Free Minotaur by David Wellington

direction, looked up. Lifted his weapon. Aimed.
    Chapel snaked forward, chest on top of the crates, and shoved the barrel of his rifle right into the man’s nose. He was holding it in his left hand, his artificial hand, while the pistol remained in his right. He had limited control of the artificial hand at the best of times and he was not at his best. Still. “I think if I pull this trigger, I’m not going to miss,” he said.
    Michael—­it was Michael—­dropped his pistol and slowly raised his hands. “Pretty good,” he said. “Ranger, you said?”
    “Yes,” Chapel said.
    Michael nodded—­carefully, as a man does when he has the barrel of an assault rifle in his face. “Sure. I was in the Air Force. They never taught us any of this stuff. Just how to fix planes.”
    “So you’re military. It shows. You’re loyal, I’ll give you that. Not a lot of ­people would have stuck by Favorov, not through all this.”
    “They taught us, you can be smart, or you can follow orders. And smart guys ended up peeling potatoes. So I made a point of following orders.” Michael shrugged. Again, carefully. “KP duty doesn’t sound so bad, right now.”
    “You going to tell me where your boss is?” Chapel asked.
    “Maybe, but—­”
    He didn’t get to finish his sentence. At that exact moment another guard came running around the corner, his gun already firing.
    Crap , Chapel thought. It was the one he’d disarmed, the one he’d bluffed with the empty AK-­47. Somewhere he’d gotten another pistol.
    “No!” Michael shouted. Maybe he expected Chapel to shoot him on principle.
    Instead Chapel clubbed Michael across the neck with his assault rifle. But only because he was standing in the way. The re-­armed guard below was shooting up, blind, not even bothering to aim. Chapel took his time, even as bullets tore up the wooden crates all around him, and put a tight burst of rifle fire right in the man’s center mass.
    The guard kept shooting for a half second after he was already dead, but eventually, he went down.
    “Now,” Chapel said, looking back down at Michael, “we were talking about—­”
    Then he grimaced, and maybe cursed a little. The re-­armed guard had managed to put a hole in the back of Michael’s head and his brains were all over the floor.

 
    22.
    F or a second, just a bare second after all that chaos and noise, the cellar was quiet. Chapel was standing on his own two feet, in charge of the situation. His brain must have decided that the crisis was over, because a sudden wave of light-­headedness and nausea washed through him.
    He was tired. Very, very tired. Blood loss, being shot, having a concussion will do that to you. His hand, his real hand felt so weak it could barely hold his weapon.
    Then someone moaned in pain, behind him. He spun around, ready to fight again. But it was only one of the men he’d wounded. “Damn,” he said. “I didn’t want this to happen. I didn’t want any of this.”
    “You killed Marty,” someone said, very quietly. Not in an accusatory way. More like they couldn’t believe it.
    Chapel bent to work. He found the wounded men and bandaged them as best he could, or at least showed them how to put pressure on their wounds so they wouldn’t bleed out. They stared at him as if he’d just fallen out of the moon. But despite what his bosses might think, Chapel’s job wasn’t to kill ­people. He wasn’t some glorified hit man wrapped in an American flag.
    Sometimes he had to remind himself of that, too. So he was kind to the wounded men, even as he ignored the dead bodies and didn’t worry too much about who had killed who. He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly—­again, blood loss, etc.—­but sometimes you needed fuzzy logic to keep moving.
    “How many more of you are there?” he asked one of the wounded.
    “Wh—­what?”
    “How many more guards, servants, whatever—­how many more ­people work on this estate who will be coming for me with