by Paula Cox
“Now.”
The door’s thrown open and we make like hell for the car, sprinting across the street, our guns out and already pointed towards the window. Kirill’t look at us. Kirill’t look at us. Kirill’t look.
Ten feet to the car.
The left figure with the machine gun turns a little outwards. Suddenly, he jumps to his feet, gun out. The window shatters with his bullets.
Our guns crack fire. So much for going in quietly. Or for the element of surprise. Four rounds, five. The guy on the left goes down, clutching his leg just as the right one gets to his feet. Shots hammer snow. I hear them whizzing past me like bugs. Five feet from the car I jump and roll and get myself secured. Crash comes in closely behind.
“Not a bad start.”
“Not a great one either.”
Bullets pound into the BMW. The rhythm shudders against our backs.
“You got a good eye on him? Good enough for a shot?”
“Won’t know until I try.”
“Then try. They’re gonna be swarming out any moment. I’ll cover.”
The second we stop hearing the rounds thud into the car I leap up and send three shots in his direction, then duck back down. A whole spray of return fire comes back, right on top of me. All four windows shatter. A tire pops—good. No retreat this way.
Then Crash is up and firing fast as he can squeeze. Six, seven, eight rounds I count off. Finally, the scream and with a hail of return fire trailing behind it like a cloud. Crash ducks and turns his wild eyes to me.
“Good shooting.” We reload our clips.
“Save it until we’re out of this, Q.”
“You see anybody on the porch?”
“No—run for the pillars?”
“On three—” I throw up three fingers towards Nail and the greenhorns— “three!”
Guns out, Crash’s trained on the shattered window above and mine on the front door, we rush for the porch. There’s no return fire. Where—
Ten feet from the porch Crash screams and goes down, holding his left knee. I glance at him but only hold it for a second before turning back to the porch. The hell did that come from? Window shot? Nothing through the front door? I unload two cups in each window and shelter behind one of the pillars.
Nail and his group of four are behind me. I shout: “Windows! Windows!”
Two more cracks of fire come from somewhere close by. One of the young guys goes down—the two others make for the BMW. Nail is the only one coming, directly up the route Crash just took and got shot down in, his shotgun held out clumsily in front of him. Goddammit.
I throw myself out from behind the pillar and make for the left window, where I heard the last two shots come from. It’s dark inside—I can’t make out anything. Then, all of a sudden, the shine of a barrel, pointing out.
Quicker than I can think I put myself in front of the window, exposing myself, and fire off two rounds before ducking down. I hear the Item thud to the ground, followed by a scream stretched out into a curse.
Nail makes it up to the pillar, stops momentarily to take aim, and blasts out the right window with a shower of glass. He takes cover behind the left pillar; I move to the right and look behind me, for Crash. He’s down, gasping hard but not screaming. His leg is mangled and bloody from the knee down.
“Blondie!” I shout, remembering only one of the names, and hoping it wasn’t the one who got shot. “You two get your asses up here! We’ve got two men bleeding out!”
I chance another look behind, towards the BMW. Did they hear me… or?
And then like two small animals, the two guys dart out from behind the car, firing bullets at God knows what.
“No fire!” I shout. “Get our guys! Get Crash!”
They don’t hear over their rain of useless gunfire. That’s the problem with these fucking kids—they assume a firefight is all this, all rounds of nonstop fire. Soon enough, their clips are exhausted, and they’re down near the frozen hedges to the left of Nail’s pillar. And from above come the sounds of return fire—a whole shit ton of rounds judging by the sounds. They riddle the hedges, the tops of the pillars, and then the two bodies. Crash gets half a dozen in the chest, same as the kid. When the fire stops shaking their bodies, they both go still as sacks of flour.
“Goddammit!” I scream. “Nail! Cover fire—now!”
No waiting to hear the response. There’s nothing else he can say aside from yes. Two of our guys have just been executed. One of them just a kid.
I rush out from my pillar and empty my clip through the window while Nail sends up blast after blast. The two guys retreat back inside, but they’re out a moment later with the same barrage as before. And that’s not everything because soon, as I move back to try and get an angle on them, I hear a shot come singing past me, from the direction of the porch. Another one whizzes by, burying into the already torn-up BMW but the third takes a piece out of me just north of my ankle. It feels like someone’s knocked my leg out from underneath me with a sledgehammer. I wobble to the side but somehow keep myself standing. The pain is a bitch but worse than that is the nausea. All I want to do is fall on the ground and throw up everything I’ve eaten since the start of last week. That’s something they don’t tell you about getting shot. They always describe the pain, the heat, and the bite of the fucking steel as it sinks into your body like a hot spoon, but it’s that twisting in your gut that really gets you.
I’m another step away from collapsing entirely and feeding my body to the bullets of the guys manning the porch, but I don’t. I stumble and lurch, and just as I trip I feel Nail’s massive arms grab me and hoist me back to my one good foot. I want to ask him what the hell he’s doing ‘cause now we’re both under fire, and that means we’re both gonna get peppered with holes the second the guys up top reload.
Too late already: I hear the shots, a drum of crack-crack, crack-crack, crack-crack like a call and response or a scream and its echo.
“Here!” Nail shouts, tossing me down in a heap, my back to the pillar. That’s when I see that the gunshots aren’t coming from the porch or from the window, but from the two kids. Ash on the left, Blondie on the right, firing for all they’re worth.
A scream from the right window and a barrage of random bullets from their guy indicate a hit. I want to stand up and clap the kids on their backs, but I don’t. I lean to the side and empty up all the water I’ve swallowed since swimming in the ocean, plus Theo’s scotch and the burger I got on the way to the apartments. It’s like throwing up poison. Nail, back at the pillar, blasts the door with his shotgun and looks at me.
“I’m fine!” I call out. He points to my leg, and I catch the word: “Walk?”
I force myself to stand, gripping the pillar to keep myself rooted. My ankle goes blisteringly hot and erupts into the pain of a thousand needles all stabbing at the nerve. I want to throw up again, but when I retch, nothing comes out except for a stream of spit. When I try putting weight directly on the leg, I get the same pain, but I realize after a few small steps that I can drag it behind me and avoid a more intense pain.
“Works!” I shout. “But I’m not climbing any stairs!”
But it looks like Nail doesn’t hear this—he’s too busy keeping his eyes on the side of the house. Another blast of his shotgun nearly tears the hinges of the door. He looks at me, grinning like a clown, which is, I realize, how I must look when I’m in the heat of things.
“What?” I say, missing what he’d just screamed. He shoulders the shotgun and lumbers towards me.
“I said you won’t have to,” he says, punctuating it with another slap on the back. This time I’m prepared—leaning into the post for stability—and I don’t shrink from the slap at all.
“Our boys are inside.”
Chapter 33
“Just like that? It’s too early. You saw them go in?”
“Just now,” Nail says. “And you can hear ‘em if you pay attention.”
Blondie and Ash have long
since stopped firing, and that could only mean that the succession of pops, cracks, and explosions is coming from inside the house, and not outside. And a hell of a lot of noise it is.
“Sounds like pandemonium in there. Why the hell are we still out here?”
“You tell me.”
Blondie and Ash look at me, lowering their Items, their faces reading astonishment and unease. “I need you two to come with me. We’re going to sweep the ground floor. In, then right. Nail behind us. Got it.”
They nod.
“You’re really gonna try walking around on that thing? Looks busted.”
“I can drag it behind me. You got my back?”
“Like always, Q.”
It’s just clearing out now, I remind myself. We’re almost there. A few more rounds—a few more minutes’ watching each other’s backs, and then we’ll have Maya back. I swallow down the new lump of nausea that’s risen up and raise my gun to the hinge hanging door, prepared to shoot whatever comes through it.
“Nail. You got a kick for us?”
Up comes Nail’s boot, up and through the door in a splinter of jagged wooden pieces. He jumps out of the way, landing with a thud on the wood of the deck as the kids and I move in.
There’s a grand entrance room, a staircase to the left, a door on the ground floor leading straight on and a dining room to the right with another door to the kitchen. That must be where the other guys have gone. I can hear shouts muffled by the thick walls.
We move through the dining room, our guns raised to tag the first person we see. The place is dark like the inside of a cave: the light of the afternoon illuminates it hardly at all. The whole place smells like smoke and powder. Shards of chandelier are scattered all across the carpet, along with chunks of paneling. The porch window is to our right; behind it, two dead guys are crumpled up in an unnatural heap. I look away, towards the kitchen.
Another gunshot. I don’t even jump. This is a firefight. The sound’s so natural it’s like it’s a part of my pulse. A shadow moves in the kitchen. One of the kids raises to fire, but I stop him, suddenly. “Gimme your name if you’re a Stitch!”
There’s a sudden scrambling of feet, and a few whispered words, and I prepare to move in and execute whoever’s waiting on the other side when I hear Kirill shout his name out.
We rush into the kitchen, which is torn to shreds the same way as the dining room. Kirill’s there, sure enough, panting hard and covered in sweat but fine aside from that. Not a mark on him. The four others wander around the place, reloading, checking the vitals of the two dead guys at the window and at the hall entrance to the back porch, and nursing gunshot graze wounds at arms and legs. Everyone’s pretty okay from the looks of it.
“You guys came early,” I say.
“We came when you fucking needed us to come.”
“Thanks. They had us pinned down.”
“We know. You been upstairs, yet?”
“No.” I point to my leg.
“They fucked you up bad. You wait down here, yeah?’
I’m just about to respond when two cracks come directly from upstairs, followed by the hard thump of a body hitting the floor. Kirill whirls to me. “Any our boys up there?” But I’m shaking my head. Suddenly, I feel frozen all over again. None of our guys were on the second floor—they weren’t even firing there. Which means those bullets… they had to have come from him.
Kirill motions towards his team of three, and they disappear back down the hall and start stomping up the stairs. My guys look at me with a what-the-fuck-do-we-do-now look, and I’m wondering about that myself when I hear Kirill shout something from above: my name and the word “Out! Out!”
“Outside.” There’s no pain, no thought of danger, no thought at all. Just instinct and the sourness of my adrenaline. I shove my way through the kitchen, hopping on my one good leg while my bad leg knocks into tables, chairs, and bodies, none of which I feel.
Through the hallway leading back, out the door, past another body and out from underneath the porch roof. No Oren. No Maya. What the hell was that shouting ab—
Something small and fiery hammers into my arm. Only after the shot, when I’m stumbling back and almost falling, do I hear the gun go off. From above. My eyes swim in a haze of drizzling snow and bright white cloud, up to the roofs where a thin guy is crawling across the flat of the roof. Oren.
I plant my foot—my bad one—spit, aim by gun and fire two rounds wildly up towards the roof. The first one goes up into the sky but the second knocks out a chunk of chimney brick. Red dust goes flying like blood. Oren doesn’t turn around—he contorts, wraps his gun arm around his body so that the barrels’ pointing towards me, and unloads his clip into the lawn. I dive back down underneath the porch, but he’s gone from the top of the roof, over to number eighty-six by the time I get back out.
“What the hell happened?” Nail asks. He looks at my right arm and his eyes go big. “Hell, Q…”
But I ignore him and shuffle past, through the dining room, back up the stairs, past the circle window with its three dead bodies, and up another staircase. I recognize Kirill’s face looking at me, and Dag’s as well, but I don’t stop for them.
“Where is he?”
“Quinn. Quinn—you’re hit. Calm down. Let us help you.”
“Show me where the bastard went.”
They know I’m not joking around. They can see it. The guys get it sometimes when they’re hot on a trail. Something between adrenaline and the thirst for revenge but much more powerful than either by itself. Bloodlust.
“Went on the roof. Up through the attic.”
There’s no waiting around for more. Down another hall—how many fucking halls are there in this apartment?—and up the third staircase. I see a little square of window looking out onto the roof. I climb out; planting my foot at an angle so there won’t be any slipping. The snow is falling again now, not as heavy as it was yesterday but enough that you can’t see any more than fifty feet in front of you. That must be about the distance Oren’s at now—there’s the silhouette, black against the mirror white. Slipping, falling, and tripping his way along the rooftop. I raise my gun. No use, he’s too far. But he’s scared. He’s not being careful. He’s not steady. If only I could get close enough…
The gun in my belt, I press myself down to the roof tiles and begin to climb. My arms are strong even though they’re full of fire. My leg aches, but it doesn’t slow me down. Nothing can slow me down. Not when he’s that close.
I rise to my feet at the top and limp forward. Steady steady. Oren’s gaining, but he’s slipping. He’s nervous. He’s going to trip if he keeps going at that speed. It just takes one wrong footfall. One loose patch of ice. One little mistake and he’ll be broken on the ground and I’ll have my shot.
He turns back and sees me approaching. He fires again and again and again, but none of his shots even come close to me. The firing stops—he’s out. He shoves a hand into one pocket and takes out what must be another clip, but it looks like he’s having trouble fitting it inside. His hands are shaking, probably. Still nervous. But you’re not nervous. You can keep walking as long as you need. Keep going until someone puts you down. They can try as hard as they want—they’ll shoot you twice and put you on the ground, but you’ll still keep on going. Because of her. Because this man tried to steal her from you.
Oren screams in triumph as the clip fits into his gun. He’s been standing still putting it in as I advanced on him instead of going forward and now he’s got it trained on me. Well, then okay—I lift my own and judge the distance. Thirty feet, maybe? Maybe more? Calm. Calm. I’ve made longer shots than this. I’ve had circumstances worse than this. Guys worse than Oren Kroll to deal with. Wounds worse than shoulders or ankles. But nothing worse than the idea of losing Maya forever to a freak like this. And nothing in the world worse than failing a girl like that when she needs you the most.
I hear the crack of his gun the second I squeeze the trigger. Something c
lips my ear like a bug bite and sends my whole body whining with a loud, piercing scream of hot metal: I know I’ve been hit. I don’t know how bad. I don’t know if that buzz and whine I’m hearing is coming from a bullet lodged in my brain or something taken off my ear or what. Whatever it was, it’s causing a hell of a lot of blood to come running over my face. My whole vision is going cloudy, red black smoky, like being back in that ocean, except it’s cold blood I’m swimming in this time instead of water.
One knee collapses—the bad one. My gun falls. My eyes are about to close. Holy shit I’ve never been so tired in my life. It’s like I haven’t slept in years. It’s like I’m falling into years of backlogged sleep, and this murky hazy cloud that’s making my sight all weird and funny is all the dreams I should have been having, resurfacing into the light of this too bright, too white, too cold day.