Author's Note: In which changes happen, Dusty explains some things, and shots are fired.
Disclaimer: G.I. Joe and all associated characters and concepts are property of Hasbro Inc, and I derive no profit from this. Please accept this in the spirit with which it is offered—as a work of respect and love, not an attempt to claim ownership or earn money from this intellectual property.
Chapter Twenty-One: Bitter
The male quartermasters bunked separately from the women, but they were only a corridor away. For a few moments Annie was tempted to head right on over there, grab Murphy and demand some answers. Maybe rifle through his things, too, because it wasn't like she'd broken nearly enough of the ultra-secret military group's rules yet.
Not an option, though. If any of the male quartermasters were spies, it would be an extra-deluxe-with-fries bad idea to put them on the alert about her suspicions. Considering the state she was in, too, it would be entirely too easy for someone to knock her down a flight of stairs and claim she tripped. Hell, considering the state she was in, the coroners (did G.I. Joe have a coroner? What would they call him, Stiff One?) would have a hard time separating postmortem injuries from whatever you called the kind that happened after death.
(She looked it up later. The word was 'antemortem,' which make no sense to Annie. Shouldn't it have been 'premortem?' What was it with medical guys and their tendency to make everything difficult for everyone? Not that she was nursing a grudge.)
That left one option. 92Gs slept in bunkrooms, but they lived in the kitchen. Everyone had their own little cupboards and nooks for personal items; they weren't really supposed to, but they did anyway, even in kitchens that were much stricter about rules than G.I. Joe's. Chopper's saffron, SOS's letters from his girlfriend, Eighty-Six's little pictures of saints, Murphy's bottle …
Murphy's bottle. Murphy's sacred, untouchable bottle, which she had never actually seen him drink from. Had anyone ever seen him open that bottle?
Annie skidded to a halt, thinking. He had a flask pretty much constantly—she remembered him producing it on the convoy—but for someone known as a functional alcoholic, he never seemed to be even tipsy. He had none of the signs of a habitual drunk.
And if he wasn't drinking, what the hell was up with the flask and the bottle? Annie was pretty sure she ought to find out, and there was no time like the present.
Getting to the kitchen was going to be a hassle. The patrols had been rearranged since Zartan's attempted escape (and she hoped Doc had used his biggest, dullest, most barbed needle on those stitches) and it was blatantly obvious that she was AWOL from the infirmary. That meant the corridors were out of the question. Again.
Suppressing a sigh, she located the nearest janitor's closet.
It was surprisingly easy to get into the vent this time. Perhaps she was too worn out to care, or perhaps she just knew what to expect this time, but she slid into the dimness with an odd sense of tired triumph. Looking down the long dusty lines of the vent, she took a moment to enjoy the absurd familiarity. She'd done this before, which meant she could do it again. And this time she had most of the night left to make the trip, which meant she could go slowly and not make as much noise.
Still, Annie promised herself that when she was eventually kicked out, she would take up swimming. All this vent-crawling was a full-body experience, and training or no, there were clearly some muscles she wasn't using enough. Maybe she could market it as a trendy new workout. Call it Tush-Tightening Tunnel Training
When she reached the vertical shaft, Annie paused for a little to reconsider her route. She knew which way she'd gone last time, but they might be expecting her to go that way again. Better not risk it. She climbed up just one floor for the sake of stealth, and absolutely not to rest her aching arms, and set off diagonally to the way she'd originally gone. By her mental map, she could make her way to another one of the vertical shafts, go up another level, and double back again to reach the kitchens. It would mean more zigzagging than she was comfortable with, but at least she had the time for it.
Everything was going to plan until, negotiating a simple detour around a grille, the floor of the vent collapsed under her.
Lifeline stifled a yawn as he rolled off his cot. Technically he had a bunkroom near the infirmary, but with the steady flow of injured Joes and the high-priority prisoner under care he had given up on it and just moved a cot into one of the back rooms off the main infirmary ward. It meant sleeping in his clothes most of the time, but it also meant he could be ready to get to work at a moment's notice. But now something had shaken him out of his sleep.
"Hello."
Lifeline almost yelped. He could have sworn he was alone in the office, but now there was a slim dark figure standing in the doorway, enormous flat eyes glinting in the dim light. It took him a moment to realize that the eyes were just goggles, that he was still half-asleep and imagining things, and that the person standing in the doorway was Low-Light.
"Hello," he said, trying very hard not to be annoyed with the other man. "What can I do for you?"
"Thought I should tell you," Low-Light said quietly. "Short Stack checked out early."
For a moment there was silence. Then Lifeline sighed and rubbed the last of the sleep out of his eyes. "I was afraid of that. Is it happening tonight, then?"
"Nothing official. Orders are to be on standby."
Without another word, Low-Light stepped back into the shadows and vanished. Lifeline sighed again and went to check his field kit.
He wasn't very high on the need-to-know scale, but nothing remained secret in the Pit for long. Whatever game the higher-ups were playing, he didn't like it, because he knew that sooner or later there would be casualties. Hopefully none of them on their side.
Annie landed hard on her right side, gasping for air. For a moment, everything was white and fuzzy: concussion combined with dust and powdered plaster from the ceiling lent her surroundings a festive wintery appearance. Her head gave a throb and Annie sucked in another deep breath, which was a bad idea. Dust filled her nose and mouth and she sneezed hard enough to almost dislocate her jaw..
Gradually, the dust cleared a little to reveal—in standard-issue shorts, t-shirt and a peeved expression—Dusty.
Whoops.
It took Annie another belated moment to actually make the connection. Bunkroom. She was sprawled on the carpet in someone's bunkroom. Someone who had heard her in the vent and, what, booby-trapped it?Someone who, apparently, was a now-dusty Dusty. He looked tired and a little irritable, which was actually the worst that Annie had ever seen him.
"Ow," she said. It seemed like the thing to say.
"What do you think you're doing?" Dusty whispered with a definite tinge of irritation. "Are you crazy?"
"Possibly," Annie hissed back, rubbing her bruised hip. "But maybe I should be asking you the same thing, since your ceiling is seriously not up to code. Ow!"
"I know it isn't," Dusty said. "I loosened some of the screws and made a few modifications to the paneling the minute I moved in here. If people know they're risking a broken neck, they're less likely to mess with Andy. What's your malfunction? Why the hell were you in there? Again?"
Annie blinked. "Who's Andy?"
Dusty nodded to something over her right shoulder. "That's Andy."
She looked and did not, in fact, immediately die of a heart attack. It was a near thing, though. Sitting on the standard Army-issue chest of drawers was an enormous glass terrarium, and in that terrarium was a hairy … stripy … twitchy … multilegged thing. In the light of day, it might have been a sedate gray. Seen after midnight in the deep shadow of a darkened bunkroom, it looked bigger than a human head and appeared to be colored Soul-Eating Stygian Nightmare Black.
It waved one hairy leg at her. The leg was thicker than a pencil and tipped with claws.
"Okay," she said, trying to get her breathing under control, "bad question. What is Andy?"
"We're not sure," Dusty said with a shrug as he sat back down on his bed. The bunks were stacked to preserve floor space, and the top bunk was occupied by a heavily snoring Snow-Job. "Outback brought her back accidentally from a mission in Sri Lanka when she was only a couple of weeks old. She seems to have crawled into his pocket while he was taking five somewhere. Scared the shit out of Flint when she jumped out during the debriefing. They were going to squash her, but she'd already bit Flint and the bite was swelling pretty badly, so they kept her alive to study her poison. I took care of her after my Galeodes granti died, and we bonded."
"That's … not very comforting," Annie said.
"Neither is having you crawling around in the vents in the middle of the night. What are you doing, anyway? Trying to make some money on the blind-bag bets?"
"I wish," she muttered. "Look, I'm sorry. I didn't want to disturb anyone. But I have things I need to do."
"Like escape from the infirmary again and wake the whole base up."
"Well, yeah, but there's more than that." Could she trust him? Well … Common sense wrestled with everything else and temporarily lost. She was tired, dirty, in extreme pain, and frankly sick to death of all this G.I. Joe bullshit. She was definitely quitting. "I think I know who the spy is."
Dusty's brow furrowed. She saw the reactions chase across his face: first surprise, then a conscious shutting-down of said surprise, as if he knew what she was talking about but also knew he wasn't supposed to know. Clearly she wasn't the only one who heard things while working.
"A spy," he said. "There've been rumors."
"Well, those rumors are true and I can prove it." Annie stuck a hand down her shirt and, ignoring Dusty's surprised expression, rooted around. Fuck protocol, she was definitely out of this unit soon anyway. She quickly found the small rag bundle and unfolded it, showing Dusty the microfiche squares. "I think someone in the kitchen is passing notes to Cobra. See these?"
Dusty eyed them with clear skepticism. Apparently wasn't considered a trustworthy source at that point, possibly due to the head injury. Or the pony pajamas.
"That looks like a sugar packet," he said.
"It's not a sugar packet, it's microfiche!" She held it up. "Can't you see it?"
"Not really."
"Well, don't you have a magnifying glass?"
"Actually, no."
"What about a jar of moonshine?"
"Not really."
"So you're not going to believe me?"
"Eh, jury's still out." Dusty opened a nightstand drawer and removed what looked like a lunch bag. He stuck a pencil into the bag, extracting something small and pinkish, and nudged the lid of the stygian horror's tank aside. As Annie watched, he stuck the skewered treat into the tank and wiggled it a bit. A flurry of hairy death claws seized the pink thing and Dusty pulled back the pencil, which to Annie's surprise was not actually broken in half or charred by the nightmare dwelling within. "Sorry," he added as he put the tank lid back into place. "She has to eat a lot. It's shedding season."
In all fairness to Dusty, it wasn't actually the strangest thing she'd heard in the last couple of weeks. Annie shook her head and brushed her hair out of her eyes. "Look," she said. "I have to get to the kitchen, okay? I need to check on something. Are you gonna try to stop me?"
"Dunno. You should be in the infirmary, right? Lifeline gets downright unfriendly when you aid and abet a wanted bedrest patient. Also, how do I know you're not actually the spy?"
Well, that was blunt. But it was also sensible and straightforward, which Annie couldn't help appreciating a little. "Look, I just need to go to the kitchen. I'll go right back to the infirmary after. Scout's honor. May I go now?"
"No." Dusty opened the terrarium again and poked a couple pieces of foliage into place for the hellbeast. "Not by yourself, anyway. If Lifeline found out that I let you go I'd be on bedpan-cleaning duty for the next millennium. So I'm going to escort you to the kitchen, and if there's nothing there, I'm going to escort you back to the infirmary and tattle to the docs. Deal?"
A sleepy rumble from near the ceiling interrupted. Snow Job, looking rather like a heavily hungover young Santa Claus, rolled over and groaned. "Fucking hell, Tadur, shut up," he muttered. "You seriously got a girl in here?"
"Not for long," Dusty told him. "Go back to sleep, Snow. I'm gonna go take the cook to the kitchen and prove that there aren't any spies there."
Snow Job blinked hazily, considering that. "... okay, man, whatever turns your crank. Just, uh, wash your hands after."
"No promises." Dusty quickly pulled on BDU pants and sat down to lace up his boots. "And don't touch the thermostat while I'm gone, or I'll stake you to an anthill at dawn."
"Fuck you too." Snow stuck his head under his pillow and rolled back into the gloom. Annie sympathized. Dusty patted the monster's terrarium lightly and led her out of the room.
The quiet minutes that followed reminded her of nothing so much as sneaking out to meet a boy. The two of them walked light-footed, not so much hiding as taking circular routes to avoid patrols and trying to look casual about wherever they were going in the middle of the night. The halls were half-lit and quiet, but the whoosh of the air system and the distant rumble of machinery from the motor pool kept it from being too silent.
Annie padded along, brushing dust from her hideous pink pajamas and mentally ordering herself not to be nervous. There wasn't much chance this could go wrong, really. Dusty was sane and responsible—for a Joe, anyway—and he seemed prepared to risk the Wrath of Lifeline, which Annie had to respect. Once they got to the kitchen, she'd see that it was all paranoia and she could go back to quietly washing out. No point in being jumpy.
"You're humming," Dusty said.
Annie clapped her hands over her mouth and swore quietly. "It wasn't 'Old Macdonald,' was it?"
"No, it sounded like 'Clementine' to me."
"Isn't that that song about the girl who dies?"
"Drowns." Dusty looked down at Annie's bare feet. "And you don't have shoes, either. But she wore herring boxes and you don't, so you should be okay."
"How do you know that?"
"How do you know the song and not know that?"
"I don't know, it's just … one of those tunes everyone knows." Annie waved a hand vaguely, leaving another residual trail of dust behind. "Herring boxes? Seriously?"
"Yep. You learn things at G.I. Joe trivia night." Dusty poked his head around the corner and signaled that the coast was clear. "Cross-Country won $75 by identifying ten American folk song heroes in one minute. But Flint kicked his ass when the category changed to the English Regency."
Annie contemplated that for a moment. "Trivia nights. Huh."
Dusty grinned. "Well, yeah. There's a lot of guys with degrees in this unit. Did you know Spirit studied law? Actually, I think Scarlett did too. There's a lot of lawyers around. Flint's a Rhodes Scholar, Lady Jaye did … something, I'm not sure, but one time we had to guard this member of the French National Academy of the Arts and he recognized Jaye from some dissertation she gave once. He was raving about her insight into the mind of Molly somebody. Hell, even me. I was finishing up my ecology bachelor's when my preenlistment application was accepted."
"Application to what?"
He glanced over his shoulder, checking lines-of-sight, and Annie belatedly remembered to do likewise. "The G.I. Joe team."
Now Annie did trip. She planted her good arm against the wall to steady herself and stared. "You volunteered? For G.I. Joe?"
"Well, yeah. We're an all-volunteer army now." Dusty darted across the corridor and into a deep patch of shadow underneath a maintenance staircase. After eyeing the corners (and the ceiling vents and floors, because that was a lesson well-learned) Annie followed. Dusty produced a maintenance ID card and swiped it through the scanner, opening the door at the top of the stairwell. "They wanted a desert specialist, and I was a desert guy looking to join up. I guess they liked my scores. Went through boot and got fast-tracked here. It's been a good fit." The skepticism must have been obvious on Annie's face, because he barked out a soft laugh. "Believe it or not, some people can enjoy what they do."
"I heard rumors that that was possible, but I never believed it." Annie mopped a touch of sweat off her face with the sleeve of her pajamas, leaving a streak of dampened dust behind. She had the sudden urge to say something. Tell him G.I. Joe had won, maybe. She was good and done with it now, and it would be a relief to say it out loud to someone who would be obligated to take notice of it. But the words stayed stuck in her throat, and she remained quiet as Dusty unlocked the next door and peered out into the hall.
"Almost there," he whispered. "Maintain silence from now on."
Annie nodded and clamped her mouth shut.
Right in the heart of the base, the patrols were thinner. Ordinarily on-base kitchens would be located near a loading dock on the perimeter and require heightened security, but G.I. Joe made a point of leaving as few weak spots as possible in its layout. It meant greenshirts had the unenviable task of escorting pallets of bulk ingredients down multiple levels, but it also meant that outsiders would have a hard time accessing the Joes' food supply.
Here, at least, Annie was able to take the lead. She made it her business to know the kitchen like the back of her hand. Maintenance doors were usually covered by patrols, but there was only a short corridor between the kitchen and the mess hall, and it was a lot harder to cover all points of entry on a hall meant to seat more than a hundred loud, pushy soldiers. The two of them slipped through easily.
The kitchen looked different in the middle of the night. Emergency lights were always on, but most of the huge room was shrouded in dimness and the tiny yellow lights only seemed to make the darkness deeper. The tile was shadowed blue-gray and cold as ice, and the chalkboard used for announcements was only a square of flat black against the wall.
Dusty gestured to the kitchen, give her an "Okay, now what?" sort of shrug. She pointed to the door and made the hand signal for "hold position." She half-expected another of his amused grins, but he just nodded and pointed to the cabinets before moving to guard the door. Annie headed to the cabinets, silently thankful for his presence.
First cabinet in the line was Chopper's. She pulled it open slowly, remembering that the hinges creaked, and rifled quickly through it. Saffron, yes; the bottles of Amaretto, yes; the pencil cup, yes. No box of bullets. She let out a breath she hadn't known she'd been holding and closed the cabinet.
Chopper still wasn't perfectly clear. He might have spotted her digging around in his area and moved the box after she'd already lifted a couple of bullets. But it was equally as likely that whoever planted them in his cabinet had removed them once Annie had been seen to take the bait. Chop was a good guy; if he found something suspicious, even in his own things, he'd have reported it.
Eighty-Six, clear. Nothing but personal tokens, a few letters from her family and a three-quarters-empty jug of more apple-pie moonshine. (She had good taste.) SOS, clear. Whiskey Down, clear. Dusty was gesturing for her to hurry it up, but her fingers were shaking as she worked and she was afraid she'd drop something if she moved any faster.
Murphy's, now. She opened the cabinet.
No Cobra insignia. No hidden microfiches or plans to blow up G.I. Joe. Just a bottle, made of tinted glass so cheap that it was practically opaque. When she unscrewed the cap, the smell of old, bad whiskey almost knocked her off her feet.
But when she picked up the bottle, her heart sank. It was solidly bottom-heavy, too heavy for a few ounces of liquid. When she shook the bottle, the sloshing sound produced was deep and echoing. Nine-tenths empty, despite its heft. When the liquid shifted, the weight didn't.
She grabbed a glass from the cabinet and poured the whiskey out. It was thick and syrupy, with unidentified grains floating on the surface. Nobody would be drinking this. The bottle was still heavy.
Capping it up, she felt along the bottom. Her fingers touched a seam in the glass: light, thin, almost impossible to detect. Nobody would find it in the crenelations of the texture if they hadn't previously made a habit of prying bullets open. Dusty watched silently, one ear to the door, as she went to work on the bottle with a thin-bladed paring knife.
A package of electronics slid out of the gutted bottle. She recognized a field radio when she saw one.
Jesus, she mouthed. Carefully laying it on the counter, she took a few light-footed steps back and pointed to the radio. Help? she signaled to Dusty.
He gestured her towards the door, and she went. While she watched for patrols, heart in her mouth, Dusty probed the guts of the radio with the paring knife. After a moment's work he beckoned her closer again and, hand signals failing him, began to write on the kitchen chalkboard.
V bad, he wrote. Mb not Cbr but like it. On 24/7, v soph pwr srce. Always listen. Cnfrm: spy.
Annie didn't need the chalkboard; it was easy enough, thanks to long practice, to give an expressive (albeit nonsanctioned) series of gestures which conveyed "We're fucked" and "Now what? I don't know anything about this, sergeant/sir/unspecified superior, I swear."
Dusty rolled his eyes a little and gestured for calm. Big prob. hv2 g2 Hawk now.
She mouthed Amen, which did get a small smile from him. Yeah, it was good to have someone else around for this.
Dusty erased the chalkboard, rolled up the bottle in a dishtowel and tied the bundle to his belt. Annie opened the door, checked the corners and the angles, and signaled the all-clear. The two of them crept out into the dimness.
"Hold it!"
Annie almost gave herself whiplash to go with the concussion. A dark figure—one she hadn't spotted—seemed to have materialized out of the shadows. It was tall and broad-shouldered and moved with uncanny stealth. For a moment her heart raced: oh God, not the ninjas, a ninja's gone bad and he's going to murder us. But the figure was too thin for Sgt. Snake-Eyes and too tall for Sgt. Storm Shadow, and when it stepped forward into the light, it revealed itself to be a somewhat familiar face. It was Long Arm, the guard who'd been on duty outside the quartermaster office and had commented on Annie's shoelessness before Dusty did.
Her pulse slowed a little. Guards, thank God. No more sneaking: they could demand to be escorted straight to Hawk.
"Private," Dusty said. "We're not out of quarters—this is a security situation.. Something strange has happened, and we need to see General Hawk right away. Notify the rest of the patrols so nobody gets slapped with an accidental AWOL."
"Yes, sergeant," Long Arm said promptly, saluting. "What's going on, sergeant?"
Dusty and Annie exchanged a glance. "That may be classified," Dusty said. "We need to speak to General Hawk immediately. Notify the patrols."
"Sergeant, if I don't know what's going on I'm going to have to treat the situation as unforeseen and potentially hostile." Long Arm's voice was light and calm. "A senior Joe appears to be assisting an infirmary escapee for unknown purposes. This looks like frat reg violations at the very least, sergeant."
Annie turned red, but Dusty seemed unfazed. He wasn't even humming! "If this was a frat reg violation we'd be a lot more open about it," he pointed out. "Flint, Jaye and the commandos have pretty much smashed that rule to tiny pieces. Private, either notify the patrols or get out of the way. Unless you want to be written up."
"Yes, sergeant!" Long Arm saluted. Then he sucker-punched Dusty in the face.
It was a testament to G.I. Joe training that Dusty wasn't knocked clean out. He saw the blow coming a split-second before it hit and managed to swing to the side, so the punch that was supposed to break his nose glanced off his temple instead. But the force of it still sent him reeling, and as he tried to recover his balance Long Arm followed it up with a rifle butt to the stomach. Dusty collapsed, wheezing, blood streaming down the side of his head where the skin had been laid open.
Annie hadn't even moved. Her heart seemed to have frozen in her chest, and a cold hand was making macrame out of her guts. As Dusty hit the floor she finally managed to force a shout past her lips, but it had barely formed before Long Arm swung his rifle to cover her.
"On the ground," he said calmly.
She couldn't seem to make her legs work. "What?" she said. Her mouth seemed to have dried up at some point in the last few seconds. "Wait. What? No!"
"On the ground," Long Arm repeated. Even in the dim light, Annie could see that he was of the Mister Safety Catch is Not My Friend school of thinking. He wouldn't have to be a sniper to hit her at this range, either; one twitch of his trigger finger and she was going to be having a very revealing experience. Oh God, she hoped she didn't piss herself. That would just be the worst ending to the worst possible day.
"I can't," she said. "I did that before. With Zartan."
Long Arm's jaw clenched. "Last chance," he said. "On the ground, now, or you get to die standing up."
"Does that make you piss yourself?" Annie wondered aloud. She really wished she could blame the drugs for that one.
"What?" Long Arm stared at her. "Fuck, how should I know? Either way you die, so get on the ground and make it easy for yourself."
The shadows were moving again. Dusty lay still in the darkness, blood soaking his blond hair, but something in the black was shifting. Was it it his hand? Was he awake? She could hear him breathing, anyway. Every single piece of training hammered into her seemed to have been hammered out again, but he was a super-duper scary-secret-trained Joe—albeit one who had been coldcocked by a private, and that's what you get for skipping the regular Army part of the career she supposed—and he could probably do many, many horrible things to Long Arm once he was up on his feet again. She had to give him that chance.
Well, there was something else she'd done to Zartan. And to Carter Hall, for that matter.
"Look, I don't want to die," she said, holding out her hands. "Please. I swear. I'm not gonna tell anyone. I just want to quit. I don't want to be here any more. These people are all insane. Just let me go, and you can go do whatever you want for whoever you want."
Long Arm raised his rifle. "Shut up."
"Wait!" she burst out as his finger went to the trigger. "Wait! I know more about the spy stuff!"
He lowered the rifle just few inches, but it was no longer pointing directly at Annie's chest, which she was okay with. She liked her lungs. Lungs were good to have unshot. "You don't know shit," he said bluntly. "Nobody tells QMs about that crap."
"But you were at the quartermaster office! I bet you were there for a reason. To rearrange schedules. Keep an eye on things. Protect the other man inside." Annie swallowed. Dusty still hadn't raised his head, but there was definite movement. Maybe he had a gun or a throwing knife or something. "They told me to watch for spies in the quartermasters. This goes way, way deeper than you know. Even if you kill me, they'll all—now!"
She ducked to the side and threw her arms over her head. Long Arm flinched violently and swung around, looking for an attacker. Dusty didn't move.
"The fuck are you doing?" Long Arm demanded, turning back towards her. "Are you off your pills or something?"
"Yes. Yes, actually, I am. And it's been very depressing." Why hadn't Dusty moved? Did he have a better plan? There was still that crawling motion, but she couldn't …
"Shut up." Long Arm's finger went to the trigger. Good-bye, lungs.
Then something leaped. Long Arm let out a screech. His finger tightened on the trigger, and a bullet hit the wall half an inch from Annie.
There was something on his leg, and it was climbing fast. Long Arm screeched again and tried to swat at it, but it scurried around the back and latched onto his butt with all eight horrifying black clawed legs of nightmare death. He screamed like a banshee and tried to slam his butt into the wall, and it moved again. It was on his arm. It was on his shoulder. It was on his neck, and he swatted at it ineffectually, seemingly unable to touch it.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck! Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck! Get it off me! Get it off me! Ahh! It's biting! It's fucking biting me! HELP!"
Annie backed against the kitchen door, which swung open behind her. Dusty was moving now, pulling himself to his knees, but he looked dazed. The hairy spider monster wasn't going to last long. Annie jolted backwards into the kitchen and grabbed the first thing that came to hand.
A knife would have been great. A frying pan, not bad either. Annie grabbed a wok.
She charged back into the corridor. Something black and flailing went flying past her. Long Arm rounded on her, face a mask of fear, bite marks already swelling around his eyes and cheeks. He clutching his own shirt, feeling frantically for the creature that had been crawling on him.
Annie brained him with the wok. The rounded metal made a hollow clanging noise as Long Arm's skull rang it like a bell. He staggered back, blood flowing from his smashed nose, and went down hard as Dusty tackled him from behind.
Dusty knelt on Long Arm's back and pinned his arms. "Gun!" he grunted. Annie quickly snatched up the rifle. Dusty kicked away Long Arm's sidearm and leaned his weight on the small of the other man's back, making something crack ominously.
"How's Andy?" he said breathlessly.
"Andy?" Oh, right. The hellbeast. Annie glanced around and spotted a dark form crawling slowly up the wall. "It's moving. Heading for the vents."
"Dammit. Her and everyone else, these days." Still, Dusty seemed reassured that his pet was still moving. "Have to go get her later. She must've hitched a ride on my pants. Does that sometimes if I leave the cage open a crack. This asshole better hope he's not allergic to her venom, or he's gonna be choking in a minute or two." Long Arm did make a choking noise, but it seemed to be more of an airflow-and-pain issue than an anaphylactic-shock issue. "Oh, well," Dusty added, suddenly cheerful again. Annie could almost see the mask going on. "Better luck next time, huh? 'Stack, point it at him, not me."
"Right. Sorry." Annie rearranged her grip on the rifle. "All that yelling must have alerted someone. At least now we don't have to go to General Hawk, right?"
"Pretty convenient, yeah. Still, better safe than sorry." Dusty plucked the radio out of Long Arm's belt and tossed it to her. Annie fielded it clumsily and slung the rifle over one shoulder. "Call it in. Being shot while trying to stop this guy would not be a good way to end this night."
Someone was yelling in the distance, and Annie could hear the echoing pounding of feet. Patrols must be headed towards them, fast. She hurriedly keyed the radio and racked her brains for the appropriate codes. "Uh, this is Short Stack," she said. Long Arm tried to struggle again and let out a squawk as Dusty drove his knee in another inch. "I'm with Sergeant Dusty at the west entrance to the kitchen. We have a 10-24 here, possible 10-26 … repeat, 10-24, possible 10-26. Over."
The radio crackled almost immediately. "What the hell is going on there?" Law's voice demanded. Annie's shoulders slumped in relief. "We have patrol incoming. Do not move from your position. Repeat, do not move. Over."
"Don't move." For a moment, Annie thought she was hearing echoes. But as she looked up from the radio, she saw another man standing at the end of the corridor.
There was a crack of gunfire. Annie blinked.
Long Arm's head jerked as a bullet hole appeared in his temple.
Dusty jerked back with a curse, but Annie was already swinging the stolen rifle into position. She fired three times and missed twice. A yelp of pain had Murphy grabbing at his damaged arm. His gun slipped from bloody fingers as he fled.
"Son of a bitch," Annie breathed. Dusty yelled something, but she ignored him and took off down the corridor after Murphy. She could see his bright green BDUs even in the dimness, and she locked onto them and forced herself to run.
He was right there. He was right fucking there. He had hidden a radio in the kitchen and probably heard everything any of them said, he'd been there for years now, and he'd shot Long Arm for some fucking reason and now he was running. To hell with him. To hell with everything. Her heart pounded as she skidded, bare feet sliding on the smooth tiles. He'd messed up her kitchen. He was the worst damn quartermaster in the United States Army and she was going to make goulash out of him—
"Shooter!" someone bellowed. "Down! Down!"
What felt like a meteor hit Annie in the back of the legs. She fell hard, cracking her chin on the floor. Stars erupted in front of her eyes. Gloved hands pulled the stolen rifle away. More shouting in the background, a crack of gunfire and doors slamming. Lights brightened. An emergency siren sounded. Dogs barked.
Annie lay still, breathing hard and trying to focus her vision. The edges were blurred. She could feel the cold of the floor tiles right through her thin pajamas.
"We got 'im," someone said. "General?"
She turned her head slightly. A pair of well-worn boots were visible next to her head. It occurred to her that she had been spending a lot of time looking at things from the floor, and also that she could probably make a snow angel right now if she wanted to. Tile angel, maybe. Shit, she hoped she wasn't concussed again.
"Have Lifeline check them out," General Hawk's voice said from somewhere above the boots. "Then put Short Stack and Murphy in interrogation together. I suspect we're about to learn some things."