Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

Paige made a slight adjustment with her wrist. It took a fourth of a second. She pulled the trigger. The bullet punched into the pack leader's forehead like a finger into stale piecrust, collapsing it inward in big bony shards. His head snapped back but his body continued forward, already dropping, obeying simple laws of physics now instead of whatever was left between his ears.

Four men left. Two of them still plowing forward between the cars.

But not the other two. They were checking their movement. Falling back. Turning their attention on Finn now, defensive. They understood the danger he was in-probably better than he understood it himself.

Finn was still in her field of fire. Still a target.

But there were still threats. Immediate threats.

Paige retargeted from the falling corpse of the first man to the second, five feet behind him. She fired again. Caught him right in front of the ear. The entry wound was small, but in the firelight she saw what had to be the full contents of his head come out the back in a ragged cloud.

Then things began to change very quickly.

The two men closest to Finn got ahold of him. Dragged him down and away. Paige saw their heads whip around, their eyes tracking over their surroundings, looking for the best route to safety-to distance and cover.

At the same time, the third man between the cars was dropping. Dropping faster than the corpses of his friends. Getting down out of her line of fire. He hadn't reached the compact car yet. He was still passing the lowrider. The chasm between it and the next vehicle was shallow, but as Paige lowered the SIG to follow him into it, the compact car's roof slid up into her gunsights, blocking the angle.

She fired anyway. Three shots, as fast as she could pull the trigger. She saw them hit the car's roof, punching through but deflecting wildly as they did. Past the roof's edges she saw the man still coming on, unhindered.

She also saw that she was out of time to try again.

She threw her body sideways in the same quarter second that his return fire cut open the darkness. The windows of the compact car imploded. Paige hit the ground, landing near Bethany again. She hit harder than she wanted to. She'd been forced to put speed before control when she threw herself out of the way, but that was going to cost her now.

Because she wasn't going to get up in time. Wasn't even going to roll herself over into a firing position in time. That would take her a good second and a half, and by then the man would be rounding the back end of the car.

She saw it all play out like a nightmare. Still not slowed down. Just clear. Agonizingly clear. She managed to turn her head, her eyes going all the way to their corners.

The gunman was already there. Clearing the car's rear window and then its trunk. Shouldering the machine gun for the easy kill.

And then his head came apart.

It happened so suddenly that Paige almost missed the muzzle burst from the twelve-gauge, in the darkness behind the car's bumper.

A second later Travis was on his feet, racking another shell into the shotgun's chamber, raising it and sweeping it through an arc above the car. Looking for Finn.

But Finn was long gone. Paige could see it in Travis's eyes.

She became aware of screaming voices-realized she'd been hearing them for seconds already, but hadn't focused on them. They hadn't been part of the simple picture.

She saw Travis turn his eyes to the side of the van, and she realized what the screaming was. The men in the fire. Still alive. Travis swung the Remington their way and emptied its remaining shells into them, its broad pattern allowing for five kills with four shots-two or three shots could've almost done the job.

The screaming stopped.

Travis slung the shotgun. He turned, held out his hands to Paige and Bethany, helped them up.

Paige stared around at the aftermath. The bodies in the flames. The bodies alongside the lowrider. The empty space where Finn and the other two had been.

She looked at the fire trail. No more than fifteen seconds had passed since Travis had lit it, but already it extended hundreds of yards. Paige could see its far end still racing toward its conclusion: the place where the three of them had first begun dumping fuel containers in a thick line between the cars.

Already the flames were spreading away from the original trail. The cars flanking it were becoming engulfed. They were well primed to burn. Engines and tanks and fuel lines caked with long-hardened gas and oil sludge. Interiors of parched foam and cloth.

And then there was the desert floor itself. A thick carpet of crumbled tire rubber, dried and seasoned by seven decades of sun. The blaze was expanding outward through it, mostly north from the fire line in the direction of the breeze, moving at maybe a fourth the speed a person could walk.

But that was deceptive, Paige knew. The fire was going to spread a lot faster than that, once it got going. She could already see the mechanism that would drive it. From the empty window frames of the compact car, burning scraps of upholstery were being channeled up into the night, riding high on thermals and wind, touching down again hundreds of feet to the north. A single glance along the line of burning vehicles showed her the same thing happening everywhere, as windows buckled in the intense heat.

Travis scanned the darkness to the north one last time, cupping his eyes against the glare of the flames.

No sign of Finn or his men.

The crumb-scattered ground around the compact car was beginning to ignite. It was time to get moving.

The three of them shared a look, and a few seconds later they were running south, with the growing fire to light their way.

The plan had been meant to have a much simpler execution. Certainly the idea had been straightforward enough: create a long line of flame south of town and let the wind carry it north, hopefully with enough speed to disrupt Finn's makeshift base of operations-especially the camera mast.

A very long fire trail had been necessary for two reasons. First, to maximize the chances of setting the entire city ablaze, and second, to give the three of them a broad curtain of heat behind which to hide, once Finn's people came after them.

That was how Travis had imagined it, anyway, even assuming Finn and his men were already moving toward them. Had the wall of flame gone up when the pursuers were still a quarter mile north, they'd have spotted the ignition source immediately and sprinted toward it to make the kill. Someone back at the camera mast would've guided them over their radios-would've tried to, anyway. But the sheet of flame would've made that impossible. The cameras couldn't have seen a thing to the south of it.

The three of them could've simply run like hell for any random place south of the fire line, then dug in and waited for the fire to consume the town. After that they'd be free to make their escape.

It probably would've worked well enough.

But Travis was much happier with how it'd actually played out.

Finn was down eight men, while their own casualties amounted to a sore spot on Travis's back where he'd landed on the Remington. All told, the face-off had shaken out pretty well in their favor.

They still picked out a spot south of the fire line to dig in, two hundred yards down from where the shooting had happened. They reached it, then turned and stared north at the flames.

"Jesus," Travis said.

The height of the blaze surprised him the most. A minute earlier, when they'd been right next to it, it'd just cleared the tops of the tallest vehicles.

It was twice that height now.

From this angle they could see the entire line, extending three miles to the east. The whole length was burning. Every vehicle that immediately bordered it had thick tongues of flame seething from its windows.