A Fire in the Night

by Christopher Swann

  Behind him, Jonas stepped through the ruined front door. “Cole,” he said.

  Cole spared him a quick glance and saw Jonas was holding his MP5 to his shoulder, aiming it at the dining room. Cole followed Jonas’s sight line and saw, on the arched entrance into the dining room, a smear of blood against the white paint.

  “Check it out,” Cole said, returning his attention to the girl and the old woman. Jonas walked into the dining room and out of Cole’s sight.

  “You were there,” the girl said to Cole. Her eyes were swollen from crying and she looked exhausted, but she was also furious. “At my house.”

  Cole tilted his head slightly, saying nothing.

  “You killed my parents,” the girl said.

  “Where’s your uncle?” Cole said.

  The girl shook her head, her dark hair swirling around her face.

  Cole fired a single shot. In the enclosed space, even suppressed, it made a loud pap. A vase on the hall table next to the girl’s head shattered. The girl cried out.

  “The next one goes in the old woman’s leg,” Cole said. “Then her arm. And when she’s dead, I’ll start shooting you.” He paused to let the words sink in. She was tough, he’d give her that—aside from that one cry, she was holding it together, but her eyes were wide with fear. “Where is your uncle?”

  “He’s not here,” she said.

  Cole stared at her briefly, then nodded. “Then we’ll wait for him.”

  At that moment the lights cut out, plunging the cabin into darkness.

  Cole immediately stepped to his right, away from the girl and into the dining room, his weapon up. “Sound off,” he said into his mic.

  “Number two, copy,” Jonas said in his ear. “In the kitchen.”

  “Number four, copy,” Zhang said.

  Cole stood in the darkened dining room, waiting. He could hear the girl and the old woman in the foyer whispering. “Hicks, Waco, sound off,” he said. “Zhang, where are you? Do you have eyes on Hicks or Waco?”

  Zhang said, “I’m behind the house, by the—”

  A burst of gunfire came over the comms, followed by another.

  “Zhang, report!” Cole barked. “Hicks! Waco!”

  Two sharp gunshots rang out, this time from inside the house, the sound deafening and accompanied by muzzle flashes like a strobe light.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  When the lights went out, Annalise froze. Even if she’d wanted to try to run from the man with the gun, she was still holding Lettie’s head in her lap, and her legs were numb from sitting in the foyer for so long. She heard the man with the gun—Cole, the other soldier guy had called him—say something that sounded like sound off and realized after a second’s confusion that he must be talking to someone else, but then Lettie said something and Annalise bent her head closer to her, Cole forgotten for the moment. “What?” Annalise said.

  Lettie’s voice was weak but steady. “Why is it dark?” she said.

  “The lights went out,” Annalise said. “I don’t know why.”

  “It’s your uncle,” Lettie said.

  “What?” Annalise wished she could see Lettie’s face.

  Lettie’s voice was calm, a benediction in the dark. “Take care of him,” she said.

  Take care of her uncle? They were captured by gunmen and Lettie was bleeding from her head and Annalise was beginning to realize she was probably going to die here, but Lettie wanted her to take care of her uncle. “I don’t—” she began.

  There was some sort of muffled sound from outside. To Annalise it almost sounded like the put-put of a lawnmower, but much briefer. The man with the gun had taken a step or two away and was muttering something, but Annalise heard his sharp intake of breath. Then came two explosions from the kitchen like a pair of cherry bombs, flashes of light in the dark. Gunshots. Annalise cried out, startled, clapping her hands over her ears. She just wanted this to stop, to get out of this house, to go far away.

  A hand grabbed her arm. “Get up,” Cole said.

  “Wait!” Annalise said, but Cole was pulling her up and Lettie was already sliding off her lap. Lettie’s head struck the carpet with a thump that made Annalise’s heart leap to her throat. “She’s hurt! I have to—”

  “She’s dead,” Cole said, yanking her to her feet. “Let’s go.”

  “No!” Annalise cried out. “I’m not—”

  He slapped Annalise across the face, the bright shock of it cutting through everything. “I said, let’s go,” Cole snarled, and then he was pushing Annalise into the kitchen. A flashlight beam snapped on from behind Annalise and scanned the kitchen counters, the floor, and then Annalise nearly cried out again as the light found a man facedown on the floor at the opening to the library. It was the other man who had come in the front door, and there were two bloody wounds on his back. The flashlight pivoted back toward the great room and caught another man on the floor, slumped against the back of the love seat. It was the deputy, Sams, his eyes closed, blood drenching his left arm and side, his face pale as paper. A revolver lay on the floor by the deputy’s unmoving hand.

  The flashlight snapped off, and a hand spun Annalise and pushed her toward the kitchen door that led to the carport. “You do what I tell you,” Cole said in her ear, “or you’ll be as dead as them.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Nick limped across his backyard, his hip on fire and a slice of pain across his thigh where a bullet had grazed him. That had been the last man getting off a burst before Nick brought him down. The one before him had required knife work so Nick could get to the cabin and the outside shutoff at the meter on the back wall. Cutting off the power was a temporary diversion, but it was the best he could come up with if he was going to get into the house and save Annalise and Lettie—he had seen Lettie’s car parked under the carport. She’d probably brought him a pie or something. Her goddamn insistence on being his friend was going to get her killed. He had to get into the house without being shot. His limp was a problem, but his leg was barely bleeding, so that was something.

  Two gunshots erupted inside the house, each punctuated by a flash from the windows. Nick flinched. Shit. No, no, no. He ran as best he could to the side porch and crouched behind a low stack of firewood. Those had sounded like pistol shots, not an MP5. He peered over the firewood and saw the truck parked near the front door. Sams’s truck. Nick’s heart lurched in his chest. Had that been Sams firing his pistol? Nick had heard someone fire a short burst earlier, but he’d assumed they had been shooting the front door down—had they been shooting at Sams instead?

  Ignoring the pain in his leg, Nick ran in a crouch to the truck, putting it between him and the cabin. He saw his front door was cracked and splintered. All was silent. Dread began to build in Nick’s chest, along with another, sharper emotion—rage. He drew a deep breath through his nose and exhaled through his mouth, then did it again, trying to calm himself. His eyes remained open and flicked back and forth between the front door, the carport, and the side yard.

  A door opened and closed. Nick peered around the rear bumper and brought his MP5 up, aiming the muzzle in the direction of the carport. After a moment, someone stepped out from the shadows of the carport, hands raised. Nick sighted on the figure. The person took two more steps forward and Nick’s stomach dropped. It was Annalise.

  “Professor!” someone shouted, and a man stepped out from the carport, holding an MP5 of his own and pointing it at Annalise. “I know you’re here. Come on out.”

  Nick stayed where he was, trying to draw a bead on the man. Annalise was between them. And even if she took a step to one side, the man was too close to her. One burst from his MP5 would cut her in half.

  The man fired a single shot, dirt kicking up around Annalise’s feet. She screamed and nearly fell but managed to stay on her feet.

  “I’m not fucking around,” Cole called out. “Let’s go.”

  “You’ve got nowhere to go,” Nick called back. “There are men coming—”
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br />   Cole fired again. Annalise spun and this time did fall to the ground, facedown. Nick throttled back a scream and heard Annalise scream instead, followed by sobs. Cole stepped forward so he was standing directly over her and lowered his barrel to point it at her head.

  “Shot her in the ass, Professor,” Cole said. “Cute ass, too. Won’t be so nice the next time. So step the fuck out.”

  Nick squeezed his eyes shut, opened them. He stood up slowly from behind the truck, hands slightly raised, the MP5 still in his right hand but pointed up to the sky. “Okay,” he said. “I’m here.”

  “Step out from the truck,” Cole said.

  Nick took two side steps away from the truck, still holding the MP5.

  “Drop it,” Cole said.

  “I—”

  Cole fired, another single shot, right next to Annalise’s head.

  Nick held the MP5 further out from his body, then, very slowly, bent and lowered it to the ground and just as slowly stood back up, both hands raised. “Okay,” he said again.

  “No, it’s not,” Cole said, and then he raised his weapon and fired a burst at Nick. The rounds knocked him back and down, the ground coming up too fast, too hard.

  COLE WALKED FORWARD, ejecting the magazine from his MP5 and slapping another one in before reaching Nick. He stood over the man, watched him gasping on the ground. He’d hit him at least twice, blood blooming on his torso. From the sound of the professor’s breathing, one of the shots had perforated a lung.

  Cole knelt beside Nick. “That was a good try, Dr. Anthony,” he said. “You were really kicking my ass there for a little bit.” He leaned closer. “Do you recognize me? Remember Lebanon, up in the mountains? You and your fat-ass partner who got shot?” He watched Nick gaze up at him, trying to place him, and then inevitably Nick looked at his ear. Cole saw it in his eyes then, and he grinned. “This is what I call karma,” he said. He slung his weapon over his back and started patting Nick’s pockets. “Do you know Sun Tzu? ‘The clever combatant imposes his will upon the enemy, but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed upon him.’ I’ll let you figure out which one of us is the clever one.” He continued patting Nick’s pockets and legs, but now he frowned slightly.

  “Don’t have it,” Nick managed to say. He coughed, weakly.

  Cole looked disappointed. “Your brother was stubborn too. Wouldn’t tell us where his baby girl was, not even when we worked on his wife. Pain in the ass.”

  Cole had to give it to the man—even shot and bleeding into the dirt, his voice barely louder than a breath, the professor looked calm, almost comfortable. “Fuck you,” Nick said.

  Cole drew his pistol and placed the muzzle on Nick’s cheek, next to his nose. “Where is it?”

  Nick smiled up at Cole. There was blood on his teeth. “You’d be doing me a favor,” he said.

  Cole’s voice was tight with frustration. “Then I’ll take it out on your niece. One bloody piece at a time.”

  Nick looked past Cole toward the cabin, then rolled his eyes back toward Cole. “He who hesitates is lost,” he said.

  Cole whirled around. The girl was gone.

  “Motherfucker!” he said, straightening up. He holstered his pistol and swung his MP5 off his shoulder. She couldn’t have gone far. He looked to the tree line, to the cabin, back to the tree line. His men were down and he had to assume someone had heard at least the deputy’s shots and called the local cops. He had to evac now. But he couldn’t leave without the flash drive, which the professor had fucking hidden somewhere. And the girl was his one hold on the professor. Cole hadn’t heard a door open, so the girl wasn’t in the house. Which meant she was hiding outside somewhere.

  He glanced down at the professor, who was staring up at the stars, blinking slowly. He wasn’t going anywhere. Cole stalked back to the carport, his boots crunching on the gravel, weapon up and scanning. He looked through the windows of the Jeep—empty. The door to the house was shut tight. From the woods he heard an owl hoot like a question, but there was no other sound. But he could smell her. A faint scent of soap and the iron tang of blood. Where was she?

  The quarter moon came out from behind a cloud, and Cole saw someone lying in the yard beyond the carport. She had fallen to the ground. Cole switched his MP5 to his left hand and, with his right, unsheathed his knife. He came out from the cover of the carport and was about to place the muzzle of his weapon against the back of the girl’s head when he realized it wasn’t the girl—it was Hicks, his body cold, his blood on the grass black in the weak moonlight. His throat had been sliced open.

  The sight made Cole want to sob with rage. Every one of his men, gone. He felt as alone and exposed as if he were standing in some vast desert. He wasn’t afraid of Kobayashi or whoever was pulling his strings. It was the weight of failure, the shame, that threatened to crush him. It was fucking Winslow’s fault. Winslow hadn’t done his job, and so everything had fallen apart. He’d had to put Winslow down, show his men how wrong Winslow had been, how careless. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t—

  Cole’s thoughts distracted him so that he almost didn’t see the girl. As it was, he started to turn away from Hicks’s body and saw the girl running at him, a snarl on her face as she lifted something—a sword?—over her head like an avenging angel.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Annalise brought the machete down, the blade embedding itself into the crown of Cole’s head above his left eye. The impact jarred Annalise’s arms so that her hands flew open, letting go of the machete’s hilt. Cole took a single step backward, mouth in a surprised O, the machete a bizarre, horrible piece of headgear jutting out from the top of his skull. Blood ran like paint down his face. Then he fell backward, landing with an ungainly thump, his feet twitching convulsively before they, too, were stilled.

  Annalise dropped to her knees, adrenaline thrumming through her body, her mind spinning like a carousel. She felt sick. She allowed herself to close her eyes and tried to calm herself. Pain lanced through her left buttock where Cole had shot her, the bullet scoring her flesh without doing serious damage. She concentrated on the pain, a sharp, bright light in the dark. When her breathing slowed and she opened her eyes, she saw Cole was still lying there, the machete sticking up out of his head. Not far away lay another man who was also dead. Her uncle must have done that.

  Oh God. Her uncle.

  Annalise got to her feet, swaying a bit before putting out a hand for balance and resting it on the hood of Lettie’s Jeep. Somewhere at the back of her mind she cried for Lettie, but she hurried through the carport and back into the front yard. There, next to the deputy’s pickup truck, Uncle Nick lay on the ground, unmoving. “No,” she said, and she ran toward him as best she could. “No, no, no.” Just before she reached him, she tripped and fell on all fours, nearly collapsing on top of him.

  “Easy,” her uncle said, and Annalise raised her head to see him looking back at her, his face gray in the moonlight. He had blood on his shirt front. She reached out her hands and pressed them on top of the bloody parts of his chest and stomach. He groaned.

  “Okay,” she said, blowing her hair out of her face as she applied pressure to his wounds. “You’re going to live, okay? You can’t die on me too.”

  So faintly that she almost missed it, he said, “I’m tired.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “She said I have to take care of you. Lettie did. So you can’t fucking die.”

  “Don’t want—” he started, then coughed weakly. “Don’t want to piss Lettie off,” he said.

  “Or me,” Annalise said, still applying pressure. Her hands were wet with blood, but so were her legs. She didn’t think her uncle was bleeding anymore. She didn’t know if that was good or bad.

  “Or you,” he whispered. “Sorry … this is how we met.”

  “You have to tell me about my dad,” Annalise said. She tasted something salty. Tears. When had she started crying? “You have to stay alive and tell me about my dad. And my aunt. Ell
ie. Okay? You have to do that.”

  She sat there, hands pressing down on her uncle’s bleeding torso, as she heard a distant sound that soon became the chop of an approaching helicopter, like the long-delayed cavalry finally approaching over the horizon.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Annalise opened her eyes before dawn as usual, a gray wash of light coming through the window. The light here was different than at home, or in the mountains, but she had gotten used to it, just like she no longer felt confused and scared when she first woke up. She sat up in bed and stretched, then pulled on a pair of sweat pants and padded downstairs. She smelled coffee and cinnamon and sugar.

  “Good morning,” her grandmother said. She was in the kitchen, wearing a flowered bathrobe and house slippers, and she smiled warmly at Annalise.

  “Morning,” Annalise said, yawning. “Are you making cinnamon buns?”

  “Monkey bread,” Grandma said. She bent down to peek in the oven. “Almost ready. Did you sleep okay?”

  Annalise nodded. “Is Granddad going fishing today?”

  “After church, if I can get him out of bed,” Grandma said. She shook her head. “The older he gets, the more he wants to sleep.”

  Annalise got two mugs with travel lids and poured coffee into them, adding milk and sugar to one and sipping it to confirm it was acceptable. She looked at her grandmother and raised an eyebrow.

  Grandma nodded. “He’s out there.” She walked through the living room to the sliding glass door and opened it for Annalise. Annalise stepped outside onto the deck. “Thanks,” she said, and Grandma smiled and nodded and closed the door behind her.

  Outside it was already muggy, but a steady breeze off the dunes felt good on her skin. Annalise carried the two mugs across the wooden deck and down the rickety stairs to the beach path, her bare feet welcoming the cool sand. She knew that by noon the sand would be unbearably hot, but for now it was pleasant to wiggle her toes in it.