Jonathon King - Acts of Nature

"But what you don't realize, sir," Buck continued, "is that there is a still a cop and his partner inside that there storage bin of yours. Now I'm sure you don't want him or her surviving to let on about your stash of cocaine or pot or meth or whatever the hell it is you got in there. And considering we're two armed against them unarmed, maybe we could come to some kind of a share and share alike understanding?"

The man in the jacket still said nothing. Maybe he was pondering the offer. Maybe there was some hope to the situation. Then the man nodded his head as though he'd come to a decision.

"There's nothing Mexican about this standoff, my friend," Harmon said, his voice tired but succinct. "It's just humans being humans." Then he pulled the trigger and the powerful, small-patterned shotgun blast ripped Buck Morris's leg off just above the knee. Harmon wished he was home. He wanted to be sitting in his protected den, reading his books, enjoying the quiet air- conditioning provided by his generator and sipping a cool drink and mildly gloating over how he had beaten nature this time. Instead he was in the middle of a bloodbath.

Harmon did not trust nature and this was exactly why. The whole way out here he'd looked down to see homes and cars and buildings and roadways all skewed off balance. At two thousand feet you couldn't see the details but everything in the wake of the hurricane looked different, the colors gone dirty, the normal flow of things stopped cold. At first it had almost seemed a relief when the landscape turned watery and open; then they'd found the cabin they were looking for and even in its own backyard nature couldn't be trusted.

As the pilot hovered and Harmon had waited for Squires to touch down on the deck, he had chuckled a bit at his partner's instant reaction to pull his weapon and sight the corners like they were going into Beirut again. But Harmon also noted the odd damage at the roofline of the simple shack: some missing tin panels and splintered wood that looked more like damage from a hungry animal than from the wide slap of a wind gust or falling limb. He was nervous when he slid down the fast rope and landed on the balls of his feet. When they'd unhooked, Harmon had given the pilot the high sign and then bent and pulled the electronic lock switch from his bag.

"OK, partner. Let's check out the inside of Crandall's mystery hole and then get the hell back out of here," Harmon said. They started for the south side of the building and the instant he punched the button on the switch an unholy scream seemed to fill the air and Harmon looked stupidly down at the button like he'd done something wrong and could turn it back off.

Suddenly they were confronted by the sight of a young man, his face in agony, coming around the corner at them with an outstretched arm like he was offering them a bloodied portion of the devil himself. All manner of their mercenary past boiled up in Harmon's memory and he could only think now in retrospect that Squires must have relaxed his weapon when he realized the bloodied kid was unarmed because they were both staring at the boy and wincing at the pitch of his wailing when another voice erupted behind them.

This time Squires tensed and swung, his gun at the ready, and when he saw a second young man come running around the west corner with a shotgun, the big man fired two quick rounds, dropping the assailant in his tracks. Harmon watched as the boy pitched forward and, almost without thought, he stuck out his foot and stopped the shotgun as it slid across the wooden deck by stepping on its barrel. For a moment there was silence, the crack of Squires's pistol sucked out into the humid air around them. The only reason Harmon was not stupefied by the series of events was that he had never been stupefied by the actions of his friend or those of people in bad places and he now realized that's exactly where they were: in a bad place. Just as automatically as he had pinned the sliding shotgun, he crouched and searched the immediate area. He and Squires were not unfamiliar with flanking military procedure. So when his friend turned at an angle and shouted: "Don't move, asshole!" with his gun still raised but pointed down toward the water, Harmon was not surprised that another unfriendly was in sight. He looked past the big man's legs at a bearded, scruffy-looking guy whose arms were now raised in surrender and without taking his eyes off the threat of the big handgun in the new player's lifted hand, Harmon reached down for the shotgun.

It was when he felt for the wooden stock of the gun that his fingers touched an uneven surface of warm goop and when he shifted eyes to his feet he realized he was touching the back of a bloodied hand, the digits cleaved off like a rack of short ribs, the white stumps of bone glowing through the red syrup and the intact thumb still twitching as it tried to grip the shotgun stock.

"Jesus," he heard himself say. And the gunfire began again. I was inside the cocoon of the closed room but there was no mistaking the sound of gunfire outside. I heard Marcus's screams and already knew I was responsible. The image of those severed fingers on the floor will be in my dreams. But then came some indecipherable yelling and two quick reports. A medium-caliber handgun, I thought. Not Buck's big.45. And then I felt more than heard something or someone tumble onto the deck just on the other side of the wall and the sound of something metal skittering across the boards. I was standing, the generator inside was humming, the air conditioning clacked on, the computer indicator lights started popping on, glowing red and green. I took a step toward the window that showed damage from Buck and his crew's attempts last night to get in but then flinched at the sound of another shot. This time it was the.45 and it repeated itself twice more and there was another thud that vibrated the floorboards. I crouched down in exasperation. There was carnage of some form going on ten feet away from me that I couldn't see, could only hear, but I knew instinctively that its outcome was going to determine my fate and Sherry's.

Again there was silence and I was afraid to move but then I remembered the open hatch in the corner and sneaked to it, my ear to its edge, hoping to hear, to get some clue what the hell was happening outside. Taking a chance, I moved my head into the opening, but the sunlight outside was still so new that very little penetrated under the raised decking and I could see little more than a black shimmer on the top of the water. When I strained, I heard nothing but a high-pitched keening like an animal in deep pain.

"Max?"

Sherry was trying to get up. She had somehow risen to a sitting position on the bed but her leg was locked straight and I needed to move to her, but hesitated. She tried to swing her damaged leg over the side and was just about to fall so I made a decision. I flipped the metal port closed with a clang and rushed to her side, catching her before she tumbled to the floor.

"Was that music that I heard, Max?" she said in a delirious whisper. "Are we home, Max?" While the skinny peckerwood with the missing leg writhed around on the deck, Harmon let go of the boy and stepped over to kick the big.45 over the edge and into the swamp. He then looked down at the man who now had his stump of a knee in both hands and was kind of spinning on one hip like one of those break dancers on TV, though they didn't leave a smear of blood behind when they did it. He stepped over to his partner, who appeared to have lost part of the side of his head. Harmon had seen dead men before and you didn't have to take a goddamn pulse to tell. He did not mean to be callous. He and Squires had been through a lot together. But after what had been nearly a lifetime of war and violence, Harmon's nature was to care only about family. Squires was not family. He picked up the big man's Mk23, checked the load, and then realized, hell, he hadn't even taken his own Colt out of his pocket yet. He took two more steps and looked down at the kid who had come sliding around the corner yelling, "Marrcussss!" until Squires shot him. The kid's skin was already going pale. Chest wounds will do that. Harmon shook his head. Neither of these boys was older than his kids, sitting in their dorm rooms at Notre Dame, probably having a party while the campus got it together to enjoy the weekend.