Subject Nightingale 1: Birth and Death Read Online Free Page B

trajectory at soft-ball pitch speed and bounced off her body harmlessly, but a few resumed their full, natural speed. A few whizzed by her hair and severed a few strands, but one in particular struck her throat, and she felt her flesh torn. The brass burnt her skin, and the acrid stench of burning flesh filled her nostrils as she fell like a ton of bricks.
    “ Contact right, contact right!” she heard someone yell as she laid on the floor, her failing sight staring up at the flickering tubes of light.
    The gunfire resumed as the ECHO squad from the stairwell stormed the hallway. One of the members fired his automatic rifle from the safety of corner cover, providing a base of cover fire while the other three crouched low and advanced into the hallway where Nightingale laid dying.
    “Contact down, confirmed kill!”
    A shotgun blast overpowered the sound of so many automatic rifles for just a moment. “Contact down, confirmed kill! Reloading!”
    Nightingale watched as one of the members of the ECHO squad kicked a steel gurney onto its side and crouched behind it. “We have an injured girl!” the squad member—a female with a Russian accent—shouted, and then began firing from behind her makeshift cover.
    “ Focus on the guys with the guns for now!” a male voice shouted. “Two contacts still up!”
    Another shotgun blast rang through the hallway. “Contact down, confirmed kill!”
    “Reloading!” the man shouted. “Can anyone see Tommy!? Glitch squad, sound off! Jonny!”
    “ Michaela!” the woman beside Nightingale shouted.
    “ Theo!” another man shouted between shotgun blasts.
    There was just gunfire, and then the first man—Jonny—shouted again, “Tommy, dammit, sound off!”
    There was no response.
    “ God dammit, where's Tommy!?”
    The gunfire came to an abrupt halt. The last enemy contact dropped his rifle and gurgled as blood poured from his throat, the skin sliced from ear to ear by a black-steel combat knife. The missing member of Glitch squad dropped the body and wiped the blood off on his pant leg.
    “Tommy. Contact down, confirmed kill. Area secure.”
    “ God dammit, Tommy!” Jonny shouted as he let go of his rifle, letting it hang against his torso by its shoulder strap. “This renegade bull $#!% is gonna get you killed! Any one of us could've shot you!”
    “ Calm down, we needed to clear these side rooms anyway.” He slipped his knife into a sheath attached to the shoulder of his tactical vest. “So I found a shortcut and flanked them, shouldn't you be commending me on a job well done?”
    “ It is okay, little one,” Michaela said quietly, her voice soothing, as she set her rifle aside in exchange for a black kit with a red cross on it.
    “ Is she gonna make it?” the man with the shotgun—Theo—asked as he approached Nightingale and the squad medic, reloading and then resting his gun on his shoulder.
    “ She will be fine,” Michaela answered as she inspected Nightingale. “There is a lot of blood, but she appears mostly unharmed. She is just dazed.” She lifted her eyelids with her thumb and shone a penlight into her eyes to check her pupils. After that she removed a clean rag from her medical kit and began wiping the blood away from Nightingale's neck and face. “But where did it all come from?” she asked herself quietly as she worked.
    Nightingale shifted her eyes away from the bright light and shook her head. Now that the noise and commotion had settled down—now that her pounding headache and the pain in her neck had mostly passed—her vision was clearing up. She could hear the nightingale again. It chirped quietly and hopped onto Nightingale's chest, having been hiding in her hair.
    “It's that bird,” Theo said, crouching to get a closer look. “When's the last time I've seen one of them? It must've been years ago.” His dark skin was smudged with a bit of dust from the crumbling walls, which he wiped off his forehead with the back of his fingerless