Free May Contain Spies: A Spy Thriller (Meet Abby Banks Book 1) by J.A. Cipriano Page B

sort of reminded me of a remote control only it had one large green button in the center. She was pressing it as hard as she could, and I wondered if it was like a video game controller. You know, the ones when you press the buttons harder, they do more damage to the enemy?
    Every single time she hit the button, a piece of the tunnel would explode in a flurry of flame and rock. Unfortunately, the black creatures dodged nimbly by the explosions. If this kept up, booby-trapped tunnel or not, we were going to get overrun.
    “Chloe, do we have a way out of here?” Stephen yelled over the din, and I could barely hear him over the ringing in my ears.
    “What, do I have to think of everything?” she screamed back at him, now hot on his heels. “Aren’t you some kind of secret agent? Do something.”
    “It’s your tunnel,” he said as he flung me over his shoulder, and the breath whooshed out of me. He grabbed something out of his pocket with his now free hand. It was all shiny and silver with lots of flashing lights.
    He flung the thing in front of us as far as he could. It sailed through the air, landing several feet away. Stephen dove to the floor, and my breath exploded out of me in a rush as he pulled his body on top of mine. “Down!” he screamed.
    Chloe hit the floor in front of us and rolled into a ball with her hands covering her head and neck like one of those duck and cover drills.
    The device began to flash with angry red light and started chirping in an angry machine sort of way. Stephen’s hand covered my face, shielding my eyes as he started counting softly. When he reached six, it felt like the world ended. I’d never really given much thought as to what I’d do if the world actually ended, but the wave of heat and smoke that exploded through the tunnel when he counted ‘six’ made me wish I had a backpack full of MREs and an underground bunker in the woods.
    A sharp ringing filled my ears making it impossible to think as Stephen pulled me to my feet and dragged me toward the wreckage. I opened my eyes. Through the haze of smoke and rubble, I saw sunlight. Real, live, honest to god sunlight filtered through the hole in the tunnel ceiling.
    “I tell you to do something so you blow a hole in the tunnel? Because that’s not going to attract anyone,” Chloe snarled as she scampered over the debris like she was some kind of goat.
    “Catch!” Stephen called and flung me bodily upward to Chloe who caught me by the wrist. Pain tore through my shoulder as I hung there for a moment as Chloe fell on her butt and tried to pull me up out of the tunnel. Stephen climbed up the rock next to me.
    He reached the top in the space it took for my shoulder to feel like it’d torn from the socket and helped Chloe haul me out into the sunlight.
    Toppled cars and blown out store windows greeted me on the surface. High above the buildings, helicopters circled like a bunch of angry hornets after someone kicked their nest. Only they weren’t news or police helicopters. No, these were those army helicopters you see in movies with musclebound actors pointing machine guns out of the side while biting down on huge cigars. Except… I was pretty sure they weren’t actors this time.
    People were running and screaming. A fire hydrant was spraying water up into the air like a macabre fountain. I swallowed. Had we hurt anyone trying to escape? I mean, Stephen had just blown up a city street in what looked like downtown Chicago. Someone had to have been hurt by the blast, or worse… had someone been inadvertently killed because they were trying to save me, Abby Banks? That was crazy, right?
    Chloe grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me to the side as something smacked into the ground where I’d been standing with a wet thunk. I turned toward the small green object, about the size of a softball, with blinking green lights that cycled to red in the space of time it took for Chloe to throw me to the ground and shield me beneath her