Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,67

her to back off, afraid they’d drag her in as well, but she wouldn’t have listened and he didn’t have time to get the words out before she was already there. She aimed her flashlight and gun together, not firing for fear of hitting Welch, and started to take a step through the gap in the door.

“Dr. Welch!” Jada called. “Ian!”

A hooded figure rushed from the darkness and grappled with her, pushing her gun away, trying to twist it from her grasp. Drake shot him in the shoulder. The attacker spun, blood spraying from the wound, and staggered back against the wall. In the shadows where Welch had vanished, others were moving. Welch was gone—maybe dead—and they had to get the hell out of the labyrinth before they joined him.

“Come on!” Drake shouted. “Jada, let’s go!”

They bolted, racing around the altar on either side and then toward Sully and the three steps to the exit together. Sully had his back to the wall on the left, but when he saw them coming, he led the charge, rushing up the stairs into the antechamber.

Drake heard the first shot but didn’t see it. Then he and Jada were out of the Thera worship chamber. The assassin they’d shot lay on the floor of the anteroom, bleeding but alive, but he was the least of their concerns. Two others were in the anteroom, and Drake saw motion off to his right. Several other hooded men were emerging from the darkness of the other doors.

“Look, if you want us to go home that bad, we’ll go home!” he shouted, swinging his aim over to cover them.

Loud footfalls came echoing along the tunnel through which Drake and his companions had arrived. A glance showed flashlight beams bouncing off the walls. They were about to have even more company.

A woman’s voice shouted in Italian and then in English.

“Who’s there? Ian, what the hell is going on down here?” she called angrily.

Hilary Russo, Drake thought. But her deputy, Welch, wasn’t going to answer. He was a captive of those hooded men or had become just another part of the labyrinth’s history, another thing that needed to be excavated from this place.

There were a lot of voices and a lot of footfalls, and Drake had the idea that at least a dozen people were headed their way. Maybe that was more people than the assassins were ready to kill at the moment or more people than they could risk letting live after having seen them down there in the secret corridors under the labyrinth. Drake and Sully and Jada weren’t even supposed to be there. Who would believe them?

One of the hooded men Sully and Jada were aiming at lunged, and Sully shot him.

“Go!” Sully shouted, and started to run.

Trust saved Drake. He couldn’t see if the way was open, couldn’t tell if Sully had done any real damage to the guy he’d shot or if they had the second or two they needed to get clear, but he and Sully had been friends since Drake was a kid. They might not have always gotten along and sometimes they frustrated the hell out of each other, but Sully had been his mentor for almost twenty years. In a moment like this, they had to trust each other or they’d both have been killed years ago.

Jada rushed into the tunnel, Drake right on her heels. He flashed his light ahead of them with his left hand even as he covered the assassins coming from the Knossos and Sobek chambers with the other, arms spread wide.

He could hear Sully to his left, muttering, “Go, go, go.” A swift glance showed him that the one Sully had shot had fallen but still lived, and Sully had his gun aimed at the face of the other assassin, who gazed back coolly in the semidarkness of the anteroom. The only light remaining in that junction room came from Sully’s flashlight, and Drake wondered how the assassins could see so well in the dark.

It occurred to him that these were not ordinary men. He thought of the swiftness with which they killed Jada’s would-be abductors in the parking lot the night before and realized that the assassins were no longer trying very hard. As he glanced back and saw Sully racing after him into the tunnel—Sully fired a bullet into the darkness as if for punctuation—he understood that they were not following. It might have been the number of people or the possibility of