The Kingdom - Peter Collinson

“Not all them,” said Grue. “Just one. You the Negro who set everyone free?”

Grue , Trait remembered. A race-hater. Militia leader. Backwoods survivalist. He had to be handled carefully.

Trait said, “What brings you here now?”

“I ain’t come to say thank you.”

Trait showed Grue his free hand as he circled away from the counter, keeping a respectful distance. Grue turned with him. “The FBI is coming with the U.S. Army. We’ve got to run. Maybe you know something about the terrain here. Maybe together you and I could...”

Grue shook his head slowly. The sound of the gunfire through the open door did not impel him at all.

“Why not?” said Trait.

“Because the second you drop your aim, I’m going to put you down.”

Trait breathed deeply through his fury. “I turned you loose. You owe me.”

“You made a distraction. I got out on my own.”

“Then what did you come here for?”

“The writer. I want to know where she’s at.”

Trait smirked cruelly. “She tried to write about you too?”

“I got a little book of my own,” Grue said. “She’s getting her own chapter.”

Shadows produced by the fire next door had been shifting the entire time.

Now all at once, whole silhouettes emerged from the dark stacks. Two men, wielding handguns.

Grue was the first to react, getting off an arrow at the most visible shooter. He dropped fast and rolled behind a table of current periodicals.

Trait swung and fired three times, and simultaneously there were flashes of light from the gunmen. Trait ducked back behind a row and looked for Grue, seeing only the warden lying on the floor, playing dead. He heard yelling in Spanish and understood that the other two Marielitos had come to collect for their murdered comrade.

The searing in his ribs was acute and he had trouble keeping his gun arm up. The bullet had gone in below his heart but had not come out. He slumped against the bookshelf, switching gun hands and then came out blasting.

One Marielito was down already. The second was half-turned by an arrow in his shoulder and Trait finished him off with two shots to the head. The third trigger pull clicked empty as the Marielito fell dead.

Trait dropped his empty gun and stood hunched, his hand pressed hard against his side. Grue emerged from behind the front desk, eyeing Trait, his empty hands, and the bloody wound. In one fluid motion Grue plucked an arrow from his pouch and strung it taut.

Trait turned toward him. Smoke hung in the air. The room smelled of cordite and sweat and the musk of decaying paper.

Grue moved in front of the desk, holding his aim. “Where is she?” asked Grue.

Trait frowned, grunting. “I don’t know.”

The warden was looking up from the floor now. “He doesn’t,” he insisted.

Grue’s eyes lingered on the warden in dim recognition. He looked back to Trait and let the arrow fly.

The point pierced Trait beneath his right breast, knocking him backward into the end of a row of shelves. Trait stood there looking down at the black-feathered arrow sticking out of his chest. He looked at Grue.

Grue set his bow down calmly on the table of current periodicals and advanced.

With a defiant growl, Trait summoned the strength to remain on his feet. There was a blur of disgust and impassivity on the race-hater’s face. This was the will of the fatherless cons, turning on him now.

He managed an impudent smile as the first blow came. Grue roundhoused him flush in the face, shattering his nose and cheek and driving him back against the metal row end, jerking the arrow for extra despair. Grue’s knee came up next, then his fists again, Trait accepting his judgment boldly, tasting in his mouth not blood but the bitterness of defeat.

He was going unconscious. Just as he was slipping into the black undertow of the room, Grue released him and backed away.

The voice calling to him was high and crazed. “Stop it! Get away from him!”

Trait twisted on the floor at the bottom of the row. He felt little pain now, drifting on a nimbus of brain-released opiates.

Someone was standing in the firelight near the Marielitos, aiming a gun. The room listed as Trait tried to focus on the face.

He saw auburn hair blazing in the flame light, and the revelation came in waves.

Rebecca stood near the front of the stacks — motionless, almost floating, the Marielito’s revolver still warm in her hand. Grue moved with incredible agility, releasing Trait upon her order, but then darting behind the warden who had been almost at his feet. Now Grue’s white-gloved hand gripped the warden by the throat. His other hand clutched the handle of a large hunting knife, held vertically, the gleaming silver point touching the crown of Warden James’s bald head. Grue’s arm was ready-bent to drive the wide blade down into the warden’s skull.

The two Marielitos lay dead at her feet. Trait was bloodied and crumpled, barely moving.

“Put that thing down,” drawled Grue. Beating up on Trait had exhilarated him, his dark, beady eyes bore a bright sheen.

The warden looked forlorn, his eyes downcast — scared but too weak to express it.

“No,” Rebecca told him. “You put down the knife.”

“I will,” said Grue. “Right down through his skull.”

She shook her head, still yelling. “You won’t kill him. You’ve got nothing if you kill him.”

Grue’s glove tightened around the warden’s throat. The knife blade twisted as with a grin Grue slowly rotated his wrist back and forth. A single drip of blood appeared on Warden James’s head, rolling down over his temple and streaming to his chin.

“We’ll stand here like this then,” said Grue. “See who moves first.”

Grue continued to twirl the knife point, holding the warden close.

As the revolver shook in her two-handed grip, she said, “I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

She was overheating inside her sweater and flak vest. She smelled him now, the sickening funk of his unwashed body. Outside, gunfire raged as the big gun continued to fire.

Grue just grinned and kept twisting the knife. Her senses plagued her as she stood by helplessly, watching him bore into the warden’s head.

Trait’s groaning, until then ignored, stopped as a hand came free from beneath his chest. Rebecca saw something in his fingers, perhaps a weapon, but did not have time to react.

Trait thumbed the switch on the stun-belt trigger. The warden rocked violently, thrashing with an immediacy and force that shook him free of Grue’s grip, dropping him hard to the floor.

Grue was left wide open and Rebecca did not hesitate. She squeezed once and Grue shuddered and stepped back.

He looked down at his chest as blood oozed out of the small hole, seeping into the white fabric. He looked again at Rebecca, arms hanging at his sides, a child’s expression of hurt on his face.

She fired four more times, emptying the revolver into his chest and neck and driving him back onto the table of periodicals. He lay still a moment, bent backward over the tabletop, then sagged and fell to one side, pulling some of the magazines with him to the floor.

Trait released the switch that freed the warden, leaving him quaking involuntarily before the front counter.

Rebecca carried the empty gun to Grue. He lay on his side, throat gurgling as his lifeblood coughed out of his neck and mouth. He was sagging like a balloon losing air, looking bewildered and small.

She knelt beside him and set the gun down near his wide, staring eyes.

“I don’t want your last words,” she said.

But he could no longer see her or the flame-lit book stacks of the Gilchrist Public Library. Death panic had tricked his mind out to a place in his past. His mother had run a slaughterhouse, and it occurred to Rebecca that he might have returned there to die.