Greg Rucka - Patriot acts

"Who?" I asked her. I could hear the ocean noise beginning to rise in my ears once more, feel the edges of my vision starting to contract.

She pointed with the hand that wasn't holding her cane, and I saw the body of a man, perhaps forty, maybe fifty feet away, lying facedown, beside one of the trees that framed the narrow yard. He was white, his hair shorn close to the scalp. He wore the same gear that the others in the front wore, but instead of an MP5, he'd been carrying a rifle.

"Vadim killed him," Alena told me.

There were another two bodies, these closer, off to the right. One of them was missing most of his throat. The other had been shot multiple times in the head and neck.

I shook my head, and the world didn't stop spinning when I was finished doing it.

"No," I said, and it was getting harder to make the words. "Who did this? Who made this happen?"

"I don't know."

"I'm going to kill whoever did this." I think I told it to Natalie. I might have been saying it to Alena.

"I know."

I could hardly hear her over the sound of waves filling my ears. I forced myself to look away from the body of my friend.

"I'm going to kill whoever did this," I repeated.

Alena nodded, blurring in my sight. Her mouth moved, and I saw Dan step into my dwindling periphery, then start forward, one hand shooting out to catch me before I fell. Vadim tightened his grip on my arm, but it wasn't enough, and the last thing I saw before I couldn't see more was the face of Natalie Trent, of my last friend, beautiful as she had ever been, as she slept forever on a blanket of leaves in the New England fall.

I woke up twice before the flight.

The first time, I was lying on my back on something cold and hard, and I could smell garlic and onions and frying meat. When I opened my eyes, I saw two large colanders and a stockpot and what looked like a twelve-inch skillet hanging above me from various hooks. Between a tarnished copper saucier and a pasta steamer hung a bag of Ringer's solution, and the line from the bag seemed to be running down and into my arm. Dan and Vadim were on one side of me, and there was a woman I'd never seen before on the other, and her nose looked like someone had trapped it in a vise and forgotten to ever release it. Dan still had powder burns on his face, but the blood spatter was gone.

There were voices all around me, some very soft, all of them speaking Russian, and the woman with the fascinating nose was wearing surgical gloves, and the gloves were stained with blood. It took me a moment to recognize that it was likely my blood that stained them, that she was probably working on me as I watched, and that explained the extraordinary amount of pain I was feeling.

"Please tell me I'm not getting surgery in a kitchen," I said.

Dan and Vadim and the woman all looked down at me in surprise.

Then the woman looked at Dan and began shrieking at him, clearly berating him, and Dan shouted back at her, and Vadim reached for something out of my sight. I felt a needle breaking through my skin, felt something warm and heavy filling my veins, and I fell gratefully back into darkness. The second time I awoke, I was in a bed, in a room, in the dark. Light filtered in from the street through windows somewhere behind me, but it was weak, street lighting, and I thought it must be late in the night. The sound of music thumped up through the floor and then through the bed from someplace beneath me, a bass line more felt than heard, and behind that, barely audible, I could make out the susurration of traffic running along streets that sounded slicked and puddled with rain.

The bed was a big one, maybe a king, and I was beneath the covers, and my clothes were gone. Alena lay beside me, sleeping above the sheets, and she had her clothes on, but had removed her boots. A pistol rested on the nightstand nearest her, along with a cell phone, and I tried reading the time on its display, but couldn't focus my eyes, couldn't manage to make things stop looking so blurry. It took me another few seconds to realize that was because someone had removed my contact lenses.

I wondered where I was going to get a new set of glasses.

Paws came scratching across the hardwood floor, Miata making his way to me, and I felt his breath against the back of my hand. I raised my arm and stroked his neck for a few seconds, and then he pulled away, and I listened to the sound of him settling once more on the floor nearby. I shifted experimentally in the bed, trying to reposition myself, and the pain that erupted from my right side, from my gut down through my knee, made me gasp, and filled my eyes with water.

Beside me, Alena made a noise in her sleep, perhaps responding to me, but more likely experiencing, once again, the nightmares that were her youth.

The pain lasted for several seconds before it drifted away reluctantly, and it must have been a minute or more before I was willing to try moving again. This time, I limited myself to moving only my right leg, and the pain returned as intense and hateful as before. Maybe because I'd known it was coming, I managed to remain silent.

The hurt retreated, taking its time to do it. When I finally closed my eyes again, I saw Natalie's body, lying in the leaves.

I stared at her until sleep took me back where I belonged. The plane was a Gulfstream V, and it was waiting on a piece-of-shit runway in Montauk, on the ass-end of Long Island, and I didn't get a good look at it from the outside, because Dan and Vadim had to carry me on a stretcher into the plane. Once inside, I had a great view of the ceiling, which was painted a robin's egg blue. It seemed an oddly cheerful choice, and I supposed whoever designed these kinds of things had gone with the color to conjure a greater sense of flying free in the wild blue yonder.

The pilot stood at the door of the cockpit as I was loaded inside, a long stick of a man with a two-day growth of gray and black beard on his face, wearing a suit with a wide array of wrinkles. Our eyes met as I was carried past him, and the boredom he showed me was so absolute I wondered if he wasn't loaded up with painkillers the same way I was.

They carried me almost the whole length of the plane, then settled me on a leather-covered bench near the galley. As soon as I was down and safe, Vadim slipped past his father, heading back the way he came. Dan looked down at me with a frown for a moment, then sighed and sat down on the bench opposite me.

"I want to sit up," I told him.

"Atticus," Dan said. "You really don't."

I rolled my head to the side to look at him. He looked tired, and I imagined he hadn't grabbed much sleep since everything had gone to hell at the safe house, however long ago that had been. I didn't know. My sense of where I stood in the passage of time had been almost entirely destroyed. It wasn't the first time I'd experienced the sensation, and each time it happened to me, I liked it less and less.

"Help me sit up," I told him.

Dan sighed heavily, but moved to assist me. If he did it because he was still afraid of me, I couldn't imagine why. The condition I was in, I couldn't have convincingly threatened a wet paper towel.

It took effort, and more help than I had hoped I would need, but together we got me propped into a nearly upright position, with my back to the galley wall, and a view of the length of the plane. I swore a couple of times while we did it.

"Don't swear," Alena said, limping down the aisle, Miata following at her heels. She had a duffel bag, gray canvas, over her shoulder, and it must have made moving with the cane difficult, but she gave no sign of it. "You can't breathe properly if you're swearing, and why the hell is he sitting up?"

The last was directed at Dan, and for a moment, I thought he would actually throw up his hands in exasperation. "He tells me he wants to sit!"