished itself, structural suicide, on schedule.
Stillness regained itself.
The rain fell relentlessly.
A/N part 2: I asked my ex-structural engineer physics teacher for information before I wrote this, so I'm pretty sure that the facts contained within are accurate, although he probably now thinks that I'm a terrorist.
