Unbreakable (Unraveling) (37 page)

T
he bodyguard screams, drops me, and grabs for his eye. I move with him, using his body as a shield while I reach for the gun under his jacket.

Over the screaming, someone shouts—or several people shout at one another, but I have no idea who’s saying what and I don’t care.

My fingers close on the metal grip of the handle, and I pull the handgun out and turn to aim. I haven’t thought through exactly who I should be aiming at. But I don’t need to.

Some kind of survival instinct drives me.

Meridian is the target. The governor only thinks she’s in charge—he’s the most dangerous person here.

I hear the shot as my finger squeezes the trigger.

But my right arm suddenly stops working. It drops to my side, and the gun slips from my fingers.

Confused, I look down at my arm. When I see the blood welling through the shirt covering my upper arm, I feel the pain.

Someone swears, and I look up and see I’m not the only one bleeding. I got a shot off, but it was a bad one. It looks like all I did was graze Meridian’s shoulder.

He grabs me by the throat and pushes me against the wall. Hard.

But he doesn’t stop there. He relaxes his grip and slams me back again and again. Too many times to keep count. The pain each time my head hits the wall feels like something is exploding against me. I try to kick or claw at him, but it’s like my body is useless. I’ve done too much damage to myself, and I don’t have any leverage. All I succeed in doing is wiping some of the blood from my left hand onto his face.

With his fingers pushing into my throat, and the weight of his hand over my windpipe, I’m out of air fast. Blackness edges my vision, like I’m about to pass out, and despite how weak I am, I reach up, wrapping my fingers around his hand, trying to pull it off my throat.

Suddenly he stops, his grip relaxes slightly, and as the air rushes back into my lungs, my vision clears, and I realize the bodyguard is still screaming.

Meridian raises his hand, and without a word, he fires three shots into the guy’s chest, and the screaming stops.

“What—” the governor screams.

“Keep making noise and I’ll shoot you, too,” he says.

She snaps her mouth shut, but she’s not about to take threats from him either. It looks like she’s about to say something.

But she doesn’t get the chance.

A shout comes from downstairs, then a spray of gunfire.

T
wo men bring in Elijah and Ben. My breath catches at the sight of them. I don’t have time to wonder what they’re doing here together or why Elijah left the hospital. I’m just so relieved to see Ben alive that it floods through my body and makes me feel weak and warm.

Their hands are restrained behind their backs. I wait for someone to bring Cecily in too, but she’s not there. I’m not sure what that means. She could be safe at the hospital; she could be somewhere else in the house; she could be injured somewhere or worse.

I look at Ben.

The position we’re in—that we’re both likely to be killed—doesn’t matter. He’s not bloody or unconscious or in an IA jail, and seeing that gives me hope.

“We had a situation.” The guy who speaks looks like he’s in his sixties, and he’s not wearing the same
Men in Black
bodyguard uniform. He must be the governor’s husband.

“Did we lose anyone?” the governor asks. Her husband nods.

The governor gestures to the bodyguard who’s been here. “Go with him,” she says before she turns to the new one. “You stay.”

The governor’s husband and one bodyguard leave the room, leaving Meridian, the governor herself, one remaining bodyguard, and evil Struz, who has been strangely quiet. If I wasn’t about to die, I’d be focused on the fact that we have even numbers.

I look at Ben. He’s staring at me, and I think about what he said—how most of his decisions revolve around me. He must have burst in planning to save me, but he made a fatal error.

He hadn’t prepared himself for the fact that if he was going to barrel in here, he’d need to pull the trigger first and ask questions later, and that means he portaled in here with a life-threatening disadvantage. And he got caught.

“What is this?” Meridian says.

The governor’s bodyguard clearly doesn’t get that the question is rhetorical. He starts to tell us that Ben and Elijah came out of nowhere and started attacking them. He doesn’t have a chance to finish.

Meridian points his gun at Elijah first, and then he fires.

Elijah grunts, stumbles back, and slumps to the ground. The bullet went into his bad leg. Blood wells up and coats the fabric of his jeans.

“Ben!” I yell. I don’t know what I’m trying to do, if I said his name to warn him that Meridian’s aim has shifted to him, to tell him to run, or something else entirely.

But it doesn’t matter.

I don’t have the chance to finish the thought.

Meridian pulls the trigger twice, one bullet for each of Ben’s legs. He grunts with each impact and falls to the floor, his face twisting with the pain.

My breath catches in my throat. I have to think of something, otherwise we’re all going to die here.

Meridian tosses his gun to the ground.

I can’t breathe again, only it’s not because of Meridian. Tears sting my eyes, and I gasp for air. All of the relief at seeing Ben alive and the hope that we might make it out, that we were so close—it’s gone now. And the emptiness it leaves behind is crushing. Now Ben is only going to get himself killed.

“Wait!” Ben says, as the governor’s remaining bodyguard grabs his hands, pulls them behind his back, and wraps the wire around them. “Let her go. Kill me instead,” he says. “I’m the one you want.”

I start to shake my head, since that’s a terrible idea.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. Meridian says, “Why would I do that? I have you both.”

He tightens his grip around my throat, and I renew my struggle against him as he pulls something that looks like a hunting knife from his pocket.

“You caused me a lot of trouble,” he says to Ben. “Now you can watch her die before I kill you.”

He lifts the knife to my neck.

W
ith my back against the wall and the steel blade biting into my throat, there’s nowhere to go. My eyes take in the room one more time.

To my right stands the governor with her arms folded across her chest, waiting for me to die. Behind her through the doorway, Renee Adams is cowering behind her computer monitor. Across from me, the dead bodyguard is on the ground, slumped on his side, one hand still holding his eye where I stabbed him. The other guard is standing next to Barclay, who’s got his back against the wall, a grimace on his face. Elijah is on the floor, blood staining his pants. He’s breathing normally, though, and glaring at Meridian. He doesn’t look like he’s going to die just yet. Struz’s evil twin is still loitering in the doorway.

And Ben.

Ben is across from me, on his side, his lips slightly parted, his eyes wide, struggling against his restraints. He looks too pale, but I can’t see how much blood he’s losing. I try to tell him with my eyes that this isn’t his fault, that it’s okay.

If I move the wrong way, I’ll cut open my own throat, and my ankle is still sore from Barclay pushing me into the subway. There’s no need to try to calculate my odds of escape, so I force myself to stop.

I meet Meridian’s eyes with my own. This close, I can see they’re a muted green with flecks of gold—not the color I would have imagined for someone so cruel.

“Are you going to try to bargain for your life?” he asks. “Offer to switch sides?”

I don’t answer. I hold myself straight and set my jaw.

This is it.

I
’ve heard that some people accept their death when it comes—that it’s their time. I never understood that until just now. It’s not that I’m giving up or lying down. It’s that I’m going to make the choice to go proud.

This time when my life flashes before my eyes, it’s not my optic nerves firing, it’s not death, and it’s not Ben Michaels.

It’s me.

I remember my mother on the beach, pregnant with Jared, our discarded sand castle next to her.

I remember the summer I turned thirteen, when the local video store had a special on old movies: four movies, four days, four dollars. Kate and I let Alex pick four action movies with no plot, and we laid out our sleeping bags in my living room and watched all of them in a row. We let Jared watch with us until he fell asleep and then we drew aliens on his forehead in permanent marker, ate popcorn and pizza, and drank Sprite until Alex puked from eating too much. Then we rode our bikes to Black Mountain Park and watched the sun rise.

I remember coming back to life on Torrey Pines Road, with Ben’s silhouette leaning over me, his hands warm on my skin. His first memory of me flooding my mind—when I was ten, in my pink flowered bathing suit, pulling him from the water, like I was some kind of angel.

I remember Jared’s birthday this year. It was just me, Struz, and two of Jared’s friends, a cake from a box with soymilk and egg substitute and frosting from a jar. We sat outside and passed around a flashlight telling the creepiest horror stories we could think of until the batteries died, and then Struz surprised Jared by getting one of the helicopter pilots to take him up for a quick midnight spin.

I remember my first date with Ben. When he took me to Sunset Cliffs and we ate takeout from Roberto’s and watched the sun set over the water. The warmth of the sun, the smell of the ocean, and the sound of the waves—the taste of Ben’s lips against mine for the first time.

I remember my dad. The way he used to come in and read to me as soon as he got home from work, the way he managed to make it to all of my swim meets despite his job, the way he looked at me every day—like he was radiating pride.

And I remember that day at Disneyland. The smell of popcorn and funnel cake, the bright colors, the balloons, and little kids on vacation laughing and screaming, Jared and I gorging ourselves on chili bread bowls and Mickey Mouse ice cream, waiting in line for Space Mountain and the Tower of Terror twice, then watching the Jedi training show and the fireworks at Cinderella’s castle.

I don’t even blink as I tilt my chin up and think of everything I’m about to leave behind—in my own world and here in Prima. Something warm trickles down my neck. I’ve left my mark on the lives of all the people I saved—the ones Ben and Barclay and I set free, the ones IA will be able to free once they take Meridian down.

I was here.

I lived.

I mattered.

This is a good way to go.

“It’s a shame I have to kill you,” Meridian says.

He readjusts his grip on the knife, and right before he drags it across my throat, I pretend I can see Ben in front of me, smell soap, mint, and gasoline—

E
verything seems to happen at once.

I don’t actually register it at first. It’s just a series of noises.

A grunt and a sort of gurgling noise.

Then a gunshot, and something warm sprays my face.

Shouts, a struggle, the pressure against my throat gone, and another gunshot.

And another.

I touch my face, and my hand comes away covered in blood. I lean forward and put my face in my hands, feeling around, but I can’t tell if I’ve been shot. Someone grabs me by the shoulders and turns me to face them, shouting something at me, but I can’t concentrate on their words.

Fighting to get my bearings, I focus on the room.

It doesn’t make sense at first. There’s a body on the ground next to Ben, lying in a pool of blood, something sticking out of his throat. The governor is lying facedown in a crumpled heap on the floor. So is Meridian, in front of me, and his face is gone. A bullet is lodged in the wall a few inches above my head. The man who is not Struz stands in front of me, a gun in his hand. For a second it looks like it’s pointed at me, but then I realize he’s just holding it, holding it like someone who’s just used a weapon and done something he didn’t think he was capable of, and now he’s at a loss for what to do next.

When I see Barclay on the floor, a gun in his hand, blood pouring out of the hollow of his throat, Elijah crawling toward him, I know what happened.

B
arclay rescued me.

He must have been in the process of trying to escape when I made my run for it too early.
That’s
what he was trying to tell me—what he wanted me to know.

I was just too focused, and too arrogant to pay attention.

When I was reliving the moments of my life, with Meridian holding the blade to my throat, Barclay finished breaking out of his restraints. He grabbed the ballpoint pen from the dead bodyguard’s eye and drove it straight into the jugular of the live one, while in the same movement reaching for the guy’s gun.

And before anyone could react, he shot Meridian in the back of the head.

But that’s as far as the element of surprise could get him. The governor had a gun too, and as he turned on her next, she shot him.

Barclay killed the governor’s bodyguard and then Meridian. The governor shot Barclay—

And someone shot
her
in the back.

A
s I look at him, Deputy Director Ryan Struzinski lifts his gun.

I make a dive for Barclay, grabbing the gun from his hand, and point it at the last threat in the room.

He might be in shock, but he’s not stupid. His gun is on me a split second before mine is on him, and my body tenses involuntarily, like that could somehow stop the bullet.

But he doesn’t shoot.

At least, not yet.

We’re frozen, both of us pointing guns at each other. At this range, neither one of us would miss a shot to the head, and the effect would be fatal, no question. Even with delayed reaction time, either of us firing would likely end up with both of us dead.

“You don’t have to do this,” I say, though I’m not sure why. I have nothing to bargain with. Sure, his two main conspirators are dead, but with us out of the way, he could still patch this up. And I’m not going to bother even trying to lie to him about keeping his involvement quiet. He would never believe me.