The Orphans had drawn the sniper’s attention. The shooter had reoriented to face this way.
Which meant that he was facing Evan.
Evan’s stomach clenched. Rolling back into position, he placed his eye on the scope in time to see a muzzle flare between two of the tree trunks in the thicket. An instant later the shale at his side kicked up, rocks embedding in the trunks behind him forcefully enough to sway the tips of the pines overhead.
Twelve inches to the left and he’d be missing an arm. He had to squeeze off a shot fast before the sniper got off a second round.
Evan zeroed in on the afterglow of that muzzle flare in the shadows of the thicket. He aimed a hair to the right on the assumption that the sniper was right-handed and lying on the left side of the rifle.
He pulled the trigger.
He never saw the impact, but a pink haze drifted out from the darkness between the trunks.
Evan hopped to his feet and charged upslope.
The shots had announced his presence to Candy and M—and, worse, to the north sniper, who had proved himself to be a serious shooter. Evan had to get to the south sniper’s rifle if he hoped to go head-to-head with him.
He figured the north sniper was already on the move, circling the rim of the valley, crashing through the woods to get within range. And Candy and M were no doubt moving up the mountain at him from below.
Driving up the incline, Evan pistoned between rocks, skimmed through trees, ignoring the pain that was firing the muscles of his legs. His bobbing torso felt exposed, hung out like a paper target. Wind whipped his ears, a whoosh to match the adrenaline surge in his veins. Every step seemed to take an eternity. And yet he hadn’t drawn fire.
The outcrop loomed ahead. For a time it seemed his legs were churning uselessly, bringing him no closer. At last the stone came within reach. Bracing for a bullet to the back, he hurled himself over the stone, rolling into the thicket of pines. He expected hard ground but landed on something soft and yielding.
The body of the south sniper.
Evan’s shot had squarely hit the mark. It occurred to him that he’d never seen the sniper’s face. And never would.
He rolled the body away from the big gun. A Sako TRG-42 in .338 Lapua Mag. A professional-grade platform, still set up for a shot. Evan swung into place next to it.
The crosshairs perfectly marked the spot on the shale where he’d been moments before. Tilting the gun downslope, he scanned across the treetops. Flickering in and out of cover, Candy charged up the mountain, Orphan M at her heels. They’d harvested AKs from the ballroom bloodbath.
Two quick shots and it would be down to Evan and the north sniper, squaring off in the snowy bowl of the valley.
Snugging his cheek to the stock, Evan led Candy slightly, the crosshairs marking the air inches in front of her face. She vanished behind a dense copse of pines, but he kept the rifle on its trajectory, timing her progress, waiting for a break in the trees.
It came, and he was ready for it.
Candy reared into the scope. His finger tightened on the trigger. The crosshairs found their mark.
An instant before he could fire, the air exploded around him. He heard the meaty smack beneath his ear, felt a wrecking ball strike his shoulder, and then all he saw were pine needles and branches blurring by. The earth rushed up to greet him. Dirt in his mouth. Splinters in his cheek. Ice in his ear.
And his own blood puddling on the ground beneath him.
56
Mostly Certain
He was alive. Of that he was mostly certain.
His body was shocked into paralysis. But he could move his eyes. He strained them, trying to piece together what had happened.
If he’d taken a .30-cal to the shoulder, he’d be dead or missing the limb. His hand lay in view in front of his eyes. He believed it was still attached to his body. The fingers were smooth and pale, slightly curled. Concentrating with everything he had, he made them twitch.
Okay, then. Still attached.
His pupils moved to the Lapua and then to the tree beside it. A football-size bite had been taken clean out of the trunk, the raw inner wood exposed. Bits of bark swirled in the air, ignoring gravity.
The north sniper had missed him by inches, the round sending a hunk of tree shrapnel smashing through Evan’s shoulder.
Evan realized, almost secondarily, that he wasn’t breathing. His throat felt snarled, the airway knotted. His stomach lurched a few times as if in anticipation of puking, and then his rib cage released and he drew in oxygen, a primordial sucking sound as though someone had punched holes straight through his lungs. For a time he gasped into the pine needles.
Blood spread out beneath him, sticky on his neck. The warmth reached his cheek. If he didn’t stanch the bleeding—and fast—then this off-kilter view of the forest floor would be his final screen grab before he powered down.
Somehow he sat up, though he might have blacked out once or twice doing it. He found himself gaping down at his torn coat and the ball of his right shoulder, a scramble of pink flesh and shredded muscle. Shards of his clavicle glittered in the wreckage. Bright blood pumped through the wound at intervals, pushing rivulets down his arm and into the matted fabric. When the collarbone shattered, it must have lacerated the subclavian vein, causing a massive hemorrhage.
The damage was too close to his neck to tourniquet.
A wave of light-headedness passed through him, bringing with it the image of—
—arterial blood soaking the shoulder of the blue flannel. Jack’s hand, already wearing a glove of crimson, clamps the wound.
Evan blinked his way back to the present, lifted his left hand, and clamped it over the wound.
He forced breath into his lungs, tried to wrestle his thoughts into place through the swamp of sensations engulfing him. He’d been trained for this, to strategize under extreme stress and pain, to shield the pilot light and keep it from being snuffed out.
Candy and Orphan M were still a good ways downslope with plenty of steep terrain to make up. Since he held high ground, they’d have to move slowly, cautiously. But the north sniper could be anywhere. And he knew precisely where Evan was.
“Draw back from the tree line.” He’d spoken the command, it seemed, rather than thinking it. It was the only way he could make his limbs move.
He scuttled backward, shoving with his heels, before realizing he wasn’t standing up.
Rising without using his arms was difficult, but he managed. He withdrew into the thicket, nearly tripping over his boots. Both rifles were back in the clearing along with the AK, but he couldn’t possibly operate them anyway. Blood snaked down his right arm, dripped from his fingertips.
The pain tasted of—
—wet concrete, the humid air of Parking Level 3 pressing into his pores, the elevator lights casting a red glow and—
—he fastened his left hand tighter over the wound, breathing—
—the all-too-familiar tang of iron, the sickly sweet trace of cherry blossom, which—
—he swore he smelled, but he knew he was here in a snow-layered valley in Maine, stumbling upslope and trying to tamp the blood back into his body. He wondered if it was possible to be in two places at once. Maybe that was what dying was, pulling up the net of time, events and places jumbling together and—
—Jack is clutching his bloody shoulder—
—as Evan was clutching his and—
—Jack says, “I’m already dead. It caught the brachial.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t—”
“I know that.” He lifts a callused hand, lays it against Evan’s cheek, perhaps for the first time ever.
Evan tripped, his knee plowing into a drift. He wobbled for a moment, leaning into the rise. The spill—so bright against the snow, a robin’s red, red breast.
Shoving himself vertical again took several phases. His feet moved, somehow carrying him onward, upward. He pinballed off trees. They proliferated, an endless s
pan of trunks splitting the earth like the bars of a cell.
At last he sensed an openness ahead, the woods giving over to a bare patch of blinding white. Through the last trees ahead, a stretch of uneven powder swept up to the summit fifteen or so meters above.
He had to make it.
The snow sucked at his boots. He yanked them free, fighting for balance. He would not go down. His teeth chattered. He couldn’t feel his arm.
It occurred to him that he was going to die. And yet all he could see was the—
—paroxysm of pain racking Jack’s body. Jack fights out the words. “Listen to me. This is not your fault. I made the decision to meet you. I did. Go. Leave me. Go.”
Evan thinks he is choking, but then he feels the wet on his cheeks and realizes what is happening to his face. “No,” he says. “I won’t go. I won’t—”
Jack’s good hand drops to his belt, and there is a clank, and then his service pistol is up between them. He aims it at Evan. “Go.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Jack’s gaze is steady, focused. “Have I ever lied to you?”
Evan stands up, stumbles back a step. It dawns on him that Jack’s flannel shirt is still mopped around his hand. His fist tightens around it, moisture spreading between his fingers. Somewhere above them in the structure, tires screech. Boots pound concrete.
“Son,” Jack says gently. “It’s time to go.” He rotates the barrel beneath his own chin.
Backing up, Evan arms the tears from his face. He takes another step back, and another, and then finally he turns.
Running away, he hears the gunshot.
Jack’s words echo in his head. It’s time to go. It’s—
—time to go.
“Goddamn it,” Evan said. “Damn it. Damn it. Stupid fucking way to die.”
The blood-crusted fingers of his left hand had gone numb, making it harder to hold the seal on the slick flesh of his shoulder. He lost his center of gravity, tilting into a soft white bank. He tried to right himself, but the snow gave way beneath his weight, delivering him gently to the ground. His hand was too weak to hold back the blood anymore. The warm current trickled through his fingers. He breathed into the cold earth. Blinked ice crystals off his eyelashes.
Since Jack he had let no one into his life, and so there would be no one to miss him.
“Stupid,” he said.
He felt himself fading away, the Nowhere Man blurring into the whiteness. A lifetime spent blending in, leaving no traces. Which also meant leaving no mark. He’d built his armor, ring by ring, but now he felt himself crushed under the weight of it, sinking into oblivion. So this was how it would end? The proverbial whimper?
His entire body was shuddering. A more intense vibration near his hip differentiated itself, and it took him a moment to identify it.
The RoamZone.
The kid.
The ringing phone called his thoughts to Alison Siegler as well. It occurred to him that when he died, instead of the customary tunnel of light, he was going to see the Horizon Express steaming relentlessly for the Jacksonville Port Authority.
Evan squeezed his eyes shut.
Son. It’s time to go.
He released his shoulder, the blood flowing freely now, and dug for the phone in his pocket. He lifted the battered RoamZone to his face. His hand, a uniform crimson. His knuckles, tacky against his cheek.
He thought of how he usually answered the phone—Do you need my help?—and wanted to laugh.
He said, “I … I can’t…”
The boy’s voice, hushed and fierce. “You forgot.”
“No. I didn’t. I just can’t…” A wave of pain swept away Evan’s breath. He grimaced, bit his lip, waited for it to pass. “I can’t help you, okay? Can’t … help you.” The ground tilted around him, a roller-coaster loop through space and time, and he was talking to the kid and to Alison Siegler, to Jack on the floor of Parking Level 3 and to himself, trapped hopelessly in a valley fifteen meters from the summit.
“I can’t … help any of you … anymore.…”
It’s time to go.
Every breath brought pain. Evan said, “There’ll be … someone else.…”
“No.” The boy’s words faded in and out of static. “It has to be you.”
Evan felt himself seeping into the cold ground.
Some long-buried part inside him split open, a flood of emotion sweeping him down, down, plunging him into deep, freezing waters. A tear cut through the snowflakes, crusting his cheek, a single warm track across his skin and—
—a straw-thin spray squirts between Jack’s fingers—
—he was crying but felt something instead of sadness, something like liberation.
Time to go.
“… sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.…”
The phone died. Evan tilted it to see the screen, his hand trembling violently. No bars left.
“… sorry,” he told the ground. “I’m sorry.…”
Go. Leave me. Go.
“Okay, Jack,” he said. “Okay.”
He breathed wetly for a moment. Stared between the last tree trunks at that bare patch of earth just within reach ahead. The setting sun caught the rise of powder in all its creamy glory. Fifteen meters to the peak. He deserved at least that.
“I want to make it,” he told himself hoarsely. “I want to see the top.”
He shoved the phone into his jacket pocket—this piece of the kid he would not let go of—and placed his hand back over his shoulder. His grip was still loose, so he used his chin to pin his hand more tightly over the wound. Somehow he wiggled to his knees. Leaning into a pine, he found his feet.
His first step broke him through the tree line. The sudden openness made his breath catch. The pain ebbed, draining out of him. As he forged up the unmarred blanket of white, the world came into vivid focus. The saw-toothed edges of snowflakes. The violet spill of the sunset through puffy clouds. The air, so fresh it stung his throat, telling him that right now, in this moment, he was still alive.
A golden glow limned the mountaintop. His last steps would carry him there.
At once the horizon seemed to bubble up in one spot, the bulge taking shape as a human form—someone coming over the peak from the far side. The figure stood atop the crest, backlit. Evan squinted into the light, noted the silhouette of the rifle held across the man’s chest.
A .338 Lapua Mag.
The north sniper.
You deserve it, Evan told him, though the words didn’t make it out. You were better.
He could no longer feel his legs. Now that he’d halted, he wouldn’t be able to start up again. He stared wistfully at the apex just a few strides away.
His blistered lips moved. “At least I tried,” he said.
The sniper’s features were cloaked in black. He raised the rifle.
Evan felt a deep thrumming in his bones and the blissful release of having no options left.
He could stop fighting.
The scope glinted in the day’s dying light, and Evan sensed the crack of a shot.
He pitched forward, holding his eyes on the brim of the valley. He wanted his last view to be of the summit.
The thrumming turned to thunder, the beating of giant wings. The sniper was jerking around as if yanked by strings, laced through with bullets. A strange calm descended over Evan as he grasped what this was: a dying fantasy played out in his mind’s eye.
Well, then he might as well enjoy it.
The thunder took on a rhythm, the whomping of some great beast. And then a Black Hawk broke majestically over the wall of the valley, sunlight gleaming off the blades. A door gunner leaned out over the skid, peering down over a machine gun, assessing his work.
Jack.
Of course. What better than Jack Johns as Evan’s archangel and a Black Hawk to bear him into the sweet hereafter?
The machine gun unleashed overhead, razing the pines behind Evan, and he understood that Imaginary Jack was protecting him,
driving Candy McClure and Orphan M back into the woods, pushing them downslope and away.
Evan was safe now. He was beyond harm.
The helo set down, the rotor wash ruffling Evan’s hair, his clothes. He smiled into the fever dream.
Jack hopped down and tromped over to Evan, the sun winking into sight behind his head. He’d aged. He’d be in his seventies by now but looked a hale sixty.
Evan knew that he was beyond a dying fantasy, that he was dead and gone, riding the last random neuron firings through his expired brain.
Two more men leapt from the Black Hawk and jogged over, a stretcher bouncing between them. Jack shouted over his shoulder, “Get him out of here!”
The men sped up, wading through the snow.
Jack set his hands on his knees and grimaced down at Evan. “What are you doing lying there?”
“… dying.”
Jack’s face warred between concern and anger. “You gave that asshole a wide-open shot. Where’s your gun?”
“… back in woods … couldn’t fire anymore … right arm … no good…”
Jack’s square head snapped down, assessing Evan. “Nothing wrong with the left one,” he said.
Evan peered up at the brilliant violet sky, grinning.
Jack. That was Jack.
The medics finally arrived, bulled Jack aside, and swept Evan up. They jostled him back toward the Black Hawk on the stretcher, Jack jogging alongside them. Evan caught an upward view of Jack and could see that concern was winning out now.
As they loaded Evan into the chopper, the RoamZone fell out of Evan’s coat pocket. He twisted and grabbed for it, crying out, but the noise of the rotors swept away his words.
“What?” Jack shouted. “What’s wrong?”
They slid Evan into the belly of the Black Hawk. He kicked and reached. Jack followed him in, the shattered phone in his hand. “This? You want this?”
Evan nodded.
Jack looked from the busted casing and shattered screen to Evan, his forehead furrowed. “Okay.”
Evan grabbed the phone, squeezed it tight. A needle pricked his arm. His stomach swooned as they lifted up. The cold, cold air breezed through the open door.
Jack was shouting into a headset: “—blood units ready, throw the saline in the freezer, and get a trauma surgeon there. Now.”
The Nowhere Man--An Orphan X Novel Page 25