Distortion Offensive Read Online Free Page A

Kevlar coat hung from the back, and Grant would need that if he was to make it through the next ten seconds alive.
    Grant scanned the area to either side of him, seeing the other volunteers ducking behind the furniture as bullets drilled into the wall ahead. They looked frightened.
    Abruptly the gunfire stopped. A moment later, Grant heard a voice from the other side of the desk as one of the gunmen spoke. “Richie?” the man shouted. “Richie, you okay, bro?”
    Richie—the gunman whom Grant had knocked to the floor—groaned, his response something less than an actual word.
    The speaker continued, issuing instructions to his people. “The guy went behind there. Ain’t nowhere else for him to go. C’mon.”
    The man was half right. Grant was trapped behind the desk, but he didn’t plan on going far. With a thought, he activated the hidden Commtact communication devicethat lay beneath his skin, subvocalizing his command. “Kane, back me up.”
    Kane’s reply was a single, whispered “Copy.” That one word was carried through the pintels of the subdermal communicator and straight through Grant’s skull-casing as though the other man stood right beside him.
    Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, if a wearer went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact.
    His brief exchange with Kane concluded, Grant was moving, leaping from cover and raising the Kevlar-weave coat out before him like a shield. The gunmen began firing instantly as Grant ran toward a nearby serving table, and he snapped the coat out at them, so that the long tails of heavy material whipped across the nearest thug’s face.
    The gunman howled as the heavy coat struck him, leaving a red mark like a blush across his right cheek. He blasted another shot from the .357 Colt King Cobra in his hand. The gunman was distracted by the coat and the heavy bullet flew wide, allowing Grant to reach his objective.
    Grant grabbed the handle of the pot of boiling soup, lifting it from the hot plate and tossing it out before himat the lead thug. As the angry gunman took another step toward Grant, the bubbling soup splashed across his face, scalding him like raking fire across his exposed flesh. In an instant, the gunman forgot what he was doing and toppled backward, reaching for his burning face as he hollered in his pain. Grant ignored him, leaping over the desk and flipping the half-empty soup pot out before him like an extension of his arm, a bowler rolling a bowling ball.
    The heavy pot clanged against the skull of the next stick-up man with a sound like the tolling of a bell. The man fell backward against the floor, his nose caved in and blood pouring down his face. Grant leaped atop his fallen foe, lashing out again with the heavy pot he held in his right hand as bullets slapped against the Kevlar shield he held in his left.
    By then, Kane and Brigid had emerged from the shadows. Before the gunmen could react, they joined the fray, felling two of their number in a swift, coordinated attack. Running, Kane drove a ram’s-head fist into the lower back of the nearest gunman before the man even realized he was under attack, forcing the man’s legs to give way so that he fell to the floor in the grip of paralysis—whether temporary or permanent Kane didn’t much care at that instant.
    Next to Kane, Brigid dropped low, sweeping her outstretched leg at another gunman, connecting with his knee so hard