How About Seven? ✔

42. Green Hill Massacre

One minute I was listening to William's voice over the earpiece. The next minute I couldn't hear anything at all.

In a tightly enclosed space, with no soft objects to absorb the sound or catch the impact, the din of a thousand bullets ricocheting around the storage bunker was pretty damn loud.

Instinct took over and I immediately dropped to my knees, back pressed up against the box. Even slamming both hands over my ears didn't help; dimly I thought I could hear William or Kaylan on the other side demanding to know of my status, but any answer I gave would have been lost in this furious cacophony of pure noise that I was currently in. 

It must have been no more than three seconds, but those three seconds were hell in my eardrums.

And then, just as sudden as it had come, it was just as suddenly over.  

Silence. The tinkle of bullets faded like the decrescendo of a dying symphony.

My heart was thudding a mile a minute in my chest, and the cardboard against my back was damp with sweat. Breathing shaky, I inched my eyes over the top of the box with agonizing slowness. I realized I was scared of what I would find.

Black and Tan were completely fine.

They stood, most of them unmoving in their original positions, though some hadn't been able to resist flinching and stumbling back a few paces. Out of the three large containers spanning the room, the middle had its door blown wide open.

And scattered all around it, were the bodies, the many, many bodies of men, dressed in black.

"Hayley!" William's voice was yelling in my ear. "Come in, Hayley! Are you alright? What was that gunfire?"

But I didn't hear him. I didn't hear him, because at this distance, I could recognize the lone man kneeling in front of the container, recognize that sandy head of hair and that scarred upper lip, a souvenir of his last Russian mission. Those same lips that had spent every year of my life making sure I knew exactly where girls belonged, and what happened to daughters who tried to step out of their rightful place. 

Those same lips that were now dripping fat droplets of blood.

I watched my father hover for a moment on his knees, before he keeled over and simply died. He breathed his last, right next to the mangled bodies of my Uncle Ian and Uncle Edward. A bloodied hand with a Blackcroft tattoo on the wrist was stretched out beneath Uncle Ian's torn apart chest; I realized that in his last moments, he had tried protecting his eldest son.

Do. I never knew his real name.

The first sound that broke the silence after the chaos was the sound of heels across concrete.

The Octagon chairman stopped just a little beyond six feet from the strewn bodies. Lifting a perfectly manicured fingernail, she tapped the empty air a few inches away from her right eye. And where there was nothing, suddenly there was something - I watched a shimmery, translucent rainbow ripple away from the first point of contact like the surface of a still lake after a dropped pebble. It spanned the entire width of the room, from left to right.

Like an invisible barrier cutting off the container from the rest of the storage bunker.

The woman took off her sunglasses. Underneath, her eyes were an intoxicating emerald green. She tossed the sunglasses forward, and when they hit the barrier, they bounced back right into the woman's waiting palm. 

The woman smiled. "This is impressive technology, Cognac."

Cognac.

A little boy that couldn't have been more than ten stepped out from behind Octagon's head security, Jesús Dimaggio. He was holding a Nintendo Switch and a very familiar jingle could be heard; it took me a second to realize that he was playing the game Fire Emblem. Three Houses, to be exact.