by Jack Lively
But maybe the two guys on my side of the fence would think about themselves instead of their friend. Who had turned into one very wounded and unhappy individual, bellowing and moaning for help. Maybe the windshield had gotten misshapen on the first shot, so that by the second round the deflection was extreme. In which case the round would have deflected low, into the guy’s belly or chest.
I listened to the noise he was making. A chest wound would have been accompanied by some kind of wheezing, so I figured he’d taken it in the belly. Terrible for him and those of his friends still alive, okay for me. The surviving mercenaries finally reacted. It was exactly as I pictured it. One option they had was to open the gate and drive to their friend, or back to the house. But to do that, one of them would have to get out of the truck and work the lock. I didn’t figure that would happen, and it didn’t. They did the other thing, which was to drive the truck away from the property, to get the hell out of there. After all, who wants to die?
I was waiting in the brush at the side of the track. The truck started up. I could see the passenger looking toward the ridge top where I’d fired. I wasn’t there anymore. The driver was bringing the vehicle around in a tight semi-circle. I got one of the Breachers up and in a decent firing position. The other rested at my feet. I was screened by heavy brush. I could see through it, but they couldn’t see me. The driver hit the gas, eager to escape. He could probably taste it, maybe ten seconds off. If he managed to get that truck thirty yards he’d be free. The truck came by me on the driver’s side. When it was a hair away from being parallel to my position, I let the Breacher rip.
Buckshot tore through the driver’s side door like it was a sheet of printer paper. There might have been a slight reduction in force, maybe two percent. The driver got the other ninety-eight. A tight pattern of steel shot at approximately chest height. Which was game over for the driver. The guy next to him got nothing but a face full of his friend. The driver’s grip must have been affected, because the truck veered to the right and buried itself into the dirt bank.
Two seconds later the passenger door flung open. By then I was striding across the road. Both Breachers up. I saw the survivor extricating himself from the cab. He was hopping on one leg, trying to get out from the bent metal. The door was catching on his clothing. With his other hand he was trying to get an assault rifle up. By the time he got free of the truck I was all over his decision loop.
I squeezed the trigger on the other Breacher. Another roll of the dice. This time it was a Brenneke slug, a very large and ugly chunk of shaped lead alloy. There is no mental preparation for the violence of gunfire. It’s always a lot more violent than most people expect. I had aimed for center mass. The slug impacted as planned and blew the guy into two parts, along with the assorted pieces and fluids that came off and sprayed back. His bottom half tipped over and fell on the spot, the torso and head were thrown onto the dirt bank a couple of feet away.
There was silence in the surrounding woods. I walked toward the fence. The quiet was pierced by an agonized bellow. The wounded guy moaned. A couple of feet away from the gate, I raised one of the Breachers and blew the lock off. I kicked through it. The pickup truck was off to the side and about twenty feet from the fence. The windshield was starred by the two rifle rounds and buckled inward. I pulled the driver’s side door open. The driver had no face. I pulled the corpse out of the truck and threw it to the ground.
The passenger was making shallow breaths and humming to himself, like a mantra. Maybe he was a religious person. He had an assault rifle across his knees, a Tavor bullpup. His hands were nowhere near it. And even if they were, so what? The guy was gut-shot. His torso was one dark wet stain from the chest down through the groin. The human gut is lined with nerve cells, like a second brain. You get shredded metal up in there and you’re not going to be thinking about much else. Maybe in the movies a gut-shot man can keep on fighting, in reality he can’t. He can keep on dying, is all. The guy looked at me and mouthed words, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. It all sounded like moaning to me. I stacked the Breachers over his knees. Then I unslung the Remington and stacked that on top.
I said, “Hold those for me.”
He moaned again, a sorrowful sound. In the middle of the moan were words. I finally made them out. “Finish me.” It had been the Russian accent.
I ignored him. A wounded enemy was worth more than a dead one at this stage. I had been making a plan on the walk over from the fence. Ellie had said that there were two outbuildings, then the main house. My plan wasn’t complicated. Take the outbuildings first, then the main house. That way, the important people would have more time to get scared and come together in one place.
The truck was new. I thought of the mercenaries out there waiting. Defense in depth. They would not be far away. The guy next to me had a radio ear-piece. But he wasn’t in any condition to be communicating. Looked like he couldn’t even move his hands. Which meant that his living team members didn’t know what the deal was.
They’d find out soon enough. I turned the ignition key. The engine kicked over nicely.
Fifty-One
The sky was clear, black and speckled with stars. Residual mist hung low, on the way to disappearing. This was high ground. The ocean looked clean and black in the moonlight. The orchard was a beautiful spot. I turned the truck around, so that it faced toward the house and shifted the gear box into park. The guy next to me had found a position where it hurt less, and he was trying to keep it. I lifted the Remington off his legs and he moaned. I got the rifle pointed out the window and looked through the scope.
The driveway curved up through the apple trees. It was hard to see anything up ahead. A couple of hundred yards away the orchard ended in a thicket. There were boulders in and around the heavy growth. The driveway punched through all of that, presumably to the house. I liked what I was seeing. It fit right in with my plans. There was risk, but there’s always risk. The rifle went back on the pile. I flipped the high beams up. Fed the engine gas and the tires bit into dirt and launched us up the track.
Not too fast, not too slow.
I figured a ninety percent chance there were guys out there in the brush watching. Fifty-fifty chance of a bullet. The men out there would be uncertain. Waiting to see what was going on. They couldn’t know for sure who was driving, if it was their friend or their enemy. If there were two of them out there waiting, maybe one of them thought they should fire on the truck immediately, the other felt differently. Maybe they’d align. Maybe not. The compromise was most likely. They would wait until the truck got closer.
The truck was getting closer.
I steered with my knees, picked up the Remington and looped the strap over my shoulder. We were about two hundred yards from the tree line. I had the truck moving at around twenty miles per hour. Nice and easy. I took one of the Breachers and fit it between the seat and the gas pedal. There was too much room, so I had to ease the seat forward in little jerking intervals. The guy screamed like someone was stirring his intestines with a knife. I ignored him and adjusted position so that the Breacher was feeding the right amount of gas into the engine. The needle stayed at twenty.
One hundred yards from the tree line I grabbed the second Breacher from the guy’s legs. He was looking pretty bad, definitely delirious. His moaning had turned into a high keening, like an unhappy ghost.
Jumping out of a moving vehicle isn’t a recommended activity. If you’re going to do it, you should make sure there is a soft landing. You’d also want to keep an eye out for rocks and tree stumps. Two types of hard object a guy wouldn’t want to meet when landing.
I looked ahead as much as that was possible. Picked my moment and flipped the door latch. One hand clutched the Breacher and the Remington’s strap. The other hand opened the door. I had my feet out on the running board. Pushed off with the legs, while at the same time flipping the door shut again with the strength of my fingers. I was hoping the high beams would be blinding
enough to mask my movement.
I landed on my ass, skidded through the dirt and weeds for about ten feet and bumped right into a rock at the end of it. If there were guys out there watching, they were keeping discipline. I dropped to a prone position. The truck ambled off the track, wobbled over dirt and rocks, then plowed into the base of a boulder.
The impact must have displaced the Breacher from between the pedal and the seat. The truck stopped dead against the rock face. At first there was a great silence. Then the wounded man began to howl. He’d been lurched out of a relative comfort zone. His bellowing cries were worse than ever. Which was the way I’d intended it to be. He was the most miserable person in the universe. If he were a friend of mine, I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself from putting a round into his head.
Which is how one of his friends must have felt. A single shot cracked out from the woods, followed closely by the tinkle of the windshield being penetrated once more. Silence. I homed in on the muzzle flash. The Remington was up and hot. It was dark in there. The distance and angle didn’t help any. I was watching a section of the woods, maybe ten feet up among the rocks. Nothing moving. The guy had taken his shot and was doing his best to be invisible. Through the scope everything looked gray and uniform and murky.
Then I saw him. One moment it was all grainy indistinguishable monochrome. The next moment I was looking at the shape of a hand. The hand moved slightly, and I saw that it was connected to a weapon. I shifted the scope higher and found the guy’s head. I couldn’t make out the features in the gloom. I moved down to center mass and put a round into his chest.
I hit the dirt and rolled. The response was almost instant. A triple burst came at me from the other side of the driveway, east of the first guy’s position. The muzzle flash was white. The rounds came over my head. I didn’t wait for the shooter to adjust. I rolled to an apple tree and waited. The shooter’s own muzzle flash might impair his night vision for a couple of seconds. He might not have seen where I’d moved. I got the Remington up and braced against the tree trunk. Through the scope my eye sought any and all movement. I was hungry for the shot, but not starving.
The guy fired first, he had seen me. Another triple burst out of his assault rifle. Three rounds, thudding into the tree. Almost perfectly on target, maybe three inches too far to the right. An impressive shot in the dark. At the range he would have been a hero. I zeroed in on the muzzle flash and found center mass. A millisecond too late. The guy rolled off as I dropped the pin on a .308 round, which spun into the thicket, sparked on the rocks, and ricocheted up into the ether with a loud ping. I pulled back behind the tree again. Another meticulously aimed triple splintered wood chips off the tree, spraying me with shredded wood. He was a very good shooter.
My brain started doing mental math. I’d jumped out of the truck at around seventy yards and eventually rolled up against the tree. Call it fifty yards from the target. Well within rifle range, but not buckshot. Thing is, with buckshot you don’t need to worry so much about accuracy. At forty yards the spread would be effective. Ten yards to go. Like a football game, I needed to get back to first down.
I pushed out and ran like a maniac for the next apple tree. I saw muzzle flash spitting lead in my direction. Heard the whirring whizz of hot rounds tearing the air. But none of it tore into me. I racked a shell into the Breacher’s chamber. Buckshot or slug? I was hoping for buckshot. The guy fired another burst. The rounds slapped into the tree trunk like a snare roll. I brought the shotgun around and fired in the direction of the muzzle flash. Boom. A slug.
The heavy metal tore into the trees, but not into the guy.
Disappointing, but not for long. Two mental events occurred then. The first event happened in the guy’s head. He now knew that I was armed with a weapon designed for close-quarters combat. Which meant that I was unafraid to come at him, a thought that made him panic. The second cognitive event happened in my head. I made a mental note that after the slug, the next shell up was buckshot. The guy wasn’t completely wrong to break cover. He might have been in a bad position for close-quarters, exposed and vulnerable. You can’t know what’s in someone else’s mind. Whatever the reason, he broke and dashed to get behind one of the big boulders. I raised the Breacher and put buckshot into him inside of forty yards.
I saw the pellets hit. The guy was running hard. When the shot reached him, his body was slapped weirdly off its intended line, as if pushed by an invisible hand.
I got up and walked the forty yards. The shooter was alive, breathing heavily. His weapon was in the dirt, ten yards away. The buckshot had struck him in the hip and the groin. I racked the next round into the chamber. A slug. We made eye contact. He didn’t stoop to begging, so I gave it to him clean.
Fifty-Two
Strange noises came from the pickup truck. The engine was still turning over, the gear shift in the drive position. The noise was a looping banging on top of the engine sound. There wasn’t pressure on the gas pedal, but the low idle was pushing the vehicle forward into the boulder like an autonomous robot gone bad.
I crossed the driveway to the truck and killed the ignition. The Breacher was lying on the floor, dislodged from where it had been wedged against the pedal. I crouched in the lee of a boulder and fed ammo into the shotguns. Same as before, one slug, one buckshot. I liked the combination. Recharged the internal magazines. Same for the Remington. A gentle breeze had come up from the ocean. The water was glowing. I was calm and centered. I sniffed the clean air. The briny smell was the calm part, the hint of cordite and blood were the exciting part.
There was nowhere I would rather be.
I was quietly slipping the bolt on the last .308 round when I heard the sound.
Someone moving in the thicket. I kept still. If they hadn’t shot me yet, it was only because they didn’t know I was there. Both Breachers were at my feet. I slung the Remington over my shoulder and picked up one of the shotguns. Then I saw movement in the brush. I got the Breacher up and hot. My finger brushed the trigger back and tightened up the slack.
I saw the face first, a pale oval outlined in shadow. A woman. She was standing in the thicket, looking at me with wide eyes. Not an enemy. The woman looked bad, like she’d missed breakfast, lunch, and dinner for weeks, if not months. She was coming through the branches and she wasn’t alone. A cluster of figures followed in her wake. They looked like something out of a news report on refugees from an industrial disaster or a civil war.
I said, “Come through. I’m not going to hurt you.”
They were dressed in loose, dull clothing. As if they had been wearing the same outfit for so long the colors had come out. They were a mix of young and old, male and female. The flesh was wasted and unnaturally pale, almost glowing in the dim moonlight. Like they’d been kept underground. I counted six of them, unarmed. They didn’t look like they had enough strength to hold a weapon.
It was impossible to tell the woman’s age. Old and young, all at the same time. Or perhaps a young person who had grown old real fast. The skin was loose, hanging off desiccated flesh in folds.
Her voice was cracked and hoarse. “Please. There are more of us up at the property. They wanted to take us out on the bus. Everyone’s scared.”
When she spoke, I saw the inside of her mouth. The fine hairs rose on the back of my neck. Because when she opened her mouth, the only thing I saw were toothless pink gums gleaming wet in the moonlight.
I stepped to the next one, an older man.
“Open your mouth.”
He was embarrassed, looking away from me, but opened up just the same. Pink toothless gums.
I said, “The radiation.”
The man nodded. He shifted his eyes back at me, like he was going to have to trust me now. I figured these were people who had been made to handle nuclear materials. The man’s sad eyes stuck on me, hungry for something. As if continuing to hold me in his gaze would guarantee deliverance, or at the minimum, understanding. He began to say something. H
is mouth opened. Wet and pink. But nothing came out except a few droplets of saliva on the lip. He licked them away, eyes never leaving mine. The group was staring at me. An endangered organism with twelve eyes, each one full of sorrow. I didn’t know how long these people had to live, but it wasn’t going to be years or decades, more like weeks or days.
I looked at them, taking my time, examining the faces looking back at me like the living dead. Radiation poisoning. None of them had teeth. Just like the body Ellie had found at the fence this spring. She had said he had no teeth.
It occurred to me that we had been misreading the situation. This was not some kind of master criminal enterprise. It was a failed project. The corporate people were bailing out right now, cutting their losses.
I was looking at losses.
A triple burst of gunfire rapped out from the direction of the house and outbuildings. It was followed by another. Two snare drum rolls, filtered and slightly dampened by the trees. The little sad cluster of victims flinched and ducked their heads. Those were NATO rounds from one of the assault rifles these mercenaries carried, another Tavor bullpup. I ignored it for the moment.
I addressed the woman, the leader. “You said something about a bus.”
She nodded. “Yes, the green bus.”
The entire situation finally clicked into place in my mind. The mystery became a puzzle. The mini-bus at the cruise ship. Green Gremlin. The cruise ship’s special hospital facilities. They were moving out the casualties to the Emerald Allure, cutting their losses. There was no way of guessing what the Mister Lawrence people planned to do with them. Maybe dump them in the Arctic, make them disappear somewhere. The whole concept was insane, which had not prevented them from committing to it. I didn’t know what country was being used for the flag state, but I did know that if the Emerald Allure got to international waters there might not be an easy way of stopping them.