Greg Rucka - Walking dead

When Alena brought it down again, she saw that the walls had collapsed along with the roof, and she was looking across the ruins and the flames at an angle, to the front of the house. Through the rippling air she could see two men, the one who'd fired at her last and another, each of them likewise reacting to the destruction of the building.

And they could see her.

She brought the Walther up, moving to her left as she did so, firing on the man nearest to her, the one she'd dogged around the side of the building. She shot him twice, adjusted while still in motion, and fired off another double-tap at the last man standing. Once again she missed, or thought she did, because he returned fire with a submachine gun of his own, and somehow managed to miss her completely.

Then he sagged to his knees, and pitched forward, and she realized that she had succeeded in hitting him after all.

Skirting the ruins of the burning house, she moved to each of the two men in turn, dumping an additional round into their heads. The car they'd arrived in was an Audi sedan, a new one, parked close to the mouth of the road, perhaps ten meters back, most likely to spare it from the fire they'd known they were going to start. She searched each of the men, finding no keys. She emptied each of their wallets of all the bills she could find, stuffing them down the front of her underpants, then ran back to the first man she'd dropped. He had the keys, and more cash, and she took both, as well as the denim jacket he wore and his belt, for good measure.

Miata was unconscious but breathing when she got back to him. With the jacket and the belt, she fashioned a pressure dressing as best as she could around the Doberman, then lifted him and carefully brought him to the Audi. She laid him across the backseat, then climbed behind the wheel and spun the car around, chewing dirt and gravel with the tires, leaving our still-burning home behind.

She headed north, pushing the Audi as fast as she dared given the road, covering the almost fifty kilometers to Poti in thirteen minutes. She couldn't stay in Kobuleti, she knew, and heading south to Batumi had instinctively seemed like a bad idea; I had left bodies in Batumi, and she was certain the men who had come to Kobuleti and what had happened there ten days earlier were connected. Batumi was out.

She needed a doctor or a vet, and she needed one fast, and that left Poti as the only option. So she raced along the coast road, swerving around the sparse early morning traffic and flooring it whenever there was opportunity, all the while talking to Miata, all the while telling him that she would take care of him, the way she had before.

For Alena, the situation had kindled a disturbing sense of deja vu. Miata had become her dog in very similar circumstances, when she had taken money from one man who dealt and packaged large amounts of cocaine to kill another who did the exact same thing. The target in question had guarded his workplace with a variety of booby traps and dogs. The booby traps were one thing, but the dogs had posed a problem entirely of their own. Each had been treated in the same way, abused and beaten, their vocal cords severed. Dogs need their voices, and denying them it can drive them mad, which, of course, was just what the dealer in question had desired.

When Alena had come for his reckoning, she'd had to deal with the dogs first, and most of them she'd been forced to kill. After all had been said and done, only Miata was still alive, though wounded. Then, like now, she had loaded him into a car-a Mazda Miata-and rushed him to a doctor.

It was twenty minutes to seven in the morning when she arrived in Poti, and she lost another ten minutes driving the city's confusing streets, desperately trying to find someone to help her. The first two civilians she saw fled from her when she stopped, and it wasn't until after the second that she realized why, how she must've looked to them, stained with blood and smoke and sweat, in her underwear, the wheezing Doberman across the backseat of the car.

The third time she asked for help, she held out a fistful of the bills she'd taken off the dead men, and that helped overcome fear long enough for her to acquire directions to a veterinarian. By the time she actually reached the doctor's home-slash-office it was three minutes to seven, and Miata's breathing had gone from labored and rapid to shallow and dangerously slow.

She parked the car literally in front of the house, less than a meter from the door, leaning repeatedly and hard on the horn before getting out of the vehicle. The man who emerged from the house was bleary with sleep, silver-haired and stocky.

"My dog's been shot," Alena told him, already opening the back door.

The doctor balked, not unreasonably, given what he was seeing. Alena lifted Miata out of the car, brushed past him, heading inside. There was an examination room just through the door to her left. The man followed her, watched as she lay Miata gingerly on the table.

"Help him," she told the doctor. "Please."

Then she went back outside to the car. She was gone less than thirty seconds, and when she came back, she saw that the vet had unfastened the belt around the makeshift bandage, had begun examining the wound. Then he noticed she'd returned and said, "It's not good. I don't know if I can save him."

"You can."

The vet saw the Walther that Alena had just retrieved from the Audi. Whether it was the sight of the gun, or her tone of voice, or both, or neither, the man hesitated for only a second before setting to work, quickly trying to save the Doberman's life. "I didn't point it at him," Alena hastened to clarify. "I never pointed the gun at him."

I told her that given how she must've looked at the time, she damn well knew that showing the gun to him was more than enough. She shrugged, then continued. For the first couple of minutes while the vet struggled to get Miata stabilized, Alena did nothing but stand there, watching. The adrenaline was dropping away like a wave retreating from the shore, uncovering all the aches and sores it had been concealing, the searing pain from the wounds on her arm and leg. She was afraid to sit down, afraid to leave the room to tend to her own needs, suspicious that the vet would capitalize on her absence.

After several minutes, the vet said, "I have to operate on your dog."

"Go ahead."

"I'll need you to help me."

"Tell me."

The man looked at her. She thought he was in his fifties, perhaps. The gun in her hand made her feel guilty, the lack of clothing made her feel ashamed.

"You have to get clean first," the vet told her. "There's a bathroom in the back, and some clothes in my daughter's room. Wash up, then come back."

She didn't move.

"Did you do this to him?" the vet asked, sharply.

"No." The question confused her at first, and then she remembered the gun again. "No! He was trying to protect me."

"Then you have no reason to fear me." The vet indicated a roll of gauze on one of the nearby tables, a pile of bandages. "Take these, get clean. Hurry."

She did as instructed, using the bathroom first to hastily wash herself off. The bleeding on her arm and leg resumed when she went to clean the wounds, and she bandaged herself as best as she was able. The daughter's room, she thought, hadn't seen use in quite some time, and the clothing she found there seemed to bear that out. She pulled on a pair of pants that were both too short and too wide for her, secured them in place with a beaded belt. She stuck the Walther in her waistband, at the front.

When she returned, the vet was still attending Miata, now delivering plasma to the dog through an IV he'd set up. He acknowledged Alena's return, then told her to come and stand beside him.

"Do what I tell you, when I tell you."