Read Havoc for Free Online

Alton’s disability would allow. Although the Colosseum’s exterior walls remained brightly lit, dark shadows shrouded the interior with an oppressive gloom.
    After moving a dozen yards in an arc around a perimeter hallway, the couple rounded a corner and entered a passage leading directly to the Colosseum floor. As they traversed the passage, the moonlight revealed a large man in a black leather jacket holding a pistol in one hand and rifling through the pockets of a prone figure with the other.
    The thief apparently heard the scrape of their footsteps and looked up. He hesitated for only a moment before disappearing into the labyrinth of hallways created by a network of stone pillars and walls in the Colosseum pit.
    Alton and Mallory headed for the wounded man. As they moved forward and crossed a perpendicular hallway, they heard footsteps receding down its left side.
    “There’s another!” shouted Mallory, pointing as a thin man in a business suit sprinted across a narrow shaft of artificial light illuminating a small section of the passage floor.
    “Let’s keep heading towards the guy on the ground,” gasped Alton, whose leg protested the exertion by sending lances of pain up his thigh. “We don’t know how injured he is.”
    As he hobbled along, Alton switched on his smartphone’s flashlight app and used it to cast a modicum of light into the midst of the gloom.
    After advancing twenty paces past the crossing hallway, the couple swiveled their heads at a new noise. They witnessed a third figure darting across the perpendicular passage in the same direction as the suited man.
    “There’s people all over the place in here!” exclaimed Mallory.
    “Let’s see to the injured man first,” said Alton. Seconds later, they reached the victim’s still form. Alton crouched over him to check for a pulse but couldn’t find one. As he pulled back the man’s jacket, he encountered a sticky pool of blood. The gunshots had apparently found their mark.
    “I’m gonna start CPR,” said Alton. Laying his flashlight-enabled cellphone aside, he turned to the still form before him and began chest compressions.
    “What about the assailants?”
    “We can’t go after them—we’re outgunned,” said Alton.
    “Let me see if the local police are already here. They might be able to track down the perps.”
    “Okay. Be careful.”
    Mallory began to retrace her steps. Scarcely two minutes later, she returned with a pair of local constables.
    “We ran into each other—literally,” she explained to Alton. She turned to face the policemen. “When we came in here, we saw three men running away. They may still be in here. One of them, a man in a dark leather jacket, shot this man—at least he was standing over him holding a handgun.”
    “Where did you see them go to?” asked a slightly chubby officer who puffed with the exertion of his recent effort.
    “The first one, the one we saw over this victim, ran into that passage,” replied Mallory, gesturing to a hallway leading directly away from the restaurant. The chubby officer flipped on a heavy flashlight and crept into the gloom, sweeping the flashlight’s beam across the walls and floor.
    Mallory turned to the second policeman. “We saw two other guys running down that perimeter hallway over there, the one we passed on our way in.”
    “Show me, Miss,” he replied.
    Mallory and the policeman jogged to the passage and rounded its corner. The sound of their footsteps died away within moments. Alton continued to administer CPR in a dwindling hope of bringing the man back from the precipice of death. As he continued the chest compressions, a collage of unpleasant memories swept through his mind, memories of mortally-wounded Army comrades in the desert of Gazib who had met a similar fate.
    None of Alton’s ministrations seemed to help. He couldn’t treat the man’s gunshot wounds without discontinuing the CPR. Like the gladiators of old, the dying man’s lifeblood