Greg Rucka: Patriot acts

Grant grunted and went down and out of sight as if someone had dropped a bag of bricks on his head, and I went after him immediately, trying to capitalize on the moment and the brief advantage it gave me. Mark was screaming a warning to him, and there was another rapid string of barks from his AR-15, but I was vaulting the Ford's hood then, the Glock in my right, and I didn't dare look back and I wasn't about to stop. I cleared the gap between the Ford and the passenger door, saw Grant on the ground, and somehow he'd managed to keep hold of his MP5, and somehow he managed to raise the muzzle in time, and somehow he managed to pull the trigger.

He'd set his MP5 to three-round burst, so that was what he fired, and that was what hit me. Rounds slammed into my chest, the sensation like being struck with a club very hard and very fast. I landed on my feet, but for some reason ended up on my right side, practically parallel to where Grant lay on his back, the MP5 still in his hands. Each of us moved to kill the other.

I was faster, and put two rounds from the Glock into his head.

Then I dropped my pistol, took his MP5, popped the magazine, and gave it a read. Eighteen rounds remaining. I slapped it back into place, ran the bolt, and then rolled onto my back, and when I did that, it felt like something tore open in my middle, low in the belly, ripping me apart with a line of acid and fire. I threw a hand out towards the Ford, reaching into the open compartment. Using the seat, I pulled myself upright with one hand, clutching the MP5 with the other, and the pain flipped, exploded, and everything from my right hip on down told me that I should, under no account, ever try moving like that ever again.

There was a tremendous amount of blood all over the ground beneath me, or so it seemed to me. Already, it had soaked my jeans. Some of it was certainly Grant's.

Just not much of it.

There were two marks in my vest, where rounds had hit and died against the Kevlar. The highest was in the upper right quadrant of my abdomen, the other roughly middle, about where my navel was. The blood I was spilling was coming from further below. With my free hand, I reached around to the small of my back, beneath the vest, and discovered a hole in my body that couldn't have been much larger than an apple. Maybe a Fuji. Maybe a Braeburn. When I brought my hand back around, it shone black in the night, covered with more of my blood.

I wasn't hearing Mark or his AR-15. There was a good chance he didn't know I'd been hit, that all he knew was that there'd been a quick exchange of shots, and now there was silence. But he wasn't calling out, either, wasn't asking Grant for his status, which meant that he figured either I'd killed Grant and was still alive and kicking, or that Grant and I had killed each other. Certainly, if Grant had killed me, Grant would have announced the fact the same way he'd announced everything else that he'd witnessed.

I was getting cold, and it wasn't just the night.

When Alena had begun teaching me, she'd done so, first and foremost, by showing me her training regimen. "Showing," in this instance, had meant making me do it with her, and the first month of the process had been a living hell, had very well nearly killed me. It wasn't just the diet and the exercise, it had been the choice of exercises. Between the swimming and the running and the combat practice, she'd thrown in ballet and yoga. Everything she did, everything she'd taught me, had been about one thing: control of the body, how to make it do what you wanted it to do, the way you wanted it done, when you wanted to do it.

Breathing had been one of the very first lessons. How to breathe properly.

I took a breath, forced myself to do it right, to bring it in deep to the lungs, to let it out slowly. I took a second one, then a third, and then, when I felt I wouldn't have to scream when I moved, I shifted myself away from the side of the Ford, turning as best as I could to face the front of the vehicle. When I moved, it felt like I was literally ripping myself in two directions, as if everything below my pelvis was grinding itself to paste, and an ocean roar grew suddenly in my ears, and the night all around me turned white.

Then the night came flooding back, and I knew I had blacked out, that I'd lost seconds, hopefully only a handful. I'd pitched forward, almost doubling over, and I'd dropped the MP5 in my lap. That had been lucky, and it had probably saved my life, because if Mark had heard it hitting the pavement, he'd have forgotten about coming slow and careful. I got my breathing under control, took hold of the MP5, and forced myself to sit upright again.

Grant's body lay to my side, his eyes open and unmoving. Through the open front doors of the Ford, I could see his partner, the one he'd called Sean, flat on his back. His eyes were closed. He had a boyish face, clean-shaven. The watch cap had come off when he'd fallen, and the hair on his head was cropped close, either brown or black. I couldn't see where I'd hit him, but the blood that had spilled from beneath his body made me think wherever it had been, it had been high in the torso, maybe even the neck. I couldn't tell if he was breathing or not.

The blood slicking my hands made controlling the MP5 hard, and I fumbled with the burst selector, trying to get it off three-round and onto full-auto. Then I listened for Mark and his AR-15 to approach. I hoped it wouldn't take long. The way I was bleeding, long was something I didn't think I could experience for much longer.

Something scraped the pavement, a faint sound, and it could have been nothing more than a leaf blowing across the lot. I raised the MP5 to roughly even with my head, supporting the barrel with my left, keeping my right on the trigger, pointing the muzzle downwards, towards the ground at an angle. It was counterintuitive, and it was risky, but it was the only way to turn a direct-fire weapon like the MP5 into an indirect-fire one, and indirect fire was the only way I could see out of this.

Firing like this-skip-firing-relied on the inherent strangeness of ballistics. Bullets don't behave like billiard balls. Despite what movies and television portray, they don't ricochet at perfect angles. This is why soldiers and cops don't press themselves against walls for cover; if the angle is right and the surface hard enough, the bullet won't bounce away, but rather will ride along the plane, sometimes as high as an inch or an inch and a half above its point of impact. If you're leaning against the wall the round is riding when that happens, you can end up with a very nasty, very lethal surprise.

I didn't like doing it, and I didn't have terrific faith that it would work, but I didn't see any other choice. I was bleeding badly, I knew it, maybe even bleeding out. I had an MP5 with eighteen rounds versus an AR-15 with quite possibly a reloaded magazine. Even if I had been able to stand for a straight-on fight, I was pretty certain I'd lose.

C'mon, I thought. C'mon, come and get me, you bastard.

It was what he had to do. His night, like mine, had become a total clusterfuck, and now he had to end it, one way or another. From the setup for the ambush, it was clear they hadn't expected that I would make them. But I had, and now Mark was down two buddies and all alone, and the last he'd heard had been Grant's shots and mine, and now he didn't know what was what. Like me, he was running out of moves and out of time. He could either climb back into his Cherokee and bolt, or he could approach the Ford and finish the job. And since I hadn't heard the Cherokee starting up again, it was going to be the latter.

Distantly, somewhere ahead and in front, I heard the clack of a magazine being fitted into place, a bolt being slid back. He'd made his decision; he was coming to finish me, reloaded and ready. Probably swinging around behind the rear end of the Civic, using it for cover.