same time.
"Fucking assholes!" Amos yelled, then rolled out and fired a couple more shots and rolled back before the return fire started.
"Where are they?" Holden yelled at him.
"Two are down, the rest in the stairwell!" Amos yelled back over the sound of return fire.
Out of nowhere a burst of rounds bounced off the floor past Holden's knee. "Shit, someone's flanking us!" Amos cried out, then moved farther behind the desk and away from the shots.
Holden crawled to the other side of the desk and peeked out. Someone was moving low and fast toward the hotel entrance. Holden leaned out and took a couple shots at him, but three guns opened up from the stairwell doorway and forced him back behind the desk.
"Alex, someone's moving to the entrance!" Holden screamed at the top of his lungs, hoping the pilot might be able to get off a shot before they were all chopped to pieces by crossfire.
A pistol barked three times by the entrance. Holden risked a look. Their tail with the goofy hat crouched by the door, a gun in his hand, the machine gun - toting flanker lying still at his feet. Instead of looking at them, the tail was pointing his gun toward the stairwell.
"No one shoot the guy with the hat!" Holden yelled, then moved back to the edge of the desk.
Amos put his back to the desk and popped the magazine from his gun. As he fumbled around in his pocket for another, he said, "Guy is probably a cop."
"Extra especially do not shoot any cops," Holden said, then fired a few shots at the stairwell door.
Naomi, who'd spent the entire gunfight so far on the floor with her arms over her head, said, "They might all be cops."
Holden squeezed off a few more shots and shook his head.
"Cops don't carry small, easily concealable machine guns and ambush people from stairwells. We call those death squads," he said, though most of his words were drowned out by a barrage of gunfire from the stairwell. Afterward came a few seconds of silence.
Holden leaned back out in time to see the door swing shut.
"I think they're bugging out," he said, keeping his gun trained on the door anyway. "Must have another exit somewhere. Amos, keep your eye on that door. If it opens, start shooting." He patted Naomi on the shoulder. "Stay down."
Holden rose from behind the now ruined check-in kiosk. The desk facade had splintered and the underlying stone showed through. Holden held his gun barrel-up, his hands open. The man in the hat stood, considering the corpse at his feet, then looked up as Holden came near.
"Thanks. My name is Jim Holden. You are?"
The man didn't speak for a second. When he did, his voice was calm. Almost weary. "Cops will be here soon. I need to make a call or we're all going to jail."
"Aren't you the cops?" Holden asked.
The other man laughed; it was a bitter, short sound, but with some real humor behind it. Apparently Holden had said something funny.
"Nope. Name's Miller."
Chapter Twenty-Four: Miller
Miller looked at the dead man - the man he'd just killed - and tried to feel something. There was the trailing adrenaline rush still ramping up his heartbeat. There was a sense of surprise that came from walking into an unexpected firefight. Past that, though, his mind had already fallen into the long habit of analysis. One plant in the main room so Holden and his crew wouldn't see anything too threatening. A bunch of trigger-happy yahoos in the stairwell to back her up. That had gone well.
It was a slapdash effort. The ambush had been set by people who either didn't know what they were doing or didn't have the time or resources to do it right. If it hadn't been improvised, Holden and his three buddies would have been taken or killed. And him along with them.
The four survivors of the Canterbury stood in the remains of the firefight like rookies at their first bust. Miller felt his mind shift back half a step as he watched everything without watching anything in particular. Holden was smaller than he'd expected from the video feeds. It shouldn't have been surprising; he was an Earther. The man had the kind of face that was bad at hiding things.
"Thanks. My name is Jim Holden. You are?"
Miller thought of six different answers and turned them all aside. One of the others - a big man, solid, with a bare scalp - was pacing