A Knight in shining Nerd-Herd armour
(Chapter 3)
As the door slammed, Casey made a decision. The woman who had been strapping a makeshift bandage around his wound looked alarmed as he reached up to grip the filing cabinet nearby, beginning to drag himself to his feet.
"What are you doing? You need to stay still."
Casey shook his head. "If he finds Chuck, he'll kill him. I'm going after them." He held out his hand to her. "Help me up."
He looked over to the unconscious robber under the desk.
"You," he said, indicating to the woman sat nearest to the desk. "He's got a gun on him somewhere- he should have some ammo as well. Pass it over here."
The woman hesitantly reached over and extracted the gun from the man's belt and handed it to Casey before searching his pockets for spare ammunition.
"I can't find anything," she said after checking the last pocket.
Casey sighed and ejected the clip from the pistol. Five shots left in it. Well, that would have to do; he didn't need more than one shot to take out his target anyway.
"Hey, just who are you?" the woman asked.
Casey turned to see all of the other hostages looking at him with the same curiosity and he smiled.
"I just work at the Buy More," he told her, letting himself out of the room.
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Chuck moved through the staff areas of the bank, keeping the gun in his hand and checking around each corner before he walked, just as he'd seen Casey and Sarah do a hundred times before. He had no idea where the last man was, and this worried him. The others had all been relatively easy; the two in the vault had been otherwise occupied and therefore easy to sneak up on and the injured man had been at a disadvantage to begin with. This guy scared him the most, the very same man who had put a gun to his head barely an hour earlier and threatened to kill him. Taking a deep breath, Chuck forced himself to keep moving. If he stopped to think about it for any length of time, he'd lose his nerve.
Unfortunately, he hadn't seen any sign of the man since he'd left the office. If only he could use the security cameras to find him, but the robbers had already disabled them by spraying over the lenses when they had first come in. Even if he could get to the controls, all he would see would be a black screen.
A sudden thought struck Chuck and he smiled to himself, turning around and hurrying back down to the vaults.
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Casey leaned heavily on the wall to catch his breath, one hand clutching the gun and the other held to his stomach. He wasn't used to this, needing help, feeling weak, and he didn't like it one bit. The thought of leaving Chuck to that psycho, however, was worse. With considerable effort, he pushed away from the wall and made himself walk, realising belatedly that he was leaving a trail of blood smears down the walls and counters he was using for support. It was careless, he knew, but then again, he wasn't the one being stalked. Chuck was.
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Chuck went to the two unconscious men near the vaults and searched them for what he wanted. Both men had a hand-held radio, and he took them both. One, he switched off, tossing it back into the room, but the other he took with him.
He made his way back through the corridors, re-checking to make sure that the remaining man had not come down this way. There was still no sign of him but Chuck had a plan. Granted, it was a plan based on some dumb movie that he'd seen years ago, and in said movie, it hadn't actually worked, but it was the best he had.
Twisting the volume on the radio he held down to minimum, Chuck pressed the transmit button over and over again. He kept moving, creeping silently as he listened, the gun still in his other hand. It was no use, he thought, until a low sound caught his attention. He stopped. There is was again.
Chuck grinned, hardly believing that it had worked. Knowing that it would only be a matter of seconds before the robber figured it out and switched off his radio, Chuck hurried as quietly as he could toward the intermittent crackles of static that he could hear.
Sure enough, the sound cut off a moment later and Chuck deposited the radio on a counter as he passed by. It didn't matter now; the static bursts had already told him roughly where the man was.
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Casey heard the static and headed that way. He knew that the robbers had been carrying radios as they had already found the one on the guy Chuck had left in the office. The noise just had to be Chuck's doing, he thought, smiling.
He heard the sound of footsteps ahead of him and tried to move faster but it was getting nigh on impossible. He was having to lean on the counters all of the way, now, leaving bloodied hand-prints behind him, and feeling the cold sweat on his skin with the effort of just keeping himself upright.
Just a little bit further, he kept telling himself.
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Chuck heard the faint scuff of a shoe on carpet and turned just in time to see the very man he had been searching for some though the door. They saw each other at the same time, both whipping their guns up, training them on each other. The robber's eyes showed his disdain for Chuck.
"Nerd guy?"
"No," Chuck told him, wanting to wipe that smug look of the jerk's face. "Agent Charles Carmichael."
He saw the robber's eyes widen fractionally and his thumb shifted on the gun's trigger.
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Casey rounded the corner just in time to see the robber, with his back to Casey, make a move to fire but another shot rang out. He saw Chuck, the gun held steady in his hand. The minute he'd said those words, his posture had changed, going to his Agent Carmichael persona. Sure, he'd squeezed his eyes shut as he fired but the shot had hit the target.
After a moment, Chuck opened one eye and looked around suspiciously before opening the other. His gaze fell to the man lying in front of him, a wet patch of blood slowly appearing on his chest.
Suddenly, the doors burst open and chaos descended on the bank. Amid yells of 'Armed Police!' and 'Drop your weapons!', the bank was filled with blue uniformed men and women in bullet-proof vests and helmets. The noise snapped Chuck out of him daze and it was then that he saw Casey.
"John!"
He managed to catch Casey before he fell and lowered him to the ground but he was dragged away. Chuck found himself surrounded by guns, all pointed at him as he was ordered to get on the floor and drop his gun. Only then did he realise that he was still holding it.
Chuck threw the gun away before trying to get back to Casey but the police wouldn't let him as he too was surrounded by police. Casey had surrendered his gun and was in no state to make a getaway but they were still guarding him.
"I'm not one of them!" he protested. "Just let me see if John's OK. He needs an ambulance; get him some help, please."
Chuck was pushed roughly back to the floor and handcuffs snapped around his wrists before he was dragged to his feet.
"Wait."
Chuck and the police holding him turned to see Casey trying to get up and failing, sliding back down the wall.
"He's telling the truth. We were taken hostage along with ten other people. They're in the first office on the right, along with one of the robbers."
Another officer was dispatched to check out his story, returning a few moments later and confirming it. He was followed by the other men and women who had been in the office, all beginning to protest when they saw Chuck in handcuffs.
It took a while but eventually the handcuffs were removed. Casey was being loaded on to a stretcher and Chuck pushed his way through the police to get to him.
"Mr Bartowski, we'll be needing to speak with you-"
Casey looked up. "No, you won't, not unless he wants to." He reeled off the emergency telephone number that was used if ever he needed to verify his security clearance. "Call it."
The paramedics took charge then, collecting up their med-kits and wheeling the stretcher back out to the ambulance. Chuck followed, refusing to leave his side as they moved through the growing crowd outside. The police were trying to keep the area clear but the story had already reached the media. Reporters shouted questions at them, snapping pictures and trying to get as close as possible with cameras. It seemed that at least one of the other hostages had told them that Chuck had gone after the robbers as he heard one reporter shout,
"Sir, is it true that you took on the thieves single handedly?"
Chuck ignored them, climbing into the back of the ambulance with Casey.
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In the Buy More, most of the staff had gathered around the TV wall, watching as the story unfolded. There had been a robbery and some people had been taken hostage, the news anchor said. There were pictures from outside the bank of the moment that the police had stormed the building.
"Hey, guys, look!" Lester pointed to the screens excitedly. "The hostages are coming out."
Everyone's attention turned back to the screens, watching as the anchor man handed back over to the pretty brunette reporter who was outside the bank.
"It seems that our hero is camera shy," she was saying. "According to the accounts of those people held in the bank, this man defended their lives by single handedly taking on the thieves. Our source says that he is an employee of the Buy More store who was a customer in the bank at the time of the robbery. He is seen here getting into the ambulance with his friend, another employee of the Buy More, after he was shot by one of the thieves. We do not have details on his condition at this point but reports say that he was badly hurt."
As a freeze frame of Chuck, looking at the camera for a split second as he climbed into the ambulance, came onto the screen, silence fell around the TV screens.
"Was that-?"
Morgan stared at the picture. "Chuck did that?" He smiled. "Way to go, Chuck."
Lester frowned. "He left with Casey, right? That means it was Casey who got shot…"
Morgan was already dialling on his cell phone. He finally managed to get hold of Chuck, telling him how they'd seen the news and asking how Casey was doing.
"I don't know," Chuck told him. "They took him into surgery as soon as we got here and I haven't heard anything since."
To be continued…