John Connolly - The Reapers

Curiously, Blake was thinking exactly the same thing about Weis but, unlike him, he was not a man who felt compelled to simmer quietly. He turned to Weis.

“Hey-” he said, and then the passenger-side window exploded beside Weis’s head, the roar of the shotgun almost deafening Blake in his left ear, and suddenly Weis had a head no longer. A warm redness descended on Blake as Weis’s torso toppled toward him, but by then Blake was already below window level, yanking the door handle and tumbling to the ground, his gun in his hand as he fired blindly, his vision clouded by Weis’s blood, knowing that the noise and the fear of a stray round hitting its target might be enough to buy him crucial seconds. He must have been lucky, he realized, for as he blinked the blood away he saw a man in a green and brown camouflage poncho fall to the dirt, but Blake didn’t stop to take in what he had done. All that mattered was to keep moving. If he stopped, he would die. He felt pain in his head and shoulder, and knew that some of the pellets must have hit him, but a combination of Weis and his good fortune in being seated a little farther forward than his late companion had saved him from the worst of the blast.

Shots impacted around him as he ran, and one passed so close to his left cheek that he felt the heat of its passage and thought that he could almost see the bullet as it flew, a spinning mass of gray tearing the air apart. Then the trees were growing thicker around him, and another shotgun blast shredded a branch not far from his head, but he kept moving, veering from left to right and back again as he went, using the trees for cover, giving them no clear shot at him. He heard the sounds of their pursuit, but he did not look back. To do that, he would have to stop, and if he stopped they would have him.

He took a deep breath into his lungs, preparing for a burst of speed that might buy him more vital time, and then his face collided with a hard object, and his nose broke and his teeth shattered, and for a moment he was blinded once again, this time by white light, not blood. He fell backward, but even as he did so his instinct for survival remained sharp, for he held on to the gun as he hit the ground and fired in the direction of the collision. He heard someone grunt, and then a body fell upon him, pinning him to the ground. The white light was fading now, and there was fresh pain in its place. The man was spasming against him, blood pouring from his mouth. Blake pushed him off, twisting his lower body to use both his own weight and the dying man’s to free himself of the burden. He staggered to his feet, still dizzy from the force of the blow that he had received, and the first shot took him in the upper back, spinning him and sending him to the ground again. He tried to raise the gun but his arm wouldn’t support the weight, and he could only lift it a couple of inches. Somehow he found the strength to fire, but the force of the recoil caused him to scream in agony and, involuntarily, he released his grip on the gun. He tried to lean over and reach for it with his left, but another bullet struck him, passing through his left arm and into his chest. He fell back upon the leaves and stared at the trees and the dark skies above.

A man’s head appeared before him, his face obscured by a black ski mask. Two blue eyes blinked curiously at him. Then a third eye appeared, black and without emotion, and this one did not blink, not even as its pupil became a bullet and brought Blake’s pain to an end.

Two bodies had been crammed into the trunk of Louis’s car. The last of the season’s flies had already found them. Abigail Endall had been blasted in the chest. There was a lot of damage, the peppering at the edges of the wound and the shredding of her shirt suggesting the shot had been fired from a short distance away, enough to allow the pellets to spread but not enough to dissipate the force of the blast. Her husband had been killed at close range with a single pistol shot to the head, the gun held so close to his forehead that there were blistering and powder burns around the wound. Abigail’s eyes were half closed, as though she were trapped between waking and sleeping.

“Help me get them out,” said Louis.

He leaned into the trunk, but Angel stopped him with the palm of his hand.

“Shit,” said Louis.

Once again, Angel took the Maglite and the stick and used it to check beneath the bodies as best he could. When he was satisfied that the corpses were not booby-trapped in any way, they first removed Abigail, who was lying on top of her husband, then Philip. The matting beneath the bodies had been pulled back, and a series of hidden clips had been activated in the base of the trunk, releasing the panels in the base and sides. The weapons stored there, and all of their ammunition, were gone. The spare tire had also been slashed, as a further precaution.

Angel looked at Louis, and said: “What now?”

Hara and Harada didn’t make it much farther than Massena, and in that they were both unlucky and lucky: unlucky in the sense that they were now unable to participate any further in Louis’s operation, and unluckier still when a routine search of their vehicle revealed their cache of weapons. The cops declined to give them the benefit of the doubt, and they ended up in a cell in the Massena police department on Main Street while the chief figured out what to do with them, and thus their lives were saved.

Slowly, Angel and Louis approached the barn doors.

“One hundred feet,” said Louis.

“What is?”

“Distance between here and the forest to the east.”

“If they’re waiting for us, they’ll take us as soon as we leave.”

“You want them to take us here instead?”

Angel shook his head.

“You go left, I go right,” said Louis. “You run, and you don’t stop, no matter what. We clear?”

“Yeah, we’re clear.”

Louis nodded. “See you on the other side,” he said.

And they ran.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

– WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ROMEO AND JULIET, III, V

GABRIEL OPENED HIS EYES. For a few moments, he had no awareness of where he was. There were unfamiliar sounds, and he was surrounded by too much white. This was not home: home was reds and purples and blacks, like the interior of a body, a cocoon of blood and muscle and tendon. Now, that protection had been stripped away, leaving his consciousness vulnerable and isolated in this strange sterile environment.

His responses were so sluggish that it took him time to recognize that he was in pain. It was dull, and it seemed to have no single locus, but it was there. His mouth was very dry. He tried to move his tongue, but it was stuck to his palate. Slowly, he formed spittle to release it, then licked his lips. He could not move his head more than an inch to the right or the left, not at first, and, anyway, it hurt him to do so. Instead, he worked on his arms, his hands, his fingers, his toes. As he did so, he tried to remember how he had come to be here. He had almost no recollection of anything that had happened after he had left Louis in the bar.

No, wait, there was something: a stumble, an old man’s fear of falling, then a burning, like hot coals inserted deep into the core of his being. And sounds, faint but still audible, like the popping of distant balloons. Gunshots.

There were stinging sensations in the back of his left hand and in the crook of his right arm. He saw the drip needle in the soft skin on the right, then took in the green plastic connector at the top of the second needle that had been inserted into a vein in the back of his hand. He thought that he might have vague memories of waking before now, of lights shining in his eyes, of nurses and doctors bustling around him. In the interim, he had dreamed, or perhaps it had all been a dream.