flesh was sticky with drying blood, and it was cold, cold, and heavy with death. He stood there trembling, Jonathan’s body half-in, half-out of the car.
Everything was happening so fast. He couldn’t think clearly—not anymore. His home invaded. Samantha attacked. Hayden paralyzed, maybe dead. And now Jonathan. Jonathan. Jonathan, the spy, the hero, the man who couldn’t be stopped, not ever. Jonathan was shot in the head and dead in his—
Andrew grabbed Simon’s sagging shoulders from behind as the shock of it hit Simon like a lightning bolt. His knees buckled and he started to collapse, but Andrew caught him, held him up. After a silent, steadying moment, they straightened together and pulled Jonathan’s lifeless body from the car, then dragged it back three feet, and loaded it into the back seat, into the place where Samantha had been sitting just moments before.
As they pushed the door shut a black helicopter, silent and menacing, flew overhead—high and fast at the moment, following the underground route of the subway, looking for them but not seeing.
Yet, Simon thought numbly. Not seeing yet. They had closed and locked the gateway and the door to the subway entrance before the black-clad soldiers had come round the bend. He didn’t think there was any way they could have known about their escape route; they should’ve continued down the dimly lit tunnel for at least another mile before they realized that Andrew and Simon and their valuable cargo had disappeared. But he couldn’t know that for sure. They could come surging up out of the underground or roaring down the street at any moment.
Samantha stood far from the Rover, hugging her arms and trying to keep her body from shaking. “What’s happening?” she said in a tiny voice. “What the hell is happening?”
Simon tried to rub the shock away with the heels of both hands in his eyes. Focus, he ordered himself. Focus. Shouting he said, “Hayden. We have to get Hayden in the car!” With a fighter’s discipline, he pushed himself into the driver’s seat and put his hand on the ignition key. “Get in, Sam,” he said harshly. “Right now!”
She didn’t move. She just pressed both hands against her mouth and shook her head, crying.
“Get in, I said! We’ve got to get the fuck out of here!”
Andrew put a hand on her bare arm and felt her flinch. “Get in the front,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to look at him.” He led her gently but insistently around the car. He opened the door for her and helped her inside. She was still trembling. Then he got in the back seat himself, next to Jonathan’s dead body.
The car started moving before Andrew was completely in the car. It didn’t matter; Simon only cruised fifty feet forward and stopped next to the motionless body of Hayden, sprawled on the side of the road near the entrance to the underground.
Andrew jumped out of the car as it stopped just short of Hayden’s body. Samantha turned her head to see what he was doing, then looked back, confused, as Simon exited the car as well. Andrew heard her gasp as he struggled to lift Hayden’s body all by himself.
“Oh my god, is he dead too?” she said, her voice going higher and louder at the end. Andrew noticed lights from the surrounding apartments had started to snap on; a few pedestrians were slowing to watch them, distracted by the commotion.
“No!” Simon said sharply. “He’s not! And you have to help him!” Together, the men maneuvered Hayden’s body into the back seat, shoving him unceremoniously to the middle, next to Jonathan’s corpse.
It’s like a bad dream, Simon thought looking at the grisly tableaux in the back seat.
He pushed away his despair and forced himself back to the driver’s seat, doing his best to ignore the blood-soaked backrest as he got inside. Andrew climbed into the back, far too close to Hayden’s body, looking just as repulsed as Simon.
Still trapped in his paralyzed body, Hayden only gradually became aware of the grotesque scene that was transpiring around him. But as he was manipulated into the back seat of the Rover like an unwieldy corpse, he found that his hearing was not the only sense that was unaffected by the gas; his sense of smell worked perfectly well, too. He knew because it was assaulted by the stink of blood that hung around Jonathan’s body like a cloud. A dead man, he thought frantically. I’m sitting next to a