John Connolly - The Reapers

IT WAS ANGEL WHO spotted Benton first. He was still some distance from them when Angel caught sight of his head appearing over the brow of a hill. He tapped Louis in warning, and together they turned to face the threat.

It was clear that the man was badly injured. He was shambling rather than walking, and he seemed to be drifting slightly to the left and then, realizing what he was doing, correcting himself. His head was low, and he held a rifle in his right hand. As he drew nearer, they could see the damage to his face and body caused by the fire, and they knew from whence he had come.

“Someone survived the explosion,” said Angel. “He’s hurt bad, though.”

“He has a gun,” said Louis.

“Doesn’t look like it’s going to be much good to him.”

Louis raised his own gun and sighted along it as he moved toward the wounded man.

“No,” he said, “I guess not.”

Benton became aware that the men he was pursuing had stopped. It was time, so he stopped in turn, knowing that he would never go any farther, not here and not in this life. The landscape wavered, and the two men in the distance became blurred and misshapen. He tried to lift the rifle, but his arms would not respond. He tried to speak, but no words would come from his scorched throat. All was pain; pain, and the desire to avenge himself upon those who had caused it. His injuries had reduced him to the level of an animal. Disjointed memories of unconnected things appeared in his mind only to disappear before he was able to identify and understand them: a woman who might have been his mother; another who could have been a lover; a man dying in the rain, the blood like colors running in a painting…

The rifle was still in his hand. He knew that much. He concentrated hard, trying to focus on it. He managed to get the index finger of his right hand on the trigger, his left still gripping the stock. He pulled the trigger, firing uselessly into the ground. A tear fell from his eye. One of the figures was drawing nearer. He had to kill them, but now he couldn’t remember why. He couldn’t remember anything. All was lost to him.

His brain, understanding the imminence of its own oblivion, fired itself up for a final effort, and Benton’s consciousness blazed for the last time, clearing his head of pain and anger and loss, allowing him to focus only on the man who was approaching. He raised his left arm, and it was steady. His vision cleared, and he sighted on the tall black figure. His finger tightened again on the trigger, and as he prepared to release his breath, he knew that everything was going to be fine after all.

The load was a 250-grain MatchKing bullet, which would have meant nothing to Benton even if it hadn’t been the bullet that tore through the side of his head, entering just behind and beneath his remaining eye and exiting through his right ear, taking most of his skull with it.

From where he lay on the damp grass, Bliss watched as the target folded to the ground. He shifted position slightly, taking his eye from the sight so he could find the others. They were already running, ascending a slight rise and making for a copse of trees to the east. Even with the XL, they would soon be out of range. He intended to finish off Louis face-to-face, for he wanted him to know who was responsible for taking his life, but the other one, his partner, didn’t matter. Bliss sighted slightly ahead of the smaller man, anticipating where the angle of his movement would take him, then breathed out slowly and squeezed the trigger.

“Shit!” said Angel, as his foot caught on a cleft in the ground and sent him stumbling forward and to his left. Louis was beside him, and paused momentarily, but Angel didn’t fall. A spray of grass and dirt erupted from the ground slightly forward and to the right of where Angel now stood, even as he regained his balance and they continued running, their eyes now fixed only on the safety offered by the woods. Angel heard another shot, but the ground was sloping down and suddenly there were trees around him and he threw himself to the dirt and sheltered behind the nearest trunk. He huddled against it, his knees drawn into his chest, his mouth open as he gasped in air.

Angel looked to his left, but Louis wasn’t there.

“Hey,” he shouted. “You okay?”

There was no reply.

“Hey,” he called again, frightened now. “Louis?”

But there was only silence. Angel didn’t move. He had to find out where Louis was, but to do that would mean peering out from behind the tree, and if the shooter knew where he was, and was sighted on the tree, then he would end up dead. But he had to know what, if anything, had befallen his partner. He flattened himself as close to the ground as he could without exposing his legs to sight, began counting to three in his head, then at two decided to hell with it and risked a quick glance around the base of the tree.

Two things happened. The first was that he saw Louis lying on his side just beneath the lip of the small rise that descended toward the wood. He wasn’t moving. The second thing that happened was a bullet striking the tree trunk and sending splinters into Angel’s cheek, forcing him to retract his head quickly before another shot cured him of concerns about Louis, and splinters, and anything else in this life.

He was unarmed, the man who mattered most to him in the world was lying injured or dead and he couldn’t reach him, and someone had him under his gun. Angel had a pretty good idea who that person was: Bliss. For the first time in many years, Angel began to despair.

It had been a lucky shot, but Bliss was not averse to taking such chances when they were offered. The natural movement of his weapon, combined with Louis’s own momentum, had brought him into Bliss’s sight, and he had taken the shot. He had seen the tall black figure’s legs intertwine and had watched him fall, but then had lost him to view because of the incline of the land. He couldn’t be sure where the shot had hit. He suspected it was the upper back, right side, away from the heart. Louis would be wounded, perhaps mortally, but he would not yet be dead.

He had to be sure. He had made two promises to Leehagen. The first was that Louis would die on his land, that his blood would soak into the old man’s soil. The second was that he would bring him Louis’s head as a trophy. The second promise had been made reluctantly. It smacked of excess to Bliss. It was curious that Hoyle had asked him to do the same with Kandic, the man who had been sent to kill him and whose eventual dispatch had been Bliss’s first job after coming out of retirement. Decapitating him hadn’t bothered Bliss particularly, although it was harder, and messier, than anticipated, and he had no desire to make a habit of it. He also recognized that a personal element had crept into all of his kills: he was now the mirror image of the man he had once been, no longer distant from those he dispatched. In one way, it added an edge to all that he did, even as it made him more vulnerable in another. The best killers were passionless, just as he himself had once been. Anything else was weakness.

But Bliss also realized that he was creating his own mythology. Kandic, Billy Boy, and now Louis-they would be his legacy. He was Bliss, the killer of killers, the most lethal of his kind. He would be remembered after he was gone. There would never be another like him.

But it was time to be done with the task at hand. Louis had been armed. Bliss had glimpsed the gun in his hands. He did not know about the other, the one called Angel, but he had seen no weapon. Bliss suspected that the smaller man would be reluctant to move for fear of taking a bullet. If he acted quickly, Bliss could cover much of the ground between them, shift position to give him a better shot at Angel, and then finish off Louis.