Chancing another peek, I fixed my attention back on Tywin in time to come to the realization that he was using one of the men as a human shield. He fired his weapon, taking out one of the men with a face shot. Somehow, he slung his tall frame around the man in front of him to kick the weapon from the hand of the last man in the doorway. The man must have been too afraid to fire at his yelling friend who did his best to break free of the hold Tywin had on him.
The moment I heard movement below, I aimed and fired and the sound of a loud groan made me smile.
Tywin let the man he was using for a shield go, but the man was staggering and clawing at his throat, and blood was pouring from it like it was in a sprint to leave his body. I hadn’t even seen when Tywin had stabbed the man, a testament to his close-quarter combat skills.
Two more shots pinged near me, keeping me pinned down. Again, I aimed down and let off a few rounds to keep them from getting any closer.
Another quick peek up, showed Tywin was pulling cord from someplace and using it to tie up the men. Two of them weren’t dead yet.
I fired a few more rounds at the men below, realizing the group’s objective was to keep me pinned down until they eventually reached me. There were only four rounds left before I ran out of ammo.
The sound of them yelling below grew more intense. Tywin continued tying the men up with what I noticed was 550 cord that he was unspooling from his cargo pocket and looping around bloody legs, arms, and necks.
What the hell was he doing? The man with the most strength from the group was screaming his head off, and I didn’t know if it was in pain or for help.
Finished with his task, Tywin peeked over the railing at me and shots immediately pinged in his direction. When he sat and used his foot to shove the three tied-up men off the side of the stairs, I gawked at the sight and gasped at how close they had fallen to where I was pinned down.
Trussed up like cattle, the men resembled a dream catcher, only Tywin had used bloody human bodies instead of feathers and beads. He certainly lived up to his nickname,Terror. It also appeared that the 550 cord lived up to its name because it was holding up three bodies like Tywin had strung Christmas ornaments.
How he knew how much and how to tie the cord so that it dropped just above where I was crouched on the landing, I had no idea and didn’t have time to run the statistics through my head. One of the men was upside down, one was damn near sideways, and one was hanging by the neck.
“Lord, this man has no sense of mercy,” I muttered.
There was one thing I was certain of, the cells in the Vallin blood were laced with hellfire. Khane was a walking nightmare. Arjen was called, Loud, the Lord of Untimely Death. Now, I was running around with the death-maker who had strung together a multi-purposeful death scene that had caused my mind to sputter.
The human dream catcher or more accurately named, human bullet catcher, wasn’t just for show. It was my protective shield to get me to the next level.
When I managed to shake myself loose from my temporary trance, I weaved and wobbled up to my feet. I passed behind the bodies, ducking below a dead swinging arm. I expected to hear bullets coming at me and thumping into the bodies, but the sight must have stunned the men below as much as it had me.
Once we were back together, Tywin, used one of the commandeered weapons to unload rounds on the ones who were only a few levels below us now. I was sure he hit at least one and stopped the rest from advancing. He did a quick eye-roving once-over over my body, making sure I wasn’t injured.
“Arjen and Khane are a few levels up and our guys below are sweeping the stairwell and making their way back up here to handle the stragglers below.”
I processed his words with a nod, taking one of the dead men’s weapons he was handing me. I ejected the long magazine, glad to see it had at least twenty rounds.
“Let’s go,” he ordered, taking one last peek at the body dream catcher he’d created.
We took to the rest of the stairs on high alert, aware that the men below had seen their dead buddies and would be gunning for our blood even harder. Bullets pinged, but we were too busy making our way up to the next few levels to return fire. The approaching crowd below wasn’t firing as aggressively as they had after seeing Tywin’s body-art display.
“Nineteen,” Tywin said, holding a finger against his ear as we ate up step after step. Sweat dripped off of me like water and sheer will was the only thing keeping me on my feet. Why had Arjen and Khane wanted us to meet them on level nineteen?
When we made it to the nineteenth floor, I saw why. The stairwell stopped at floor nineteen, which made level twenty off limits by stairway access. Tywin opened the door and did a quick scan before proceeding.
I was forced to catch the breath I had lost once we stepped onto the hallway. Khane and Arjen stood on the other end near the elevators. They turned in our direction, lifting their weapons and dropping them when they saw it was us.
The rapid thuds of gunfire in the stairwell, thankfully, no longer had anything to do with us.
The once white sterile hallway we walked down was splattered with blood, the walls painted in red polka dots and large chunks of human tissue. Tywin and I stepped across so many bodies that it was like being inside an unkept mausoleum.
Tasting the metallic bitterness on my tongue, the scent of blood hung heavily in the air. Dust particles and more than likely human body particles were visible at certain angles as they floated by my vision.
It wasn’t until I took my attention off the bodies that I noticed the shadows of people standing just out of sight. The closer we drew, I noticed that it was a group of men, haphazardly dressed and badly beaten. The brothers had liberated more people from the torture chambers inside this place.
“Are you sure you have them all,” Arjen questioned, speaking to whoever listened on the other side of his earpiece.
“Level twenty has been swept,” he confirmed.
“We have men on each floor, sweeping this place for hostages,” Tywin explained. “The guards we trapped inside the elevators have been taken care of so Rhi has enabled the elevators to get the six additional victims we found to our crew in the basement. The five on this level will be going with us.”
His status report put a relieved smile on my face, and I exhaled. The notion that they were rescuing all of the hostages made them heroes in my eyes. The men looked like I felt—dead on my feet.
Arjen and Khane stood on either side of the elevator allowing the tortured men to enter first. The men wore dirty hospital gowns and one, who was naked, had a towel wrapped around his bottom and a blood-splattered lab coat up top.
The brothers didn’t move to step into the packed elevator until after Tywin and I were inside. Tywin bumped elbows with his cousins when he passed them, and I got the sense that this was something they did often when they were on this type of mission together.
The doors slid closed and the elevator lurched upwards, lifting us to an unknown future. What was on that roof waiting for us and were we going to get there without having to weave our way through another field of bodies?