Page 23 of Inez

Sucking in a breath, I make my feet and assess. Lorenzo is tucked against a bedroom door, pressed as flat as he can get,wincing as he blinks and shakes his head to clear the effects of the flashbang.

A barrage of rounds pepper down the stairs, chew up the doorframe next to Lorenzo's ear, divot the floor between Fonz's knees. Throwing himself backward, Fonz hits the floor on his back as another flurry of bullets craters the floor where he'd been.

He fires up the stairs from his back, and I hear a gurgling cry, thumping, and then a bleeding body topples to a stop at the base of the stairs.

"Them bitches almost had my number," Fonz mutters, eying the floor where he'd been.

For a moment, all is deafeningly silent.

And then…

A clatter of something hard bouncing off a stair, another. The something is small and round…

"GRENADE!" Fonz shouts, twisting to his hands and knees and lurching into a scrambling run.

Lorenzo is moving, too, a blur of shocking speed. His arm slams into my middle, just when I'd finally regained my breath from the last time, and I’m airborne once again, this time carried in Lorenzo’s arm, ass up and belly down like a toddler having a tantrum being carried out of a restaurant.

He throws me bodily around the corner of the hallway's end where it opens into the common area and then his body is surrounding mine, a hot solid envelope of masculine brawn sheltering me from the explosion.

The detonation shudders the walls and floor, rattles the droptiles of the ceiling, sending several of them fluttering to the floor. Shards and shrapnel whizz through the air and pepper the walls and floor and ceiling.

Silence, abrupt and total, except for the ringing in my ears I fear will be permanent.

Lorenzo staggers to his feet and hauls me to mine; I hold on to his arm as I struggle to catch my breath yet again, coughing as acrid smoke billows. Emergency lights flash. Electricity arcs and sparks in the ceiling over the blast site, blue-white light obscured by smoke.

Shadows move in the swirling smoke, lit in strobe effect by the sparking of electricity and flashing emergency lights.

"Contact!" Lorenzo shouts, rifle crashing to his shoulder and jerking as he fires into the eddying smoke.

Coughing, gasping, wheezing, I drop to a knee beside and behind him, aiming high. Between bursts, I hear a low groan.

"Fonz?" I call. "Report!"

"It ain’t great, boss-lady," he grunts, his voice tight with pain. "Shrapnel to the leg."

"Gym," I snap. "Now."

"I can fight, boss. Just gotta tie this bitch down."

"Gym—now!” I shout, and then devolve into hacking as smoke fills my lungs all over again.

"Fuck," I hear him growl. "Hurts like a motherfucker." A moment later, he grunts again. "Oooh, nice, I’m bleedin' like a stuck pig. Very cool, love that for me. Yeah—gym. Gym sounds good. Pretty ladies to play doctor for me. And away…we…go!”

Lorenzo pauses and glances at me as he reloads. "He is always like that?"

"Yes," I answer. “Wildly inappropriate humor is his default setting for every situation."

"We heard an explosion," Toro says across the radio. "Report,por favor."

"Grenade," I answer. "Fonz took shrapnel to the leg but he's mobile."

"Mobile may be a bit of a stretch. Don't ask me to run any hundred-yard dashes," Fonz says over the radio. "But I ain't gonna die—owFUCK, woman, Jesus. No, tighter.FUCK!"

Lorenzo’s rifle chatters beside me again, and I add mine to the fray as more shapes glide through the smoke.

The scent of death, cordite, and blood is rife and thick and pungent.

Our rifles fall silent when no more shapes appear in the eddying, arc-lit pall of smoke.