The Enlightened (Mind Dimensions #3)(61)

I do as Thomas says, though it feels odd. If Kyle shows up behind me, I won’t even see Thomas put a bullet in the guy, a sight I’d enjoy.

“On three,” Thomas says and counts down. When he reaches three, my body tenses. By now, Thomas must’ve touched Kyle to bring him in.

No one appears in front of me.

For a second, everything is silent.

Then I hear a grunt from behind me.

I turn around and see Kyle holding Thomas in a headlock. Kyle must’ve materialized behind Thomas. I don’t have time to wonder whether Kyle has mastered the ‘show up in unexpected places in the Quiet’ technique. Right now, I need to do one thing and one thing only.

Raise my gun.

As I take aim, I hesitate. Even after all the training I’ve received from Caleb, there’s still a chance I might hit Thomas. It takes me only a moment to decide to throw caution to the wind. I should make the shot, and even if I hit Thomas, he’ll just wake up Inert in the real world, which won’t kill him.

So I take closer aim.

Kyle looks at me. He must see the determination in my eyes. With his free left hand, he reaches into his vest and pulls out a knife.

“Thomas, watch out,” I shout, but it’s too late. Even though Thomas bends, breaking out of the headlock, Kyle manages to plunge the knife into Thomas’s thigh, halfway to the hilt.

Thomas screams.

Kyle rips the knife out and raises his hand to stab my friend again.

I shoot at Kyle, squeezing the trigger with a sudden jerk.

My bullet hits the wall about a foot higher than where Kyle’s head is. Clearly, shooting under intense stress is not a skill I’ve mastered. Still, it wasn’t a wasted bullet, as Kyle doesn’t wait for my next one. He releases Thomas and runs down the corridor.

Thomas falls to the ground, clutching his thigh.

I approach him, trying not to look at all the blood.

“Go after him,” Thomas says through gritted teeth. “Remember the guard you Guided? Kyle can’t learn that he’s blocking the way in the real world.”

Without hesitating, I run after Kyle. Thomas is right. The best course of action is to get Kyle before he learns that this hallway is a dead end. Then, after we make him Inert, he’ll take this same path and find himself trapped. This, of course, assumes it’s us who’ll make him Inert and not the other way around.

I hear a gunshot. Then another. And a third.

I feel no pain, and I’m still in the Quiet, so I assume Kyle missed me. My ears ring as if he shot the gun directly into them.

Without meaning to, I note the big holes in the wall in front of me. One is about a foot away from where my head was about to be.

A foot away from being Inert again, a possibility I don’t even want to consider.

I shoot in Kyle’s general direction and run faster. At least four shots answer mine, and like me, he isn’t aiming, just shooting at random. I think he’s doing this to slow me down. But despite more gunshots, I don’t stop. In a berserker-like mode, I actually speed up.

As I turn the next corner, another blast sounds in my ears. This one much closer than the others. The bullet misses my shoulder by the width of a finger.

I return the shot, though Kyle is already behind a corner.

Then I push my legs to their limits.

As I sprint, I feel that strange sensation that I first experienced on the Brooklyn Bridge and a few times since—a feeling like I’m about to phase into the Quiet, but hit a mental wall that prevents it.

I shake my head to clear it and turn into the alcove area we scoped out during our recon. And that’s when I hear the sound of a thousand thunderclaps. The pain in my ears is instantly followed by a blast of agony in my right arm, as if someone took a baseball bat to it. A baseball bat made of red-hot iron. The impact causes me to drop my gun.

He shot me, part of my brain screams. A wave of nausea hits me.

With great effort, I ignore the pain in my arm and look up to see Kyle reloading his weapon.

As I look at him, my anger rekindles and turns into a wave of pure hatred. The bloodlust hits me harder than the gunshot to my arm. The thin veil of civility is gone, and I want to claw and bite the object of my fury until he’s ripped into shreds. Except I’m in no position to do anything but watch as he shoots me. I don’t accept this, though. Acting without thought, I run up to the wall. With my left hand, I grab the heavy, framed painting of wine bottles and launch it at Kyle.

As the thing flies, I hear the click of Kyle’s reloaded weapon.

I get lucky. The corner of the frame hits him right in the face. In the seconds of confusion that it buys me, I close the distance between us.

Still acting without deliberate thought, I execute a move that part of me knows is from Krav Maga. My left palm secures Kyle’s wrist, and my right palm hits the gun, sending waves of pain to my brain as it connects.

My reward is Kyle’s screams, and shortly thereafter, the metal clink of the gun hitting the floor.

I look at Kyle’s hand. His finger is so unnaturally bent that I have to assume it’s broken. It seems that the move I executed created a fulcrum point around the midsection of the gun. And that, combined with the fact that his finger was on the trigger and the physics of how fingers don’t bend to the side, caused this rather favorable development. I hope it hurts even worse than it looks.

To my shock, the injury doesn’t stop Kyle from forming a fist, an action that must hurt like a motherf*cker. Like me, he must be running on pure adrenaline.