Immortal by Dean Crawford

out of here and—’
    ‘The lady is fine and so is the fucking monkey,’ the girl hissed. ‘Shut up and follow me.’
    Ethan shrugged and followed the girl, noting the hard line of her jaw and the thick blonde hair tied up behind her head. She was wearing the cloak of the fearless eco-warrior, but Ethan could
see she was gripping the shotgun so tightly her knuckles were white and the barrel of the weapon was trembling.
    ‘Easy,’ he said soothingly. ‘No need to let this get out of control.’
    ‘Out of control?’ she spat. ‘Not the sharpest blade in the kitchen, are you?’
    ‘What do you want?’
    The girl gestured to the shattered bulk of the computer servers.
    ‘I want you to crawl behind that and look for anything rolling around back there.’
    ‘Such as?’ Ethan asked, maneuvering himself alongside the server. The girl kept the shotgun trained on him.
    ‘Things that go bang,’ she hissed at him with a humorless smile.
    Shit. Ethan guessed that the grenade he had heard had done the damage to the server and that there must be another one that had failed to detonate. Thoughts crashed through his mind. If
it was a fused grenade then it had a three-second delay from releasing the pin. Most modern grenades were highly reliable, unless you were unlucky like some Marines who had served in the jungles of
Vietnam, where wiry bushes and twigs had pulled the pins from where they hung on the soldiers’ belt-kits. The girl watching over him wouldn’t likely have access to modern military-grade
munitions. That would mean the grenades were probably old, maybe even vintage, black-market devices crudely reactivated using gunpowder and improvised fuses. Unreliable. Volatile. Sensitive to
movement.
    Ethan knelt down and peered behind the server, flinching as showers of sparks splashed and crackled round him. Through the acrid wisps of blue smoke he saw the grenade lying three feet away from
his grasp, faintly illuminated by shafts of light beaming through the wall behind where shrapnel had punched through to the outside world. Prefabricated double-skin aluminum walls, no
insulation.
    ‘I can see it,’ he coughed to the girl standing watch over him.
    ‘Good,’ the girl shot back. Ethan heard her call out to Lopez and the scientist. ‘Get out of here, all of you!’ Then back to him. ‘You, get off your knees and out
of there.’
    Ethan scrambled to his feet and backed away as the girl jabbed the shotgun at him, prodding him back into the lab as she moved to look down the back of the server. Ethan glanced over his
shoulder to see Lopez herding the scientist out of the labs and away down the corridor.
    ‘You’re trapped,’ he said to the girl. ‘The servers are destroyed, so whatever you’ve come here to do, you’ve done. Why not put the weapon down while you
still can, before the police get here?’
    The girl looked at him for a brief moment, as though considering the suggestion, before shaking it off.
    ‘The police are otherwise occupied,’ she said tartly, ‘and we’re done here.’
    ‘Yeah?’ Ethan chuckled. ‘And what the hell are you going to—’
    Ethan whirled as the girl swung the shotgun to point at his head, and in a fraction of a second he knew she was going to pull the trigger. With an instinct born of self-preservation his legs
propelled him without conscious thought sideways as he dove for cover behind one of the benches. The shotgun blasted a round over his head and smashed the ceiling above where he’d been
standing. Ethan hit the tiled floor hard on his knees and elbows, sprawling as he did so. He squinted through swirling smoke to see the girl take several steps back from the servers and then point
the shotgun at the grenade and fire again. A deafening blast ripped through the frame of the servers amid a spray of sparks and clouds of blue smoke from burning relay circuits.
    Through the haze and a fine hail of plaster chunks Ethan saw the girl suddenly dash out of sight