Free The Bounty Hunter: Soldier's Wrath by Joseph Anderson Page B

gun.
    “Fire quickly at the door. Leave
only a second between each shot. Aim for the chest, not the head.”
    “My dad taught me how to shoot.”
    “I only need another minute to get
to you,” he said.
    He dived down another flight of
stairs. He decided he was moving too fast to risk reloading his weapon. Cass
magnetized it to his chest plate and he moved faster down the stairs instead.
She displayed the other group in the elevator. They came to a stop more than
ten floors below Kristen’s level. Burke wondered at that as something like an
explosion came through the call in her apartment. He heard three shots before
the video feed abruptly cut off. A second later, Cass lost connection with the
rest of the cameras and the lights in the stairwell went dark.
    “They cut power to the building,”
Cass said.
    Burke stayed calm. He was less than
twenty seconds away from reaching the apartment. Cass changed the visor to
accommodate for the low level of light in the stairwell. He moved just as
quickly in the darkness. When he burst through the door onto Kristen’s level,
the light from the scattered corridor windows made it easier to see.
    He hadn’t heard anyone come into
the stairwell below him. He knew that meant they were either still in her
apartment or had taken her to the other stairway on the other side of the
building. He saw three bodies in a heap on the floor outside Kristen’s
apartment. He stepped over them quickly and saw a fourth corpse in the living
room. She had managed to take four down before they got to her but she was
gone. Her gun was on the floor.
    “Cass, we need eyes on the outside
of the building,” Burke rambled.
    “I’m on it.”
    He leaped over the other corpses
and raced to the other stairwell. He shouldered his way through the door and
heard footsteps far below him. Kristen wasn’t calling out; either she was gagged
or unconscious, he was confident they wouldn’t kill her. Not yet at least, he
thought, and gritted his teeth.
    He dived down each set of stairs.
He placed a hand on the nearest wall after each fall, pressing himself off of
it with enough force that he left cracks in the concrete after he moved on. He
was gaining ground on the group below him and could hear the sounds of their
footsteps more clearly after he descended nine levels. At the next exit,
however, the door suddenly opened and the other group flooded into the
stairwell. They opened fire immediately and the barrage of bullets forced him
to stop and back away.
    “Damage?” he barked. He wanted to
curse that the other squad was getting away.
    “Minor. Armor piercing bullets but
low quality.”
    “Can I engage?”
    “Yes.”
    Burke didn’t need to be told twice.
He turned and felt another wave of bullets smack into his armor. He jumped down
into the group and took no pleasure in the look of shock on their faces. He
triggered both the shield and the blade at the same time expecting his old
features of a blade in each arm. He used the shield as a weapon as much as he
did the blade, carving and smashing his way through the mercenaries. He stabbed
the blade through the chest of one woman and then turned, leading with the shield
and knocking a man cleanly off his feet and into the wall behind him. He
crashed head first into the solid wall and Burke didn’t stop to confirm the
kill. He turned and finished what remained of the group. There were trails of
smoke in front of his visor from the bullets that had landed on the chest of
the aegis.
    “How far up are we?” he asked
quickly.
    Cass quartered out the visor and
displayed the outside of the building. The two men that remained of the first
squad met with the other group and carried Kristen out onto the street. He
could see her struggling in their arms. There was a jet bike nearby and they
were strapping her to it. He had less than a minute.
    “A little over fifty storeys,” Cass
answered.
    “Can we take that fall?”
    “Barely,” she said. “Yes,” she
said,