Nora wanted to die, right where she stood.
Then Paul groaned, rolled onto his side. He’s alive! Thank you thank you… He peered at the light, then raised a shaky arm to aim Juan’s pistol in her general direction.
“It’s me!” she choked through the sobs blocking her throat. “Darling, it’s me!”
Nora cradled Paul against her, rocking him, whispering in his ear. She pressed the still-sobbing children to her side with one hand, while with the other she ran her fingers through Paul’s hair. Blood dribbled from a wound on the side of his head, the kind that came from a rifle butt and not a bullet. Nora couldn’t find any other visible injuries, praise Allah.
Even though he trembled in her arms, Paul wouldn’t release his two-handed death grip on Juan’s pistol. Every few seconds, he said, “It’s okay, guys. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Like a recording, or a broken robot.
“Is he dead?” he finally whispered.
Nora glanced toward the dark lump on the floor next to them. “Yes. You did good.” She gulped. “I’m so sorry you had to do that.”
He nodded, then winced.
Nora wanted to sit there for a few hours, comfort Paul and the kids, forget what had just happened, but the business part of her brain wouldn’t let her. These six hostiles were down, but they’d have backup, vehicles, a recon team maybe. How many more outside? How long before the next wave came in?
“Darling,” she murmured after a deep breath, “I need your help.”
Paul choked out a garbled laugh. “Who do you want me to shoot?”
“Not that. Juan was hit in the shoulder. I need you to patch him up while I figure out how to get us out of here.”
After a few rough breaths, Paul said, “It’s not over, is it.”
“No, it’s not.”
Paul and Nora lugged the dead gunman out of the bathroom and dumped him next to his partner. Nora found a small, tube-shaped LED flashlight on the corpse’s utility belt, stuffed it in Paul’s hand, then scurried back into the bathroom. She lit the lantern Paul had wedged behind the toilet, placed it on the debris-strewn vanity. The room looked even worse in full light.
She crushed Hope and Peter in a hug. “It’s okay, Mr. Juan got hurt, Daddy’s taking care of him, I love you,” all tumbled out in a rush.
“Is Daddy okay?” Peter asked through his last hiccups of sobs.
“He’s fine. He protected you. He was very brave.” But there’d be a price to pay later. She hoped it wouldn’t cost more than either of them could bear.
Nora kissed them both, then reluctantly pulled away and stood. “I need you to go back in the bathtub for a few minutes. It’s safe, Daddy and I will protect you.”
Please let that be true.
Nora huddled against the garage’s side wall next to the door into the back yard. Juan and her family crouched close behind her. Even bitter with smog, the outside air was better than the stew of mold, dust, blood and gunpowder in the house. She longed to get out of this horrible place, get her family somewhere safe. But they were pinned by the whine of a large mosquito.
The drone.
She peeked around the doorjamb into the dark, looking for a tell-tale marker light. The sound was close; she ought to be able to see the drone. With any luck, she’d see it before it saw her.
A dark shape the size of a throw pillow drifted across the not-quite-black background in her NVGs. No light. She switched to infrared, saw the gentle glow of four warm electric motors maybe thirty feet away.
That thing would follow them wherever they went and bring the dogs down on them all.
Nora slid behind the doorjamb and switched off the laser sight mounted on the UMP’s receiver. She took a moment to calm her breathing. She’d get one chance at this; the laser or the muzzle flash would warn the drone’s operator, and it would never come this close again. They’d all be trapped here until more hostiles arrived.
She carefully slid the UMP’s stubby muzzle out the door, aimed at a currently empty piece of sky at the drone’s general altitude. Nora wiped dust from her goggles, concentrating on the whine, listening for a change in volume or pitch that would tell her it was moving some way other than left to right past the garage.
The glowing motors edged into her field of view. She inched the barrel up and down as she followed the fuzzy light in the gunsights, trying to draw a bead.
There. She exhaled and fired.
The whine cut off; the glows plummeted. Plastic tinkled on hard ground a second later. They’d be drone-free for at least a few minutes.
Nora swung outside, peeked over the rotting redwood gate. A white panel van and three more SUVs—enough to carry at least another dozen men—had arrived in the fifteen minutes since the last shot. A dark shape on a roof across the street flagged a sniper. She felt like an antelope surrounded by lions.
She rasped through the doorway, “Go! Straight to the back fence, there’s a hole. Don’t stop, don’t talk.”
Paul shuffled out, bent under his backpack, leading Peter by the hand. He looked surprisingly macho in the tactical gear she’d salvaged from the dead men, with a UMP slung across his chest. Juan tottered out of the garage a few seconds later, also geared up, holding Hope’s hand.
“Are you okay to walk?” she asked as she hefted Hope into her arms.
He braced against the gate, breathing hard. “Just slow. Go on.”
Nora jog-walked toward the back of the yard, hugging the fence, trying not to think about what was happening out front or if the sniper had her dialed in. She pressed Hope’s tear-streaked face into her neck, cooed, “It’s okay, Cupcake, just be really quiet, we’re going someplace safe, please don’t cry.” Those thirty feet in the open stretched for miles.
Paul helped her swing Hope through the fence hole into the next yard. “Help Juan,” she stage-whispered to Paul, then ducked through the hole herself. She sat the kids together, stroked their hair and murmured comfort to them. Then she broke away to check on the men.
They were ten feet from the fence, Juan’s good arm around Paul’s shoulder. She peered past them toward the street, waiting for gunmen to bust through the gate. Hurry hurry hurry…
Then she remembered: half the first team had come over the back fence.
Juan stumbled, but Paul braced him up at the last moment. Nora recognized the grimace on her husband’s face: his back had just tweaked out. The men staggered toward the hole.
She heard footsteps and rustling in the yard next to this one. Faster!
Juan reached the fence, held onto the hole’s edges, then lurched through. Nora yanked him aside so Paul could pick his way through while trying not to bend.
She heard a thump from the other side of the fence. A man flashed past the hole, running toward the safe house. Three more followed. Nora let out a huge sigh of relief.
But they weren’t clear yet. Once the hostiles figured out the only people in the safe house were their own casualties, they’d start a search. She had to move everyone out of here…now.
She caught Paul’s arm. “Your back?” she murmured. He nodded. “Can you carry Hope?”
“Yeah, or my backpack. Not both. I’m sorry.”
“Shh. Get Juan’s keys and go get the car. We have to leave right now.”
The first explosion knocked them both into silence. Nora dashed to the hole in time to see four men pile through a huge gap in the plywood that used to cover the patio door. More explosions inside—they were using real grenades now, not flash-bangs—and a lot of automatic-weapons chatter. They were clearing rooms by fire. Time was running out.
“Go!” she hissed to Paul. “Fast as you can!”
37
With the once-formidable Federal and state firefighting arsenals disbanded or dispersed to budget-strapped local governments, western states are least able to confront wildfires just as the number and size of those fires surges…Record numbers of homeowners evacuated from dwellings threatened by wildfires or related landslides have opted to not r
eturn or rebuild…“It’s almost impossible to sell a house on a hillside now,” says Miley Kendrick, a real estate agent in wildfire-prone Woodland Hills. “Everyone knows the insurance companies won’t pay fire departments to protect those properties.”
— “Wildfires Shape Population Shifts in West,” LATimes.com
WEDNESDAY, 12 MAY
“Bel?”
“Oh, thank God!” Bel ground her burner phone into her ear. Half a bottle of cheap wine, a lot of oldies on the iPod (she couldn’t take another go-round of “Bad Romance”), miles paced around the dining-room table, and finally Lucho calls. “Are you okay? Where are you?”
“Going. To Santee.” His voice was drifty, out of focus. Undecipherable noises rattled in the background.
The lump of ice in her gut grew larger. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“Someone. Shot me. Through a wall. My shoulder.”
Oh, God, no, no, no, no, not again! Not again! “Lucho, I—”
“Hi.” A woman’s voice. “Your husband got hit in his left shoulder. It’s a—”
“Who are you? Where is he?”
“Um…I’ll explain later. It’s a through-and-through wound. He’s lost a lot of blood. He also took three hits to his body armor—”
Body armor?
“—so he may have a broken rib or two. He wants you to come meet us with your medical bag. We’re going to—”
“What’s happening? Who are you?” Panic had shorted out most of her rational-thought centers. Oh, God, what if he dies?
“We’re… his clients. Can you write down an address?”
Bel unearthed a pen and an old notepad in time to copy down an address in Bostonia, and where in hell is Bostonia? “Okay, okay, I’ll be there, just, please don’t let him die, please—”
“I’m taking care of him as best I can,” the woman said, her voice trying to be comforting even if it wasn’t working. “Oh, he also said to take the battery out of your phone before you leave and make sure you’re not being followed. We’ll see you soon.”
“Wait! Give him the phone!”
She heard fumbling, then, “Bel?”
“Lucho? I’m coming. Hold on, I’ll be there soon. Don’t you dare die before I can kill you. I love you so much.” Bel barely got the words past the rock in her throat. She was already in motion when the connection turned to dead air.
Number 8405 was a flat-roofed, ‘70s-vintage rancher with gaping-empty windows and a charred palm tree with the top burned off. There were no lights anywhere along this last half of a dead-end street. The headlights revealed to Bel the cracked, rippling mud coating the road and some front yards up the hill ahead. Most of the houses past this point were scorched rubble.
A man faded out of 8405’s shadows and edged toward her car. Bel pulled her pistol from the center console, clicked off the safety and held it in her lap.
The man didn’t look like a cop. The headlights showed his face to be too soft, his hair a little too long, and it seemed like half the cops she saw now were on steroids, which this guy clearly wasn’t. In his tucked-in, black collarless shirt and black jeans, he could almost be going out to a club. But when she rolled down her window at his signal, she still led with her gun.
“Who are you? Where is he?”
The man backed up two quick steps and spread his hands at waist level. No gun. “Whoa. Friend. Are you Bel?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Paul. You talked to my wife on the phone. Park here, I’ll take you to your husband.”
Bel followed Paul uphill, passing other burned or abandoned houses. The hardened mud threatened to turn her ankle with every other step. Paul offered to carry her big medical duffel, but instead she handed him the gym bag holding clean clothes for Lucho and his shaving kit.
They entered a long, low-slung ranch house with a stubby garage at the uphill end, boarded-up windows and dead grass. Inside was overwarm, stuffy and musty with a strong overlay of smoke. The carpet had been ripped out who knew how long ago, leaving exposed concrete slab that echoed their steps like a cavern. Paul led her to what had been a bedroom.
“Lucho!”
He sat on a pile of beach towels, his back against the wall facing the door. Harsh lantern light showed his left shoulder, side and sleeve were black with crusted blood down past his elbow and almost to the waistband of his jeans. Bel felt her heart stop for a moment.
A silly half-smile crawled onto his lips. “Oye, cariña.”
“You turkey,” she growled. She charged to his side, dumped her medical bag and thumped to her knees. All she’d thought about during the two-plus-hour drive was throwing herself on top of him and holding him for a few hours, but now she wrestled down the impulse. “Really, getting into a gunfight at your age.”
“Sorry.”
“Sure you are.”
“We tried to keep him from going into shock,” Paul said from the doorway. “I hope we didn’t make things worse.”
“No, that’s fine.” Bel dragged on some latex gloves, fished a liter of saline solution from her bag. Going into nurse mode helped her not bog down into worried-sick-scared-to-death wife mode. She checked the use-by date on the foil pack of HemaSafe; it wasn’t too expired, so she began mixing the blood substitute into the saline. “Paul, can you bring me some water, please? I need to clean up this crazy man.”
Once Paul left, Bel gently peeled off what remained of Lucho’s shirt. She gasped at the garish bruises on his chest. She’d seen far worse before, but not on her husband. He gazed at her with a dopey expression and tried to stroke her face. For a moment, she let him press his palm against her cheek. Despite the dirt and blood and gunpowder, she could still smell him, sweat mixed with his soap and shaving cream.
“Stop scaring me, huh?” she murmured. She spiked the IV bag to the wall above his head and ran a line into his right arm. He flinched at the needle, just like he always did. Then she carefully shaved off a square of chest hair, smoothed on a diagnostic patch and watched his vitals on her slate for a few moments. Nothing bad showed up, thank God. “What happened?”
“Got jumped at a safe house.” His voice was stronger than on the phone, but still wandered. “We won, sort of.”
“This is winning? I don’t wanna see losing.” The bullet wound under the big, square patches was unattractive rather than ugly, a good excuse for another sigh of relief. “This is gonna sting.” She swabbed both sides of his shoulder with alcohol, then sprayed aerosol sulfa into the holes. Lucho squawked both times, but didn’t flop around too much. “Can’t you learn to duck?”
He tried to smile. “If I did, we wouldn’t’ve met.”
While she cleaned and dressed his wound, Bel remembered the first moment she laid eyes on a big, handsome, filthy, smelly soldier with a couple nasty shrapnel cuts from an IED. Lucho had no hair, a beautiful smile, and a couple heaping helpings of bad boy in him. She had more attitude than sense back then, and they spent their time in her ER cubicle flirting and giving each other shit while she stitched him up. After she told him, “Drop your drawers, soldier,” and her fingers lingered with the cotton ball a little too long where she gave him the tetanus booster, she knew she’d have to schedule him for a follow-up. Maybe several.
Twenty-three years later, she was still patching him together.
“Hey,” he said, cupping her chin. “It’s okay. Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying,” Bel sniffed. She’d been pressing a gauze pad against his shoulder for too long. She kissed his hand as she brushed it away, shot her strongest full-spectrum antibiotic into the IV, then sat back on her heels. “Well, your new hole won’t kill you. Let’s check those ribs.” She poked and prodded and grimaced every time he did and tried not to think of all the times she’d rested her head on that chest and listened to his heart beat.
Bel wiped her eyes with the backs of her wrists. “Okay, nothing’s moving. I guess your chest’s made out of cement—like your head.”
Then
she kissed him. Long and hard and with every ounce of love she had in her.
38
Brandon Sikes, a lighting engineer for Denver’s Department of Public Works, says, “We haven’t been able to keep up with copper thieves for years. A survey we ran three years ago showed only about a fifth of our streetlights still work.” This may be a blessing in disguise. According to Sikes, “The city can’t afford the electricity to power them all anyway.”
— “Blackout on the Streets,” DenverPost.com
THURSDAY, 13 MAY
Nora perched on the low concrete planter behind the house and stared down at the sleeping valley. A sprinkle of lights marked the houses and apartments of people back from late shifts or preparing for early ones, and islands of yellow-orange glow showed the intersections the cities managed to keep lit. Above her, stars straggled through the smog and haze.
Hope squirmed in her lap, buried her face and a little fist in Nora’s chest. She was too scared to stay with her brother. Peter, like most boys, could sleep through anything. Juan’s wife had cleaned Paul’s head wound and given him a fentanyl patch for his back. He’d gone back to the former master bedroom to sleep. She didn’t envy him the dreams he’d have.
Nora, dead awake, couldn’t see sleep anywhere on her radar.
Footsteps crunched the weeds to her left. She drew her pistol, held it next to her right hip, ready. Then Juan’s wife appeared from around a corner in a scrub top and jeans, her arms crossed tight over her chest. She stopped.
They eyed each other for a few moments. “How is he?” Nora finally asked as she holstered her weapon.
“He’ll live. No thanks to you people.”
Nora felt her cheeks flush from the verbal slap. What right did she have to take these chances with the lives of strangers, anyway? “If it means anything, I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t. I’m taking him home with me. He needs to stay in bed for a day or two.”
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