John Sandford - Bad blood

Nobody on the stairs, the fire growing wilder, and down they went, into the kitchen, to the top of the stairs by the back door, and Coakley said, "Oh, shit," and turned and gave the rifle to Virgil and said, "I'll be right back. Ten seconds."

"Where the hell…"

But she was gone, and a minute later, over the sounds of shouting outside, and the sounds of cars, and more gunfire, there was a sudden crash of glass, and then Coakley was back, took the rifle and they were out and Virgil was shouting, "Right into the trees, right into the trees."

He ran as best he could, with Dunn on his shoulders, and when they got into the tree line, they stopped, crouching behind the thick-trunked box elders, and Virgil put Dunn down. Dunn groaned as he did it, and then said, "Man, thanks. Thank you."

Virgil took the gun from Coakley and said, "You guys stay here. There's another guy with me, he'll be coming round the back of the house, probably, don't shoot him. His name is Jenkins."

"Where're you going?" Coakley asked.

"I'm going to shoot some more people," he said.

He didn't. There'd probably been a dozen of them, or even twenty, but they'd taken casualties and had finally broken, running for it, piling into their trucks and cars as Jenkins gave them a send-off. One truck was nose-down in the driveway ditch, with its headlights still burning. There were two bodies on the ground in front of the house.

And it was silent, finally, and then somebody moaned. Virgil, moving slow again, walked down the side of a shed and found a man on the ground, his face and neck a mass of blood; he'd been hit in the face with a shotgun, Virgil thought, and if he didn't die, he'd be blind.

The man had been firing a hunting rifle into the house, and the rifle lay on the ground next to him. Virgil kicked it away, and the man heard him and tried to say something, but was so badly hurt that he mostly swallowed blood: but he might have said, "Help me."

Virgil got down behind a tractor wheel on an old John Deere parked next to the shed, and called, loud as he could, "Jenkins!"

A moment later, "Here."

"You okay?"

"Okay. I'll meet you back where we started."

Virgil moved slowly to the back of the house. He got to Coakley, Dunn, and the girl just before Jenkins came in. Virgil was on the phone, calling the highway patrol guys and the local cops off the watch at the Einstadt meeting, and to warn them about men with guns.

"We need you here, but stay clear of any big bunch of cars-they may be coming your way. We've got one dead cop and one wounded. We're gonna need a fast run into town… We need a fire truck…"

"We're coming."

Coakley asked, "Are we clear?"

"I think so," Jenkins said. "There may be some wounded who still want to fight. Gotta be careful."

"Bob's dead," Coakley said. "Ah, God, what am I gonna tell Jenny? Ah, God…"

Virgil ignored that and asked Dunn, "How bad's the bleeding?"

"I tied a couple strips of towel around it," he groaned. "They're soaked, but I don't think I'll die from it. My foot's a mess… I can feel the bones moving around. Man, it hurts. It really hurts."

"You warm?" Virgil asked.

"Huh? Yeah, warm enough."

The fire was really blowing up now, had climbed the stairs as though it were a chimney and was spreading into the second floor. Coakley stood up and said, "I've got to run around to the other side. Right now. Somebody needs to cover me."

She started moving and Virgil said, "I'll take it," and followed as she dashed around the back of the house, and then down the far side. Virgil kept the rifle up, now on its third magazine, looking for movement. Heavy black smoke was boiling out of the house now, and glass was beginning to break, and Virgil could smell burning meat.

Two bodies, at least. Could have been Coakley and Dunn and the girl, as well.

Coakley went to the side of the house, knelt, then stood, staggering a little, carrying a computer. She got back to Virgil and said, "I threw it out the window. Eight thousand pictures. I couldn't let it burn. I hope the hard drive's okay."

Jenkins said, "Our guys are coming in," and Virgil looked out of the woodlot down the road and saw a car coming fast, light bar on the roof, and, at right angles to it, on another road, another car with a light bar. The highway patrolmen. The first car pulled into the driveway and Virgil's phone rang: "Everything clear?"

"I don't know. We've got at least two wounded, one of us and one of them. I don't think anybody's holding out to ambush us, but take it easy. Wait for your other guy, check the truck across the road, and we'll start clearing out the buildings here. Watch your gun, careful not to shoot each other-"

"Okay. Every ambulance in three counties is on the way. It looks like a fuckin' war, man."

"It was a fuckin' war," Virgil said, and clicked off.

He said to Jenkins, "Let's clear the outbuildings, and the trucks."

Four trucks were sitting empty in front of the house and along the sides, all pocked with bullet holes. Jenkins said, "I was doing everything I could to scare the shit out of them, get them running. Nothing scares a shitkicker like somebody shooting up his truck."

Virgil might have laughed but Jenkins sounded so intent that he didn't; instead he said, "Let's clear them."

They went off together, using Coakley's flashlight, cleared the first, small shed, a repair shop smelling of gasoline; and in the second, large shed, which was full of farm machinery, they moved the light around and a man's voice said, "Don't kill me."

"Come out of there," Virgil said. He came out with his hands over his head, a tall, rawboned man maybe twenty years old, with long hair, in a camo jacket. In the dark, and in the military jacket, he looked like a surrendering German in old World War II books that Virgil had seen.

"Move out into the light," Virgil said. And, "I can't fool around here. If you do anything quick, I'm gonna shoot you. Get down on the ground, flat on your face."

The man got down, and Jenkins came up and cuffed him, and then patted him down. The man said, "They left me. Ran like chickens."

"Don't worry," Virgil said, "You're gonna have a lot of time to talk to them about it."

They cleared the trucks, found another wounded man, an older man, face wet with pain-sweat, going into shock, shot through both legs. He said, "Help me," and they threw his gun into the snow and then hastily cut strips of cloth out of the back of his coat and put pressure pads on the leg wounds.

They cuffed him to the steering wheel when they were done, and moved on, but found nobody else. Virgil said, "Jesus, Jenkins, you went through here like Mad Dog McGurk."

"I was feeling uncharitable," Jenkins said. "And hell, I didn't even see most of these guys. Once they got in the trucks, I just started unloading on the vehicles, to mark them."

Another car came steaming down the highway and up the drive: Brown and Schickel.

Virgil met them at the top of the hill: the house was now fully aflame, and he could feel the heat on his back, and water from melting snow was starting to run down the driveway.

"We need to get Dunn to the hospital like right now: can you take him?"

Brown took him, and five minutes later the first of the ambulances arrived. They put the blind man in first, and then the man shot through the legs. The second ambulance arrived, and the highway patrol cops loaded a man from the ditched truck; he'd been hit in the back. One of the ambulance people said he thought that one of the men lying in front of the house was still alive. But maybe not.

They took him.

More cops started coming in, everybody from Warren, Martin, and Jackson counties, cars parking up and down the road, searchlights and flashlights looking behind trees, following tracks out across the fields.