Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

The rifle rose in recoil, having sent a nuclear flash into the air along with its 750 grains of pure mayhem and a sonic boom, then settled, and Mick rotated just a bit, cheek and eye relief still perfect, fired again, producing the same assault upon the senses by flash and bang, sending another hot spent casing flying from the breach, which itself was in the process of ratcheting and clacking in the bolt blowback sequence.

He waited for recovery, rotated back left, and fired at what should have been the colonel. Three shots, in under two seconds. Took a good, trained man to do that on a Barrett.

“Rock and roll!” he shouted, while up front Tony Z was going, “Whooooooaaaaahh, mother fucker !”

Reindexing on the zone of his initial targets-he could see two craters spewing pure illumination where the big slugs had bludgeoned through the aluminum and wallboard-he really put the pedal to the metal. He fired six more times, trying to hold his strikes within the parameters of the first two penetrations, and with each arrival a blast of fragmenting metal and spewing dust and streaks of flaming debris snapped off the wall in supertime.

“Fucking A,” said Crackers-he’d ducked to the floor during the shooting, to save his eardrums and his night vision-“look at that!”

The burst of.50s had literally ripped a slash in the wall next to and a little beneath the building. It looked like the hull of a ship that had caught a torpedo full on, a twisted mass of metal, bent struts, sheaves of tormented wallboard, all in a haze of dust and smoke.

“Ma, we won the war,” said Tony.

Mick pulled the big rifle back into the truck, awkwardly got it into the back space over the edge of the seat, and said, “Okay, punch out. No, punch out slow, no howling. No more than fifty-five. Just drive, son, drive into the dawn.”

“Fuck,” said Crackers. “I didn’t get to see any of the hits.”

“It looked like a fucking movie. Man, did those suckers kick ass.”

“It would have been cooler,” said Mick, connoisseur of destruction, “if we’d had tracers.”

“Oh shit yeah,” said Tony Z. “Man, what a fucking show that would have been.”

“Should we go and check-”

“Yeah, and run into Barney F with his double barrel who happened to be pissing behind the gas station? Punch it.”

They got so far so fast they never even heard any sirens.

DANIELSTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

0306 HOURS

Ray didn’t know his reflexes worked in that science fiction time zone. He was on the ground before the desk, lofted mightily into the air by the first shot, crushed Swagger hard in the head, putting him over backward in his chair. Ray squirmed into the fetal as another big hammer punched through, and hit his own chair-the one he’d just vacated-and sent it spinning crazily through the air as well. Nothing stood against these heavy hitters and he knew without putting it into words that it had to be Ma Barrett and her half-inch, 750-grain progeny, atomizing all that lay in their way.

The next shot hit flesh and it could only be the colonel’s. The sound of bullet on meat is instantly knowable and completely unforgettable to those who’ve heard it: a kind of whap! of vibration being quieted by the density of flesh, a sickening wetness implied under the abruptness of the noise. Either in that second or the next, the back of Ray’s neck felt a shower of warm droplets and mist.

He got his eyes opened for the next six big hits. Whoever was shooting was damned good. He kept the recoil in check and put the six in a neat pattern, almost a group, between the first two holes with but half a second between, and each, hitting the wall, blew it asunder in a cascade of vibration that lifted Ray from the floor and sent shards of supersonic metal spraying into the atmosphere but, following the laws of physics, on a slight upward direction and thus mostly missing him.

Dust jetted everywhere, as did debris of mysterious origin, flaming chips of wallboard, chunks of metal from the struts of the structure, all of it illuminated in the fluorescent light up above: it was an image of a turbulent universe. Would they reload and fire another mag? Would they now rush? He had the Beretta and knew he’d go down hard, taking many along on the trip.

But it stayed quiet, even though his ears rang like alarms. It was through an actual hole in the wall that he spied a flash of motion that told him the shooters had been in a vehicle and had now taken off.

Shakily, he stood, turned to see the colonel against the far wall, the impact of the huge bullet unkind. Metal does things to flesh, as no one knew better than Ray, and he deduced in a second that no first aid was capable of fixing the colonel. He felt a stab of pain: old friend, good guy, sound advice giver, supporter in time of need, really a true believer in the Church of Ray. And for that he’d been taken down hard by assholes on a.50. That goes in the book, he thought. Ray will deal with that when the time is right.

He then turned to the old sniper. Swagger, a dry stick of a man, all ribs and bones and sinewy grace, under a butch-waxed moss of gray, was either dead or unconscious. The edge of the flying desk had opened a bad, deep cut along his cheekbone, and it was oozing blood, though the lack of squirt action suggested no arteries had been cut. It ran down his still cheek, caught in his nostrils, then sluiced to the floor, forming a lake. Ray touched him, felt a heartbeat. Quickly he lifted the desk off the bottom half of the fallen man and dragged him to the wall. Had to get him upright so he wouldn’t drown in his own blood.

Ray peeled off his hoodie, wrapped it around the broken head, and secured it with his Wilderness belt. Maybe that would keep the crotchety old bastard alive until the medics arrived.

Having done what he could do, Ray turned and zipped out into the hallway. Knowing the building well, he got to a rear door, unlocked it, and slipped out, and set out across farm fields and backyards, even as sirens were finally beginning to sound, as firemen and officers tumbled out of bed. Ray knew exactly where he was going; he was far from unprepared.

He’d loaded his equipment in the trunk of a clean, legally purchased, and unstolen Dodge Charger, parked behind the Piggly Wiggly in town. He popped the lock, got in, and quietly started up, turned left and headed out. As far as he could tell, no one had seen a thin, athletic man in jeans and a UCLA T-shirt with a Baltimore Ravens ball cap up top. He disappeared-it’s the sniper gift, after all-into the night.

ROANOKE, VIRGINIA

1730 HOURS

The phone awakened Bogier. It was Tony Z in the next room; he and Crackers were up now, and were going to start drinking. Did Bogier want to come? No, Bogier did not want to come. Had Bogier heard from MacGyver? No, Bogier had not heard from MacGyver. He would wait until he did and then join them.

Bogier lay naked in the dark room, under clean, crisp sheets. His massive, beautiful body was a god’s, though he’d been a week out of the gym and yearned to get back to the discipline and purity of the heavy-iron dead lift. He could tell; the ridges that defined the tectonics of his delts were a little less precise, the knobs that represented his abs a little less jagged, the bulge of his veins a little less prominent. It was, ever so slightly, beginning to soften. He was still doing this shit.

He’d been up for forty-eight straight, the last twelve of it driving mad-assed across the mid south, monitoring radio stations for news on the incident at Danielstown, South Carolina, where it was said a deranged ex-sniper had opened fire on the offices of Norman Chambers, a former marine and some kind of sniper warfare expert, who had been killed in the incident. But no other news was forthcoming.