4.2
Echo skidded to a stop alongside Jelani and furrowed her brow. "They're in the mayor's office?"
"No," he answered, "but the door to the room is in there. We should probably break through the wall here, though, 'cause the door is even thicker than the walls are."
"I guess they do care about security," Echo muttered. "Go ahead, break through it."
However, after Jelani's fist passed through the drywall, all it did was dent the thick iron barrier guarding the weapon room.
Jelani shook his bleeding hand, ignoring the intense pain that blossomed from every nerve that ran through it. He took another full swing, and this time, a small crack formed in the metal.
Lowering his shoulder, he drove forward into the wall, and by the third time his body slammed into the metal, he tumbled through the warped opening and onto the floor of the weapon room.
An ear-splitting alarm shrieked through every room, blaring with enough volume to make Echo instinctively shield her head with her arms.
"I'll stay here!" she yelled over the wall-shaking sound. "Make sure you get the right thing!"
The room was vast. Jelani had never actually entered it, and he hadn't imagined that it would be this big. The ceiling was over ten feet high, and guns upon guns were displayed on the towering black walls lining the aisles that ran across the room, illuminated by a cold, bright white light.
The weapons were meticulously organized, and he suspected that the mayor took great pride in its beauty. They could have just piled the weapons into bins, but instead they were carefully presented, sometimes not even sorted by shape or color. If the mayor decided that it looked better to have a massive black sniper rifle displayed alongside two small, silver revolvers, then that's how it was done.
Jelani spotted a few knives among a mass of rifles, and he carefully scanned the walls in search of what he was looking for.
Bangs and crashes came from outside, mixing in with the alarm's endless bleating, but he stayed focused on the sea of weapons, his eyes racing up and down the walls.
He heard shots–guns were clearly being fired. Nevertheless, Jelani didn't give them a second thought.
His eyes finally settled on a pair of shining silver weapons, each of their finger holes sitting safely beneath a sharp peak of steel, and a sleek, gleaming blade sticking out on one side.
The knuckle dusters clearly had a place of honor in the display, and they were unlike any Jelani had seen before.
Swiftly snatching them off the wall, he held them out in front of himself and carefully examined them. Every finger hole was the same size, so he figured that he could hold them either way, exactly what he'd been hoping for.
He slid the cold metal over the fingers on his right hand, and then on his left, and he clenched his fists, feeling every minute detail on the surface of those hard steel handles.
Nice.
A vicious round of gunfire brought him back to his senses.
Jelani sprinted across the weapon room, lunging for the opening on the other side. At least ten shots had sounded in the tiny amount of time it took him to cross the room, and he felt fear.
A fear that he would be too late.
He'd learned how strong Echo was, both mentally and physically, and it was hard to imagine someone like her being forced to her knees.
But the image of the tall woman lying in a pool of blood, bullet holes all over her body, appeared in the front of his mind.
What can you do against bullets?
The opposite wall approached as if in ultra slow motion.
Guns always win.
In the right environment and with the power of elements, it was possible to beat a few guns. When he was a soldier and got sent to hunt down rebels, Corvus and Eve had beaten the hundreds of guns opposing them.
But that was different. They won because they had remained invisible, and because they had driven their enemies away from them in fear.
What could a single woman standing in the center of an empty hallway do against a barrage of bullets?
She would submit to them, because no one can beat a gun. She would be forced to her knees–forced to the ground–because guns are unbeatable.
Projectiles traveling at 3000 feet per second would go through her skull long before she was aware of them. While she might be able to anticipate the aim of a single weapon, she couldn't do anything against a gun behind her–one that she couldn't see.
She would fight back, but she would lose, and she would die. Not because she was weak, but because it had never mattered in the first place how strong she was.
Guns always win, and that's the way it will always be. They possess an invincible power that can take anyone, anyone's life in far less than the blink of an eye.
"You got 'em?"
Jelani's soul must have departed his body as his eyes stared vacantly at the woman in front of him.
The woman who stood upright.
Bullets clattered to the ground around her, joining the dozens of small metal projectiles that had already fallen at her feet.
Echo, noticing the gleaming knuckle dusters on Jelani's fist said, "Ohh, those look good."
She put her arm around the frozen young man's neck and pulled him right up against herself. "Stay close to me, princess, and I'll get us both outta here alive."
With her left arm anchoring Jelani against her, she proceeded down the hallway, which had soldiers crammed into the openings at either end, firing a two-way stream of shots at her lower body. They couldn't risk shooting any higher, because they might end up hitting their comrades who stood at the other side.
However, they'd failed to acknowledge the possibility of a ricocheting bullet, and one of the young men suddenly collapsed onto the smooth, concrete floor, killed by his own best friend.
If the soldiers hadn't been panicking already, they were panicking now. The collection of young men and women, all decked from head to toe in matching camouflage uniforms, trembled in fear as a bulletproof warrior approached them.
Echo held her free hand up in front of herself, facing her palm to the cluster of guns pointed at her.
"Stop," she commanded in her usual, tired voice.
The soldiers could barely hear her, but, when they saw her palm facing them, they stopped. And when the soldiers on the other side heard the sudden absence of gunfire, they too ceased to pull their triggers.
What else could they do?
Echo lowered her arm. "If you let us out of here, or, even better, out of the city, I won't hurt you. But I'm tired of this, so I hope you won't shoot at me any more."
A few of them lowered their guns and looked at each other, a few of them simply stared in wonder, and one of them decided that, even though it hadn't worked so far, he might as well give it another go and pull the trigger.
But as his bullet rocketed towards its target, it not only stopped in midair as every other shot had done, but then it reaccelerated back towards him.
His own bullet, as if sucked back by a vacuum, went through the bridge of his nose and out the back of his skull, and his body thudded down onto the concrete floor.
Every soldier lowered their gun. Every soldier took a step backwards. Every soldier's hands shook, and every soldier's breath rattled.
Echo took a step forward, and they took a step back. Another step, another step. A few soldiers' wills snapped, and they turned and bolted down the hall.
More followed, and within seconds, both ends of the hallway had cleared completely.
They cleared completely except for two soldiers who, refusing to back down, still stood firmly before the intruders.
"Who are you?" one of them demanded bravely. She was a young woman that stood hardly over five feet tall.
"Take me out of the city," Echo said, repeating her request.
"Tell us who you are," the other soldier, a tall young man, commanded. "We'll have more forces soon," he threatened. "Our entire military will come for you, so you're in no position to bargain."
"Who's in no position to bargain?" Echo mused, proceeding forward with Jelani at her side.
"Have you snapped out of it, Jelani?" she asked, directing her attention to her partner in crime and releasing him from her grip.
The male soldier's determined expression failed, and his face fell into disbelief.
"Jelani?" he muttered. "Jelani?"
"'Sup, Trevor," Jelani greeted with a nod of his head.
"Let's go, Jelani," Echo urged, picking her pace up to a run.
The two soldiers weren't stupid enough to fire any more shots, so they simply barred the opening with their arms and braced for impact.
Echo and Jelani effortlessly shoved them aside and, without breaking their speed, leapt straight through the windows across the hall. In perfect unison, the two of them smashed through the glass and plummeted three stories to the ground below.
Echo landed softly; Jelani did not, and he popped his shoulder back into place as the two of them scrambled to the left, dashing along the edge of the massive dirt field.