by Paula Cox
“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 mor
e 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 clips 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.
And even while I’m falling into this weird, surreal state of dreams, I realize I’m not the only one falling. Because there’s the silhouette on the rooftop next to mine, swaying around like a drunken man, both hands hugging his neck like he’s got a frog trapped in it that he’s about to spit out. Except it’s not a frog he spits out, but a whole clot of blood. Blood as thick as jelly, with a color of rose petals. Blisteringly red blood painting sunsets on the white of the rooftop.
Oren dances around like this a few more seconds while I swim around between dreams, sleep, and wakefulness, between images of white and bursts of red. And just as the last string connecting me to my conscious begins to fray and snap and send me falling, falling, falling into a place I don’t know, I see Oren plunge from the side of the slippery roof. He careens, rocks, and thrashes his way down the rooftop, plummeting like a plane punched out of the sky with a snap and crack of bone and sinew as his body hits the ice below.
Epilogue
I was in the hospital for a long time. With a whole spider web of IVs networking across my body, just like I’d imagined for Palmer and Miles if I trust what the Stitches told me later about it all. Like a damaged little kitten. Or: they had you wrapped up like a half-finished mummy. There were pictures of me all wrapped up and broken apparently, though I never got a chance to see them. Kirill’t know how much I trust my guys outside of watching my ass and making sure I don’t take any more bullets than I have to.
As things turned out, two was the grand total of slugs lifted out of me. One buried pretty good inside my ankle where it was lodged a few centimeters away from my nerves. The doctors showed me some x-rays a little later on and told me I was the luckiest son of a bitch he’d treated. I didn’t know what to do with that, so I assumed it was a compliment and said thanks. They’re good types, these local doctors. They know what to expect when they see our cars coming up and know what forms to fill out and what bribes to take to keep us from drawing too much attention from the pigs. Hence why both Miles and Palmer didn’t have any problems letting themselves get stitched back up after their altercations.
The second bullet was taken out of my left shoulder blade. Two weeks after the surgery, the whole left half of my body was on fire like it’d been dipped in a vat of battery acid. And on top of that, that third shot took out a piece of my left ear. Just the top. Nothing to cry about.
“You put in a request now, he might be able to get you in for a steel leg replacement,” Miles told me when I was awake and back in a functioning state. “I mean, he ought to put in something badass, considering just how much he’s charging you for all this handiwork. You’ll be having to run overtime contracts starting next week at the rate he’s going. Or you would be if you weren’t the luckiest son of a bitch alive.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that thing was, what, a fifth of a fucking centimeter from you suffering severe nerve damage and never being able to walk on that leg again?”
“Not that. What do you mean that I would be having to pay?”
After the first week, when I wasn’t on painkillers anymore and could function like a normal human being again—granted, one who’s just had two slugs of steel cut out of him with a knife—my boys decided to deliver the good news. Maya was safe. Unharmed. A little shaken up the first few days after Oren took her away but who the hell wouldn’t be, being locked up with a guy like that while the walls around you were literally exploding to pieces. And then the bad. About Crash and the kid—Vat I think his name was.
All my boys were there to share it—even the two greenhorns—crowded around my bed like it was my own fucking funeral.
“You all have to look that uncomfortable?” I’d said, feeling pretty damn uncomfortable myself the longer they stood there, saying nothing, checking their watches or their phones, talking a little to each other in low voices.
“Well, what the hell is it?”
Palmer finally decided to come forward and say something, just to keep me from looking like too much of an idiot. “She’s down in the lobby, Q, waiting to come up and see you. We’ll leave you guys alone. Just thought you ought to know something—Theo died this morning.”
They’d told me about this right in the beginning when I asked for the whole rundown on what happened after I shot Oren and passed out. Bolt had been trying to tell me when I was on the second floor, rushing out. I’d thought for certain that Maya was with him. As it turns out, she was just a little ways down the hall, and I didn’t see her.
What had happened, according to Bolt, was that they’d gone through the back lawns like we’d planned and secured the back way for anyone leaving. They’d heard the firing and shouting in the front of the house but held the position some minutes longer, watching the other guardsmen rush up to the front to guard the place against me, Nail, Blondie, and Ash.
That’s when he’d seen her—right through the window above the back porch. A stone’s throw away—Maya, tied to a post and scratching at her knot. Bolt had been keeping a watch out for anyone coming from the side, but it was plenty enough time for Theo to abandon his position and make
it up the stairs, Bolt hot on his heels. They got to the room and found Oren with a foot on the stairs to the attic. He turned sharply, fired off two rounds into Theo’s stomach, and disappeared. If Theo had been twenty seconds later, none of it would have happened. But now he was dead. He was dead, and I was going to be the first person Maya saw since he died.
Palmer knew I was nervous and I was happy with him for moving the Stitches out of my room so we’d have a little bit of privacy.
“Just go easy on her for us. And while you’re doing that, go easy on yourself. You sure as hell ain’t a spring chicken, not after having two bullets dug out of your body.”
“Hey, Palmer?”
“Yea, Q?”
“Would it be alright if you shut the hell up? Just for a little while? A few months, maybe?”
He laughed and closed the door. Two minutes. I had just about two minutes to make my hospital gown not so rumpled and to try to smooth down my hair although it’s gotten too long and without water, it’s impossible to fix it down in one position. Whatever. Maya’s seen me worse off than this.
