The ba-booming sound of the wreck was still reverberating through Gannon’s own skull as he unclipped his seat belt, swung open the smoking cement truck’s cab door and jumped down to the rubble-strewn sidewalk.
Kit’s backup Glock was in his just-in-case pack, and he reached back and put it in his hand as he walked into the street and back alongside the truck through the cloud of dust.
The mixer was still spinning, and as he arrived on the other side of it, he stopped for a moment, coughing into his fist, as he surveyed the wreckage.
The cab of the ambulance was lost entirely from view under the rubble of the building, but the rear of it was still accessible. One of its bright orange rear doors had actually swung open in the crash, and Gannon hurried over and peeked in over the barrel of the Glock.
Over the mess of spilled-out cabinets and broken glass, beyond a pair of overturned oxygen canisters, he saw Kit on the emergency medical stretcher with her eyes closed.
On the pebbled steel floor almost beneath the stretcher lay a thick-necked white guy facedown in a pool of blood. He was strapping some kind of machine gun over his shoulder.
Gannon jumped up and in and grabbed the gun. Then he lunged farther in over the stretcher and checked Kit’s pulse at her neck.
“Kit! Kit! You okay?” he said.
There was no response but her heartbeat and breathing seemed fine. He scanned for head injuries. Though the stretcher was half knocked over, she’d been belted in with three tight straps so she actually seemed to have weathered the crash pretty well, all things considered.
At first, he thought to unstrap Kit from the gurney, but then thought again. Instead, he kicked the fallen debris out of the way, yanked the stretcher loose and slid it out onto the street.
When he was done, Gannon took a quick look at the gun. As he lifted it, he saw it was a Heckler & Koch G36 short-barrel carbine.
He popped out its magazine. It was filled to the brim with 5.56 NATO bottleneck full metal jackets. He slapped it back in and when he looked back into the ambulance, he saw that the fake EMT had a bag with two more mags of 5.56.
Gannon hopped back inside and took those as well before he began rifling through the guy’s pockets.
“Bingo,” he said as he found Kit’s thumb drive in the man’s back left pocket beside his wallet.
He was squaring the guy’s fake EMT ball cap on his own head when he heard the hissing.
He looked down and saw the tactical hands-free headset radio rig the fallen man was wearing, and he stripped it off and traced the cord down to the push-to-talk unit and then down another radio cord to the Motorola radio on his belt.
Gannon quickly re-clipped the rig onto himself as he hopped back down onto the sidewalk.
Then he grabbed the bottom of Kit’s stretcher bed, and they were rolling north out in the street beside the crash through the dust, giving the truck’s still rotating mixing drum a wide berth as they passed.