The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

“Yeah, well, I’m not feeling very lucky.” She rubbed her right knee, the leg straight out in front of her. “Twisted something when I went down. I can’t put any weight on it.”

“Where’s your helmet?” I asked, searching around. “I need you to contact the others, clear them out.”

“The blow cracked it in half. Communication’s shot.”

“Crap,” I muttered. “How are you fixed for ammo?”

From feet away, a scream sounded. Terror threw me in a half spin. The bugbear’s silhouette filled the opening to our sanctuary, red eyes pulsing. He screamed again and pumped his club overhead. I raised my sword in a sad effort to parry the inevitable blow.

A deafening burst of gunfire resounded through our space. The bugbear danced like a giant epileptic and fell backwards. He crashed to the ground with a solid whoomp.

“Holy crap,” I whispered, watching the creature’s chest deflate.

“Fully loaded until just then,” Vega said, answering my earlier question.

I lowered my sword. “Nice shooting.”

“Thanks, but we’ve got bigger problems.”

“Yeah, I know. The goblin horde.”

“Worse.”

“Worse?” Something gave my gut a hard twist. “What could be worse?”

“Command and control was ordering our evacuation when I lost communication. Cole—”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “He ordered your evacuation?” Even as I asked, I realized the only gunfire I was picking up now was sporadic and distant.

Thank God for that.

“He’s ordering a napalm strike,” Vega finished.

I choked on a fresh fit of panic. “A strike? When?”

But I could already hear the distinctive bat-bat-bat of rotary blades. Attack choppers were incoming.

20

I now understood why Captain Cole had tried to stop me from leaving the command-and-control tent. He had just ordered his helicopter division to drop a few hundred pounds of liquid hell. It didn’t change anything, though. I still would have seen that Vega made it out of the park.

“If I support you, do you think you can stand?” I asked her.

“Not like I have a choice.” Gripping the automatic rifle in her left hand, Vega let me underneath her right side and grasped my neck. I wrapped an arm around her upper back, and we stood together.

“The shortest way out is the way I came in,” I said.

Vega drew a sharp breath between her teeth as she took her first hopping step. With me stooping and her limping, we made our way down the hillock. With each step, I braced for the sting of an arrow, but none came. I listened for goblins, searched the surrounding trees for their movement. Vega seemed to be doing the same, the rifle aimed from her abdomen. I guessed the thundering of the approaching helicopters had driven them back into hiding.

Vega and I were squelching through the mud around the pond when something heavy crashed away to the west. Another bugbear? The explosion that followed told me no. Fiery light broke through the trees, accompanied seconds later by an intense, oily-smelling heat. Crap, they were dropping the napalm.

“Path is just over there,” I panted. “We’ll take the stairs out.”

The next explosion was closer, the heat like raw blisters over my skin.

Vega grunted as we burst onto the crumbling path. We were paces from the staircase when she staggered. I squeezed her perspiring body to my side to keep her from falling.

She swore. “My good leg’s giving out.”

“Muscle fatigue,” I said, sweat pouring from my own body. I peeked back and beheld an apocalyptic scene. A large swath of park was in black-red flames. The helicopter’s first pass had targeted the park’s lower west side, but I could hear them circling, coming in from the east. They would drop their remaining tanks in the vicinity of where we were standing.

“Go for it,” Vega said, already knowing what I was planning.

I stooped and placed my shoulder against her stomach. She folded over my back until I could get an arm around her thighs and lift her fireman style. I trudged forward, gaining speed, and hit the staircase at a jog.

“Shit!” she cried.

I thought the jostling motion had hurt her leg until I realized arrows were clattering against the steps around us.

Shit is right, I thought.

I glanced back to see the short, stooped silhouettes of two goblins at the bottom of the steps. I high-stepped as an arrow tore a chunk of fabric off my pant leg. I felt Vega moving her rifle around into a shooting position. I paused at a landing midway up the staircase so she could aim. At the same moment gunfire burst from my back, something knifed into my right calf. I went straight down with a holler. Vega tumbled from my shoulder.

“Nailed them both,” she shouted above the roar of the choppers.

“And one of them nailed me.” I turned my leg over until I could see the dark shaft of the arrow. It was in there good.

“We’ll take care of that once we’re out,” she said, crawling toward the final flight of steps.

When she looked back to make sure I was following, the fire reflected in her eyes showed her fear—not for herself, but for her son. The idea of him growing up motherless. I nodded and crawled after her, remembering the fear and sadness my own mother had felt in her final moments.

Fresh detonations shook the earth. A chopper swept low. More napalm tanks crashed and tumbled into the woods behind us. Too close. We weren’t going to survive their explosions.

I said a quick prayer and shouted, “Protezione!”

Light sputtered around my staff’s orb, then, breaking from its water-logged lethargy, came brilliantly to life. The light wrapped us in a spherical shield as fire roared from the woods and engulfed us.

“Respingere!” I cried, channeling the force toward the landing downstairs from us.

In a whoosh of flames, the counterforce launched us into a weightless parabola. We cleared the park and were soon plummeting toward the street. On impact, the sphere shattered into sparks. We rolled over asphalt, my sword and staff clattering away in different directions.

Vega and I came to a rest near the far side of