Десмонд Бэгли - Running Blind

I distinctly heard the impact of the first bullet in Kennikin’s back. His hand tightened convulsively around his gun and it exploded in my face, the bullet burying itself in the arm of the chair next to my elbow. By then I was moving. I dived for Slade head first and rammed him in the paunch. My skull was harder than his belly and the breath came out of him in a great whoosh and he folded up and lay gasping on the floor.

I rolled over, aware that Elin was still shooting and that bullets were still whanging across the room. ‘Stop!’ I yelled.

I scooped up Slade’s popgun and came up under Elin’s elbow, grabbing her by the wrist. ‘For Christ’s sake, stop!’

I think she had shot off the whole magazine. The opposite wall was pock-marked and Kennikin lay in front of the chair in which I had been sitting. He lay face upwards gazing sightlessly at the ceiling. Elin had hit him twice more which was hardly surprising, considering she had been shooting at a range of less than six feet. Come to think of it, I was fortunate she hadn’t put a bullet into me. There was a ragged red spot dead centre in Kennikin’s forehead to prove he’d had the vitality to turn around and try to shoot back. Another bullet had caught him in the angle of the jaw and had blown off the bottom half of his face.

He was very dead.

I didn’t stop to ruminate about how in the midst of life we are in death. I dragged Elin behind me and headed for the door. The boys outside might be prepared for the odd shot, especially after Slade’s little demonstration, but the barrage Elin had laid down would be a matter for urgent investigation and that had to be discouraged.

At the door I let go of Elin’s wrist with my left hand and swapped it for the gun I held in my wounded right hand. With a hole through the palm I couldn’t possibly use a gun in that hand, even one with as little recoil as Slade’s gimmicked weapon. I’m a lousy pistol shot at the best of times and even worse when shooting left-handed; but one of the nice things about gun battles is that the man you’re shooting at doesn’t ask you for a proficiency certificate before he decides to duck.

I glanced at Elin. She was obviously in a state of shock. No one can shoot a man to death without undergoing an emotional upheaval — especially for the first time, especially when a civilian, especially when a woman. I put a snap in my voice. ‘You’ll do exactly as I say without question. You’ll follow me and you’ll run like hell without any hesitation.’

She choked back a rasping sob and nodded breathlessly, so I went out of the front door, and I went out shooting. Even as we went someone took a crack at us from the inside of the house and a bullet clipped the architrave by my ear. But I had no time to worry about that because the pair who had been sent to search the Chevrolet were heading right at me.

I shot at them and kept on squeezing the trigger and they vanished from view, diving right and left, and we belted between them. There was a tinkle of glass as somebody decided it was quicker to smash a window than to open it, and then the bullets came after us. I dropped Slade’s gun and again grasped Elin by the wrist and forced her to follow me in a zigzag. Behind I could hear the heavy thud of boots as someone chased us.

Then Elin was hit. The bullet pushed her forward into a stumble but, as her knees gave in, I managed to put my arm around her to hold her up. We were then ten yards from the edge of the lava flow where I had hidden the rifle, and how we managed to travel that short distance I still don’t know. Elin could still use her legs and that helped, and we scrambled up towards the top of the flow, over the mossy humps, until I stooped and laid my hands on the butt of Fleet’s rifle.

I was jacking a round into the breech even before I got it clear of the moss. Elin fell to the ground as I swung around holding the rifle in my left hand. Even with a hole in the palm of my right hand I could still pull the trigger, and I did so to some effect.

The magazine contained the mixed load I had carefully put into it — steel-jacketed and soft-nosed bullets. The first one that came out was jacketed; it hit the leading pursuer in the chest and went through him as though he wasn’t there. He came on for four more paces before his heart realized it had a hole in it and it was time to quit beating, then he dropped on the spot, nearly at my feet, with a surprised look on his face.

By that time I had shot the man just behind him, and that was spectacular. A man hit by a big, soft-nosed bullet driven by a magnum charge at a range of twenty yards isn’t as much killed as disintegrated, and this character came apart at the seams. The bullet hit him in the sternum and then started to expand, lifted him clear off the ground and throwing him back four feet before lifting his spine out and splattering it over the landscape.

Everything was suddenly quiet. The deep-throated bellow of Fleet’s gun had told everyone concerned that something new had been added to the game and they held their fire while they figured what was going on. I saw Slade by the door of the house, his hand clutched to his belly. I lifted the rifle again and took a shot at him, too quickly and with shaking hands. I missed him but gave him a hell of a fright because he ducked back in haste and there was no one to be seen.

Then a bullet nearly parted my hair and from the sound of the report I knew someone in the house also had a rifle. I got down off the skyline and reached for Elin. She was lying on the moss, her face screwed up with pain and trying to control her laboured breathing. Her hand was at her side and, when she withdrew it, it was red with blood.

I said. ‘Does it hurt much?’

‘When I breathe,’ she said with a gasp. ‘Only then.’

That was a bad sign, yet from the apparent position of the wound she had not been hit in the lung. There wasn’t anything I could do there and then. For the next few minutes I’d be busy making sure we stayed alive for the next few minutes. There’s not much point in worrying about dying of septicaemia in the next week when you might have your head blown off in the next thirty seconds.

I scrabbled for the box of ammunition, took the magazine from the rifle and reloaded it. The numbness had left my hand and it was now beginning to really hurt. Even the experimental flexing of my trigger finger sent a shock up my arm as though I’d grabbed a live wire, and I didn’t know if I could do much more shooting. But it’s surprising what you can do when you’re pushed to it.

I poked my head carefully around a slab of lava and took a look at the house. Nobody and nothing moved. Just to my front lay the bodies of the men I had shot, one lying as though peacefully asleep and the other dreadfully shattered. In front of the house were the two cars; Kennikin’s car appearing to be quite normal, but Nordlinger’s Chevrolet was a bit of a wreck — they had ripped the seats out in the search for the package and the two nearer doors gaped open. I’d be running up quite a bill for damage to people’s cars.

Those cars were less than a hundred yards away and, dearly as I wanted one of them, I knew it was hopeless to try. I also knew we couldn’t leave on foot. Apart from the fact that walking on the lava beds is a sport which even the Icelanders aren’t keen on, there was Elin to consider. I couldn’t leave her, and if we made a break for it we’d be picked up within fifteen minutes.

Which left only one thing — since neither the Mounties nor the US Cavalry were going to show up on the horizon in the time-honoured manner, I had to fight a pitched battle against an unknown number of men securely ensconced in that house — and win.

I studied the house. Kennikin hadn’t thought much of it as a prison. ‘Built like an eggshell,’ he had said. A couple of planks thick, a half-inch of plaster and a few inches of foamed polystyrene. Most people would regard a house as bullet-proof, but I laugh every time I see a Western film when the hero takes refuge in a clapboard hut and the baddies carefully shoot at the windows.