Stephen Hunter - Black Light

He tossed the can out beyond the tree, where it hit, tipped, but gurgled as the volatile liquid inside poured out of the holes and soaked into the brush. He seized the rifle, listening as the fuel chugged out. It formed a pool and its vapor began to rise in a palpable mist, its stench washing over him. It would linger for a second or two, a balloon of gas without a skin.

Time to go, he thought, and stepped out.

It felt so familiar.

It was so like the first time. He’s waiting, a hundred yards away, for a man to emerge. Except not from the trees but from the corn.

The weather was almost identical, and so was the time. It had the ache of déjà vu to it.

He knew it was close to time. Bob couldn’t wait any longer. He had to move.

In the scope, against the green of the infrared, Preece saw him behind the tree, fiddling with something, possibly checking his rifle. An odd banging came, metal on metal, signifying what? He watched as something was launched from the tree and landed with a thud beyond.

Now, what the hell was that?

He grew impatient.

Come on, marine, he thought. Let’s do this. Let’s finish it. It has to be done.

At last Bob stepped out into the black light, which was green in Preece’s scope, faced him frontally and appeared to step toward him.

Got you, thought Preece.

He placed the crosshair dead center of the chest and felt the trigger begin to slide back of its own volition, encountering just a whisper of resistance as it pressed against the internal mechanisms straining for release. It was a five-pound trigger; he had two pounds of weight against it, then three, then—

It was all gone.

The black light wiped white in harsh incandescence. What the hell?

He blinked hard, involuntarily drew his eye from the scope and looked into the heart of fireball that vaporized his night vision, detonating his optic nerves, filling the eyes in his brain with pinwheels, skyrockets, illumination rounds of sheer wild color.

Bob stepped out, his rifle in his left hand, his .45 held behind him in his right.

Hold it, he told himself, smelling the vapors.

One.

Hold it again, he told himself, as the vapors rose around him.

He felt crucified. He was on the cross. There was no help.

He fired the pistol.

It bucked in his hand: its muzzle flash ignited the column of vapor behind him as he dropped it. He felt the whooosh as the darkness ruptured with a blade of light so fierce and radiant that it bleached the colors from the forest and the field even as it briefly exposed them. Starburst, nova, supernova, the universe ending in fire.

The heat rolled across him and he felt his back pucker and blister as he fell forward.

Across the clearing, like a dog’s eyes caught in the full light, two lenses captured the radiation from the fireball and reflected it back at him. They were stacked circles: the lens of a light-amplifying scope and the lens of an IF search-light. But still they were the eyes of a beast.

Bob fired over his sights, not through them, aiming out of instinct, following the illuminated trajectory of his first round. The tracer flicked fast and a little low, kicking up some dirt. In a nanosecond he corrected, fired again, the tracer skipping across the distance so fast, a whipsong of illumination, and it went to the eyes and struck between them.

Fire for effect, he thought. That’s in the book of counter-sniper operations: locate, then overwhelm with superior firepower.

He jacked ten fast rounds into the eyes, the tracers snaking over the clearing and plunging into the position across the way, a sleet of light. He threw darts of light, bolts of light, missiles of light, as he burned through the rest of the magazine, a controlled burst, three shots a second, walking the rounds across the position where the now vanished eyes had proclaimed themselves. The tracers struck and sunk, or they bounced crazily away, like flecks of an exploding star.

He looked and all about him, fires burned.

But he was done.

Jesus H. Christ.

Peck drew back, astounded at what he saw before him.

A column of flame, like the detonation of a bomb, gushed upward through the trees.

Then in a second, someone was shooting tracers. They dashed across the field fast, low and ugly, snapping remorselessly at the base of a tree on the far side.

He had a terrible suspicion that Jack Preece was on the receiving end of the fireworks.

His night vision was shattered, but enough of it came back in time to see a dark shape rush from the tower of flames, cross the clearing and close on the far position and bend to probe a body.

It was enough.

Peck knew he was overmatched.

Time to get the hell out of there.

Bob found Preece in his ghillie suit, looking like a sofa that had exploded. He lay on his belly, and Bob almost put a shot into him, but held up. The body was still, the fingers relaxed.

Fuck you if you can’t take a joke, he thought.

He turned the body over. In the illumination of the fires flaring across the clearing, he saw that the man had taken at least four or five shots in the head and upper torso. Blood everywhere, the face smashed and broken.

Bob flipped the body aside; Preece was the ultimate step-on. Bob knelt to examine the weapon and saw quickly that it too was destroyed. A bullet had smashed the scope and another had shattered the lens of the infrared searchlight.

Now it occurred to him he was illuminated in the fire-light. Maybe there was someone else around.

He felt no triumph or power but only the emptiness of survival.

He moved out.

N ow what?

It was first light and the sun had begun to filter through the black trees, turning them gray and then green.

Russ stirred painfully. His limbs were numb from the water that had washed over them all night. He tried not to look at Jed Posey, whose skull had been evacuated and now seemed like a queerly semi-deflated balloon.

He had no idea what was happening. Sometime last night, the sky had lit up for a second or so, as something huge and hot burned fast; there’d been gunfire too: a batch of rounds tapping out, almost fast as a machine gun, he thought.

But since then, silence.

He remembered his instructions. Wait until dawn. The sniper’s rifle is worthless in the light as well as awkward and heavy, so you’ll be safe. Then strike out due west, moving quickly. Six or seven hours away is the road, U.S. 71. Get into town, call the cops, tell everything to everybody.

And what about Bob?

No sign of Bob.

Possibly Bob was doing all that shooting, possibly not. Russ couldn’t imagine a world without a Bob in it. It somehow seemed impossible.

He pulled himself out of the creek and climbed up the bank. He searched for the compass in his pocket, found it, held it level and let it orient itself. Then he shot an azimuth due west, picked a landmark at its end and started out for it.

The woods, in the increasing light, were quiet, green and oddly lovely. Something about the freshness of the morning dew, the sense of a long and bloody night past and having somehow survived it. Wouldn’t this make a terrific book?

He wondered if he had the strength to write it. Maybe not now, but after a few weeks’ rest. He had an image: he’d take that job on the Fort Smith paper, get a little place and work hard in his off hours on the book. Maybe he could go up to Nashville, to Vanderbilt, and see Sam’s granddaughter Jeannie, who—

Something crushed into Russ, knocking him flat. He thought it was Bob, rescuing him, but the iron strength applied against him, pushing his face into the loam, and the sudden spasm of pain as a knee drove into his kidneys told him no.