[Icelander]

Warden Tyrrell seems to be hurt from the knee strikes, off-balance or surprised by Taylor’s instant transition to a brutal grab and smash. Taylor manages to lift Tyrrell backwards and up from his knees on the wind-up and puts all his power and their combined body weight behind smashing his foe forward into the wall.

Tyrrell’s head hits the corner with an ugly thunk as the right cheekbone disintegrates and Taylor can feel through his hands as Tyrrell’s skull splinters at the pterion, the junction of the frontal, parietal, temporal, and sphenoid bones. Droplets of blood spatter the off-white wall and Taylor’s expressionless face. There is no feeling of victory or vindication and Taylor wonders if he should perhaps smash Tyrrell’s head into the wall again and again until it feels like winning.

Hearing boots on the linoleum floor, Taylor comes back to himself and reacts immediately by turning with Tyrrell’s head still grappled. An African-American man wearing SRT tactical gear and wielding an M4 carbine with CQC optics and weapon light is less than ten feet away from Taylor, having come out the same open door as Warden Tyrrell. The man appears to be looking for a clear shot, but Taylor lifts Tyrrell by the broken head and raises him in front of him as cover and rushes at this new threat. Without any shot that wouldn’t hit the Warden, the man backs frantically into the open doorway.

With explosive power, Taylor heaves Tyrrell at the SRT guard before launching himself after him in a tackle. The guard manages to leap backward into the room he came from and avoid having Tyrrell’s head impact the muzzle of his carbine, but this forced him to move the weapon out of line. Taylor reaches him and tries to grab the gun, but a decisive weapon retention motion by the guard pulls the carbine out of Taylor’s blood-slicked hands. Only a desperate grab for the guard’s tactical vest allows Taylor to get inside trapping range before the guard can get off a burst.

As Tyrrell landed on the floor in the room, head first by the feet of the guard, he gave a surprisingly strong groan. As Taylor wrestles with the guard, he still retains enough awareness to rule out the sound being simply the expulsion of air from dead lungs. The SRT guard decides not to fire his carbine in the clinch, as the muzzle is pointed upward with Taylor’s slip inside his reach, and instead lets go of the weapon with his left hand and punches Taylor hard in the solar plexus while trying to step backward out of his grasp.

Taylor doesn’t seem to notice the blow, but pulls the guard off-balance enough to prevent him from escaping the clinch. While still struggling for position, Taylor glances downward at the prone Tyrrell and with lethal precision stamps his right foot down on the back of his head, hard. There is a crack of bone and bloody fragments of teeth shoot out as the mouth and jaw are crushed into the floor.

Taylor uses the same leg to follow up with a sharp knee strike to the groin of the guard he is wrestling with. The SRT member ‘oofs’ with pain and Taylor transitions his grasp to the rifle, turning it around in one deft move to point at the guard’s head while it is still attached to the patrol sling he’s wearing. The guard freezes and Taylor addresses him in a voice completely without affect.

Taylor: “I reckon you ain’t gonna believe me, but I don’t want you dead. I’s gonna step away an’ you gonna keep your hands up an’ then go to your knees, real slow.”

Taylor unhitches the patrol sling while keeping the rifle aimed at the guard’s head and steps back to allow the guard to kneel. Then Taylor removes the duty belt from him and grabs the grenade and flashbang from his vest, attaching them to his own gear. Finally, Taylor pushes the guard down and applies flex cuffs to his hands. All in all, securing the guard doesn’t take more than ten seconds. While he does it, Taylor can hear the conversation on the third floor continuing.

Townsend: “…about Deputy Warden Tyrrell?”
Southern voice: “Well, he’s not here at the moment, is he?”
Townsend: “Can you get him to surrender?”

Taylor looks over to the stairway in the corridor, where the corpulent guard who fell down the stairs is lying. Taylor can tell that this guard is pretending to be unconscious, but doesn’t feel like doing anything about it. He also notes idly that Tyrrell is somehow still breathing, but now that there is no immediate danger, the thought of killing him as he lies there defenceless seems obscene, no matter what he might know about Sherilyn Bell’s powers and how him talking to Onyx Rain might affect her.

Southern voice: “Well, I can try, but Brad Tyrrell is unfortunately quite stubborn about his delusions. I rather think he’ll perish fighting your tactical teams, don’t you?”

Taylor hears a female scream from the rear annex building, the second floor. He starts running for the windows to the balcony in the next room and as he does, he can hear a burst of assault rifle fire from the same location. While running, Taylor draws a rescue knife to cut his own patrol sling, so the M16A2 rifle he’s wearing falls to the ground and as he reaches the window, he throws the M4 carbine he’s holding at it to break it, so he’ll be as unencumbered as possible.

Townsend: “…you care…”

Taylor leaps out and puts his feet on the iron railing of the balcony, jumping as high as he can. While in the air, Taylor grabs the railing on the second floor balcony with both hands and swings upwards, managing to put his feet on the railings and push himself off again without losing all his velocity, turning his swing into a flying leap for the rear annex, feet first. Another three-round burst rings out from the building Taylor is jumping toward, about a second after the first one.

Even with the balcony standing out, the distance is more than ten feet and Taylor is aiming for a window that is up on the second floor. Even if he makes the distance, if he should hit the base of the window and it doesn’t break, Taylor is going to end up like a bird hitting plate glass, falling head first into the courtyard. And if the window breaks, Taylor is going to be surrounded by lethally sharp fragments of glass of varying sizes, some of which might be big and sharp enough to pierce vital organs or cut open arteries. There is a reason movie stuntmen break windows made from sugar or synthetic resin instead of real glass.

Townsend: “…at all, Dr. Cot…?”

The sounds of shattering glass distort Townsend’s speech at the end, but Taylor is pretty sure he was saying ‘Cotton’. Rolling among the sharp fragments, shielding his face as best he can with a left arm clad in sharp-protective tactical gear, Taylor ends his motion crouching and draws his M9 pistol.

[probable] Dr. Cotton: “No. And if you are honest, neither do you, really. You’re primarily interested in your own survival and future advantage, as you should be. Tyrrell, guards, hostages, tactical police; these people can live or die without affecting our lives in any way.”

Taylor is in a dark room that looks like a large office or a small library, with book cases covering every wall. More or less every part of Taylor’s body hurts, but he doesn’t feel any new wounds to speak of, just minor cuts and bruises. Of course, it’s very possible to get a deep cut with a sharp enough edge without feeling anything until the loss of blood starts to tell. From the corridor outside the room, Taylor can hear O’Toole talking, trying to be quiet.

O’Toole: “Did you guys hear that?”
Taylor: “It’s Chase Taylor, come to see if’n y'all need help. Is anybody hurt?”
Cherry Bell: “I’m fine, Chase! I can take care of myself, you know. I just shot a guy!”

Taylor moves into the corridor and forward to where the others are where the corridor enters the staff rec room. He can see Dr. Anderson kneeling over Emma King on the floor, but she doesn’t look injured, just shocked. O'Toole is holding Mace can and baton, with his rifle swinging on a patrol sling.

There is also a pale, bare-chested man with camouflage paint all over him lying on the floor. Cherry Bell, holding an M16A2 at the ready, has kicked a big and scary looking autopsy knife away from his right hand, but he’s got six scalpels hanging off an improvised belt around his patient issue trousers.

The bare-chested man in also very dead, with one bullet hole in the center of his chest, a good sized part of his cheek shot away and two bullet holes in the middle of his face, one between the eyes and one under the left one. Blood and other substances pooled thickly around his head and torso indicate that all the wounds left exit holes in the back as well, probably significantly bigger than the relatively small entry wounds.

Taylor runs to Sherilyn Bell when he sees that her tactical gear has a huge cut at the lower back. He sighs in relief when he can see that while the Point Blank ATF SWAT vest doesn’t reach down to the hips of a typical user, Sherilyn is short enough for the cut to have caught the lower edge of the vest. The para-aramid fibers are cut through from hip to hip and even her shirt underneath is tore open, but her smooth white skin is entirely unmarred.

Cherry Bell: “I said I’m fine. I’m not a baby, Chase!”
Taylor [looks at the dead body]: “I’m real sorry you had to do that, Lynnie, but I’ma sure glad y’all ain’t hurt.”

Taylor cocks his head as he hears something along the corridor that goes all the way to the front central building. Motioning for everyone to take cover, he peeks around the wall from the rec room down the length of the corridor while readying the flashbang he took from the SRT guard. He can see a man in full tactical gear coming into the corridor from a room to the side, holding a large precision rifle and scanning for threats.