When you are surrounded and outnumbered you have a choice: either surrender or fight your way through your enemy. Surrendering is usually the sensible decision. It is more likely to leave you alive and breathing, to fight another day.
So we fought our way through.
If the CIA could be said to have goons, these were them. The number of brain cells owned by the ten men surrounding us was outweighed by muscle tissue, ten to one. Or so it seemed.
Still, I wished Patel had a panic room hidden below his house somewhere.
He did not.
The gun play was quick and heartless. In real life, what seems like an hour is actually a few minutes, at most. Time is dilated in order to leave room for more action and more reaction. El quickly dispatched several of the pinheads. They didn't go down easily; too much mass, but they eventually succumbed if you imbedded enough lead into them. Roger also seemed to be a good shot.
I surprised myself. Suddenly, the gun that Sands had given me was in my hands and I was firing it. At first there was no control. The kick of the gun threw me off balance. I adjusted and found myself causing one of the henchmen to fall. Fuck. Was I sickened more than exhilarated? Or visa versa? I don't know. But both feelings hit me at once, along with the ongoing panic that accompanied this entire nightmare. Sands was orienting himself. We both stood on either side of a window. He was hesitant to move. The commotion of sounds was likely too much to digest and make sense of. I was realizing that he really was blind. It wasn't some affectation or a joke. It's not like he could surreptitiously peak out from under the blindfold for a second. I put my hand on his shoulder and we made our way to the back of the house. El and Roger started to blast a path for us and we ran for it. We had parked a car in back just for this sort of occasion. I didn't get it then. Now it was our only way of getting out of this mess. I jumped into the drivers seat. Sands did not get in yet. He ducked behind the car and waited.
Then it happened.
Roger was blasting away in a 360 degree circle. Yet, seemingly out of nowhere, one of the goons materialized and shot. It happened in a split second and Roger was down. I couldn't see exactly where he was shot but El was dragging him to the car and the perpetrator raised his gun again. And then quickly fell with a bullet imbedded in his temporal lobe. Sands kept his still smoking gun out and hopped into the passenger seat. I opened the door for El and Roger and we sped off.
Roger was trying to talk. Sands was practically kneeling in his seat facing the back and talking to Roger. "You're going to be fine, fucker. You still have to give me payback for that date I ruined for you with my stupid prank. Come on." Roger smiled a bit and said "It's ok." His breathing started to become erratic and he was unconscious now. Soon El was trying do CPR in the cramped back seat. Sands was yelling. "You can't do this, dammit. You can't." There was a strained sort of desperation in his voice. He could hear El trying to position himself in order to perform chest compressions. He leaned in between the two front seats and reached in back. His angle was actually better than El's. He was on his knees. He started to do compressions. I knew he must have felt the warn wetness of Roger's blood seeping through the chest wound. El and Sands switched off for a desperate half hour. The continued long after it was obvious that Roger was gone. Sands emitted half of a strangled sob and remained slumped over the divider between our seats with his head in his hands.
I didn't know where we were going but I kept driving.