The three silhouettes kept coming.
Isaac stayed on one knee because his body had stopped negotiating and moved straight into mutiny. Blood ran warm down under the sling. His stomach clenched around pain so hard it felt like a hand. The white at the edges of his vision still hadn't gone away. It had just settled there, waiting.
The thing on the floor twitched once.
Didn't rise.
Didn't matter.
The humans had already taken over the room.
Now that they were closer, he could read them better.
The one on the left was a woman. Small. Maybe five-two. Lean in that compact, whipcord way that made short people seem like a trick of angles until they moved. She had both hands on the stop sign pole balanced across her shoulders, the red octagon still bolted on crooked and painted over with old scratches and dried black blood.
The one in the middle was a man around five-ten with the gun still up and steady. No wasted motion. No panic in him. His face stayed half-shadowed by the broken light and the smoke lifting off the barrel.
The tallest was on the right.
Six-one, maybe a little over. Empty hands. No visible weapon. Nothing theatrical about him at all.
That was the bad sign.
The woman saw Isaac looking and laughed.
Bright. Delighted. Like she'd walked into a party already halfway drunk on violence.
"Oh ho ho," she said. "What do we have here?"
The other two said nothing.
Not a word.
Not a warning.
Not even a glance at each other.
Isaac tried to stand.
Huge mistake.
Pain tore through the broken shoulder, the punctures, the ribs, the stomach-cramp of overuse, all of it hitting at once. His fingers twitched toward each other anyway on reflex.
The woman saw that too.
Then she moved.
Fast enough to feel rude.
One second the stop sign rested across her shoulders. The next she had both hands on the pole and the whole thing came around in a flat vicious arc.
It hit Isaac across the side of the body before he could fully raise his arm.
The sound was metal and bone and breath leaving him all at once.
His feet left the ground.
Not high.
Just enough.
Enough to make him helpless in it.
Airborne, sideways, a few feet off the floor—
—and the tall one vanished.
Not literally.
Worse.
He crossed the distance so fast Isaac never saw the first step. Just a smear of motion and then fists.
One to the ribs.
One to the kidney.
Two to the sternum.
Three to the gut.
A hook to the liver.
An uppercut under the floating body that kept Isaac aloft instead of letting him fall.
Then more.
Too fast to count cleanly.
Still countable because pain kept score.
Five.
Eight.
Twelve.
Sixteen.
His whole body jerked and folded around impacts before the impulses from the first strikes had even finished reaching his brain.
Twenty.
Twenty-four.
Twenty-seven.
Less than five seconds.
Thirty blows easy.
Every one of them precise. No wasted rage. No sloppy brutality. Just clean violence delivered into a suspended target the speedster had no intention of letting him touch the ground yet.
Isaac couldn't scream.
No air for it.
The leader stepped in under the storm of hits like he had all day and three rounds left with Isaac's name on them.
Gun up.
Three shots.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
All three punched into Isaac's stomach in a brutal tight line.
Not center chest.
Not head.
Calculated.
Like somebody preserving merchandise while breaking it.
The pain that followed wasn't pain at first. It was subtraction. Everything inside him going blank-white and wrong. Blood burst hot into his mouth. The world flashed. The speedster appeared beside him one last time in that impossible stutter of movement and drove a kick into the side of Isaac's head.
That one finished it.
His body ragdolled.
He hit the deli floor hard enough to bounce once, slid through candy wrappers and broken glass and came to rest half-curled on his bad side.
Then the scream came.
Late.
Raw.
Torn out of somewhere deeper than pride.
Blood spilled out of his mouth with it and streaked the tile under his chin.
He tried to move.
His body answered with one weak twitch and then a flood of agony so complete it almost felt clean.
The three of them walked toward him.
Not rushing.
Not worried.
The woman came first, stop sign dragging one inch behind her with a little metallic scrape.
The leader kept the gun angled down but ready.
The tall one had already gone still again, hands empty at his sides like none of the last five seconds had required effort worth remembering.
They stopped over him.
Isaac could only see them in pieces from where he lay.
Boots.
Pant legs.
The red stop-sign face hanging by her knee.
The muzzle of the gun.
The leader's silhouette cut against the blown-out doorway.
The tall one's stillness like a blade standing upright.
The woman leaned in.
Didn't crouch.
Didn't bother.
Just bent at the waist until her face entered his field of view upside down and smiling.
Close now.
Young.
Sharp-featured.
Dark eyes lit with the exact kind of fun a sane person never should've been having here.
"Wow," she said, studying him. "He's pretty cute."
Isaac spat blood sideways and tried to push himself up.
Nothing useful happened.
Her smile widened.
"I still wanna kill him though." She turned her head slightly toward the leader without taking her eyes off Isaac. "Can we kill him?"
The leader answered with one word.
"No."
That landed worse than yes might have.
Because no meant purpose.
Because no meant they had already decided he was worth more alive than dead.
Because people only did math like that when they knew something he didn't.
The woman made a disappointed face.
"Aww."
Then she looked back down at Isaac and her expression shifted from playful to openly baffled.
"Are you a dumbass?"
Isaac tried to focus on her.
Failed.
Tried again.
The white at the edges of his vision kept eating inward. His stomach burned around the bullet wounds. His broken arm felt nailed to the rest of him with lightning.
She pointed at him with one finger.
"At your whole deal, I mean." Then she tipped her head, genuinely curious now. "Can't you just heal yourself?"
That cut through the pain better than anything else in the room.
Isaac stared at her.
The leader still said nothing.
The speedster still said nothing.
The woman kept looking at him like he had disappointed her personally by bleeding too much.
She clicked her tongue.
"You know we saw you in action, right?"
His breath caught.
Not because the sentence surprised him.
Because some part of him had hoped, stupidly, that this was random. A wrong place wrong time collision. Three violent lunatics walking into a deli on the exact second a monster needed shooting.
No.
They had been watching.
The leader finally moved, crouching just enough to put the gun close to Isaac's face without touching skin.
Up close, he looked older than the other two. Not old. Just settled in his violence. A face without wasted emotion in it. Dark hair, hard jaw, eyes that didn't flicker or search because they already knew what mattered.
"Listen carefully," he said.
His voice was calm.
That was worse than shouting too.
"You are not dying here."
Isaac laughed.
Or tried to.
It came out as blood and air and a broken choking sound.
The woman straightened and rested the stop sign across her shoulders again.
"See? He's funny."
The tall one looked down at Isaac for the first time in a way that felt direct. Not cruel. Not kind.
Assessing.
Like he was reading damage off the body and deciding how much more it could take before transport got messy.
Isaac dragged one hand half an inch over the tile.
Toward his fingers.
Toward crossing them.
Toward anything.
The leader saw that and put one boot on his wrist.
Not hard.
Just enough.
A reminder.
"You'll get your hand back," he said. "When I'm sure you've stopped making decisions with it."
The woman laughed again, softer this time, almost affectionate.
"That was hot."
Isaac tried to buck the wrist free and got nowhere. Pain rolled through him so hard the store dimmed.
Through the ringing in his ears, he could still hear the bone-needle thing on the floor behind them making small wet sounds that meant it wasn't fully dead yet. None of the three cared. Not one glance back. Not one shift in posture. Whatever they were, they were more dangerous than the creature had been and knew it.
The woman rocked back on her heels and looked around the trashed store with obvious approval.
"You really did wreck the place."
She looked down at him again.
"Messy, but creative."
Then her eyes dropped to the blood soaking through his sling, the stomach wounds, the needles still lodged in his shoulder line, and for the first time something like irritation crossed her face.
"Oh, come on," she said. "Don't pass out yet. That's boring."
The leader finally lifted his foot off Isaac's wrist.
Not mercy.
Timing.
He holstered the gun and said to the speedster, "Get him up."
Isaac's whole body went cold.
The tall one stepped forward.
Fast again—not striking this time, just movement so abrupt it made the air feel cut. One hand closed in the front of Isaac's shirt and hauled him half off the floor before the rest of the pain had time to object.
It all objected anyway.
Hard.
Isaac made a sound he hated and his head dropped forward, blood stringing from his mouth to the tile.
The woman leaned in close one last time, smile still there, voice dropping into something almost fond and therefore much worse.
"Try not to die before we get where we're going," she said. "I'm getting attached to the mystery."
Behind her, through the blown-out storefront and the hard daylight beyond, the street waited with no interest at all in what kind of people had just walked into it.
Isaac forced one eye open.
Looked from the woman to the leader to the silent speedster holding him upright like a piece of ruined luggage.
No names.
No faction.
No explanation.
Just certainty.
These weren't rescuers.
And wherever they were taking him next was going to be worse than the deli.