by Robert Pobi
Erin watched Damien hit the small courtyard to the basement door, then reach up for Maude. The kids would make it. They would be fine. All of them except Alisha.
But she couldn’t leave the little girl.
She waved Damien away. He put his arm around Laurie, and they all ran for Madison.
Erin tried not to cry as she turned and went to the bedroom door.
47
Alisha was getting used to sleeping in her new home, and she was far across the slumber frontier, dreaming little girl dreams and breathing little girl breaths. There were no people or animals or rainbows in her head, only colors and music, but it was enough to keep the machinery moving. She was gone, unaware of anything. And then a low-level rumble began to shake her skeleton.
She opened her eyes, and the rumble grew from an indistinct but personal noise to a full-blown growl coming from the big furry rib cage in the bed beside her. She had her arm over Lemmy and her face was stuffed into his collar and all she could smell was dog. And all she could hear was his growl coming up.
The little girl sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. The dog rose beside her, his snout aimed at the door. She could feel the heat rising off him. Someone was out in the hallway; she could see the shadows under the door. Was it Mrs. Erin? Mr. Lucas? She wanted to call out, but something stopped her. Maybe the dog. Maybe the movement out in the hall. Maybe the dark. Whatever it was, it was enough to keep her quiet.
The door opened a crack.
The dog stiffened.
Alisha was small, and she didn’t have a lot of experience with the world, so she went with what she knew. And she knew how to hide; she used to play hide-and-seek with Mommy’s friend, Uncle Quincy. She was an expert at the game. When she closed her eyes, no one could see her.
So as the door swung silently in, Alisha closed her eyes and stayed very quiet. She knew they couldn’t see her.
It felt good to be safe.
48
Dingo stopped at the bottom of the staircase, beside the newel post, and shifted the sword in his grip. He took a deep breath to power his blood, then headed up into the dark.
The carpeted steps dampened his footfalls, and the only sound he made was generated by his left blade where it flexed at the footpad; the slight torque caused an almost imperceptible squeak that it took him three steps to correct.
He stopped on the landing, in the shadows of the stairwell, balancing on the thick carpet. Above him, the oak paneling and spindles wound up into the dark. The sword vibrated in his fist, and he tightened his knuckles around the leather-wrapped hilt.
There was a little pink night-light on the landing above, and the men were there. In front of one of the kids’ doors—the little girl who had arrived a few nights back.
The two men looked virtually the same in the dark. Medium height and medium build.
He skirted the wall on his way up the steps, keeping below their line of sight in the dark. He was two steps away when he heard one of them turn the knob on the little girl’s room.
Dingo rushed the last few steps.
49
The clock slowed, and time unfolded in perfect CinemaScope slow motion. They were miles away. Distant points in the darkness. Erin ran forward, her screech lighting up the air in a siren of rage.
As Alisha’s door swung in, the men spun, their muzzles coming around in unison.
Erin knew that in a few more seconds she would be dead. But between now and then, she would fight.
Their weapons came around in a tight arc.
And … then … a shadow sprang out of the staircase, screaming.
Some primitive part of her recognized Dingo, and with that, her rage increased. These were her children!
Her fucking children!
In her house!
Dingo shot up out of the dark. And he was swinging a … a … was that a sword?
There was the sound of the blade cutting the air. And the meaty thwack of steel connecting with human. And the thump of two arms and an assault rifle hitting the floor.
The man fell back, bloody stumps painting the air in a black mist delivered on a scream.
The second man spun on Dingo.
There was a thud as they connected.
His rifle fell to the floor.
Fist and elbow connected with bone.
The swish of a pistol coming out of a holster.
There was a grunt. And a snap. And the knot of men tumbled down the stairs, taking out spindles, and crashing into the table on the landing.
Lemmy bounced out with a roar and grabbed the armless man by the throat, punching him back into the banister.
Erin ran into Alisha’s room.
The little girl had her eyes squeezed tight. Erin scooped her up with a quick, “It’s me.”
Back out in the hall, Lemmy was making horrid, monstrous noises, and the man without arms tried to scream.
He punched at the dog with his bloody stumps, but each movement had less vigor than the last as he lost consciousness. Lemmy tore at him, pushing him down as a horrible squawk bubbled up from somewhere deep within him.
Downstairs, Dingo and the other one were kicking the ever-loving shit out of each other. Punches snapped in the dark. Grunts. Kicks. More broken furniture.
Erin locked the bedroom door and carried Alisha to the window.
She wrapped the girl in a throw from the chair in the corner, then looked down at her. “You hold on to me, okay?” She had to say it twice—the little girl was shaking, frightened by the sounds of violence beyond the door.
Alisha nodded.
Erin climbed out the window, first sitting on the edge, then rotating until her stomach was on the sill, and Alisha was under her arm like a football. She shifted the girl to her front, then began to Tarzan down the ladder.
It was freezing out, and the metal rungs stung her hands, but she kept moving.
One hand at a time.
One foot at a time.
One rung at a time.
Below her, the street was deserted.
She hit the snow-covered ground beside the trash can and gave Alisha a comforting squeeze.
Then, from inside the house, she heard the ugly punch of gunfire—four rounds in tight succession.
Pause.
A fifth.
Silence.
Erin ran for the corner.
50
The Upper East Side
Whitaker swung the SUV around the final corner in a four-wheel drift that crossed three lanes. She hit the apex of the skid, and the tail knocked through a snowbank, taking out a mailbox in a loud display of Newton’s third law of motion. The blue metal can flew into a lamppost, wrapping around it like a wet sock.
She punched up the street and rammed up onto the sidewalk, murdering a family of garbage cans.
The house was dark, and all Lucas saw was the ladder hanging from the window, billowing in the wind like a disconnected spinal column that didn’t know it was no longer alive. He hit the sidewalk before the truck had even approximated a full stop and took a single step when Erin’s voice cut through the screaming in his head. “Luke!”
He turned to the direction of her voice and almost lost his balance as he torqued his prosthetic ankle on the ice.
Erin was two houses down the block, headed for the market on the corner of Madison. “Luke!” she screamed. “Run!” She had a bundle that had to be Alisha clenched to her chest in a running back’s grip.
Lucas ducked around a boulder of snow that used to be a car, picking up speed with his idiosyncratic hop. She reached out and he pulled himself into her and Alisha, almost losing his footing. She was sobbing and shaking, and he tried to get her to Whitaker’s SUV.
She pulled for the corner. “The children! They’re at the market.”
“My kids are in the market on Madison!” Lucas yelled to Whitaker.
Whitaker unclipped her pistol and ran for the corner.
Lucas tightened his grip on her. “What happened? What’s
going on?”
“T-t-t-two men. With m-m-machine … guns. I think D-D-D-Dingo killed one, but there were shots and…” Her speech was skipping like her reader had malfunctioned, and Lucas suddenly realized that she was only wearing her bathrobe and slippers.
“Is someone still in there?”
“I-I don’t know.” Erin shook her head. “Dingo. Dingo’s in there!”
Lucas grabbed her by the shoulder and pointed her toward the market. He was about to give her a shove when the tactical van rounded the corner, two police cruisers on its back bumper. As the support vehicles rocketed up the street, fishtailing in the not-yet-plowed snow, the red-and-white lights turned the night into an epileptic fit–inducing tunnel.
Lucas pointed at the corner of Madison. “I’ll get Dingo. You need to—”
The front door of the house blew open, the oak slamming into limestone and shattering the colored window. A man stumbled out—Detective Michael Atchison. Blood vomited from his mouth in a black rope.
He had a good foot of sword sticking out of his chest.
And an assault rifle in his hands.
He saw Lucas. Saw Erin. And drunkenly swung the murderous muzzle toward them in what looked like stop-motion animation.
Lucas heard the van carrying the tactical team slide to a halt behind them. But they were too late. Everyone was too late. This fucker had them.
Lucas threw his arms around Erin and leaned into a turn.
The doors of the van slid open, and all Lucas could do was hope.
And that was when it came whistling in. A supersonic pulse that bent the air in a high-octane hiss.
For one last tiny instant, Atchison still had a bead on them.
And then, as if Satan reached out with a big wet kiss, Atchison’s head disappeared.
He hammered back through the door, landing with one foot out on the stoop.
Brains and blood hung in the air in a black mist.
There was an awkward silent second that Erin ended with her scream just as the kaboom came cracking in.
Someone screamed, “Sniper! Sniper!”
Lucas pulled Erin down, covering her and Alisha with his body.
And waited for a shot to take his world away.
51
Lucas held Erin down on the snow-covered pavement. Alisha was clamped between them, and he could feel the little girl’s heartbeat above his own.
Erin kept screaming that Dingo was inside.
He was scared. Then fear morphed into terror. And terror gave way to anger.
Behind him, in the dark, the SWAT men kept whispering, “Sniper. Sniper. Sniper.” Over and over—a serpentine death mantra.
Lucas knew it was the man he had been hunting—the question mark with a rifle out in the storm that he had tracked to two rooftops and a windswept shoreline at LaGuardia.
He was here.
On top of them.
Lucas lay on Erin and the girl, waiting for a round to come in.
A second turned into two.
Into five.
Into ten.
Then thirty.
And there was nothing but silence and the ambient sounds of the city beyond his little universe of fear.
The shot had come from the east.
And the lag time between impact and the sound rolling in had been significant—an easy second.
Which meant a thousand yards out.
And there was only one building in that direction with a clear vantage of his front door that timed out at more or less a thousand yards.
The cops across the street were calling for backup. The SWAT team wasn’t so patient; two men with sniper shields crab-walked toward Lucas, Erin, and Alisha.
Lemmy came to the door and sniffed the dead man in the snow. The dog’s snout, front paws, and chest were a different color now—a deep pink—as if he had been feeding on a corpse.
Lucas heard the cops behind him shoulder their weapons. “No!” he yelled. “That’s my dog!”
He snapped his fingers, and Lemmy bounded down the stairs.
The dog reached him and gave him a big lick on the side of the face that was slimy with blood. Lucas pulled him in just as the armored men reached them. He grabbed the one with sergeant’s stripes on his shoulder. “The shot came from two blocks east. Off Park. The high-rise. Check the roof.”
The man looked at him as if he were nuts.
“Trust me,” he said. “Now get my wife and little girl to safety.” He gave Erin a quick kiss before she was pulled away. She called Lemmy, and he disappeared with her. “You,” Lucas said, pointing at the second man with the shield, “come with me.”
“It’s not safe, sir!” The man shook his head.
The shooter was gone; if he’d wanted anyone else dead, they’d be Sleepy Hollowed all over the snow by now. “Then stay here.” Lucas stood up.
The clock was on Pause, and it felt as if he were moving slower than he ever had in his life. His limbs felt like they were weighted down, and the adrenaline coursing through his tissue was acting as a coagulant, not fuel. His reasoning said that the sniper had jackrabbited—it made no sense to hang around. But that tiny little primitive part of his mind that ran the fear generator wasn’t as certain.
He heard the SWAT man come up behind him, waving the shield like it meant something against their guy and his magic bullets.
Lucas hit the steps and moved up, his hand out on the stone rail for balance, concentrating on one stair at a time. When they hit the landing, they had to step over Atchison’s body and Lucas tried to ignore the brains and blood steaming in the snow. Once they were inside the house, he felt the clock power back up.
Dingo was on the landing at the top of the first flight of steps, sitting on the blood-soaked Persian rug. His back was against the wall, and his legs stuck straight out in front of him, one of the blades snapped off and hanging by carbon fibers like a broken cigarette. He was hugging himself, his hands over his stomach and chest. Even in the dark, Lucas could see blood thudding out between his fingers.
Lucas snapped on the light that was knocked over and kneeled, the only movement he could manage to get closer to the floor without sitting or lying down. He took Dingo’s hand. “Dingo?”
Dingo didn’t move.
Above them, sprawled out like a doll that had been abandoned, was the other intruder. One of his arms was on the bottom step; the other was wedged in between the rungs of the banister. There was no questioning that he was dead as fuck—his throat was torn out, and his face was twisted into a frozen mask of pain. Unable to override his training, the SWAT man checked for a pulse. Then he moved past to clear the rest of the house.
Lucas scanned Dingo’s wounds and put his good hand over two holes in his chest to stop the awful sucking sound he heard. With that, his friend coughed. It was a small, tentative action, barely a breath, but it said that he was still alive.
The SWAT man ran through the floor, clearing the rooms, while Lucas tried to stop the bleeding.
Dingo looked up at Lucas and smiled a mouthful of blood. “Erin … and the … girl?”
Lucas kept the pressure on the mass of chest wounds, and his eyes filled with tears. “Everyone’s safe. You saved them.”
Dingo coughed. “The sec … ond … asshole? I heard…”
“They’re both dead.”
Dingo managed a bloody smile that sent a little stream of black down the stubbled terrain of his chin.
The SWAT man came back, and by now his friends were charging through the downstairs, calls of Clear! Clear! Clear! echoing in the dark. More sirens outside. More diesel engines. More personnel.
Back at Lucas’s side, the SWAT man got on the horn. “We’ve got a man down in here. Multiple gunshot wounds.”
Lucas still held Dingo’s hand. He didn’t know what to do, so he said, “Thank you.”
But Dingo was just staring off into the distance.
SWAT men poured up the stairs with a pair of paramedics in tow.
T
hey went into lifesaving mode, probing wounds, checking vitals, and administering the appropriate mix of painkillers, blood thickeners, and assorted syringed voodoo. Lucas stood back while they worked, but he kept his eyes locked on Dingo’s. He didn’t see any fear or pain, and all he could think was that Dingo was going to die.
They got the stabilizer board under his body, strapped him in, and hoisted him onto the stretcher. Lucas kept with them all the way downstairs, and when they got to the doorway, the street was lit up with the barrage of headlights, emergency lighting, and task lighting that, when reflected off the snow, magnified to the point that it looked like daylight out. Vehicles of various form and purpose—both marked and unmarked—decorated the street. The scene was interlaced with SWAT and police doing their best to be effective in the cold.
Lucas followed Dingo’s stretcher down the front steps and across the sidewalk to the ambulance. The pair of EMS techs had to ford the narrow path chopped through the snowbank before they could drop the wheels for the few feet it took to get to the back doors of the vehicle.
Whitaker and Erin were across the street, beside a police van. Erin was wearing a big police parka and fireman boots, and Whitaker was on her cell. The kids were in the van, and when they saw Lucas, they waved, but there was nothing joyous or festive about the action; they were just searching for something familiar.
Erin crossed the blocked street, negotiating a zig, then a zag, between a cruiser, an unmarked SUV, and two SWAT men decked out in what looked like assassins’ gear.
As the wheels came up and the stretcher slid into the back, Dingo tried to say something, and Lucas leaned in and put his ear to the oxygen mask covering his mouth and nose. “Don’t forget to … oil the sword and … feed the horse,” he whispered. Then he passed out.
Erin began to cry.
The techs closed the doors, and the siren spun to life. As the ambulance headed off, Lucas and Erin stood in the shadow of a building, away from the lights. “How are the kids?” he asked.
