The crash of the door being kicked open split the dead silence like thunder. Amid flying splinters, Li Jie slipped in sideways, his gun pointed ahead.
The first thing he saw was the green-haired man standing beside a pregnant woman, his gun pressed to her temple. Beside them stood a terrified Jack Napier and a crowd of former neighbors from Chinatown.
"Ha ha!" The green-haired man grinned from ear to ear, wild delight written across his chalk-white face. "Officer! I was just thinking something was missing. Nothing could be better than having you join the game. Play well, and you can get them out."
That face... Even if I'd never seen him before, I could name him at a glance.
Clown.
Had this happened right after he crossed over, he probably would have jumped in panic. But now, he hardly seemed to care. He paid no attention to that crazed smile or deranged expression, only flicking his gaze swiftly around the room.
An old man on the floor, a congealed pool of blood, a terrified crowd, and a blinking bomb in the center.
"What game?" he asked coldly, keeping his gun raised.
"The bombs here are divided into two groups. Each group has just enough power to kill half the people."
The green-haired man giggled and gestured with one hand. "The rules are..."
Bang!
The sudden gunshot cut off his speech.
It wasn't the gun pressed to Jenny's head. It was the SIG 550 in Li Jie's hands. A 5.56-millimeter bullet burst from the muzzle, crossed fifteen feet of air, and drilled precisely into the center of the green-haired man's forehead.
His head snapped backward. A fan of red and white sprayed from the back of his skull onto the recreation room's mottled wall, tracing an abstract, hideous pattern. The