Burned Bridges

by A. J. Stewart

  One of the enemies appeared. Flynn recognized the scrappy hair and puffy features of Cameron Dennison. Her mouth was fixed somewhere between a snarl and a smirk. She stepped out of the shadows behind Hutton. Flynn pulled his Glock high and aimed it at Cameron’s head. The smirk stayed plastered on her face.

  “You should drop that,” she said. Her speech was slow and deliberate.

  “You think?”

  She nodded and edged backward. The fire from the drum near her lit the side of Hutton’s face. And showed the handgun aimed at her temple. Hutton flinched and Cameron scowled but didn’t move the gun. Hutton hadn’t been playing nice. It was impossible to say for sure, but it was probably her own weapon pointed at her head. She wouldn’t like that. Bureau types had a thing about losing their weapons.

  Flynn didn’t alter his aim. “You shoot her, you’re dead.”

  “You think?” she said, mocking him. “You’re pretty far away. You might miss. I won’t.”

  It was a reasonable point. He was about twenty yards from Cameron. A yard was close enough to a meter to count, and he shot ninety-five percent at twenty-five meters. But that was without distraction or pressure, at tin cans in the desert or targets at the range. And now was not the time to discover the five percent. He didn’t fire. But he didn’t drop his sights either.

  “Nice operation you got going here,” he said. “Almost looks law-abiding.”

  “You think?”

  “Not like you at all.”

  “You got a big mouth.”

  “Let me guess, you put less tread on to make your rubber go further.”

  “Some folks is cheap.”

  “And what about these ones?” He nodded at the tire fort. “They’re past even being retread.”

  She smiled. It wasn’t an endearing grin. “The dealers charge customers a recycling fee. But some don’t go to the expense of using the official dump.”

  “What do you do with them?”

  The smile grew. She nodded at the drum in front of her. One half of her face was lit by the headlights. The other side glowed in the firelight.

  “I burn ’em.”

  “So not too law-abiding.”

  “You need to drop your gun. I ain’t gonna ask you again.”

  Flynn looked at Hutton. She closed her eyes slowly, then opened them. No, she was saying. Don’t give up your weapon. But she didn’t know. Didn’t know about the plan B, or the plan C. She didn’t know that in being drawn out himself, he was actually drawing someone else out. And he was Teflon. They weren’t going to shoot.

  So he dropped his aim. Lowered his Glock to his side.

  “Toss it down,” Cameron spat.

  He threw the Glock onto the gravel, in the glow of the headlights. About six feet away. Then objective one was met. Cameron removed the gun from Hutton’s ear and pointed it at Flynn.

  “Now what?” Flynn asked.

  A voice came from the darkness. Slurred, like a drunken sailor.

  “Now you pay.”

  Flynn watched the second person appear from behind Beth. Just as he planned. But the person he saw wasn’t what he expected.

  He was emaciated, like a prisoner of war. The jacket and trousers he wore hung from his frame. His face was pink, like fresh skin after a scab had fallen off. New but stretched tight across his cheekbones. But the skin ran in contours across his face like a topographical map of the very mountain ranges they were standing in. It was as if a million years of rainfall had run across him, wearing his face down like a riverbed. He had one eyebrow, and no eyelashes. He had no hair on the left half of his skull. Just a wide arc of pink skin. And Flynn saw why his speech was slurred. His lips were fused tight across his mouth, hard like the skin on the sole of a foot. It didn’t flex and form the words the right way. Like talking after getting punched in the mouth. Flynn looked hard at the pink man.

  “Take a good look,” the man said. He nodded, fast like a spasm. “Even the bogeyman can’t hide forever.”

  And Flynn clenched his jaw. He knew who it was, and who it was told him what it meant. It meant that he had drawn out the wrong guy.

  It was Ox Dennison.

  Chapter Thirty

  Ox nodded again, as if he had trouble with the motor control of his head. Despite that, he pressed a handgun into Beth’s chest steadily enough.

  “I dreamed a this day. For four years. E’ry night I dreamed a this.” He nodded more.

  “They told me you were dead,” said Flynn.

  “Told me the same a you.” He laughed, but it sounded like he was choking.

  Flynn said, “You shot me.”

  “And you me.”

  “And then you tried to burn the evidence. Doesn’t look like that went very well.”

  “Shut it!” he yelled. Then he coughed like a cat spitting a fur ball. Except without lips, he couldn’t spit a yard. He gathered himself and looked up at Flynn.

  “Six years. They made me stay in that hellhole for six years. The army packed up and left. And I was still there. Looking for traces of you.”

  “At least you got the medical attention you needed. They did a good job.”

  Ox screamed, but the sound only made it halfway out. He shook his head savagely.

  “Do you know what Iraq was like after the US pulled out?” He shook his head. “But we found you.” He choked on another laugh. “And now it’s my turn.”

  “What do you want, Ox? You want to hurt me?” Flynn spread his arms. “Go ahead. Hurt me.”

  Ox wobbled his head, up and down, side to side.

  “Oh, I wanna hurt you. But I can’t kill you. I kill you, they kill me.”

  “Who is they?”

  Ox said nothing.

  “Who are they, Ox? The eight? Where are they?”

  Ox nodded again. “The eight? They are the air you breathe. They are e’rywhere, but they are invisible.”

  “You said it. Even the bogeyman can’t hide forever, Ox.”

  Dennison grunted. “They can. And they want what you got. So I can’t kill you.” He nodded as if trying to force his lips to bend into a smile. He failed and gave up. “But I can hurt you.”

  He held up his gun again and pressed it into Beth’s breast. She tried to squirm beneath her bonds, but it was effort without reward.

  “I hear you fell in love.” Ox hacked another cough. “Bad move.” He lifted the gun up to Beth’s ear. At twenty-five meters, the old Ox would have been about a fifty-fifty proposition to hit a human-sized target with a handgun. But even the new disfigured Ox was close to a certainty with the muzzle held to Beth’s head.

  Beth turned away. Closed her eyes. It was reflex, but it didn’t help. Mortality rates for gunshots to the side of the head were ninety-eight percent. Mainly because side-to-side shots saw the bullet travel through both hemispheres of the brain. That was usually a terminal event. Front to back had the best chance of survival, about five percent, because there was a chance the bullet would only hit one hemisphere, and maybe only the frontal lobe. Quality of life was rarely very high regardless. But to Flynn’s knowledge there were zero documented cases of a human being shot in the brain stem and surviving. The brain stem was made of three sections, starting with the medulla oblongata at the base of the skull, which became the spinal cord at the top of the spine. Right where the muzzle of Ox’s gun ended up.

  Flynn’s world moved slow. Like his feet and his muscles and his brain were stuck in cement. He turned and pushed off and dove into the darkness as if it was him that was being shot. One moment he was visible and then next he was gone, into the darkness. He flew above the ground for what felt like forever. Waiting for the sound of the gunshot. Then he hit the gravel hard. His momentum slid him forward like a runner trying to steal second base. Gravel flew into the undercarriage of the old sedan that sat on cinderblocks. His slide was stopped by his shoulder crashing into the rear block. He reached out in the darkness. Still waiting for the sound. Reaching, grabbing at loose gravel. For the Heckler and Ko
ch MP5K he had left there. Plan B.

  But plan B failed. He pulled himself half under the car and spread his reach and dug at the ground. But there was no gun to be found. He stopped moving and tried to control his breathing. He could hear the sound of a cat choking.

  He slowly pushed himself out from under the car and got up on his knees. The sound was Ox Dennison. He was doubled over. Maybe he was laughing. It sounded painful. Flynn cast his eyes on Beth. Still tied to the tires but alive. Ox collected himself and pushed on his thighs to stand as if his muscles weren’t strong enough to lift his birdlike frame. He stepped back to the turret of tires and reached down beside Beth.

  “Looking for this?” he said, holding up the MP5K. He nodded, like a version of a satisfied smile. “I saw it all.”

  “How?” asked Flynn, but he already knew the answer.

  “Seven generations Dennisons been in this county.”

  “The storm shelter, behind the barn,” said Flynn, standing up. “It’s not the entrance, it’s the exit.”

  “You is a smart boy. Just not smart enough.”

  “Your family had a still, right? But not in the barn. In the woods.”

  Dennison nodded. He pointed his gun out into the darkness over Flynn’s shoulder. “You had a gone another hundred feet up the hill, you might a seen it. Now, step into the light where I can see you.”

  Flynn thought it through as he moved nice and slow. An old still up on the hillside, a tunnel dug over generations. That explained how they had gotten behind him and taken Beth. It explained how Ox knew about the MP5K he had hidden. Flynn stepped into the arc of the headlights, as he had been before. Half in, half out.

  “Now, where were we?” Ox took a step toward Beth and lifted his gun to her head. This time he pushed it hard into the side. Improving her chances by two percent.

  Flynn glanced out of the side of his eye at Hutton. She was looking at Beth. Frowning. Not from fear. She was tied up, a gun to her own head, and still she was working the problem of how to save Beth. Bureau types. They didn’t give up. Flynn looked at Cameron. She was looking at her brother, face impassive, like he was watching football on the TV and she had become bored of it.

  Then Flynn looked into the darkness beside her. At the capped oil drum beside the farmhouse. Plan C. He tensed, ready for the starter’s gun in his head. He calculated the distance. Twenty yards. Close to twenty meters but not close enough. 18.2 meters. And from a standing start to a full sprint, that was about fourteen strides. With the leap, he calculated twelve. About three seconds. He readied himself. Then he saw Cameron turn.

  She eased the gun away from Hutton’s ear and looked away. Away from the imminent action, away from her brother. Past the farmhouse. Up the hill and into the darkness. Into the ether. And Flynn stood down. Let his body relax. He focused his attention on Ox. On Beth.

  “Any last words, lover boy?”

  Flynn said, “You’re a dead man.”

  Ox nodded his head in his facsimile of a smile and turned his focus to Beth.

  And his head exploded in a mess of brain matter and pink skin.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A round from a sniper rifle can travel at speeds more than twice the speed of sound. The supersonic rounds give off a sound of their own, the snap of the sonic boom, but the round can even outpace that. Unless the distance is great, however, in practical terms, the two events are almost simultaneous to an observer close to the target. Or the target itself.

  So Ox Dennison might have heard the sound of the sniper rifle, but his brain would not have had time to process the sound before his head exploded into an atomic mist.

  The force of the round drove his body backward, and the last part of him to hit the gravel was his feet. The round landed half a mile into the field beyond. Beth closed her eyes, which was good, as she might have caught any number of bloodborne diseases from Dennison as his plasma splattered across her face. It was then she started making noise. Frantic screaming filled the air. Cameron Dennison turned to see her brother hit the ground and then spun back toward the direction from which the shot had come. Hutton looked amazed at the result of intense kinetic energy exerted on a human head. Flynn stood still. He thought about making a play for his Glock, which lay in the gravel in front of him, but he wasn’t sure what the field of view was for the sniper, or whether his Teflon status extended that far.

  He fought the desire to run to Beth. To console her, to wipe her eyes and tell her it would all be okay. Right then he was consoled by the fact that she was still alive. And if they were still alive that minute, they could be for the next. He stood at a casual attention, weight distributed evenly across both feet, ready to go one way or the other. But he went neither way. He just waited.

  To draw out the fifth man.

  It took some time, but eventually he heard the footsteps on the gravel. A consistent cadence, the sound of someone who knew how to walk with maximum efficiency and minimum effort. Someone who had learned to march. He watched the sniper appear from the other side of the Yukon, the tendril-like shape of the sniper rifle held at ease across his arms. He was in battle dress, an older version of the US Army’s camouflage uniform. The woodland pattern, a design that had been made largely superfluous when the US military’s battles had become desert-bound.

  The team leader stopped short of the headlight beam and surveyed the landscape. He wasn’t tall, but he wasn’t short. He was a little older and had grown out his mustache into a scraggly beard. But he had the same broad shoulders, the same puffed chest. He wore the quiet confidence of a man doing exactly what he was best at. Flynn knew the look. A lot of guys in the Legion wore that look. Many wore it right up until the point that they crashed out, unable to take the conditions, or the solitude from family and friends, or the marching.

  Flynn had known him as Steve White, his Legion name. But he recalled their last meeting, in Iraq. White had become a private security contractor and his name was Neil McConnell.

  The pieces fell into place for Flynn. Two sides of the same coin. Amateur and professional. Dennison and his small-time grifting, finding himself in the middle of something way above his pay grade; and a professional unit, sent in to clean up the mess.

  The broad Scotsman looked across the lit space at Ox Dennison’s remains lying in the gravel. Then Cameron Dennison stepped forward. Dropped her handgun from Hutton’s ear. It looked like she was going to pop McConnell in the side of the head. But McConnell didn’t flinch.

  Cameron said, “You didn’t say you were going to blow his head off.”

  McConnell kept his eyes on Ox’s body.

  “What did you tell me you wanted?” he asked in his heavy Scottish brogue.

  “Money?”

  “Apart from the money.”

  “The farm?”

  McConnell nodded. “The farm. This glorious farm. And when your parents died intestate, who did the court give the farm to?”

  “What’s intestate?”

  McConnell huffed. “Without a will.”

  “You know who. Oxnard.”

  “And why did the court do that?”

  “They thought I killed my parents.”

  “No. They knew you killed ya parents, lass. Lucky for you another court deemed you too young to be tried as an adult. So Ox got the farm. So sad. But then Ox disappeared in Iraq. And what did the court say?”

  “They said the Army had him listed as MIA, not KIA. They said I had to wait until the Army changed its status or at least seven years.”

  “Because?”

  “Because there was no—what did they call it? Tangible proof of death.”

  McConnell turned to Cameron. His voice remained low and steady. “There’s your tangible proof. Now shut up.”

  He stepped into the light and across in front of Flynn. Picked up Flynn’s Glock and looked at it like it was a dinosaur bone in an archeological dig.

  “Glock,” he said. “You went Austrian. I figured you would stick with the Italians.”r />
  “A gun is a gun.”

  McConnell suppressed a mirthless chuckle. “You always were so damn pragmatic. And so wrong. Take this fine weapon, for example.” He tapped the sniper rifle in his arms. Flynn recognized it as an AS50 rifle produced in Britain by Accuracy International. It was designed for a 12.7×99mm NATO round, otherwise known as the .50 Browning machine gun cartridge. The BMG round had been in play since 1921, but the version that the military favored today bore little resemblance to the original. Flynn had heard they now incorporated microprocessors and steering vanes to adjust trajectory midflight, although he had never seen such a round in action.

  McConnell continued. “This fine weapon is a work of art.”

  “The Barrett is more accurate.”

  McConnell shook his head. “You know that’s not true. And at my level it’s more about the quality of the round than the rifle. I can hit a coconut at fifteen hundred meters.”

  “And a human head.”

  McConnell nodded. “That was considerably closer.”

  “How far was the shot in Iraq?”

  He frowned. “Iraq?”

  “The suicide bomber that came for me and Hutton. That shot wasn’t one of your men. That was you.”

  “Oh, that guy. You got me. But that was only about three hundred meters.”

  “In the dark.”

  McConnell shrugged, as if talk of his sniper skills embarrassed him.

  “And you just happened to be there,” said Flynn.

  “Of course not. We were following you.”

  “What about the bombers’ families? You did that too.”